For a glimpse at the glamorous side of BEA, head to the Abbeville booth (4406) today, 2–3 p.m., for a signed copy of movie critic Jeffrey Lyons's Stories My Father Told Me: Notes from "The Lyons Den" (June).
Jeffrey Lyons is no stranger to famous people—as the cohost of three national movie review shows—Sneak Previews, MSNBC's At the Movies, and Reel Talk—he's profiled everyone from Clint Eastwood to Cate Blanchett.
But he's a bit of a piker compared to his father, the late Leonard Lyons, who for 40 years penned a column titled "The Lyons Den" for the New York Post that chronicled the lives of the famous, including artists, athletes, movie stars, politicians, musicians, and writers. Leonard Lyons knew everyone.
Coauthor of three baseball books and a book on movies for children, Jeffrey Lyons is making his first visit to BEA. Stories My Father Told Me features a selection of the 12,479 columns that the elder Lyons contributed to the paper, chosen by his son. (Leonard turned out an impressive 1,000 words a day.) Jeffrey has included some of his own work as well, along with a foreword by Charles Osgood, anchor of CBS News Sunday Morning since 1994.
Jeffrey Lyons reports that in picking which of his father's columns to include, he "went by the biggest names who were mentioned often and took the timeless stories: funny, amazing, informative, newsworthy in their time and ours. There were many more I could have included, but the book would have been much too heavy and cumbersome."
He began reading his father's column as a preteen in 1956, when it had already been in existence for 22 years. He was nonplussed at the time by the constant presence of famous faces in their New York home. Lyons recalls, "As a small boy it seemed just normal, until Joe DiMaggio came to our home for the first of several visits. Then Steinbeck. Then Orson Welles. And then many others."
As Lyons notes of his father's time in his introduction to the book, "There were no faxes, nor e-mails, word processors, Internet, computers, laptops, cellphones, and until the mid-sixties no electric typewriters." And that's not the only difference between that era and the present. Lyons says, "Today there is no privacy, no discretion. We live, sadly, in the age of Snooki and that ilk—just famous-for-being-famous people of no talent. Also, we have TMZ and intrusive cameras everywhere."