B009HOTHPE EBOK (19 page)

*   *   *

By 1962, I began to feel my record company, ABC-Paramount, was losing interest in me. They were no longer doing as much as they had done previously as far as promotion and distribution of my records. Also I kept seeing all these RCA products in stores. Washing machines, refrigerators, radios. There was RCA this and RCA that—all over the world. They were an international company and I wanted to be associated with a global corporation who could distribute my records around the world. Secretly I began talking to Robert York at RCA Victor Records, and we had discussions that went on over a period of six months. At the end of 1961, I asked ABC if I could buy my masters back. No one had done that before. Then some time toward the end of ’62, we got the deal pounded out. It took almost all of the savings I had, $250,000, but it was one of the wisest decisions I ever made. I knew the whole thing was going to come around again and I just had to sit on those masters until my songs had legs again. Before I left ABC, Ray Charles joined the label, and has a number one hit while I am there: “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” I Met Quincy Jones for the first time and he introduces me to new artist Lesley Gore. I wrote “Danny,” the other side of her big hit, “It’s My Party.”

By 1962, I am in my new offices on Fifty-seventh Street in New York. My dad was there working with me, and I can remember watching TV when the Cuban missile crisis occurred. In February, Elvis’s “Good Luck Charm” comes out and makes it into the chart’s Top 20. Hey, I was now on the same label as Elvis! It’s early 1962 and I’m kicking in with my new label, RCA Victor! We are getting ready for “Love Me Warm and Tender,” my first chart record for RCA. In May, I released “A Steel Guitar and a Glass of Wine” (Top 30 record) on RCA and in November I followed it with “Eso Beso” (“That Kiss”), my interpretation of the bossa nova, a musical craze that people were starting to pick up on. I formed my own production company, Camy Productions (for my late mother), to manufacture and package the albums I was going to produce under the auspices of my new label. Then I started Spanka, my own music publishing company, and got my dad to help me run the company. By August, I was hitting the road again, playing to capacity crowds in Spain. Then back to the Sands Hotel in Vegas, and, of course, the summer circuit: the Steel Pier, Freedomland, and so on.

Then Zanuck arrives in New York. He comes to hear me at the Copa where I’m premiering the theme song for
The Longest Day
because the movie is opening the following week, on October 4, 1962.

We’re sitting upstairs, bullshitting in the Copa lounge and he’s telling me how he loves the show and suddenly he says, “Do you remember how people were coming into our rooms and robbing us all the time?”

I go, “Yes, of course.”

“Well,” says Zanuck, “I want to thank you, because we caught the guys.”

Turns out that they brought in detectives from Paris and began eliminating hotel staff,
ba-da bing,
and after months of investigating they go to this one-room service waiter’s house, and up in his bedroom
on the dresser
in clear view is the little lighter I gave everybody on the set, with the inscription in curlicue English script. But the thief didn’t know English—it wasn’t that easy to read as it was—so for all he knew it could have said
MARSHMALLOWS IN HEAT
.

The detective picks up his lighter and it says,
STOLEN FROM PAUL ANKA
. Aha! So they go into the guy’s basement and they find all the missing shit, thanks to that one-cent lighter! And I didn’t even smoke. Still don’t!

*   *   *

In 1962 my song “Ogni Giorno” (“Every Day”) got to number one in Italy and I made my first Italian video of the song “Estate Senza Te” (“Summer Without You”) written by Carlo Rossi and Roby Ferrante and produced by Ennio Morricone. It was a pretty basic scenario featuring me on a pebbly beach climbing up and down on fishermen’s boats. I learned to sing songs in Italian phonetically the same way I learned to sing them in German and Japanese.

*   *   *

I still had to deal with my relationship with Anne. Anne’s parents were getting impatient, and gave us an ultimatum: “Either you get married or that’s it. You guys aren’t dating anymore!”

So we got married at the airport in Paris on February 16, 1963. First we had the civil ceremony at the local government office in the Sixteenth District, with six or eight people and a priest, and then we moved on to the airport, Orly. We had the big ceremony in a chapel there so we could get on our flight without any paparazzi hounding us. There was too much craziness, with photographers and all that stuff. After we said our “I do’s” we stepped onto the plane and flew to Switzerland for our honeymoon.

