by Paul Anka
“No, please!” he insists.
He gets in with me and we drive down the strip, and people are looking and honking. I don’t want to make him feel bad because I know from meeting other Arabs, they don’t take kindly to someone saying no.
We talk about our business blah blah blah, and I take the Zimmer home. I can’t even get it in the driveway; my wife’s ready to kill me. “Aw, don’t worry, we’ll keep it a while and then sell the thing,” I tell her. “I can’t seriously keep a car like this, I just don’t want to offend this guy.”
The following week he sends his 737 plane to Princeton, where Brooke is in school. The mother and secretary also come out to be with her. The prince drives up to my house with thirty people. I had a guitarist playing nice mellow tunes under the stairs of my huge living room. I put tables and chairs out. They’re cooking their special food and they’re all over my house—my kids think I’m totally nuts. I drive down to the airport and I get Brooke off the plane and I tell her and her mother, “Now look, this is what it is, don’t be nervous, I’ll guide you through this, make sure everybody’s happy, nothing gets out of hand buh buh buh.”
We’re all at dinner, the prince is there, he’s drinking and leaning toward Brooke and I’m propping him up, trying to avoid an awkward situation. I can obviously see what his intentions are but we’re not going to let it get into anything like that. After dinner we go dancing and clubbing, and I’m just crossing my fingers. It’s all to culminate the next day when they’re going to throw a big lunch at a local hotel owned by my closest friend when I lived in Carmel, Ted Balestreri, he and his wife Velma. I have adored them both for years and cherish their friendship. Anyway, there we are in the midst of mounds of rice and lamb and more Middle Eastern delicacies. We sit down and we’re getting through the lunch and Brooke says she wants to get back to school and the mother wants the check and you know what the prince wants—he wants her. He’s way down on the end of the bench by now. So we finish and I say, “Okay, let’s go out and talk the talk.” There’s me and the prince and the banker and the mother and Brooke. And we start talking.
In the end, Brooke gets the sixteen million dollars to make the movie. They give the mother the money, everybody disperses, she gets off the plane in Princeton, and there’s a brand-new Mercedes waiting for her. Meanwhile, I’ve still got the Zimmer that I don’t want sitting in my driveway like the Queen Mary in dry dock. So the kid gets her Mercedes, I get the Zimmer, Mom gets the money, and they start to make the movie. At this point I bow out of the picture for other reasons entirely. He wants to do other business with me but I discover there are some other characters involved that I don’t want to be in business with. I’ve learned my lesson from my dealings with Khashoggi.
A few months later I’m performing at the Sporting Club in beautiful Monte Carlo. Brooke’s off doing her movie. In the interim I hear they ran short of money, so the prince gives her a few more million. Meanwhile, on the nightly news I’m seeing a certain Clark Clifford and his attorney, Robert Altman, who was married to TV’s Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter. Clark Clifford was a banker and Wonder Woman had moved to Washington to marry Altman, Clark Clifford’s partner. There’s some big bank scandal that is becoming the big news topic on the nightly news.
Bottom line, I get a call from the investigative department of the L.A. Times. I’ll never forget it, I’m sitting on my terrace at the Hôtel de Paris overlooking the harbor in Monte Carlo and the reporter says, “Can I ask you a few questions?”
“Yeah, sure, what about?”
“Uh, I just want to ask you. About a Saudi prince. And the money that he gave to Brooke Shields, is all that true?”
And I said, “Well, wait a minute, what’s ‘all that’?”
He says, “Well, what’s the link?”
“Look, first of all I don’t know what you’re going after and I’m going to tell you just what I need to tell you because it’s none of your business. I arranged for the financing for the Brenda Starr film and that’s about it. What’s your interest?”
“You know what’s going on with Clark Clifford and Robert Altman and the bank scandal?” he says. “Well, they were all tied in together with that bank.”
“That’s goddamn news to me,” I say. “I didn’t know anything about who they were tied into, and, yes, I arranged for the money. And, yes, she got the movie, but other than that I have no idea who they were involved with, so I can’t help you.”
