B009HOTHPE EBOK

by Paul Anka

  In Vegas, we’d meet and we’d talk. We’d talk about everything: music and girls and movies. You’d sit there with him drinking and there’d be all these guys around him, so it was mainly small talk: bullshit, songs, music, buh buh buh buh buh. Slowly he started coming over to see my show; he’d sit up there and I’d come back after the show and we’d talk music. And then all of a sudden he started growing out of his skin. There seemed to be a different Elvis; you saw this guy gradually becoming disfigured. What I’ve discovered is that all of us have our natural face and when you go too far with weight, you stretch your skin to the point where you no longer have your real face anymore. If you’re a little overweight it’s livable—most of the world’s overweight—but Elvis was way beyond that.

  And his whole thing near the end with me was very disturbing, with all his graciousness and all he was going through. “My Way” meant so much to him as a song, he was going to do it. And I’d say, “Elvis, it’s not really your kind of song.” And he’d say, “Nooo, Paulie, but those words, they mean so much to me. Boy, I want to do that song one day.” It was one of the last songs he recorded. In the end, that song and those words had resonance for him but not in the way I intended. Basically, given Elvis’s pathetic state at the end, it was in the opposite sense that the words had had for Sinatra. There was nothing defiant or heroic about Elvis at that point.

  It was the same way he lived his life—he destroyed himself. Just went too far. He became another statistic. Life is about construction and destruction. It’s all in that balance, everything we see when we can look far enough. When you lose track of that, you self-destruct. And that’s what happened to my talented friend.

  I was in Vegas, got up, turned on the news. Elvis Presley—gone. I cried that day. He was a cool guy, a nice man, but was too young to go. Really blew it.

  I got to know Elvis pretty extensively when he first started coming to Vegas. He would come over to Caesars Palace, see the show, come over and visit, sit backstage. Through that whole evolution, from when he hit town to when things started going bad for him, and where he started losing control, I would sit with him and just try to tell him, “Man, you’ve got to get it together, you can’t live this twilight half life. Get ahold of this situation or it’s going to pull you under.” But he couldn’t—would usually only see me in his suite.

  His social terror was extreme. I’d say, “Elvis why don’t we just go out to dinner, go for a walk?” “Oh, no!” He was terrified of that. You’d go over to his hotel—we both worked the Hilton—and he’d have aluminum foil on the windows; he never wanted to see the daylight. He’d go up to Vail, Colorado, and I’d be up there with my family skiing—in the daylight. Elvis wouldn’t get up until the sun went down, and only then would he go up on the mountain with the floodlights turned on, to snowmobile. He was that kind of creature. Nice guy, but so locked in that prison of celebrity, of who he was, and his image, the person inside shriveled up. Sometimes you sat and talked to him and it was as if he were already gone. You couldn’t save him.

  Elvis imprisoned himself, and lived in a perpetual night. And then there were the guns. He hated Robert Goulet, and every time he was on TV, Elvis would shoot the television. There were bullet holes all over the room. He was shooting at ghosts and in the end became one himself.

  * * *

  It must have been something about the air in those casinos that kept affecting Sinatra now and then that got him doing crazy stuff well into the ’70s. He never learned. Frank was King Frank and he thought the rules simply didn’t apply to him. I was there the night this casino boss Sandy Waterman pulled a gun on Sinatra in the casino. After the incident, in the Sands coffee shop with Carl Cohen, I thought I had seen it all.

  A few weeks earlier Sinatra and his neighbor Danny Schwartz won $2 million at Caesars’ baccarat table. This particular night Sinatra, gambling on his own, was playing $8,000 a hand and ended up in debt to the casino to the tune of $400,000. Although he still had a handful of white $500 chips, he demanded another $25,000 worth of markers, but was refused. Sinatra flew into a rage, became abusive, insulting the dealer with vile language and threatening them with losing their jobs.

