What needs saying -- what it seems nobody has yet said -- is that when she was able to suppress her demons enough to pull herself together and look her best, she was fabulously gorgeous. Numerous red-carpet moments, the footage of which we now run over and over again like a televised rosary in order to understand her death, reveal this. Anna Nicole was a star because she possessed an unusually large amount of beauty. At her best, she didn't evoke Marilyn Monroe so much as Anita Ekberg in "La Dolce Vita" -- the strapless black dress, mounds of white flesh, piles of blond hair. She was indelicate, but an unstable element nonetheless -- not so much a candle in the wind as a bonfire in a hailstorm. But the real similarity between Anna Nicole and Marilyn was their shimmering tension -- an unsettlingly powerful physical beauty, collapsing irresistibly in real time beneath the frailties of its hostess. She was entropy porn at its finest.
Our fascinated gaze was her real addiction -- and the humiliating media tractor pull between our disgust and our attraction for her was, in all likelihood, both her lover and her murderer. Fame, the only chemotherapy available for the desperate toxicity of narcissism, proves once again that it is deadly enough in its own right to be avoided.
Cintra Wilson cuts through the barely disguised glee most media derived from reporting the untimely demise of Anna Nicole Smith, finally presenting it for what it is, the sad story of a beautiful woman gone before her time. Another girl from a small town, making good on the "dream" of fame and wealth so many Americans see as the most noble of pursuits, chewed up by the machine of tabloid culture.
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