I hung up and couldn’t believe it. Who woulda thunk it? The press was all over this bank scandal. The prince was never accused of any wrongdoing, and Altman was eventually acquitted of all charges. What a scene!
No wonder the guy spent money like water. This prince—you knew if he came to see a show and hung out, he was good for three or four million a night. So a big spender like that, you needed to say hello to him. Whatever scandals he was or wasn’t involved in, I didn’t know any more about him than the man in the moon. At the time the reporter called I was still thinking, what the hell am I gonna do with that big tank of a car?
* * *
One night while I am working at the Riviera Hotel in Vegas, I get a call from a charming gentlemen, who I knew worked for Adnan Khashoggi. His name was Victor Danenza. He said, “Paul, Adnan Khashoggi wants you to do us a favor.” He says, “I am in town with royalty from an island in Asia. They don’t know him here at the hotel and they will not give him credit.” The fact that I was working there, they knew I had contacts that could help them. He went on to say, “So, you see, they just won’t give him the money, and I was wondering if you could meet him and his family, give him some CDs, autograph some photos, and take them to the movies, make them happy ’cause we need to arrange some cash for him. They’re nice people.” Okay, I go over. Pleasant family, bunch of kids. We go to the movies, kill time, come back to the casino, and they get it worked out—barely. Gave him $50,000, which is nothing in that world!
We’re talking casually and I ask, “By the way, who is he?” And the guy says, “The Prince of Brunei.” One of the richest men in the world! And they only gave him $50,000. It’s a casino, but they don’t know anything at these places outside the city limits. In Vegas they don’t know from Prince the dog to Prince Ali Baba.
Then there’s another Middle Eastern crisis: the fraught relationship between Adnan Khashoggi and Mohamed Al-Fayed—the guy who bought Harrods and whose son Dodi was dating Princess Diana.
The connection between Fayed and Adnan is an interesting and tangled one, Khashoggi claiming Fayed was a Singer sewing machine salesman when he hired him and Fayed saying Khashoggi worked for him and that he’d had to fire Khashoggi because of his gambling habits. Whatever the story was, the two families were intimately connected when Adnan Khashoggi’s sister, Samira, married Fayed and became the mother of Dodi Fayed.
As I stated earlier, Khashoggi’s empire fell in 1988 when he was arrested in Switzerland for concealing funds, but was ultimately acquitted. Fayed comes into power, buys Harrods, etc. and suddenly there’s this young kid called Dodi Fayed running around, his son. I’d known him as a kid; now he’d grown up, and every now and then I’d bump into him. Sweet enough guy, kind of wants to get into show business, winds up over here because he’s into the Hollywood thing—he’s trying to make movies. He’s Daddy’s boy, and you know a father is a father and doing the best that he can to help him. Dodi looks up to me in a father-figure kind of way, but I know he’s heavy with the cocaine and he’s getting into skirmishes about his rent and so on. News travels fast in this town. I’m hearing all this stuff, but I don’t judge him for it. I try and give him advice, tell him he’s with the wrong women, but young and wild kids will do what they will do. Ultimately he gets a winner movie, Chariots of Fire.
I’m not running with his crowd, because they’re young and with a group like that with no brakes it’s always a bad ending. One day Dodi comes to see me, and says, “I gotta talk to you.” He meets me at the Ivy, a superhip local watering hole. H
e begins with a big long ramble, which already makes me nervous.
“Paul, as you know we go way back, our two families, blah, blah, blah. I’ve known you all these years, and your family stayed at the Ritz, And we were all tight with Adnan.…”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“But I got a big problem.”
“What is it?”
“Well, I was coming through customs from Europe and I didn’t declare some money and they took $150,000 from me and I can’t tell my dad.”
“Okay. What do you want me to do?”
“Could you just loan it to me for a week?”
Now, I don’t like loaning money. There came a point in my life where I realized, I don’t want to make a liar out of anybody. You loan someone money, you’re making a liar out of them from that day on because you never get the money back. I mean, I could make a long list of the people to whom I’ve loaned money, and then never heard from again.
