R.I.P.: Gossip Columnist Liz Smith

Liz Smith - 2011

New York gossip columnist Liz Smith, who covered the breakup of U.S. President Donald Trump’s first marriage and helped lead the media’s charge into celebrity news, died on Sunday at her Manhattan home, the New York Times and other media reported. She was 94, according to Reuters.

The Texas native chronicled the lives of Hollywood and Broadway stars, along with moguls, models and the wealthy, starting in the 1950s.

Her column, called simply “Liz Smith,” ran in The Daily News from 1976 to 1991; in New York Newsday from 1991 to 1995, when that newspaper closed; continued in Newsday until 2005; and, with some overlap, in The New York Post from 1995 to 2009 — a 33-year run that morphed onto the internet in the New York Social Diary. According to the NYTimes, it was syndicated for years in 60 to 70 other newspapers, even as she appeared on television news and entertainment programs and wrote magazine articles and books.

She famously broke the news of Trump’s separation from his first wife, Ivana, in the New York Daily News, one of several papers where she worked over the years. She also worked at New York Newsday and the New York Post. Her column was widely syndicated, and at her peak she earned more than $1 million a year, according to the New York Times.

Unlike her predecessors in the gossip field, her coverage often had less to do with scandal and more about offering readers a window into the lives of the rich and famous.


Born Mary Elizabeth Smith in Fort Worth, she was the daughter of a cotton broker who fell on hard times during the Great Depression, the Times said. She later told the newspaper that she “couldn’t face” the family’s poverty and fell in love with the glamour of movies and their stars.

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. She later 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 five 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 eleven 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 seventy newspapers. She won an Emmy for her reporting on Live at Five for WNBC in 1985.

Smith was once reportedly the highest-paid print journalist in the United States