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Liz Smith: "My Most Memorable Special Occasion"
A Who's Who Guest List
Among the many luminaries who showed up to honor their friend were Barbara Walters, Liza Minelli, Walter Cronkite, Mike Nichols, Candice Bergen, Mike Wallace, Oscar de la Renta, the late Texas Governor Anne Richards, and media executive Barry Diller.
"Everybody who was anybody was there," she recalls. "It was just wonderful, and it was so much fun to have a party where you didn't have to do anything. My friends who put on the party did everything."
The hosts of Liz Smith's fabulous 80th birthday party: From left to right, back row: Ellen Levine, now Editorial Director of Hearst Magazines; Liz Smith's wax likeness from Madame Tussauds; publishing legend Joni Evans; Cynthia McFadden, now ABC News "Nightline" anchor; Children's Television Workshop founder Joan Ganz Cooney; and philanthropist Louise Grunwald. Left to right, front row: TV journalist Barbara Walters, the late Gov. Ann Richards, and Vanity Fair writer-at-large Marie Brenner.
The hosts who did everything wore yellow boas that evening, symbolizing the yellow rose of Texas, and coordinating their accessories with the prominent color of the evening.
Madame Tussauds Wax Museum agreed to let Smith's likeness take the night off so she, too, could attend the event. The statue stood next to the microphone at which numerous guests made speeches.
After dinner, a large cake was presented; it was in the shape of a typewriter. "I said, 'Nobody will know what this is,'" laughs Smith. "Nobody uses a typewriter anymore."
Instead of giving presents, guests were asked to contribute a dollar to the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York. The guests were decidedly more generous: "We had an outpouring of money–about $286,000," she recalls.
"Mayor Bloomberg was there. He was thrilled that this money was earmarked for the discretionary fund that he could use for emergencies and other purposes," she says, adding that an ongoing fundraising effort was born that evening. "We've put on a charity party for the Mayor every year since then, in a big tent at 73rd and Lexington."
Make Everyone Happy That They Came
Looking back on her wonderful evening, Smith shares a major reason for its success and a key principle of celebrity party-planning: "You want to make everyone glad that they came," she says. "Usually people are more impressed with who else came. The better the guest list, the more they like it, and the more they feel good."
In this case, some 600 people came to celebrate the birthday of a girl from Texas who built an astonishing career, and who long ago had become a toast of the town in her own right.
The guests at Liz Smith's 80th birthday celebration were unquestionably glad that they had come and impressed with who else was there. Best of all, though, they still talk about that party.
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