I said, “Dodi, look, I don’t loan money; don’t put me in that position because—”
He pleaded; he was afraid to tell his father. “I beg of you, Paul. Please, just loan it to me. One week.”
Well, I knew his dad, I’d stayed at the Ritz, the Fayeds were always very courteous. I don’t know what got me to agree, but I did. I said, “Go to this address; go to Merrill Lynch, buh buh buh, and pick up the money.”
He picks up the money. End of the week I try to reach him. He’s in Australia chasing the actress Tawny Kitaen.
I think, Okay, let me call Australia. “Dodi, I thought you were supposed to—”
“Well, I came down here, I’m starting a movie thing, and duh duh duh.”
“But Dodi, you promised.”
“No no. Don’t worry. As soon as I come home this week I’ll get you the money.”
He comes home, gives me a check, Bank of America. I go to cash it and it’s bouncing all over the room. Wall to wall, boom boom boom. I can’t believe it. I call him.
“Dodi, I told you I didn’t want to loan you this money. What are you thinking? And how dare you? What are you up to?”
“Oh no, I’m so sorry. It should have been in there. There’s a Bank of Scotland in London, I’m transferring the funds tomorrow.”
I know now that I’m smack in the middle of a bullshit story. And I’m livid. Checking around I realize that he hasn’t even paid his rent for months, he owes people money for jewelry, and he’s living way beyond his means.
Dodi gives me the name of a bank in London that I’m getting the money from, and I wait till about 12:30 at night—I’m living in L.A. and I call the bank, just out of the blue. I take a shot, I got nothing to lose, I’m already losing, and I ask for the bank manager. He turns out to be a fan. I give him a number to call me back, so he can check that it’s me.
He says, “Mr. Anka, you know I’m not supposed to give out bank information, but I feel that you’re telling me the truth, as to what the situation is. Let me be frank with you—this guy’s been a problem. There is not enough money in that account to cover your check.”
I go, “Oh, Jesus!”
I wake Dodi up, it’s one in the morning by now, and I’m shouting, my voice is in the 120 decibel range. I’m so loud my wife comes down, thinking I’m being attacked by some intruder.
“You be here tomorrow,” I tell Dodi. “Or you’re going to jail.” He comes over and in the afternoon pleads his case—the why and the what and the wherefore.
“You know what?” I tell him. “You need to be taught a lesson. You just can’t do this to people. And it’s not just me; I found out you’ve been doing this all over town.
“You are behind with your rent with that prominent lawyer in Los Angeles whose house you have been living in—way behind in your rent. There’s a host of people you owe money: these girls, the jewelry, the doctors. How can you do this? I’m going to save you; you need help. I’m going to call your father.”
“Don’t call my father,” he says. “Don’t call Daddy.”
He leaves. I call his father. “Fayed? How are you blah blah blah. I’m a parent, you’re a parent. I think I’m doing the right thing here for you. I’m going to help you with your son; he’s in big trouble over here with this one and that one. And now me, and I am right on the verge of calling the police.”
“Please don’t do that,” he says. “Don’t do a thing, don’t call the police. I’m sending my brother in, and someone from our law firm; he’ll be in your office tomorrow.”
They show up, and a checkbook is put in front of me. “How much do you want? Name any amount.”
“Only what you owe me, of course. I just want my $150,000 back.” They give me the check, shut down Dodi’s house, pay off all his bills, put him on a plane, and take him back to England.
Two weeks later I get a call from the doctor who treated Fayed’s son Dodi. She talks in this very regal manner. “Mr. Anka, first of all, you know, I went to school with your wife in Egypt; please give her my best. Second of all, I want to thank you for what you’ve done for this family in sending this boy back. He needed the help badly.”
Next thing I know I’m laying in bed at the Mirage Hotel in Vegas, where I was performing. It was months later and I’m watching the news on television. They interrupt the program with a news bulletin. It was about Princess Di and the car crash in the tunnel. You know when you just get up, like I did today, and there’s not even a transition from sleep to being awake? I haven’t even gotten kissed on the mouth yet and something like this hits you. It’s like WOOOWACK! I see the car in the tunnel and I think I’m dreaming. My brain can’t even take it in.
