Paul Anka spills on Presley, Sinatra and JFK in new book My Way

“My Way” meant so much to him as a song, he was going to do it. And I’d say, “Elvis, it’s not really your kind of song.” And he’d say, “Nooo, Paulie, but those words, they mean so much to me. Boy, I want to do that song one day.” It was one of the last songs he recorded. In the end, that song and those words had resonance for him but not in the way I intended. Basically, given Elvis’s pathetic state at the end, it was in the opposite sense that the words had had for Sinatra. There was nothing defiant or heroic about Elvis at that point.

It was the same way he lived his life — he destroyed himself. Just went too far. He became another statistic. Life is about construction and destruction. It’s all in that balance, everything we see when we can look far enough. When you lose track of that, you self-destruct. And that’s what happened to my talented friend.

I was in Vegas, got up, turned on the news. Elvis Presley — gone. I cried that day. He was a cool guy, a nice man, but was too young to go. Really blew it.

I got to know Elvis pretty extensively when he first started coming to Vegas. He would come over to Caesars Palace, see the show, come over and visit, sit backstage. Through that whole evolution, from when he hit town to when things started going bad for him, and where he started losing control, I would sit with him and just try to tell him, “Man, you’ve got to get it together, you can’t live this twilight half-life. Get a hold of this situation or it’s going to pull you under.” But he couldn’t — would usually only see me in his suite.

His social terror was extreme. I’d say, “Elvis why don’t we just go out to dinner, go for a walk?” “Oh, no!” He was terrified of that. You’d go over to his hotel — we both worked the Hilton — and he’d have aluminum foil on the windows; he never wanted to see the daylight. He’d go up to Vail, Colo., and I’d be up there with my family skiing — in the daylight. Elvis wouldn’t get up until the sun went down, and only then would he go up on the mountain with the floodlights turned on, to snowmobile. He was that kind of creature. Nice guy, but so locked in that prison of celebrity, of who he was, and his image, the person inside shrivelled up. Sometimes you sat and talked to him and it was as if he were already gone. You couldn’t save him.

On Annette Funicello

So dating Annette was a frustrating situation. You had these two young kids who were hot to trot trying to deal with all the Victorian restrictions imposed on them, the chaperones and the teachers, and all of that. We’d say, “We need more privacy!” And that of course involved getting rid of the mother! But sexual frustration is a great stimulus to ingenuity and I came up with a plan. I went to one of the guys who were always around and got him to divert the mother by playing cards with her, so that Annette and I could lock lips and get in a room together alone. The chemistry was definitely there and we were getting more and more curious about each other.

Things got so bad with me and Annette and all the restrictions that I was banging into walls or walking into doors. Sexuality, of course, back in the ’50s was a lot different than it is today; everything was just so religiously hypocritical and morally protected, but humans will be human and teenagers will get horny. And all I wanted to do was to get her alone, maybe in her room at night, with no supervision.

The funny thing is when I did get into her bedroom there must have been thirty stuffed animals on the bed — big bears, bigger tigers, giant monkeys. It was unbelievable!

On Sammy Davis Jr.

He’d tell me about all this weird stuff he was into. He had another life eventually, beginning at the end of the sixties and on through the seventies, where Sammy, at a certain hour, would gravitate to that porn crowd. It was the drugs and sex and all of that. His whole thing was, “Shit, I’m only living once; I want to do what I want.” It was a very, very strange situation and Sammy was just off the wall with that.

As time went on, Sammy’s kinky sex habits got kinkier. He became obsessed with Linda Lovelace and got very close to her, and also her husband, Chuck Traynor, who had a sadistic relationship with her. (She later claimed he beat her and forced her into porn movies at gunpoint.) He got into threesomes with them. They’d come over to his house. Sammy’s wife got involved with Traynor.

After the midnight shows, Sammy had a whole other life from the rest of us. He got seriously into drugs. Frank and he didn’t talk for a long time because Sammy got heavily into coke and Frank didn’t approve. They didn’t make up until years later. The wives got them back together, got Sammy off the blow, and got him back to his old self.

He just enjoyed life. Curiosity about everything. Explored everything. He was completely open about his sexuality, and got into his bisexuality. He loved England, went over there a lot, and was very open with an eclectic group of people he hung out with. He would confide these things to me, how cool it was to be involved with two women, with guys. He’d say, “Hell, man, I’m living my life the way I want to. No restraints, no hang-ups. It’s my time and I’m gonna do it the way I want to.”

On Fabian

Fabian was a nice kid, a wonderful guy to hang with, but his career had pretty much been manufactured by Bob Marcucci. We all knew he was an invention because we were with the same label. The guy just didn’t have the vocal chops. He wasn’t a singer in the true sense, he was a pretty boy. That’s what was selling at the time. Being with the same label you knew who had the talent and who didn’t. We understood what was happening. We all recorded at the same studios, Bell Sound, and once I saw what seemed like a hundred pieces of tape they’d spliced together to get one good take for him. It was all monaural in those days so it was done with razor blades and tape. To his credit, Fabian admitted he wasn’t really a singer — he was very honest about it. We all knew it, but the public didn’t and that was the difference.

On Michael Jackson

Anyway, on this one occasion, Michael Jackson in his fashion floated to Vegas and was staying at a villa next door to us at the Mirage. I saw the parade of kids going in and out — scary. He was at the end of the stay but they were trying to get him out of there anyway. They swore never to let him return.

At first, Steve Wynn and Michael earlier had been all buddy-buddy. Steve even called one of his suites, the Michael Jackson Suite — but he didn’t know then what was about to erupt. And when it did erupt, Michael was ensconced at the villa next door to me. The maids and other hotel staff would come to me and say, “We can’t even go in that room; if we have room service we gotta leave it outside.” When they finally get Michael out, after weeks of trying, they go in and there’s broken glass, perfume bottles, food — the place is an unholy mess, the Jacuzzi has bubble bath pouring out of it, there’s rotting food everywhere. They finally had to renovate that villa for tens of thousands of dollars. Once they got him out, they never did let him back in that hotel.

On Frank Sinatra and John F. Kennedy

JFK and Frank got very tight, so tight that Sinatra started building guest quarters for JFK at his house in Palm Springs.

In 1961, Frank spent an enormous amount of time and money creating a compound specifically for JFK, building new cottages, putting in new phones, buying new furniture, and installing a fancy specially built bed above which hung Frank’s little in joke: JOHN F. KENNEDY SLEPT HERE. The walls were covered with photos of Frank, Jack, and Peter Lawford. Frank was therefore utterly humiliated when in the spring of 1962, JFK, on a visit to California, ignored Sinatra’s invitations and never saw the sumptuous quarters Frank had built for him in Palm Springs and had hoped would become the Western White House. Instead, JFK chose to stay at Bing Crosby’s home, which threw Frank into a rage. He began smashing pictures of the Kennedys and took a sledgehammer to the heliport he’d had built for JFK to land on.

After JFK became president, he wanted to put some distance between himself and Frank because of supposed connections, a lot of which were hearsay, to the mob, and the compound sat empty. That hurt. Frank felt it was a slap in the face, and went nuts. Whatever Sinatra’s ties to JFK’s father, Joe Kennedy, or what his obligations were to JFK as a friend, Kennedy had to sever the connection. JFK, of course, loved the ladies and the situation played right into the whole sexual circus. I saw the reality: Kennedy and the hookers, the women who hung around Frank, and the mob. It was a shop window. The media at that time was controlled, so they wouldn’t write about it.

Excerpted from My Way by Paul Anka with David Dalton. Copyright © 2013 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.