B009HOTHPE EBOK (16 page)

The second movie I was in,
The Private Lives of Adam and Eve,
was even crazier than the first. It opens with my character, a singer named Pinkie Parker (by now I’m sure you’re wondering who comes up with these goofy names, but that was a name that really fit the era), singing while steering his $400 hot rod with his feet on a highway outside Las Vegas. Then a really bad thunderstorm hits as only those desert storms can, driving me and a lot of other people to seek refuge in an abandoned church. Moral of the story: don’t drive with your feet!

Anyway, they all fall asleep in church and dream they are in the Garden of Eden. At that point everything in the film, which was in black and white up until then, goes Technicolor.

Tuesday Weld was a real cutie. She was the first person I saw who would drink a lot of hot water with lemons in it to shrink her stomach and stay thin. She didn’t appear in the dream sequence, but really sparkled for the time that she was onscreen.

Teen movies like these are a vanished genre, but back then there was a big audience for them. They were poor movies, very formulaic, but not trashy. Some of them even had decent storylines and involved such a diverse group of people that the cast was like a Hollywood police lineup. Mel Tormé, Mickey Rooney, Martin Milner, Tuesday Weld—eight or nine stars in
The Private Lives of Adam and Eve
alone.

It wasn’t
Gone with the Wind,
of course, or
Citizen Kane,
but the movies sold and we made money. Movies gave me a chance to expose some of my songs and hit my target audience for records. I would show up for one or two weeks’ work and then I was gone. The acting was no big deal and it was cool to be able to tell people about them—just so long as they didn’t go see them.

Even though I was playing these different characters, I was just being Paul Anka and singing my songs, which was great for me because my audience could see me as well. That’s all they wanted.

There were a bunch of my old songs in each of them. Plus, I always wrote the title songs. “Lonely Boy,” which was used in
Girls Town
, became a big money-maker.

I’m sure these directors knew how to make better films, but they were following a formula, trying to establish some kind of career. Same thing with the actors. You look at all of these guys, guys like Jack Nicholson. They all started out doing B movies with Roger Corman. That was good thinking, like working in a repertory company. These films definitely didn’t age well, but they’re true to the time, little 1950s time capsules.

The Private Lives of Adam and Eve
caused kind of an uproar when it came out, which surprised everyone involved, because it wasn’t a big theme movie, just a light sort of ’50s morality tale, cloaked in a send-up of the book of Genesis. From the outcry I guess there were a lot of people who weren’t ready for that kind of satire. Considering the prudish morality of the time, a lot of people were probably offended by the fact that Mamie Van Doren and Martin Milner appeared to be naked in the dream sequence, and being in color somehow made it worse: naked people in Technicolor making a mockery of the Bible!

After that I didn’t really pursue movies. I wasn’t going to take any part that came along, I was so busy with my music and performing. I was offered plenty more parts in similar type productions, but by then I’d had it.

Bobby Darin and I, as we were making our little pop records, started thinking, “Okay, what’s next? Where is this going from here? Could we be doing something cooler than this?” Those of us who wanted to survive knew we had to move on from the teen idol thing to prove ourselves.

At some point I said to Irv, “Let’s bring in a big band and just—with my young little squeaky voice!—do some swing.”

I loved that stuff. So that was how I made my first big band album,
Paul Anka Swings for Young Lovers,
which was released in January 1960.

I loved making that album. Swing was with a big band, as opposed to going in the studio with five or six pieces and making a little pop record. And it gave me a taste of what was to come. It seemed so hip and cool to have a big band behind you.

The album came out at the start of 1960, and shortly before that I’d moved my family down to New Jersey. I bought a house in Tenafly so we all could be living together again under one roof, including my mother, because I wanted to spend as much time as possible with her, and my dad because he couldn’t run the restaurant and deal with my business at the same time. I especially needed his help because I was still a minor and couldn’t legally sign contracts on my own. And, of course, my brother Andy and my sister Mariam—who are both younger than me, came with us, too. It took a while to get the house together so initially we stayed at the St. Moritz Hotel until the house was ready. That would have been toward the end of 1959.

