Introduction
One day when I was in fifth grade, the members of my class were asked to stand in turn and tell what their fathers did for a living. Back then, there were few working mothers. I remember hearing: lawyer”; doctor”; investment banker”; painter”; musician.” Then came my turn, and I said: Columnist.” No one seemed to know what that meant, so I said: My father writes about all your fathers.”
My father Leonard Lyons wrote The Lyons Den” column in the New York Post and was syndicated in over 100 newspapers around the world from 1934 to 1974. His anecdotal style of writing flourished in the Golden Age of the Broadway column. Whereas others dealt in scandal and rumor, he thus stood alone, enjoying a special place in his craft.
The Lyons Den” became an American journalism institution and our familys key to the world. My father knew EVERYONE! Stroll down Madison Avenue on a Saturday afternoon visiting the art galleries, and everyone knew him or recognized him or had an item for him. Our home movies, for example, had the usual scenes of my family members sledding down snowy hills in Central Park, tossing a football or baseball, and long-dead relatives mugging for the silent camera. But those color films also showed us with family friends: Marc Chagall, Marilyn Monroe, Ernest Hemingway, Edna Ferber, Moss Hart, Adlai Stevenson, Sir Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Sophia Loren, and Frank Sinatra. Oh, and a few others, too: Danny Kaye, Thornton Wilder, José Ferrer, George Bernard Shaw, and Laurence Olivier.
Its a safe bet that most of my classmates didnt have such family friends. Nor did they say goodnight to their fathers at 7 a.m.; most fathers would return from work just before dinnertime. Mine, however, worked from mid-day until dawn. He spent every night out on the townnot gallivanting or drinking (he was, as they used to say, a teetotaler) but gathering stories for his next column. We thought playing baseball across the street in Central Park with Paddy Chayefsky on Saturdays and Sundays, as well as showing Richard Burton how to bunt, was normal. We thought a phone call from Hemingway or a late-night call from Milton Berle or a holiday gift from J. Edgar Hoover was normal.
One night, Norman Mailer called, seeking legal advice from my father, a practicing lawyer before he became a columnist. Mailer had just stabbed his wife.
Didnt everyones parents get invited to the White House or attend Broadway openings and movie premieres? Didnt every family have Nobel Prizewinner Dr. Ralph Bunch, Abe Burrows, and Phil Silvers sit at their seder table every Passover? Didnt every high school football player get to train with the New York Giants? Or tour Spain with a famous matador? Didnt other kids know Joe DiMaggio on a first-name basis or get a phone call from Marilyn Monroe on their sixteenth birthday? It never occurred to me that there was anything unusual about such an upbringing. Looking back, it wasnt just unusual. It was amazing!
In his tribute the day after my father died in 1976, Clyde Haberman of the New York Post wrote that my father knew personally more names than probably anyone in any country.” He quoted my father saying he understood the appetites of newspaper readers for the kings and stars and villains and dog-biters.”
Lyons made the worlds famous familiar to the average subway straphanger,” and, saying his was anything but a gossip column, there was more news to be made looking at people across nightclub tables than through the keyholes of bedroom doors. He expanded the column from mere show business chatter to include the professional activities of notables in politics, literature, and diplomacy.”
Carl Sandburg, our greatest historian, called him Americas foremost anecdotist. He reveled in ironic, sentimental, sometimes dramatic human stories about very important persons, from Broadway to the White House. For four decades The Lyons Den was an institution and will be invaluable to historians seeking behind-the-scenes glimpses of that long era.”
It was an amazing life he led, from a poor boy born in a Lower East Side tenement in New York (who twice ran away from Fresh Air summer camp because he missed the city) to a dinner guest of the Trumans on their last night in the White House; from the son of a Romanian tailor who died young, leaving his widow to sell cigarettes individually at a candy stand (who later learned to read English so she could enjoy her sons column in the newspaper) to invited guest at the Monaco wedding of Princess Grace and Prince Rainier. From a night-school graduate of the City College of New York to having tea at 10 Downing Street with Churchill. He traveled from winning the Spanish prize pin at P.S. 160 to wearing it on his lapel at a white tie dinner at the Kennedy White House, where the invitation had read: Decorations will be worn.” It was quite a journey.
If only Id had that tribute to read to my classmates so long ago!
This is a book about some of the most amazing people of my fathers time and ours: authors, actors, politicians, musicians, and athletes mostly. Stars whove risen to the apex of their professions telling you things you never knew about them.
Along with his brother Al, my father went to the High School of Commerce, then to the City College of New York, where he studied accounting; then he finished second in the first graduating class of St. Johns Law School, before being admitted to the New York Bar in 1929.
But journalism would become his eventual calling. While practicing law, he began contributing items to columnists and wrote a column under his original name, Leonard Sucher, for the Sunday English page of the famed Jewish Daily Forward, a newspaper that still exists. The column was called East of Broadway,” a reference to the Lower East Side where thousands of immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe were clustered at that time. But he kept contributing items to the more established columnists of the day and built up a scrapbook.
Then in 1934, the New York Post announced a contest to find its own Broadway columnist to rival Walter Winchell, whod created the genre in The Daily Mirror. My father entered, showed his bulging scrapbook, and beat out 500 other applicants to win a job at the Postthe oldest continually published newspaper in America, founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801.
Starting on May 20, 1934, he would write six columns a week for forty years to the day. It was in the age of New Yorks so-called café society.” Soon after hed assumed his new job, his editor told him on a Friday that come Monday hed have a new name. Lyons” was chosen to be the alliterative counterpart of Winchells.
But unlike his rivals, my fathers wasnt a gossip column by any means. Never once in more than 12,000 columns did he use the word celebrity.” He abhorred it. He said hed write about his sister Rosie in Brooklyn if she did something newsworthy, as well as presidents and movie