ANOTHER VERY OLD PROFESSION

‘Gossip is news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress,” says Liz Smith, the latest and loudest practitioner of the fixture of American journalism known as the gossip column. The gossip star of New York holds what’s left of the star columnist torch passed on by Walter Winchell and Dorothy Kilgallen. She’s a post-Watergate phenomenon now in her 11th year at the New York Daily News. People who know things want to tell them. Mostly, in Manhattan, they want to tell them to Liz Smith.

Bette Davis’ lawyer, Harold Schiff, was on Line 1. Liz Smith took the call. “Hello, honey. Please don’t write me a letter. Listen, Harold, I have a report that Bette and her daughter B.D. have reconciled.” Smith said this dubiously, pretty sure there was no reconciliation. “No? Definitely not? Well, my source was wrong for once in his life!” Smith beamed and hung up.

A terrified caterer was on Line 2. The day before, one of Peter Lawford’s children hosted a square dance in honor of Caroline Kennedy’s marriage. Caroline’s mother, Jacqueline Onassis, was livid that the menu was leaked to Liz Smith by (presumably) Glorious Foods, the caterer. A waiter would have to be sacrificially fired. Said the caterer to Liz Smith: “You can tell Mrs. Onassis we’re not firing anyone. Our waiters don’t talk.” That one stopped Smith in her tracks. “I guess he doesn’t expect to be hired by the Kennedys again,” she said after hanging up. “Or maybe he’d rather have a mention in the column.”

A WNBC-TV producer was on Line 3. That day on “Live at 5,” Liz Smith would do two items on her broadcast, a three-minute segment she does three times a week on the WNBC’S popular afternoon talkathon. “We need graphics of Nancy Reagan and Jean Harris,” Smith said. “Nancy got 63 red roses for her 65th birthday from a florists association. I know she isn’t 63, but she sure sticks to her guns. . . Yes, I know Nancy sold her book to Random House. (Agent) Mort Janklow told me Random House came to him. If Santa Claus comes to the chimney. . . . Jean Harris we’re using because of her new book, ‘Stranger in Two Worlds.’ My lead is, ‘If you like to argue, simply say two words: Jean Harris.’ Listen, I know it’s not easy to get a good picture in jail. . . . But try!”

Joe Armstrong, former publisher of Rolling Stone, was on Line 4. “I’ve never known a day so dull,” Liz Smith told him, not kidding. “The city is so totally deserted they should give me a plaque for staying in town. . . . Now, Joe, where would you hear that the Attorney General called Playboy pornographic? OK, kid, you little gold mine. . . . No, I already told Bella I can’t use her item. I can’t write only about fund-raisers!”

Now it was Line 5. (There are only five lines.) This time it was Diane Sawyer. Only now Liz Smith was making herself coffee in the kitchen of the crammed two-bedroom apartment in the Manhattan neighborhood known as Murray Hill. The second bedroom doubles as her office. Liz Smith has only two hands, both at this moment ink-stained. She’d just typed a column on how the rich (namely, Malcolm Forbes) are different from you and me--and had one hour to finish a Sunday piece that she would devote to a first novel by a colleague. Her calls were being answered for her. But this was Diane Sawyer and Smith snatched up the phone.

“Hi, you gorgeous thing, how are you?” said Smith in the kind of Texas drawl that New Yorkers find so intimate. It’s a semi-literary drawl that novelists like Dan Jenkins and anchors like Dan Rather use to great advantage, and so does Liz Smith. “I saw your boss (“60 Minutes” executive producer) Don Hewitt on a boat over the weekend,” Smith confided into the receiver. “He said, ‘Diane will never leave me’. . . . Jean (Mrs. Douglas) MacArthur was also on the boat. She said to me, ‘Liz, honey, I promised the general if I ever talked’ . . . . I told her if she ever talked, it should be to Diane Sawyer! What do you mean (producer) Charles Evans will kill himself if you don’t return his calls. Trust me, honey, Charlie won’t kill himself. It ain’t fitting.”

Probably Sawyer took the advice. Liz Smith is listened to. This month marks her 11th year at the New York Daily News, a decade at the top of the heap of Manhattan gossip columnists. (Smith is syndicated in about 60 papers by Chicago Tribune Enterprises, but her turf--and her power base--is Manhattan.)

