Bill Zehme, noted biographer.
Mr. Zehme’s biography of Mr. Sinatra, “The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin’” (1997), was a best seller. He also shared the author credit on best-selling memoirs by Regis Philbin (“I’m Only One Man!” in 1995 and “Who Wants to Be Me?” in 2000) and Jay Leno (“Leading With My Chin” in 1996).
His other books included “Intimate Strangers: Comic Profiles and Indiscretions of the Very Famous” (2002), “Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman” (1999) and “Hef’s Little Black Book” (2004), a stream-of-consciousness collaboration with Hugh M. Hefner, the founder and publisher of Playboy magazine.
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Mr. Zehme provided tips from Mr. Sinatra about what men should never do in the presence of a woman (yawn) and about the finer points of his haberdashery: “He wore only snap-brim Cavanaughs — fine felts and porous palmettos — and these were his crowns, cocked askew, as defiant as he was.”
“Mr. Sinatra’s gauge for when a hat looked just right,” Mr. Zehme wrote, was “when no one laughs.”
George Nassar is burning in Hell. The name might ring a bell for some of you: he was Albert “The Boston Strangler” DeSalvo’s cellmate, and DeSalvo supposedly confessed his crimes to Nassar.
In 1995, Mr. Nassar recalled in an interview with The Boston Globe that Mr. DeSalvo had described the killings 30 years earlier as they walked along a concrete hallway at Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts, where both men were incarcerated and undergoing mental health evaluations. Mr. DeSalvo was being held on unrelated charges of armed robbery, assault and sex offenses involving four women.
“He began describing a crime and watching my reaction to see if it was too abhorrent to listen to,” Mr. Nassar said. “Some of it was horrible, particularly the crimes of stabbing a woman under her breasts in Cambridge. But I wasn’t there to condemn.”
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Mr. Nassar told his lawyer, the famed criminal defense attorney F. Lee Bailey, about the confession and recruited him to represent Mr. DeSalvo.“We were setting it up,” he told WBZ, “saying, ‘Al, you’re going to confess, you’re going to trial, you’re going to do your book, we’re going to take care of your family,’ and he was saying, ‘OK, OK, OK.’”
Mr. DeSalvo subsequently confessed to Mr. Bailey and gave his account to psychiatrists, a state investigator and the Boston police, but for reasons that are unclear he was never charged with any of the killings. He later retracted the confession.
In 1967, Mr. DeSalvo was convicted of the robbery, assault and sex offenses he had been charged with and sentenced to life imprisonment. During the trial, another inmate, Stanley Setterlund, testified that Mr. DeSalvo had confessed to the murders “and laughed.”
This is one of those odd obits: Mr. Nassar actually died in December of 2018, but for various reasons, his death only became public knowledge recently.