B009HOTHPE EBOK (17 page)

One night I overheard Podell talking with Doug about new songs for the fall show, so the next night, I come in with a ukulele and say, “Hey, boss, I got a couple of songs you could maybe use in your show.” I played them and that was it. He says to Doug, “What a kid. In two years he’ll be bigger than Sinatra.” Who can resist over-the-top stuff like that? I loved the guy for that.

I wound up writing a lot of the songs for the big productions there. I did that for a couple of years, actually. I wrote all the music for the shows that came on before the main acts—the Copa girls, who were just about as famous as the Rockettes, would come out and do all these racy numbers. They were some beautiful showgirls.

The Copacabana was the ultimate status symbol, and this was its heyday. If you could headline the Copacabana in New York you had it made in the shade. There would be Carmine at the door, huge guy, behind the velvet rope. My life really changed when I started to do the Copa, that was the way I got into that Rat Pack world, because after that, all of a sudden, you felt legit, you’d separated yourself from the rest of the teen pack. As a performer—and in life in many cases, too—everything’s been done, so you always want to learn from someone who does it better. That was my new playground. There comes a time when you realize you don’t want to be the smartest person in the room.

Jules Podell was an impulsive guy, but I liked him and he could see where I was going. I performed at the Copa a few more times. After I headlined there on June 1, 1961, I got the kind of reaction from the press I’d been looking for—in other words that I was no longer a just a pop star who appealed to teenyboppers.

In the
New York Mirror,
Lee Mortimer’s headline read: “Adults Love Teen.”

There’s no teenage audience at the Copacabana these nights, where Paul Anka the teenage phenom is playing to turn away audiences of adult sophisticates. For Anka, though only 19, is no callow rock ‘n’ roller, but a consummate artist whose talents are far beyond his years. Of all the juves making show business history this year I have a feeling that Paul is the only one who will outlast the craze.… Engaging, personable and no smart aleck kid trying to seem mature. Anka’s showmanship is excellent.

Variety
saw me as the first of a new wave invasion: “The young pop singers are now taking over the citadels of adult sophisticate as well.… Across-the-board appeal to the oldsters as well.” The
New York World-Telegram
quoted my main ambition: “Paul Anka the almost twenty-year-old pop singer from Canada, frankly admits ‘trying to break through and reach the adult audience.’ If the reaction to his opening night audience at Jules Podell’s Copacabana is any criterion, the colorful young balladeer has achieved his goal.” Milton Esterow at
The New York Times
called me a “personable baby-faced, dimpled phenomenon of our time. He is a polished performer, confident but not brash. There is a charm and a voice that easily handles sentimental and swing songs. Mr. Anka could give lessons in showmanship.” And Gene Knight at the
New York Journal-American
(“Anka’s Aweigh at the Copa”) said that I did it again as the “do-it-yourself type song man.… Secret of his sensational success is his high-speed method of presentation—a method you can’t equal, Paul is possessed of unlimited showmanship.”

Jules Podell was pleased. He sent the word out that he wanted to see me. I guess I’d brought a lot of business in to the club, so he told me, “Go to Tiffany, kid, and buy yourself a nice watch.” I went to Tiffany and picked out a cool-looking watch. It was silver and elegant, and being unsophisticated I had no idea what it was—anyway it was getting charged to Julie Podell. The next day Podell calls Irv. “What the hell, Irving! I told Paul to pick something out—and what does he do? He selects a $10,000 watch. A fucking platinum watch!” What did I know? It was bright and shiny and I wasn’t paying for it. It wasn’t exactly what Jules expected me to choose, but he bought it for me anyway.

*   *   *

Annette and I were still an item and the interest level in us and what we were doing was high. From what the fan magazines said, you’d think we were always together, had lots of time alone, et cetera, but it was all strictly Hollywood hokum. Her mother was always there, or the Disney people, “handlers” as they’re now called.

Annette was all about family, and what she was looking for was exactly the perfect kind of people who would fit that family mold. I was educated, well-mannered, and as sophisticated as any nineteen-year-old can be, but I wasn’t ready to fit into anyone else’s mold, even Annette’s sweet, delectable mold. Her mother was the classic stage mother, but she cared madly about her daughter. The father was a hard-working guy, and her brothers were great.