If the name Liz Smith means nothing in Peoria, it means much to the powers that be in show business. Her column is pouched on an overnight basis to Hollywood studio chiefs, agents, producers and others. And they react, and overreact. As David McClintick put it in “Indecent Exposure,” Smith has “redefined gossip and elevated it to a new level of respectability.” McClintick defines the Liz Smith column as a “new form of gossip journalism.”

Example: Smith recently printed “the possibility,” as she put it, “that Richard Pryor might have AIDS. The rumors were rampant, and not because of homosexuality,” Smith explained. “I printed a list of reasons, praying it wasn’t true. But the talk was everywhere. Richard had admittedly been an intravenous drug user, and he’d had a lot of blood transfusions. . . . Well, I was laid to filth by my friend (Paramount production president) Dawn Steel, saying how could I do this? Studio heads see the column faster than anybody.”

Smith has been right--it was she who “kept the drum fires burning” in the David Begelman check-forging scandal and persuaded chief witness Cliff Robertson to break his silence in the case--but she has also been wrong. She predicted that Robert Redford would enter politics and that Elizabeth Taylor would not marry John Warner.

But whatever else Smith has been, she has been pivotal--and personal. As Frank Sinatra calls her, “The Extra Strength Tylenol of journalists.” Or, as producer Ray Stark puts it: “Liz is sometimes inaccurate, but she is always fair.” What she isn’t--and it works to her advantage--is Hollywood-based.

(Though she does have several local outlets: See article on Page 4.) “I don’t have enough integrity to live in Los Angeles and write a gossip column,” Smith said, half-joking. “I spent one Christmas there and I saw the extraordinary gifts that went to Hedda and Louella. I thought then I could never live there. Now there’s no temptation, of course: I’m too old to be corrupted.”

“Gwen Davis called from L.A. She’ll be in town tomorrow and tomorrow night,” said Saint Clair Pugh.

“Good. That means I don’t have to answer the phone tomorrow night,” replied Liz Smith.

It’s harder to write funny than it is to talk funny, and Smith knows that. She loves to recall the broadcast about Joan Kennedy moving to Boston while Ted Kennedy remained in Virginia. “Rose Kennedy saw it and said: ‘Who’s Virginia?’ ” The story is funny every time Smith tells it. But one can’t do six columns a week, three broadcasts a week, four (or more) parties a week, four sessions with a hairdresser a week--and still be Dorothy Parker. So Smith doesn’t try, and thus the column is considered lively without being stylishly written. Nor is it a pulpit for star making. In “All About Eve,” the waspish columnist Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) made something of a star out of Eve Harrington. Smith isn’t above plugging a personality or a project--for example, in recent months she has helped lengthen the run of the Broadway revival of “Arsenic and Old Lace” (against a pan from the New York Times) but she doesn’t want to play savior.

Nor is she about to unmake anyone, a la the brutal J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) in “Sweet Smell of Success.” Instead Smith has a minimum of enemies (which is not to say she has none ). But when insiders say they have troubles with Smith, they usually mean they can’t get through to her. The reason may be Saint Clair Pugh, a brusque, briskly effective man of indeterminate age who fits Smith like an argyle sock.

(At 63 Smith is herself precisely and undisguisedly “post-menopausal,” as she puts it. She hasn’t glamorized her image, as has her friend Barbara Walters or her rival Aileen (Suzy) Mehle.)

Smith and Pugh are very much synchronized; they see the column as work-work-work. Going to a party is work. An evening of theater is work. Pugh helps decide which things should and shouldn’t be covered. He shouldn’t be discounted--and can’t be: To crack the ice with Pugh is like cracking a safe at Chase Manhattan. Only after weeks of plea bargaining did he concede that a reporter could see Smith at work, at home, not just at parties and over the requisite lunch. “But,” he kept insisting, “she doesn’t let reporters see her at home, ever.” Smith says of Pugh: “People say he can be a tough guy. And I say, ‘Yes, but he’s my tough guy!’ ”

Pugh is more like a major-domo, indispensable at a job nobody really understands, and he has the loyalty of the smarter people who call Liz Smith. Example: When writer Dominick Dunne calls, he knows to talk to Pugh and spare Smith one more call . When a less savvy publicist calls and wants “to talk to Miss Smith,” she gets nowhere. (“We only take exclusive items on major stars,” Pugh told a major Hollywood publicist recently; the publicist hung up). Knowing Pugh is knowing power.

