Dish (34 page)

In 1949, the year after she graduated, she hopped a bus to New York with $50 in her pocket. She dreamed of becoming a serious writer for magazines like the
New Yorker
or
Time,
but was turned down everywhere. Actor Zachary Scott, about whom she had written a glowing profile while she was in college, pulled strings and got her a job at
Modern Screen,
the last of the old-time movie magazines. It was a valuable early lesson on favors. She held a number of jobs, including producer for Mike Wallace and ghostwriter for Igor Cassini. “New York was still very glamorous then—black-and-white floors, satin dresses, men in dinner jackets,” she said. “I went to El Morocco every night for five years.” Smith was briefly married a second time, to a travel agent named Freddie Lister, who mysteriously disappeared years after the divorce. After Igor Cassini was fired in a flap over his work for the Dominican Republic, Liz made an unsuccessful bid to take over the column. She wrote for several magazines, including
Cosmopolitan
and
Sports Illustrated.
She was also one of the anonymous contributors to a mean-spirited column called Robin Adams Sloan. Around this time, Liz started seeing a pyschiatrist, “a fabulous mother type” who helped her realize that one of the things that was keeping her back was envy. Liz had worked with a lot of famous people but “deep down, I was jealous, maybe, of their fame or their power or their money. And one morning, I asked myself, ‘Do I like these people?’ I did! They were very kind to me. I wanted them to succeed, because on top of everything else, their success would be my success. And at that moment, one career life ended and another began for me. When I sincerely started to want others to succeed, when I worked to help them do just that, my career took off. Real suceess followed.” In 1976, Liz Smith got her own column in the
Daily News,
which was
looking for a counterpart to its Aileen “Suzy” Mehl’s society column. Liz Smith was a hit, and shortly after its debut it jumped from page twenty-two to page six, leapfrogging “Suzy”—who won’t speak to her to this day.

In the 1980s, with the Wall Street boom and the emergence of nouvelle society, businessmen and moguls realized something that celebrities had long known—fame increases market value. They began angling to get mentions in the respectable gossip columns—especially Liz Smith’s. By the time the Trump divorce erupted, Liz had redefined the art of access gossip journalism and had become the most prominent and most sought after in her field. When celebrities, authors, businessmen, or socialites knew that a detail of their private lives was about to become public because of some looming scandal, they would often turn to Liz for sympathetic treatment. It worked for Liz, it worked for them, and it worked for the
Daily News.
It never worked better for all three then it did with the Trump Divorce.

If there was one thing more humiliating for the staff of the
New York Post
than the looming prospect of bankruptcy, it was getting beat on a big story by the
Daily News.
“This shoulda been our story,”
Post
editor Jerry Nachman was bellowing. “How did we get scooped by the Daily Snooze?” The
Post
staffers sat with their faces buried in Liz Smith’s breathless report. The
Post
had the scrappiest, hardest working reporters in town—but they’d been under siege lately. The staff at the dingy, rat-infested offices overlooking the FDR Drive were being hit with layoffs and pay cuts. There was rampant speculation about who—if anybody—would buy the tabloid, which was hemorrhaging more than $10 million a year. The Trump story had been circulating for months. They couldn’t use it. A while back, Page Six had run a blind item about Trump’s other woman. Several weeks before Liz’s story broke, word of the Aspen spat had reached executive editor Steve Cuozzo. He called “Suzy,” who in 1985 had left the
News
and her nemesis Liz Smith for the
Post.
She knew the Trumps well. “It’s absolutely true,” Suzy said. “The girl’s name is Maria Maples. She’s a model from Georgia and they’ve been seeing each other for months.”

Cuozzo was thrilled. “When are you going to write it?” he asked.

“I’m not going to touch it,” “Suzy” said.

They all knew the story, says a
Post
reporter: “Trump was friends with Peter Kalikow [then the owner of the
New York Post]
. They had worked on deals together. There was even talk that Trump was going to buy the
Post
from Kalikow. There was no way we were going to piss off the boss’s friend.”

Donald Trump was flying home from the Mike Tyson fight in Japan when his assistant Norma Foederer called him in his private jet with the news. The story was page one of the
Daily News.
Trump, the master of media manipulation, had been scooped by his wife.

