Lifestyles

Liz Smith, a Gossip and Friend

“I am a garbage pail,” the gossip columnist Liz Smith once said. “My best stories come from other newspaper people and media people. My best stories come from people at The New York Times and CBS and NBC and ABC and Time and Newsweek. People who are frustrated by what they know and don’t have a place to print.”

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JACOB BERNSTEIN
, New York Times

“I am a garbage pail,” the gossip columnist Liz Smith once said. “My best stories come from other newspaper people and media people. My best stories come from people at The New York Times and CBS and NBC and ABC and Time and Newsweek. People who are frustrated by what they know and don’t have a place to print.”

Her favorite foods were fried, her favorite exercise was none, and when she dined at restaurants — which was pretty much all the time — she left inordinately large tips, saying, “no one ever got rich stiffing a waiter.”

Although she never won a Pulitzer Prize, Mike Wallace once said she was more widely read (and better paid) than almost anyone who did. She trafficked in gossip, but knew “The Odyssey” backward and forward. And, somewhat counterintuitively, she regarded benevolence as an essential requirement of her job.

So when Smith was celebrated Friday afternoon at a memorial at the Majestic Theater in Midtown Manhattan on what would have been her 95th birthday, it made some sense that people who appeared regularly in her columns were not cheering her death the way others had cheered Walter Winchell’s, but were instead tearing up on stage, talking about her as a friend, confidante and mentor.

The crowd included people from virtually every sector of media and entertainment.

Toward the front on the left was Gay Talese. Just behind was film producer Jean Doumanian. A ways over was Tom Wolfe.

Cynthia McFadden, a correspondent at NBC, was the first speaker and said that Smith had at first been against having a memorial. “But with a little loving encouragement, she seemed to soften,” McFadden said.

So much so, in fact, that by the time she died, there was an exit note left in her sofa with detailed instructions to friends that included the request (“in all caps,” McFadden noted) that they hold this posthumous event at a Shubert Theater.

Ta da!

Barry Diller spoke after McFadden and talked about how he shared a birthday with Smith and Elaine Stritch.

One year, Diller, Stritch and Smith decided to celebrate at the 21 Club. That excursion came to an end after the third oyster, when Stritch said, “this place is a dump,” grabbed everyone’s coats and took them to 3 Guys.

In the late 1980s, Diller worked as an executive at Fox, where one of his responsibilities was starting what he described as an “'Entertainment Tonight"-type show.

“Liz introduced me to a producer she had known and who I had never met before,” Diller said. “He’d come from political campaigning, and I thought he’d be great. He was, but not for this show. We became friends, and later I introduced him to Rupert Murdoch. His name was Roger Ailes. So, Liz, it’s all your fault.”

Other speakers included actors Renée Zellweger (who described Smith traveling to Austin, Texas, in 2011, despite a hip injury, so she could accompany her to a film festival), Bruce Willis (who recalled Smith’s habit of using her column for charitable causes) and Holland Taylor (who met Smith back in the mid-'70s and received her last email from Smith around Nov. 5, a week before her death).

Had Taylor and Smith enjoyed a summer romance back at the beginning of their relationship?

Taylor alluded to that possibility from the stage, but said that what really endured between them was a friendship that “was for me the single safe harbor in what has always seemed a storm-tossed scattered life in, let’s not kid ourselves, the mean old world.” The writer Billy Norwich said he owed his name to Smith. She had been a mentor to him when he was young, broke and looking to break into the publishing business.

“'Honey,'” he recalled her telling him, “'the first thing we need to do is get you a better name if you’re going to be a writer.’ I was born Billy Goldberg in Norwich, Connecticut, and one day over lunch I became Billy Norwich from Goldberg, Connecticut. Which is very useful because you get the anti-Semitism direct that way.”

Over the years, Smith promoted Norwich relentlessly to colleagues.

She also admonished him for misspelling people’s names in his columns at The New York Observer and The New York Daily News, advised him to always have two drinks before he went reporting at society functions, and stepped in front of Oscar de la Renta the night he was about to knock Norwich out for something he’d written.

“Oscar, honey, you can’t hit him. He’s a Jew wearing eyeglasses!” Smith was said to have said.

Occasionally, said Lesley Stahl, another speaker, Smith got into feuds of her own.

Long before President Donald Trump began calling CNN “fake news,” Stahl said he vowed to purchase The Daily News merely so he could fire Smith, who had written disparagingly about him during his divorce from Ivana Trump.

And Smith did have a few shortcomings.

For example, McFadden said, “she was not good at keeping a secret. Professional liability, I guess.”

Yet she rarely lost friends. “If she did, she would woo them and get them back,” Stahl said.

I can attest to both of these things being true. For many years, Smith was a close friend of my mother, Nora Ephron.

In 2012, my mother came down with leukemia, and told almost no one about it.

The day my mother went into a coma, about 24 hours before she died, I began calling her extended circle of friends, so that they wouldn’t find out about it when obituaries began appearing.

Smith was among those I called.

We had a lovely talk. Having known her for at least 30 years, it never occurred to me she would scoop my mother’s death. But that’s what she did. Hours later, she uploaded a “tribute” to my mother on her website. As someone pointed out on the web, it was about the weirdest obituary that had ever been published given that the subject wasn’t dead yet.

I’m sure Smith was devastated by the loss, but her claim that she thought my mother had died when she posted the piece made no sense. In the piece itself, she said my mother hadn’t died.

But I couldn’t stay mad at her.

She was too kind. She was too smart. She was too much fun.

And it was precisely the sort of thing my mother would have found amusing, had it happened to anyone else. (I could almost see my mother saying: “Well, what did you expect?” A scary thing about storytellers is that their central allegiance is to the story.)

So seven weeks later, I called Smith for help on an article and stayed friendly with her until her death.

Bygones. The world was a better place with her in it.

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