I’ve just gotten over the business of the loan to Dodi, just put the money in the bank, and now this. Suddenly I remember that Dodi was always very security conscious; it was always about speed with him. Fast, fast, fast. He was very paranoid. Frightened all the time about kidnapping, holdups, vendettas. And when he got involved with Princess Di all that anxiety must have increased exponentially because the paparazzi were on them day and night. Always living with the fear that somebody might want to kill him—or her. Dodi, when he got in a car, it always had to be fast.
Wow, just a little favor and such a terrible end. What if I hadn’t loaned Dodi the money? What if I hadn’t called Fayed? I made myself crazy with that for quite a while.
* * *
They say you should never go home again, and after the way I’d been treated in Ottawa in the past I just stopped going back. That started a twenty-some-year personal Cold War with me. When I get ticked off, I get ticked off.
I’d gotten a scathing concert review in the local paper, the Ottawa Citizen, and in a 1962 cover story in Maclean’s (Canada’s answer to Life magazine), they called me “the world’s reigning juvenile” and went on to say, “Although most Canadians can be excused for shuddering at the thought, our best-known countryman abroad is indisputably a squat, bowlegged rock’n’ roll singer named Paul Anka.”
But in April 27, 2002, I returned for a fund-raising at the Ottawa Congress Centre for the Canadian Liver Foundation. Basically I came back in memory of my mother, Camy, who was thirty-seven years old when she died of complications from diabetes in 1961.
My mother had witnessed my early success, but her untimely death meant she didn’t live to see me really make it. My father, Andy, worked with me regularly and helped run Jubilation, my Las Vegas disco. When my dad died in 1993, at the age of seventy-four, I began reflecting on my feelings about not having my parents at the upcoming gala. Not having them there meant a piece was missing. My mother’s death was from complications brought on by diabetes, so it was symbolic for me to come back to raise money for another desperately needy cause, pediatric liver research.
I know they thought it was a long shot, trying to entice me home to perform, especially after I had refused previous overtures by concert promoters to get me to return to Ottawa. I hadn’t played there publicly since August 1981. But this time, they were ready to acknowledge me. In 2005,
I got my name in Canada’s Walk of Fame, and on April 26 got named Paul Anka Day. The concert raised $250,000, so I was happy to be back, and to give back.
I’m sorry my mom never got to see it; she was my ally. She made the difference. My father was a straight-shooter, a practical person who was initially skeptical about my chances in a singing career. He wanted me in a legitimate business and back then show business to him wasn’t legitimate. But he would have been thrilled to see me welcomed back by Ottawa’s mayor and the prime minister.
* * *
I do believe there is a master plan. I believe that we are all given a gift. I also believe in luck and guardian angels. I believe there’s an angel on my shoulder guiding me—or how else would I have made it this far?
One of my problems—careerwise—is that I haven’t messed up enough. Seriously. Stories of success are always most interesting (and marketable!) when there are tragedies, when they’re entwined with setbacks (well, I have had those), outrageous behavior, controversy, drug addiction, and despair. This has not been my lot (or ambition!) in life, and a career without them can seem as monotonous as a love story without a breakup.
In today’s society it would probably do me good if I could get a little discoloration to my reputation. People love that. If I were to go out and tell all, or get a little funkier, there’d be an even bigger audience out there to eat it up. There are even a few popular national magazines that have offered to put me on the cover if I’d—shall we say—“open up a bit.” It doesn’t even have to be true, they tell me.
Well, come to think of it, there has been a frightening lack of boredom in my life in recent years. Around 2008, not only did I have the good luck to become the father of another great kid, but I had a second marriage, and a really scary divorce.
* * *
I was married for thirty-eight years. Despite our ups and downs, my ex and I are still friends. We can proudly say that we learned from one another, built a lifetime of memories, and have proudly raised five beautiful daughters all of whom I am, of course, very proud of. My second marriage ended in eighteen months. Need I say more?