Journalist, editor and author Barbara Goldsmith died last Sunday at age 85. In her 20s, Goldsmith worked as a journalist in the art world. She profiled contemporary cultural icons like Audrey Hepburn and Pablo Picasso, creating award-winning work that would help her become a founding editor of New York magazine. She continued writing profiles and editing the magazine until the mid-'70s, when she "got tired of making other writers look good through my re-writing."
So Goldsmith turned to writing books. Her first, The Straw Man (1975), is a novel about the New York art world, in which an heir mounts a legal challenge over control of his wealthy father's massive art collection. The book was a bestseller. So too was her next, Little Gloria... Happy at Last (1980), a narrative nonfiction look at the bitter battle over custody of Gloria Vanderbilt (and her $2.5 million trust fund) in the 1930s. In 1982, Little Gloria became an NBC miniseries starring Bette Davis, Angela Lansbury, Christopher Plummer and Maureen Stapleton. Goldsmith's last book was Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie, a biography of the luminary scientist and part of W.W. Norton's Great Discoveries series. It was last published in 2005 ($14.95, 9780739453056). --Tobias Mutter
