B009HOTHPE EBOK (22 page)

Now I wait until I’m in the mood. It’s mostly at night or early morning around six o’clock. About 90 percent of the pencil and score-sheet labor goes on between three and six in the morning. Now I know to just wait because I know my pattern. I won’t write for a month and then I get a feeling and I’ll just knock it out. I keep a typewriter beside the grand piano so I can work on lyrics and melody simultaneously. When I finish a song, I’ll sing it into a tape recorder and send the cassette off to one of my arsenal of music arrangers so they can score it. The longest time it took me to write a song was “My Way.” Sometimes songs have a quirky double life. “Diana,” for instance, was given a new lease on life in Britain, due to the marriage—and breakup—of Lady Diana Spencer and Prince Charles.

I often wonder where songs come from and how I get to write them. It doesn’t add up that this is what I ended up doing with my life, coming from where I did, born in a town that size, and from my background. Who ever thought of becoming a songwriter in Ottawa? Why wasn’t I a hockey player? Lord knows I played enough hockey, but I wasn’t any good—I was short and I was ducking all the time. Even now I can easily conceive of myself getting on skates and playing hockey—that doesn’t seem remote at all. But who dreams of being a songwriter when you’re sixteen? Elton John? Bob Dylan?

When you’re writing a song, all of a sudden you know when you hit that area—your body reacts like a pinball machine that has just hit the jackpot. But as to how that happens, I don’t have a clue. It’s a weird thing, really. You’re dealing with air. By and large, music is magic; when the pinball machine lights up, it’s the best feeling in the world.

At first, as a songwriter for other people, I trapped myself. When I started out I wrote songs and sang them and some would become hits. But since I recorded all the songs I wrote up to a certain point, whenever I offered one of my songs to another singer, they’d say, “If it’s not good enough for you to do, why should I do it? Am I just getting your rejects?” At that point I decided I would have to invent another Paul Anka, the one who is mostly a songwriter and is known for writing for others. That Anka had to come first. The most important thing was to get the part.

In the late ’60s I began to observe how French songwriters like Charles Aznavour and Georges Brassens worked. Although it’s not easy to translate what they were doing lyrically, it was through French songwriters that I learned how to use emotions. And I knew we were ready for that style of song here.

The message of my music is the romantic ideal—my songs are all about the strongest emotion in life: love. I’m a writer for lovers and their problems. I’ve never written for what was currently in vogue. There will always be enough people out there who deal in the tangled game of love and want to hear a lyric that reflects the state they’re in. “Do I Love You” is a poetic love song. I write for women in that lost group of souls who still believe in one man. I could never come on like a Rolling Stone. “One Man Woman/One Woman Man,” “I Don’t Like to Sleep Alone,” “(I Believe) There’s Nothing Stronger than Our Love,” “Anytime (I’ll Be There),” “Make It Up to Me in Love,” “Everybody Ought to Be in Love,” “This Is Love,” “As Long as We Keep Believing,” “Think I’m in Love Again,” “I’ve Been Waiting for You All of My Life,” “Hold Me ’Til the Morning Comes.” That’s ten years of love songs—1974 to 1984.

I wrote “(You’re) Having My Baby” for women who wanted children but didn’t necessarily want to be involved in a relationship—because men are not as honest in relationships as women. I try to find a common theme and reach as many people as I can, not only through my lyrics but also the melody that carries it. I generally try to represent myself with signature-type songs, like Lionel Richie did. And every decade, I set out to make a statement that says, Anka is still relevant. I’ll always have something to say.

I’ve always been a businessperson, always thinking of a way to last in this crazy, mixed-up industry. Collecting money owed you was a tricky business in the early days of pop music. There was a lot of looseness and monkey business in the accounting in the beginning—still is—regarding how the record companies dealt with royalty statements. We were all selling a lot of records, but not seeing anything like the money owed us. All of us performers knew we weren’t getting the royalties and money from records due us. There was a lot of funny business going on and we were all aware of it, but there wasn’t anything we could do about it. After I got screwed financially, I wanted to take care of my own business, which meant I had to be aware of what was out there myself.

