Have you watched the cable/tabloid news shows in the last day or so? They're all covering the Anna Nicole Smith story but, more than ever before with an Enquirer-type event of this sort, they all look real embarrassed about it. Larry King last night acted like he was doing a show about it at gunpoint. You can always tell when King is really uninterested in a guest or subject because most of what he asks will end with, "What do you make of this?" That's another way of saying, "I don't care enough about this to formulate an actual question so you figure out what to say about it."
Adding to the problem, of course, is that everything we know about Anna Nicole Smith and her untimely demise could be effectively summarized in about six minutes, and there don't seem to be a lot of available guests who knew her well. With all those hours to fill, this one's really running on fumes.
My friend Earl Kress just made a good point in a phone conversation. People are likening Anna Nicole to other celebs who died too young — Elvis, James Dean, Marilyn (of course), and a few others. But all those people did things that people liked. Marilyn was in some good movies. Anna Nicole Smith was most famous for marrying a rich old guy and for turning up at public events, drunk or otherwise incoherent.
Still to come: The "Anna Nicole was murdered" scenarios, followed by attempts to link this story up with other tabloid faves. You just know that right now, they're working late in the offices of Star trying to figure out how they can get Anna Nicole and O.J. into the same headline. Or maybe Anna Nicole and Jon Benet or Monica Lewinsky. We're going to be hearing about this until…well, until an even juicier story comes along. This one has a lot of the right elements — money, sex, huge breasts, mysterious parentage, court battles, public drunkeness, a maybe-orphan, a Gabor sister, etc. — so the next one's going to have to be even tawdrier. It's hard to imagine how but I know they won't disappoint us.