The Princess and the Playmate

Ten years after her death, Diana retains the power to fascinate. Three weeks after her death, at least, the same can be said of Anna Nicole.

At Sunday's Academy Awards, to no one's surprise, Helen Mirren won Best Actress for her portrayal of an out-of-touch monarch befuddled by the outpouring of public grief over the death of a princess.

Mirren's Oscar arrived the same month that we across the pond have been mesmerized by the death of the ultimate commoner.

With Princess Di and Anna Nicole Smith, to paraphrase Marx, celebrity repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

The public obsession with Diana -- and by public, I mean female public, for DianaMania was overwhelmingly a girl thing -- is easy to explain. As my late friend Marjorie Williams wrote after Diana's death, "Diana brought to life, on the grandest scale, the archetype of the princess inscribed on every girl's heart."

Feminists though we might have been, we woke up early to watch her fairy-tale wedding, even if we tutted about those overdone sleeves. Mothers that we had become, we wept at the card, inscribed "Mummy" in a child's hand, nestled amid the flowers on her coffin.

The public interest in Smith -- for all her all-too-obvious appeal to men, the posthumous AnnaMania feels to me like another mostly female obsession -- is a far less attractive phenomenon. The hawkers of Anna Nicole Inc. understood this perfectly: "America's Guiltiest Pleasure!" proclaims the DVD cover of " The Anna Nicole Show."

Now that she is dead, we can't stop watching, like rubberneckers at a grisly car crash. Or, for that matter, talking about it. Dannielynn, who's your daddy? It's turned into a low-rent game of Clue: The faux prince in the Bahamas with Viagra? Howard Marshall from the afterlife with a turkey baster?

The difference between our attitudes toward Diana and Anna Nicole is the difference between dreaming and gawking. Diana tapped into our desire to dress up and play princess; Anna Nicole evoked our inner Mean Girl, allowing us to feel oh-so-superior. She was everything our mothers warned us against, a slutty object of ridicule rather than desire.

But our derisive interest in Anna Nicole is leavened with a dollop of "you go, girl" admiration for her unbridled, up-by-her-bootstraps moxie. The stripper not only married a billionaire customer 63 years her senior -- she wore her wedding veil to his funeral 14 months later. The former Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken waitress litigated her claim to his money all the way to the Supreme Court -- and won.

I confess: The helicopters-whirring, wall-to-wall cable coverage of Anna Nicole's death took me by surprise. I felt rather like the Queen holed up at Balmoral, mystified by all the hullaballoo.

If, like me, you didn't pay much attention to Anna Nicole when she was alive -- if it took you, too, a while to figure out that she wasn't with that Howard Stern-- you may have also recently found yourself drawn to the latest episode of the Anna Nicole Show.