It was 15 minutes before a recent Phil Donahue show was to air and producer Lillian Smith was escorting a guest to an office to get a pencil. The woman, whose two daughters were joined at birth, glanced at a big board listing that day`s guests and saw the word, ”freaks.”
She started sobbing and said that neither she nor her daughters would appear on the program. With only minutes to go before air time, Smith had to talk fast.
”Look, it doesn`t matter what they write on a board,” she said, trying to calm the mother. ”What matters is what you are. The way to show them you`re not freaks is to go out there and prove it.”
Convinced by Smith`s words, the mother and her two daughters went ahead with the program and showed 15 million viewers that, except for being physically joined at the head, the twins were as normal as anyone else.
Lillian Smith was speaking to her from the heart.
”I was not a favorite,” Smith said, referring to her childhood.
”That`s why I think I`m drawn to people who are in need. I can identify with pain; I can identify with being alone.”
That sense of distance, of being different began in her youth, which was spent on the South and West Sides of Chicago in the turbulent late `60s. Smith, 43, remembers it as a time of discovery of black consciousness, of wanting to know more about what it meant to be black and proud, but being unable to cross a generation gap within her own family.
”My mother had six kids,” she said recently in an interview in her spacious Manhattan apartment. ”I`m the fifth child-the different one.”
Her older siblings were too busy concentrating on their own youth to spend much time with a younger sister. And her mother, Luzzelle Kelly, who reared her kids alone after her husband died, often was away doing domestic work, trying to make ends meet and to earn the tuition to send her children to parochial schools.
Her mother, who still works, believed education was the key to freedom and she worked hard to see that all of her children got that education, Smith recalled.
”I was a noisy, quiet kid,” Smith said. ”I was noisy in larger situations and settings, but when it came down to sharing my feelings, I was very quiet, very silent. I just felt nobody understood.”
”Being the fifth child, you don`t get the special attention,” Smith recalled. ”I felt a sense of rejection then that now, as a mother looking back, I can understand what my mother was doing.”
Smith found herself questioning her traditional upbringing. It was a family in which ”you do as you`re told,” she recalled. In the face of the growing black pride movement, she wanted to discuss what it meant to be black and proud. ”It was a blank for me,” she recalled. ”I got no answers in parochial school. So I moved away from all that.”
And as she became more involved in the changes occurring in society-adopting an afro, becoming politically involved-her sense of estrangement grew.
”I was in the generation that started to ask questions. Why? What? When? And that made me different,” she said. ”I was a good student but I asked questions I wasn`t suppose to ask. I didn`t get answers, which bothered me.” She transferred to a public school. That also led Smith, who was starving for affection, to be interested in the opposite sex. At 14, she experienced
”love at first sight.” They dated the next three years and she became pregnant in her senior year of high school. Shortly after graduation, she had a son.
The young couple married and Smith thought she had found the family-and love-that had eluded her in her youth.
At first, the couple agreed that she would stay home with their son, but after the birth of a second boy, the couple decided that Smith, who had aspired to become a secretary, needed to work.
She got a job at Sears, first working as a clerk in the employment office and then as a secretary to the general manager of the surplus division.Soon she was earning more money than her husband, Smith recalled.
The marriage began to disintegrate and her husband began drinking.
”One day he didn`t get home from work,” Smith said. This was in the seventh year of their marriage. ”That morning, when I woke up, he still hadn`t gotten home. Six months later, he still hadn`t gotten home. He had run away.”
The period that followed was very difficult financially but Smith was determined to show she could handle problems on her own. ”I didn`t want to admit I`d made a mistake,” she said. She was evicted for non-payment of rent, had the car repossessed and was forced to move in with friends.
One day she saw an ad in the Chicago Defender newspaper that would change her life. The ad was for a secretarial position with ”Donahue,” which was based in Chicago at the time. She decided to apply and was hired as a production secretary in 1977.
”My first day there, the producer said, `Muhammad Ali is going to be on the show. Why don`t you go and get him? We have problems with him all the time. We`re a live show and he takes his time getting out of the house. That`ll be your first task.` I said, `I can do it.`
”The limo pulled up to get me. It was the first time I`ve ever been in a limousine. It was like a dream.”
When Smith, a small, slender woman, arrived at Ali`s home, he was dragging as usual, she recalled. So she decided to hit the heavyweight champion with her best punch.
”I said, `You get in this car. I just got this job and I`m not going to lose this job because of you.` He said, `OK.` I just took charge. I wanted to do well.”
But Smith was determined to surpass her ambition of becoming a secretary. She worked during the day, had her boys come by the office after school so that she could help them with their homework and then took night courses at Columbia College to learn more about television.
But given the small staff of the ”Donahue” show, promotions came slowly. It was six years before she was promoted to researcher, three more years before she became an associate producer and another year before she was promoted to be a producer.
As one of five producers, she is responsible for program ideas and themes, selecting and interviewing guests and providing Donahue with background on the guests.
She has established a special place on the Donahue show, says her friend and mentor, Dick Gregory, the longtime civil rights activist.
”She is very clever, very streetwise. She knows everything. Everybody comes to her and asks her questions. When Donahue`s not there, she`s Donahue. ”Sixteen years ago (when she began with `Donahue`), she was doing things that women are just beginning to do now,” Gregory added. ”She has earned a reputation that allows her to reach out to people because they know they will be treated fair and honest.”
Smith, who can be tough as well, landed the first U.S. media interview with Winnie Mandela when she and Nelson Mandela visited the U.S. following his release from prison; producing a show on the Tawana Brawley`s so-called kidnapping case; arranging interviews with the Rev. Louis Farrakhan and civil rights leaders.
”I want to bring information into people`s homes, clarify myths, stereotypes,” she said of her work.
When she`s not working, she volunteers time teaching and mentoring aspiring journalists and serving as a role model to teenage mothers.
”Let`s get real,” Smith said. ”We know that the system still puts out negative images of single mothers. Of course, everybody wants a mother and a father. But if it`s not there, it doesn`t mean you`re a failure to society.” In 1989 she was named the Black Journalist of the Year by Copeland`s restaurant in New York, which honors black women who give back to the community, she said. ”I was very grateful. I flew my children in but I was nervous because I didn`t have that `Leave It to Beaver` kind of family. My mother wasn`t there. So I wrote my mother and told her my feelings.”
That marked a turning point in their relationship, she said. ”I learned I needed to release these feelings. I`d always buttoned up and moved on.”
After the Mandela show aired her mother wrote to tell her how proud she was.
Smith maintains a close relationship with her sons, now in their early 20s, who live and work in Chicago.
”I`ve come a long way,” she said. ”A shoulder to cry on is wonderful and when you don`t have it, it`s not. But to be able to go on and do it anyway is pretty good.
”I`m proud of myself.”
