Names and faces
■ LOS ANGELES — Willie starts with the words. It’s one of the surprising revelations in Willie Nelson’s new book, “Energy Follows Thought: The Stories Behind My Songs,” an examination of the 90-year-old country legend and soonto-be Rock & Roll Hall of Famer’s seven decades of songwriting. To him, it’s doing the hard part first. “The melodies are easier to write than the words,” Nelson told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of Tuesday’s release of his book. He does not, however, write those words down, not even on a napkin. “I have a theory,” he said, “that if you can’t remember ’em, it probably wasn’t that good.” Nelson actually started out as a poet of sorts. At age 6 in Depression-era Texas, he composed a verse in response to the looks he got when he picked his nose and got a nosebleed while standing in front of his church congregation. “My poem was, ‘What are you looking at me for? I ain’t got nothin to say, if you don’t like the looks of me, look some other way,’” he recalled 84 years later. “That was the beginning.” He started writing songs soon after. In 1961, three of his songs became hits for other artists: Billy Walker’s “Funny How Time Slips Away,” Faron Young’s “Hello Walls” and, most importantly, Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” a song that would become a signature for her and both a financial boon and an ego boost for him. “Because Patsy liked it, I was poor no longer,” he writes in the book. “This particular ‘Crazy’ convinced me, at a time when I wasn’t a hundred percent sure of my writing talent, that I’d be crazy to stop writing.”
■ Actor Robert De Niro shouted “Shame on you!” as he testified Tuesday in a New York courtroom, directing the comments at his former executive assistant and vice president who seeks $12 million after accusing her former boss of being abusive. Graham Chase Robinson watched with her lawyers while De Niro’s anger built as attorney Andrew Macurdy pelted him with some tabloid-style accusations his client made about De Niro’s behavior toward Robinson as she served his needs, large and small, from 2008 until several months into 2019. Robinson, 41, seeks damages for emotional distress and reputational harm that she claims has left her jobless and in unrecoverable trauma. She earned $300,000 annually when she quit, frustrated by interactions with De Niro’s girlfriend and the effect she believed it had on De Niro. The jury is also considering evidence in a suit De Niro filed against Robinson in which he claims she stole from him, including 5 million points for airline flights. De Niro is seeking the return of three years of Robinson’s salary. Macurdy asked De Niro whether it was true that he sometimes urinated as he spoke with Robinson on the telephone. “That’s nonsense,” De Niro answered. “You got us all here for this?” De Niro, 80, has won two Oscars in a six-decade movie career that has featured memorable roles in films including “The Deer Hunter” and “Raging Bull.” Currently, he is in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.”