Entrepreneur focused on black audiences
Barbara Smith, a fashion model who created a business empire by catering to the tastes of aspiring black professionals with her restaurants, television shows, bedding and furniture collections and books on entertaining, died Saturday at her home on Long Island. She was 70.
The cause was early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, her family said. Smith had waged a long and public battle with the disease, which was diagnosed when she was in her 50s.
Smith was best known for her popular Manhattan restaurant, B. Smith. Located at the edge of the theater district, it opened in 1986 and almost immediately attracted a following among affluent black New Yorkers, who welcomed it as a stylish gathering spot. Essence magazine in 1995 described it as the place “where the who’s who of black Manhattan meet, greet and eat regularly.”
Smith opened a successful offshoot in Union Station in Washington, D.C., in 1994 and four years later in Sag Harbor, N.Y., where she and her second husband and business partner, Dan Gasby, maintained a summer house.
Often called the black Martha Stewart, Smith translated her sense of style into a series of books on cooking and entertaining; a syndicated weekly television show, “B. Smith with Style”; a bedding, tableware and bath products collection for Bed Bath & Beyond; and a furniture line for the La-Z-Boy company that mingled African and Asian elements.
Her ventures achieved crossover success, attracting customers beyond her core black clientele. The Washington Post wrote that her restaurant in Washington “manages to transcend racial lines,” adding that “like a well-whisked beurre blanc, the races here mingle without separating.”
In an interview with National Public Radio in 2007, Smith said: “What B. Smith’s brand is about is bringing people together. I think that if Martha Stewart and Oprah had a daughter, it would be B. Smith.”
Barbara Elaine Smith was born Aug. 24, 1949, in Everson, Pa. Her father, William, was a steelworker. Her mother, Florence (Claybrook) Smith, was a part-time maid with a flair for interior decorating that she had once hoped to make her career.
From early childhood, Barbara Smith was a whirlwind. “I inherited a paper route, I sold magazines, had lemonade stands, I was a candy striper and into fundraising,” she told the New York Times in 2011. “I’ve always enjoyed being busy.”
When she was barred from joining the Future Homemakers of America because of her race, she started her own home economics club and named herself president.
In high school, she saw an advertisement for the John Robert Powers modeling school and pestered her father to allow her to attend. When she convinced him that it was a finishing school, he relented. She raised the tuition money by babysitting.
After graduating from high school, Smith modeled for department stores in Pittsburgh and won a job as a ground hostess with TWA. Her first big break came in 1969, when she won a place with the Ebony Fashion Fair, a show that traveled to 77 cities across the U.S.
Along the way, she shortened her first name to B.
Two years later, she was signed by the prestigious Wilhelmina agency in New York and began appearing on magazine covers and in print ads, her fresh, girl-next-door looks ideally suited for products such as Oil of Olay and Noxzema. She appeared multiple times on the covers of Ebony and Essence, and in July 1976 became only the second black model to appear on the cover of Mademoiselle.
As her modeling career waned, Smith began looking for other outlets. She sang in nightclubs and tried her hand at acting, without much success.
In the 1980s, she worked as a hostess and floor manager at America, a large restaurant near Union Square Park operated by the Ark restaurant group. The management, impressed, agreed to help her start her own restaurant, and B. Smith, the restaurant, was born.
It was at her restaurant that she met Gasby, a marketing executive who helped her develop her television show. Her first marriage, to HBO executive Don Henderson, ended in divorce. Besides Gasby, survivors include her stepdaughter, Dana Gasby.