Original gossip girl of New York
Liz Smith Gossip columnist BORN FEBRUARY 2, 1923 - DIED NOVEMBER 12, 2017, AGED 94
LIZ SMITH wasn’t known as the Grande Dame of Dish for nothing. For decades she chronicled the lives of the great and the good in New York’s leading papers, read by up to 50 million people a day, and wrote until the age of 86.
She became the leading gossip columnist of her generation – famously defining gossip as “news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress”.
Her biggest story was the 1990 break-up of Donald Trump’s first marriage to Ivana. She had been a friend of both and The Donald did not take well to the way she supported Ivana in the aftermath.
“I was left holding the bag, ethically, because I had foolishly appeared to have accepted a lot of favours from him,” she said last year. “The truth was I thought I could get him to give me money for my charities. He never gave me a dime. And I got the criticism I deserved.”
Asked why readers were so fascinated by gossip columns she explained: “We make stars into something exquisite and we want to know what they’re doing and thinking because our own lives are desperately boring.”
Smith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, to a cotton broker who ran into financial problems in the Great Depression, forcing the family to sell their home.
AFTER graduating she moved to New York and hit the ground running. “I was just climbing and electrified all the time,” she said. “Burning up with ambition. So I don’t want to judge other people too harshly that I see on television. They’re just climbing also. But I like to think that I had some talent.”
Smith got a job at Modern Screen magazine, then became a proofreader for Newsweek, PR for Broadway shows, worked at CBS Radio and became an assistant to actress and singer Kaye Ballard. Her real break in journalism came in 1958 when she started as Igor Cassini’s ghostwriter for his column in the New York Journal-American.
Her modus operandi was to make friends with the stars, especially Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The friendship “really helped make my career,” she once said. “It didn’t do them any harm either.”
But many disapproved. “It’s a valid criticism, I suppose,” she once said. “But I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t have to be pure and I’m not. I mean, I am not a reporter operating on life-and-death matters, state secrets, the rise and fall of governments and I don’t believe you can do this kind of job without access.”
Her last Liz Smith column was published in 2009. She wrote several books including her 2000 memoir Natural Blonde, in which she came out as bisexual, and Dishing: Great Dish – and Dishes – From America’s Most Beloved Gossip Columnist, in which she combined celebrity anecdotes with food.
She was married and divorced twice but her long-term companion was archeologist Iris Love. She had no children.