The Gentle Gossip

With his sparrow eyes and landmark beak, Leonard Lyons was a more recognizable fixture at Manhattan's expensive restaurants than any six headwaiters. He came not to dine but to gather crumbs of gossip, morsels of color--occasionally some meaty news--about any celebrity he could buttonhole in his non stop table-hopping. Was Joe DiMaggio flying to New York "for some dates at El Morocco"? Lyons heard it there and so reported. What did Artur Rubinstein's wife cook for dinner the night before? The pianist gave Lyons the answer (Polish chicken) at the Cote Basque. Was it true that Jacqueline Susann met that other author, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., at Sardi's? Lyons was there as a witness.

For nearly 40 years Lennie Lyons was Broadway's most cheerful, most benign columnist. He attended openings good and bad. He chatted easily with a cast of public people that included royalty and burlesque comics. Once given the choice between Lyons' 14-hour-a-day schedule or six months in jail, a group of wags--including Groucho Marx, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott--unanimously chose the clink.

Yet Lyons thrived as a night person and predawn writer, turned out six columns (and about 6,000 words) a week. He remained the star-struck son of a Rumanian Jewish immigrant and chucked a law career in 1934 when the New York Post finally bent to years of entreaties and made him a columnist (at $50 a week). His refusal to monger scandal earned him the trust that the famous withheld from more waspish types like Walter Winchell and Dorothy Kilgallen. On George Bernard Shaw's 90th birthday, he granted Lyons an exclusive interview. Ernest Hemingway's wife Mary phoned Lyons with the first word that her husband was dead. The Trumans entertained him during their last days at the White House.

Botched Story. Whole columns were deservedly devoted to such coups. But "The Lyons Den" more typically had the flair of a railway timetable. Lyons' prose strained toward the average, and his penchant for missing, mangling or omitting entirely the kicker of anecdotes was the despair of his sources. During the World War II point system of rationing managed by the Office of Price Administration, George S. Kaufman said that Lyons "missed so many points that he was under investigation by the OPA." One botched Lyons story: after Noel Coward had made some disparaging remarks about Brooklyn and earned the borough's vocal displeasure, he began his visits to U.S. military hospitals with the question: "Anybody here from Brooklyn?" If any of the patients assented, Coward replied: "I'm Noel Coward. Go ahead." When Lyons reported this byplay, its edge was blunted: "I'm Noel Coward. Anybody here from Brooklyn?"

But no matter. Lyons retained the affection of both his subjects and his readers for decades. He conveyed the sense of having been there, of caring about what he wrote. In a time when the famous were more distant and more different from their audience than today, Lyons was an honest middleman who every day arranged brief, decorous peeks devoid of cynicism and leers.

He prided himself on the accuracy of his items, rarely printed comments that he had not heard at firsthand. He was probably the only newsman in the world who could introduce "Two-Ton" Tony Galento to Noel Coward or Marc Chagall to Richard Nixon. He staged such meetings whenever possible, gathering details for his readers the next day.

Slowly Crumbling. At its prime 20 years ago, "The Lyons Den" earned its author over $60,000 a year and was syndicated in more than 100 newspapers. Recently that number had shrunk to 18, and last week Lyons retired. The final column bore all his trademarks: names (118 of them) of politicians, writers, painters, composers and entertainers whom Lyons had interviewed during his long days and nights on the job, a fond reference to Wife Sylvia, and a modestly unfocused anecdote involving one of his four sons. Sadly, Lyons' last column was not really his own. Now 67, he was afflicted a few years ago by a degenerative neurological condition, and the burden of producing the column had increasingly fallen on Anita Summer, 40, his secretary and assistant for 18 years.

Lyons' failing health has kept him away from his posh rounds. But many of those once famous haunts, including the Stork Club and Lindy's, had disappeared well before he did. In fact, Lyons' Broadway beat has been slowly crumbling for years. The Latin Quarter is now a porno moviehouse. The famous now use television talk shows to unburden themselves of intimacies that Lyons and most of his colleagues were too tactful to report. The liveliest, cattiest New York gossip now has shifted to the pages of Women's Wear Daily.

The thirst for gossip certainly survives, and some remain to slake it (see box preceding page). But the New York that furnished "The Lyons Den"--a fantasy world of glamour and greatness, squeezed into a few square miles of concrete--has lost much of its mystique. Thanks to Lyons' long devotion to minutiae, a record exists of the way things were--or seemed. One of his proudest memories is of a remark made by Carl Sandburg: "Imagine how much richer American history would have been had there been a Leonard Lyons in Lincoln's time."

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