As media organisations around the world have reported tonight (including some more surprising outlets for such a story)- Anna Nicole Smith died in the early hours of the morning. She was a curious individual- famous in many ways for having no talent or discernable ability- save for a fairly cheap and obvious beauty. She was a blonde who immitated both Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield in pictures and poses. In 1991 whilst working at a strip bar she met a billionaire and in 1994 at the age of 26 she married her 89 year old boyfriend, J. Howard Marshall.

Their romance was brief. Marshall died after 13 months of marriage and after that Smith was engaged in constant court battles with his family over who should be the heir to the estate that he had left- the complicated legal issues were still being decided upon 12 years after his death. Its difficult to comment upon another person's life. Anna Nicole Smith's life definitely had its share of incident- the stuff above and also a second marriage to her lawyer, the suspicious death of her son and the birth of a baby daughter, not to mention several flopped movies and a reality TV show- but what emerges from it is not something of beauty or to be esteemed.

Rather than praise, her death has produced mockery- see for example this tongue in cheek obituary from Gawker.com and even in life reputable news organisations like CNN invited psychiatrists to openly speculate about her mental state. This was not neccessarily someone who lived a happy or fulfilled life.

So what should we make of Anna Nicole Smith- my sense is that its hard to understand her interior life- how can we from the outside? However what we can see is a set of patterns. Anna Nicole Smith seems to have sought out and tried to find the limelight- tried to find people who would photograph her clothed or not, tried to make money from the perilous property of her own appearance. Her income depended to a large extent on attention being paid by the public and increasingly desperate antics- like for instance her reality TV show.

The problem is that such a life means that your public life increasingly becomes the same as your private life- you need crisis because crisis writes columns like this one, it creates a demand for interviews and pictures which produce the funds that can support your lifestyle. Consequently there has to be a continuous drama going on within your life- people have to be coming in and coming out in order for you to maintain a profile. The problem is of course that that coverage can become as much an addiction because of the attention as because of the money coming in, that the need for incident can turn into an unstable and incident filled private life where at every opportunity people run to the papers.

The issue with Nicole Smith like with any celebrity is that its so easy to lose control of this tiger that you attempt to ride. Its made worse by the fact that she had no discernable talent to fall back on for monetary reasons. But also no discernable talent to fall back on for her self esteem- how would you feel if you knew that your fame and life came just through your looks. How would you feel as those looks decayed?

Her story is in a sense one of success- she got everything she probably desired working at Playboy in the early nineties but it surely must rank as a tragedy that that is what she desired. Her quest for attention and money from that attention led her to places where her relationships and even her children became the victims of her own need for the spotlight. Her death has made her the subject of ridicule- but ridiculing someone when they die hardly seems kind. What we observed from the sidelines was the wreckage of a life- we never knew the insides of that life nor how it looked to her in the cold hours of the early morning. Rather than ridicule, I suggest we should adopt compassion in looking at her and people like her- the Jade Goodies of the world.

She sought noteriety in the hope that it would feed and clothe her- and noteriety did but it also eroded her life away and made it more difficult for her to face the problems that she faced in becoming fully adult. Her life wasn't particularly noteworthy in the end, except as a terrible example to anyone desiring that peculiar kind of celebrity lifestyle.