Here we were, two young kids on our honeymoon at the St. Moritz Palace Hotel in St. Moritz, Switzerland, one of the greatest ski resorts in the world, lying in bed in a suite overlooking the mountains—the view was so beautiful and awe-inspiring, it was like looking at a wide-screen movie through your bedroom window. Next door to us in the hotel was the distributor for Coca-Cola, a guy from Denmark. He had ten kids and they’d come pouring out of his suite every morning making an infernal racket, so there wasn’t much sleeping late. We both loved children so we didn’t mind. Anne was a lot more sophisticated than I was in the wine department—and the ways of the sophisticated French. Anne liked to have a bottle of red wine in the evening. I wasn’t used to drinking at all and every night I would get drunk on a couple of glasses of classic French wine and fall under the table. I just couldn’t handle it. We were two kids having a great time running around, skiing, skating, and riding in sleighs pulled by horses.

I didn’t care about anything else in the world but being with Anne. At that moment, a Martian invasion could have been decimating Planet Earth and as long as they respected the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on our door and know they could do what they wanted; we were in heaven.

Anne not only changed my life, she changed my whole image—I was now a married guy. I’d read an article in a magazine that many pop stars concealed the fact they’d got married because it might alienate their female fans. This was even true of The Beatles for a while. For a teen idol to marry a world-famous model was unheard of in those days. Now it’s the norm. But Irv said, “Don’t worry about it, it’s not going to affect you that way.”

However, the change in me was immense, and totally for the better, in the ways she helped to shape me, the things she introduced me to—her effect on my life was incalculable. She opened me up to art, fashion, wine, culture. Just the way I dress I owe to her. She was in the fashion business and she knew about style. Later on when I first went to France with Anne to work on
The Longest Day,
she took me to Cifonelli to get a suit made. She also introduced me to the incomparable John Lobb (a great shoemaker bought out by Hermès) and those essential Charvet shirts.

By September 1963, I was getting taken seriously in France, too.
Le Monde
called me “the Mozart of rock ’n’ roll.”
Le Figaro
said my interest now was in singing well, “far from the whimpering of his first successes.… He demonstrated that one can sing rhythmically without having convulsions on the floor.” The
New York Times
correspondent, Peter Grose, said, “The young man who brought American rock ’n’ roll to France five years ago is back in Paris. It was a gentler and more mature Paul Anka who reopened the renovated Olympia Music Hall last week.” The
New York Herald Tribune
was even more effusive:

There are few performers in active practice these days who have anything approaching his stage presence. He walks on and the audience is his at once. His brash assurance works as magic for he never seems to doubt his ability to control. He is a show in himself.

I got mobbed by teenagers at a PX in Frankfurt am Main when German versions of my songs were released there. I was still popular in parts of the world I know practically nothing about: Sweden, Holland, Finland, Turkey, Portugal, Greece, Poland, Belgium, Denmark, Spain. By 1963, I was considered an international institution, at least according to my manager Irv Feld. He put an ad in
Variety
showing a globe of the world with pennants stuck in it with the names of the countries that I’d performed in on them, under the heading, “WORLD FAMOUS!” above my picture.

Then, in 1963 I headed down to the Caribbean and Latin America: Nassau Bahamas, Jamaica, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Port of Spain Trinidad, Curacao, Caracas, Venezuela, Panama, and Mexico City. That year I was back in Italy again where I released my first Italian LP,
Italiano.

Back in Paris, again at the Olympia, there’s a riot, and six busloads of cops arrive to quell a crazed mob, while overly enthusiastic fans demolish a chimney as they try to break into the theater. And that was just the beginning. On went the tour through Sweden, Holland, Turkey, Portugal, Greece, Finland, Spain, and France.

I met the Polish president on an airplane in Switzerland and he invited me to Poland. The State Department then arranged for me to go. I did the whole tour for $15,000, paid for by the Bank of America. While there I see postcards with my picture on them, an indication that people in Eastern Europe were buying my records, while in Cuba they’re bootlegging them. In Poland I am playing to 10,000 to 20,000 people in stadiums. On November 22, I go to Warsaw but just before I go on stage I hear that President John Kennedy has been assassinated. I was unable to perform; I apologized to the audience and promised them I would come back, a promise I kept fifty years later, on November 16, 2011. Just to point out that things other than me were happening in the world, 1963 was also the year Frank Sinatra Jr. was kidnapped.

