Anka's Aweigh

At 34, Paul Anka is one of the richest entertainers in the world. When night falls over the mountains outside his Sun Valley condominium, he sits down at the baby grand to compose. "I like to have four or five songs going at once," he says with satisfaction. Beside the piano is a typewriter to which Paul, a 60-words-a-minute typist, turns to do the lyrics. It is the same machine on which he has tapped out such solid gold hits as My Way for Frank Sinatra, She's a Lady for Tom Jones and (You're) Havin' My Baby for himself. Recently he wrote something for New York, too: "I'm on my way back home to New York City/ On my way to where I used to be/ To leave her when she's down would be a pity/ After all she's done for me."

Wet Look. This week, for the first time in 14 years, Anka returns to Broadway, which--despite the nice things he has to say about it--locked him out last September. That was during the musicians' strike. Unfazed, Paul plans to give the entire take from his ten one-night stands to New York City charities as a gesture of thanks to the place where his entrepreneurial genius was first sparked.

Paul's one-man show is refined Vegas, trim but not brassy. When he is not donating his time, he performs for no less than $150,000 a night. Since 1956 he has written 400 songs, 18 of which have sold more than 1 million discs apiece. He has leased his old hits for five years to a golden-oldie outfit called American International. The deal is likely to bring him half a million in royalties. Residuals from the Tonight Show theme, which he wrote in 1962, yield $30,000 a year. For $50,000 against royalties, Anka cut Kodak's advertising jingle, The Times of Your Life. Now Paul and the jingle are rising on the pop charts as well. This Christmas he is opening his own auberge, Chez Paul, in Sun Valley. Next May he will open a million-dollar discotheque in Vegas. His business headquarters are in New York and Los Angeles, and he flies between them in his Lear Jet. From his combined enterprises, Paul can gross up to $10 million a year--depending on how hard he wants to work.

This seems a lot of loot to derive from what is, after all, a hangover of the '50s schmaltz. But Paul's smooth style is always in fashion somewhere, and with the raucous '60s behind him, he is even more successful than in his days as a teen-age idol. A glance at the young Anka hardly explains his durability in show business: could that chubby kid with the wet look who dated pubescent Mousketeer Annette Funicello really have been smart? Paul was the son of a Lebanese restaurateur in Ottawa, but he was only hungry for success. At 14, he won a three-day trip to Manhattan in an IGA soup contest ("I collected the most labels"). One bite of the Big Apple made him want more. Within two years Paul was back, with $100 from his father and six songs tucked under his arm. He was dossing down in a friend's bathtub when ABC-Paramount Records gave him a contract. Diana was his first cut. It was an immediate hit and went on to become the second biggest grossing record in history, right after Bing Crosby's White Christmas.

By 20, Anka was superrich--and a has-been. The Rolling Stones and the Beatles were knocking the adenoidal crooners off the pop charts. "It wasn't my time," says Paul. "You have to be realistic. Don't panic, don't force." At 5 ft. 5 in., he trimmed down to a lean and hungry 135 lbs. and made a killing at Vegas. He was and is the kind of velvet-voiced baritone that Vegas' middle-aged audience likes best.

The days of new hits, however, seemed to be over. That changed in 1968 when Paul heard a French ballad called Comme d'Habitude. He bought the rights and in three months turned it into Frank Sinatra's song, My Way.

Fear of Dying. Paul's way was subsequently diverted into tailoring signature songs for others, but he was still unable to fashion another golden disc for himself. In 1974 he made up his mind: "I had to come back with a big hit, and all I had to fall back on was my own experience. What I had experienced was four natural childbirths." The fruit of this vicarious reasoning was (You're) Havin' My Baby: "Didn't have to keep it/ Wouldn't put you through it/ You could have swept it from your life/ But you wouldn't do it."

The song swept to the top of the charts. Both right-to-life and pro-abortion groups protested the lyrics. So did feminists, although Baby is rare among macho pop songs in that it acknowledges a woman's autonomy. Now Anka is thinking about what he hopes will be his next big hit: an album that will include songs about cancer and fear of dying. "People are ready to deal with these subjects in a song," he claims. And he may just be right.

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