We knew her, or thought so

It was easy to snicker, even easier to be dismissive. By now, four days after her death, Anna Nicole Smith has been thoroughly dissected and digested, her life reduced to timelines marking recent scandalous milestones.

There's the birth of her now motherless baby Dannielynn, the death of her 20-year-old son Daniel three days later, the dispute -- now between three live men, and goodness, a dead donor -- over the little girl's paternity.

Drugs came up almost immediately as the cause of her death, seconded even by her estranged mother. It's not a completely unreasonable assumption; after all, there were all the slurry-voiced appearances.

Yet almost nowhere did observers speculate her death might have sprung from a different kind of cocktail, say postpartum depression mixed with grief.

But why should they?

That's not the Anna Nicole we knew.

Our Anna had a story we knew by heart: no talent, an echo of Marilyn Monroe, a gold digger, a punchline, an addled tabloid queen. The idea that there might be another story is disruptive; it disturbs the narrative we signed on to, the one she helped create in exchange for fame.

When Vickie Lynn Hogan traded up to Anna Nicole Smith she was trying to rewrite her life. Vickie Lynn was poor, living in small-town Texas, married at 17 to a 16-year-old fry cook.

"Fame is the best way to reinvent yourself," says Jake Halpern, author of "Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truth Behind America's Favorite Addiction." "Her life did not seem to be going anywhere."

Wealth, Halpern points out, used to be the way out -- think of "The Great Gatsby." Anna Nicole, of course, seemingly hedged her bet, by becoming a Playboy Playmate and marrying 89-year-old billionaire J. Howard Marshall.

"But once you're reinvented, there's a huge hidden cost," Halpern adds. "You're locked into this person."

With her life story, her weight issues, her spacey ways, Anna Nicole was part Marilyn, part Oprah, part Elvis; a best-of remix of our favorite celebrity vices. That was her appeal.

"It's like watching a movie we've seen before," Halpern says. "Personal lives of celebrities are a whole 'nother realm of entertainment."

Yet as comfortable as her role made us, it may have made Anna less so. In her day, Monroe -- who was born Norma Jean and not Marilyn -- spoke of this, of keeping up the machinery of "Marilyn Monroe," of how exhausting it was to maintain that facade.

Last week, a Houston Chronicle article quoted a man who knew Anna Nicole in her youth.

"People said she was real ambitious and talked about going off and doing great things, but how many people actually go off and do it?" he said. "She was just an ordinary, skinny, brown-haired local girl, but I do remember she was brighter than most of the kids we got."

Was Anna bright? Ambitious? Was she savvy? Was she in on the joke we called her? Was she going along to get along?

A lot of narratives are being written, in this age of reality shows, a lot of narratives being claimed and capitalized upon. Look at "Survivor" "villains" Rob and Amber -- they met on the "reality" TV show, she wins a million on the all-stars edition and they get engaged on camera. Then they go on "The Amazing Race," smart and ruthless all the way. This month, they're on Race's all-star edition.

Or Omarosa of "The Apprentice," who parlayed that into a gig on "The Surreal Life."

It doesn't matter anymore who they were. They are characters now, and we've been taught exactly how to think about them.

Priscilla Wald, a professor of English and women's studies at Duke University, understands the power of repeated references. She writes about narrative, examining how language about science circulates in popular culture and how the way media write about science affects the way we think about it.

She notes, for instance, that many people think of clones as not having a mother or a father, but rather, in the language of popular press, "donors." "If you see it enough, it gets in your head that [clones are] not human."

She sees similar echoes in the creation of an Anna Nicole. The characters we're assigned -- or we create -- are based on pre-existing stereotypes, she says. The stern guy with the heart of gold. The dumb blonde. Those stereotypes allow us to not dig any deeper. They make for a story line easy to follow, right to the end.

Now, with Anna Nicole gone, we can cast a new character. Ready for your close-up, Nicole Richie?