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The most ludicrous part about all this petty business is that his wife took up this vendetta too. We've sat next to each other in theater several times. It's terribly embarrassing because we look straight ahead. I delight in this feud now, and of course all of our friends scream with laughter at it and I can't say it's hurt my career, not being mentioned in Leonard Lyons‘column! In one way it's wonderful to have an enemy like that because any time that I do something that attracts attention, there's added pleasure in the knowledge that it's going to infuriate Leonard Lyons. A dozen people have said, “For god's sake, life is too short. We're going to bring this to an end because it's embarrassing to all of us,” because a lot of people like Leonard Lyons and they like the publicity that he gives them. I say, “Nothing doing. I'm having much too much fun out of this. I wouldn't ever end this.” For instance, Henry Kurnitz, who is one of our authors and a very funny man and gives Lyons a lot of stories, and I were walking down Fifty-second Street once about two years ago. He was on the outside, and Leonard Lyons came along across the other side of the street and saw Kurnitz and yelled “Harry.” He started running across the street. Suddenly he saw who Harry was with. He stopped short. He was almost run down by a great big truck and darted back to the side of the street that he had come from. I gave a hoot of laughter, which of course made him livid with rage. These are episodes that I remember with great pleasure.
When Geoffrey Hellman was doing a profile of me for
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