One of the first things Trump did when he got to his office was to call up his old friend Liz Smith. “I am leaving because I want to leave,” he told Liz, desperately trying to respin the story to his advantage. “Ivana is a very wonderful woman and a very good woman and I like her. We might even get back together.” Liz had given Donald a chance to break the story with her, and he didn’t. “You gotta dance with the one who brought you,” Liz said. She stuck with Ivana.

Ivana had snagged the best-read and most-liked columnist in town. Suzy would write some pro-Donald stories, but she had been around too long, and after Suzygate—a wildly publicized episode in 1988 in which it was revealed that many of the big names in one of Suzy’s party columns had never actually attended the event—she was no longer a powerful enough ally. That left Donald with only one real option: Cindy Adams.

Readers looking for unbiased news and solid reporting didn’t bother with Cindy Adams’s column. Cindy Adams wasn’t really a journalist—she was a character. If Liz Smith was the good old girl of gossip, Cindy Adams was the Dragon Lady of Dish. Liz Smith was small-town and star-struck while Cindy was a smart-mouthed, pushy New Yorker—and she cultivated the image. Her conversation and her column were heavy with attitude and peppered with words like
kiddo
and
chick.
Cindy always dressed to the nines: she wore big jewels and bigger eyelashes. She showed
up for TV appearances with her own hair and makeup person in tow, and once there, she sometimes refused to go on with lesser guests. She once tried to get a hapless reporter fired for not recognizing her at a party. Cindy Adams and her husband, comedian Joey Adams, traveled around town in a white chauffeured Cadillac and ate free meals in restaurants that got plugged in Cindy’s column.

By the mid 1970s, Cindy’s career had not gone very far since she butted heads with Dorothy Kilgallen in the sixties. She had become friends with a number of politicians and Third World leaders from her touring days with Joey, and she sometimes wrote about her conversations with them for third-tier magazines and neighborhood newspapers. Then one day, she had to cancel a lunch that she and Joey were going to have with an editor from the
New York Post,
where Joey had a humor column. “I can’t make it,” she told the editor. “My close personal friend, the Shah of Iran, wants to see me.” The toppled dictator was on his death bed, and journalists around the world were desperately trying to get a quote from him. The stunned editor asked if Cindy could possibly get an interview. “Of course,” she said. The interview was short on facts but high on drama and it made international headlines. Cindy Adams was rewarded with her own column in the
New York Post.

Cindy Adams’s column quickly became the place where the world’s maligned—the drug kingpins, tax cheats, sex harassers—could get sympathetic treatment. Old buddies like the Marcoses, the Sukarnos, and Adnan Khashoggi all cried on Cindy’s shoulder and got a fiery defense in Cindy’s column. Cindy would, in turn, get world exclusives from them. So, with Liz already taken, Donald Trump had nowhere else to turn. Cindy Adams became his ally.

The tabloid war was on—the battle lines were drawn. Ivana had as her defenders Liz Smith and the
Daily News.
And at Liz’s recommendation, Ivana hired public relations guru John Scanlon, who also happened to represent the
Daily News.

Donald Trump’s side was being presented by Cindy Adams and the
New York Post.
Doing public relations for Donald Trump,
not coincidentally, was Howard Rubenstein Associates, the company that also represented the
New York Post.

A lot happened in the world that week. The Berlin Wall was toppled and Germany was reunited. Drexel Burnham Lambert, the wildly powerful junk bond company that spearheaded the 1980s financial boom, collapsed. And after twenty-seven years in prison, South African civil rights leader Nelson Mandela was freed. But for
eleven
straight days, the front pages of the tabs were devoted to the Trump Divorce.

Time
and
Newsweek
did cover stories. Even the
New York Times
stooped to cover it. Some of the best coverage came from Carl Bernstein’s old paper, the
Washington Post.
Bernstein, who was pulling an ill-fated stint at
Time,
was disgusted, calling it the “Three Mile Island of journalism: a meltdown waiting to happen.” He seized the opportunity to attack Liz Smith and her “smarmy sort of New Journalism.”
*

“Time
interviewed me for its story on gossip,” says Smith. “The first questions its reporter asked me was whether I had a face-lift, dyed my hair and whether I was gay. I would never ask anybody any of those questions. And it had the audacity to make fun of me for being trivial.”

