B009HOTHPE EBOK (15 page)

Irv, thank God, was just such an astute, resourceful manager. After I’d had a few hit records he knew I was going places, but he also knew I was going to make mistakes, right? So he figured, let Paul Anka fail out of town. It was a way to test the waters for my new songs. If they hit there, bring them back to the big city. It was a brilliant formula.

I’d always had this attraction to the Rat Pack, Sinatra and those guys. I wanted to wind up like them. So when I told him what I wanted to do, he came up with an ingenious plan to take this teen idol kid, smooth out the rough spots, put me in a tux, and transform me into a performer who could become an attraction for adult audiences—get me headlining at night clubs like the Copacabana in New York. His first move was to get me to record an album called
My Heart Sings
, which featured old standards like “Autumn Leaves” and “I Love Paris,” and included only one of my so-called teen songs. I also did a big band album,
Paul Anka Swings for Young Lovers
and later on a live LP,
Anka at the Copa
.

In 1958, Irv Feld made a deal for me to open for Sophie Tucker at the Sahara. At that time I was riding the crest of all my teenage success. There I was in Vegas, long before The Beatles set foot in the States. So when they did come, I already knew where I was going. I wasn’t going to get blown out of the water like all my other soft-pop contemporaries.

So I opened for Sophie Tucker at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. I had finally made it to the fabled land of the Rat Pack. When I showed up in Vegas I was way ahead of myself. I was the youngest headliner ever. Wayne Newton came out much later doing his 1963 hit, “Danke Schoen,” becoming a Vegas fixture. I was different, not only in that I wrote my own songs, but I’d taken the time to become a polished cabaret act. Because I was underage and I wasn’t allowed in the casino, they would bring me into the hotel through the back door.

I did about twenty-five minutes opening for Sophie Tucker. There were a lot of families in Vegas, their kids listened to the radio and watched
American Bandstand,
so they knew me, and, all of a sudden, they’ve got five hundred kids in a showroom at a Sophie Tucker concert going nuts. I wasn’t even on stage yet when this huge hooting-screaming-whistling barrage of noise came on. Then you’ve got Sophie Tucker coming on and going “Some of these days, mama can I have another, uh, banana split, mama” or whatever the words were. The kids started screaming as soon as she came on. She was a trouper, nothing fazed Sophie, she was like a great old battleship, but in the end it was too unsettling for her, they were driving her
nuts
. She was a grande old dame, and after opening night she asked me to close the show for her. She just said, “My boy, I hope that you could come on after me so that I don’t get pelted with spitballs.” Funny lady.

She was this very big imposing aunt of a woman—Paul McCartney once referred to her as “Our favorite American group, Sophie Tucker.” She was like the lady next door yet had a good strong sense of who she was. She had her game down. She was a legend who had so many years of being a success, she was like a singing Statue of Liberty.

She was great to work with. I used to hang with her after the show. She’d sit in her big robe and sign autographs and meet people backstage. I held the cigar box she put the money in. But she wasn’t anybody to hang out with really. She was like ninety-two—born in tsarist Russia in another century. We didn’t have all that much in common. The girls I was going to bed with were just a bit younger and a lot skinnier.

My bringing soft, preachified rock ’n’ roll to Vegas helped business and I started getting invited back. Rock ’n’ roll, even preachified rock ’n’ roll, was not the kind of music Vegas favored but, after all, money was money, numbers were numbers.

At first I was so young I wasn’t allowed into the casinos other than to walk the halls, stay in the room, etc. I loved entertaining, I loved meeting people, but, initially I didn’t—wasn’t allowed to—socialize. Basically I hid in my room. The irony being that I was headlining, filling a show room, and yet not allowed to go near a casino because I was underage. So I would look through the outside window, go back to my suite, and watch television, or I’d stay in my room and write songs. Lonely boy in Sin City.

That was really the beginning of my other career. Meanwhile, the whole teen idol thing, once thought to be a passing phase, was getting a lot of mainstream attention. The music business had gotten behind it and suddenly there was this huge “teen market” that hadn’t existed before. But there was I, just trying my damndest to get away from it. For a while I had a foot in both worlds, but I knew which one I wanted to follow.