What Smith does in reality is so unglamorous it would send journalism students back to film school. In a robe or a T-shirt, she sits in a 9x12 room facing an unbeautiful one-window slice of Manhattan and she types, using an old Texas Instrument and an earphone and a stopwatch to time and hear herself. She chooses the items. She asks Pugh for credits. (“Did John Hurt play ‘The Naked Civil Servant’?” Yes.) She wonders what’s on the record, and off, but then she just types it all up. And reads it aloud. Not waiting for perfection, or inspiration--but often while waiting for a cab--she snatches time and writes columns. And three-minute TV scripts. The WNBC job, her Daily News column and other free-lance pieces give her a six-figure income.

How does she do it? She gets interrupted all day long by Pugh, by calls she can’t refuse, by needed reference books that are under piles of souvenir programs and unopened bottles of Cristal Champagne and typewriter ribbons she inserts herself. “Why are you here?” she asked one morning after a half-hour of being observed. “Are all offices this messy? We threaten to move, but. . . .”

“Liz, it’s Simon & Schuster time,” said Pugh one morning while Smith was writing a column. His desk is directly behind hers; the room is claustrophobic, but these two have known each other since the 1950s when they shared an even smaller office at a company called Martial Arts--Pugh was a publicist and Smith ghost-wrote the Cholly Knickerbocker column. Years later, Pugh asked his pal for a temporary position. Eleven years after that they’re still together. Neither uses kid gloves with each other, which saves time. Writing is a cranky business, after all.

“Simon & Schuster, Liz,” repeated Pugh.

“Meaning what exactly?”

“Meaning Dick (Snyder, S&S; chairman) and Joni (Evans, his associate-wife who also heads her own S&S; imprint, Linden Press) may be in Splitsville.”

“Get me Joni.”

One-and-a-half minutes later, Joni Evans was on Line 1. Evans and Snyder (or “Dick and Joni” to the trade) have long been one of Manhattan’s most public and powerful couples; their rise through the ranks of Simon & Schuster, and their romance, has been perfect Manhattan media fodder.

“Hello, my darling,” began Smith. “This is the divorce call. You are still living together on weekends? I think that’s very intelligent myself. Couples can’t be together all the time. You are going on vacation together next week? Oh. No, I don’t want to quote you. You just trust me. Yes, I love you too. Bye.”

Smith swiveled in her chair, and raised her eyebrows to indicate amusement. “They’re living apart, but are together on weekends and vacations. And, no, we are not calling her husband.” She said this as if the arrangement was the most natural in the world, or at least in New York.

Here it became clear just why Smith could only operate in Manhattan: In the company town of Hollywood, such an announcement, handled lightly and with humor and in Smith-style, would set off shock waves. Hollywood egos are more fragile. So the Hollywood press is kept either at a distance or very very chummy.

(Very very chummy usually means off the record. A decade ago, when the wife of a studio president left him for what could be euphemistically called a handyman, nobody in town reported the split or the situation or the humor. Nobody wants the president of a studio upset, least of all the press that covers the studio.)

New York is another city, however. New York is not a company town. It’s a town of fashion and publishing and broadcasting and government and finance. And Smith touches, lightly, most of these bases. Her lead items could be on Andy Warhol or Happy Rockefeller or Donna Karan or Dick and Joni. There’s a diffusion of names and power. And New Yorkers are used to being investigated. But is New York enough when show business is now totally bicoastal? “New York Parochial” is a label attached to Smith with some very strong adhesive. But there’s neither time nor energy enough to seek wider distribution.

“Let’s define the G word,” it was suggested one day when Smith was working on a speech about her profession.

“Hmmm, the G word,” repeated Smith, intrigued. “You mean gossip.” Smith is very modern in her attitude about what she does; she doesn’t sugarcoat it. “I’m not an investigative reporter, and I think that very term is redundant. How can you be a reporter and not investigate?” she asked logically.