My mother was not doing well, she was suffering badly from the diabetes and that was a big worry to me, so it was good to have her nearby, closer to New York. She’d been diagnosed with diabetes when still a young girl, and after Mariam and I were born, the doctor had told her she wasn’t supposed to have any more children but she did anyway.

My sister Mariam is two years younger than me and then there is Andy, who is the youngest. Andy is very sweet and gentle and quiet. He’d be happy plunking away at his guitar while I’d be showing off singing from the top of the dining room table or something crazy like that. Mariam and I are more alike in that way, more outgoing and outspoken. My mom, who had always been a force of nature, was now weakening just at the point when I was achieving my great success, and because of my success it meant that I was away from her more and more on tour. So my achievement as a pop star had a bittersweet quality for me. That summer, on June 23, 1960 I was finally set to headline at the Copacabana in New York, the one spot I’d been shooting for.

I can’t tell you what the allure of the Copacabana was in those days. It was the ultimate place to play in New York, the fanciest, swankiest club there was, which is why I wanted my parents—my mother especially—to see me there. Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. had made it the most famous nightclub in the world. It was like inviting them to the prince’s ball where I would be the star attraction. It was the culmination of all my mother could ever have wished for. My dad took her to get a new dress and her hair done for the occasion. We got her dressed up and made up, and I took her out for a night on the town, including a front row seat to my show at the Copa. I wanted her to be part of my success. It was the moment when I could express my love to my mother and thank her for all she’d done for me and show her that all these dreams we’d hatched in the basement of our house had come true.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Irv had to bargain to get me top billing at the Copacabana. My regular salary in the clubs by this time was $7,500 a week, but Irv told the Copa they could have me for $3,500 if I was billed as the star of the show. It was a big gamble, but it worked.

The night before I opened, the manager of the Copa, Jules Podell, called Irv and said, “You gotta help me out. We’re oversold six hundred seats. Could the kid do three shows instead of two on opening night?” I said okay and then nearly collapsed. Not even Sinatra ever had to do three shows on an opening night. That’s when I knew we were going to make it.

Because of the layout of the club, all the performers had to go into the Copa through the hotel next door, the Hotel Fourteen. The club was basically a basement. There was only one entrance with a door to the left of it that went up to the Hotel Fourteen.

There were no dressing rooms, per se; it was, literally, a hook with a drape down the stairs. Before you went on, you had your tea, and then upstairs you had a room in the hotel. We were all supposed to go in that way, already dressed, and pretty much straight onto the stage.

There was nothing casual about the Copa. In the clubs, you had to dress up. Every night was New Year’s Eve. The Copa had showgirls, sexy girls, and they’d come on before the main act; sometimes they’d have a comedian. You didn’t have a tux, you didn’t go on, period. It wasn’t optional, it was mandatory. The comedian Jackie Mason opened for me on my first night at the Copa, and as he was walking into rehearsal, someone told him he had to wear a tuxedo for the show. He panicked, so I lent him one of mine. Could he fit into it? Yeah, back then he was kind of my size.

The truth is, so much stuff was happening I didn’t have time for stage fright. You have to maintain your cool whatever happens—otherwise you’re
dead
. And that’s definitely a place you don’t want to go. You have to learn quickly, know how to handle every crazy situation smoothly—because if you show anxiety they’ll eat you alive. You have to have that confidence even if you’re quaking in your patent leather shoes. I studied, looked at how everyone else handled it, saw how they maintained their cool, and applied my own take on it. I may have been terrified out of my mind that first night at the Copa—but I was cool!

Gene Knight in the
New York Journal-American
headlined his report: “Anka Sizzles in Copa Debut.”

When he appeared, the seething Copa audience applauded, whistled, cheered. Immediately he and they were en rapport.… The ovation at the finale of his act was the greatest I have heard at the Copa in years. I call Paul Anka electrifying.

Lee Mortimer in the
New York Mirror,
comparing me to Bobby Darin, said:

And now comes even younger Paul Anka, who is no objectionable child prodigy.… His humility is infectious. His voice is beautiful. His material is entertaining. His showmanship comes naturally. At 18 … he is one [of the Copa’s] all time greats.

