No. I Name Dropper

Among U.S. newspaper columnists, Leonard Lyons, 47, is the No. 1 name-dropper. Columnist Lyons bears his title proudly, and his chatter about celebrities in his column, "The Lyons Den," syndicated to 74 dailies, earns him $65,000 a year. This week Columnist Lyons explained why name-dropping makes a successful column. "Would you [like me to] tell you about a dinner party for my Uncle Max? . . . Nah, you really don't want to hear about that . . . The basic fact of newspaper life is that if any Uncle Max--unless it's Beerbohm, Beaverbrook or Factor--breaks a leg, it never makes the news columns . . . The appetites of newspaper readers are for the Kings and Stars and Villains and Dog-Biters."

Leonard Lyons, who is as sharp-eyed and lively as a sandpiper, flits in and out of restaurants and nightclubs picking up tidbits on kings, stars, villains and dog-biters. His office files bulge with more than 20,000 of their names from A (Fred Allen, Konrad Adenauer, Dean Achesoh) to Z (Darryl Zanuck, Vera Zorina. Babe Didrikson Zaharias). The names are his cast of characters in anecdotes which are interrupted only by items of news and occasionally "the kind of gossip that doesn't hurt anyone." A typical Lyons anecdote: "I owed the Trumans a dinner, for they had been our hosts on that memorable last night in the White House . . . During the cab ride [to a restaurant], I suggested a private screening of ... Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. He shook his head, glanced at Mrs. Truman's new hairdo, and said: 'Real gentlemen prefer grey hair.' "

The Exhilarating Rounds. Celebrities like to be in Lyons' column as much as he likes to put them there (except for Walter Winchell, with whom he has bitterly feuded in the past few years). He reaches for friendship, shows most people he writes about in a favorable light, and often makes them more amusing than they are. At one time, he was helped in this by his quick-witted, attractive wife Sylvia. Those who appeared in "The Lyons Den" didn't mind if Sylvia's quips were sometimes put in their mouths. Lyons occasionally blunts--or loses completely the point of a story. But most people don't seem to mind, since few people whose stories he tells ever get hurt.

He starts his day about 1 p.m., when his secretary awakens him by phone. ("There's mail today from Hemingway, Randolph Churchill, Admiral Carney and Christine Jorgensen.") On his way to the office, he makes his first regular stops at such restaurants as Toots Shor's, Lindy's, the Algonquin and Sardi's, moving from table to table, greeting friends and picking up items. Trim (5 ft. 8 1/2 in., 154 Ibs.) Columnist Lyons, who never drinks and rarely eats on his rounds, is at his office at the New York Post by around 3, writes his column, dictates 15 to 20 letters a day, checks stories and telephones "people who don't go out nights." He is home every night for dinner at 6:30, often followed by a rough & tumble indoor basketball game with his four sons (ages 6 to 16). Evenings, when he is not at a Broadway opening or entertaining friends at dinner, he stays home until 10:30 or 11, then starts his rounds again, with Sardi's, the Stork Club, El Morocco and ten or 15 other regular stops on his beat. At 4 he goes home, phones in late corrections and additions for his column, greets the early-rising members of his family just before he turns in at 6:30, still "exhilarated," from his night.

His comfortable seven-room apartment overlooking Manhattan's Central Park is as marked by celebrities as is his column. There is everything from Adolf Hitler's personal telephone to a copper-covered coffee table (a gift from Sports Announcer Ted Husing) that still bears "heel marks from the time that Ray Bolger danced on it at one of our dinner parties, while Leonard Bernstein accompanied him on our piano." At another dinner party several years ago, Lyons' eldest son George was introduced to Writers Robert E. Sherwood, John Steinbeck, Russel Grouse, Gene Fowler and Howard Lindsay. Said George: "Maybe those men do write better than you, Pop, but you--you write more."

Six Months in Jail. No one is more wide-eyed about the celebrities he knows than Lyons himself. Says he: "Sylvia and I both came from East Side families, and look at us now." Lyons was born the son of a poor New York vestmaker, went to night school to study law and accounting. During his five years as a lawyer, he started a weekly column in his spare time for the English language section of the Jewish Daily Forward. ("In my home, Forward was like the New York Times") He began sending in items to every columnist in town, finally talked the New York Post into hiring him as a columnist for $50 a week. Three months later the paper raised him $10, and he married his high-school girl friend, Sylvia, who rarely accompanies him on his rounds, but keeps him in line with such advice as: "Don't confuse tongue in cheek with foot in mouth."

Many of his friends cannot understand the pleasure Columnist Lyons gets from a life of moving from table to table at 15 or 20 restaurants and nightclubs a day, talking to celebrities who are often interested only in talking about themselves. Once at a party, a group of such friends, including Dorothy Parker and Harpo Marx, took a poll on whether they would rather have Lyons' job for six months or spend the same time in jail. Unanimously, they picked six months in jail. Not Sylvia and Leonard Lyons. Say they: "How could any life be better and more interesting than ours?"

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