by Paul Anka
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.
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 sophisticat
e 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.