A number of Castle cohorts have told me he was one of the world's great b.s. artists, none as emphatically as his one-time partner Robb White: "He could lie faster than anybody I ever saw! We went to a meeting at Columbia one time and he told a horrendous lie. When we came out, I said, 'Bill, why did you tell a lie like that?' And he said, 'To keep in practice!' He was un-embarrassable, that guy."

In the early days of car phones, Castle (always a ride-moocher) liked being seen with a phone receiver in his hand as he was chauffeured around Hollywood. That's all he had, the dead receiver and the dangling cord, but ... those were the kinds of things he liked to do.