Tragedy Plus About a Week

In Woody Allen's penetrating (and last great) movie "Crimes and Misdemeanors," the bombastic comedy producer played by Alan Alda pontificates that "Comedy is tragedy plus time." Meaning that we can make Lincoln assassination and Titanic jokes now that we could not have made in the shocked aftermath of those events. (e.g., "Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?" and "What do you get when you cross the Atlantic with the Titanic? ...Halfway!").

Depending on the event, though, and in these tabloid times, the interval gets a lot smaller than a generation or several decades. In fact, after the recent demise of Anna Nicole Smith, the headlines of which dominated the news media last week for about 48 hours, the darkly comic outlines of the story have begun to emerge. News reporters tried their best to keep a straight face, but the efforts become increasingly difficult when introducing a news clip of an impromptu interview with Zsa Zsa Gabor's husband, Prince Von Something, who suggested an intimate connection with a late great bimbo.

Just one of the aspects of the bizarre story of Anna is that scores of men seem to be claiming paternity of Anna's daughter Daniellynne, defying the conventional disavowal of attachment, since the little girl may be heiress to a couple of hundred milliion dollars. In the normal course of nature they'd have to stand behind a lot of inheritors, but Anna's other child, a son, OD'd in her hospital room a few weeks ago, and her mother seems rather uninterested and critical. Zsa Zsa, though, could use the dough for another binge in Beverly Hills, and the extra cash could help bail her out in case she slaps another cop.

Seriously, did anyone really think Zsa Zsa was still alive? I mean, she emerges in public less often than Puxnatawny Phil.

The E networt and Fox (for sure) must be madly developing TV-movie deals about Anna, and I wouldn't put it beyond Andrew Lloyd Webber to be writing a musical. But a quickie compilation of news clips and outtakes from her reality TV show would be just as effective in telling a story that is about as vulgar a rendition of the American Dream as any satirist could ever conceive. Here's a smalltown fat teen-ager with a pretty face who marries a pimply short-order cook, then after a divorce tries to earn money in a daytime gig as a stripper because she's too porky to wrap herself around the pole at night. She catches the eye of a dirty but very rich old geezer who can't stay up late. She sends some flattering photos to Playboy and accidentally happens upon a flowering that fits well into the buxom ideal of the Playboy Calendar Girl. Since this was the platform from which Marilyn Monroe gained her fame, Anna tries to pursue the same course, but with absolutely no talent or brains. The geezer turns out to be her Joe Dimaggio and Arthur Miller combined, and thoughtfully conks out after nine months. Anna demands a portion of his humongous oil wealth (though interestingly, not that large of chunk of it), and benefits greatly when the son contesting the will (he himself not of the oil man's blood) keels over.

Then with the aid of very voracious and brilliant lawyers, she wangles a settlement that is validated by, of all people, the Supreme Court. This was the same Supreme Court that put Bush into office, so a funny decision from them is not all that surprising.

Anna, meanwhile, gets very fat dining on all the profits, and becomes the central figure of a reality show in which she teeters around drunkenly and incoherently. And one of her lawyers, named Howard Stern (but not the Howard Stern), tames her enough to impregnate her, or so he says. Then while she is on one of her countless "exhaustion" stays in a hospital, her visiting son ODs, adding an unnecessarily sad note to the cavalcade of her life. Then, while she and Howard are pursuing some sort of marriage plans while staying in The Hard Rock Casino in Florida, she herself expires in mysterious circumstances which the coroner can't even figure out. At least that was just like Marilyn.

Okay, so who came up with this plot line? Some bizarre hybrid of Sidney Sheldon, Thomas Pynchon and Lars Von Trier?

There will be more to this epic, I fear, and the Internet browsers that have kept her fame afloat will continue to obsess over whatever the hell she means or represents. Little Daniellynne, who never got to know Anna anyway, will likely be raised in luxury and educated in very toney prep schools by father-in-likelihood Howard Stern, and don't be surprised if she stars in the 3D Imax Story of Anna that debuts in 2025.