“I’m chiefly a gossip columnist. It’s one of the world’s oldest professions, so why shouldn’t we dignify it a little, and have some fun with it? Gossip has been with us always, since the doin’s in the ruins of Pompeii. . . . Man does not live by black serious headlines alone. Gossip comes from the word God and sib , meaning related, or kinsman.” In other words, gossip originated within family units. Smith’s theory is that modern life is lived in “related and manufactured” families, in the yuppie celebrity restaurants on both coasts that are full of “wonderful little moments,” at No. 10 Downing St., in Imelda Marcos’ Hawaiian apartment, anywhere .

The moments are the gossip, real or imagined, and the Smith motto--”I am glad to apologize in print for a mistake”--is her secret weapon. If Beverly Sills or Helen Gurley Brown or Mike Wallace tells her something, that’s a good enough source of material that she’ll run with it and worry later.

(Example: Smith printed in 1975 that Alexander Haig would run for the presidency. She also didn’t print that Goldie Hawn was pregnant out of wedlock, as a favor to the star and her publicist, and was scooped by a fellow columnist.)

“Gossip goes in cycles. It’s fashionable, and then it isn’t,” Smith decided, knowing how timing worked in her favor. “The New Wave started with Watergate. Sally Quinn (then a reporter for the Washington Post) said that when Watergate ended, the nation’s psyche was shattered. Sally also said we as a nation were now addicts. We were hooked on the heroin of Watergate, and now required the methadone of gossip. It was a pretty brilliant remark, and one I wish I’d made, but then I didn’t have a romance with (Washington Post editor and Quinn’s husband) Ben Bradlee.”

Smith believes the post-Watergate-blah ‘70s produced a news void that only gossip could fill. Editors like the Daily News’ Mike O’Neill and People magazine’s Pat Ryan began putting the word out: A good gossip column is what the media needed. The thought was hardly original. Gossip columns have been power bases even before HeddaandLouella --as the Golden Era of Hollywood was known--but Smith was a different breed of cat. Her power base is not a moral one, at least not on purpose.

“I’m really terribly worried that readers see journalists in any kind of exalted position,” she said earnestly. “I want to find a way to write this, maybe in a column, about this misconception that I live an elitist life. Anywhere I go I go as a working reporter. You see this apartment, it’s hardly glamorous. But people tend to blur it, to confuse you with the people you write about. I come back from events. I write them with a personal fix, and it looks very powerful. That’s all.”

Still, as Smith herself claims, “Gossip thrives when it has the field to itself.” So if you are the one print journalist on the Malcom Forbes yacht (young Ron Reagan, also aboard that day, didn’t count), you get the attention. You are read. By everyone. Celebrities traditionally devour the press--their own particularly. But when a Jimmy Carter demands (and gets) a retraction from the Washington Post, as he did during his presidency for an item in the Ear column, then gossip is in flower. And power. Certainly the “Ear” item--about the Carters possibly bugging Blair House to eavesdrop on the Reagans during the 1980 Inauguration--was news. But it was also gossip.

Smith, when asked, said she agreed with Ben Bradlee that he didn’t go into journalism to preside over a boring newspaper. “Also gossip is practically an industry,” she added. “Places without gossip, like China or Argentina, are not places we want to be.”

But do we want to be on Malcom Forbes’ yacht? Or are we satisfied with firsthand reports? Did the era of HeddaandLouella end because Americans wanted to participate and not simply be voyeurs? “I think everybody in show business, everybody, has a secret desire to be a gossip columnist. And so do a lot of other people. It seems like the best of two worlds. You get to go out and play, but then you have to be disciplined enough to come home and write about what you did. Or what they did. Or what you think they did.”

It’s a 1980s nuts-and-bolts approach to gossip versus the earlier glimmer-and-shimmer style of, say, Dorothy Kilgallen, who wielded power as if it were a magic wand. Readers are too aware now, too jaded, and also much less in awe (of stars or politicians) for a Kilgallen to flourish--or dictate. Smith, who started in gossip as a fan-magazine editor, knows how time changes perceptions. She, too, was once “giddy” about glamour, but 30-plus years of doing fan magazines, publicity, free-lancing, etc., etc., can drain the honey from even the sweetest bee’s nest.

