Anna Nicole Smith is dead.

You are quite possibly indulging in a little eye-rolling/sneering right now, that was certainly my initial reaction. But there's something that I had forgotten, that I almost had to forget as soon as hearing it, which is that ANS was less than six months from the strangest celebrity story of the last decade*, a minimal nugget of weapons-grade wierdness that would crush the most normal and well-adjusted person on the planet flatter than a chewing-gum wrapper.

Also, she was actually a human being. Cintra Wilson does her justice:

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.

*She gives birth to a daughter, her 20-year-old son comes to visit them in hospital, sits down in the same room while they sleep, and dies.