Getty ImagesIt has been nine years since Anna Nicole Smith died of a drug overdose at the age of 39, but Margaret Cho is paying tribute to her in a big way.
The Fashion Police special co-host released a single titled "Anna Nicole" off her upcoming album, American Myth, and gave it a music video that honors the late star in a huge way. The video and song, which recall Cho and Smith's famous kiss on The Anna Nicole Smith Show's Christmas special in 2002, also expresses Cho's well wishes for her fallen friend.
"This is a wonderful collaboration with Garrison Starr and it's a requiem for Anna Nicole Smith that is as beautiful and quirky as she was," she posted on her blog. "It's my version of 'Candle in the Wind,' and about the archetype of someone who is too good for this world that exists in all of us."
Cho opened up about her friend's final days on Conversations With Maria Menounos revealed that the death of Smith's 20-year-old son, Daniel, in 2006, permanently changed her. "I think that her grief was overwhelming," the comedian told Menounos. "Her son had died, and her son was just so precious to her."
Only three days after Smith gave birth to daughter Dannielynn and she suffered from postpartum depression.
"There's lot of things going down in that story," Cho, 57, continued. "So it has to do with some postpartum depression, some overwhelming guilt that her son had died. They both had an issue with prescription painkillers and different drugs like that. I don't know if there's anybody that's necessarily at fault."
Cho admitted in the interview that she wouldn't know how to deal with the tragic loss Smith had suffered. "But then how do we deal with addiction, how do we deal with that overwhelming grief? When a mother loses a child—I know it took them four hours to pry her off of his body. She wouldn't allow him to be buried, she just had to be next to him and near him. I couldn't even picture it," she explained.
"I don't have a child, so I don't know what that would feel like. Certainly people have to take that into consideration: the amazing torture and grief that she was experiencing anyway because of the loss of her son. And that with postpartum, too, it's got to be hard."
When Smith passed away, Cho took to her blog to express her sadness about the loss.
"So pale and blonde, with this incredible soft serve ice cream vulnerability, like ripe summer peaches hot from the sun, or rice pudding made from grains boiled for over a day on the stove; Anna Nicole Smith was the goddess of all things that are sweet and enveloping," she wrote in 2007. "I hope that she is happy now, where she is. It is easy to picture her there, riding the clouds, her young son at her side, a million miles above the paparazzi and the tabloids, the gossip columns and the lawsuits and Bobby Trendy and Trimspa and the rest. I hope she feels thin, and nothing is bugging her, and that she doesn't have any more doubts or worries. Only puppies and kisses and love. Because she deserves that."