Austin City Limits Gossip • Liz Smith
Liz Smith In a world of celebrity journalists, she’s both.
“THIS IS MY REWARD for living a good life having rich friends,” Liz Smith says, settling in after a butler-cooked breakfast at the Bel-Air, California, abode of her best friend, director Joel Schumacher. Things do, indeed, look good: Lemons are ripening on a tree in the garden, the slate-lined pool is glistening, and the sky is a smoky Los Angeles blue. Schumacher is away in Acapulco, recuperating from a tough promotional tour for Batman & Robin, so Smith, a perennial houseguest (she has her own room), makes herself at home, collapsing her lanky frame into a leather sofa, her blue eyes a little doleful, her blond page boy a little limp from what could be called too much fun. A week earlier she returned from a Grecian idyll with investment banker Pete Peterson and his wife, public television executive Joan Ganz Cooney; now she’s flown from New York into L.A. to interview Michelle Pfeiffer for Good Housekeeping. “I like to interview people I like,” she says gamely.
These days, it seems, there are few people Smith doesn’t like, and few people who don’t like her. As the nation’s premier gossipwith a syndicated column that appears in sixty papers and nightly appearances on the E! channel’s Gossip Showthe 74-year-old Texan has become as much a celebrity as the people she writes about. Indeed, 1997 has been particularly successful for Smith: She was a hit as a society fundraiser (Brooke Astor gave her $250,000 to expand her new literacy charity, the Liz Smith Fund), she got to reveal JFK mistress Judith Exner’s final secrets in Vanity Fair, she collected $1 million from Hyperion for her memoirs, and she scooped the world on the dishiest celebrity doingsshe was months ahead of other entertainment reporters, for instance, in breaking the news of Jim Carrey’s divorce. She also proved how much impact her column really has. Liz Taylor raves to her about Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade and it wins an Oscar; Demi Moore complains to her about the editing of G.I. Jane and the movie gets recut; TV stars Ta Leoni and David Duchovny let her in on their wedding plans and it makes national news.
But just as Smith has scored on a grand scale, she has come under fire for breaking one of journalism’s commandments: Thou shalt not write about one’s friends. This summer, a few weeks before she bunked at Schumacher’s house, the New York Observer took her to task in a front-page story for labeling Batman & Robin “a cinematic work of art” and “the best of the Batman movies to date.” To some, it was a replay of 1991, when she covered the divorce of Donald and Ivana Trump while remaining pals with both. On such topics Smith is as flinty as a West Texas rancher. “Joel and I never wanted to abandon our friendship to prove that we’re not exchanging favors,” she says. “I’ve got a philosophy of what it is to be famous: People in the press attack me because I’m there. My statistical chance of making an ass of myself is much greater than someone who’s not in the paper three hundred and sixty-five days a year. You get a lot of heat and light for just being there.”
Perhaps it isn’t a case of ethics but of geography. Any Texan who spends a nanosecond with Smith will know her for who she is: the embodiment of the good ol’ girl. She’s always nice (until her mother died at 95, she wrote her every day), always speaks her mind (her language is frequently salted with cusswords), and shines in any crowd (“She makes any encounter a party,” says author and fellow Texan Marie Brenner), though she prefers her own company. She hides how smart she is, too”I work at my intellectual capacity,” she says, after admitting that she devoured the Napoleon biography How Far From Austerlitz? But above all, she always gets her way. “I’ve sung at Carnegie Hall and the Met. I’ve sung with Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer. I’ve danced with the cast of A Chorus Line. I have realized a lot of my secret Walter Mitty dreams.”
Those dreams were formed in Fort Worth, where, like so many ambitious Depression-era Texans, she grew up knowing that her surroundings were too small. The daughter of a cotton broker who took her everywhere with himyou can’t be a good ol’ girl without being a daddy’s girlshe was a restless child in a staid environment, already smitten with the likes of Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart. “We were poor,” she says, “but my mother and father sent me to a better grade and high school, so I grew up with all those rich kids in Fort Worth. It gave me a social complex. I was a horrible cutup. My French teacher signed my annual, I’ll never forget my little monkey of the French class.’ I expect I haven’t changed much. I’ve always been outside with my nose pressed against the glass.” She studied journalism at the University of Texas at Austin”the seminal experience of my life”and then, in 1949, lit out for New York City. A friend was engaged to a man who had already moved there; the woman wanted to be with him but couldn’t go without a chaperon, so Smith agreed to accompany her. She had only $50 in her pocket. Her first morning there, she opened the window of her Chelsea hotel room and hollered, “Which way is town?” That night, her friends took her to Times Square. “I found out which way town was,” she says, “and I never thought about leaving ever again.”
She was bright and charming, driven and star-struck. In the early fifties she began carving out a career for herself in a New York ruled by Walter Winchell, then the country’s most famous gossip columnist. Smith worked as a producer for Mike Wallace at CBS radio and as a ghostwriter for Cholly Knickerbocker’s gossip column in the Journal-American. But it was Winchell, with his brashness, his frequent scoops, and his restless imagination, who served as her role model. “I had read him in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram,” Smith says. “I thought he wrote the best column ever.” Later, she saw him hold court at El Morocco, the famous New York nightclub: “He’d say, Hi, kid, you’re doin’ great.’” She learned to imitate his style and saw some version of what she could be. “What Winchell was, essentially, was an entertainer,” she says. “He would go up and dance onstage with Judy Garland, and she couldn’t do anything about it. He was really the three-thousand-pound gorilla.” Eventually, however, the all-powerful Winchell fell. “He believed his own publicity and became a power freak,” Smith says. “He went from being a real champion of the underdog to being a conservative asshole.”
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