“I would hate to have been a young success,” Smith said one morning. “It’s the pits, the worst, to start out on top. How do you have time to develop your life if you are a Wunderkind ?” Better to be struck instead with wanderlust. Smith got off the bus in Manhattan in 1949 and asked somebody, “Which way is town?” She got to Manhattan with $50, no return ticket to Fort Worth, one divorce behind her (and two more ahead). She imagined an intoxicated Fred-and-Ginger nightclub world; instead she became a typist, then called in her one marker.

As a journalism student at the University of Texas, she had interviewed actor Zachary Scott, who told her: “If you ever get to Hollywood, look me up.” Smith and Scott happened to be in Manhattan at the same time, and Liz called him. He told her to call an editor-friend at Modern Screen. She became an associate editor there. Ten years as movie critic for Cosmopolitan led to a livable free-lance income until “my one last shot” came, 15 years ago. Daily News Editor Mike O’Neill negotiated with Smith for three years before her column (almost called “City Lights”) took the town, almost instantly.

Scoops make a columnist a star, and Smith had two the first year: She printed the first excerpts from the Woodward-Bernstein book “The Final Days,” and she predicted an NBC executive-suite massacre that led some NBC employees to wear buttons reading, “I didn’t talk to Liz Smith.” As it happened, the NBC item was a non-scoop; the firings never happened. John Chancellor, then the “NBC Nightly News” anchor, never really forgave Smith. (She predicted his axing, too.) And her reputation for occasionally making a mistake began--along with her reputation for correcting herself.

“All right, now, look,” she said, sounding almost schoolmarmish. “A good source is a good source. If a good source--mine are people like Barbara Walters, Nora Ephron, Mike Wallace--gives me an item about the president of a record company and cocaine, I am probably going to print it. Blind or not blind. Because if I call the President, I am going to get the Establishment Answer. A denial. So I print an item, I get a call, and I print a correction.

“Even if I know the person complaining is also lying, I print the correction because it gives the column balance. I don’t get mad at people for getting mad. And I don’t get mad at people for lying to me. I don’t have time for grudges.” It may be a saving grace.

Example: Smith had no problems admitting that she was wrong about Robert Redford going into politics and Liz Taylor marrying John Warner. By the same token, she doesn’t gloat over the fact of breaking the Begelman check-forging scandal. (Nor does she see any contradiction in the fact that she wrote the most loving obituary on the death of Begelman’s wife Gladyce earlier this year.)

Smith in person is self-deprecating in the extreme, and it probably is another of her secret weapons. As an outsider, she watched Winchell and Kilgallen make their own enemies lists (and scare their friends). She watched them take the power very seriously. Being powerless herself right into her 50s, Smith had no illusions. “Nora Ephron says every good writer betrays his subject, but I’m not sure,” Smith said.

Clearly being liked is very important, almost as important as being trusted . There’s no other way to fill six columns a week. So Smith keeps herself off a throne. Her apartment is all clutter, too small and a pretty fair approximation of the way journalists live. Promotional material seems to fill every unoccupied shelf, and time doesn’t exist for opening all the mail.

“Away from the apartment, I have a marvelous life,” she agreed. Marvelous publicly and privately, in varying measures. She spends the month of August in Vermont, this year working on a nonfiction book outline. She is seen at parties with pals, mostly, and often wishes she was home reading. She hasn’t tried to reinvent herself; she still hangs with the so-called Texas Mafia (Putnam editor Ellis Amburn, writer Larry King) whom she’s known since hitting town.

Still, columnists do become celebrities, especially with regular TV exposure. Walk with Smith from Rockefeller Center to her dentist’s office on 50th Street and you discover what local fame is like. Asked for an autograph, she replies: “You must be hard up tonight, honey.”

Here, after all, is a woman in her 60s carrying two tote bags, slouching, wishing she’d seen her hairdresser that day. “People see in me a middle-aged woman who talks like Texas and knows that 99% of them will never get into Elaine’s. I have just enough celebrity that it’s amusing. And I see in myself someone whose magical presence at a party is just not vital.”

What Smith lacks is what Jacqueline Susann said was the one essential for a gossip columnist: the guts of a burglar. “She’s provocative without being vicious” is how Barbara Walters sums up Smith. Or, as Truman Capote put it, “Liz is a very square honest girl.” Even competitors like Marilyn Beck don’t dismiss Smith. “It’s Liz there and me here, and it’s comforting to know she’s there,” said Beck. “She isn’t interested in creating enemies, and neither am I.”

