Gossip Columnist Liz Smith Dead at 94

Mary Elizabeth "Liz" Smith was an American gossip columnist. She was known as "The Grand Dame of Dish."

Smith was born in Fort Worth, Texas. She married her college sweetheart, George Edward Beeman, a World War II bombardier, in 1945 but left him to enroll at the University of Texas, where her papers and memorabilia are kept in the Dolph Briscoe Center. They were divorced two years later.

Smith graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in journalism in 1949, where she wrote for The Daily Texan and The Texas Ranger, then moved to New York where she worked as a typist, a proofreader and a reporter before she broke into the media world as a news producer for Mike Wallace at CBS Radio. She spent 5 years as a news producer for NBC-TV. She also worked for Allen Funt on Candid Camera.

In the late 1950s Smith worked as a ghostwriter for the popular "Cholly Knickerbocker" gossip column that appeared in the Hearst newspapers. After leaving that column in the early 1960s she went to work for Helen Gurley Brown as the entertainment editor for the American version of Cosmopolitan magazine, later working simultaneously as Sports Illustrated's entertainment editor as well.

On February 16, 1976, Smith began a self-titled gossip column for the New York Daily News. During a 1979 newspaper strike, her Daily News editors asked her to appear daily on WNBC-TV's Live at Five, and she stayed with the program for 11 years. Her exposure on television made Smith a popular figure on the Manhattan social scene and provided fodder for her column, which had, by then, been syndicated to nearly 70 newspapers. She won an Emmy for her reporting on Live at Five for WNBC in 1985.

Smith was hired by Fox Broadcasting Company heads Barry Diller and Rupert Murdoch to develop a talk show, with Roger Ailes as her producer.

Smith was once reportedly the highest-paid print journalist in the United States. In 1991, shortly after her exclusive interviews with Ivana Trump at the time of her divorce from real-estate tycoon Donald Trump, Smith moved to Newsday, where she stayed until 1995. Smith then signed on to the Murdoch-owned New York Post. She worked for Fox News for 7 years and was last on Fox & Friends. She was the only columnist to ever have her column printed in three major New York City papers at the same time.

In April 2005, Smith left Newsday, over a contract dispute. The official discontinuation of her column came after several months of dispute among Smith, her lawyer David Blasband, and Newsday management. The matter was settled out of court and Smith continued at the New York Post and the Staten Island Advance, where her column still appeared.

On February 24, 2009, the Post announced that the paper would stop running Smith's column effective February 26, 2009, as a cost-cutting measure.

Smith acknowledged her bisexuality (or as she refered to it, "gender neutrality") in her memoirs, but in the December 5, 2000, issue of The Advocate, Smith dug deeper and confided in Editor in Chief, Judy Wieder, that it isn't her nature to be a role model in the LGBT movement. However she admitted: "I think that my relationships with women were always much more emotionally satisfying and comfortable [than with men]. 

And a lot of my relationships with men were more flirtatious and adversarial. I just never felt I was wife material. I always felt that I was a great girlfriend."  She was twice-divorced and lived alone in a Park Avenue apartment in Manhattan.

She raised millions of dollars for charities, $6 million for Literacy Partners, millions for AMFAR, the New York Landmarks Conservancy, PAL, and the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Smith died at her home today November 12, 2017, in Manhattan, New York, at the age of 94.