One of the good ones

I hope I’m for­giv­en for a bit of what may be per­ceived as inside base­ball but I wanted to express my sad­ness at the news of the death of Lois Smith, a vet­er­an movie industry pub­li­cist I had the priv­ilege of work­ing with on sev­er­al occa­sions dur­ing my time at Première magazine. She was already a legend when I star­ted my job there, and I did­n’t get to work with her right away, but I remem­ber that when I first had occa­sion to intro­duce myself to her, she had already famil­i­ar­ized her­self with my work there, and hav­ing found it worth­while, pretty much auto­mat­ic­ally made me feel wel­come in her realm. Which is to say she genu­inely loved movies and ten­ded to love oth­ers who loved them. While hardly a pushover, she was always warm, well-informed, fun to talk to, and very shoulder-to-shoulder in dif­fi­cult situ­ations, and first to acknow­ledge that in this buis­ness of show what are often taken for dif­fi­cult situ­ations are gen­er­ally ridicu­lous. One of the first memor­ies that came back when her name came up in this sad con­text yes­ter­day was of rush­ing across town one swel­ter­ing sum­mer day on an art-closing dead­line to fetch a por­trait of a film fig­ure who was less-than-happy with a por­trait we were run­ning as the open­ing art for a lengthy inter­view. Lois had the pre­ferred head shot, which was, truth to tell, indeed bet­ter from both an aes­thet­ic and a making-the-subject-look-good per­spect­ive, and on hand­ing it over, we had a few good, but not unaf­fec­tion­ate, laughs about the pecu­li­ar spasms of van­ity to which many of our movie gods and demi­gods are prone.  In her pres­ence, she always made you quietly aware that you were, after all, at work in a kind of charmed realm, and was­n’t it odd and wer­en’t we all kind of lucky. I send my most sin­cere con­dol­ences to her family.