There’s an old tune whose refrain goes:

So be easy and free when you’re drinkin’ with me.
I’m a man you don’t meet every day.

In the pages that follow you’ll meet a man you don’t meet every day. His name is Tom McCann.

I’ve known him and worked with him for a long time, so I can say that for sure. He is one of a kind. But he’s filled the pages of this book not with himself but with the varied cast of extraordinary characters, some famous, some not, who have peopled his life. There are many of them.

Some are superstar personalities like Hollywood’s longtime marquee star Katharine Hepburn. Their friendship started with an acrid phone call that ended with her hanging up on him. He responded by sending her a gift whose subtle subtext may have been: “Go fly a kite!” Hepburn liked his audacity, and they became fast friends. Tom has a lot to say about her. Their relationship over the years says a lot about him.

Same with basketball legend Bill Russell, who chose to skip a Boston Celtics victory parade to have a sandwich with Tom in Tom’s office thirty floors above the parade. Of course, that says a lot about Russell – and, also, a lot about McCann.

The thread connecting these colorful stories is Tom’s rise from a hardscrabble life in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York, to become a vice president in a Fortune 500 corporation, and moving on from there to found his own television production company. Tom’s would be a story in itself. But he chooses to focus on the stories of others, people he came to know – and who came to know him.

In these pages you’ll get to meet them all. And along the way you’ll get to know Tom McCann, a man you won’t meet every day.