B009HOTHPE EBOK (18 page)

I later wrote a song dedicated to my father called, “Papa.” When I looked back after a few years, I saw that it was very much about that time.

When she died

My papa broke down and cried

All he said was, “God, why her? Take me!”

Every night he sat there sleeping

In his rocking chair

He never went upstairs

All because she wasn’t there.

From my mother’s death I learned about what we get and what we lose in this life. It had unexpected consequences for me. It gave me independence and propelled my unstoppable drive. For a whole year I had lived with that knowledge I was going to lose her. And then suddenly, a few months before she passed, I realized, “She’s going to die!” I knew she was going and there was nothing I could do about it. From that loss I learned that part of life was losing, and that knowledge changed my music. By the time she passed I’d had a lot of hits, but thank God I’d played every single one of them to my mother in our basement.

After my mother died we eventually moved into the city to an apartment in the Carnegie House on Sixth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, right off Central Park, it was the top corner apartment. My dad, being a widower, was having a hard time taking care of my brother and sister and dealing with my business as well. It all became too much for him. My mother had always wanted to send Mariam to a finishing school in Europe. So, after she died, I put my sister and brother through school. I sent Mariam to Le Grand Verger in Lutry, Switzerland; well-to-do kids from all over the world went there; King Farouk’s daughters were students. My brother went to the Brummana High School near Beirut, Lebanon, a world-famous school run by the Quakers. The year before, they had all gone on a visit to the Middle East with my father and I think that’s where the idea of sending Andy to the school in Lebanon must have come from.

I’d written “You Are My Destiny” for my mother—because she
was
my destiny. It was her faith in me that had driven me throughout my life. And, by sheer happenstance, I fulfilled one of her fondest wishes: she wanted me to marry a nice Lebanese girl … and I did.

I went to the Sands Hotel, then the Coconut Grove Club at the Ambassador Hotel in L.A., Eden Roc, and back to the Fontainebleau again. Right after that I’m booked at the Copacabana, then the Steel Pier in July—in the same month, the Frolics, the Concord, the Glen Park Casino in Buffalo, and in August the Wildwood at the Manor Hotel.

When I performed at the Copacabana in June of ’61, the crowds that formed around the block out onto Fifth Avenue began to seem a bit alarming. Then it was, tomorrow the world! Later in August I left for Spain and performed in Barcelona. On these tours the enormity of the change in my lifestyle was boggling. In Japan, two thousand fans had waited in line in a typhoon to see me. In Sweden, twenty thousand fans waited to hear me in the rain. In Algiers, they’d called out paratroopers to control the mob trying to get into my show. And, to think, only a few years ago I’d been this short, geeky, not-exactly-popular kid in Ottawa, wondering who I was and what I had to do to get out of my little provincial town—and now I needed police protection from my fans!

On August 27, I was in London doing a Granada TV special—and that’s where I first meet Johnny Carson, which led to me writing the theme for
The Tonight Show.
At the Sands Hotel that September I started to develop my relationship with the Rat Pack: Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. Next, I’m booked to perform for ten days at the Araneta Coliseum in the Philippines, breaking all existing records, playing to more than 226 thousand Filipino fans. Irv was thrilled at the time to get me out of New York and away from Shirley Ornstein because of his concern about me being with an older woman who was separated from her husband. The fan repercussion was on his mind. Shirley had an earlier relationship with Burt Bacharach from before she was married and he continued to see her as her marriage was coming to an end. In fact it was Shirley who, in a sense, introduced me to Burt. While I was seeing her, Burt was still in her life, which was cool to both of us. Every time I would see her a week later she would be filling me in on what Burt was up to and what songs he was excited about writing. That was my introduction to Burt Bacharach and Hal David.

In December, I went to perform at the Caribe Hilton in Puerto Rico—this was to become a major turning point in my life because, thanks to Shirley Ornstein, that’s where I was to meet my future wife, Anne.

Anyway, it was Shirley who first saw Anne on the beach one day and came back to me and said, “There’s this beautiful model down there, from France, doing some commercial on the beach, blah-blah-blah.”

