B009HOTHPE EBOK

by Paul Anka

  Now Steve says, “I gotta tell the prince what you did.” So we flag down one of the emissaries and we say, “Mr. Wynn wants to talk to Prince Rainier.” And she takes us over. At this point in his life the prince is not a late nighter. His health is failing, poor guy. He has been sick and what have you. The prince is over in the corner; I and the emissary take Steve over to the corner to meet the prince. It’s dark, so he’s not really catching the expressions on the prince’s face. The prince is a pleasant old aristocrat and Steve is wildly enthusiastic. He starts to tell the prince the whole story and you could see that the prince was not that thrilled to be courteous. Steve shouts, “So we left him out of the loop” and the prince is going “Eh? Heh heh heh.” He’s not following the story; he’s just going along with it, not knowing what the fuck Steve’s saying.

  Now Steve is very articulate and he’s a guy who can tell a story, he’s one of the great talkers of all time and very intelligent. However, enough is enough. The emissary comes over to me, this big hefty woman, and says, “Mr. Anka, he’s taking too much of the prince’s time. You’ve got to tell him to come away.” I say, “No, you tell him.” I have never been able to stop Steve mid-story. Eventually, the emissary, out of exasperation, asks Princess Caroline to go over and see if she can do something. She walks up to him, taps Steve on the shoulder, and this of course gets his attention; she takes him by the arm and leads him away. Meanwhile the prince is sitting there like a dumbfounded character in a comic strip with question marks sprouting out of his head as if to say, “Whaaa just happened?”

  * * *

  We all go to Venice, Steve Wynn, me, plus wives and kids. I used to take my family to Cipriani; it’s on a separate island and the only hotel in Venice that has a pool. It’s beautiful, private, doesn’t have a lot of rooms, a great hang for the family. We must have taken up fifteen rooms between all the families. Day before last, we’re checking out the next morning at eleven o’clock. I call Wynn up.

  “Meester Wynn, how are you. It’s Piero Cariacci downstairs, such an honor to ’ave such great celebrity staying with us.” Pause. “You know, of course, you’re checking out tomorrow and we’re a small hotel and the summer season, very busy time. All kinds of people, reservations, and so on, and they’re going to come and get here early. Do you mind if you maybe check out tomorrow morning at six thirty instead of eleven? We give you free breakfast, compliments of the hotel, because we got the Arabs coming and we gotta give them the room.”

  Steve explodes. “This is outrageous. I have a hotel, and I would never do this to anyone. What do you mean six thirty? I have the Ankas and we have all these women with us, and there’s seven daughters, and I would never—”

  “But, Meester Wynn we got the Arabs a-coming for the room. We have got to clean and prepare the rooms so we are ready for their arrival. You already been here four, five, six days. We give you a free breakfast, how about it?”

  “I don’t want a free breakfast. I’m staying in my room till eleven A.M., understand? I’m sleeping in tomorrow.”

  I say, “Mr. Wynna, thatsa unfortunate. In that case, fucka you,” and I hang up.

  He couldn’t believe his ears; he could not believe what he’d just heard the manager say to him. His wife, Elaine, one of the great ladies—gracious, stylish, caring—was trying to calm him down. He thinks it’s the hotel management. I get to Steve’s room as quick as I can so he doesn’t get to the front desk.

  He was tearing out the door when I got there. I said, “Where you going?”

  “Those goddamn sonsofbitches, I’ll tear them a new asshole…”

  I said, “Oh, you mean that phone call?”

  “Yeah, how’d you know about it?

  “Steve, I know about it because it was me!”

  Well, he fell down when he heard that; he loved it.

  Now comes the classic Bellini: Ed McMahon. We’re in Europe, Steve, me, the families—it was that same trip. We were staying at a fancy hotel in Antibes, France. It’s tough to get a reservation there in the summer. Potential guests were picked by the hotel manager on a quota basis. He selected them like this: “We’ll take two blacks, we’ll take three Jews, we’ll have two Italians, we’ll have one of…” He does it like a dart board to make sure he gets whatever mix of guests he wants. And in the meantime, because of this arbitrary system, his elbow is permanently crooked from all the tipping that goes on, because tipping him big is the only way you can get in. You grease him up big-time to get a room. People from all parts of the world rush to get there cause it’s the cool hang, but at the same time it’s sort of a pain in the ass because you run into everybody you know from back home.

