DYING TO BE DIVAS

Between hourly updates on the decomposing body of Anna Nicole Smith
and the balding of Britney Spears, we can confidently declare that
the Jerry Springerization of America is complete.

The travails of these two tragic characters would be of little
interest in a normal world, but "celebrity" is the new normal. Like
it or not, we're all in this together.

Britney and Anna Nicole, after all, are our inventions. We made them
celebrities, awarded them icon status, gave them life. Now, like Dr.
Frankenstein upon realizing he's created a monster, we've become
instruments of their undoing.

Anyone who has turned on a TV the past few days has been witness to
the spectacle in Fort Lauderdale, where hearings have been in
progress to decide what to do with Anna Nicole's body.

In death as in life, it's all about the body. Who gets it?

I confess that it took a few minutes watching the probate proceedings
to realize that it wasn't a spoof or a soap opera. The posturing and
pontificating of Judge Larry Seidlin, clearly enjoying his 15 minutes
of fame, makes Lance Ito, of O.J. Simpson trial fame, look like
Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Also at issue is the paternity of Anna Nicole's 5-month-old baby
girl, Dannielynn. The subtext to the entire mess is, of course, money
- -- the other defining concern of the former Playboy model's short unhappy life.

Anna Nicole spent most of her public life trying to get millions from
the estate of her deceased oil-tycoon husband, J. Howard Marshall,
who died in 1995 at age 90. Now that same money is up for possible
grabs among her survivors.

Wednesday, titillation merged with the macabre as mortals clamored
over the bombshell's remains like the ravenous widows in Zorba the
Greek. The weird got weirder when the disembodied voice of the
Broward County medical examiner was piped into the courtroom via
speakerphone to issue a decomposition status report.

Better hurry up with that funeral, he said. Things are deteriorating
fast around here. No kidding. And then everyone took a lunch break to
visit Anna Nicole at the morgue.

While you're mulling that image, we switch channels to the other
coast, where Britney has shaved her head and checked in and out of rehab.

Theories vary as to why Britney clipped her hair. The most recent is
that she was reacting to estranged husband Kevin Federline's alleged
threat to have her hair tested for drugs in a custody battle over
their two children. If Federline indeed wants one of those strands,
he'll have to take a number and bid on the sheared tresses, now for
sale by the owner of the salon where the shearing took place.

At "Buy Britneys (sic) Hair Dot Com," bids start at $1 million.

"This is the Ultimate Britney Spears Experience!" boasts the site.

At the same time we might recoil from these prurient displays, we're
also involuntarily mesmerized. The human wrecks of Britney and Anna
Nicole transcend the usual roadkill metaphor, however, because we're
participants -- not just spectators, but also instigators.

We are the mirrors to their vanities.

For former child stars like Britney, who didn't get to develop a
normal sense of self, identity comes from what is projected by the
audience. What happens when the projection stops, or when it shifts
from admiring to critical?

If you're Britney, apparently, you take out the shears and turn the
rage on yourself.

Anna Nicole, who was without talent except the ability to attract our
attention, existed only as an object. She posed; we ogled. But what
happens when no one's looking? If you're Anna Nicole, apparently, you
take more drugs and make a spectacle of yourself as a slurring,
stumbling bimbo with her own reality TV show.

The parallel sagas of these two sad divas -- one dead and one
self-destructing -- have the feel of reality TV that has spiraled out
of control. Too much exposure. Too much celebrity. Too much attention
- -- if never enough.

The desperation that drove them both to extremes, and then to the
brink, may have been born of the truth that reveals itself to all
celebrities eventually: What the public giveth, the public also taketh away.