For whom the bell (really) tolls.

THE air is thick with high-minded complaints that the Anna Nicole Smith story dominated the news and distracted us from what C-SPAN junkies reverently call "the issues." Media figures are even complaining about themselves for covering it so obsessively, and now they need to rationalize why they did it. The talk-show schedulers will round up the usual pundits, who will furrow their brows and explain that fame itself, like fear itself, does the most damage when it is ubiquitous. Therefore, analyzing the condition known as "famous for being famous" and its impact on the 15-minute birthright bestowed on each of us by Founding Father Andy Warhol was the motivating principle behind their wall-to-wall coverage.

Not even close. What fascinated them and us about Anna Nicole Smith was not Smith herself, but the other woman, the one she killed off. It was this woman, not Smith, who finally got buried. It is she, not Smith, who will be missed because she really was famous, not just for the brief span of one lifetime, but for centuries. She was a cultural archetype of the Christian Western world who went on to become a cornerstone of sexual psychology when the Victorian era replaced the medieval witch with the prostitute. I'm talking about the beloved infidel of Central Casting, the stock character in our collective subconscious: the Whore with a Heart of Gold.

I happen to know something about her, having been raised by a grandmother who remembered the many popular songs about her and sang them to me. From the Gay Nineties to the early years of the 20th century, Tin Pan Alley was the main thoroughfare for streetwalkers, where you met "a woman in tears from the crowd's angry jeers" on one corner, "Nelly's not to blame for her smile is just the same" on the next, and "a wild sort of devil but dead on the level" when you ran into everybody's gal Sal.

As I watched the Anna Nicole Smith coverage I was struck by how thoroughly she demolished each one of these sentimental ballads, turned it inside out and backwards, and stood it on its head. The extent to which she did not fit the lyrics was uncanny. Even what ought to be her signature song makes no sense with her in it. "Her beauty was sold for an old man's gold, she's a bird in a gilded cage" overlooks the fact that she seemed to prefer gilded cages, moving from one garish hotel to another, and once inside, never left unless she had a court date.

The same was true of the song about the letter forwarded to a brothel. "And sadder she seems when of Mother she dreams in the mansion of aching hearts" lost everything in translation when a tape-recorded Smith, her lip literally curling, snarled and growled that she hated Virgie Arthur and called her another Mommy Dearest.

Anna Nicole Smith had a baby. The Whore with a Heart of Gold also had a baby, but the resemblance ends there. "Just then the church door opened, the wedding guests turned 'round, and seeing the intruder, they dared not make a sound. 'Stop!' the ragged ...