And Annette herself was just this sweet, conscientious little starlet, who behaved just like the person you saw on TV. She was always respectful of what Disney—it was always “Mr. Disney”—wanted her to do. There wasn’t one Annette on TV and then some other personality in her private life, like many young actresses today who in their personal lives are drinkers or druggies or what have you—fun as that stuff is to read about. She was always committed to her work, doing the best job that she could. She was a very warm, very passionate girl. She wasn’t at all inward or reserved, just very open and expressive. On TV she was magnetic. Everybody loved Annette. She really deserved the stardom. She realized what kind of commitment that adulation involved and respected that. She was very conscientious in that way, a professional, trying to meet a heavy schedule, with no back drama.

Not that Walt Disney was hanging around her, exactly—he had his infrastructure of people who would account to him. Still, he was very hands-on and she’d see him whenever she had to at the studio. The executives and what-have-yous were always very much in evidence. She was a hot commodity and they wanted to protect her. They didn’t want a pregnant Mousketeer, or have her eloping to Tijuana with a used-car salesman.

So dating Annette was a frustrating situation. You had these two young kids who were hot to trot trying to deal with all the Victorian restrictions imposed on them, the chaperones and the teachers, and all of that. We’d say, “We need more privacy!” And that of course involved getting rid of the mother! But sexual frustration is a great stimulus to ingenuity and I came up with a plan. I went to one of the guys who were always around and got him to divert the mother by playing cards with her, so that Annette and I could lock lips and get in a room together alone. The chemistry was definitely there and we were getting more and more curious about each other.

Things got so bad with me and Annette and all the restrictions, that I was banging into walls or walking into doors. Sexuality, of course, back in the ’50s was a lot different than it is today; everything was just so religiously hypocritical and morally protected, but humans will be human and teenagers will get horny. And all I wanted to do was to get her alone, maybe in her room at night, with no supervision.

The funny thing is when I did get into her bedroom there must have been thirty stuffed animals on the bed—big bears, bigger tigers, giant monkeys. It was unbelievable! Some of them were bigger than I was. Annette was very passionate and intense. Having an affair with Annette was an absolute fantasy come true, but I realized it wasn’t going to go anywhere. She was always direct about where she wanted romance to go—wedding bells—and she ultimately married my booking agent Jack Gilardi, whom she’d met through all of us pop singers.

*   *   *

Anyway, around the time Annette and I broke up, I got this offer, toward the end of 1960, to play the lead in a film called
Look in Any Window.
I got to write and sing the title song, too.

It wasn’t as silly as the other two teen movies I’d done, so I signed on, playing the role of Craig Fowler, who was kind of a troubled teen, a common theme in these movies. They were always directing a message at the kids. You might call it an anti-teenage-delinquency film. The movie’s tagline was, “The shades are open and their morals are showing!” It was a Peeping Tom–type thing and I played the lead. Basically, it was just another teen movie with higher aspirations. Sure, I was spying on people, but it was because my parents didn’t understand me.… You know, I’m just doing it to see how normal people live. Unfortunately, the neighborhood is full of alcoholics and perverts!

Four

GLOBETROTTER

People think I went to Vegas, toured around the world, and made records in Europe because The Beatles came along and wiped us all out. Not true. I was playing in Vegas five years before anyone in this country had even heard of The Beatles. I was performing in London, Paris, and Tokyo while The Beatles were still playing in Hamburg.

It was all due to Irv’s smarts. In the documentary
Lonely Boy,
at one point Irv says, “God gave you something that he has not given to anyone in the last five hundred years.” That was a little over-the-top … maybe. Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and … Paul Anka? But just about everything else he did was genius. Irv was the first promoter/manager to foresee pitfalls for a pop singer in the rapid turnover in pop music. Performers came and performers went. After the bus tours Irvin began rethinking my career. He came up with two concepts: clubs and the world. These became the basis of my survival act. My style and my songs were smooth enough to work in the clubs, especially with a little tweaking of the arrangements. I was essentially a crooner anyway—my idols, after all, had been Frank Sinatra, Frankie Lane, and Johnnie Ray, not Chuck Berry and Little Richard. You couldn’t put hard rockers like Eddie Cochran or Gene Vincent in a nightclub in those days.

