B009HOTHPE EBOK (43 page)

I saw it coming. As far back as the early seventies I was told that no Las Vegas act could expect to have a hit song on the charts. Then I wrote “(You’re) Having My Baby” and it went to the top of the charts. Critics cut me some slack after that, but to this day I’m sure they consider my Las Vegas appearances as a mistake.

In 1980 I had a top five AC hit on the charts for Sony records with “Hold Me ’Til the Morning Comes.” By the ’80s I figured it was time to try out other media. In 1980, I wrote a song for Louis Malle’s
Atlantic City
—the movie tied for first place at the Venice Film Festival.

I’ve done a bit of acting, too. I’d been in all those teen movies and, of course,
The Longest Day.
I wasn’t too enamored of the movie business but started doing a few cameo parts in the ’70s and ’80s. I played a yacht broker in
Captain Ron,
a pit boss in
3000 Miles To Graceland.
On TV I was on
That ’70s Show
and
Gilmore Girls
(where Lorelai named her dog Paul Anka) and in the “Treehouse of Horror VI” episode on
The Simpsons
—now that’s
almost
as good as a Grammy.

Yes, in the ’80s, there was a lot of activity—especially foreign travel. I began touring a lot more in Asia, a part of the world that is fascinating and has my respect. It’s been the most stimulating part of the world to tour and experience. I have sustained a long working relationship with two people who were my first promoters in the Hong Kong region, Florence and David Chan. To this day I hold them very close to my heart for their loyalty and friendship, Florence Chan especially. She is a very special and rare human being. Another couple dear to my heart are Dr. Albert Yeung and his wife Semon. Albert is one of the most successful and brightest men in Hong Kong. They are both giving and incredible hosts. I cherish the moments when I am in their company.

Ten

THE BELLINI EPISODES

I’ve always been a practical joker, ever since I was a kid, but my serious capers started in the late sixties and early seventies and onward. Steve Wynn and I became very close when we were neighbors in Vegas. Steve had never been to Europe so we took a trip there with our wives and families. As soon as we got to Venice we started drinking Bellinis, which is champagne and peach nectar. I loved bellinis so much Steve started calling me Bellini, and that became my nickname. And whenever I’d do a practical joke, he would call it “doing a Bellini.”

On one occasion, when we went to Monte Carlo with Skip Bronson, who at the time worked with Steve at Mirage Resorts. We went over to look at the Grand Prix race route because Steve wanted to bring it to Vegas. The idea was, shut down the strip, and try and re-create the Grand Prix in the center of the city. He’s a great visionary and we have a lot of fun together when we get away.

The Grand Prix race lasts two or three days and on that opening night we get invited to the Palace to meet Prince Rainier, the ruler of the glamorous gambling kingdom on the Mediterranean—Monaco is one of the most beautiful spots in the world. We land, we go to the Hôtel de Paris, one of the most well-appointed and stylish hotels in Europe. After attending the second day of the Grand Prix, I feel it is the right moment to pull a Bellini. I pick up the phone and call Skip Bronson. We’re all staying on the same floor, and I say, “Meester Bronson, this is Fridrici Baglatini over at the Palace with Prince Rainier.” I’m doing my corniest Italien functionary’s accent.

“Yes?” says Bronson.

“We are so happy to ’ave a Mr. Wynn over here as our guest for the Grand Prix and tonight you know we’re ’aving the big celebration at the Palace. Mr. Bronson, Mr. Wynn we’re very happy to have ’im ’ere, ’e’s incredible business for the casino, and the prince would like to ’ave private audience with Mr. Wynn, to discuss casino business.”

“Oh, wonderful, I’ll put that together,” Bronson tells me.

“’Ave ’im up ’ere at six o’clock. And make sure ’e wears a tuxedo, cause ’e’s going to see the prince by ’imself.”

“Oh, tuxedo? Okay.”

“We’ll send a car. You put him in the car; we will get him out. We got a department for people with any kind of a health problem”

“Well, but there’s something you should know, Mr. Wynn has a problem with the eyesight. He has retinitis pigmentosa, so he can’t see clearly when it gets dark.”

“Don’t vorry,” I say. “You put ’em in the car, and we got a department for people with any kind of health problems. And vill take care of ’em.” Then I add, “This is official visit, you cannot come with him,
capisce
?”

He says, “Oh, okay.”

I say, “’Ere’s my phone number, if anything
bup-bup-bup
.” And I give him a phone number and he takes the phone number—but of course it’s bogus.

I go down to Steve’s room; he’s been informed by Skip over the phone that the prince wants to see him alone. I walk into Steve’s room, and he’s on the phone with his wife, Elaine.

“I haven’t got long,” he says. “Turns out the prince wants to see me. I gotta get this tuxedo ready. I go over to the Palace at six, just the two of us. We’re going to discuss…”

And I’m going, “Steve…”

“Honey,” Steve’s telling his wife, “I gotta hang up, Bellini’s here, I’m going up to see the prince. I gotta be there in half an hour.”

So he hangs up and he says, “Bellini, come on, help me, what should I wear? The black, the blue?” He’s showing me different outfits, because he can’t tell the difference between the colors on account of his eye problem and I’m helping him through all of this. He’s getting more and more revved up for the meeting.

I realize at this point I’ve gone too far and have to stop it. I say, “Steven, there is no meeting.”

He says, “What do you mean, Bellini?” I tell him I just did a Bellini on Skippy. “That was me; I called Bronson. I just put him on. Just to get him. He had never experienced my humor before, and needed a “Bellini” pulled on him.

He says, “Oh fuck, Bellini, that’s funny. You didn’t!” As we’re talking about it, there’s a knock at the door and in walks Skip Bronson. He’s got a pad in his hand and a pencil and he looks at us and says, “Oh man, these people are something over here.”

So Steve says, “What do you mean?”

He says, “You know, I tried to call this guy back, who set this meeting up with you and the prince. I call over there; I can’t get through. I must have taken down the wrong number and I could not reach him. So I called the main number through the hotel operator here and when they answer they said they did not know anything about the guy. So I said, ‘Get me the emissary to the prince.’ I get this guy on the phone, this real snobby French cat; he’s telling me he doesn’t know anything about the meeting. And I said to him, ‘Well, you know what, you’re out of the loop. I’m gonna have Mr. Wynn there at six.’ They’re trying to give me an argument, but I
handled
it, Steve! Told this Frenchman off,
da uh da
.”

Steve says, “You told the Palace that you’re coming with me, and you told the prince’s emissary that he’s out of the loop? And you’re bringing me, hell or high water?”

Skip says, “Yeah, why?”

So finally Wynn says, “There ain’t no fucking meeting. That was Bellini on the phone. Not some guy at the Palace.”

Skip goes white, and he says, “You mean I just bawled out the entire staff over there—for nothing?”

He gets over it, and we’re laughing and laughing about the thing. We go to the Palace at 8:00, stand in line with a hundred people in the Palace courtyard until they’re ready for us, all still cracking up. Steve thinks it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard, that Skip has told off the entire Palace. So now we get inside and Steve says, “I can’t fucking believe this.” And as we’re talking, the guy who Skip called up and told, “You’re out of the loop,” comes walking by and is introduced to us. He goes white when he hears Skip’s and Steve’s names and storms off.

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.