Barbara Goldsmith

Barbara Goldsmith
Goldsmith in January 2009 at 78 years old.
Born	Barbara Joan Lubun (1931-05-18)May 18, 1931 New York City, New York, U.S.
Died	June 26, 2016(2016-06-26) (aged 85) United States
Occupation	Author journalist philanthropist
Language	English
Alma mater	Wellesley College (B.A., 1953)
Genre	Journalism
Spouse	Frank Perry ​ ​ (m. 1977; div. 1992)​
Children	3

Barbara Goldsmith (May 18, 1931 – June 26, 2016) was an American author, journalist, and philanthropist. She received critical and popular acclaim for her best-selling books, essays, articles, and her philanthropic work. She was awarded four

Goldsmith was born Barbara Joan Lubun in New York City in 1931.[2] She received a Bachelor of Arts in 1953 from Wellesley College, where she majored in English,^[3] after which she took art courses at Columbia University. Her first assignments as a journalist were in the art field, where she simultaneously amassed an art collection comprising mostly contemporary American painting and sculpture. In her early twenties, she wrote a series of prize-winning profiles of such Hollywood luminaries as Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, and Audrey Hepburn. In the late 1960s she initiated “The Creative Environment” series, interviewing in-depth Marcel Breuer, I.M. Pei, George Balanchine and Pablo Picasso, among others, about their creative process.

Goldsmith’s “The Creative Environment” caught the eye of Clay Felker, editor of the Sunday magazine supplement of the

Later life and books

“At magazines I got tired of making other writers look good through my re-writing,” Goldsmith wrote.^[8] From the mid-1970s, though continuing to write for the New Yorker and the New York Times among other publications, Goldsmith concentrated on writing books, all of which brought critical success and became bestsellers.

In 1975 Goldsmith completed her first book, The Straw Man, a novel about the New York art world. The wealthy Royceman family’s private art collection—a hundred million dollars worth of Old Masters, Impressionists, Neo-Impressionists, and objects d’art—has been willed by Bertram Royceman to a New York museum to be housed in a special pavilion. However, Bertie, the only son of Bertram Royceman, files suit to challenge his father’s will. The ensuing battle exposes many of the players in the art world. The book reached #1 on the bestseller lists^[9] and was praised in a review by John Kenneth Galbraith in New York Magazine as “brilliant social criticism.”^[10]

Goldsmith’s second book was Little Gloria...Happy at Last, published in 1980. The nonfiction narrative tracked the 1930s custody battle for Gloria Vanderbilt (Little Gloria, then). The book reached the top of The New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists and was hailed by critics. It was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club and described as a “literary masterpiece...the skill of Proust,” by Alden Whitman.^[11] The book became both a Paramount Pictures film and a major NBC television mini-series, Little Gloria... Happy at Last, starring Bette Davis, Angela Lansbury, Christopher Plummer, and Maureen Stapleton. It was nominated for six Emmys, including one which Goldsmith won.

Johnson v. Johnson, Goldsmith’s third book, completed in 1987, recounted the longest, most expensive will contest in United States history between Basia Johnson, the widow of pharmaceutical heir J. Seward Johnson, and his children from previous marriages. It, too, became a bestseller and received critical accolades, such as

Goldsmith completed her next book in 1998. Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull chronicled the women of the Gilded Age who fought for equality and the right to vote. Centered around the controversial newspaper editor, spiritualist and free love advocate Victoria Woodhull, author Jane Stanton Hitchcock described the work as "a whole vivid and inclusive way of writing history. It’s spellbinding.”^[14] The New York Times’ Richard Bernstein hailed it as an “absorbing, sweeping book...the richness of its narrative, the complex and morally nuanced portraits of its character...You finish it nearly out of breath astonished at the tragic heroism of the flawed character who tried to challenge the American Establishment.”^[15] Other Powers was the finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize. The book is optioned to become a major motion picture.

Her final book, Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie, has been translated into 21 languages world-wide. The work is based on the workbooks, letters, and diaries of Marie Curie, which had been sealed for sixty years because they were still radioactive. It won the prize for the Best Book of 2006 from the American Institute of Physics and its thirteen affiliated societies, earned Goldsmith the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit medal for service to the Republic of Poland in 2009, and will soon be adapted as a major joint HBO/Sony production.

Goldsmith’s most recent awards are the highest honor given by her alma mater Wellesley College, the 2013 Wellesley Alumnae Achievement Award. In 2013, she also received the Erwin Piscator Honorary Award for her writing. Many of her other outstanding awards are listed below. She died on June 26, 2016, at the age of 85.^[2]

Philanthropy

The President of the Carnegie Corporation, Vartan Gregorian, named Barbara Goldsmith along with David Rockefeller and Brooke Astor on his list of America’s ten most enlightened philanthropists.^[16] Gregorian particularly noted the campaign she spearheaded to convert books and documents to permanent paper lasting 300 years instead of disintegrating in thirty and her securing of $20 million from the federal government for this crucial work.

Her major philanthropic efforts include the donation of two preservation and conservation laboratories at The

Among her early major philanthropic efforts was the 1968 founding of the Center for Learning Disabilities at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. In 1974, she succeeded with Adele Auchincloss (the late Mrs. Louis Auchincloss) to have the city, state and parks department install safety surf, a cushioning material, under swings and slides in every park and playground in the five boroughs of New York City. Goldsmith initiated many other anonymous grants.

She founded the

• The New York Public Library
  . Trustee since 1987. Served on Executive Committee, Nominating Committee, Library Policy Committee, Finance & Acquisitions Committee and others.
• American Academy in Rome. Trustee since 1994. Served on Executive Committee, Committee on Fine Arts.
• The Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers. Advisory Board since its inception in 1999.
• PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award
  .

Bibliography

Books

• Goldsmith, Barbara. The Straw Man. 1975. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York. (
  ISBN 0374270902
  )
• Goldsmith, Barbara. Little Gloria...Happy at Last. 1980. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York. (
  ISBN 978-0-394-42836-9
  )
• Goldsmith, Barbara. Johnson v. Johnson. 1987. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York. (
  ISBN 0394560434
  )
• Goldsmith, Barbara. Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. 1998. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York.(
  ISBN 0394555368
  )
• Goldsmith, Barbara. Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie. 2005. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York. (
  ISBN 0393051374
  )

• “La Dolce Viva,” New York Magazine, April 1968.
• “How Henry (Geldzahler) Made 43 Artists Immortal,” New York Magazine, 1974.
• “Comment on Culture,” Harper’s Bazaar (special arts & literature issue with artist James Rosenquist), editor and writer, January 1969.
• “The Meaning of Celebrity,” New York Times, December 4, 1983.
• “Women on the Edge: The Streetwalker’s Life,” The New Yorker, April 26, 1993.

Selected profiles of the author

• “A Testament of Riches Shared,” by Pamela Ryckman. Financial Times, September 28, 2007. Available online [1].
• “Saving Books From the Paper They're Printed On,” by Eleanor Blau. New York Times, November 27, 1994. Available online. [2]
• New York Social Diary Interview with Barbara Goldsmith, by David Patrick Columbia. Available online. [3]
• Aspen Magazine Profile of Author: “Leading the Way,” by Daniel Shaw. Aspen Magazine, Summer 2005.

References