B009HOTHPE EBOK

by Paul Anka

  * * *

  As we fell into the seventies and eighties, everything became disposable. We learned to live in a disposable society. It was always funny to see all those changes, what with the Neil Bogarts, the Jon Peters, and Peter Gubers. The movies—Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider—reflected the new climate in Hollywood. The power started being taken away from the old guard.

  It just wasn’t my time. You sit there saying to yourself, “Maybe the older I get, things may revert, and maybe I could be ‘in’ again.” That sort of thing happens a lot in pop music. It was getting to the point where I was old enough to become new again. You are constantly watching the demise of this or that person or style of music. That’s what life is all about. Construction and destruction. Something else comes in and defuses something else. It has been an interesting trip, to say the least.

  I began waiting to see what I could do next. I had a family I loved, I had kids to raise … but I also had this career that was not where I wanted it to be. The business as I knew it had been wiped out.

  In the meantime I ran after a performing career. I thought if I could be a performer and have those kind of legs, I would always work. But as to what to write, that was my dilemma—I had to bide my time. I kept waiting for my chance, to see where my writing could lead me into that next thing. You’re always waiting for that next window, but you can never really anticipate these changes until they arise.

  I had tested this song a few years before it came out, and the disc jockeys told me they couldn’t put a record out with a singer talking about his wife having a baby; it just wouldn’t fly. Anne postponed having children for a couple of years after we got married but then they came one after another: Alexandra was born November 25, 1966. It was a natural birth and I went through it with Anne. “I now understand the word ‘miracle,’” I told the Philadelphia Daily News a few days later. Right after she was born I had to leave for Philadelphia to do The Mike Douglas Show. Amanda was born in ’68, Alicia in ’70, Anthea in ’71, and Amelia in ’77. I had written “(You’re) Having My Baby” as a tribute to Anne.

  When I thought the time was right I began thinking how to approach “(You’re) Having My Baby,” so as to make a delicate subject like this sound as heartfelt as possible. I’d met Odia Coates when I was producing the Edwin Hawkins album for Buddah Records, and he introduced her to me. My cousin Bob Skaff, who at that point was a United Artists executive, suggested I make “(You’re) Having My Baby” a duet. Odia had a great voice, she came out of gospel, and was the daughter of an evangelical minister. All the great black acts came out of gospel: James Brown, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles. I’ve always been into gospel, and I had an idea: I would try to integrate gospel into my songs. Odia sang with me on “(You’re) Having My Baby,” one of the first black and white duets, and it went to number one in 1974. We went on to make more hits with “One Man Woman/One Woman Man” that same year, plus in 1975, “I Don’t Like to Sleep Alone” and “(I Believe) There’s Nothing Stronger than Our Love.” Sadly we lost her to breast cancer in 1991—she was only forty-nine.

  “(You’re) Having My Baby” was a song I thought nobody would object to—who could possibly be against that? But it ended up stirring up quite a bit of controversy. We were growing up as a country, things were evolving, and obviously the situation of women was changing radically. A whole new wave was starting. Some women’s magazines thought it was condescending and hipsters naturally found it corny. Rolling Stone hated it. The National Organization for Women gave me their “Keep Her in Her Place” award, and Ms. magazine called me “Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year.” But there really is no such thing as bad publicity. It generally ends up doing something for you; controversy is always a plus. In the end I never needed to get up on a soap box to answer my critics because suddenly everybody was coming to my defense. Even Time magazine said, “What are you getting on this guy’s case for? We’re in a war. We’ve got a drug plague. We’ve got shit going on in our country. Give him a break, he’s writing a song about his wife.” Overnight, with all that heat, the record went to number one. Go figure.

  * * *

  Everyone has a dark side, but in those days no one guessed that there could be a dark side to Michael Jackson. However, I saw it early on and it wasn’t pretty. I had a cool run of stuff in the early seventies, but at some point I decided to get back to writing with other people. I love collaboration and the diversity it brings to a song.