I’ve never wanted to have teams of people around me kissing my ass and telling me how great I am. I never had an overkill of personnel in my entourage like pop stars do today, but still it’s in the nature of the business to have a lot of people hanging around and their natural inclination was to pump you up. You’ve got road managers, publicity people, managers, people from the record company. Even though it was minimal it was still an entourage. But I didn’t have a posse of fifteen people fawning around me, cocooning me like artists do today.

Generally, I tried to make myself aware of how the industry worked. I wanted to see how I fit it in. But then there’s people who make it in pop music brilliantly by
not
fitting in. With Bob Dylan, I understood his talent. I saw he was very, very different from the rest of us. That voice! For one thing he was not a pop writer. At some point, as a writer, I realized he had made a radical shift in his lyrics. Many crooners and big band singers didn’t like him at all, didn’t get rock, period. Sinatra couldn’t stand the sound of rock music, he never wanted to sing it, and he
hated
the sound of Dylan’s voice. He never got any of that stuff. And yet, there Dylan was, at Sinatra’s eightieth birthday celebration, singing “Restless Farewell,” with Frank beaming. Go figure.

I don’t know that it’s necessarily totally true that romance is gone out of today’s music altogether. Rap is a new and aggressive kind of music. Its frequently misogynistic lyrics certainly have turned the traditional romantic lyric on its head, but underneath all the bravado and braggadocio, it’s all about relationships between men and women. I’m not crazy about rap, but I don’t think I’d like to see the same kind of music wall-to-wall, year in and year out. The way music evolves and changes is essential to society—and inevitable.

I started out as a songwriter and that’s primarily what I am today. The performer in me developed through the years. It’s rougher to write for myself than for someone else, but it’s a writer’s world today. I’m glad I’m not just a performer. I’d be just as insecure and as batty as any of them.

I’ve written songs for The 5th Dimension, Sonny and Cher, Engelbert Humperdinck, Andy Williams, and The Partridge Family. Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand, Linda Ronstadt, and Robbie Williams have recorded songs of mine.

Barbra Streisand did “Jubilation”—that was around the time Jon Peters was still her hairdresser. Next thing you know he’s her producer, and he’s producing mega motion pictures. Barbra can sing the phone book. She has no problem singing
anything
. She’s got one of the great voices, like Celine Dion. When I did
Body of Work,
my duets album, I had Celine and Julio Iglesias on it. I did “It’s Hard to Say Goodbye” with Celine, “She’s a Lady” with Tom Jones, “Hold Me ’Til the Morning Comes” with Peter Cetera, and “Do I Love You” with my daughter Anthea (and Barry Gibb). I tried to choose the songs to suit each artist’s personality. Your songs are like your children; you can’t really compare them. You have that special feeling for all of them. But my favorite interpretations of my songs include Brook Benton’s “My Way” and Buddy Holly’s “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.”

After you get to a certain age, it’s not that easy to get airplay. But you can still write songs, and if you’ve been a performer yourself, you have a certain advantage. If it’s “My Way” for Frank, I can do Frank as I’m writing, the way he phrased a lyric, the way he might say, “ate it up and spit it out”—with that swagger—but I can’t carry that off onstage. You can only write well for others when you know their limitations. The song has to fit the image we have of them, but also their self image—you want to flatter them by letting them know you wrote it just for them—or, better still, let them think that they could have written it for themselves.

A composer writing a song—for someone else to sing—is no different than a screenwriter creating a movie for a big star. What’s the actor like? What kind of situations would he be in? I thought of Johnny Carson when I was writing the
Tonight Show
theme. I thought: cool, late night, big band—and the rest was easy.

*   *   *

My mad road map right up until 1965 consisted of constant touring, clubs, TV shows, traveling. I was reeling from the enormity of these changes in my career. I traveled and toured so much I rarely got time off to be with Anne. Vacations became important. I tried to fit in three or four of them a year just so we could be together. One evening when we were in New York together I invited Anne to go to dinner with Frank Sinatra at Jilly’s bar—something I stupidly thought she’d be thrilled by. She hated the place. At one point she tells me she has to go to the ladies room but she’s scared. It’s dark in there, the characters were sinister looking and she was the best-looking girl in the room. Sinatra overhears this and says, “I’ll take you, honey.” He takes her by the hand and waits for her and brings her back to the table. Pure Sinatra gesture. He loved to play Sinatra.

