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No Fear. After leaving PM, Goldberg joined the New York Mirror's Sunday magazine section as a girl watcher, interviewing starlets—real, would-be and soiled—so often that a Mirror rule, which limited him to only one byline a day, has forced him to appear under such pseudonyms as Amos Coggins, Gabriel Prevor, Reg Ovington, Jaime Montdor (Spanish-French for Hymie Goldberg), Robert Benevy and Veigh S. Meer—a phonetic rendition of the Yiddish for "Woe is me." Goldberg rarely has trouble cornering subjects. "When they see me come, all fear vanishes," says he. "There is first my distinguished white hair. Then my baby-blue eyes. Also, most of them are bigger than I am." This disparity in size did not dispel the suspicions of one statuesque beauty named Grace Kelly who, when Goldberg first approached her, thought he was a white slaver.
As Prudence Penny, Hyman Goldberg brings to the job more than the collection of old jokes that usually appear as preludes to his recipes. Cooking runs in the family. Goldberg pere taught his wife how to cook while he established a number of eateries in The Bronx and its summertime extension, the Catskills. Son Hyman was bending over hot stoves before he reached his teens, and he has accumulated the most impressive library of cookbooks in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, where he now lives. "My repertoire is catholic," he says. "I cook in Japanese, Russian, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, as well as American."
Mrs. Goldberg, who does not share her husband's multilingual enthusiasm for the kitchen, cooks strictly in Bay Ridge.