Liz Outs Self! (Sorta!)

By James Poniewozik

Reading gossip, Liz Smith cheerily admits in the prologue to her new book, is for people with a lot of time on their hands--"for leisure, for fun." So reading the memoir of a gossip columnist may be a sign that you should start donating time to charitable work.

But Natural Blonde (Hyperion; 460 pages; $25.95), for all its starstruck reminiscences (lunch with Richard Burton! Sean Connery in the buff!), promised headline-making dish that had publishing circles abuzz last week about the top-secret book. The 77-year-old gossip queen, the woman who broke the story of Donald and Ivana Trump's marital woes, was going to out herself.

As a natural brunette? Yes. (We knew it!) As a bisexual? Uh...kinda. If you can call this coming out, it is one of the weirder comings-out in the history of the genre. Smith writes of a doomed youthful romance with a fellow female student at the University of Texas; their parents read their love letters and forced the two apart. Yet she writes about her longtime roommate, the archaeologist Iris Love, with puzzling coyness. She dismisses Kitty Kelley's insinuation, in a book on Nancy Reagan, that Love and Smith were a couple ("a fantastic aside that I had been 'living openly for years with another woman in New York'") without flatly denying it ("I didn't quite get this stupid and arcane implication, but on the other hand, I did"). She writes of 15 years of living in "close companionship," but she calls Love nothing more amorous than her "pal." Is she hiding something? Leading us on?

And why--if one can seriously ask the question in a Liz Smith review--is it any of our business? Gay activists have criticized the columnist (whom they long maintained was gay) for helping celebrities keep closeted by passing on their stories of heterosexual relationships, implying that homosexuality is the one secret too filthy for even a gossip to reveal. Smith says that she has always opposed outing--she once helped Rock Hudson "counter-blackmail" a woman who threatened to expose him--and that she doesn't like to define herself in terms of her love life. So why write about her two marriages or her childhood "molestation" by an older cousin ("I had rather enjoyed it")?

Well, our prurient, inappropriate concern did add a buzz to an overlong buffet of stardust memories. Smith dishes--remembering, for instance, a farcical night dropping acid with actress Holland Taylor. But she does it, generally, with obsequious reverence and block-that-metaphor prose (Joan Crawford was "her own nebula--a woman who hauled herself up by her bootstraps and created her glittering star self from scratch"). That soft touch has made her the Barbara Walters of gossip, with access to match. "[W]ouldn't you rather I dealt with it Liz Smith-style?" she asks subjects. After a few hundred pages, it becomes a little much--and that's before Smith shares her thoughts on religion. Still, if you like worshipful, '40s-style celebrity journalism and old-Hollywood glamour--Smith's career spans anecdotes of Tallulah Bankhead, Elizabeth Taylor and Julia Roberts--this book may be for you.

Or you could go build a house with Habitat for Humanity. Just kidding.

--By James Poniewozik