Gossip • Liz Smith
Liz Smith In a world of celebrity journalists, she’s both.
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At the same time, coincidentally, her own star began to rise. In 1976 the New York Daily News hired Smith to write a gossip and entertainment column, and the rest, as they say, is history. In the early days she was toughshe reported on Pat Nixon’s drinking, for examplebut before long she was drawing criticism for being too close to her subjects. Her column was funny and fluffy and eclectic, but she no longer had her nose pressed against the glass, it was said. She had come inside the rooma very nice, very cushy room.
And who could blame her? The Algonquin Round Table, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing on smoky glass: Smith came of age during what was, on the surface at least, a more graceful time in the life of Manhattan, a period she readily admits is gone. “America is an aristocracy of money now,” she says. And, of course, celebrity, a fact she acknowledges with the grimace of someone who knows she has contributed to the creation of a monster. “We have this overweening obsession with celebrity to take our minds off what’s really going on,” she says. “That’s the only healthy thing about gossip; in a world of real attrition we wouldn’t have time for it. If that time ever comes in America, we’ll be like Richard Nixon: We won’t have gossip to kick around anymore. It’s a manifestation of the leisure class.” Smith isn’t anybody’s foolshe knows she is chronicling a vulgar timebut like any plucky Texas heroine she works hard to enjoy it, establishing her own moral ground among the amoral. To the world, she presents a wide-eyed enthusiasm, but privately she is nothing if not shrewd and self-aware, two qualities that are not always obvious in her column.
Her intimate life is a good example. Twice divorced, she has abandoned romantic entanglements”I don’t have any romantic connections; that’s all over for me,” she has saidand instead invests her emotional stock in friendships. She is usually surrounded by loyalists: an office manager who has worked for her for 30 years, a housekeeper who has been with her for 25 years, and two longtime assistants who have, over the past quarter century or so, become semi-collaborators who keep strangers and sycophants from piercing her privacy. (One of them, the famously protective Saint Clair Pugh”Saint” to Smith’s friendsis aptly named.) Smith makes a point of keeping up with close friendssome from kindergarten, some, like Brenner, from Manhattanthrough daily letters and faxes. She also maintains an ongoing correspondence with many of her friends’ children.
Yet Smith knows she lives in a world in which many relationships are perishable. “I think my instincts are pretty good,” she says, “but I don’t have any hard feelings about people who aren’t of quality. Appreciating a person of quality is its own reward.” In an odd way, Smith has managed to convert Manhattan into a larger version of Gonzales, the small town where she spent much of her early adolescence: She is the sharp-eyed spinster who knows everybody’s business but keeps her own very much to herself, the one who tells people what they want to know and what they need to know. “Hank Luce saw me at a party,” she recalls. “Oh, Liz,’ he said. You’re still writing about all that Hollywood shitit’s so boring.’ I went home, and the more I thought about it, I thought, Hell, I agree with him.’ So I leaven the column with social history and opinions and reality. I write about the things that interest meart, archaeology, booksmore than anyone else does.”
And, naturally, she is nice about it. “Rejoicing at other people’s misfortune is just a phenomenon of the time,” she says. “I can only be what I am. I can only think that my benign approach has worked for me. Rosie O’Donnell takes the benign approach. Oprah takes the benign approach. I think people are getting sick of this mean shit.” Thus, if she prints a story about marital problems between Billy Bob Thornton and his wife, Pietra, she will sooner or later make up for it by promoting Pietra’s Playboy pictorial. Such is what passes for a good deed in contemporary America.
And when Smith is going to be unkind or racy, she sometimes resorts to the anonymous, or “blind,” item”The coward’s way out,” she sayswhich never seems to backfire on her as it does on many columnists. In the midst of sitcom actress Ellen DeGeneres’ coming out, for instance, Smith reported that a major TV talk show star would follow suit. Evidently, she touched a psychic nerve in the homophobic heaven of the stars: Fearing fans would think the item was about her, Oprah Winfrey immediately dispatched a press release confessing her … heterosexuality. By doing so, of course, she paid homage to Smith’s vast reach, as did many others. “Oprah nominated herself, and we weren’t even talking about her,” says Smith. “If I told you all the people who told me they weren’t going to come out, you would die laughing. Big, big starsit’s hilarious.” (She won’t say who; holding out is part of being nice.)
In fact, Smith has made a career of being on the side of the stars; criticism aside, it is, to her, just good business. “Why wouldn’t I be their mouthpiece? The other columns portray them as child molesters, deadbeats, secret homosexuals. I am open to anything these people want to say. Let them talk. Don’t tell me that isn’t more interesting to the reader to hear from them directly.” Recently, Sharon Stone called to complain about press coverage of her romance with a San Francisco newspaper editor, and Smith wrote her gripes into a column. “This is an intimate look into her mind,” she says, “and I’m the only one who’s got her statement. If they want to talk to me, I’m sure willing to let them have their say. I’m the one who has access, and I don’t think that’s a small thing. I spent a lifetime becoming the kind of reporter they would want to talk to.”
As time nears for Smith to leave for her interview with Michelle Pfeiffer, the conversation turns back to wealththis time her own, a subject of which she is pragmatically proud. “I don’t care about the money,” she says. “I never made any money till I started doing TV. I think journalism is the greatest career because you can keep your independence, remain one of the common people, and at the same time have a lot of privileges. But you don’t have to enter that morally ambiguous thing about making lots of money.
“I’ve still got my nose up against the glass,” she insists, waving good-bye from the doorway of Joel Schumacher’s house.
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