Stories My Father Told Me: Notes from "The Lyons Den"

by Jeffrey Lyons, Charles Osgood (Foreword by)

Overview

An incredible collection of celebrity stories and photographs from 1934 to the present, from the archives of "The Lyons Den" by eminent New York Post columnist Leonard Lyons, compiled by his son, movie critic Jeffrey Lyons.

This amazing collection of choice anecdotes takes us right back to the Golden Age of New York City nightlife, when top restaurants like Toots Shor’s, “21,” and Sardi’s, as well as glittering nightclubs like the Stork Club, Latin Quarter, and El Morocco, were the nightly gathering spots for great figures of that era: movie and Broadway stars, baseball players, champion boxers, comedians, diplomats, British royalty, prize-winning authors, and famous painters. From Charlie Chaplin to Winston Churchill, from Ethel Barrymore to Sophia Loren, from George Burns to Ernest Hemingway, from Joe DiMaggio to the Duke of Windsor: Leonard Lyons knew them all. For forty glorious years, from 1934 to 1974, he made the daily rounds of Gotham nightspots, collecting the exclusive scoops and revelations that were at the core of his famous newspaper column, “The Lyons Den.”

In this entertaining volume Jeffrey Lyons has assembled a considerable compilation of anecdotes from his father’s best columns, and has also contributed a selection of his own interviews with stars of today, including Penélope Cruz and George Clooney, among others. Organized chronologically by decade and subdivided by celebrity, Stories My Father Told Me offers fascinating, amusing stories that are illustrated by approximately seventy photographs. He so captured the tenor of those exciting times that the great Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg said: “Imagine how much richer American history would have been had there been a Leonard Lyons in Lincoln’s time.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780789260017
Publisher:	Abbeville Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/14/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Jeffrey Lyons grew up in a home visited by many of the greats of his father’s time. His forty-year career continues in television, radio, and print. A movie critic and baseball author, Lyons has acted in two films, reviewed more than 15,000 movies and hundreds of Broadway plays, broadcast baseball for the Red Sox, and interviewed virtually every major star of his own time. Lyons co-hosted three national movie review shows: Sneak Previews, MSNBC's At the Movies, and Reel Talk. Jeffrey Lyons is also the co-author of 101 Great Movies for Kids and three baseball trivia books. He hopes to see his beloved Red Sox win another World Series. Soon.

Read an Excerpt

FOREWARD

by Charles Osgood


In 1999 my CBS Sunday Morning TV program marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ernest Hemmingway with a broadcast from Finca Vigia, the Havana home where the great writer lived for twenty years. When I got home to New York, a neighbor in my apartment building told me he especially enjoyed that show because he'd been to Finca Vigia with his father to visit with Hemmingway and that Papa (Hemmingway) had taught him to shoot. How many people do you know who could say that?
&nsbp;&nsbp; That neighbor is Jeffery Lyons, the gifted writer, critic, television commentator, and author of this book. Jeffrey's father was the incomparable Leonard Lyons, who over a span of forty years, from 1934-1974 wrote a column called "The Lyons Den"which was published in the New York Post. and in 105 other newspapers around the world. These columns contained fascinating anecdotes about comics, singers, songwriters, painters, poets, politicians, presidents, dictators, restauranteurs, all sorts of people. Leonard Lyons disliked the word "celebrity". He used to say that if his sister in Brooklyn became newsworthy, he'd write about her. And when she did, he did.
&nsbp;&nsbp; Leonard Lyons was a lawyer by training. He got the job as a columnist, beating out five hundred other applicants after writing for the English page of the Jewish Daily Forward. "The Lyons Den" was decidedly not a gossip column. Lyons did not write about who was "running around", as George Burns used to put it, with whom, who was cheating or being cheated on, or who was arrested again for drunk driving or drug possession. You might find that sort of thing in Walter Winchell's or Earl Wilson's column, but never in "The Lyons Den." Jefferey's father believed, as do I, that good journalism does not require that you keep your fangs bared or you claws unsheathed. Lions might do that but not Lyons. It was not his objective to embarrass the people he wrote about or destroy their reputations. Like Charles Kuralt, Leonard Lyons genuinely admired the people he wrote about. And knowing this they would open up to him and tell him the colorful stories that were his bread and butter, and that the readers loved.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Charles Osgood
Introduction



'The Thirties

Irving Berlin
George Burns
Sir Charlie Chaplin
Ty Cobb
Gary Cooper
Noel Coward
Albert Einstein
J. Edgar Hoover
Sinclair Lewis
Groucho Marx and his brothers
W. Somerset Maugham
Pablo Picasso
George Bernard Shaw
The Duke & Duchess of Windsor



