In all his travels, Gregg and his wife Rosalind have found no place where they would feel so much at home as the West Side. "It's a great, wonderful community for the classical musician," he says. "It's one of the most vibrant, alive, sometimes terrifying but always exciting, places to live." Perhaps Gregg's rarest quality is his unselfishness toward other American composers. His biggest concern seems to be: how will be manage to get all their works recorded? "I have enough important recordings to do," he says in a voice hovering between joy and frustration, "to keep me busy for five years. That would mean literally hundreds of thousands of dollars." The money may come or it may not. But the worth of Gregg Smith, gentleman artist, is beyond price. ******** EASTSIDER LIZ SMITH Queen of gossip 3-8-80 Like most of the kids she grew up with in Fort Worth, Texas during the Great Depression, Liz Smith was star-struck by the movies. "They told me there was a whole world out there where people were glamorous, where men and women drank wine with dinner and wore white tie and tails and drove cars with the tops down and danced on glass floors," she recalls, smiling dreamily. Her soft, languid accent, dripping with Southern charm, echoes through the coffee shop at the NBC building in midtown. Despite her cordiality, she somehow gives the impression of being in a great hurry. And for good reason: Smith is probably the hardest-working -- and certainly the most successful -- gossip writer on the East Coast. Unlike Rona Barrett, the queen of Hollywood gossip, Liz Smith does not have a large staff, but relies on a single full-time assistant and part-time "leg man" in California. Nevertheless, she manages to turn out, each week, six columns for the _New York Daily News_ (syndicated nationally to more than 60 newspapers), five radio spots for NBC, and two television spots for WNBC's _Newscenter 4_. "The minute I get up, I go to work. I get up at about nine, and go right to work," says Liz. "I look at the paper right quick, and go right to the typewriter, and work till I finish the column at one. I work in my apartment because I would never have time to get up and dress and go to another place. I would never get to meet my deadline. ... I work all the time. I work a lot on the weekends because that's the only time I can even vaguely make a stab at catching up. ... I just about kill myself to get everything done. I don't know if it's worth it." For all her complaints, Liz believes that gossip-writing is well suited for her personality. "I can't help it. I'm just one of those people who likes to repeat a tale," she explains. "I'd be reading every newspaper in America that I could get my hands on and every book and magazine anyway, even if I weren't doing this job."