  When I first met Michael Jackson I knew he was immensely talented—this was before Thriller and his huge hits—and I began to think about collaborating with him. I’d known the Jackson family for a while. They used to bring their kids to Caesars to see my shows when they were young. They were a theatrically driven family. You could see that. I knew of Michael’s talents, saw him growing up—everyone knew it was going to happen. Later on I met Michael again through a guy named David Gest, a real go-getter who eventually married Liza Minnelli.

  I first sat down with Michael Jackson and talked about collaborating in 1980. We started working together at my house in Carmel. It was a fun place to be—he was using my guest house, playing with my girls in the Jacuzzi. He clearly had a real fondness for kids—he was very childlike himself and related to them on their own level. When Michael and I talked, we were rapping. Even then he had this fascination with plastic surgery, a major obsession, obviously.

  Anyway, Michael and I start messing around with the songs we were working on. I was very impressed with the way he went about the writing process. He knew how to make his way around a song, not only because he had an incredible vocal quality, but he also had a capacity to make complicated singing licks from an initial one-finger tune played for him on the piano. He didn’t seem at all like a disturbed character when he was working. He was just very tenacious, very focused on what he needed to do. But you could tell he was also wildly ambitious and capable of anything; I sensed an absolutely ruthless streak.

  The concept of the album I was working on for Sony, Walk a Fine Line, was collaborations, with other artists: Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, David Foster, and Chicago, plus the two tracks I was doing with Michael. But the thing is, while we were doing Walk a Fine Line, Michael was also doing tracks for his album, Thriller. Well, Thriller comes out and is an absolute smash, and of course I can’t get Michael in the studio to finish what we are doing. But I had tapes sitting in the studio in L.A., at Sunset Sound I think it was—all the tapes from when we were working together. It was right around then I started to see Michael’s true colors. It happens.

  I’m trying to finish my album, and suddenly I couldn’t get him on the phone. Then he sent one of his people over to the studio and they actually stole the tapes we’d been working on.

  When I heard about this, I went, “What? Michael went in and just took them? Holy shit!”

  Then Michael disappears, and only after weeks of threatening, did I get the tapes back—finally. But I knew then that this kid was headed for trouble.

  I just thought it was a terrible thing to do. How do people become ruthless? What mania takes over them is always a mystery. What happened? This boy was a child when I met first him. Who knew what went on in that family? I saw him a few years after the disappearing tape affair, at a law office, ironically.

  I worked many years with my two loyal and smart lawyers—and close friends—Stu Silfen and Lee Phillips on this issue. They were involved all the way through in the negotiations regarding the posthumous release of Jackson’s song, “This Is It.” The song was originally titled, “I Never Heard,” when it was written in 1981 for the album I was recording. In the end we prevailed—I got 50 percent of the credit and “They did the right thing,” I said at the time. “There were only honorable people involved. I don’t think that anybody tried to do the wrong thing. It was an honest mistake.”

  Some time after the stolen tape incident, Michael called and asked to meet me. I could tell he was disturbed and sorry, but I mean, what could you say? T
his was a major talent who got derailed too early in his life. It was never a good situation, and see where he winds up. You could almost sense it coming.

  For example, between the Jacksons and the Osmonds, there was always a certain rivalry despite the fact that they were two family groups supposedly competing with each other in a friendly way. But Michael could be scathing about the Osmonds. He thought they were a kitsch exploitation group compared to the Jackson Five.

  While we were working together he’d call the Osmonds and talk them up in a nice, chatty manner, and as soon as he’d hung up he’d rip them apart behind their backs. The Osmonds were not in good shape at that time. Donny is a nice guy, he and Marie both are. He has kind of kept it together the best that he can. It’ll be interesting to see what he can make out of the next phase in his life.

