Ambassador Liz.(The Talk of the Town)(Liz Smith)(Interview)

Wall Street, the spiritual (if not, these days, the actual) home of finance, and the Upper East Side, where many financiers live, maintain a special relationship, perhaps akin to that of Britain and America, or--more recently--to that of co-dependents, who thrive or founder in tandem, and are quick to make excuses for each other's shortcomings and missteps. Fortunes made downtown become uptown apartments. A.I.G.'s former chief executive Robert Willumstad has property on Park Avenue, as do John Thain, of Merrill Lynch, his predecessor Stanley O'Neal, and Richard Fuld, the head of Lehman Brothers, who, last year, paid twenty-one million dollars for a spread at No. 640. Think of the districts as poles on the globe of Manhattan society, termini of a gilded corridor, the hefty expanses on either end of a barbell-shaped territory--the connective bit is the No. 4/5 train--of the mind. The sudden lightening of Wall Street has led to wondering, and worries, about who will hold up the other side.

So, while Wall Street was calling on its sagest analysts, the Upper East Side enlisted one of its own--Liz Smith, the self-proclaimed "two-thousand-year-old gossip columnist" for the Post, who, Monday night, appeared at a benefit dinner for the preservationist organization Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts, which was making her an honorary ambassador to the neighborhood. At five o'clock, Smith welcomed a visitor to her apartment at Thirty-eighth and Third--ride-over country--and said that, while many of her friends to the north were fretting over their net worths, the crisis hadn't affected her personally. "All of my money is in Treasury bonds," she said, settling into the sofa. (Needlepoint throw pillow: "I DON'T REPEAT GOSSIP--SO LISTEN CAREFULLY.") "I'm one of the rare people who didn't make any money in the stock-market boom, so I didn't lose any, either."

Smith, who was wearing a blue-striped button-down, creased tan slacks, and a vivid application of peachy lipstick, arrived in New York in 1949 with fifty dollars and a degree in journalism from the University of Texas. (She had become Liz several years earlier. "My first husband gave me that name," she said. "He said, 'I can't be sleeping with someone called Mary Elizabeth.' ") "We were all starving to death," she said. "Every Saturday, we'd go to a restaurant called A la Fourchette and have a Dover-sole lunch for a dollar and a quarter."

A nostalgist of the best sort, Smith is wry and engaging about her ...