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 Premiere 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.