Things began to pick up for me record-wise when in 1971 I wrote “She’s a Lady” for Tom Jones. The first meeting I had with Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, and Gordon Mills, their manager, they came to my home in New York and we tried to make a deal for my publishing company. It’s late at night, and we’re watching a movie at my house and they are all drinking champagne. The next day I woke up, looked in the living room, and my wife, being a significant decorator, and I were shocked to find all our bowls of potpourri empty. They had eaten all of it thinking it was potato chips.
I wrote “She’s a Lady” on the back of a TWA menu, flying back from London after doing Tom Jones’s TV show. Jones’s manager wanted me to write him a song. If I have an idea and I don’t have a pad of paper, I’ll write on whatever is available. What’s the difference? Paper is paper. And those blank pages on the back covers of menus are nice and hard. I like the look of them, and I can print on them without needing anything for support. When I’m writing, I generally toy with an idea until it manifests itself—meaning a phrase or a tune comes into my head and eventually begins to jell. When something hits me, I write it down immediately. I don’t wait, or it’s gone. You just cherish those moments and write on anything—the stewardess’s leg if need be.
My main problem in writing for Tom Jones was finding the right vibe for him. He’s got a great voice, and he’s a good friend. “She’s a Lady” is not a song I would ever sing myself, but thinking of Tom it just came to me. It started with a verse.
She’s the kind they’d like to flaunt and take to dinner
Well she always knows her place
She’s got style, she’s got grace, she’s a winner.*
Ouch! You get that first verse, and if you’re lucky you’ve found your groove and the rest writes itself—theoretically anyway. I don’t know where that stuff comes from, but believe me I’ll take it. A germ of an idea in your head is all you need, but it does help to have an artist in mind. When I think about Tom Jones, I get a cocky, macho image— writing for other people is like playing a character, and I thought, “What would this character say?”
What came out was pretty brash and arrogant, and sure, it was politically incorrect, but what the hell. I write like a Method actor, putting myself in his place. It’s the shortest time it ever took me to write a song. I knocked off the lyric on that TWA flight from London back to New York. Later I went to my den and pulled the melody out in about an hour and a half. But I can tell you this, I dislike “She’s a Lady” more than anything else I’ve written. I’m not saying I don’t have a chauvinistic side, but not like that. Still, I wanted to make it as realistic as possible, and Tom Jones is as swaggering and brash as a Welsh coal-miner in a pub on a Saturday night.
Jones was all the rage at the time, he and a guy with the outrageous name of Engelbert Humperdinck. Well, when your real name is Arnold George Dorsey, you’ve got to think of something that’ll make you stick in people’s minds. He took the goofy-sounding name of a German composer (who probably would have preferred to have been called Arnold George Dorsey)—and it made people pay attention.
Tom Jones’s manager, Gordon Mills, was a larger-than-life character himself, a bigger star in his own way than either Tom or his other client, Engelbert. Gordon pushed these kids around like puppets, ran an incredible company, and was kinky as hell—as only a Brit can be.
I’m in London doing the This Is Tom Jones show, and one night Gordon says, “Let’s go to dinner, have some drinks.” He’s shmoozing me, trying to buy my catalog. Tom is with us, and after dinner he says to Tom, “Let’s go over to you-know-where” (wink, wink), meaning some kinky place I didn’t know about.
“Oh no, Gordon, what’s that cost, then?” Tom asks. He was thrifty, real thrifty. We go to this house, and when we get there I start getting nervous. The joint looks dodgy, and I haven’t even put my head inside the door.
“What’s going on here, Gordon?” I ask.
“Oh, don’t worry,” says he, “it’s all lovely stuff.” We go upstairs and are ushered into a room with a curtain, which they ceremoniously open to reveal a two-way mirror and a woman in there with a sheep. Wow! All kinds of sexual bullshit going on, and Tom and Gordon taking absolute delight in my reaction.
