Remembering a star among stargazers, the original TMZ
Longtime queen of N.Y.C. gossip, Liz Smith was funny, tough and a throwback to another era
There is no broad like an old broad.
Tough by any measure, sometimes salty, she has a sense of humour and takes no guff. Knocking down pylons put up by men. Born in a pre-Steinem era, her heyday was a while back and hers is a retro-femme model.
It hit me, being something of a student of broads, that this is the season of them — in newly creased obituary sections as well as on the newsstands.
The first wind? It came courtesy — thump! — of the news this week that the great Liz Smith had died at 94. A tattletale with a heart of gold, she was the origi- nal TMZ, Twitter, Instagram, everything. Buzz, banter and bons mots. She was the queen of it.
Holding court for more than three decades, most notably at the New York Post, hers was a life, as the obit in the Times put it, that went “from hardscrabble nights writing snippets for a Hearst newspaper in the 1950s to golden afternoons at Le Cirque with Sinatra or Hepburn and tête-à-tête dinners with Madonna to gather material for columns that ran six days a week,” ascending to a “fame and wealth that rivalled those of the celebrities she covered.”
An impressionable lad, I followed her antics religiously, Smith being the Glinda the Good Witch to Cindy Adams’ Elphaba (the other reigning gossipist of her era). To say she lit many of my interests would be an understatement.
Decades later, I met her at a Time magazine party, where I discerned that Liz became blonder, and toothier, with every advancing year, and — in one of the moments of my life — I found myself talking to her just as Jennifer Lopez glided by. Swathed in the light of her celebrity, the famed scribbler and I bonded in the agreement that photographs do not fully capture J.Lo’s wattage.
With a trace of her native Texas twang still discernible, propped up by Noo Yawk directness, our conversation then shifted to Margaret Trudeau (she wanted to know everything about her life now in Canada) and then, strangely enough, to Lindsay Lohan. She wasn’t ruling out a “comeback” for La Lohan and thought she still had “something.” In the context of the latter, it was classic Liz: though she could spring an unsuspecting barb when she needed to, in general she always rooted for the people she covered. She was in love with the love of celebrities.
Much has come rushing back this week about Liz, from some of her pithier commandments (“I always use the men’s room. You avoid the lines that way”) to her tips on aging gracefully (“Always stay abreast of the movies, because that way you never grow old”) to, of course, her scoopage about Donald and Ivana Trump’s split, which made her a television ubiquity in the 1990s and, ultimately, the highest-paid print journalist in history.
When I heard that she’d died, I almost felt bad that she wouldn’t live long enough to see how the Trump presidency turns out and it reminded me (again) of a truism I can never shake: without the sensationalist coverage of the Trump divorce way back when, he would never have become a household name and pop-culture figure, with- out which he would never have been given The Apprentice, without which — duh — he would never have had the mileage, or platform, to run for president. All roads inherently lead back to the New York tabloids. Political scientists, take note.
Smith missing out on the rest of the Trump story kind of reflects her own reaction when Princess Diana died 20 years ago.
Comparing her to other supernovas she’d covered — Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Onassis — Smith admitted, years later, that “aside from the shock I felt when word reached me of Diana’s death in that Paris tunnel, I selfishly thought of how much news had been lost. There goes 30 more years worth of columns!” Once a muckraker, always a muckraker.
In the end, though, her MO was simple: “We love to bring celebrities down a notch, all of us. But it comes out of sheer love. We care about these people so much, we feel like they’re our best friends and when they disappoint us we have to knock them down a peg.”
Want more broad? You can certainly fill your quota by picking up the latest Vogue, featuring Meryl Streep, the oldest woman to ever grace its U.S. cover. It’s not Streep who I have in mind, though — she’s too much of a celestial goddess to really qualify for broad-dom — but her upcoming film for which she’s on the promo trail. In Steven Spiel- berg’s The Post, she plays the storied publisher of the Washington Post, Katharine Graham, who died in 2001, but not before becoming the first female Fortune 500 CEO, earning a Pulitzer for her excellent memoir Personal History and who was a doyenne, ne plus ultra, of D.C. society.
Something of a gambler and f-bomb artiste — beyond the Oscar de la Renta exterior — she’s long intrigued me for another reason: Graham was the sometimes-forgotten guest of honour for the most famous party ever thrown, a.k.a. Truman Capote’s Black-and-White Ball, at the Plaza in New York in 1966.
A sort of a “coming-out” for a “middle-aged debutante,” as she later called it, the dynamo remembered the scenario this way: Capote “phoned me to say he was going to give a ball to cheer me up — what he said would be ‘the nicest party, darling, you ever went to.’ My initial response was, ‘I’m fine. It’s really nice of you, but I don’t need cheering up.’ But Truman went right on talking of his plans, paying no attention to me. He explained that he’d always loved the Grand Ballroom at the Plaza, and also the Ascot scene in My Fair Lady, for which his friend Cecil Beaton dressed everyone in black and white . . . I was puzzled by the whole idea and not sure if Truman was serious, so I didn’t think about it much . . .
“Soon afterwards, I realized that this party was more about him than about me. I think he was tired from having written In Cold Blood and needed to be doing something to re-energize himself. I was a prop.”
No matter, the ball was to soon take on a life of its own. The gossip columns quickly went into action about who was and wasn’t asked to the event. In the weeks before the party, whole pages of magazines and newspapers were devoted to the guest list: “their dresses, their hairdos, their masks. Truman spent hours developing the list of invitees.”
And the best subplot to all this? When the so-called guest-of-honour went to the salon of “Kenneth” — the who’s who of hairdressers at the time — she was given a bit of a tepid reception. Less known than other society stars of the time — the likes of Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill or Marella Agnelli — she was told by a woman at the salon, “We’re so busy, Mrs. Graham, with the hairdos for the Black and White Ball. Have you heard of it?”
One of Capote’s biographers, Gerald Clarke, put the whole thing in this pithy perspective: “Graham was arguably the most powerful woman in the country, but still largely unknown outside Washington. Putting her in the spotlight was also his ultimate act as Pygmalion. It would symbolize her emergence from her dead husband’s shadow; she would become her own woman before the entire world.”
You could call it a baptism by broad. And, come to think of it, precisely the sort of story that Liz Smith would have adored.