Then Irv Feld carefully arranged the perfect setting for my nightclub debut—the first time I would appear in a show not designed specifically for teenagers. It was a big step. New Year’s Day, 1959. On that day, Paul Anka’s second incarnation began.

There was a lot riding on this move, so Irv next cleverly booked me at the Lotus Club in Washington, D.C. It was his hometown and as he put it, “I could paper the joint with friends and celebrities who came free and made a lot of noise.” On February 15, the day after Valentine’s Day, I began a weeklong engagement there.

Just a genius move on his part. And true to his prediction, there was a virtual who’s who of music-biz people, deejays, press, and publicists on hand my opening night. And because my nightclub debut was a success there, I got booked into top clubs in Las Vegas, Boston, Philadelphia, and Buffalo.

Irv Feld and I always felt: hit the clubs, break into Vegas. He wanted me in those places and I wanted to get in there. When I first went out, I saw Johnnie Ray, an old idol for me and all these older guys who took the business in their stride. Eddie Fisher and Nat King Cole were the best-selling artists at the time, playing Vegas and New York. They were all very supportive of me, considering I was just a snot-nosed kid.

*   *   *

Annette Funicello, the princess of afternoon TV. What can I say? She was not exactly model beautiful, but just so cute with her dark curly hair and big personality. We all loved Annette. See, back then, 1958–59 we’re talking, with the limited programming on television, you couldn’t cherry-pick through tons of shows, you just took what was there, and that was one of the big ones, obviously. Everyone watched
The Mickey Mouse Club
. And she was one of the Mouseketeers. I was kind of a fan of the show and had a serious crush on her even before I met her.

Disney wanted Annette to get all the exposure she could—they had a huge investment in her. Coming out of the Mouseketeers and that Disney stable, the only other available performing venue for her was to be out there singing. It was on Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars tour in October 1959 that she met me and Fabian and Frankie Avalon, that whole gang—young guys with their tongues hanging out. You could say we hit it off with her, but you’d have to see it like a Disney cartoon—the Seven Goofy Dwarfs and the Disney Princess.

I think there were three or four of us who were looking to get on base there. I didn’t feel I was the obvious one. I was intimidated and a little afraid to the point where I was overly humble, overly polite. We were a new phenomenon on the scene and people were looking at us differently—we were a novelty, not unlike hula hoops. We were told what we could and couldn’t do—and that would definitely include:
not
date Annette Funicello. Funny thing is, I later found out (in her book) that one of the reasons I eventually got to date her was “his attitude toward life in general was more intense, more serious, than that of most young men.” Well, I guess being the shy one helped out for once.

Annette and I kind of gravitated to each other and it didn’t hurt that her mother liked me. I must have looked like the most promising out of the bunch of mutts because I was the songwriter. Anyway, Annette and I hit it off, but the mother and the chaperone were all over her like white on rice. No one could really get near that. At first. Later on we’d learn to get around her. Like the time we made out in the bathtub of the hotel while her mother read a book in the other room. She once even let us fool around in the backseat of the car with her right back there with us, pretending to doze.

I think the real glue between us came about when I started writing an album for her—
Annette Sings Anka
—and getting involved in that part of her life.

She had a big hit previous to that with her song “Tall Paul”—not written by me—which played off of our romance. Big irony there, huh? The paradoxes of life, of which I am all too aware!

So, she’d already had that one hit under her belt—I think the Sherman Brothers wrote it—but her management wanted her to do a full album, and that’s when I got involved. She did about twelve tunes of mine—“Train of Love” was the single—and I oversaw the production with Tutti Camarata, her A&R guy.

So, you know, we
dated
. Of course, I was constantly traveling, so it was mainly a lot of long-distance phone calls. We were always on the phone. Still, it was probably her first real serious relationship. According to Annette, “We sort of fell in love over the phone, during several of the hundreds of three-hour-long late-night conversations we shared over the next few years.”

