Poised for Everything
Thousands of miles away from her Manhattan home, B. Smith looks perfectly comfortable sitting astride a horse in the middle of the Ojai Valley, a cowboy hat on her head and worn western boots on her feet. The former model is on autopilot posing for a magazine layout, knowing exactly the moves the photographer wants.
A voice is heard from out of camera range: “Power, honey, power,” says Smith’s husband, Dan Gasby. Immediately Smith’s 1,000-watt smile brightens a shade more, and her head tilts a little higher, revving up the energy.
Gasby is Smith’s head cheerleader, helping to propel her beyond successful restaurateur to lifestyle maven. Together they are on the cusp of the big time, with a weekly syndicated TV show, “B. Smith With Style” (seen locally Sundays at 10 a.m. on KNBC), books and their newest venture, B. Smith Style magazine.
Smith, who shortened Barbara to “B.” during her modeling days, is one of many in a crowded field of lifestyle experts, but she is most often called--and somewhat maddeningly--the black Martha Stewart.
There have been other more annoying labels and stereotypes Smith has had to deal with during her multifaceted career.
“When you’re a woman and/or a minority,” she says, “you get discounted no matter how far you’ve come. And also as an ex-model, you get discounted. So for me now, everything is pulled together, and we’ve got that foundation.”
On-screen, Smith is upbeat and optimistic, the best friend who’s always up for something fun. Off-screen there is the infectious smile and enthusiasm, but she occasionally lapses into a more subdued persona, often lost in thought, a million miles away.
At 50, she looks trim and youthful, the result of a careful diet and consistent exercise. Her seven-year marriage to the 44-year-old Gasby appears to be a solid one. His background in television production and ad sales and marketing for TV companies King World and Petry Inc. made it easy for him to segue to becoming publisher of B. Smith Style magazine (he sold 60 pages of ads in the premier issue); partner in her three B. Smith’s restaurants in Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and Sag Harbor in New York’s tony Hamptons; and creator of the show. Gasby’s easygoing manner and quick wit counterbalance Smith’s occasional intensity and help lighten up situations from meetings to television shoots.
They first met at Smith’s restaurant when both were married (she to former HBO exec Don Anderson). They started dating when both were single and married in 1992. The couple share custody of Gasby’s 13-year-old daughter, Dana, with her mother.
She calls Gasby “the most intelligent person I’ve ever met.” In 1995 came Smith’s first book. By 1996, she had a TV show and three years later a magazine.
“I have a unique opportunity to be part of helping her realize her full potential,” Gasby says, “and I take that very seriously. It’s also good for my daughter, and for all the little girls out there who need to know that there’s a possibility that there’s going to be somebody to support them.”
She Learned Importance
of Self-Sufficiency
Smith grew up as part of a working-class family in Everson, a small town outside Pittsburgh. Her father was a steelworker and her mother a part-time housekeeper. In other interviews she has emphasized their do-it-yourself abilities by calling them “the original Bob Vila and Martha Stewart.”
Her parents instilled in her a sense of self-sufficiency.
“My father said, ‘You should never marry anyone who can’t take better care of you than I have.’ But I twisted it around to where it meant that I had to take care of myself.”
Her mother wanted to be an interior decorator, but, says Smith, “being African American, she wouldn’t have had a career. But I turned that around and thought, I never wanted to say I wished I had done something.”
Her father disapproved of his teenage daughter’s desire to go to modeling school but relented when she recast it as a finishing school. Modeling took her to Ebony Fashion Fair shows, representation by Wilhelmina, several commercials and some acting work in film and TV.
As one of few African American models of her day--and the first to appear on the cover of Mademoiselle magazine--Smith fought hard for jobs in the 1970s, breaking barriers in a world that favors blond hair and blue eyes.
Modeling also favors youth, and eventually Smith felt it was time to move on. An accomplished cook who was fascinated with restaurants, Smith did a 180 and worked as a hostess and floor manager at America, a popular New York spot owned by the Ark chain of restaurants, which also includes Manhattan’s legendary Lutece.
Her stint there was successful enough that Ark backed her first B. Smith’s eatery in Manhattan in 1986 and her second in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station in 1994. Smith and Gasby recently bought out Ark.
Ark’s chief operating officer, Bob Towers, calls the partnership “a nice relationship” and says Smith “really worked the restaurant and the customers. She helped as a partner and got the business going, and we did well in terms of sales.”
Problems erupted when Smith and Gasby weren’t pleased with their share of the partnership and wanted to buy out Ark. Says Towers, “We respect them that that’s what they wanted to do.”
The couple opened their own seasonal restaurant in upscale Sag Harbor in 1997.
Not every top model segues into a successful second career once the bookings stop. Nina Blanchard, former L.A. modeling agency owner-turned-author who represented Smith in the early 1980s, says, “What she’s been able to do is, frankly, rare. If you think about it, not even that many women own restaurants, and for her to have this kind of career is astonishing.”
The restaurants led to her latest book, “B. Smith Rituals & Celebrations”--one of four with Random House, which led to her TV show and now the magazine.
