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 woman cried, 'my story must be told. The bridegroom is the father of this dead child that I hold!'"

The Whore with a Heart of Gold was always "more to be pitied than censured" because nothing was ever her fault. "Do not scorn her with words fierce and bitter, do not laugh at her shame and downfall, for a moment just stop and consider that a man was the cause of it all." A man? Show me one man in Smith's housebroken entourage of eunuchoid sycophants. She didn't suffer at the hands of feminism's brutal patriarchy, they suffered at hers. From the very beginning she always looked for some weakness in men or some symbol of authority or dominance in herself. The chicken-frying teenage first husband (a year younger than she), the physically feeble sugar daddy, the middle-aged lawyer supported by his parents, the hunky bodyguards who waited on her hand and foot, and "soft-spoken" Larry Birkhead, who shriveled up in an apologetic heap when she berated him in a vicious screaming tirade for bringing her the wrong sunglasses. A real man would have belted her, but how can you belt a 5'11" harpy with DD bazooms? I'll bet you anything she didn't get those implants to be sexy, but to be big. There's a difference.

Anna Nicole Smith pulled our fantasy of the Whore with a Heart of Gold out from under us and sent us sprawling in a psychological pratfall. We don't like people who rob us of our fantasies. To punish her the commentary on her death and post-mortem activities was frequently mocking and occasionally even cold. In fact, nobody in the media descended to the usual lugubrious excess except Rita Cosby, herself the Great White Oprah, who asked a funeral guest, "How did you feel when you touched the coffin?"

Instead, the phrase "famous for being famous" was repeated incessantly and scornfully, and male commentators stressed "Marilyn Monroe had talent" more times than Monroe ever heard men say it in her lifetime. Most significant, for the first time the phrase "that quality of vulnerability" was absent from all discussion of the death of a young, blond sex goddess. It has been a staple for decades, but this time, nobody to my knowledge said it.

The Whore with a Heart of Gold was a Sunday sermon delivered at the vaudeville show and the movies instead of in church. So much in her imagery was tied up in the New Testament that she became a remedial spiritual guide for the masses, a kind of "Dichotomy for Dummies" who helped us grasp the knotty principle of dueling incarnations while at the same time entertaining us, until we were able to look for the good in bad people and believe in the power of redemption without putting too much strain on our intellects. Anna Nicole Smith could not do this because she was the "ho" of today's popular songs.

Florence King can be reached at P.O. Box 7113, Fredericksburg, VA 22404.