Of course, from a woman’s point of view and coming from her background, I think what she really wanted was to get married. She and her mother looked at every potential suitor with an eye as to maybe this could grow into something where he’d be the husband. Or maybe it’s me who saw it that way (typical guy’s point of view).

And the fan magazines were all over it. It was “Paul and Annette” this, “Paul and Annette” that. It generated a lot of publicity and teen-romance nonsense. Annette was doing her movies (not the beach movies, that was a little bit later, but the ones for Disney) and I had just broken into film myself, so we were all over the place, running around doing television shows, acting in dopey movies, performing—and generally stirring up lurid, sugar-coated dreams in a million teenage brains.

Let me tell you about my so-called life as a teenage movie star. I got my start in movies when I was hired to write the music for a movie called
Girls Town
. Teen movies had to have songs in them—that’s the way you appeal to the teenage audience. And once you were there on the set they’d go, “You want to be in movies?” No prior experience—in life or in the movies—required. You certainly weren’t required to act, you barely had to know your lines. This wasn’t Shakespeare.

I mean, who the hell doesn’t want to be in movies? When you’re seventeen and look the way I did—I wasn’t exactly Tab Hunter—you figure, hey, somebody’s making a big mistake here, but, what the hell, you’re gonna go for it, ’cause you may never get the chance again.

I found acting fascinating and boring at the same time. I didn’t want a full diet of it. What I really loved was performing in front of an audience—you’re on stage, the MC comes up to the mike and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, Paul Anka!” You go on, do your thing, get your check, and go home. With movies, you start at eight in the morning and by the time you leave at nine at night, you’ve done all of thirty seconds of work. I did not want to do that for the rest of my life. But I enjoyed it, and it gave me some ideas. If you could put songs into movies, you could also put mini movies into songs—which is what “My Way” is. You see someone at the end of their career defiantly watching a home movie of their life.

I was in three … what? I guess you’d call them teen movies. The same guy, Albert Zugsmith, was the producer of the first one,
Girls Town,
which came out in 1959, and also the director of the second one,
The Private Lives of Adam and Eve,
which was released the next year. Then came
Look in Any Window
in ’61, so it was boom-boom-boom, three in a row.

They were all really just vehicles to exploit this whole new teen market that hadn’t even existed before—and, improbable as it seems, that’s how I ended up in a movie with Mamie Van Doren!

What was she like?
Hot
! Sexy, blond bombshell type, real luscious, everything that you would imagine. I don’t want to spoil your image of her as a bad-girl vamp, but off camera she was a very sweet person.

No one even cared that a woman over thirty was playing the part of a high school bad girl or Eve in the Garden of Eden! There was a huge Mamie Van Doren crowd. She had a fanatical following—here was a big, healthy
va-va-voom
broad you could have wet dreams about without too much trouble.

She was very sexy and all of that—and
knew
it—and here I was, a kid, virtually speechless in the presence of this sex goddess, and she’s trying to be as nice as possible. I would sit there with my ukulele, teaching her to sing, and by the time I had, I’d sweated half my body onto the ukulele.

Did I have an affair with Mamie Van Doren? Can you call two and a half minutes an affair? I think I came before I walked in the door. I walked in with the ukulele to teach her a song. The next thing I know my pants are down, the ukulele is in my left hand.

Girls Town
was a real soap opera. Mamie played the proverbial bad girl with a past, named Silver Morgan who becomes the number one suspect in the death of this kid named Chip, who at the beginning of the movie accidentally gets thrown off a cliff trying to rape a girl. Not a very subliminal message to teenage boys: forcing yourself on a girl is a bad idea! My character is a singer she has a crush on. What I’m really there for is to sing, and that’s what I do.

These movies were so unbelievably corny and unrealistic, they’re now considered classics—camp classics! One scene involves the “people” in Mel Tormé’s car, who are so obviously dummies that even teenagers laughed out loud in the movie theater. But then, that was Albert Zugsmith’s MO. He was known for trying to throw in a little bit of everything, especially the outlandish. Reality never got a chance in his films.
Girls Town
is in everyone’s Top Twenty episodes of
Mystery Science Theater 3000
. (By the way, they have quite a bit of fun at my expense!)