  Teen idols have a tough afterlife. I know because I was one—and so was Donny Osmond. His subsequent career, after the Osmonds initial hits, was checkered, to say the least. His trajectory as a performer is somewhat similar to many people that began very young. They start out as kids and then, like me, they have a big problem dealing with the next phase. In 1972, Don Costa had the bright idea of Donny recording two of the songs I’d had hits with as a teenager and they both became hits for him, too. “Puppy Love” was number one in the UK and number three in the U.S. and “Lonely Boy” got to number three in the UK and into the Top Twenty in the U.S.

  Anyway, on this one occasion, Michael Jackson in his fashion floated to Vegas and was staying at a villa next door to us at the Mirage. I saw the parade of kids going in and out—scary. He was at the end of the stay but they were trying to get him out of there anyway. They swore never to let him return.

  At first, Steve Wynn and Michael earlier had been all buddy-buddy. Steve even called one of his suites, the Michael Jackson Suite—but he didn’t know then what was about to erupt. And when it did erupt, Michael was ensconced at the villa next door to me. The maids and other hotel staff would come to me and say, “We can’t even go in that room; if we have room service we gotta leave it outside.” When they finally get Michael out, after weeks of trying, they go in and there’s broken glass, perfume bottles, food—the place is an unholy mess, the Jacuzzi has bubble bath pouring out of it, there’s rotting food everywhere. They finally had to renovate that villa for tens of thousands of dollars. Once they got him out, they never did let him back in that hotel.

  While we were living in Vegas, I got a place in Sun Valley because the heat became insufferable. My daughter Alex went on to become a ski instructor and lived in Aspen for many years. It was a safe and healthy place to raise kids. In 1975, I got to work on a project that involved my family and expressed my love for them. That was the Kodak commercial, “The Times of Your Life.” Even though I had previously licensed my songs to several companies, I’d never wanted to do commercials. I was always very careful what kind of product was linked with my songs. You associate Kodak with family snapshots, wedding pictures, photos of your children. Kodak came to me with the idea, with Jack Gilardi, my friend and agent at ICM. I loved the concept and together we put this piece together. I produced the record, which became a Top Twenty hit. The campaign was very successful and I was really happy to be a part of it. All of my kids were in it, and I think that’s why it was such a hit—it connected.

  Eight

  VEGAS REDUX

  In the early 1970s I moved my family west from New York to Vegas and that turned out to be quite a very different experience for all of us—what with bright lights, high rollers, mobsters, and movie stars.

  But what I remember most about moving to Vegas, regardless of public opinion, was that you could have a wonderful family life there—and we did. The simple everyday joys of the girls coming home from school, making milkshakes and pizzas for them, helping them with their homework. They loved everything four-legged and furry and I loved to see the expression of pure joy on their faces when I’d bring home stray animals, dozens of cats and dogs. Then there was Mary Rizzo, who was my secretary for many years, very much part of the family—and a real character. Mary loved to wear very tight jeans and one day my kids came running to me and said, “Dad! Dad! Come look! Mary’s got hair in her pants.” I peeked at her jeans and I saw they’d split wide open in the crotch area and all her pubic hair was spilling out.

  Vegas itself was growing and changing, and soon I found myself very much a part of the new scene. In 1978, I became one of the partners in a lavish discotheque called Jubilation (named after one of my songs) with Steve Lombardo and Marty Gutilla, two guys from Chicago who’d been in the restaurant business, and a third partner, Bob Marsico. None of them were mob guys, but it was from Lombardo and Gutilla that I heard some alarming stories about underworld types they’d got to know through their business dealings. My cousin Bob Skaff introduced me to these guys who owned restaurants and clubs in Chicago. We had a meeting at Sweetwater, one of their establishments. I liked them and trusted them and we became partners. My intuition was to put up the first freestanding disco in Vegas, the first freestanding nightclub. At that time, all these facilities were in-house at the hotels.

