Gossip great Liz Smith dies
Gossip titan Smith, a News legend, dies at 94
GOSSIP GURU Liz Smith, whose bold-face blurbs included stories on everyone from Madonna to Marlon Brando, died of natural causes Sunday in the tabloid town she took by storm. She was 94. If you were a celebrity, Smith knew you — and likely wrote about you in the pages of the Daily News, where she dished on famous people from 1976 to 1991.
The scoops included the frontpage divorce between a real estate mogul named Donald Trump and his first wife, Ivana.
Not only did Smith spend three months covering the public split, but she also took sides.
“She still wants to be his wife,” Smith wrote of Ivana at the time. “But the bottom line is, she won’t give up her self-respect to do it.
“Intimates say she had every chance to continue being Mrs. Trump by allowing her husband to live in an open marriage.”
Trump wasn’t happy. He once offered to buy The News just to fire Smith, The New York Times reported this year.
Known as the “Grand Dame of Dish,” Smith graduated from the University of Texas and moved to the city with two suitcases and $50 in her pocket.
She began her journalism career as a CBS Radio news producer for Mike Wallace before starting as a ghost writer for the Hearst gossip column Cholly Knickerbocker in the late 1950s.
Smith moved on to work for Cosmopolitan and Sports Illustrated in the ’60s, then began a self-titled column at The News in 1976.
Eventually, her column became syndicated in almost 70 newspapers as she made famous friends from Elizabeth Taylor to Frank Sinatra.
Smith’s “Live at Five” show on WNBC lasted 11 years, and it earned her an Emmy for reporting in 1985.
“During my time at WNBC, she was nothing short of fabulous,” tweeted Al Roker. “Liz passed away at the age of 94 and with her, a piece (of) New York.”
Smith jumped in 1991 from The News to Newsday, which she left in 2005 for the New York Post. Her column was cut by the Post in 2009, but she continued to write online.
For all of her scoops and speculation, Smith said she never forgot what she was doing.
“We mustn’t take ourselves too seriously in this world of gossip,” Smith told The Associated Press in 1987 in a Texas drawl that decades in New York could not erase.
“When you look at it realistically, what I do is pretty insignificant. Still, I’m having a lot of fun.”
Celebrities took to social media to heap praise on Smith.
“Loved Liz Smith. Smart and funny. Gossip from the High Road,” Rob Lowe wrote on Twitter.
“Liz Smith was the definition of a lady,” tweeted James Woods. “She dished, but always found a way to make it entertaining and fun.”
In her 2000 memoir “Natural Blonde,” Smith — who married her college sweetheart Ed Beeman and later wed travel agent Freddie Lister — came out as bisexual.
She called it “gender neutrality.”
“I think that my relationships with women were always much more emotionally satisfying and comfortable,” she told The Advocate that year.
“And a lot of my relationships with men were more flirtatious and adversarial. I just never felt I was wife material. I always felt that I was a great girlfriend.”
Smith is survived by several nieces and nephews. A memorial service will be held for her in the spring.