  The pit boss called Caesars executive vice president Sandy Waterman, who tried to reason with him: “C’mon, Frank, you and Dan just won two million a few weeks ago. You took it with you. Now you owe us. The boys want their money.” Frank threw his white chips in Waterman’s face and slapped him across the forehead. At that point the generally cool Waterman lost it. He went to his suite and returned with a loaded gun which he pointed at Sinatra’s head. “Listen, you! If you ever lay a hand on me again, I’ll put a bullet through your head.” Frank dismissed it, saying that playing with guns went out with Humphrey Bogart movies. Sinatra’s sidekick Jilly managed to knock Waterman’s gun to the floor. Waterman, afraid for his life, ran to the cashier’s room to escape from Sinatra’s rage. Frank tried to push his way through the door, but Sinatra’s left arm—in a sling from a recent vein surgery—got crushed in the door and blood started spurting everywhere. Sinatra was rushed to his third-floor suite, where a doctor was sent for.

  * * *

  I’d done the theme for The Longest Day, I’m doing Vegas, touring Europe, I’ve got “A Steel Guitar and a Glass of Wine” and “Love Me Warm and Tender” in the charts—I’m feeling good about myself. Okay, I have to figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m at a critical juncture here. Sure, I was working steadily, but I knew it could all go very wrong—because when hard rock hit, the venues all changed again. I still had my Vegas base, thank God, and I was still getting gigs out there. But a few years, 1962 to 1966, were hard. Everybody was waiting for that next something from me, and that only came with “My Way” in 1967. What I was writing wasn’t all that different from all the other stuff I’d written and I knew it. I hadn’t really crossed over that line into new territory. “My Way” changed everything, the whole feeling about me shifted. It gave me a new prestige and respectability. Everyone started saying, “Okay, there’s some legs here, this is something entirely different, this is Anka Mach Two.”

  As I got to know Sinatra and hung out with him through the years, he’d always joke with me about writing him a song. I was always very intimidated by that because I didn’t have the balls to give him “Lonely Boy” or whatever else I was writing at the time—what would he do with that stuff anyway? I’d heard him when we were hanging, ranting on about mindless rock ’n’ roll and moronic rock ’n’ rollers. How was I going to write something for him that he’d conceivably want to record?

  * * *

  The first time I met Sinatra was at Trader Vic’s, it must have been 1958; he was sitting at the next table. Sinatra hated rock ’n’ roll, and dismissed it as “written for the most part by cretinous goons” and went on to say that by means of its “almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty lyrics, it manages to be the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the earth. It is the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.” But Frank liked me—and I wasn’t exactly a hard rocker, either. Maybe my clergyman’s answer to rock ’n’ roll was less threatening to him than the guitar-driven rock ’n’ roll of Elvis and Chuck Berry.

  Now it’s the sixties, I want to give him a song, but most of the stuff I’m writing is not really in Frank’s genre—to put it mildly. “Lonely Boy”? I don’t think so. “Puppy Love”? Not too likely. In the back of my head I want to write that song, but I’m scared shitless. I’d be competing with guys like Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen. I don’t have those kind of chops yet. It wasn’t until 1965 or 1966 that Sinatra began putting out pop records, because by then he saw the writing on the wall. The long and winding road to writing a song for Frank began in 1967 when I had rented a house in Mougins, a quaint little town in the south of France near Cannes, and one day sitting by the pool with Anne and my daughters heard this song on the radio. It was a pop record,
light rock ’n’ roll: “Comme d’habitude,” which means, “as usual.” It’s a story about a couple breaking up, a very French lyric: le money, les eyelashes, le coffee, whatever. It was okay, it wasn’t a huge hit. But I heard something in the melody that grabbed me.

