Who

The inexhaustible octogenarian has been a fixture on the gossip scene for more than three decades.

Backstory

The daughter of a cotton broker, May Elizabeth Smith grew up in Forth Worth, attended college at UT Austin, and arrived at Penn Station in 1949 with the proverbial $50 in her pocket. She landed her first gig in journalism as a writer for Modern Screen; she later moved on to jobs at Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and CBS Radio (where she worked as a producer for Mike Wallace) before stopping off at Cosmopolitan to work under Helen Gurley Brown as entertainment editor. Smith started writing a gossip column for the Daily News in 1976 and quickly amassed a devoted following of housewives with her largely innocuous bits of celebrity dish. Three years later, she branched out to TV with a gig on Live at Five. She later traded the News for Newsday and Live at Five for a deal with Fox, and landed a lucrative deal to syndicate her column to more than 100 papers nationwide, including the Post. The show soon fizzled and her contract with Newsday was terminated in 2005. (The paper's execs suggested she take a 95% pay cut, she understandably refused.) Thanks to her able assistants, though, her tenure "writing" for the Post continues.

Of note

Like fellow Postie Cindy Adams, Smith hasn't had broken much in the way of actual gossip in years. Her biggest scoop, which she alludes to frequently—the divorce of Ivana and Donald Trump in 1991—is now more than 15 years old. Like Adams, though, she's managed to hang on, turning out meandering anecdotes about the elderly friends (Barbara Walters, Lauren Bacall) she met for lunch yesterday at Le Cirque, and occasionally plugging a book as a favor for a publicist friend. Just how many people still read the Post column isn't entirely clear. It's also not clear just how much longer Smith will continue in the job. In early 2007, Post editor Col Allan cut Smith back from six columns a week to three, a forced semi-retirement that she reportedly wasn't too thrilled about. But she picked up a new gig in 2008 when she co-founded Wowowow.com, a site for older women, with publishing honcho Joni Evans, Lesley Stahl, ad guru Mary Wells, and columnist Peggy Noonan. 

Grudge

Although she has a kindly reputation compared to some of her colleagues in the gossip biz, Smith has had her fair share of catfights. She had a longstanding beef with the late Frank Sinatra: After she used her column to criticize the way he bullied his female companions, Sinatra called her a "fat, old, ugly" and "a dyke." She also had a decades-long enmity with loony publicist Bobby Zarem. At one point, she refused to cover the movies he flacked in her columns.

In print

Smith's 2000 autobiography Natural Blonde was a bestseller, recounting incidents like the time Truman Capote handed Smith a fishbowl filled with cocaine and then yanking it away, saying, "No, it's too good for the likes of you." She followed up in 2005 with a food memoir, Dishing: Great Dish—And Dishes—From America's Most Beloved Gossip Columnist, in which she waxed rhapsodic about chicken fried steak. In 2007, the Michael's regular wrote the foreword to the eatery's official cookbook, Welcome to Michael's: Great Food, Great People, Great Party.

Personal

Smith was married twice—to WWII pilot George Beeman and Fred Lister—but she's out of closet these days. Her sexual orientation was an open secret for decades, but she confirmed it in her memoir Natural Blonde and has since made mention of her 15-year "companionship" with archaeologist Iris Love. These days, though, Smith is unattached and lives alone in Murray Hill. She can often be found sipping on margaritas at El Rio Grande, the Mexican restaurant above her apartment building.