Liz Smith, premier gossip columnist, dies at 94

Variety
Updated

Liz Smith, known as “the Grand Dame of Dish” or “the Doyenne of Dish” and one of the most prominent gossip columnists in the country for decades, has died in New York from natural causes. She was 94.

Literary agent Joni Evans confirmed the news to the Associated Press on Sunday.

The famously Texas-born, Southern Baptist with the blonde bob began penning a column under her own name at the New York Daily News in 1976. Three years later, during a newspaper strike in New York City, her editors at the Daily News asked her to appear in daily segments on WNBC’s Live at Five newscast; she remained with the program for 11 years, earning an Emmy in 1985. This exposure on television enhanced her status — she became a popular staple on the Manhattan social scene, which served to provide more material for her column, by this point in syndication in more than 70 newspapers.

At one point Smith was hired by Fox to develop a talkshow that Roger Ailes would produce.

She moved from the Daily News to Newsday in 1991, remaining for four years, then signed with the Rupert Murdoch-ownedNew York Post. Once part of News Corp., she naturally made appearances on the Fox News Channel. Smith remained with the Post until she was let go in 2009; she continued writing her column, the syndication of which also continued, and the column appeared for a while in Daily Variety after the death of the paper’s own legendary gossip columnist, Army Archerd, in 2009.

Smith told the New York Times in 2014 that her love of movies began when she was 6 or 7 and that she never wanted to do anything else.

Asked about why we retain our fascination with celebrities, Smith replied: “Remember Camelot? The song: ‘I Wonder What the King Is Doing Tonight?’ We make stars into something exquisite, and we want to know what they’re doing and thinking because our lives are desperately boring.”

Smith was full of stories about the likes of Jackie Kennedy, Carol Burnett, Bette Midler and her sometime-friend Barbara Walters, but she professed, to the Times in 2014, not to pay any attention to Gawker, TMZ or any of the other celebrity gossip-oriented websites that have proliferated over the last decade. “I never know whether the stories are true,” she declared.

Despite her professed disdain for online developments, Smith came to write a blog for the Huffington Post. She was also one of the founding members, along with Lesley Stahl, Mary Wells Lawrence and Joni Evans, of the website, which is intended to allow women to talk culture, politics and gossip.

Asked by the Times whether she ever paid for stories — a sensitive subject for at least some gossip columnists — Smith replied: “I could have. But that would have been against my principles. The only thing I ever negotiated for money was covering Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding to Larry Fortensky at Neverland Ranch. They said, ‘No press.’ And I said, ‘I’ll give all the money to AIDS charities.’ So they let me come, and boy, that was an experience.”

Mary Elizabeth Smith was born in Fort Worth, Texas.  In 1949 Smith graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin — where she wrote for the Daily Texan, and all her papers are ensconced at the university’s Dolph Brisco Center. She soon relocated to New York, where she worked as a typist, proofreader and reporter before working as a news producer for Mike Wallace at CBS Radio. She spent five years as a news producer for NBC-TV, and she also worked for Allan Funt on Candid Camera.

Smith started out writing the anonymous Cholly Knickerbocker gossip column in the 1950s for the Hearst papers. After ending her work on that column in the early 1960s she went to work for Helen Gurley Brown as the entertainment editor for the U.S. version of Cosmopolitan magazine, later also working as entertainment editor of Sports Illustrated.

Smith raised millions of dollars for charities, including $6 million for Literacy Partners, millions for AIDS charity AmFAR, as well as money for the New York Landmarks Conservancy.

She appeared on a variety of documentaries about celebrities including 2007’s A Tribute to Peter Bart: Newhouse Mirror Award, centering on the former editor-in-chief of Variety; Smith also played herself on TV series including The Nanny, Murphy Brown and The Roseanne Show.

Her tome The Mother Book was published in 1978, followed by her New York Times bestselling memoir Natural Blonde in 2000 and 2005’s Dishing: Great Dish – And Dishes – From America’s Most Beloved Gossip Columnist.

Smith was married and divorced twice to George Beeman from 1945-47, and to Fred Lister from 1957-62, but acknowledged her bisexuality in a roundabout way in her memoirs, dubbing it “gender neutrality.” She was less circumspect in a 2000 interview with Judy Wieder, editor-in-chief of the Advocate, declaring that while it was not in her nature to be a role model in the LGBT movement, “I think that my relationships with women were always much more emotionally satisfying and comfortable (than with men). And a lot of my relationships with men were more flirtatious and adversarial. I just never felt I was wife material. I always felt that I was a great girlfriend.”

 

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