Unfamiliar Tune

It took a broken foot to get Tommy Tune to sit still long enough to write a book.

“I couldn’t walk across the room to get myself a beer,” said Tune, whose memoir, “Footnotes” (Simon & Schuster), is due in stores Nov. 6. “It was a very, very difficult time in my life.”

The celebrated singer-dancer-choreographer-director slipped during a 1995 performance of “Busker Alley” (titled “Stage Door Charley” when seen at the Orange County Performing Arts Center earlier that year), and the fracture kept him off the stage until this year, he said.

Throughout his early recovery, the insomniac Thomas James Tune heard voices in his head at night, he recalled by phone Monday from his New York City penthouse.

“One . . . kept saying, ‘I never had a grandfather.’ Finally, I sat up, rolled over, and took a piece of paper and wrote that [line] down, and I was able to go to sleep.”

The next morning, Tune began writing the story of his ancestors’ fate, and the words never stopped. The book, which he penned on his own, jumps back and forth chronologically in “short takes” as the Texas native, 58, “channel surfs through his memories.”

“There are some long passages,” he said. But “I think it has an energy to it, and people say it’s an easy and fun read and they laugh and they cry.”

The memoir contains “quite a bit that’s shocking,” added Tune, who will also release an album of romantic ballads, “Slow Dancin’,” next month.

“To have written this book [as if I didn’t have] a penis would not have been the truth, so I wrote about things sexual, and that might be surprising to people.”

He also addresses in print a question that has nagged him for two years: Why such a serious injury now in his career?

“I believe now,” he said, “that it was God’s way of saying, ‘Take a break,’ because I never do; I just keep going from show to show to show.”

* Tommy Tune will appear in a salute to Broadway with the Manhattan Rhythm Kings at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive. $35-$50. (562) 916-8500.