'The Forties

Tallulah Bankhead
David Ben-Gurion
Thomas Hart Benton
Ingrid Bergman
Milton Berle
Humphrey Bogart
Charles Boyer
Winston Churchill
Joe DiMaggio
John Garfield
Sam Goldwyn
Cary Grant
Howard Hughes
George S. Kaufman
Danny Kaye
Helen Keller
Charles Laughton
Gypsy Rose Lee
Oscar Levant
George S. Patton
Edward G. Robinson
Carl Sandburg
John Steinbeck
Harry S. Truman
Orson Welles



'The Fifties

Lauren Bacall
Marlon Brando
Yul Brynner
Ralph Bunche
Marc Chagall
Salvador Dalí
Kirk Douglas
Jackie Gleason
Rex Harrison
Ernest Hemingway
Audrey Hepburn
Sir Alfred Hitchcock
Judy Holliday
Grace Kelly
Ethel Merman
James A. Michener
Marilyn Monroe
Lord Laurence Olivier
Otto Preminger
Rocky Marciano
William Saroyan
Phil Silvers
Frank Sinatra



'The Sixties

Brendan Behan
Richard Burton
Truman Capote
Dustin Hoffman
Lyndon B. Johnson
John F. Kennedy
Sophia Loren
Paul Newman
Barbra Streisand
Billy Wilder
Shelley Winters
Peter Ustinov



The Next Generation

Antonio Banderas
Javier Bardem
Cate Blanchett
Michael Caine
George Carlin
George Clooney
Penelope Cruz
Dame Judi Dench
Clint Eastwood
Ralph Fiennes
Dennis Hopper
Samuel L. Jackson
Sir Ben Kingsley
Jay Leno
William Shatner


Epilogue
Index

Editorial Reviews

"These stories are wonderful! I saw Leonard Lyons on a lot of nights out in Manhattan and if he told these stories, they're true!"

Kirk Douglas

"For four decades ‘The Lyons Den’ was an institution and will be invaluable to historians seeking behind-the-scenes glimpses of that long era."

Clyde Haberman

"Leonard Lyons genuinely admired the people he wrote about. And knowing this, they would open up to him and tell him the colorful stories that were his bread and butter, and that the readers loved."

Charles Osgood

"No one did more to promote New York’s deserved reputation as a capital of glamour and culture...a century after his birth, the legacy of Leonard Lyons lives on. The names on the marquee may have changed, but the memory of Leonard Lyons remains a guiding light in New York City’s cultural community."

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg

These stories are wonderful! I saw Leonard Lyons on a lot of nights out in Manhattan and if he told these stories, they're true!”—Kirk Douglas


“Leonard Lyons genuinely admired the people he wrote about. And knowing this, they would open up to him and tell him the colorful stories that were his bread and butter, and that the readers loved.” —Charles Osgood, from the Foreword


“No one did more to promote New York’s deserved reputation as a capital of glamour and culture...a century after his birth, the legacy of Leonard Lyons lives on. The names on the marquee may have changed, but the memory of Leonard Lyons remains a guiding light in New York City’s cultural community.” —New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg


“For four decades ‘The Lyons Den’ was an institution and will be invaluable to historians seeking behind-the-scenes glimpses of that long era.” —Clyde Haberman, formerly of the New York Post (1976 tribute)

From the Publisher

A veritable storm of outtakes from Leonard Lyons' "Lyons Den" society column from theNew York Post,which dazzle rather than titillate.

Lyons wrote his column for exactly 40 years, from 1934 to 1974—six columns a week, tallying 12,479 at 1,000 words each—about people in the public eye. He would leave for work as the sun went down, heading for a variety of hot spots—Toots Shor's, Downey's, Sardi's, El Morocco, the Stork Club, the Little Club, or all of them—gathering choice items for his readership. "Leonard Lyons genuinely admired the people he wrote about," writes Charles Osgood in the foreword. "And knowing this they would open up to him and tell him the colorful stories that were his bread and butter." Here, his son, TV and movie critic Jeffrey Lyons, sews together pieces from his father's columns into vest-pocket profiles of the famous, from Irving Berlin to Shelly Winters. For those who have never dined on Lyons' work, this collection is a treat: Lyons was a champion at getting telling quotes, material as pithy and vivid as the Algonquin Round Table—e.g., Lauren Bacall's response to whether she would curtsy to Prince Philip: "If he curtsies to me, I'll curtsy to him. In this world, you get what you give." Or Joe DiMaggio: "Never wake a ballplayer on a rainy morning." There are terrific comments from a stunning range of characters—Einstein, Rocky Marciano, Groucho Marx, Chagall—and if Lyons can seem a bit eager and star-struck ("There was never anyone like Oscar Levant"; "Orson Welles...the most amazing person you'd ever meet"), he takes such obvious pleasure in the telling that readers will be swept along with him.

An intoxicating selection of snippets from a columnist that journalist Pete Hamill called "an ornament to the profession."

Kirkus Reviews