“This is like stealing money,” Smith confided as she entered the makeup room at WNBC. Three days a week, she arrives at 4 p.m. for her three-minute segment on “Live at Five.” The show is so highly rated, and such a good berth for Smith, that every time she renews a contract it means she must say no to “Entertainment Tonight” and other such programs (though she keeps getting asked). “I’ve never done career moves,” she insisted. Again it’s “New York Parochial,” but it works for Smith. There’s an ease to the 45 minutes that she spends at WNBC, and sometimes there’s humor: “Lana Turner came on and said, ‘Oh, Liz, we’ve been friends for so long!’ and I’d never clapped an eye on her until that day!”

For this particular broadcast, Smith is featuring the unlikely duo of Nancy Reagan and Jean Harris. Nancy Reagan had been in New York the previous evening, and Smith had some private firsthand dinner chatter to report about the First Lady’s book deal. Harris, in jail, had just published her book; Smith’s source said even Harris’ lawyer had advised Harris not to submit the manuscript as it was.

Those two items would not appear in the column; what she does for WNBC is separate, and the hardest part is getting the graphics. “For one minute on the air, it’s an hour of preparation,” she explained, hardly complaining.

If she works fast--following the rule that the liveliest and most conversational columns get written in an hour--it’s not all speedo time. “What takes me a while is to figure out what I think,” she explained. “I want to be accurate and I don’t want to be belligerent.” (Read: Smith wants every columnist’s dream--to be well-liked and well-read.)

“I do not want to kiss behinds. I do not want to be part of the elitist crowd. Stars now are people I’ve often never heard of, and then they vanish, and that scares me. I turn on TV and see a rerun with Bonnie Franklin and I dream of the return of the star system. A Bonnie Franklin as a star is not something I comprehend. I mean, what is Rob Lowe going to do with the rest of his life?”

What is Smith going to do with her power? “Not become hypocritical like Hedda and Louella, I hope,” she replied. “I don’t want to be involved in witch hunts, I don’t want the power to punish. I’m guilty to an extent, when an opinion of mine flies into the column, but honestly I don’t have real power. I could drum up a little interest in someone, maybe, but that’s all. I can do a lot to promote a book, and I did do a lot for the show ‘Moonlighting.’ But Walter Winchell affected the stock market. I can’t do that. And I can’t make a star. If you can’t make a star, you have no real power.”

Nor can she, today, break a star. In the ‘40s, when Ingrid Bergman’s career was temporarily crucified by columnists (during her out-of-wedlock pregnancy by Roberto Rossellini), the press was largely in agreement. Today there would not be such consensus.

(Though certainly there was always rivalry. New York at one time had eight major print columnists vying for items. Hollywood had at least as many, but there were fewer star columnists. And they could “gang up” a la Ingrid Bergman.)

Today Sean Penn may not be a media darling, exactly, but he is not going to be done in by gossip columns. By bad pictures, maybe, but not by columns. In fact, Penn plays along: He has a publicist, he appeared recently on “The Tonight Show” and his wedding to Madonna was nothing more than a media circus. Also, readers and viewers today are what Smith calls “beyond shockproof.”

Not that stars themselves are. “Sean Connery called me one day, livid about something I’d written,” Smith said off-handedly. “He told me, in very graphic terms, what I could do with my column. And I thought for a moment and then said, ‘Sean, you know that’s the best offer I’ve had all week . . . ‘ I mean what can you do? Egos are fragile.”

Example: On a talk show, Smith said how lucky certain stars were, Lauren Bacall in particular, that there was Broadway, since there are so few movie roles for aging actresses. Smith used the phrase, “What do they want for a nickel?” Promptly she heard from Bacall’s agent, who huffily insisted that Bacall was worth more than 5 cents. Smith now calls Bacall the most insecure woman who ever lived.

Has Smith learned anything on the job? “Yes. Not to use superlatives. Don’t say ‘the greatest’ or ‘the first’ or you’ll hear from a lot of people. And don’t necessarily let people know where you’re from. I’m now expected to write about everything ‘Texas’ that hits New York! And, finally, remember that gossip is relief. Liz’s Law is that bad gossip drives out good. I have to keep it lively. Because any minute, what I do for a living could become unfashionable.”