Tabloid gossip queen Liz Smith dies at 94
Liz Smith captured the lives of the rich and famous in print.
For more than three decades, she chronicled the lives of the rich, famous and beautiful.
Liz Smith, the longtime queen of New York’s tabloid gossip columns, who for more than three decades chronicled little triumphs and trespasses in the soap-opera lives of the rich, the famous and the merely beautiful, died Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.
Her friend and literary agent, Joni Evans, confirmed her death.
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, Smith captivated millions with her tattletale chitchat and, over time, ascended to fame and wealth that rivaled those of the celebrities she covered.
A self-effacing, good-natured, vivacious Texan who professed to be awed by celebrities, Smith was the antithesis of the brutal columnist J.J. Hunsecker in Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman’s screenplay for “Sweet Smell of Success,” which portrayed sinister power games in a seamy world of press agents and nightclubs.
Her column, called simply “Liz Smith,” ran in the New York Daily News from 1976 to 1991; in New York Newsday from 1991 to 1995, when that newspaper closed; continued in Newsday until 2005 and, with some overlap, in the New York Post from 1995 to 2009 — a 33-year run that morphed onto the internet in the New York Social Diary. It was syndicated by Tribune for years in 60 to 70 other newspapers, including The Palm Beach Post (where her column appears today on Page E2), even as she appeared on television news and entertainment programs and wrote magazine articles and books.
She was not an exceptional writer or reporter, although there were occasional scoops — the 1990 split of Donald and Ivana Trump, Madonna’s 1996 pregnancy — but her income often exceeded $1 million a year, more than any newspaper columnist or executive editor, and she became as prominent as her legendary predecessors, Walter Winchell in New York and Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons in Hollywood.
Her style was not the intimidating jugular attack of columnists who expose intimacies or misdeeds in the private lives of public figures, thriving on Schadenfreude and sometimes damaging reputations. Nor, for the sake of a titillating item, did she seize upon ugly rumors or tasteless embarrassments.
On the contrary, she offered a kinder, gentler view of movie stars and moguls, politicians and society figures. And gossip was hardly the only ingredient of her columns, which were sprinkled with notes on books or films, bits of political commentary and opinions about actors, authors and other notables.
She often inserted herself into stories. Explaining why Madonna had become a regular in her columns, Smith wrote in 2006, “I didn’t always agree with what she said, or what she did, but the hysterical overreaction to her caused me, if not to defend her, then at least to put a more balanced perspective on her astonishing ongoing saga.”
If her columns lacked edge, they provided something more: the insider’s view. Many of those she wrote about became personal friends, people she genuinely liked and who liked her. She lunched with them, partied with them, vacationed with them and shared their successes and travails. And they trusted her, knowing she would not trash them in print.