LIZ SMITH (1923 - 2017)
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. Moving to New York, she worked as a typist, proofreader and reporter before landing a job 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 ultimately wrote for nine New York newspapers and dozens of magazines. While establishing herself as an authority on Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Smith attracted the attention of the New York Daily News. She started her own column at the tabloid in 1976 — and a gossip star was born.
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. By the 1990s, she began a syndicated daily column that ran in Newsday and the New York Post.
In later years, she helped found Huffington Post along with Lesley Stahl, Mary Wells Lawrence and Joni Evans. But as she told the Times in 2014, she didn't pay any attention to Gawker, TMZ or any of the other **29** gossip-oriented websites that have proliferated over the last decade. "I never know whether the stories are true," she declared.
"Liz Smith was the definition of a lady," actor James Woods tweeted. "She dished, but always found a way to make it entertaining and fun."
Vanity Fair called her "an unflagging standard of integrity and grace that is shamefully rare in today's media ... She redeems the very institution of the Gossip Column from utter disrepute."
Asked about why we retain our fascination with **28**, 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, Beverly Sills, Carol Burnett and Barbara Walters at a Lincoln Center tribute to Sills in 2003: