Color Me My Way - NYTimes.com Next month, pop culture's court painter, LeRoy Neiman, turns 91, an occasion he'll celebrate by publishing an often amusing autobiography, "All Told" (Lyons Press, $30). "Plenty of others have had their say about me and my art, for better or worse," Neiman said in an e-mail interview, perhaps alluding to critics who have dismissed as commercial his crazy-colored renderings of athletes, presidents and Playboy Bunnies. But until now, I've never told my own story. That story begins in Minnesota, where Neiman grew up tough and poor. Enough happens to him in the 1940s alone to fill a book: he spends a night in jail for brawling and ships off to basic training the next day. When G.I."s land on Omaha Beach, the Army gives them condoms to protect their rifle muzzles; Neiman uses his to safeguard his cigars. He eventually goes AWOL in Belgium, paints murals for the Red Cross, bootlegs Cognac and loses a girlfriend to Marlene Dietrich. Neiman said his memoirs came together over decades. "I wrote at the large desk in my study surrounded by the tchotchkes I've picked up in my travels: 17th-century tapestries, Venetian columns, a gargantuan 18-branch crystal ballroom chandelier," he said. Maybe that's the reward of a long life, even when the machinery starts turning on you. You get a chance to look back and say: "I did that. It all really happened." "