Part 57

The same economic rule holds true when the Singers do a concert. Because of the large size of the group and the vast amount of rehearsal time needed to perfect new works or new arrangements, the box office receipts don't come close to meeting the expenses. The grants they receive from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council for the Arts are not always sufficient. "Like every one of the arts, it's a constant deficit operation. At this point, we're not nearly as strong in fund-raising as in the other aspects."

In spite of the financial pressures, Gregg does manage to provide his Singers with about 25 weeks of full-time work per year. His group has gone on a national tour for 15 consecutive years so far. The Singers have performed in every state except Alaska. They have made four tours of Europe and one of the Far East. Their typical New York season included four concerts at Alice Tully Hall and a contemporary music festival in one of the local churches. This year the three-day festival will be held in St. Peter's Church located in the Citicorp Center starting on April 20.

A native of Chicago, Gregg attended college in Los Angeles and founded the Gregg Smith Singers there in 1955. His talent as a conductor and arranger soon came to the attention of the late Igor Stravinsky, the Russian-born composer who was then living in California. The pair eventually recorded more than a dozen albums together. When Stravinsky died in 1971, Gregg was invited to Venice, Italy, to prepare the chorus and orchestra for the rites in honor of the late maestro.

In all his travels, Gregg and his wife Rosalind have found no place where they would feel so much at home as the West Side. "It's a great, wonderful community for the classical musician," he says. "It's one of the most vibrant, alive, sometimes terrifying but always exciting, places to live."

Perhaps Gregg's rarest quality is his unselfishness toward other American composers. His biggest concern seems to be: how will be manage to get all their works recorded?

"I have enough important recordings to do," he says in a voice hovering between joy and frustration, "to keep me busy for five years. That would mean literally hundreds of thousands of dollars." The money may come or it may not. But the worth of Gregg Smith, gentleman artist, is beyond price.

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EASTSIDER LIZ SMITH Queen of gossip

3-8-80

Like most of the kids she grew up with in Fort Worth, Texas during the Great Depression, Liz Smith was star-struck by the movies. "They told me there was a whole world out there where people were glamorous, where men and women drank wine with dinner and wore white tie and tails and drove cars with the tops down and danced on glass floors," she recalls, smiling dreamily. Her soft, languid accent, dripping with Southern charm, echoes through the coffee shop at the NBC building in midtown. Despite her cordiality, she somehow gives the impression of being in a great hurry. And for good reason: Smith is probably the hardest-working -- and certainly the most successful -- gossip writer on the East Coast.

Unlike Rona Barrett, the queen of Hollywood gossip, Liz Smith does not have a large staff, but relies on a single full-time assistant and part-time "leg man" in California. Nevertheless, she manages to turn out, each week, six columns for the New York Daily News (syndicated nationally to more than 60 newspapers), five radio spots for NBC, and two television spots for WNBC's Newscenter 4.

"The minute I get up, I go to work. I get up at about nine, and go right to work," says Liz. "I look at the paper right quick, and go right to the typewriter, and work till I finish the column at one. I work in my apartment because I would never have time to get up and dress and go to another place. I would never get to meet my deadline. ... I work all the time. I work a lot on the weekends because that's the only time I can even vaguely make a stab at catching up. ... I just about kill myself to get everything done. I don't know if it's worth it."

For all her complaints, Liz believes that gossip-writing is well suited for her personality. "I can't help it. I'm just one of those people who likes to repeat a tale," she explains. "I'd be reading every newspaper in America that I could get my hands on and every book and magazine anyway, even if I weren't doing this job."

When she was hired by the Daily News in February, 1976 to start her column, Liz was no stranger to the New York celebrity scene; she had already been in the city for 26 years, working mainly as a free-lance writer. "I made a lot of money free-lancing. Even 15 years ago, I never made less than $25,000 a year." Besides writing for virtually every mass market publication in America, she spent five years ghostwriting the Cholly Knickerbocker society column in the old Journal American. Her many contacts among the famous, and the resurgence of interest in gossip, also helped persuade Daily News editor Mike O'Neill that the paper could use a gossip column in which the personality of the writer came through.

