Milton Berle, show-biz whiz, wins $20,000 and I win $8 betting on General Mowley in eighth race at empire! The 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s

Good night, Jimmy Durante (and Clayton and Jackson, too), wherever you are!

Vaudeville headliners Laurel and Hardy return to their roots; also about Roy Rogers, Trigger, early-days movie Cowboy Buck Jones, and other show-biz exotica!

Harry Bloomfield, free-spending ticket-scalper/theatrical producer; the young, idealistic Frank Sinatra; and Peru's Alberto Vargas, painter of the Ziegfeld girls, the Varga girls, and the Playboy girls

Tales of Chicago's all-day, all-night Astor theatre and the peerless menu Poet Dario Toffenetti next door

The Fantastic Sally Rand: the 1933 world's fair Lady Godiva and her trusty adding machine

Dynamic Sam Wanamaker from Chicago's west side: a Broadway star, internationally famed director/producer, theatrical force in the west end, and restorer of London's old globe theatre

Francis X. Bushman, king of silent movies worldwide, earned multi-millions before income tax!

My romantic 1948 transatlantic call results in a fascinating forty-year, five-continent travelog with actress Dina Halpern

Russia's tempestuous Madame Eugenie Leontovich: actress, director, playwright, producer, teacher, and great artist

George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein's perfect partnership

Geraldine Page, a brilliant young actress and casualty of the method

Samuel Goldwyn (Shmuel Gelbfisz) walks from Warsaw to Hamburg, is a blacksmith in England, a world-champion glove salesman, and wealthy Hollywood producer in America

Carol Channing parlays "diamonds are a girl's best friend" into a half-century career climaxes by Her hello, dolly! Mega-triumph!

Danny Kaye, the all-time great who felt that he must, wherever he was, Wow everyone within range!

They loved me in Scotland (but I didn't love the deathly damp and dreary underheated winters)

Jan Kiepura, grand opera's high-D specialist, and his wife, the adorable operetta star Marta Eggerth, enchant sentimental audiences everywhere!

Yul Brynner, macho celebrity, and Dolly Haas, "Wisp of a porcelain actress," star in touring Lute song: thirty-seven days of passionate press-agentry

Richard Tucker, the great American-born tenor

Truman, Stalin, and a daring ticket sales strategy for Porgy and Bess

Audience agape as Don Jose leaves Carmen in onstage lurch; cheapskate impresario evades payment

Ardis Kranik, the apple-cheeked, all-American girl and award-winning savior of lyric opera

Boyish Bruno Bartoletti joins lyric opera conductors Dimitri Mitropoulos and Georg Solti in 1956 to become artistic director for four decades

Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi: two Donnas, both prima!

Giuseppe Di Stefano, dapper, dashing bon vivant and the tenor darling of opera lovers everywhere!

Baritone Tito Gobbi, lyric opera's godfather who made the huge civic opera house shrink to intimate size

Saving Roger Dettmer's life, or, hell hath no fury like a tenor panned!

The great Jussi Bjorling of the seamless voice (and a bone-crushing arm-wrestler as well)

Kiril Kondrashin gives Puccini lessons, and adventures with the Russians

Placido Domingo: tenor, conductor, impresario, and dominant personality of the opera world

Paradise lost composer Krzysztof Penderecki and Pope John Paul II

The great Luciano Pacarotti, faithful lyric opera star, turns "serial canceler" and Ardis Krainik reacts

Tempestuous, controversial Carol Fox, who against all odds founded lyric opera of Chicago.