  It had been written in February of that year by Gilles Thibautt and Jacque Revaux, recorded by Claude François, in September and October, and released by Barclay Records on November 3rd. On December 17, I negotiated to acquire the rights for my company, Spanka Music, with Eddie Barclay at the Plaza Hotel in Paris. I knew Eddie Barclay well, a larger-than-life guy who’d had seven wives—he was Mr. France. He was close to Quincy Jones, who, to this day, is one of my dearest friends. Eddie and I had become close, I’d done some business with him, published the James Brown catalog in Europe with him, so I called him up and told him what I wanted to do: take the melody, write new words to it. He said, “Yeah, take whatever you want. It’s not doing so well, you want it?” It was a small industry back then, so he gave me the song—no money. It was just two pieces of paper. I mean, we weren’t buying the pyramids here. He gave me the publishing, the right to re-create the song. I went back to New York and put it in a drawer. But I never forgot it was in that drawer—it was in there, palpitating, waiting for the moment I’d awaken it.

  I knew there was something special to this song. I heard the melody as a foundation to something very interesting—but what? It just had such a solid base to it, I knew that the story was going to be very dramatic and have a grand sweep to it. And I knew the kind of story I was going to lay over it would be very graphic. It was inspiring to me but I didn’t quite know what to do with it yet. I began playing “Comme d’habitude” on piano again, and everything came together. Then it really grew into itself. I transformed it on piano, got the right vibe to it, taking it away from the original Europop version. But I hadn’t figured out the hook yet.

  Sometime in 1967, I’m in Florida performing at the Fontainebleau Hotel. Sinatra was doing a film down there, one of those detective movies, Tony Rome, I think, and I get a call from Jilly Rizzo. He says, “Kid, come on over, the old man wants to have dinner with you.” I go and have dinner with Frank at a restaurant. We’re at dinner, and Frank tells me that he’s going to retire from show business. He’s had enough. The Rat Pack thing was starting to wane, it was splintering off, which made him feel vulnerable. He was still getting harassed by the FBI because of his mob connections.

  Frank was vulnerable. There were irritating kinds of things going on in his life all the time, to the point where he decided to do one last LP with Don Costa, who had always been my guy.

  “Kid,” he said, “I’m fed up, I’m going to do one more album, and I’m out of here.” And after he’d finished bitching about his problems, he lightened up and said, “Hey, kid, you never wrote me that song.”

  “Frank, you got me there. I gotta think about that.”

  “Don’t take too long!”

  When I contemplated the idea of Sinatra retiring I got quite emotional. I went back to New York. It’s one in the morning and I’m haunted by the idea that he’s quitting. I couldn’t quite accept it.

  I was living in a midtown apartment in the 70’s at the time. I would write songs on my Selectric typewriter. I was afraid to start, because he was into Gershwin and all those other jazz-tinged composers. He never liked pop music and had only dabbled in it at this point.

  I’ll never forget the night. It’s about one in the morning, I know there’s a storm moving in, the atmosphere is charged, there’s a sense of drama in the air. I’m all alone, playing this melody on the piano, writing it as if Frank were writing it, in the person of Frank, tuning in Sinatra’s vibe, a sense of foreboding and finality. I get that first line, “And now the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.” The rain is getting heavier. The great legend is leaving the stage, the lights going out. It needed to be operatic, a big, swelling moment. I start typing like a madman—forget the craft, I told myself, just write it the way he talks: “Ate it up … spit it out.” I finish it in about four hours, and edit it down to what I think it should be, give or take, a few optional lines. That’s the way I do it, building it up, adding, rewriting, etc., and then cutting it back until only the essential emotional core is there.

  Little did I know I was to write a song that would ultimately revitalize his career and change the direction of mine.

  I had the first verse done and then—wow! I said, this is for Frank. I’m going to finish it for him. The title, “My Way,” which came to me first, gave the story a particular feel, and I went along with it. Sometimes you write something very special that starts to write itself. I know that from the get-go. The song has to be treated as a person in a sense, the person who is evoking those feelings. It was a departure for me—I would never under normal circumstances write something so chauvinistic, narcissistic, in-your-face, and grandiose. The reason I pursued it was that I knew now that this was for Sinatra and that he could pull it off. One unexpected side effect of “My Way” was that it came out right on the eve of the Me Generation—it was all, me, me, me which is possibly why the song became so popular among a very diverse group of singers.

