Liz Smith - Gossip Column from
the NEW YORK POST
July 2000

I WENT down to Nashville this week, where it was 103 degrees. But nobody in Tennessee cares about hot weather; everybody there stays strictly inside. Nashville is air-conditioned to the max, and the great honeymoon tourist attraction hotel, Opryland, has been created as a living green jungle inside a huge glassed-in shell. In this cocoon, there are cafes and shops to beat the band, balcony rooms with views, rivers, waterfalls and flower beds of blooming gardenias. It's great!

[...]

In Nashville, I ordered to my hotel room one hairdresser, so I could look as good as possible for the Waldenettes. In came Joseph Gregory, who is young, handsome and has pale blue eyes like the kids in the movie "Children of the Damned." As he did my hair, he told me he, too, has a book coming out in September about his fabled great-grandmother, Evalyn Walsh McLean. This work, from Providence House publishers, is titled "Queen of Diamonds." (Ms. McLean was a legend of wealth and eccentricity. She owned the fabled but unlucky Hope Diamond, which was finally bought by jeweler Harry Winston.) I told young Mr. Gregory that in my own book, there is the tale of how Harry gave the diamond to the Smithsonian Institution, mailing it to them in a parcel post brown wrapper. He said the Smithsonian is cooperating with him on his book. It turns out that this Nashville hairdresser has his own perfume with a bottle designed by the well-known Marc Rosen and it is in Bergdorf Goodman under the name Fable.

Elizabeth Taylor, move over!