I was the youngest act ever to play the Copa and after that I performed there a few more times and became very good friends with Jules Podell, the club’s owner and manager—he ran it for Frank Costello, the head of the Genovese crime family. He was something: very tough-looking guy, heavy-set, bulldoggish face with greased-back hair and a big cigar. Smoking like a chimney, drinking—drinking
all
the time. He was the epitome of that whole Mafia thing. Everyone was scared shitless of him. In
Lonely Boy,
the filmmakers asked him to repeat the incident where he kisses me—they hadn’t caught it on camera—and I thought he was going to kill them! That’s the way he was—you crossed him at your peril.

That place was something, what a scene. You didn’t fool around at the Copa. And he was something, that man. Jules Podell. Uncle Julie. He was notorious for the tight ship he ran. If somebody was out of line, he would rap his big diamond ring on the table. It would echo all over the place and people would just be terrified. He would look at someone and just say, “Beat it,” and they’d be tripping over each other to get out that door. Nevertheless, he was a gentleman and when he liked you, he was there for you. He was something. All of those mob guys were.

Opening night was a huge hit, these prom kids—Guys in white dinner jackets, girls in their crinoline dresses—from all over began showing up and the place was sold out in twenty minutes. The next night, the lines went all the way around the block.

And Mr. Podell, every night would have his position right there inside the front door, sitting at a little round table where he could watch everything with his drink in front of him and his big ring. He was kind of a diamond-in-the-rough himself and as hard as cut glass.

And there was Jackie Mason, who has always been an aggressive, arrogant-type guy and funny as hell. Because of the crowds and the big hullabaloo going on his chest was pumping—wearing the success of the night before—and he decides he’s going to walk in through the front door of the Copa instead of from the Hotel Fourteen.

So he walks in past the kids and into the club and past Podell and he goes, “Good evening, Mr. Podell!” Jules looks up and says, “Get back in line, kid!!” and throws him back out the front door before he can say anything. Someone who could make Jackie Mason speechless, that’s the kind guy Podell was.

One night the actress Gene Tierney was there (God, she was beautiful!) and Podell went over to her table to greet her. She was there with some people and when he came over she was very snobby to him—she was offended by the ballsy manner of this hoodlum, so Podell says to her, “Well, you ain’t such a hot contender in the ring yourself, babe!” Podell was making a pun on the famous Gene Tunney–Jack Dempsey boxing matches in 1926 and ’27.

The stuff that went on there! On Friday night, it was all these mob guys with their girlfriends. Then Saturday night, the same guys would turn up with their wives. It was always a tense vibe in there with the mob.

Uncle Julie checked every dish as it came out of the kitchen, lifting each cover to check the size of the portions, the appearance of the plate overall, making sure it was as near to perfection as possible, sending a waiter back to change his jacket if there was a pinhead-sized spot on the lapel or the sleeve or, God forbid, his shirt wasn’t crisply starched.

There was a Chinese chef, Lum On. Under him there were actually about twenty other chefs, mostly French, but he was head chef. And the Copa—even though it had an art deco décor with a tropical Brazilian vibe and was run by Jews and Italians—was known for having some of the best Chinese cuisine in town. So the place was a real melting pot, just like New York. Aside from the main showroom there was a lounge at the Copacabana, Wayne Newton and his brother were playing the lounge when I did my show there. That’s what they were in those days, a lounge act.

Every night after the last show, I would meet Podell in the bar. I liked to just schmooze, have a steak sandwich, or sometimes I would sit in on drums with the trio in the Copa’s house band.

There was a guy at the Copa named Doug Coudy—he did just about everything to do with the show: lights, sound, the whole thing. He was a nice-looking guy, tall, thin, gray-haired, but boy, did he stutter. It would take him forever to say all the things he was going to do for your show in the way of lights. “Paul, you know when you go into the bridge, I could f-f-f-f-f-fade out the bl-bl-bl-bl-blue sp-p-p-p-p-pot.…” You’d tend to say, “That’s great, Doug, why don’t you try that” before he’d even got to the end of the sentence.