Luke Yankee grew up a “showbiz kid,” the son of actress Eileen Heckart, an Oscar-winner for “Butterflies Are Free.”

As such, he rubbed elbows with big stars and heard his mother tell wonderful insider stories.

Eileen Heckart could dish.

So, it turns out, can her son. For the past five years, Yankee has been touring with a one-man show he calls “Diva Dish!” – a loving tribute to his mother, who died Dec. 31, 2001.

Yankee brings “Diva Dish!” to the White Plains Performing Arts Center on Friday. It’s a benefit for the theater, which has been reimagined as a home for professional musical theater. Later in the month, Yankee will direct the theater’s first mainstage production, “Man of La Mancha,” starring Broadway’s Robert Cuccioli.

But first, it’s time to dish.

“After my mother passed away, I was looking through all of her memorabilia and realized that I was the only one who knew all of these stories,” Yankee says.

The stories include tales of working with Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren and Bette Davis, among others.

“I realized that if I didn’t do something with this, an incredibly important piece of theater and Hollywood history would be lost forever,” Yankee says.

He put together a PowerPoint presentation with slides from his mother’s photo collection, and showed it to friends. That presentation became the multimedia show “Diva Dish!”

Yankee sings a few songs and tells plenty of stories, in which a son is added to the constellation: There’s Heckart talking with LBJ, and Ethel Merman teaching a young Luke how to mix a martini.

Yankee grew up in Fairfield County. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward – friends of Heckart’s from their time working together on “Picnic” on Broadway – stopped in regularly.

It was in Heckart’s New Canaan living room that Newman gave the 14-year-old Yankee an important acting tip.

“He taught me how to upstage my co-star in children’s theater. I loved him forever for that,” Yankee says. “That was so cool of him.

“He taught me how to stare the guy down if he went up on his lines and make him look like a jerk. Of course, when I did it, it didn’t have the same impact as when Paul Newman did it.”

There are so many stories, Yankee can’t tell them all in the 90-minute intermissionless show. So in the show’s program, he prints a list of about 25 names of people he’s ready to talk about.

“After the scripted part, we bring up the house lights and I say to the audience: ‘Shout out a name and I’ll give you the dish’ and rattle off stories about Martha Stewart, Bob Fosse, Mae West. Just on and on,” he said.

“People get a charge out of it and every show is different.”

Celebrities flit through the performance, but Yankee says the show is really about a loving mother-son relationship.

“It’s not all about gossip,” he says. “My mother was a larger-than-life character, and I talk about saying goodbye to her for the last time, when she died of lung cancer, and it goes to some intimate places as well. It’s funny and heartfelt and touching.”

Still, with the time constraints of live theater, some stories went undished at some performances, so Yankee compiled them in a book, “Just Outside the Spotlight,” with a foreword by Mary Tyler Moore. He’ll sign copies of the book at Friday’s benefit performance in White Plains.

That’s a dish that won’t get cold.