B009HOTHPE EBOK

by Paul Anka

  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.

  * * *

  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.

  I started telling everybody I knew about this great group over there called The Beatles and how I felt they were going to cause a major change in the music business. And change the business they did. And here I was, promoting these guys that almost put me out of the business!

  I’d come back and talk to Norman Weiss (my agent who later became my manger) and Sid Bernstein, one of the other agents that worked at GAC, and say, “You gotta listen to this!” And eventually it seeped in. That’s how they eventually wound up on a little label: Vee-Jay Records out of Chicago.

  Finally Norman listened to me, went over there, met with Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, and brought The Beatles back and put them on The Ed Sullivan Show in ’64.

  Oh, they were slow on the uptake—everything traveled at a snail’s pace back then. They didn’t get it. “Love Me Do” probably sounded very primitive to them. It was so new sounding that they couldn’t wrap their ears around it. The business in those days was very basic. It was more like one guy phoning the next guy about an act, and if they got a bite, they’d mail you a picture. There were no fax machines, everything was slower, more cautious, you couldn’t maneuver the world then the way you can today.

  It took time for people to really grasp what you were talking about. You didn’t just jump on a plane (or online) and go “Look! Something amazing’s happening over here.” It cost money and there wasn’t a lot of that around. Guys weren’t flying to Great Britain at the drop of a hat. Still, things were about to change. Everybody had been so confident that we were it, but, as it turned out, we weren’t.

  Changes were happening in the music business in part because of changes in technology, the advent of the stereo sound system, FM radio, three- and four-track tape machines, the electric guitar, transistors—all developments that made rock ’n’ roll possible.

  I remember in 1958 when Boeing and Douglas introduced their commercial jetliners, the 707 and the DC-8. I was very green when I first began traveling, and when they first took me to the airport to get on a jet I was scared shitless. I didn’t know what a jet plane was. No, I’m not getting on that! I want a plane with those things that go round and round! What do you mean jet plane? What are you, crazy? I looked at the engine: You mean air goes in there?

  The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, all those guys, were electronically driven, particularly in terms of guitars, making a personal statement through the way they played their instruments. I could never have used my piano the way a guitar player could use his guitar. Unless you’re a flamboyant showman like Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis, you’re not going to set fire to the keyboard or play it behind your back.

  What The Beatles were laying down was a road map of vibe and attitude with guitars. The Everlys’ harmonies were a huge influence on The Beatles and The Hollies, as they were on Simon and Garfunkel. I always felt that although I had supposedly “made it,” I was quite a different entity than this bunch and always had to keep my eye on the ball. I needed to think of novel strategies just to stay ahead of the curve.

  When I think of the difference between the way the fans saw me and the way they saw Buddy Holly, I feel it was because his approach was so personal and “in house,” if you will. He played the guitar and The Crickets were his band, not like the kind of pickup bands I was using on the road. It was his bass player and his drummer playing both on record and on stage. My approach was to envision a big orchestra and creating an enveloping atmosphere around it. The Brit Invasion bands wouldn’t have been intimidated by that kind of sound; it wasn’t the kind of thing a Brit garage band could attempt, anyway—or even wanted to. They may have been in awe of the Don Costa arrangements but that was irrelevant to them because they could never orchestrate a song like that—and had no wish to. Theirs was strictly a customized sound. Like me, Chuck Berry had pickup bands but it was always him on guitar. The guitar became the predominant means of getting a song across and the concept of the group created a sense of camaraderie with their audiences.

  Buddy laid down a vibe that was unique to him. No technology. One microphone for him, one in front of the band. Nothing like today.

  The British were taken with the concept of the group, of three or four instruments—a riff-driven, wailing guitar assault. That’s where I separated from the pack, because I wasn’t ever going to be that guy in any shape or form. I wasn’t a guitar player and I wasn’t in a group. I wasn’t going to be initiating any next wave.

  Is there life after The Beatles? I felt a great frustration, as did other performers. Americans as a whole hadn’t really embraced pop music in the ’50s. The media as we know it was virtually nonexistent; fashion hadn’t kicked in with the sound. Elvis was being shown from the waist up. No one really believed pop music would become such a big part of the culture. It was just a fad. Then came the British Invasion, and that turned it around. Suddenly, rock became part of the fashion industry. It keyed into advertisi
ng, lifestyle, everything. There was a whole fashion change going on, and I was getting with it, wearing bell-bottom trousers. The whole rock scene as I knew it had changed and I needed to get a new wardrobe.

  The Beatles dominated everything right from the beginning. Hit after hit after hit. It was at that point that American artists just started to get wiped out. Something new and strange was happening—it was like a sonic comet had hit the earth and evaporated a huge segment of the American musical industry.

  It didn’t really bust out until The Beatles. Until then, the pop music business just wasn’t accepted by the mainstream, and Madison Avenue hadn’t embraced it. We were just looked upon as a novelty. Once it was accepted by Madison Avenue, pop music instantly became part of the culture. Once The Beatles hit, the media was all over us, whereas prior to that they wouldn’t even look at us. All you ever heard was, “Oh, it’ll never last” and “Burn those records” and “Elvis Presley is disgusting and vulgar.”

  So, after I recovered from the initial shock, I loved what The Beatles had wrought. As a businessman, I looked at it and said, “Okay, I’m off the radio now, because all you hear is British Invasion music, but I’ve had a good five-year run and now I have to figure out a new direction. On the other hand, the Brit Invasion had now gotten the whole world listening to music. I figured there’s gotta be a place for me in there somewhere. I said, “Wow, there’s a bigger window, greater things can happen, and everybody’s got their time. I’m still writing and I’m still touring Europe and I’m even selling records in Italy.” So I embraced it. No choice, anyway. That’s where the hook-up with RCA records really worked for me. RCA had studios, and distribution in Europe and around the world. You get a much better quality record commercially if it’s produced and manufactured in the country where it’s going to be sold and played on the radio. The arrangers in these different countries all have different conceptions of how a record should sound in the area it’s intended for.