La Liz at 85
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The New York World
The business-lunch crowd was beginning to trickle in around 12:30 p.m. on a recent afternoon at El Rio Grande, the Murray Hill restaurant where the gossip columnist Liz Smith is a regular (she lives upstairs). Ms. Smith, who is 85, has been writing gossip for nearly 32 years, and recently helped start a Web site for women over 40 that is, perhaps, where the mothers of the saucy lasses of the women’s blog Jezebel might hang out online. The site, Wowowow.com, stands for Women on the Web, and Ms. Smith’s partners in the venture read like a Who’s Who of the well preserved and the powerful: advertising guru Mary Wells; Joni Evans, who used to be the president of Simon & Schuster; Lesley Stahl, the 60 Minutes reporter; and Peggy Noonan, the conservative columnist.
“We had hundreds of meetings and lunches. Well, not hundreds, but a lot,” said Ms. Smith in her slight Texas drawl. She wore a white button-down shirt tucked into khakis, a pink cotton sweater tied around her neck country-club style, and a western belt. Her hair is very blond, her lipstick very pink. She has bright blue eyes, one of which has a ring of green around the pupil. “It’s taken almost a year or two to launch. We had to design it, and then we wanted it to look very classy and different.
“We also got three major advertisers—Tiffany, Citigroup and Sony,” she said. “We got classy, upscale advertisers. We didn’t have any advertising director. We did all of that personally. So that’s why it took so long.”
The site is not dissimilar to an online version of The View, with posts by the site’s boldface contributors (Candice Bergen, Lily Tomlin, Marlo Thomas and Judith Martin, a.k.a. Miss Manners, among them); “Conversations” (icon: a coffee carafe), which feature the site’s contributors weighing in on a topic (“Age, Sex and the Sometimes Single Girl”) or interviews with prominent women of a certain age (Anjelica Huston, Diane von Furstenberg); and a Question of the Day. One of last week’s questions, “Should Silda Spitzer Stand by Her Man?”, generated almost 500 responses. Each of the Wow women has her own bio on the site, encapsulating what’s naughty and nice about being an older gal with gusto. In HBO producer Sheila Nevins’ bio, she writes: “I Respect: People who make it on their own. ... I Use: A vibrator.”
Ms. Smith ordered a frozen margarita and an enchilada with chili. “And don’t put any of that green stuff or any of that white ricotta cheese on the top,” she said. “And refried beans. My life is refried, so why not?”
In her best-selling 2000 memoir, Natural Blonde, Ms. Smith describes her starry-eyed arrival in New York in 1949 with $50 in her pocket, after a small-town Texas upbringing and college at the University of Texas. Within three months, she had landed a job at Modern Screen, a fluffy movie-fan magazine, and from there she would work for, among others, Igor Cassini, who wrote the pseudonymous gossip column Cholly Knickerbocker for Hearst Newspapers; Candid Camera; and NBC. She would be the entertainment editor at Cosmopolitan and on contract at Sports Illustrated. (“They had guys writing for them who were the peer of every great writer in the past,” said Ms. Smith. “They gave them lots of money. They gave them incredible expense accounts. We used to go around the world, first-class! Three or four of us, on assignment!”) Meanwhile, she was making friends with the likes of Barbara Walters, Elaine Stritch, David Frost, Lee Bailey, Dominick Dunne, Robert Benton, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Mike Wallace.
In 1976, the Daily News hired her to write a gossip column, and in 1991 she left for the now-defunct New York Newsday for a reported $900,000 salary. When that paper folded in 1995, her column shifted to Newsday on Long Island, as well as the New York Post. Newsday declined to renew her contract in 2005, and since then she’s been pumping out three Post columns a week from her home office, where her longtime assistants Mary Jo and Dennis come in every weekday.
“So I’m having another career,” Ms. Smith said. “On top of all the other ones.”
In some ways it’s surprising that Ms. Smith would choose to launch a Web site as her latest venture; she freely admits to feeling “completely daunted” by the Internet, and Dennis even takes care of the tech aspect of filing her Post columns. Still, she is savvy enough to know what she doesn’t know. “I think the Internet is difficult,” she said. “It’s hard to use, hard to deal with. Nobody agrees with me. I guess I just don’t know how to do it. I’ve had lessons and everything. I’m always going back to bed with a book.”
