The gossip columnist who befriended the stars

Liz Smith was so successful as a gossip columnist that she became almost as rich and famous as the celebrities she covered. Over a feted 33-year newspaper career, the disarmingly charming Texan became friends with Frank Sinatra, Truman Capote, and Elizabeth Taylor, and earned as much as $1 million a year with a column syndicated in 70 newspapers. Her biggest scoop came in 1990, when Ivana Trump told Smith that her husband wanted a divorce—a story that dominated tabloid front pages for 11 straight days and led Donald Trump to threaten to buy the New York Daily News just to fire her. “That was the biggest story I ever covered that didn’t amount to a hill of beans,” she said years later. “It was just two rich people arguing about money.” Born in Fort Worth, Smith “was the daughter of a devout Baptist mother and an eccentric father,” said the Associated Press. She developed a love for the movies at an early age because they were “one of the few things her mother did not consider a sin.” After studying journalism at the University of Texas, she moved to New York City and spent the next 30 years bouncing from job to job, working as a publicist, a production assistant on TV’s Candid Camera, and a gossip column ghostwriter. Given her own column by the Daily News in 1976, Smith took a different approach than her predecessors, said The New York Times. Whereas they had thrived on exposing celebrities’ affairs and misdeeds, she “offered a kinder, gentler view of movie stars and moguls, politicians and society figures.” She admitted her friendships with these people led to “conflicts of interest,” but noted that she wasn’t reporting on “life-and-death matters.” Smith boosted her profile by becoming a celebrity expert on local New York news shows, where her “folksy drawl and down-home style were a hit,” said The Washington Post. She moved to New York Newsday in 1991, and then on to the New York Post; in 1996, Madonna personally gave her the world exclusive on her pregnancy. Smith “kept up an exhaustive, multiple-nightsa-week round of cocktail parties, book readings, dinners, and lunches well into her 80s.” But she never took herself—or her industry—too seriously. “What I do is pretty insignificant,” she said. “Still, I’m having a lot of fun.”