Liz Smith

Mary Elizabeth "Liz" Smith (born February 2, 1923) is an American gossip columnist. She is known as The Grand Dame of Dish. Smith was born in Fort Worth, Texas. She married her high school sweetheart, George Edward Beeman, a World War II bombardier, in 1944. But she left him to enroll in college and they were divorced several years later. Smith graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Journalism in 1949, where she wrote for The Daily Texan, then 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. In the late 1950s Smith worked as a ghostwriter for...