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One of my favorite places to perform and to see other acts is the Olympia, a grand French theater from the Belle Epoque. Built in 1888, it had been the mecca of the great French chanseurs. I saw Édith Piaf there, and Jacques Brel, and Bacharach conducting Marlene Dietrich. I remember going to see Charles Aznavour there with Anne. In 1995, they were going to tear it down to make a parking lot, and there was a huge outcry. Finally Jack Lang, the minister of culture, declared it a national treasure and it was saved. The Olympia was run by the classic, Gauloises-smoking, wine-imbibing,
femme fatale
–attracting Bruno Coquatrix. He was like an old Gaul out of the French comic
Asterix
in a Pierre Cardin suit. He was my Parisian godfather, my French uncle.

One evening I walked into the Olympia—it must have been around 1962—and I saw a shocking sight I’ll never forget. A British rock ’n’ roll group was on stage, they were the opening act but they were phenomenal. They had a whole look: the guitars, the songs,
the hair
. I was stunned. Today we’re all conditioned, but just to hear this new sound, you sat there and went “Holy shit! What
is
this?”

I had just come off of these tours on which you were used to hearing that recognizable, characteristic American sound, the R&B sound, augmented by these huge brass orchestras, and all of a sudden—this! They had been introduced by the MC as “Mesdames et messieurs, it is my pleasure to present, direct from England, les Beatles!” The
what
?

Pre-Beatles was a fun time to be around. It was a smaller scene, unlike today where eighteen dozen bands come out at a time and you don’t know who the hell they are. It was more an underground scene back then: everyone knew everything that was going on, radio was limited.

Until then it had been a potpourri of sounds: Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, The Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, then all of a sudden you’re in this hall with these screaming Frenchmen—and they weren’t even totally into it the way the kids at Shea Stadium would be. At first they sat there mesmerized and then the next thing you know they were whispering and analyzing it, as only the French can do.
Wait a minute, something is happening here—
that was the feeling, and what an absolutely boggling impact it turned out to be. Later that night I got to go backstage—I happened to be working there, too—and had my picture taken with them.

Before long, I got to hang out with The Beatles in London. I’d gone there with Anne, to the Colony Club, where the old Hollywood actor George Raft served as casino director. The first thing that became apparent about The Beatles was that they absolutely loved American music: Chuck Berry, Little Richard, The Everly Brothers—and especially Buddy Holly.

Paul and John were the curious ones; the other guys were quiet. Paul was the most forthcoming of them all—he was interested in everything, besieging me with all kinds of questions. We were backstage, talking about music, sounds, sound effects, audiences, girls.… Everything was small and cozy then, everybody was glad to seek each other out and you knew who you were every minute.

It was amazing being a firsthand witness to such a huge change in the making. They hadn’t been to the U.S. yet, so it was kind of cool knowing about them before anyone else. The Beatles are coming! The Beatles are coming! They wouldn’t know what hit them.

I had discovered them just as they were discovering us, but the thing is, Americans hadn’t really caught up. We weren’t living in the glare of the media, like we do today. I’d come home with these records and they’d say, “Vat, Beatles? Who are these guys? Whaddaya, crazy? Oy! Nobody’s interested!” But that was just part and parcel of American insularity. I’d come home and tell them about this fantastic French pastry that melted in your mouth, the croissant; I’d tell them about discothèques, bidets, about escargots. “They eat
what
? You mean they actually eat
snails
?” they said incredulously. I remember Sam Clark, the president of my company, staying at the Hotel George Cinq the first time he went to Paris with me on a promotional tour. He shit in the bidet. He didn’t know what it was, thought it was the toilet. Turns the taps on, and the shit splatters all over the walls and the ceiling. It was a different era back then—only 2 percent of Americans had passports. Think about that. We were a provincial society, and there was, of course, no Internet, no cells phones, no Twitter, no around-the-clock news coverage. I always say, if there’d have been CNN in 1939 Hitler would never have made it out of Germany.