Dinner with Teddy Kennedy wasn’t quite so charming. We’re at this French restaurant La Grenouille. Teddy gets plastered. He’s a terrible drunk. He was notorious. His dialogue was getting filthier and more obnoxious with gutter talk “Cocksucker did this…” and “Cocksucker said that … Hell, a penis is a fucking penis, any cock looks alike.” All this vile stuff. The way Al Pacino behaved when he got plastered in that restaurant in
Scarface
. Anne and I weren’t sitting together. She was on the opposite side of the table. All of a sudden I saw this look on her face. I looked back at her as if to say, “What’s wrong?” She simply said, “I would like to go.” “Are you not feeling well?” I asked. No explanation, she just insisted. “We go now. Please!” Off we went and as we left I probably looked at her as if she was absolutely nuts. She just said, “I can’t tell you now but I’ll tell you later.” She’d only say she’d been exposed to things that she’d never been exposed to in her life. It turned out that he’d put his hand on Anne’s knee. And she freaked, naturally.

We were trying to be together as much as possible, but to her dismay that meant she ended up in Vegas with me quite a bit, a place she’d barely heard of—and hated with a passion: a vulgar, glitzy place full of mobsters, hookers, gamblers, and showgirls.

Sometimes it was just pure slapstick. One night in Vegas I’d made arrangements to meet singer Jerry Vale, who had a huge Italian following in the ’60s and ’70s. I had written a song for him and he was coming to hear it. But we didn’t agree on where. Before I got in the shower, I told Anne, “The valet is coming to pick up my suit. Tell him to have it back in time for the show tonight and give him a dollar.” What transpires instead is that Jerry Vale comes over to my bungalow and knocks on the door. Anne opens the door, hands him the suit, gives him a dollar, and shuts the door, telling him to have it back by seven o’clock. A flustered Jerry Vale called on the home phone in the lobby. It’s all new to her—she had found herself in this upside-down world where night is day, the bad guys are the good guys, and there are no clocks anywhere.

Six

VEGAS

There’s a gorgeous woman perching at the bar in a low-cut dress, sipping a dry martini. She’s looking at you over the rim of her glass, knowing you’re in with the in crowd, and she wants to be there, too. It’s perfection. A song, a tinkling piano. The ice is clinking in the glass, the music is soft, the lights are low, the crooner up there on the stage knows how you feel about that girl, makes your dreams come true. All your problems evaporate. After a couple of mellow verses and melancholy choruses and a few shots of Johnnie Walker, even your heartbreak starts to get a golden glow. Frank—Frank Sinatra—tie loosened, he knows what you’re going through, he’s been there himself … many times. Just about every song he’s ever sung, as a matter of fact. Just hang in there, kid, the worst is yet to come, “So make it one for my baby, And one more for the road.” You’re in good company, the best company in the world. Sinatra is the only guy I ever knew who, when you heard the first five seconds of a song, put you in the mood right away.

The very first time I walked into the Copa showroom in Vegas, I knew this was the kind of place you never want to leave. You want to live there forever. You settle in the big upholstered booth, a waitress in fishnet stockings and a tiny sequined skater’s skirt is asking if you’d like another drink. “Oh! Omigod!” she says, “It’s
you
! Aren’t you the guy who does ‘Put Your Head on My Shoulder’? I
love
that song! Can I get your autograph?”

Frank introduces me from the stage, hangs up the mic, and walks off to huge applause. Across the table some babe is giving you a wink. Frank is telling Dean Martin a joke, the table is a haze of smoke. A couple at the next table are requesting you sing a song,
their
song. He’s telling you it’s the song they played when they made love the first time. The wife is saying they named their first girl Diana. You’re their idol, and if you’ll just sing “You Are My Destiny” and dedicate it to their wife, they’d be
in heaven
. And all I got to do is what I love to do. Get up on that stage and sing. Gimme an A.…

From the time I first heard about the Rat Pack I wanted to be around these guys, and amazingly they took me in. You can learn a lot from people you idolize. You see the kind of impact they’re making and you want to emulate that. Sammy became a close friend. He taught me a great deal in terms of style, energy, and pacing, and so forth. Frank, the same way. He had that incredible breath control, something he used to say he picked up from Tommy Dorsey. He hung around the musicians so much he had the rhythms down; they were second nature to him. He had it down to where he could take a long phrase and really stretch a lyric out like a rubber band.