Because she had a lock on one side of the story, Liz Smith wasn’t just reporting the story, she was becoming part of it. She was getting embarrassed by this spectacle, but her editors and her WNBC-TV producer loved it. For three months she was allowed to write about hardly anything else. “I’m getting sick of myself,” she confided to friends.

“If this isn’t a tabloid story, there are no tabloids,” said Matthew Storin, managing editor of the
Daily News,
who, in addition to Liz, had about a dozen reporters plus photographers on the story. Newspaper sales skyrocketed. Ratings for
Live at Five
jumped 50 percent.

Smith’s producer at WNBC was jumping up and down, calling her first thing in the morning: “What have you got?” he’d ask.

“Fuck you,” Liz told him. “I’m asleep.”

He’d call back in a few minutes. “I mean, he tormented me. We got some great stuff because he was so aggressive. It was the biggest story I ever saw happen that wasn’t important—next to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.”

Liz Smith was a star. She was on the cover of magazines. All because of access. But the serious journalist she had once wanted to be was slipping further and further away. “I hate myself,” she said. And she was about to get in even deeper. On Valentine’s Day, she and Ivana and about a dozen of Ivana’s friends and family were scheduled to celebrate Ivana’s forty-first birthday at La Grenouille, a ritzy Midtown restaurant.

Liz Smith, Barbara Walters, Carolyn Roehm, Shirley Lord, Ann Bass, Judy Taubman, Georgette Mosbacher, even Trump’s mother, his sister, and their sister-in-law, Blaine Trump, were there for support. While an unruly mob gathered outside, the power women dined on lamb chops, asparagus en croute, and chocolate cake. Ivana, wearing a bright red designer jacket, cried throughout much of the lunch. She was showered with heart-shaped gifts and declarations of support; Adnan Khashoggi sent a cake. “Donald Trump’s name was never mentioned,” says Liz Smith “He was like a hovering presence.”

Ivana had been escorted into the restaurant by two beefy guys who looked like they belonged with the Secret Service—with walkie-talkies, earphones, and all. When it came time to leave, “Ivana was scared to go outside,” says Liz. So were most of the ladies who lunched. Reporters, photographers, cameramen—even her fans—were getting incredibly aggressive for a quote from the elusive Ivana, who would speak for the record only to Liz. “I’m not afraid of the press,” Liz said. “Those were my pals out there, or my enemies—my peers, at least. I’m not afraid of them.” Liz turned to Barbara Walters and said, “Come on, Barbara, you and I will go out there with Ivana.”

So two of the best-known newswomen in the country became bodyguards, flanking the teary-eyed socialite. The crowd surged forward, and Barbara got pushed aside before they could make it
through the door. Ivana was trembling. “I wanted to get out of there and get Ivana out,” said Liz. “Barbara was shoved aside, so it was just the two of us.” The crowd went crazy as the pair appeared.

“Get the money!” someone shouted.

“Get the Plaza! We’re with you, Ivana!”

“Break his ass, blackmail him.”

“Take Donald’s money! Take his money, Ivana!”

“I said to Ivana ‘Now smile. Be like Jackie Onassis,’ ” recalled Liz. “You don’t want to go out there and let them see how sad you are. You look so beautiful. Just smile.’ So we both went out with those idiot grins on our faces.”

A huge photograph of the two women and their wide grins was plastered across the front page of the February 15
Daily News:
“DOING OKAY” blared the headline. “Outside a crowd cheered Ivana. Inside posh La Grenouille, her pals, including our Liz Smith, moved her to tears with their support.”

“I looked like her nurse taking her to a psychiatric ward,” Liz says. “I was shocked. I didn’t know the paper was going to be there.”

Donald Trump had always enjoyed a cozy relationship with the press. Reporters were sometimes a bit awed when Trump himself returned their calls. He always asked about their health and their career and remembered the names of their spouses and children. He often told them they were “the greatest.” He sometimes spoke to them off the record asking to be quoted as “a source close to Trump” and would tell them how fabulous business was and what an incredible deal he’d just made. And, presto, the next day there it was, word for word, in the papers. He would exaggerate his own personal wealth at say, $3 billion, and what do you know, the next day, according to the papers, he was worth $3 billion, and the banks would come knocking on his door to do business. He could make something come true by telling it to reporters.