B009HOTHPE EBOK (2 page)

But socially he was a dapper kind of a guy, an essential character on account of his knowledge about what went on at every level. Because of his looks he moved easily in the Hollywood scene in California, and because of his links with the mob they eventually moved him out to Vegas.

Roselli hit Vegas in 1957. He was a very charming and well-dressed guy. We all knew he was monitoring everything for Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello. He helped with the loans with the teamsters—the Riviera Hotel was constructed with their cash. By the mid-1960s Roselli & Co. had already figured out what to do before Howard Hughes arrived and started to buy all the mob casinos—and in most cases he overpaid for them. They were trying to clean up the town, trying to lose the mob image, but Roselli stayed on.

Roselli was a major presence in Vegas until around 1966 when word had it he was extorting from the key casinos and Ralph Lamb the sheriff started looking at him. That led to the confrontation between Lamb and Roselli at a coffee shop. Lamb put Roselli in handcuffs and shoved him into the backseat of a squad car. His decline started at that point. In 1969, he was convicted for rigging a card game in Los Angeles. The rest of the story is public knowledge. In 1976, a fisherman found his body floating in Dumfoundling Bay, Florida, in a 55-gallon steel drum with his legs cut off and a pink washcloth stuffed in his mouth. That is when the mob shipped out their new enforcer from Chicago: Anthony Spilotro—and things started to get really wild, about which more to come later.

I’d be sitting around the Sands, hanging out with all those guys or lounging in the steam room with a whole other pocket of people—Sinatra, Gregory Peck, Don Rickles. Today it’s hard for people to get an idea of how incredible Vegas was in those days, the kind of intensity that existed there. The sense of fashion, the sense of klieg-light visibility the casinos stimulated. You walked in, you were already on stage. You were ready for your close-up every time you went through those doors.

I don’t think there’s ever been anything quite like Vegas in its golden era. Today, Vegas is this huge Disneyland for grown-ups where you get all of this stuff thrown at you: spectacles (with no real heart and soul, none of the real magic of what Vegas was back then), a few square blocks of glitter and glamour like a glitzy oasis in the desert with sand everywhere, and no high-rises. The type of people that run the casinos today are a different kind of animal altogether. Today it’s all corporate, which means lawyers and contracts and fine print.

And eventually, I made it into the innest in crowd there ever was: the Rat Pack. I got to hang around with singers who hung around with gangsters, politicians, movie stars, a who’s-who of people. I got to live the life. It was a high wild life—something I’d only dreamed of back in Ottawa.

One

OTTAWA

Upstairs in our house in Ottawa we had huge storm windows with wooden flaps. Underneath the flaps there were three small holes the size of a silver dollar. You couldn’t just prop open the window or you’d freeze to death, it was so damn cold. I’d jam a pencil through these little holes to hold open the flaps so I could look outside. I used to sit there at my window and the snow would be falling, snowflakes swirling outside in the wind, the windows all frosted—it was so beautiful, with all that magic snow and the whole smell of winter and I was snug and warm in my room. And then, I don’t know why, an unexpected thought would pass through me: “I can’t stay here, one day I have to get out of here.”

The odd thing was I had a great life—my sister Mariam, my brother Andy, my father Andrew and mother Camy, my relatives, everybody in my family were all close and loving. We weren’t rich, but we were a tight, comfortable, and happy family. But for some reason I felt like an outsider. Everyone I knew was going about their lives and they were happy, focusing on school, on sports, on their friends, on their hobbies. They were content with their lives. On the surface I did all the things other kids did at school. But I loved hockey the most. I
loved
hockey. I drew, made model airplanes, had a stamp collection. I was very athletic and I was always very busy; I would go out as much as I could. But at some point it became claustrophobic. Something was missing and I didn’t know what it was.

Everybody loves the idea of small town life, happy families, people sitting on their porches in the evening, neighbors strolling past and chatting—like in the movie,
It’s a Wonderful Life
. But then there are the exceptions, and I was one of the exceptions.