That night I picked her out myself. Puerto Rico being the hang place that it was at the time, everybody always wound up in the same scenes. And there she was, at a party given by Tony Beacon, a socialite columnist. I saw her at the end of a long table with maybe twenty people, and I said, “Wow! Who the hell is that?”

“That’s the girl on the beach,” said Shirley.

“My God, you’re right,” I said. “Shirley, guess what, you’re going home tomorrow!” She took it like the true friend she was, and the next day I started looking. I had to find that girl. The search went on for three days. I called around to all the hotels—no luck. I had my cousin Bob Skaff looking, everybody. Finally, she surfaced at a tiny hotel. I called her up and invited her to the show.

She was with a guy named Bernard Lanvin, whose family owned Lanvin, the big French clothing company. They came to the show together but I wasn’t discouraged. I tracked her down again and said, “Please have coffee with me.”

I finally wrangled some time with her and we did have coffee, talking until six in the morning. She told me about her upbringing. She told me she hadn’t heard that much pop music because she’d been to a strict convent school where the nuns forbade her to play certain kinds of music—for example, her favorite, Elvis Presley. Turns out they did allow someone called Paul Anka. Lucky for me!

When she told me she was Anne de Zogheb, I asked her what kind of name that was and you should have seen my face when she said Lebanese! She was one of the top models at the Ford Agency. She was actually living under Eileen Ford’s roof, that’s how young she was. Otherwise, her parents never would have allowed her to leave Paris. Eileen was supposed to be protecting her from men like me and until I showed up, was doing a pretty good job of it.

I love Paris. I adore it aesthetically, culturally, intellectually—plus I speak French. I’m bilingual, I’m from Canada. When I was courting Anne like crazy—and she happened to be in Paris, which was whenever she wasn’t working—my whole motivation was to get to Paris! Get to Paris! We dated for almost a year before I even got to meet her parents who lived there. They seemed to have landed from a whole other world. I was in Paris shooting some interiors for
The Longest Day
in which I play a kid from the Bronx who fights alongside the American Rangers on D-Day. Well, I went directly from the set to meet the parents—dressed in army fatigues!

They were very aristocratic, actual aristocrats. Her father was titled, her grandfather a count. They just started grilling me: “What do you want with our daughter?” and “Do you have enough money to take care of her?” Believe me,
that
was the longest day—and may I add the longest night.

In
The Longest Day,
I scaled the cliffs of Normandy under simulated battle conditions and all I got was a mashed finger. But working on that movie was an amazing as well as exasperating experience. First, you’re waiting all day in a tent, waiting and waiting, the way one does on movies. And in walks John Wayne! He’s
huge
. He’s CinemaScope size. He’s a wall. He walks in and he has full power, you know? He just sits down and without saying a word plays chess with me. And there’s Richard Burton! Hungover and muttering something dire from Shakespeare’s
Henry V
: “And gentlemen in England now-a-bed shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s Day.” Robert Mitchum was already three sheets to the wind. He didn’t have to act—he was already a classic noir character. So much charisma in one room, it was a little intimidating. You grew up seeing these people twenty feet high on the screen and then when you meet them they really do seem larger than life.

I’ll never forget that first scene, running up the beach, and then onto the hill and up those ladders. All the singers were there: Tommy Sands, me, Fabian. We all kind of looked alike! If we’d all been wearing helmets, nobody would have known who was who, but as I was going up the ladder, I lost my helmet. I was trying to get my foot up as high as I could, put my head down, and my helmet hit the ladder and fell off! I thought they’d reshoot the scene but apparently they don’t reshoot entire battle scenes because one soldier has lost his helmet. When the next scene comes up, the assistant director says, “You have to keep your helmet off to match the previous shot.”

Well, little did I know that, for continuity purposes, the mistake had to be carried through the whole film. I wound up being the only guy in all those battle scenes without a helmet! Kinda good for me because all my friends could pick me out whenever I appeared. Everyone else had helmets!

We literally re-created the war there. All the airplanes and helicopters and boats came over from our armed forces in Germany. The magnitude of it was boggling! Not to mention the umpteen stars (everyone in the world was in it).