  But given the Italian surnames of my three partners, even getting a license was a big hassle. As Marty Gutilla says, “We applied for a license to open a club in Vegas—it wasn’t an easy road. Coming from Chicago and being Italian—this was a bit of a problem for us. They didn’t like no I-talians in Vegas in those days. Tony Spilotro, the Chicago mob enforcer, had poisoned their minds so badly they didn’t want to hear about any Italians. You could’ve brought Enrico Fermi there and they weren’t going to like him. No Italians of any kind. Because three of us had Italian names—Steve Lombardo, Bob Marsico, and me, Marty Gutilla—we had to pay a fee and bring the investigators out to Chicago. They sent these two guys to investigate us who were like my old high school principal. Two Western shitkickers. We put them up at the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago. They had the greatest time. They were investigating everything and they came up with nothing.

  “And that was just the beginning. It took three years to build and everybody was robbing us blind. I knew we were getting ripped off but I didn’t know I was getting gunned down in broad daylight.”

  Marty would say to a cement contractor, “Maybe you could bid my job.”

  The guy comes back with, “I already did.”

  “Wait a minute, how could you do that? You haven’t even seen the plans.”

  That’s the way they operated. There were five or six cement contractors and they’d trade off the jobs. One week they would select one guy to get the contract, the next week another guy. It was all fixed. They’d make outrageous bids and the guy with the lowest bid would get the job that week—and his bid was still 30 percent higher than the price it should have been. It was all a big joke.

  Marty and I often hung around the casinos to get away from this nonsense. Jubilation took from 1975 to 1978 to build. During that time I met some interesting underworld characters. These mobsters weren’t my dear friends or anything like that. I just knew them from hanging around and you would see a lot of these things. Because of the new Howard Hughes era, with its corporate mentality, things got even more complicated. With the old mobster regime everybody knew where they stood—now it was all mixed up. The mob were still around but the corporate structure on top of the mob arrangements confused everybody; even the cops were conflicted. We—meaning me, Marty, Steve, and Bob—were right in the middle of the changing time in Las Vegas. They were great partners, and friends to this day.

  I must say Jubilation was one beautiful building. It won all kinds of big-time awards. Jubilation was way edgy for Vegas. It was an oasis in the desert. In those days you walked two blocks off the strip and it would be all cowboys and guys in spurs and ten-gallon hats in any direction you looked. It was wide open. The International Hotel, for example, was in the middle of nowhere. That’s where Elvis spent the last seven to eight years of his life. He rarely ever left.

  W
e brought in three hundred trees we had chosen individually from all over California. We took silt from the bottom of Lake Mead, $100,000 worth of dirt, to put those trees up. People thought we were crazy bringing black dirt from San Bernadino for that amount of money. In 1970, $100,000 was an appreciable amount of dough. There were forty to fifty trees in the atrium that separated the restaurant from the nightclub—the rest we planted outside.

  We built a retaining wall around the whole building so you could look out and see shrubs and trees with lights on them, but you wouldn’t see the ugly side of Las Vegas. It was all glass on the outside. The architect was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. You could see outside and look at the trees all lit up. Jubilation was the only place in Las Vegas that had anything green anywhere near it. Not a tree could be found anywhere else in Las Vegas at that time. There were glass windows in the bathrooms so you could look outside. There was a retaining wall and trees all lit up and shrubs in the foreground. You couldn’t see in the bathroom unless a guy wanted to climb up the wall and of course they did do it, by the way. Whatever you think they could do, they did. In Casino, they showed booths covered in leopard-skin fabric. Marty was outraged at that; he found it so embarrassing. He would hate anyone to think that he’d ever have put leopard skin in an elegant place like Jubilation. That was such hokey Las Vegas crap. Jubilation was nothing like that.

  Opening night of Jubilation in 1978 was a big splashy event with a lot of stars. It was huge. As Marty says, “Those cocktail waitresses we had; beautiful, five-foot-eleven college girls, were sensational—sparkling starlets. I would put them against the Dallas cheerleaders any day.”