J. Geils Band Singer Tossed Jack Nicholson's Furniture into the Pool While the Actor Was Upstairs with Faye Dunaway

Peter Wolf, the former frontman of the J. Geils Band, is telling all about his life and loves — and the former category includes Hollywood legend Faye Dunaway, to whom he was married from 1974 to 1979.

In his new memoir, Waiting on the Moon (Little, Brown), Wolf, 79, writes about his first meeting with Dunaway, which happened through the matchmaking efforts of a mutual friend. According to Wolf, it wasn't love — or even necessarily attraction at first sight — but the two bonded the next day over music when Dunaway showed up at Wolf's hotel looking for their friend.

What followed was a sexy, stormy romance between the still-struggling rocker and the actress, who had already ascended to Hollywood's A-list with movies like Bonnie and Clyde and The Thomas Crown Affair.

Things fell apart, though, while Dunaway was shooting the 1973 classic Chinatown with costar Jack Nicholson and director Roman Polanski. One night Nicholson invited Dunaway to come over to his house to work on a scene they were shooting the following Monday, and she invited Wolf to tag along.

"As the evening wore on, the other guests seemed to drift away until it was just Jack, Faye and me," Wolf writes. "They discuss Polanski and the best way to deal with his temperament. Jack invited Faye upstairs to work on the script, and Faye asked if I would mind waiting. I answered, 'Of course not.' "

Alas, after a few hours, Nicholson and Dunaway had yet to come down, and Wolf called out for Dunaway and got no response.

"I continued to wait in the living room," Wolf continues. "Finally, as I saw the sun coming up, it occurred to me that what I thought might be happening was definitely happening. I call out her name again, louder and more forcefully, but still no response."

Since Wolf didn't drive, he was stuck at Nicholson's house in the awkward situation, He ended up calling a taxi, and when the taxi arrived, he told the driver to wait for five minutes.

"I opened the sliding glass doors," he writes. "Then I picked up the coffee table laden with books... walked over to the pool, and released it all into the water, watching it sink and settle on the bottom."

"For symmetry, I lowered a chair from the living room into the water, where it landed perfectly at one end of the table," he continues. "Then I picked up another chair and lowered it at the opposite end."

He adds. "I felt certain that Nicholson, an art lover, would appreciate my homage to Duchamp."

Despite the somewhat comical ending to the disastrous evening, Wolf and Dunaway eventually reconciled and got married in 1974 after she proposed. They divorced in 1979, two years before the J. Geils Band broke into the pop mainstream with their massive No. 1 hit "Centerfold." Wolf left the band in 1983 and launched a solo career.

So did anything actually happen between Nicholson and Dunaway that night? She told PEOPLE in 2016 that their relationship remained strictly platonic throughout the Chinatown shoot. "He was with Angelica [Huston] at the time, and he wasn't going to stray from her," she said.

Waiting on the Moon is out now on Little, Brown and is available wherever books are sold.