As for his idea of going global, my new record company, RCA Victor, was an international corporation. They not only made washing machines and TV sets, they made records in Europe and Japan. With the arrival of transistor radios and TV broadcasts, Irv saw a new era was dawning. He thought that eventually everyone would know what was going on anywhere in the world. He believed that’s why the Berlin Wall came down. It was the beginning of instant communication that would lead to e-mail, texting, Facebook—the tweeting age we’re in today.

*   *   *

It’s 1960. No Beatles, no Stones, no Herman’s Hermits even on the horizon, but my nonstop career life careened on as it had done for the previous three years and would continue for at least another four. After I opened up the Copacabana on June 23rd, I appear on
Coke Time
on TV. While touring I’m breaking in my nightclub act. From the Holiday Inn in Pittsburgh, I head to Reno. In August, I’m on the Italian Riviera. I’d become friends with Domenico Modugno, the songwriter/singer of “Volare,” and started making records in Italy in 1960 with an Italian version of “Tu Dove Sei,” which got to number four on the Italian charts.

In September, I’m performing in Rio de Janeiro, São Paolo, and Buenos Aires. Although I don’t get back there that often “My Home Town” is my current single and although I’m not yet nineteen years old, I have an album out called
Paul Anka Sings His Big 15
like I’ve been recording for dozens of years. My life was so hectic it was beginning to feel like I had been around for several decades.

January 1961, I went to Puerto Rico. I was working at the Caribe Hilton Hotel, a big hang for visiting Americans. Halfway through an afternoon of signing autographs in the F. W. Woolworth store on Ponce de Leon Avenue, a mob backed me to the wall in a handshaking and autograph-seeking frenzy. They wrecked the place, and the situation was becoming life-threatening. After nixing a scheme to spirit me away in a coffin, the authorities summoned a naval helicopter. They broke through a wall, put me in a box (that looked like a coffin), took me out of the store, ran up a set of stairs where there was a helicopter waiting to lift me off the roof.
The San Juan Star
blamed it on my psychic powers: “He does things that foul up the feminine endocrinic mechanism in an age range from lower teens to the middle 60s.” In February, I do
The Ed Sullivan Show,
and in April, Danny Thomas’s Show,
Make Room for Daddy
. Then I’m back at the Fontainebleau. And on to Boston, Pittsburgh, and then the Copacabana again.

Look in Any Window,
the Peeping Tom movie I’d made the year before, was released at the beginning of 1961 and was still playing in theaters that spring when I appeared on
The Perry Como Show
the night of May 10. The next day, my mother, Camy, died at the age of thirty-seven. So young, really, it’s hard to imagine, but she’d been having a tough time with the diabetes for years. She died from uremic poisoning, which affects the kidneys; it’s a degenerative development from diabetes. In those days they didn’t have the technology we have today to deal with these things. If my family was my core, my mother was the source of my strength—I got it all from her until the day I buried her.

There were hundreds of people in the church. I walked up to the open coffin. She looked beautiful in the same elegant dress she’d worn when she came to see me perform at the Copa. I was so overwhelmed with emotion at that moment I don’t know how I managed not to cry. I just knew I had to be strong. She used to show me her wedding ring, and say, “Your father gave me this. It will always be on my finger.” And there it stayed until the day I saw her lying in her coffin. That ring was from another time and place when bonds between husbands and wives were forever. It was symbolic of the ancient cycle of life of birth, love, death, and rebirth that went back hundreds of generations. I, too, wanted to find someone with whom I would share that eternal bond. Secretly I slipped the ring off her finger as a keepsake and to this day I still have it.

My mother’s death was devastating, utterly devastating. I had lost my biggest supporter from when I was just a boy, the one who always believed in me. It was also very traumatic for my father. After she died, he just sat in a darkened room for days on end. They were very much in love and it was very tough for him. He was a good man. He didn’t get involved with anyone for years and it was a long time before he got married again.