Someone on NPR this morning described Ms Smith as "famous for being famous". It's indicative of the power which mass media and mass marketing exert over much of our society that a woman whose sole claim to legitimate "fame" was the good fortune to have attracted the eye of a lonely rich man should have been elevated to a level of celebrity equal to that of the most talented among us. In the absence of the money-seeking machine that attached itself to her like a leech, she would have been a brief blip on our communal radar, a curiosity whose untimely death would have meritted brief mention, not newspaper headlines and magazine cover stories.