There was no media blitz like there is today, no twenty-four-hour news cycle or hundreds of channels. In 1954, for instance, there was maybe six hours of television a day. This was before the version of
American Bandstand
that featured Dick Clark. He didn’t come on the scene until 1956. And we’re not even in the USA, we’re in Canada! The only word to describe that was “provincial.” Ottawa was the epitome of provincial. All I knew was I had this thing inside me—there really wasn’t any model for me to follow like today with talent shows and
American Idol
. However you’d describe what motivated me, I felt like the first kid in the world to try and do it.

People in show business come from all kinds of backgrounds; quite a few come out of poverty-stricken or dysfunctional families. If you’re from an abusive family where your parents are always fighting and they beat you and there’s no money or your parents are drug addicts, of course you want to get away from that. But that wasn’t the case with me. When I had these thoughts about leaving, I’d ask myself, “Why are you doing this? What is your problem?” I didn’t know.

When I was twelve, I had all the energy and desire in the world but I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know if I wanted to be a lawyer, join the circus, discover a miracle vaccine, or be in show business. I don’t know where my drive came from, but from an early age I felt I had something inside of me that needed to be expressed. Many people grow up believing they’re talented at something, that they have a gift—but it’s not just being good at something that makes the difference, it’s the urge to be the best at it. I could never pinpoint where that came from, but I know I always had it. It was just so far out of most people’s range of thinking that it was scary, this desire to embark on some out-of-control journey.

For me it was never the unknown that was scary—it was the predictable. That’s what I found oppressive. Ottawa was a small town—relatively speaking—and in any case it had the same conventional, old-fashioned values as any little town would have, and like all small towns it had small expectations. You were expected to grow up and take over the family business. It was assumed, for instance, that I’d go on to run my dad’s restaurant—that’s what people thought was a good thing back then. Today anything is possible. There are so many alternatives that kids can dream about—you want to be a sportscaster, you want to be a Web designer, a venture capitalist. Ambitions of that sort didn’t exist back then except in rare instances. Expectations were limited; there were fewer things to aspire to. The big difference today is that kids walk around saying, “I want to be famous.” As a kid in those days you might daydream about being a famous baseball player or a movie star, but nobody took these fantasies too seriously. My ambition was particularly odd given the time and place I came from. Now everybody wants to be famous, but they don’t necessarily know what they want to be famous for.

They did a survey of kids in England about what they expected to do in life. They were asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up? Many just said, “I want to be famous.” Fame has become an end in itself, unattached to any achievement. It was different back when I was growing up. One kid wanted to play hockey, another wanted to be a football player; my friend from school wanted to be a ski champion. As soon as I figured it out, I knew what I wanted to be: a writer. That’s what I aspired to. I wanted to write—I had no idea what that might lead to, but somehow I knew I had an aptitude for it. Whatever being a writer entailed or how you became one were still a complete mystery but that didn’t faze me one bit.

Throughout my childhood, I ran into the occasional racial taunt from my classmates. Because of my swarthy Middle-Eastern complexion, they called me “the black Syrian.” While this was painful and humiliating, in one way it did me a favor: at a young age I became aware of the stupidity of prejudice. I remember one night when my uncle was throwing a drunk out of my father’s restaurant, the guy said, “You lousy Jew. I hope the Arabs beat the hell out of all the Jews in Palestine!” When my uncle pointed out that he was an Arab not a Jew, the drunk bellowed, “You lousy Arab. I hope the Jews beat the hell out of all the Arabs in Palestine!”

They tried to categorize us as part of the black race, as they did the Jews, which is why many of my friends were Jews. We were all lumped together in one package, when in fact we were Lebanese Christians.

Despite problems out there, life in the neighborhood felt safe: we lived in modest homes, life was family-driven, there were always lots of friends around, lots of relatives. It was a friendly, sheltered, suburban neighborhood. My cousins and our families were very close. I’d go over to Aunt Jessie’s or Uncle Mike’s, and all the children that went with it: eleven on my father’s side and five on my mother’s, so there was a constant rotation every weekend. Merriment, food, partying—just very close-knit families.

I was a wildly lively child. I was all over the place.

