Toukie Smith, model and Robert De Niro's former partner, dies at 74

Toukie Smith, a runway model in the 1970s and an actress on the NBC sitcom “227,” died Nov. 4 in a New York hospital at 74.

Her twins, Airyn and Julian, announced the death and said she had endured a “long, courageous battle” with multiple sclerosis, as The Hollywood Reporter reported. The twins are the children she shared with actor Robert De Niro, her partner from 1988 to 1996.

Smith’s death closes a career that crossed fashion and television at a time when Black models were fighting for room on magazine covers and runways. Her brother, fashion designer Willi Smith, died of AIDS complications in 1987 at 39. She followed him into fashion and outlived him by nearly four decades, until multiple sclerosis ended her life in a New York hospital.

Born Doris A. Smith in Philadelphia on Sept. 25, 1952, she took the name Toukie from her grandmother, who played her a children’s record about a little red fire engine with lots of energy. “I’ve always had lots of energy,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. She attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and began modeling in 1972.

She worked for Chanel, Versace, Geoffrey Beene, Issey Miyake, Norma Kamali, Thierry Mugler and Patrick Kelly, and she modeled for her brother’s label, WilliWear Ltd., The Hollywood Reporter reported. She appeared in a Yves St. Laurent photo campaign and in the pages of Vogue, ELLE, Ebony, Cosmopolitan, Redbook and Seventeen. In 1978, Bloomingdale’s named her its model of the year and commissioned a mannequin in her likeness, making her the second African-American model to receive one, according to a 1992 New York Times profile.

The mannequin mattered. In the 1970s, Black models were rarely hired for mainstream American retail campaigns, and a Bloomingdale’s mannequin was a public statement that a Black face could sell to the department store’s largely white clientele. Beverly Johnson had become the first Black model on the cover of American Vogue in 1974, four years before Smith’s Bloomingdale’s honor, according to Johnson’s biography. Smith arrived in the wave that followed.

She left modeling in the early 1980s and turned to acting. She appeared in three episodes of NBC’s “Miami Vice” in 1987 and 1988, playing Angie, the wife of Don Johnson’s Sonny Crockett and assistant to a pop singer played by Sheena Easton, as The Hollywood Reporter reported.

In 1989, she joined the NBC sitcom “227” as Eva Rawley, an artist who moves into the Lexington Place apartment building where Marla Gibbs’ character, Mary Jenkins, is the landlord. Smith recurred on the show’s final two seasons, through May 1990, and her character managed the building for a stretch. “227” ran from 1985 to 1990 and was set in Washington, D.C. It was a Gibbs vehicle, and Smith arrived in its last years.

Her film credits included “Talkin’ Dirty After Dark” (1991), “I Like It Like That” (1994), “Joe’s Apartment” (1996) and “The Preacher’s Wife” (1996), the last opposite Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston. In the 1990s, she ran a restaurant called Toukie’s on West Houston Street in Manhattan, The New Yorker reported in 1994.

Her relationship with De Niro lasted eight years. Their twins were conceived by in vitro fertilization and delivered by a surrogate mother, The New York Times reported in November 1995. De Niro has five other children with three women, The Hollywood Reporter noted.

At the time of her death, Smith lived in Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan, according to her biography.

Her children said in a statement that their mother “shared in a family legacy that helped shape American fashion and culture” and that “her beauty, grace and unmistakable presence helped pave the way for generations of Black models and designers in fashion.” They called her “a force of nature” who “left an indelible mark on our hearts and on everyone lucky enough to know her.”

Willi Smith, her brother, founded WilliWear Ltd. and was, at the time of his death, one of the most commercially successful Black fashion designers in the United States, according to his biography. He died in 1987 of AIDS complications. He was 39. Toukie Smith was 34 when he died, and she continued modeling and acting for nearly a decade after.

Multiple sclerosis is a disease of the central nervous system with no cure. It disrupts the flow of information between the brain and the body. It is diagnosed most often between the ages of 20 and 50, and it affects two to three times as many women as men, according to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Smith was 74 when she died of it, after what her children described as a long battle.

What I think

The reason Toukie Smith is trending on Google is Robert De Niro. The Hollywood Reporter mentions him in the subhead of her obituary, and the search spike followed the article’s publication on the morning of Nov. 9. That is how celebrity obituaries work now: the famous partner drives the traffic, and the deceased becomes a supporting character in her own death notice.

She was more than that. Smith was one of the first Black models to get a Bloomingdale’s mannequin in 1978, at a time when American fashion was almost entirely white on the runway and in the magazines that covered it. Her brother Willi Smith, who died of AIDS at 39 in 1987, was one of the most successful Black fashion designers of his generation. Between them, the Smith siblings changed what American fashion looked like, and the obituaries mention this in a clause before returning to De Niro.

The De Niro chapter was eight years of a 74-year life. The modeling career, the mannequin, the brother, the restaurant and the sitcom role came before and after it. The traffic says what it says about how obituaries are read now, and about which lives are considered worth attention on their own terms.

Multiple sclerosis took her at 74 after years of illness. The disease has no cure, it affects women more often than men, and it is usually diagnosed in early adulthood. She lived with it privately and worked around it for as long as she could. That is the part of the story that will not trend.