The Winner.

{Nota del editor 2: si el lector se siente ignorante por la informacion y personajes descritos en esta noticia, no tema. El editor lo acompaña. Y si se da cuenta que mueve la cabeza diciendo 'no lo puedo creer' o 'que tienen los gringos en el mate,' tambien.}

When Larry Birkhead came out of a courthouse in the Bahamas yesterday, raised his arms and jubilantly said to the television cameras, “I told you so!,” he completed a strange transformation. Less than a year ago, before he became a chew toy for celebrity journalists, he was an unknown freelance photographer and former boyfriend of Anna Nicole Smith, not an image with wholesome written all over it. But during the months of legal wrangling to prove that he is the father of Ms. Smith’s baby daughter, Dannielynn, Mr. Birkhead exuded clean-cut sincerity, emerging as a sentimental favorite over rival Howard K. Stern, Ms. Smith’s companion and business adviser.
The way Mr. Birkhead’s newfound fame has morphed is just an aspect of the larger way in which Ms. Smith’s own celebrity has changed in the two months since her death. As a postmortem star, she is bigger than she ever was alive. The public fascination has been driven not by Ms. Smith’s personality but by the story itself, shaped by celebrity journalism in its many forms — television, magazines and especially Web sites — and fueled by the sheer messiness of her life.

From the Who’s the Daddy question to the trumped-up murder-mystery element attached to both her death and to her 20-year-old son’s, her true story has played out in real time, as breaking news. Yet to the public it has also taken on the qualities of a long-running entertainment series, part reality television and part online game show. As on any reality show, the audience has been offered characters to root for or to hiss against. Mr. Stern and Mr. Birkhead have had their personalities shaped by television producers in much the way editing turns contestants on “Survivor” or “Big Brother” into heroes or villains. In the Smith case, there are competing camps, with infotainment shows aligning with the man who has given them access, and rarely bothering with the pretence of objectivity.

“Entertainment Tonight” and “The Insider” (sister shows owned by CBS Paramount Network Television) visited Ms. Smith and Mr. Stern in the Bahamas not long after the child’s birth and are still milking that interview. The shows’ friendly approach to Mr. Stern (who Ms. Smith named on the birth certificate as the father) has a distinct refrain: they refer to Mr. Stern as “Howard,” the 7-month-old baby as “Anna Nicole’s little angel” and to Mr. Stern as “the only father she has ever known.” Meanwhile at “Access Hollywood,” the reporter Tony Potts has been so firmly situated in the Birkhead camp that he sat side-by-side with Mr. Birkhead on a couch to watch the television news conference announcing the results of the autopsy on Ms. Smith. “Access” is owned by NBC Universal so its video often turns up on the MSNBC Web site.
Like many successful series, though, the most forward-looking element of the Anna Nicole story comes from the Web, where a satiric tone and playful approach are a better reflection of the gossipy curiosity that fuels the public’s interest.
Web sites turned paternity into a game show, asking viewers to vote in frequent polls. (The Web has also offered celebrity magazines, hampered by weekly deadlines, a way to keep up with the story.) Both Us Weekly’s site, usmagazine.com, and MSNBC.com asked readers to vote on whom they believed the father to be. Us offered three choices: Mr. Stern, Mr. Birkhead and Prince Frederic von Anhalt. (He’s more easily identified as Prince Zsa-Zsa’s-Husband, and even television commentators could hardly mention his claim to fatherhood with a straight face.)

Before the announcement yesterday, Us presented its results under the headline “Who Needs a DNA Test When We’ve Got a Reader Poll?” Mr. Birkhead won by a wide margin, but the sly tone was more revealing. The site reported that the prince had gotten 105 votes, or 1 percent, and thanked him for voting 105 times. A little less slyly, the MSNBC.com poll included a fourth possibility, “Other,” which beat Mr. von Anhalt.
The Us site also had a feature offering composite photos of what Dannielynn might look like if fathered by each of the three men, a stunt similar to the “If They Mated” feature on Conan O’Brien’s show.
Yesterday morning the enormously influential TMZ.com, the site that has often set the pace on celebrity stories, was already moving to the next cycle of the Anna Nicole tale. In reporting that Ms. Smith’s mother, Virgie Arthur, was likely to fight for custody no matter what the DNA results, the site asked voters to “Rate Virgie as a Mother,” with letter grades of A, C or F as possibilities.

Although a custody hearing is scheduled for Friday, now that Mr. Birkhead is confirmed as the father the story will likely slow to a trickle. The “CSI” aspect never generated as much interest as the paternity question. Ms. Smith had many drugs in her system when she died, and her son died from a combination of methadone and antidepressants. But no one has seriously suggested premeditated murder, and accidental drug-related deaths aren’t really the stuff of good murder mysteries.

But there is definitely one more piece of posthumous fame that might come Ms. Smith’s way. On May 1, her last movie, “Illegal Aliens,” will go straight to DVD. In the film, meant to be a tongue-in-cheek sci-fi adventure, she mocks her dumb blonde image as one of as a trio of women from another planet who take human form — and jobs as Hollywood stunt coordinators — while fighting evil on Earth. Ms. Smith was one of the film’s producers, but even so, the spoofy approach of “Illegal Aliens” suggests that even Anna Nicole Smith didn’t think of Anna Nicole Smith as a serious actress. It took death, the loose ends of her life and celebrity journalism to transform her into one of the world’s most famous people.