It’s impossible to catalog all of the changes Atlantic City has experienced over the past seven decades, but there is at least one constant that has spanned that time: Paul Anka.
When the 84-year-old singer-composer takes the stage of the Event Center at Borgata Hotel, Casino & Spa on April 18, it will continue an unprecedented run that began when Dwight Eisenhower was president of the United States and tail-finned cars ran on 30-cents-a-gallon gasoline.
“With everything it has been through — the negative and positive — it’s still Atlantic City,” offered Anka during a recent phone chat. “It’s a different landscape of what it used to be. But still, it’s Atlantic City and it’s still got that sizzle for a performer. So of course I’m gonna go there.”
Anka — who as the composer of both the Johnny Carson-era “Tonight Show” theme song and, of course, “My Way” for Frank Sinatra, has left indelible contributions to popular culture beyond his own canon of signature tunes including “Diana,” Puppy Love” and “You’re Having My Baby” — first appeared in Our Town on Steel Pier in the late-1950s as a member of the first generation of teen pop idols. But his initial interaction with an Atlantic City institution actually predated his stardom.
As the Ottawa, Canada native recalled in his wonderful (and wonderfully juicy) 2012 book, “My Way: An Autobiography,” in the early 1950s he put together a vocal-harmony group called The Bobby Soxers, whose gigs included playing in Ottawa at a touring circus owned by George Hamid Sr., the legendary impresario who turned Steel Pier into “the showplace of the nation.”
As Anka and his co-author, David Dalton, wrote, “We were pulling down $35 for the week’s work, which seemed like a fortune to us in those days.”
The tale continues. Several years later, Anka, who was by then a top recording artist, was pitched to Hamid as a Steel Pier headliner by his then-manager, famed show business promoter Irving Feld. The asking price was $3,500. According to the book, Hamid’s response was “What do you mean $3,500? I had this guy for $35 with two other kids thrown in!”
The book doesn’t say for sure whether the deal was made, but the historical record indicates it was.
Playing the Pier
As for his multiple appearances at the legendary amusement complex, Anka reminisced about the grueling performance schedule to which he and such fellow teen sensations as Ricky Nelson, The Everly Brothers and Bobby Rydell were shackled.
“You’d get there in the morning,” he explained. ”And you’d have to sing in the morning. There was a movie, then the [diving] horse would jump. It was like an all-day affair between movies and the horse [and his performance segments]. And that went from morning till night. That was the format.”
So, looking back over 60-plus years, were they good times? Or does Anka regret that grind?
“It was probably a combination of all of it,” he said. “You have to realize that everyone that I knew back then, we weren’t sophisticated. You were given a gift, and you had to claw your way along this journey saying, ‘How do I keep it together?’”
Interestingly, Anka never performed at the notorious 500 Club, the Missouri Avenue hotspot owned by local legend Paul “Skinny” D’Amato. The reason, he suggested, was that the club’s operation (read: backroom casino) didn’t fit the profile of the kind of venue in which his handlers wanted him to play.
A new Anka for a new AC
As the 1950s melted into the 1960s and pop music changed, so did Anka’s career and Atlantic City.
The latter lost its luster as a vacation destination, while the advent in early 1964 of Beatlemania and the “British Invasion” that remade pop music in its wake, ended the “American Bandstand” era that had birthed Anka’s career. But, as he freely admitted in his book, it was Frank Sinatra, not Elvis Presley from whom he took his cues as an entertainer. As a result, he pivoted to performing more sophisticated, adult tunes in the manner of his hero. Which meant he was perfectly positioned when, in 1978, legal casino gaming came to Atlantic City.
Logically, Anka’s first local gaming-hall stage was at what was then called Resorts International (now Resorts Casino-Hotel), the first state-sanctioned gambling den, where he appeared in 1978. In 1980, he moved to the newly opened Golden Nugget, which was built by his longtime close friend, Steve Wynn. He remained a regular attraction there after Wynn sold the property (the first AC casino to be built entirely from the ground up) and it became known as Bally’s Grand. In the ensuing decades, he has gigged at Caesars Atlantic City, Trump Plaza, Trump’s Castle/Trump Marina (he and Donald Trump share a friendship that began in the 1980s), Ocean Casino Resort and Borgata.
While he said he has enjoyed playing at all of them, he admitted he has special feelings for the 500-seat Opera House at the original Golden Nugget/Bally’s Grand because of its intimacy and his decades-long, family-level relationship with Wynn. He also named the 1,000-seat Music Box at Borgata as a favorite space.
A final thought
The only time the normally loquacious Anka, who is currently working on a Broadway musical based on his music and life, was at a loss for words during the interview occurred at the end of the discussion, when he was asked how he’d like to be remembered 50 or 100 years from now.
At first, after a short hesitation, he replied, “I couldn’t even give you a really profound answer to that. I don’t know.” But then he added, “Does it sound corny? I did it my way.”
For tickets, go to ticketmaster.com.
Harrah’s revives the sounds of the ’80s
This Sunday, Harrah’s Resort Atlantic City gets back into the production-show business with the debut of “’80s Live,” which runs Sundays at 4 p.m. through June 28.
The revusical, which features a small army of singers, dancers and musicians, focuses on the era when MTV set the pop-music agenda. As such, the set list is expected to include music from the likes of Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston.
For tickets, go to ticketmaster.com.
‘Pig’ news at Resorts
Friday will see the debut of the latest “pop-up” bar at Resorts Casino-Hotel. The Piggy Bank, which will operate through the summer, has a porcine theme that extends to the décor and “Piggy Dancers.”
Friday’s unveiling, on April 10, begins at 6 p.m. with the revelry continuing until 2 a.m.
Chuck Darrow has spent more than 40 years writing about Atlantic City casinos.
