The Fascination: "One Never Knows, Do One?"

For the past two weeks the media have been fascinated by Anna Nicole Smith's life and death. A couple of days ago Larry King interviewed Barbara Walters about her Oscar special on Sunday, the 25th. Barbara, with her usual elitist tone, haughtily said to Larry that The View would not spend any time on the subject, implying that the subject was not worthy of coverage (plus she was likely also miffed by thirty minutes of Larry's show being devoted to the latest developments in the Anna Nicole custody fight over her body). Later, however, Barbara admitted to covering the Britney Spears' story but justified it by essentially saying Britney was talented and Anna Nicole was not. Larry asked Barbara what the fascination was regarding these stories? No one seemed to have an answer.

I would like to weigh in, along with other journalists the next day or so, on the question: Why are we so fascinated by Anna's story? Perhaps musician Fats Connor gave the only true answer though when he said, "One never knows, do one?" We have already heard from psychologists a plethora of reasons including America's obsession with celebrity, weariness from watching the coverage of the Iraqi War, even more exhaustion from hearing about the spats between presidential contenders some two years before the election, and escape--induced from all the disaster specials (the latest was John Stossel's two hour coverage on 20/20 of fearful, hypothetical happenings in the future).

My thought about the fascination is that Anna was all of us. She was the mother who could shower us with love or withhold her blessings upon her whim; she was the ideal woman of beauty and figure (even with her weight gain, she endeared herself to us even more, representing a woman other than the slinky anorectic model; she must have been a terrific lover as evidenced from the loud weeping of her attorney/lover Howard K. Stern and her photographer lover Larry Birkhead; she overcame a background of poverty and lack of education to become a household word; she evidently treated her assistants well (Big Moe, the bodyguard, and Kim, the personal assistant) have defended her honor repeatedly; she was someone we knew from her reality show, full of foible yet very vulnerable and in obvious need of protection and intervention. In short, we liked her, just as we liked Marilyn Monroe in the past for all the same reasons. I am not sure we feel the same way about Britney, Nicole, Paris, and Lindsay.

Was Anna Nicole's life like a Shakespearean tragedy as the Florida judge suggested this week? I would conclude that the answer is yes. It could allegedly be a revenge tragedy where there is a death or murder that must be solved by the next of kin (Daniel's and now Anna's), at least one ghost (Daniel and now Anna), and a mad person (perhaps Anna or someone still to be revealed). Let us hope that the answers to the mysteries will come together in the next few weeks and that our fascination with Anna can be put to rest, as she is.