Toukie Smith’s obituaries agree on almost every fact and disagree on which one comes first. The Hollywood Reporter called her a top runway model and an actress from an NBC sitcom. USA Today, People and Deadline put Robert De Niro in the headline. Hello! opened with “Robert De Niro’s ex”. Her twins, Airyn and Julian, began their statement somewhere else entirely: with fashion, and with the Black models and designers who came after her.

That gap is the story worth reading. The famous partner and the sitcom are the facts that make a stranger click. The fact that explains her is quieter. Smith was the sister, model and keeper of Willi Smith, the designer behind WilliWear, and she held on to what he made for her long after he was gone. Her obituaries treat that as background. It belongs in the first line.

Why argue over the order of a dead woman’s credits? Because an obituary is the last public draft of a life, and the headline is the part search engines keep. Anyone who types her name this week will meet her through someone else, a film star or a show that ended decades ago, unless a writer decides otherwise.

What the Toukie Smith obituaries actually say

The facts are not in dispute. Smith died on Wednesday, November 4, in a New York hospital after what her children called a “long, courageous battle” with multiple sclerosis. She was 74. The twins announced the death through The Hollywood Reporter on Monday, November 9, and the Los Angeles Times, Deadline, People and USA Today built their pieces on that statement.

She was born Doris Smith in Philadelphia on September 25, 1952. The nickname came from her grandmother, she told the Los Angeles Times in 1990: it “came from a children’s record about a little red fire engine with lots of energy. I’ve always had lots of energy.” She studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology and began modeling in 1972. The Hollywood Reporter lists a Yves Saint Laurent campaign and pages in Vogue, Ebony, Cosmopolitan, Redbook and Seventeen. The Los Angeles Times adds work for Hubert de Givenchy, Chanel, Issey Miyake and Thierry Mugler. In 1978, Bloomingdale’s named her its model of the year.

Television came later. Deadline and Forbes place her first screen work in three episodes of Miami Vice in 1987 and 1988, as Angie, assistant to the pop singer played by Sheena Easton. Then came 227, the Marla Gibbs sitcom, where she played Eva Rawley, an artist who moves into the building and ends up managing it. The Los Angeles Times notes that the series stood out for its portrayal of a middle-class Black family. Films followed, among them Talkin’ Dirty After Dark, I Like It Like That, Joe’s Apartment and The Preacher’s Wife. She also ran a catering business, Toukie’s Taste, and a New York restaurant under her own name, which the Los Angeles Times says gave part of its proceeds to the Smith Family Foundation.

Then there is the relationship. She and De Niro were partners from 1988 to 1996, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Their twins were conceived by in vitro fertilization and born to a surrogate in 1995.

Willi Smith is the part the Toukie Smith headlines skip

Every one of those pieces mentions her brother. Few let him do any work. Willi Smith founded WilliWear and, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, “pioneered a whimsical yet accessible style he dubbed ‘street couture.’” He died in 1987, at 39, of complications from AIDS. The Times reports that Toukie got her start modeling for him, and quotes her on his approach: “Willi always had fun with fashion. He had a special energy and a love of keeping clothes from being too serious. He also totally designed for the masses.”

The detail that should have led comes from People, which went back to her Los Angeles Times interviews from nearly 40 years ago. Smith said she hoped to open a fashion museum to display her archives. “I have everything Willi made for me from my sixth-grade graduation dress on. I kept it all,” she told the Times. That is not the remark of a model who passed through her brother’s showroom. It is the remark of a custodian.

Institutions noticed, even if this week’s headlines did not. When the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum staged Willi Smith: Street Couture, which ran from March 2020 to October 2021, its credits thanked the designer’s family, friends and collaborators, and that list includes Norman Smith and Toukie Smith. The museum, which says Willi Smith “united fashion and American culture” across a twenty-year career, also built a community archive to collect anecdotes, personal photographs, ephemera and garments. His reputation now rests on exactly that kind of material: clothes and memories kept by the people who were there.

Read the twins’ statement with that in mind. Their mother, they wrote, “shared in a remarkable family legacy that helped shape American fashion and culture,” and “her beauty, grace and unmistakable presence helped pave the way for generations of Black models and designers in fashion.” That is a claim about lineage, not celebrity. It places her in a line that runs from her brother’s label to the models and designers who followed. Airyn added a shorter, private note on Instagram, reported by the Los Angeles Times and Hello!: “I’ll always love you, Mom.”

The case for putting Robert De Niro first

The defense of the De Niro headline is not cynical, and it deserves a fair hearing. Most readers outside fashion and late-1980s television do not know her name. An obituary nobody recognizes does not get read, and naming a famous partner is the fastest way to tell a general audience who she was. The twins themselves carry their father’s surname. And Smith gave obituary writers little else to work with on her private life. “What’s great about a private life is it’s private,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1990, as People recalls.

There is a fairer version still. The trade press did not reduce her to her partner. The Hollywood Reporter led with “top runway model”, and the Los Angeles Times called her a model and actor. Even Hello!, whose headline was the bluntest, wrote in its body that “although her connection to the Taxi Driver actor attracted attention, Toukie had already established a successful career of her own long before they became a couple.”

Why the order of a Toukie Smith obituary matters

That last sentence is the problem in miniature. Hello! knew, and printed, that the career came first. Its headline still put the partner first. The information sat in every piece. The ranking was a choice, made for search and for clicks.

The ranking has a cost. A headline that files Toukie Smith under De Niro tells readers her life was interesting because of whom she loved. A headline that files her under 227 says she mattered for a role that, by Deadline’s count, ran about two dozen episodes. Neither tells the reader that she belonged to the family behind WilliWear, or that she spent decades keeping its clothes.

The privacy argument also cuts the other way. Smith kept her relationship private. She did not keep her brother’s work private. She talked about it in interviews and lent her guidance to a museum show built on it. If an obituary should honor what its subject chose to make public, the wardrobe has the stronger claim than the romance.

None of this needs a villain. Search rewards the bigger name, so women who worked beside famous men get indexed by those men when they die. The fix is not to hide the famous name. It is to move it to the second clause and let the subject’s own work carry the first. For Smith, her family has already written that first clause: a model who helped open doors for Black models and designers, and the keeper of Willi Smith’s clothes.

What the record confirms about Toukie Smith, and what it leaves open

Confirmed: Toukie Smith died on November 4 at 74 after a long battle with multiple sclerosis, according to her children. She began modeling in 1972, was named Bloomingdale’s model of the year in 1978 according to The Hollywood Reporter, played Eva Rawley on 227 and was De Niro’s partner from 1988 to 1996. The Cooper Hewitt credits her among those whose support made its Willi Smith exhibition possible. The Los Angeles Times reports that she is survived by her twins, her brother Norman Smith-Harllee and her nephew Eliazar Smith-Harllee.

Still open: the outlets do not agree on her time on 227. The Hollywood Reporter says she recurred through its final two seasons, Deadline says she was promoted to series regular for the last one, and Forbes counts 23 episodes. The Los Angeles Times calls her Bloomingdale’s honor “Bloomingdale’s Favorite Model” rather than model of the year. And no obituary says whether the fashion museum she hoped for ever took shape, or where the clothes Willi made for her are now. That is the question her obituaries should have asked first.

Tags: Robert De Niro, obituaries, Cooper Hewitt, Toukie Smith, Willi Smith, WilliWear