Williams has written the story of his musical life. The entertainment legend recently shared memories about his 70 years in show business in an exclusive interview.

Williams is coming up on 82, and still performing the hit that produced his first fortune, after he sang it on the Academy Awards show way back when.

“The next day, it sold 400,000 copies,” he said.

It's the title of his memoir of a lifetime in entertainment: “Moon River and Me.”

Williams is the kid from small-town Iowa who left a sought-after radio and nightclub act with his three brothers to go solo.

“For four years, I was going every place and bombing terribly, singing songs nobody wanted to hear,” he said.

Then Steve Allen put him on NBC's “Tonight Show” and turned him into a pop music star.

“I did the ‘Tonight Show’ for two-and-a-half years, then started making records.”

Later, with 10 years of performing on primetime TV with everybody who was anybody in show biz, and another decade in Las Vegas, so much success and limelight cost him his first marriage.

“You work to get some place, things happen and you get too busy to spend time with your family, and that's what you should've done.”

Williams reveals he tried clinical LSD to straighten out his life before his divorce.

“Well, did it change anything?” he was asked.

“No, not much!”

Witnessing the assassination of his close friend, Sen. Robert Kennedy, and being asked to sing at RFK's funeral in 1968 still haunts him.

“Bobby's death affected me a lot. I decided to take better care of myself,” he said. “That’s not my favorite part of the book.”

Williams has been in Branson almost 20 years. Building his theatre, he says, was the easy part. Leaving the national spotlight was the hard part. He says his older brother talked him into it.

“I said, ‘Where is it?’ He said, ‘In the Ozarks!’ I said, ‘Where's that?!’ I had no idea.”

He said re-inventing himself at age 63, and opening Moon River Theatre helped him finally overcome anxiety that pursued him since he was 13.

“My father said, ‘You'll always have to try harder, because you're not as good as other people.’”

Ironically, that unkind advice inspired the last lines of “Moon River and Me” and why you can't get Williams to talk about retirement.

“I'm beginning to accept the fact that I'm as good as others after all.”

Williams' book will be in stores on Oct. 13.