‘What I’m Selling
Is Affordable Luxe’
Smith describes her appeal this way: “I am today’s woman as far as--unfortunately--having a second marriage, but having it be successful, having a stepchild, being a working mother and wife, and being creative. What I’m really selling is affordable luxe. It’s about having a little bit of the good life. I think any backlash to that is perfectionism--it’s intimidating.”
Next season she plans to do more segments solo, revealing more about herself, “so there is definitely no reason to think I’m perfect.”
Smith and Gasby would like the TV show, now in 206 markets, to become a “strip” show, airing five days a week. Merchandising plans are in the works for home decor products, though Smith has turned down other offers. Hearst, which syndicates her show, passed on the opportunity to publish her magazine, opting for Oprah Winfrey’s O instead.
The magazine, which premiered during the winter holidays, is Smith’s latest eponymous endeavor designed to enhance her status as an authority on cooking, entertaining, fashion, home design and crafts. But rather than just be another face in the crowd, Smith wants to bring a different face to this arena.
“Our magazine is multicultural,” she explains. “That will continue to be our goal. Our businesses are multicultural, even the people who work for us. It’s a real melting pot. And that’s what we’re about. We make friends who are interesting and have different backgrounds. But still in our society we do that one step a time, one magazine at a time, one article at a time. That’s what changes people.”
The first issue of the magazine, due to go bimonthly this summer, featured a holiday gift guide that included a crystal ice bucket, a menorah and a maple Chinese serving set; details B. and Dan’s Kwanzaa in Aspen; and lets us see their at-home Thanksgiving with a bunch of good-looking, hip people who happen to be black, white and Asian.
Art director Dan Josephs says his goal is to bring a bright, colorful look the magazine, not only to reflect Smith’s lively personality, but also to contrast with the pale, subdued tones of the very successful Martha Stewart Living.
“I’m not worried about competition,” says Richard Fairfield, CFO and vice president, new media, of American Express Publishing (in partnership with Time Inc. in this venture). He adds that the magazine’s demographics (a crossover black-white audience, made up mostly of affluent women in their 30s) are attractive. The growth of the black middle and upper-middle class also is a factor.
The 200,000 issues that hit newsstands yielded 8,000 subscriptions.
“That’s a really good number,” Fairfield says. “We consider this one of our very, very successful launches.”
Success Brings Wealth
--and Controversy
But as fame and success have brought independence, nice homes in Manhattan and Sag Harbor and business venture offers, it has also brought controversy. Smith is scrutinized for promoting what was once portrayed on television, magazines and films as the exclusive domain of the white upper class--lavish parties, posh resorts, beautifully decorated homes.
Some think her disingenuous for calling her parents the “original Bob Vila and Martha Stewart” without mentioning the hardships they incurred, while others take her to task for not putting her ethnicity more in the forefront.
Smith says she doesn’t hide her parents’ personal struggles, yet at the same time doesn’t feel she must bring them up at every opportunity.
“This is the biggest conundrum that you face when you’re a black person who is successful,” Gasby says. “You get body-slammed by everybody, by whites who say, ‘How did you get here, and you should be thankful that you are here,’ while not realizing there are so many doors you had to break through, that you had to prove everything from ground zero.
“Then you have blacks who say that if you didn’t come out of the projects and still don’t have one foot in the projects, you somehow have lost touch with reality,” he says. “Then you have the African American bourgeois that totally renounces the fact that they are African American, and they hate everything that’s white, but they live in a white world, and they play the game of putting you in the middle and asking you to somehow be something you’re not. It’s a real mess out there. Barbara has been hurt because she stays classy.”
This conundrum is a familiar refrain to KABC radio talk show host Larry Elder, who deals with race issues on his daily KABC shows. He concurs that this is a familiar refrain: “There is so much confusion within the black community about who and what we are, and how we should be. If you’re a high school student who’s interested in academics, you’re accused of acting white. Why is it that someone who aspires to greatness is acting white? There’s a holier-than-thou attitude that you’re expected to be a certain way, have a certain world view. The answer is to ignore it. Why is it OK for Martha Stewart to be everywoman, but not B. Smith?”
Smith’s solution to all of this is “to have tougher skin. It is hard. That’s why you have to surround yourself with your friends and family, and you have to have your world. You start to understand why celebrities are the way they are.”
Smith hasn’t built the kind of entourage that often flanks the rich and famous. For the shoot at the Ojai Valley Inn & Spa there are no personal assistants, no hangers-on, just a small crew, and Louise and Phil Keoghan. The couple--he’s is the host of the Travel Channel’s “Phil Keoghan’s Adventure Crazy,” she’s a producer--will be featured in the next issue of Smith’s magazine.
Over three days the couples golf, bike and go for spa treatments.
At the end of the last long day, Smith looks no worse for wear after the photo shoot on horseback.
Her endurance level is a point of pride: “We’ll be doing the show and the crew can be felled by the heat, but I keep going and going and going. It’s almost like they’re thinking, ‘As long as she can stand there, we’ll have to find a way to stand there.’ Because I don’t use the word t-i-r-e-d in my life.”
Jeannine Stein can be reached at socalliving@latimes.com.
