Barbara Elaine Smith, a former model and restaurateur whose sense of style and love for entertaining helped her create a business empire that included books, a magazine, and a television show, died on Saturday of Alzheimer’s disease at home in East Hampton. She was 70 and had been ill for seven years.
At 17, Ms. Smith moved from Everson, Pa., where she grew up, to New York City to pursue a modeling career at a time when the industry was not welcoming to African-American women. In July 1976, she became one of the first black women to appear on the cover of Mademoiselle magazine. “I wasn’t discovered. I made them discover me,” she told The New York Times in 2011. That cover soon led to several others, as well as numerous advertising campaigns.
It was during her modeling career that Ms. Smith had shortened her name to “B.” She had also begun to lay the groundwork for her future by working night shifts at America, a restaurant near Manhattan’s Union Square. She started as a hostess and was promoted to manager.
In 1986, she launched her own restaurant, B. Smith’s, in the theater district. It offered elevated soul food and quickly developed a following, particularly among black professionals. She opened a second one in Washington, D.C., in 1994, and a branch in Sag Harbor, where she had a house in Sag Harbor Hills, followed in 1998.
“Her restaurants are the black 21 Clubs, the places to see and be seen,” Lawrence Otis Graham, the author of “Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class,” told The New York Times Magazine in 1999.
She met Dan Gasby, a marketing executive, at her Manhattan restaurant. They married in 1992. He survives. An earlier marriage ended in divorce.
After her restaurants proved successful, she began writing cookbooks and guides to entertaining such as “B. Smith: Rituals and Celebration,” and “B. Smith Cooks Southern-Style.” She launched a lifestyle magazine, developed lines of home furnishings and housewares, and hosted a nationally syndicated weekly television show, “B. Smith With Style,” which debuted in 1996 and aired for eight years. She taped the show at her house in Sag Harbor.
“She really did have an empire at one point, I mean, how amazing,” said Michael Shnayerson, an author who collaborated with Ms. Smith and Mr. Gasby on “Before I Forget,” a book that looked back at her life and chronicled the challenges of having Alzheimer’s. The broad range of her endeavors brought frequent comparisons to Martha Stewart. “What B. Smith’s brand is about is bringing people together,” she told National Public Radio in 2007. “I think that if Martha Stewart and Oprah had a daughter, it would be B. Smith.”
Soon after being formally diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2013, she shared the news with the public and worked to raise awareness about the disease. She testified before a Senate committee on aging and became a spokeswoman for the Brain Health Registry, an online research study designed to speed up the process of finding cures for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other brain disorders. “She was determined to find some good in this by telling her story,” Mr. Shnayerson said.
Because of her illness, she and her husband moved from their Sag Harbor home to a more secluded spot in East Hampton. “It became apparent that living on the beach, by the water, was a dangerous situation — she was constantly escaping,” Mr. Gasby said at a planning board hearing last year.
Ms. Smith was born in Everson on Aug. 24, 1949, to William Smith and the former Florence Claybrook. She grew up there and graduated from Southmoreland High School, where she had started a home economics club.
Even as a youngster, she was an accomplished multitasker. “I inherited a paper route, I sold magazines, had lemonade stands, I was a candy striper, and into fund-raising,” she told The New York Times of her childhood. “I’ve always enjoyed being busy.”
In addition to Mr. Gasby, she is survived by a stepdaughter, Dana Gasby, and, according to The Times, two brothers, Dennis Smith and Ronald Smith.
