By Chuck Darrow
Why do we love Paul Anka?
It may be because he is still a vital show business force after a career that started when he helped create the teen-pop-idol template in the late 1950s with such hits as “Diana” and the TikTok-embraced “Put Your Head On My Shoulder,” and which has touched parts of eight decades and included collaborations with a roster of show business immortals including Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson.
Or maybe it’s because he composed two of the most iconic of all post-World-War-II pieces of music: The theme song of the Johnny Carson-hosted “Tonight Show” and the Sinatra signature, “My Way.”
Or maybe it’s because he’s still doing things his way, regardless of what anyone else may think. Take, for instance, the current advertising campaign for Cologard, the do-it-yourself colon-cancer test whose TV commercials feature new lyrics set to “My Way.” It has certainly engendered some consternation among Sinatra-philes (at least a few that I know) who insist using the tune for such a purpose somehow demeans and/or devalues the beloved anthem of defiance and pride.
“They called me up. They sent me a storyboard. I gave some stupid number [when the Cologard people asked for a price to license the song], not thinking they’d pay it. They did,” chuckled the 83-year-old legend during a recent phone chat occasioned by his Nov. 16 engagement at Ocean Casino Resort.
“I respected where they were going metaphorically, in a sense, with it and what the product was. It didn’t bother me. I don’t care. You know, that song’s getting used left and right all the time, and always will. I don’t think it’s hurt the song in any way. I mean, people still love it. They still sing it when people are dying or, or dead or in prison.
“No, it doesn’t bother me. It’s just business. Just business.”
Much more dear to Anka than any TV commercial these days is “Paul Anka: His Way,” a film documentary that recently premiered at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival. It covers his life before the Ottawa, Ontario native became a pop sensation with the July, 1957 release of “Diana” four weeks before his 16th birthday (he originally had his sights set on a journalism career), as well as the multiple paths his show biz career has encompassed:
Singing and composing music are but two facets of his professional life; he’s also a major behind-the scenes player, having discovered superstar crooner (and fellow Canadian) Michael Buble. He’s also an actor whose credits include the 1962 World War II epic, “The Longest Day” and TV shows such as “Las Vegas” and “Gilmore Girls.”
Anka suggested he was particularly impressed by the filmmakers’ research for the project.
“They came up with some footage that I hadn’t known about,” he offered. “You’ll see footage in there that goes back to the Fifties. You’ll see footage from certain countries. I mean, my hat’s off to this team of people: young, smart, good people. They did their homework.
“I got warehouses of stuff and I got stuff everywhere. They kind of tapped into it. But they came up with stuff that I looked and went, ‘Wow! Where did you find that?’”
Not that attending the film’s premiere was an especially enjoyable experience for him.
“It was horrifying,” he admitted with a laugh. “I sat in the theater in Toronto with 2000 people, and I’m looking at myself on the screen, and I wanted to crawl out of there. I hated it. It is not my thing, man. Not my thing.
“But the audience was laughing and screaming.”
If things work out to his satisfaction, “His Way” won’t be the only documentation of Anka’s life and career.
“Now, I’m knee deep in a Broadway show,” he divulged. “We’re trying to select a writer. We’ve got the money and I want to get a script or it’s a ‘no-go,’ because that’s what it’s all about. The investors really want to do it, but I’ve been saying for years, unless I get a script I like, I just don’t want to go in there and waste anybody’s time and money.”
Anka explained the unnamed project will not be a “jukebox” musical that uses his compositions in the service of an original story, but a biographical piece.
“It’s gonna take me back to when I was a 15-year-old kid,” he said of the play that will feature two actors playing him in different periods of his life. “There’ll be two actors [one portraying] the kid that came down from Canada and got lucky all those earlier years, right up into working for [the organized-crime figures who ran the nightclub business in the 1950s, ’60s and ‘70s] the [Sinatra-led] ‘Rat Pack, and then the evolution into what I did after.’
“It’ll be all my music and it’s going to be all of that with stuff that a lot of people don’t know. But it’s about the story.
“If we’re using ‘Jersey Boys’ [the smash Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons-based hit] as the [standard], from my point of view, it’s great music. But it would never have gotten what it has in terms of its success without a great script. You gotta have the story. And they did a great job getting that story done.
”If I don’t get [a writer] that gets it, I’m not interested. I’m really not.”
For tickets, go to ticketmaster.com.
Chuck Darrow has spent more than 40 years writing about Atlantic City casinos.
