by Paul Anka
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.
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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 w
ithout 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!)
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.
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nbsp; 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.