Within weeks of her debut, Liz broke some of the sensational details of Woodward and Bernstein's The Final Days, which was about to be excerpted in Newsweek. She added the TV and radio broadcasts to her schedule in 1978, and avoids duplicating items whenever possible.

Her best sources, says Liz, are other journalists. "Because they know what stories are. I know a lot of very serious and important writers who have a lot of news and gossip and rumors and stuff that they don't have any place to put, so they're apt to give it to me. They have impulses to disseminate news; I think real reporters do feel that way."

Liz says that, generally speaking, she prefers writers to all other people. Asked to name some favorites, she bubblingly replies: "Norman Mailer. I just think Norman is a genius. Oh God, I love so many writers. My favorite novel recently was Peter Maas' book, Made in America. ... There's Tommy Thompson, who just wrote Serpentine. Nora Ephrom, Carl Bernstein are friends of mine. Norman Mailer is a friend of mine. Oh, I could go on forever."

An author in her own right, Liz wrote The Mother Book two years ago; it sold approximately 65,000 copies in hardcover and 200,000 in paperback. "It kind of wrote itself," she says modestly of the acclaimed collection of anecdotes about mothers. Someday she would like to try fiction; at present she is working on a book that she describes as "a history and philosophy of gossip and what it is and what it's all about."

An Eastsider for half her life, Liz says her neighborhood "has the lowest crime rate of any police district in New York." Most of the restaurants he frequents are on the Upper East Side. They include Le Plaisir, Gian Marino, Szechuan East and Elaine's.

For years she saw her therapist at least once a week; now she pays him just occasional visits. "It helped me enormously in writing. I quit having writer's block. I quit putting things off. I quit making myself miserable. I accepted my success, which was hard, because a lot of writers: they don't want to succeed. They don't think they deserve it. It's like people who don't want to be happy.

"Well, I mean you can be happy, you know, if you let yourself, and if you do your work. The most important thing in the world, I think, is to do your work. If you do your work, you'll be happy: I'm almost positive about it."

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EASTSIDERS TOM & DICK SMOTHERS Stars of I Love My Wife on Broadway

2-17-79

As the Smothers Brothers, they were perhaps the funniest, most original American music and comedy team to come out of the 1960s. Their 10 albums sold in the millions, and for three seasons they had the most controversial show on television, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. When CBS abruptly canceled their contract in 1969 for seemingly political reasons, they became a cause celebre by suing the network and winning a million dollars in damages. After 18 years of performing together as a team, they retired their act in December, 1976, saying that their brand of satire had been "stated," and that repetition would bore them. The brothers parted on friendly terms, each determined to make his mark separately as an entertainer.

This past Labor Day, they were reunited as a comedy team -- not on television or in a nightclub, but on the stage of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on West 47th Street, where they instantly breathed new life into the long-running musical I Love My Wife. Cast in the roles of two would-be wife swappers from Trenton, New Jersey, they insisted on being billed not as the Smothers Brothers, but as Dick and Tom Smothers. However, anyone who laments the demise of the Smothers Brothers act should catch the show before the six-month contract runs out on March 4. Dick Smothers, as Wally, a smooth-talking pseudo-sophisticate, and Tom Smothers, as his naive, bumbling friend Alvin, a moving man, wear their roles as if they had been written for no one else.

"I like theatre and I'm going to do more of it," said Tom, 42, during a recent dressing room interview after a matinee performance. His brother Dick, 40, had other plans. "As soon as this show is over, I have to go back to California and do some bottling for my winery. And I want to do more auto racing. I race for American Motors. As far as making a career in acting on Broadway: no. I think I could work at it and become a fairly decent actor, but while I'm making wine, I want to play in cabaret theatre and dinner theatre. It's fun, and it keeps you sharp. Broadway isn't a place you should learn. What we're doing is apprenticing on Broadway.

"But that's how we got our television show," protested Tom. "We'd never done a television show before."