Season 30, Day 18 - "Have You Heard?"
It's Smith week, and today's quiz is inspired by Liz Smith.
Liz Smith
“Gossip is just news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress.”
Liz Smith was a gossip columnist. Nicknamed “The Grand Dame of Dish,” she was a contributor to the syndicated “Cholly Knickerbocker” gossip column in the late 1950s and later became the entertainment editor of Cosmpolitan and Sports Illustrated. Called the most powerful gossip columnist of the 1980s, Smith had the distinction of being the only columnist to be published in three major NYC newspapers simultaneously (Newsday, New York Daily News, New York Post). She reportedly became the highest-paid print journalist in America after landing exclusive post-divorce interviews with Ivana Trump in 1990. She raised millions of dollars for charities like amfAR (the American Foundation for AIDS Research), which was co-founded by Oscar-winning actress Elizabeth Taylor. Her memoir Natural Blonde was a bestseller in 2000. She was finally dropped by the New York Post in 2009 and continued to write for the website New York Social Diary up until her death in 2017 at age 94.