  We’re there hanging for a couple of days, Steve and I, looking forward to going on to Italy, and who should show up at the hotel but Ed McMahon with his new girlfriend Vicki—Victoria Valentine—whom he’d met as a National Airlines VIP hostess. Steve and I run into Ed and Vicki at the pool. Ed says, “I want to show Vicki Europe. Paul, I know you know Paris, you’ve lived over here, and I love the way you dress. I want to go to your tailor and get a white suit made, I heard he’s the best.”

  “No problem,” I say, “I’d be happy to introduce you to M. Cifonelli.”

  “Now, Paul, tell me, you’re a friend of Regine’s, aren’t you?”

  “Well, yes,” I say, “she’s a close friend.”

  Regine had sung with me at Caesars Palace—I’d known her since she was a hatcheck girl in Paris. Regine’s was the famous discotheque that she’d created. It was all the rage then, but hard to get into and Ed wanted to be given the VIP treatment to impress Vicki. “No problem,” I say. “Whatever you want, Ed. I’ll arrange it for you. You’ll get a call; somebody will fill you in on the details.”

  We all leave. Ed goes to Paris, Steve and I go to Italy. We’re sitting around the pool at the Hotel Cipriani in Venice.

  Now Steve and I haven’t done a Bellini in a while so I say, “Let’s get McMahon.”

  “Whaddaya suggest?’

  “A phone call,” I say. “We can tell him anything. Also, he’s very tight with money, so we’ll play on that.” I pick up the phone and call the hotel where he’s staying in Paris.

  “Ed McMahon,” I say. They ring through. Steve is sitting on the toilet, listening in on the other phone.

  “Meester McMahona?” I say (using my German accent this time because the hotel managers over there, they’re all Germans). “This is Helmut Schweitzer downstairs at the front desk there. Thank you very much for coming to the hotel, such an honor to have such an important American personality. We got a call from some fellows, two people, that Mr. Anka arranged an appointment for you at Cifonelli, the tailor. That’s not going to be the problem, because you vant the white suit, okay.”

  “Thank you,” says McMahon.

  “But vee have a problem Mr. McMahon; they’re doing some construction here at the hotel. And you know for the fall they’re getting ready and we gotta do some sand-blasting. Unfortunately it’s right now on your floor.”

  “Oh, okay.” He was an accommodating kind of guy.

  “We’re gonna sandblast de floors, de valls, and de ceilings. For ten hours a day it’s goin’ on. It’s gonna make a mess and, o, boy, ze dust!”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “But don’t vorry,” I say. “Ve gonna make dis offer for you. We can move you down to the second floor, we give it to you half price, but the view it not so nice—the wall of the American Embassy. Or … You can stay where you are for nothing, no charge, and we give you zee sound proof ear muffs.”

  Now he goes, “One moment. Victoria! They’re gonna sandblast blah blah. We can go downstairs for half the price but if we stay here for nothing we’ve got the soundproof ear muffs.” She says, “Take the ear muffs; we can spend the money on something else.” So he says, “We’ll take the ear muffs.” They thought, hell, we’re out all day, they’re not going to be sandblasting at night, why not settle for the free breakfast, we’ll wear ear muffs
and that’ll be that.

  “Fine decision. That’s vonderful,” I say as the German hotel manager. “Oh, Mr. McMahon, about Regine’s. You want to go to the discotheque? Everything is taken care of.”

  “Great!”

  “But zay are very busy in the summer and you called a little late. Because we got the people from all over: zee Arabs, Scandinavians, Germans, zhey all come here. But don’ta worry—we gotta you a good slot.

  “A slot?”

  “This is a small discotheque, Mr. McMahona, we can’t put all the people in the same hour. But you got your own slot with the wife at five in the morning.”

  Now Ed’s fucking going crazy. “Are you kidding me?” he shouts.

  “So sorry, but dat’s all that’s available.”

