Quinn on Books: We’ll Always Have Paris Review by Michael Quinn

In 2014, a friend turned fifty. To celebrate, he organized a trip with friends to Paris—myself among them. At the celebratory dinner, a guest arrived late, walking into the restaurant on tottering heels. As she approached the table, men threw themselves out of their seats to help her with her coat. They quickly cleared a place for her. The party was suddenly infused with a potent new energy. Helplessly shifting their attention away from the birthday boy, the guests were magnetically-drawn to the arrival of this new center of attention: the enigmatic, charismatic Bevy Smith.
Bevelations: Lessons From a Mutha, Auntie, Bestie, Smith’s new book, touches on this glamorous, jet-setting existence. A former fashion advertising executive at Rolling Stone and Vibe, Smith walked away from the world of mid-six-figure salaries, expense accounts, and international shopping sprees to find her true purpose, what she calls “a great thing, an inspiring thing, a creative thing, a feeling of freedom, a new dream.” Her book—part memoir, part self-help guide—doles out life lessons Smith calls “Bevelations,” such as “Being comfortable with being uncomfortable is a hallmark of every successful person’s trajectory” and “Confidence is good, but it doesn’t pay the bills.” To build a personal brand like she has, Smith instructs, you have to do some soul-searching to find out who you really are. Smith took ownership of whom she understood herself to truly be by “anointing myself Bevy Smith” (her given name is Beverly).
An observant nerd
Born, raised, and still living in Harlem, Smith comes from a tight, lower middle-class family, the youngest of three born to late-in-life parents affectionately known as “The Smittys.” At her core, Smith still feels she’s the little girl they raised, a persona she calls “L’il Brown Bevy.” Her traits? Sensitive, shy, smart, curious. In pursuit of popularity in her teenage years, Smith leveraged the best that L’il Brown Bevy had to offer. “When you’re a nerd, you’re naturally observant. You learn how to assess people,” she writes. Her high school persona (“MC Bev-Ski”) was a “witty, street-smart, book-smart, uptown girl.” She was popular with the boys, and had a steady, serious romance (though she’s coy on these details) which kept her from pursuing college. Instead, she found temporary work as a receptionist at an advertising agency. With working-class parents, her only ideas of what office life was like came from the TV. Smith dressed the part, and a career in fashion was born.
An influencer before they existed, Smith soon established herself as a force to be reckoned with—“as a salesperson, no was just the beginning of the negotiation”—and rose to the top of her field. She traveled first class to Europe for fashion shows; she partied nightly until the wee hours in New York with the likes of Jay-Z and Tupac. But for all her success, she was living a double-life: fashion executive “Beverly Smith” by day; party girl “Big Bev from Uptown” at night. This involved quite a lot of code-switching, Smith writes: “Unfortunately, when you’re the only Black person in a company, you often feel you’re representing the entire race.” A gnawing feeling of being unfulfilled soon grew overpowering.
“How dare he!” she thinks, when, giving her notice at Rolling Stone, her boss suggests that she’s having a midlife crisis. Pushing forty, she’s living the high life, yet continues to feel like an outsider in “an industry that wasn’t exactly clamoring to welcome curvy Black girls.” It takes her five years to work up the guts to walk away. Bevelations is meant to save readers time—and grief—by sharing lessons learned.
Smith admits she’s “obsessed” with self-help books and cribs heavily from her two biggest influences: Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. She encourages readers along a similar path of self-exploration, even leaving a bit of space for them to jot down their own reflections, joking, “I’m hoping that the blank lines that follow, which are intended for you to write your list on, will count toward the word count my publisher requires.”
Smith is very funny, and Bevelations has a brassy, sassy, peppy tone that longtime fans will recognize from her previous TV gigs co-hosting Fashion Queens and Page Six TV, as well as her current SiriusXM radio show (also called “Bevelations”), where she interviews celebrities she respects and admires, drilling deep to discover what really makes them tick.
However far-fetched they might seem now, Smith believes in boldly putting her dreams out there, whether it’s singing and dancing (“I’m obsessed with people who have EGOT [Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards] status”), or living in a mid-Century house on a California beach with a rich, well-endowed lover—Smith is big on vision boards—the fantasy of her natural-hair alter ego she calls “Malibu Bevy.”
Covid tragedy
Just as Smith was finishing work on the book, the pandemic struck. She got sick with the coronavirus—and her beloved father died from it. Her heartfelt tribute to him feels somewhat tacked on—it’s a totally different tone from the rest of the book—but it was my favorite part. It’s like a different person wrote it. She’s honest, she’s real, but she sets aside the sass to draw from a deep well of intense feeling. This wasn’t the woman I met in Paris who captivated a room full of strangers, but the one who’s genuinely interested in people, and shows how much she cares about them, and for that reason, makes them feel like friends. This was L’il Brown Bevy all the way. I hope we hear more from her.