Gossip columnist dished on boldfaced-name set
The Washington Post
Liz Smith started her gossip career in the early 1950s writing about Shelley Winters for a pulp movie magazine and ended it nearly seven decades later tweeting about actor Ryan Gosling. In between, she dished with and about pretty much every author, entertainer, business mogul and political eminencein the news.
A blue-eyed blonde from Texas with a disarmingly self-effacing manner, Ms. Smith inserted herself into the peculiarly New York-Los Angeles orbit of celebrities, chronicling the mundane and significant events of their lives.
Ather peak in the 1980s and 1990s,Ms. Smith’s eponymous syndicated column ran in morethan 70 newspapers. She publicly feuded with Donald Trump and Frank Sinatra, dropped acid with actress Holland Taylor, went ballooning in France with Malcolm Forbes and collected experiences as avidly as Elizabeth Taylor (one of her frequent subjects) collectedjewelry.
In her column and in her 2000 memoir, “Natural Blonde,” she dashed off anecdotesin breathless fashion.
About the evening she spent with writer Truman Capote, she wrote in her book, “In came Truman carrying a large fishbowl full of white powder. He sat it down in front of us and announced, ‘This is the world’s purest, best cocaine. You have never had anything like this before.’ Then, as suddenly as he’d offered it, Truman snatched it up and marched away with it, saying, ‘No, it’s too good for the likes of you.’ “
Another time, she added, “Madonna did me the ultimate favor. From Budapest, she gave my column the exclusive on her pregnancy. I was sputtering in shock when Madonna’s rep, Liz Rosenberg, called. ‘But, she’s just starting Evita,’ I said. ‘How can this be true?’ Madonna herself picked up the phone. ‘Liz, I’m pregnant,’ she barked. I started writing.”
Ms. Smith, 94, died Sunday in New York. Her literary agent, Joni Evans, confirmed the death to The Associated Press.
Mary Elizabeth Smith was born in Fort Worth on Feb. 2, 1923. Her father was a cotton broker and a gambler; her mother was homemaker.
Growing up among rich kids, she said she never pretended to have more than she did because she thought she would gain respect by admitting to her reduced circumstances.
“I was always a horrible little social climber in my way,” she told the New York Times in 1998.
When she was about 6 or 7, her babysitter started taking her to movies — ones inappropriate for her age — which sparked a lifelong enchantment with film stars.
After graduating in 1949 with a journalism degree from the University of Texas, she promptly bought a one-way train ticket to New York, landing at Modern Screen, a movie fanzine, and later took a job as a ghostwriter for Igor Cassini’s “Cholly Knickerbocker” gossip column.
Perhaps the biggest scoop of Ms. Smith’s career came in 1990,when she broke the story in the Daily News of Donald and Ivana Trump’s divorce. She had been on trips with the couple — who intrigued her, she said, because they hadn’t descended from old money or SocialRegister families — and it was Ivana who asked her to come to the Plaza Hotel, which Mr. Trump then owned.
“When I got there, she threw herself in my arms and told me that Donald didn’t want her anymore. I said, ‘Get yourself a PR person who’s respectable and defend yourself against him,’ “she told NPR in a 2009 interview. Mr. Trump was so enraged, she said, that he threatened to buy the Daily News just to fire her. The story made tabloid front pages for 11 days straight.