Mary Elizabeth Smith (February 2, 1923 – November 12, 2017) was an American gossip columnist. She was known as "The Grand Dame of Dish".
Early life
Smith was born on February 2, 1923, in Fort Worth, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in journalism in 1949, and she worked for The Daily Texan and The Texas Ranger.
Career
Smith later moved to New York City, where she worked as a typist, proofreader, and 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. After leaving that column in the early 1960s, she began working for Helen Gurley Brown as the entertainment editor for the American version of Cosmopolitan, later working simultaneously as Sports Illustrateds entertainment editor as well.
On February 16, 1976, Smith began a self-titled gossip column for the New York Daily News. During the 1978 New York City 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.
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 entrepreneur Donald Trump, Smith moved her column to New York Newsday, staying until that paper closed in 1995 and then continuing in both the Long Island Newsday and the New York Post simultaneously. The official discontinuation of her column came after several months of dispute among Smith, her lawyer David Blasband, and Newsday management.
Smith, along with Lesley Stahl, Mary Wells Lawrence, and Joni Evans, was a founding member of wowOwow.com, a website for women to talk culture, politics, and gossip. and they divorced two years later. Beginning in the late 1970s, the archaeologist Iris Love lived with Smith romantically for 15 years.
Smith was a good friend of Texas Governor Ann Richards, and she helped Richards to acculturate to New York City society after leaving Texas. Smith was also good friends with Texan pundit and writer Molly Ivins, also a friend of Richards.