Early rock ’n’ roll rocketed a cadre of swoon-worthy teen idols to fame in the 1950s, but none has stayed aloft longer than singer/songwriter Paul Anka.
The hits that Anka wrote and recorded, including “Diana” (1957), “You Are My Destiny” (1958), “Lonely Boy” (1959) and “Puppy Love” (1960), put him on the map. “My Way” (1969), the stirring anthem he penned for Frank Sinatra, ensured that he stayed there.
Anka has released 124 albums in English, German, Italian and Spanish, selling more than 42 million records all told. He has recorded three songs that hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts: “Diana,” ”Lonely Boy” and “(You’re) Having My Baby” (1974). Citing his total of 33 top-40 songs, Billboard has named him one of the 25 most successful recording artists of all time.
At 71 Anka still does about 100 live performances each year, spending four to five months touring in China, Europe and South America as well as in the United States and his native Canada. It has been decades, though, since he had a top-40 hit in the United States.
“Am I as needy of that as I was years ago? No,” Anka says. “Do I need it to survive? No. I’m very realistic. There is no music business as I knew it.”
Once upon a time, though, Anka was at the center of the music business and, indeed, the whole entertainment world. His new autobiography, My Way (St. Martin’s Press), written with David Dalton, is packed with revelations about Angie Dickinson, Michael Jackson, John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley, Sinatra and more.
He looks back, for example, to his romance with the late Annette Funicello, at the time a crazed Anka fan who was fresh from Mouseketeer duty and soon to star in Beach Party (1963) and a string of similar films.
“She was … a very, very passionate girl,” Anka writes. “Having an affair with Annette was an absolute fantasy come true.”
Nonetheless, it was a relationship without a future.
“I loved Annette,” Anka says, “but I wasn’t ready to get married. Ultimately she got it that that wasn’t going to happen.”
Besides, Anka had other things to worry about. He had established himself as a canny songwriter and a powerful singer when suddenly the“British invasion” hit. Musical tastes changed virtually overnight and knocked him off the radio. Many of his peers saw their careers wiped out in a flash.
“I wasn’t supposed to last with what I was up against,”Anka says. “I’ve absolutely led two lives.”
The secret to his success was, in part, that he had already launched a counter-invasion. As early as his first hit, “Diana,” the 16-year-old Canadian of Lebanese Christian descent was already touring Algeria, Australia, Belgium, Chile, England, France, Japan, Spain and Sweden.
“While the British invaded the United States,” he says, “I was moving into their territory. I went to Europe and established the foreign marketplace, which has been very supportive of me to this day.”
Anka, whose new CD, Duets, features team-ups with Celine Dion, Michael Jackson and Willie Nelson, among other top artists, attributes his songs’ international appeal tostrong melodies and “easy to understand” lyrics.
“People can relate,” he says. “And I write in a minor key, which is very, very emotional.”
Also helping him keephis head above water during Beatlemania’s high tide was his second career as an author of songs for other singers. The artists for whom he has written include Buddy Holly, Tom Jones, Sinatra and Sonny and Cher, as well as Michael Jackson - he cowrote Jackson’s posthumous No. 1 hit, “This Is It” (2009). That sustained him in the mid-1960s when, as he writes, he was “performing but living on my past.”
“If I weren’t a writer, I don’t think I would have lasted,” he says. “Frankly, if I weren’t a writer, I don’t think I would have started.”
Anka was only 15 when he wrote “Diana,” initially as a poem about a neighborhood girl four years his senior on whom he had a serious crush.He was already a musician, however, having formed a singing group called the Bobbysoxers at 13, and it was natural for him to set his poem to music.
It didn’t win him the girl, but a half-century career is a good consolation prize. Anka had the song with him when he journeyed to New York and, without even an appointment, walked into ABC-Paramount and walked out with a recording contract.
“Diana” zoomed to No. 1 in England, then again in the United States, hitting the top of the charts a month after Anka’s 16th birthday. One triumph followed another: At 18 he became the youngest act to play New York’s fabled Copacabana nightclub and the youngest to headline in Las Vegas, when Sin City was in its heyday.
Playing Vegas was a thrill for Anka, because he was fascinated by the storied Rat Pack, led by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.
“Silly little teenage songs got me started,” he says.“They were emotional and had a lot of heart. But that didn’t mean that other dynamics of my personality weren’t alive.”
Though he never became an official member, the brash young singer struck up a friendship with the Rat Pack, who seemed to be amused by his eagerness and let him hang with them.
“I was intrigued by that world,” Anka recalls. “I wanted to be like those guys. I wanted to have the cool they had. But I never became Sinatra cool or Dean Martin cool. I was this kid who tried to be cool, dressing like them and emulating their behavior.But not their bad behavior - smoking, drinking, womanizing - because [my manager] was always watching me.
“I was making money [for him],” Anka says. “Money was driving everything.”
In his first two years in show business, the young Canadian chalked up five Top 20 hits. At 21 he was Oscar-nominated for writing the title song for The Longest Day (1962), a film in which he also acted. (He was also in Girls Town, Let’s Rock and Look in Any Window.) The same year he composed the theme music for The Tonight Show.
It didn’t last, though. Beatlemania rocked the music world, and by 1967 even Sinatra’s career was on the wane.
“Frank was going to quit because, in his mind, it was over for him,” Anka recalls. “The Rat Pack was falling apart, he was fed up. He was playing with electric trains. But he needed to work.”
Inspired by Sinatra’s adamant refusal to tailor his act to the new wave in music, Anka wrote the lyrics to “My Way” for his buddy. It became a huge hit, revitalized the careers of both men and was Sinatra’s theme song for therest of his life.
“She’s a Lady” (1971), which he wrote for Tom Jones, proved that Anka was back to stay, surging to No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. Three years later Anka scored his first No. 1 hit in 15 years with “(You’re) Having My Baby.”
Released right after abortion was legalized in the United States and at the height of the feminist movement, the song generated controversy. Feminists saw it as deliberately retrograde: The National Organization for Women “honored” Anka with a “Keep Her in Her Place” award, and Ms. magazine branded him “Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year.”
“I wrote that as a love song to my wife after our fifth daughter was born and when I noticed that a lot of women were having children out of wedlock,” Anka says. “But I wasn’t ready to hand outpamphlets explaining what my songs were about every time I wrote one.
“It’s interesting, though,” he says. “That one went to No. 1 after all the flak heated up. It took on a new life.”
He may specialize in romantic love songs, but Anka has been divorced twice. His first marriage, to former model Anne de Zogheb, ended in 2001 after 39 years and five daughters. Six years later he wed his personal trainer, Anna Abery, a union that lasted only two years before a divorce that he calls “really scary” in his book.
“The marriage was horrible,” the singer/songwriter says somberly.
It did, however, produce his first son, Ethan, who is now 7 and often accompanies his father on out-of-town gigs.
“My son is a treasure in my life,” Anka says simply. “He’s everything to me. My life is centered around him.”
Style, Pages 29 on 04/25/2013