  “Victoria! It’s busy but we got our own slot, five till six in the morning?”

  “Well, whatever you wanna do, Ed,” she says.

  “Okay, we’ll take the slot.”

  This is all getting too much for Steve. He is choking with laughter and trying to stay quiet at the same time. He is waving at me from the toilet seat with his hand cupped over the phone. In a loud whisper he is saying, “Paul you have gone too far—I don’t want to be a part of this. Just tell him it is you. I can’t do this anymore, I can’t take it.”

  So I tell him, “Ed, this is Anka and Wynn … and we were just having a bit of fun.” He laughed in a stricken kind of way.

  Eleven

  MOVING ON

  Adnan Khashoggi is one of the most interesting personalities I’ve ever come across. If ever there was someone who could be called larger than life, he was it. Adnan was flamboyant as they come, a character and a half. He was a billionaire, and that’s just for starters. He was a Saudi arms dealer and businessman and was involved in the 1987 Iran-Contra deal in which several senior members of Ronald Reagan’s administration had secretly sold arms to Iran.

  Khashoggi loved Las Vegas and that’s how I got to know him. He would come and just wrap the town up. Everybody was dazzled by him, especially the casino owners, including Kirk Kerkorian who had a special affection for him. He was just a likable guy—and a big spender.

  Khashoggi would throw lavish parties and invite everyone in town. He would come with his family to see my show and bring forty or fifty people, and have a party afterward to boot. It would be the most opulent, wonderful bash you could imagine. He would throw it at the Sands Hotel, and there’d be over-the-top food, booze, entertainment, and just good, good times.

  I got to know him pretty well over the years and would see him whenever I played Vegas, went to Europe, to New York, or to Paris. I did little favors for him as he had done for me. On one occasion he invited me to his New York apartment where he introduced me to a gorgeous young girl who wanted to be a singer. Unfortunately, she was a singer who couldn’t sing. I advised her to get into acting and maybe take some voice lessons, trying to be as kind as I could. On that occasion I stayed for a few hours, which he thought reason enough to give me a few extravagant pieces of jewelry. I really didn’t want to take them, but I knew he would be insulted if I didn’t. Let’s just say it’s an Arab tradition: you accept a gift when offered to you.

  A few years later, I was doing some shows in the Philippines, where I often went to perform. After my concert I was invited to the Palace by Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos. Imelda was very outgoing, gregarious, personable. Marcos himself was a quiet fellow. But every time I’d go there to do a concert, I’d have to go to the Palace after the show, around eleven at night, and socialize with ambassadors and VIPs. We had the usual outlandish dinner and after midnight Imelda got up to sing. Well, she would start to sing, and then she sang and sang well into the night—truth be told, it felt like an eternity. She’d sing till two in the morning. She didn’t have a great voice but she had some tonality—it was bearable. She had a lot of desire and a big heart and was always a very gracious hostess. She’d be singing “Moooon Riii-Ber” and Marcos would be sitting there next to you—the poor guy got so tired after a while he’d be falling over. He needed his sleep. One night he fell asleep on my shoulder (he’d obviously been through this many times before). That particular night she finished around three-thirty in the morning, and that’s when she got it into her head that she had to give me a tour of the Palace to show me her famous shoe closet. I think I got to bed around five that morning.

  (On a one-to-one basis Imelda was a very gracious hostess and fun to be around. But she played the whole royalty thing to the hilt. There was a lot of money there. Lots of money.)

  The next thing I know, I’m in Paris at Khashoggi’s apartment. He asked me if I would help him sell three properties he owned in New York City (the Crown Building on Fifth Avenue, the Herald Shopping Mall, and the 40 Wall Street Tower).

  He said if I could sell the properties for him he would give me a commission. We agreed and I proceeded to look for a buyer, but as I did so, I became more and more suspicious. Everybody I talked to was telling me Khashoggi didn’t really own the buildings—they were the property of the Marcos family. People were warning me to be careful: “Watch out, Paul, it’s a powder keg.” I called Donald Trump to see if he was interested and he confirmed to me that Khashoggi was fronting for Imelda Marcos and that he had never owned the buildings.

