The image show

From the Who’s the Daddy question to the trumped-up murder-mystery element attached to both her death and to her 20-year-old son’s, her true story has played out in real time, as breaking news. Yet to the public it has also taken on the qualities of a long-running entertainment series, part reality television and part online game show. The audience has been offered characters to root for or to hiss against. Stern and Birkhead have had their personalities shaped by television producers in much the way editing turns contestants on Survivor or Big Brother into heroes or villains.

Entertainment Tonight and The Insider (sister shows owned by CBS Paramount Network Television) visited Smith and Stern in the Bahamas not long after the child’s birth and are still milking that interview. Like many successful series, though, the most forward-looking element of the Anna Nicole story comes from the Web, where a satiric tone and playful approach are a better reflection of the gossipy curiosity that fuels the public’s interest.

Both Us Weekly’s site, usmagazine.com, and MSNBC.com asked readers to vote on whom they believed the father to be. Us offered three choices: Stern, Birkhead and Prince Frederic von Anhalt. (He’s more easily identified as Prince Zsa-Zsa’s husband!)

Before the announcement yesterday, Us presented its results under the headline “Who Needs a DNA Test When We’ve Got a Reader Poll?”

The Us site also had a feature offering composite photos of what Dannielynn might look like if fathered by each of the three men, a stunt similar to the If They Mated feature on Conan O’Brien’s show.

Meanwhile, the enormously influential TMZ.com was already moving to the next cycle of the Anna Nicole tale. In reporting that Smith’s mother, Virgie Arthur, was likely to fight for custody no matter, the site asked voters to “Rate Virgie as a Mother”, with letter grades of A, C or F as possibilities.

On May 1, Smith’s last movie, Illegal Aliens, will go straight to DVD. In the film, meant to be a tongue-in-cheek sci-fi adventure, she mocks her dumb blonde image as one of a trio of women from another planet who take human form while fighting evil on Earth. Smith was one of the film’s producers, but even so, the spoofy approach of Illegal Aliens suggests that even Anna Nicole Smith didn’t think of Anna Nicole Smith as a serious actress. It took death, the loose ends of her life and celebrity journalism to transform her into one of the world’s most famous people.
Caryn James, NYT