Social scribe
Remembering Betsy Parish
With Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, nowadays everyone can be a gossip columnist — or at least pretend to be. But it wasn’t always that way.
In the heyday of Houston’s newspaper war in the late 20th century, columnists Maxine Mesinger, Marge Crumbaker and Betsy Parish served as authoritative arbiters of the social scene with witty comments on the city’s boldfaced names. Their daily columns about the fantastic goings-on and all-too-human foibles among Houston’s society set were must-reads, offering the inside scoop on the rich and famous.
That golden era was recalled recently at a memorial service at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church for Parish, who died at her Tanglewood-area high-rise in February. She was 71.
The Rev. Martin J. Bastin called Parish “Houston’s version of Liz Smith and Rona Barrett” and noted that she was “classy, stylish and quite the charmer.” Yet, he added, “under all that performance bravado, she was down to earth.”
Parish, whose given name was Elizabeth Ellen but had been known as Betsy since childhood, succeeded Crumbaker at the Houston Post in 1989 and served as the paper’s gossip columnist until it folded in 1995. Parish was on a transAtlantic trip on the QEII when she got the news that she was out of a job. “I’ve just gone from a ‘Who’s Who’ to ‘Who’s That?,’ ” she quipped.
Parish then reinvented herself as an author, specializing in the history of health care in Houston. Among the books she wrote were a comprehensive history of Texas Children’s Hospital and the story of Dr. Michael DeBakey and his work at Methodist Hospital.
As the Post’s gossip columnist, Parish went head to head with Mesinger, the longtime columnist at the Houston Chronicle. Before taking the job at the Post, Parish was a principal at the public relations firm Callas & Foster and had supplied Mesinger with juicy tidbits for her column.
According to an account in Texas Monthly, when telling Mesinger she had taken the Post job during a dinner at Segari’s Seafood Resaurant, the legendary Chronicle columnist replied, “This is our last supper.”
Mesinger, who made lasting friendships with such notables as Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland when they made regular appearances at the Shamrock Hilton’s Cork Club in the 1950s and ’60s, regularly sprinkled in famous names among the locals in her wildly popular column. (Mesinger, who died in 2001, remains a patron saint of the Chronicle’s features department, as a large photograph of her occupies a prominent position in the newsroom.)
Parish, a fifth-generation Houstonian who knew just about everyone who was anyone in the city, also famously relied on her contacts with waiters, maître d’s, valet parkers, security guards and other service personnel whom she had cultivated from her years in the hotel and PR business for inside information.
In her early career, she had worked with Judge Roy Hofheinz as AstroWorld Hotel convention and public relations coordinator, oversaw the opening of the Hyatt Regency in downtown Houston and was director of sales and public relations for Houston International Hotels, whose properties included the Warwick in Houston and Villa Vera and Marallsa hotels in Acapulco, Mexico.
She also served as vice president at Sakowitz department stores in the late ’70s and early ’80s, working closely with president Robert Sakowitz to produce the legendary annual storewide festivals, select unusual items for the Christmas catalog and open new stores in Dallas, Midland and Tulsa.
“We had a lot of fun together creating all kinds of ideas (like) ‘Ultimate Gifts’ and working on festivals,” Sakowitz said. “She and I would come up with some outrageous ideas and didn’t see how we would implement them. But she loved taking on the impossible.”
In his eulogy at Parish’s service, Sakowitz noted that in 1979, during the “Urban Cowboy” craze, Parish came up with an “Ultimate Gift” of ‘Texercise’ on your very own mechanical bull from Mickey Gilley for $3,800. A year later, representatives of Walter Cronkite tried to stop distribution of the holiday catalog after Parish came up with the gift of “11 Ways to Be Somebody” that included an appearance by the CBS anchor at a dinner party. But cooler heads prevailed, and the catalog went out as planned.
Parish, who was also known to friends as her alter-ego “The Contessa” and who often was dressed in all black, with a jeweled bumblebee on her shoulder, made the transition to columnist when then-Post editor David Burgin hired her after an extensive search to find a successor to Crumbaker, who had served as the newspaper’s gossip columnist since 1970. (Crumbaker died last year.)
Parish applied for the job by writing Burgin a cheeky letter that caught his attention. “For the past 10 years, many of my friends and cohorts have told me that I should be the person to take over Marge Crumbaker’s job should she ever leave. If it was so apparent to them, I thought you would have called by now.”
She started her first column in late 1989 with a quote she credited to Rabbi Judah Schatel: “Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.”
“Betsy suffered fools poorly,” Sakowitz said. “When people deserved it, she would prick the balloon. But she was a wonderfully whimsical person about the way she would do things.”
“Her inquiring mind and her sense of humor were two things that automatically stood out. She was very much a wordsmith and would really appreciate the nuances of phrases. We used to joke about that a lot. And she was a wonderful storyteller. The short phrases of a tweet were not exactly her style.”