Celebrity Chronicler

"He goes where the wind blows." says Actress Faye Emerson, "darting from table to table, with his eyes always moving on to the next promising group. But I like Lennie Lyons."

So does many another celebrity, for Columnist Leonard Lyons, 52, has a talent for getting on the right side of the right people. "I'm a good straight man," he says. "They need someone to bounce against." Gossipist Lyons never bounces back, never breaks a confidence, and except for a few personal feuds, notably with Walter Winchell and Bennett Cerf, never spits venom in his column. The gentle and often limp anecdotes of his syndicated "The Lyons Den" (106 newspapers) picture the great as playing a perpetual game of conversational pattyball, in which the backhand blast is taboo, and the score is always love-love. "So many people use print to tyrannize," says Drama Critic John Mason Brown. "Lyons just wants to inhale the world."

Last week, celebrating his 25th year as a columnist, sparrow-spry Lennie Lyons could take pleasure from the fact that he is as famous as many of his subjects, grosses some $90,000 a year. The seven-room Manhattan apartment he shares with his witty wife, Sylvia, and their four sons is cluttered with the trappings of the great: Hitler's telephone, a coffee table dented by a Ray Bolger tap dance, a copy of Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe inscribed, "To a REAL writer."

But Lyons (born Leonard Sucher on Manhattan's celebrity-spawning Lower East Side) still works as hard as in the days when he landed a job on the New York Post by successfully bombarding established gossipists with unsolicited material. He gets up at 1 p.m., stalks the famous in likely lairs (El Morocco, Toots Shor's, Sardi's, the Colony) until 3 a.m., when he finally sits down to whack out his column before falling into bed at 6 a.m. Said he, on the recent occasion of receiving an honorary doctor of laws degree from Ohio's Wilberforce University: "I know of no other job I would prefer--than to go wherever I want to go, see whomever I want to see, and write whatever I want to write."

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