  I finished typing my final draft of “My Way” at five A.M. in the morning. I know Frank is at Caesars, I know he’s offstage, drinking at the bar and I know he’s there with Don Costa, because I’m also working with Don, and I say, “Frank I’ve got something very interesting, I’m gonna bring it out.” I then flew to Las Vegas in August 1968 and I played it for Sinatra. I knew Frank loved the song when I originally played it for him but he always wanted to be cool, so all he said was “That’s kooky, kid. We’re going in.” Coming from him, you have to understand, that meant he was ecstatic.

  They carefully planned to record it when Sinatra had a week off. Frank went to Palm Springs, rested, rehearsed the song, knew it well—doing what he liked to call woodshedding. Meanwhile I called Claude François, the French writer, on December 7, to tell him Frank planned to record it. Frank and and his daughter, Nancy, went into the studio on December 30. He knew it so well he sang it in one take. All the musicians were there, this huge orchestra playing live. Everybody who’d worked with him through the years was there, they all stood up and gave him a standing ovation.

  I get a phone call from the studio on Sunset Boulevard and Sinatra played it to me over the phone and I started crying. And that was it. That was the turning point. As a writer, it was like a miracle; it was hugely important for me to have Sinatra record a song I’d written finally come true. They decide to make “My Way” the single off the forthcoming album and I send Claude François a copy.

  “My Way” is released on March 28, 1969—in May it gets to #27 on the charts. In January 1970, I receive a special citation from BMI for a million plays on American radio. In December 1970, I meet Claude François for the first time in Paris—unfortunately he never got to meet Sinatra, he was electrocuted in the shower with a hair dryer under bizarre circumstances. “My Way” goes on to be a megahit for Sinatra, the Coca-Cola theme song, and the most-played, most-covered song in the world. I wrote a second song for Frank, “Let Me Try Again,” which was the follow-up, but nobody expected that lightning was going to strike twice.

  Hanging out with Sinatra and knowing what he was about, the song came out of that. Everything in that song is him. I loved him. I could never have set it up as he did. It was written for Sinatra and it went to him first—no one else heard it.

  I was with RCA at the time and when they caught wind that I’d given the song to Frank they were furious. “Why don’t you keep it for yourself?” they asked me. “Hold it!” I told them. Forget the ego thing and forget the money and the guarantees, forget everything—none of that stuff means anything here.… The old rules don’t apply. The song has to be treated as if it were a person in a sense, and that person was Sinatra.

  There was never any question of singing it myself. I couldn’t have pulled it off. The song woul
dn’t have had anywhere near the impact that Sinatra gave it.

  “My Way” was Sinatra’s way—and that was the right way, basically the only way. Although I do like the way Sid Vicious did it. At first I thought he was just goofing on the song. He starts out making fun of it, but then he gets into it, gets swept up in it. It’s as if the song midway reaches out and grabs him by the foot.

  I really questioned whether I was going to grant the license or not. But after I made some calls and realized his intent was sincere, I said, yeah, I’ll let him do it. He’s entitled. You know, I wasn’t concerned about the copyright. Sid went in there, took primarily a jazz band in Paris, pulled some tubes out of the amps, and after his vision of it, and I think Jonesie—Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols—added some stuff later. It was believable and unique enough that when Scorsese called to use it at the end of Goodfellas, I was all for it. It had an anger to it, a voicing of his resentments.

  Sid’s version is not as extreme as what I did later on with Rock Swings—although in my case in reverse—taking those songs and doing big band versions, but at that time it was shocking, when you first heard it. It was also very prescient. Prophetic for Sid, too. Sid Vicious’s version isn’t my favorite, and I can’t say honestly that I would listen to it every week, but what he did worked as both a goof and a sincere take on it, which is a pretty amazing accomplishment in and of itself. Sid put himself into the song, and he really did do it his way. It’s perfectly in sync with Sid Vicious going down that staircase in the video. An incredible visual, no doubt about that.