"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, The 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 in-depth interviews conducted on his own TV shows with George Clooney, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Dame Judi Dench, George Carlin, Dennis Hopper, Sir Michael Caine, Sir Ben Kingsley and other current stars. Organized chronologically by decade and subdivided by celebrity, "Stories my father told" me offers fascinating and amusing stories illustrated by some sixty archival 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."--

"For forty glorious years, from 1934 to 1974, Leonard Lyons made the daily rounds of New York City nightspots, collecting the exclusive scoops and revelations that were at the core of his famous newspaper column, "The Lyons Den." In this entertaining volume, author Jeffrey Lyons has lovingly assembled a considerable compilation of his father's best columns, and has also contributed a selection of his own interviews with stars of today, including Penelope Cruz and George Clooney, among others"--

Machine generated contents note: Stories my father told me: notes from "The Lyons Den" -- Foreword -- Introduction -- Acknowledgments -- 'The Thirties' -- Irving Berlin -- George Burns -- Sir Charlie Chaplin -- Ty Cobb -- Gary Cooper -- Sir Noel Coward -- Albert Einstein -- J. Edgar Hoover -- Sinclair Lewis -- Groucho and his brothers -- Harpo -- Chico -- W. Somerset Maugham -- Pablo Picasso -- George Bernard Shaw -- Duke of Windsor -- 'The Forties' -- Thomas Hart Benton -- Ingrid Bergman -- Milton Berle -- Tallulah Bankhead -- David Ben-Gurion -- Humphrey Bogart -- Charles Boyer -- Sir 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 -- Gen. George S. Patton -- Edward G. Robinson -- Carl Sandburg -- John Steinbeck -- President Harry S. Truman -- Orson Welles -- 'The Fifties' -- Lauren Bacall -- Marlon Brando -- Yul Brynner -- Dr. Ralph Bunche -- Marc Chagall -- Salvador Dali -- Kirk Douglas -- Jackie Gleason -- Sir Rex Harrison -- Ernest Hemingway -- Audrey Hepburn -- Sir Alfred Hitchcock -- Judy Holliday -- Grace Kelly -- Ethel Merman -- James 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 -- President Lyndon B. Johnson -- President John F. Kennedy -- Sophia Loren -- Paul Newman -- Barbra Streisand -- Billy Wilder -- Shelly Winters -- Sir Peter Ustinov -- Next Generation -- Antonio Banderas -- Javier Bardem -- Cate Blanchett -- Sir 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