  I called Khashoggi and asked him why he hadn’t told me Marcos was the owner. Turns out the properties were bought secretly in the late 1970s and 1980s and were the subject of a heated dispute between the Philippine government, New York Land Company, Canadian Land (run by Ralph and Joseph Bernstein and attorney Philip Carter), and Khashoggi, who was a friend of Ferdinand Marcos.

  At that point I had to go to Khashoggi and say, “Don’t put me in this awkward position. You know these buildings aren’t yours, they’re hers.” I told him I didn’t want to be involved in this stuff and that I was out of the deal. About a month later, he gets in trouble with the government and ends up in jail. Khashoggi was also the head of the Triad Holding Company, which built many properties in the United States and abroad. But he is mostly known as an arms dealer. He brokered deals between the U.S. and the Saudi government in the 1960s and 1970s. His luck ran out in 1988 when he was arrested in Switzerland and accused of concealing funds. He was held for three months, then extradited to the United States, where he was released on bail and subsequently acquitted. Well, he may have been acquitted, but let’s face it, I felt I was obviously in over my head.

  So in 1990, a U.S. federal jury in Manhattan acquitted Khashoggi and Imelda Marcos, now a widow, of racketeering and fraud. Justice? Go figure. But through it all, I have a fondness for Adnan, a good man, with an incredible lady by his side, his wife Lamia.

  * * *

  Through Adnan I came to know Khashoggi’s brother, Essam and his lovely wife Layla, also gracious hearts and good people. Visiting them, I almost didn’t get out with my life. In Europe, my wife Anne and I were at Essam’s house outside of London, being royally treated by Khashoggi, an incredibly lavish host—that’s what billionaires do best. On the last day there, we were waiting to be taken to Heathrow Airport to board his private airplane, a 737, for the trip home.

  Well, I happened to look out of the window of our bedroom, which was on the second floor overlooking the driveway below and saw a big van pull up along with two Rolls-Royces. I see what appears to be a jewelry box, a foot and a half by a foot and a half in size being loaded all by itself in the back of their car while all the luggage was placed in the back of the van. Essam and Layla Khashoggi had a large staff. When it came time to leave Anne and I went downstairs to get in the car. The van and Essam’s limo proceeded out of the grounds ahead of the car that Anne and I were in.

  As our car approached the gate to the property, it suddenly closed in front of us. I found it unusual but paid it no mind. Why had the gate closed so quickly? This delay in waiting for the gate to reopen caused us to fall behind by a few minutes from the other vehicles.

  The neighborhood that E
ssam lived in was out in the woods, very secluded. As we headed to the airport we passed several industrial parks. We’re driving along and all of a sudden an orange car passed us and pulled in between us and the other two cars, which had driven on and were about a quarter of a mile ahead.

  We reached the top of a hill, giving us a view of the road below. As we descended to the highway, Essam’s two cars approached another industrial park on the right-hand side of the road. I was looking ahead and I saw two other cars come from behind a building and cut off Essam’s car, while another car from another building bolted out and parks behind them.

  Now they had Essam’s vehicle boxed in. Then these guys got out with their masks and Uzis and they were running toward the car that has the jewelry box. I was looking at this and not believing what the hell I was seeing. It was frightening and chaotic and it suddenly hit me what was really going down. It was definitely a heist and maybe even a kidnapping and we were right in the middle of it. I told my wife Anne to get down on the floor of the car.

  “Stop!” I said to the driver. “Turn around and get out of here. Look what’s going on.”

  I saw Essam’s car; his driver had been taught evasive action. He pushed one car out of the way, got over this ditch, turned into a field, and started off in another direction. My driver now stopped the car as I instructed him to do and made a U-turn on the highway. I saw that all the cars were also starting to head back. Anne was still frightened but things were settling down as we drove back to the compound.

  We got back to the estate, and when Scotland Yard shows up to interview everybody, I took one of the detectives aside and said, “Hey, I’ve been around stuff like this most of my life, and I can tell you I smell an inside job.” I told them over the weekend I’d seen some members of his staff exchanging looks and whispered asides. I mentioned the incident at the gate. I explained that I had told my driver to get out of there as fast as possible.