I started to get friendly with Darryl F. Zanuck, the producer, and one day eating lunch the natural thing to ask was, “Who’s doing the music?”

“No music,
nooooo
love story,” he said. He had his theories and he loved saying it—it wasn’t the last time I’d hear it.

Okay, no love story was something I could wrap my brain around. Sticking to the book and all that, keeping it authentic. What do we need a love story for? But no music? No way.

So we would hang and drink beer together, and I would ask him again, “No music, Mr. Zanuck? Really?” I mean, I can’t believe it.

“No music, no love story, no distraction of any kind!” he said.

Meanwhile, Zanuck’s mistress was just about the only woman in it. So the only love story going on was
outside
the film. Irina Demick was her name. He was a hell of a guy, that Zanuck, just this really feisty character. I identified with him. He was my height, had the cigar—a straight-ahead, no-bullshit kind of guy. You shook his hand, you had a deal. I loved the guy. The son was great, too, but Mr. Zanuck, I loved.

Anyway, they liked what I did, extended my part, and invited me back to do more. That second time around was my big chance.

“Mr. Zanuck,” I said. “I’ve got this melody in my head.” And I sang it for him.

“Well, that’s wonderful,” he said, so I’m feeling really psyched. But then he added, “but no music.” He was on a loop.

So there I was, in the road company, so to speak, part of this film, and very inspired by it all. I go home and I’m sitting at the piano and I just start banging it out,
da da da da, da da dee da,
you know? Like I say with songwriting it’s all in the finger—that’s where the hits are. It’s one finger, right? That’s what it was. Simple. You start to brainstorm. Okay,
The Longest Day.
I see many men, tired, weary, scared, inspired. And I was, too. My writing chops were there, I’d been doing this stuff since ’57, since I was a kid. So you go
da-da daaa, da-da dee dah,
and then you go to your arrangers, your band, and you start putting it together and it comes alive. But it all starts with that piano, and finding the basic tune that captures the mood.

When I left the second time, I told Zanuck, “I’m going to go home and make a demo. You can throw it away, but I’m going to send it you, ’cause this whole experience has really inspired me. Just listen to it and do what you want.”

I came home, spent a couple thousand dollars putting everything down on the demo, and I sent it to him. And he sends me back a telegram:
THERE WILL BE MUSIC STOP LOVE IT STOP.
That’s how telegrams read back then. I couldn’t believe it.

Happy as I was, I was still me, so I answered, “Thank you very much, and you don’t owe me a thing. All I want is the publishing.” And he said, “You got it.”

When the head of Twentieth Century Fox caught wind that the music was in, they wanted to take the publishing, but Zanuck said, “You don’t touch the kid’s stuff.… He gets what I promised him.” And then I got Maurice Jarre to score it—what could be better than that? I’d been to France, I love France, and I loved his work—he’s just brilliant.

Then it was on to Japan again, where I had five of the ten top records in the charts. And you know the Japanese, they have great ideas, can produce and reproduce anything. So the first thing that happens to me is this guy comes up and says, “Mista Anka, look! I give you a lighter, one cent, you give it for presents.” And he shows me the side of it, and, in a very oblique form of calligraphy—red lettering on silver—it says,
STOLEN FROM PAUL ANKA
. In other words it was written calligraphically in such a way it wasn’t that easy to read.

“That’s cute,” I said. “It’s a cute gimmick.”

I loved that and of course I had to order a bunch of them. I must have bought three boxes of these lighters from him. And I start giving them out—to stagehands, to anyone who does anything for me. Back then it was a big deal for me to give out a gift, a lighter. One cent, they cost! Jeeze.

So I go back to France to shoot more scenes of the film. I give them out to all the key camera guys, the director, people who helped me, but naturally I’ve also got quite a few left over. Meanwhile, we begin to notice that every time we go down to Normandy beach to film—it took us a couple of hours to get to the location—we get robbed. And every time we’d leave these rooms in tiny hotels in tiny towns, we’d get robbed again. The whole world knew where and when we were shooting, and they’d go in and take clothing, jewelry, whatever.