My father was the first of the brothers to own his own home and so all the brothers and sisters from all the families would congregate there on the weekends. Altogether it was a huge family with his sisters, some fourteen kids—two of the babies tragically died falling into a tub of boiling water so then there were twelve, but still the house was absolutely teeming with relatives. With me on the dining room table singing away. My father’s youngest brothers loved me. One would stand at the top of the staircase and the other at the bottom and they’d throw me up and down the stairs with great hilarity and to my mother’s horror. And I’ve stayed close to people in my family. To this day I’ve stayed close to my cousins Donny Abraham and Bob Anka. They’ve all been in and out of my life throughout my career. In fact I took my first trip to Paris on December 3, 1958, with Bob Anka, and that was a pretty interesting experience to say the least. My cousin Bob Skaff was one of my dearest friends all the way from the 1960s to the ’90s, in my earlier years traveling with me and doing promotional work. He was so helpful to me through his support and loyalty and in promoting my records over many, many years, until his death in 2012.

Ottawa was a small government town, somewhat conservative, but beautiful, even idyllic, from the fairy-tale tower of the House of Commons building to the dappled, leafy streets with the whir of kids on bikes and the ice-cream truck. It was a wonderful place to grow up. Life was pleasant, uneventful, and predictable, which is why I eventually left.

Ottawa for me was pure innocence. We would run water onto the lawn and freeze the backyard, and I’d play hockey on it. I had my chickens and my dogs. There were strawberry bushes all around the yard, which I tended. I would get as many apples off the trees in the neighborhood as I could being chased by dogs down the laneway that separated the yards. To this day I love apples.

I was born Paul Albert Anka in Ottawa on July 30, 1941. My parents were of Lebanese Christian descent and the name Anka itself had an almost folkloric history attached to it. It means “noose” in Arabic, and it came about in this way: In a small town in Syria called Bab Touma—where my ancestors came from—a man raped a young girl of thirteen. The parents of the girl were distraught to the point of madness, but the man had powerful friends and no one would bring him to justice. My grandfather and his brother took the matter into their own hands. They caught the rapist, made a noose from a length of rope, and hung him from a tree. Eventually my grandparents immigrated to Canada to escape revenge from the man’s clan. The immigration officer asked them what their name was. Not understanding the question they began to tell the story and during their explanation the story of the noose came up. The official heard the word “anka” and that became our surname.

When I came into my parents’ lives, they ran the Victoria Coffee Shop near the House of Commons building. That’s how I got my middle name, Albert, from Prince Albert who was Queen Victoria’s consort. We lived above the coffee shop until I was three or four. Then we moved to Bayswater Avenue, which was a much higher-end area.

As a child I sang in the St. Elijah Syrian Antiochian Orthodox Church choir where I got to know the choirmaster Frederick Karam, with whom I would study music theory later on.

I’ve always been an irrepressible ham. I remember going up to my grandmother’s and just acting stuff out. If I’d seen a Gene Kelly movie, I’d go and act out the whole thing for her, running around the living room, jumping on the chairs and singing. She was a sweet old gal, a very good-hearted woman, and later on somehow always knew when I needed money to buy records. She’d give me a couple of bucks after every living room performance. Maybe my businesslike approach to music started there because I was so comfortable with her, she was so indulgent of me—and I always got rewarded for my antics. She had to suffer through all my early amateur-hour performances—but she always made me feel as if I were giving her a great gift. Although sometimes I went too far, like banging out rhythms with a fork on her best china. She’d yell, “Paul, will you stop that! I don’t wanna hear that racket!”

I was a big music fan from a very young age. I loved music—every type of music. As a kid, I remember listening to a lot of different kinds of stuff, but I guess the first song that really hit me big was the Five Satins’ 1956 doo-wop hit “In the Still of the Night.” I used to play it constantly and get all my friends to sing along with me.

But my career as a shameless ham began long before that. At age ten I discovered I could make people laugh by singing and sobbing like Johnnie Ray. I was always performing: after we’d seen a show, after dinner, on vacation, in the backseat of the car. I’d serenade the neighbors from my back-porch stage, singing for housewives hanging out the wash in their backyards.