The rumors of Frank Sinatra's violence and his ties to organized crime were such that journalists joked in print about me ending up in concrete boots and sleeping with the fishes if I proceeded to write his biography.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I won't write my autobiography because I never had an affair with Frank Sinatra, and if I had had, I wouldn't tell anyone.
My inclination, as an old-school, classically trained journalist, is not to go with a story unless I have it hard. It's not good enough to say something based on rumors that were flying around.
I went to the premiere of The Detective with Sinatra, and perhaps people jumped to conclusions. He was very protective towards me and never came on to me sexually.
I was a storyteller for The Band. It was never, 'Hey guys, here's a song about what happened to me.' I was always more comfortable writing fiction.
My biography of Frank Sinatra is not paean to his music but rather an illumination of the man behind the music, who once described himself as 'an 18-karat manic-depressive who lived a life of violent emotional contradictions with an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as happiness.'
I worked on a film short with Frank Sinatra when I was a kid.
So many people had been asking me to write an autobiography, or threatening to write my biography without any input from me, that I thought I'd better tell my story before other people told it for me.
I came up with a story and I wrote it.
That's always been my test for what makes a story: is this something journalists would gossip with each other about?
My autobiography was simply the story of my life.