Except on the nights she goes out! Ms. Smith still steps out several nights a week, particularly if her charities—Literacy Partners, the New York Landmarks Conservancy, the Police Athletic League, and the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City—are involved. (Otherwise she stays in and watches the local news, then Jeopardy!) “But I know there’s still an enormous, youthful nightlife that I’m just not a part of,” Ms. Smith said. “Until the end of Studio 54, I was still doing it a lot! And I was already older than everybody else on the dance floor! It was great. I loved going out. And I loved the era, the ’50s particularly, when there were what they call supper clubs, like the Blue Angel. That was wonderful, because you go in and you see people like Mike Nichols and Elaine May and all kinds of cabaret performers. You got all dressed up and men had to wear coats and ties.
“Things didn’t get informal until, I’d say, the end of the ’60s. Everybody began protesting everything and dressing like rag-pickers, dressing as badly as they can. But that’s just young people. I mean, I think the upper classes still—they preserve a little decorum. But I don’t know that there are really fabulous places to go and dance and drink and have fun anymore. Well, I mean, I’m sure there are—if I would go downtown, I’d see a whole different thing. But I sort of quit, I guess, after the Donald Trump years. When was that, the ‘80s?”
Ms. Smith famously broke the news of Donald and Ivana’s 1990 divorce, much to Mr. Trump’s chagrin. (The two made up long ago.) “I like Donald,” said Ms. Smith. “I admire him. You know, he’s really a pretty nice guy. He’s sort of culturally deprived. He wants to go home and get in bed and eat a hamburger and watch sports. He’s not a social climber. He couldn’t care less. He thinks he is everything that he needs to be.”
Today, though, it’s likely the news of Mr. Trump’s divorce would have landed on the Internet first. “The news is so instant, and particularly for me, now that the Post has cut me down to three days a week, I can never get a scoop anymore. I’ve had to start writing philosophically about entertainment, and try to bring a more mature point of view to whatever is going on,” said Ms. Smith. “Because if I had any news, if I filed it, somebody would give it to the Internet. Frankly, I don’t think most of it is worth keeping up with.”
The Observer averred that one could, in fact, drive oneself crazy trying to.
“Well, I don’t know who the hell all these people are,” said Ms. Smith. “There’s so many of them! You know, I used to write about entertainment from the ‘40s on, when there were really big stars. They were stars and they stayed stars, and they were really fascinating, whether you told the truth about them or you didn’t.”
Now, in addition to the columns she writes for the Post, Ms. Smith has been contributing to Wowowow -- posts like “PRINCESS DIANA! Remember Her?” and “Texas Cowgirl and ‘Tenderfoot’ Memories,” about her college roommate Nita Mae Boyd. There was also the “Age, Sex and the Sometimes Single Girl” conversation that Ms. Smith participated in, which took place on her 85th birthday on Feb. 2. Ms. Evans asked her whether she’d had sex since turning 80, and her response was: “What an impertinent question. No, I haven’t had a lot, Joni, because you’ve got the only guy I want. No. Actually, I have had a little bit. I can’t deny it. I have had a little bit of sex … with people who don’t know how old I am.”
“Well, my point was yes, but let’s not make a big deal about it,” Ms. Smith told The Observer. Natural Blonde made waves because Ms. Smith had admitted to affairs with women, including longtime partner Iris Love, though it’s also filled with tales of being hit on and dating and marrying men. “And then some Web site comes along and says, ‘Liz Smith will sleep with anybody,’” she said. “And I thought this was funny, and great, but I was thinking, wow, how times have changed! Not very long ago you would never have printed that about somebody unless you had something on them. Because they would have sued you for it.
“Of course, I thought it was funny,” she continued. “I don’t care if they want to write that. If they think an 85-year-old woman will sleep with anybody, well, then great! But on the other hand, I’m not dead yet, so who knows. Somebody said, ‘Would you ever marry again?’ I said, ‘Instantly!’ I think about it every day! I said, if you know any men who want an 85-year-old woman, send them my way.”
Ms. Smith called the waitress over for an order of sopapillas, the Mexican fried-pastry dessert. “Be sure to bring me some powdered sugar, will you? How about another drink? Hey, sweetheart? Could we have one more on the rocks?”
That was The Observer’s drink. “You’re not having one?” we asked.
“I’ll have some of yours. How’s that?”
Copyright © 2008 The New York Observer. All rights reserved.