“What the hell are we doing here?” I’m asking Gordon.
“Bet you’ve never seen anything like that,” he says. I had to confess I hadn’t. So weird. Big, gypsy-looking woman in there with the sheep. When the British get kinky, they’re kinkier than anybody.
This guy Gordon was the biggest egomaniac in the world; he just lived so huge, and he made those kids big stars almost by extension of his oversize personality. He was married, but a big, big player. Always running around with a set of sexy little blond twins, and that was just for starters—just to get the conversation going. In the end I sold him my catalog, realizing I was in business with a maniac—but I understood his madness and his ego!
He was the kind of guy who would always challenge you, didn’t trust anybody. He’d say stuff like, “Son of a bitch, I can’t believe the flight is sold out from Las Vegas to New York. I betcha you can’t get me on a flight. Tell ya what, I’ll give you $10,000 if you get me on that flight.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Nope, $10,000 cash. Just get me on that goddamn TWA flight to New York, and I’ll pitch you $10,000.” I used to do favors for him because I knew he was a little crazy, and I guess I like that (in case you hadn’t noticed). He’d poke you so much about nonsense like that, to the point where you’d say, “I’m gonna get you on that flight and you’re going to give me 10 grand.” I get him on the flight and, I kid you not, he gives me the 10 grand.
Another time, Tom’s in town with Engelbert Humperdinck. They’re staying at the Riviera in Las Vegas, and Gordon, out of the blue, starts confronting me about my tennis playing.
“Anka, I can play tennis better than you. I can beat you any day of the week.”
“Okay,” I say, “try me.”
“No,” he says. “I can beat you, you son a of a bitch, and to let you know that I’m not kidding. I am going to bet you $25,000 that I can beat you.”
“Okay, well when ya wanna play?”
“I’m going to call you up one night, and whenever I call, that’s when I want to play.”
“You’re on, Gordon,” I said. “Whatever you want.” I’m already in that mode, thinking I know how to handle the guy.
Three or four weeks go by, they come back. He calls me up about 10:30 P.M. and says, “Meet me at 11:30. I’ve arranged with security in the hotel. They’re going to open the tennis courts and turn on the court lights and we’re going to play in one hour.”
I stumble out of bed and get myself dressed. I pull up at the back of Caesars, where we’ve agreed to meet, and in he walks, dressed to the nines. He’d just come from a formal event at the Riviera with his wife and his assistant and his secretary. The wife is dressed in a full evening gown—he hadn’t given her a chance to change—the assistant is in a tuxedo, and the female secretary is also in evening dress. He puts each of them in a chair at the boundary lines on the tennis court. One in the center, one on my line, one on his. It’s now close to midnight, and it’s clear there’s been a lot of drinking going on—the poor wife, the last thing she wants is to be sitting there refereeing a fucking tennis match. “Okay,” he says, “now we’re gonna start.” We start playing, play till 2:30 in the morning. We play and we play, and finally he concedes that I’ve beaten him.
“All right, you beat me, and I owe you,” he says.
“You’re gonna pay me right now, you son of a bitch,” I say.
“What? You don’t trust me?”
“You woke me up! We’re going to the cage; I know you’ve got money.” So we leave the tennis court, march through the casino in our tennis clothes—wife’s in the nightgown, falling apart, wants to go to bed. We go up to the security boxes, he takes out $25,000 and gives it to me. Isn’t that wild? Ah, what ego and power will do to people!
There was nobody that this guy Gordon wouldn’t challenge, including chance itself. He would bet on whether a raindrop would land on your nose, if the odds were right. Or even if they weren’t. He was a huge gambler—one time he lost a million dollars in that casino, when he was managing Tom and Engelbert. He lived large—reminded me of Colonel Tom Parker, a big roulette player. Tom was Elvis’s manager, and he was always betting everything. Gambling was a big thing with the agency guys. Colonel Parker gambled so much at the Hilton that he sold Elvis for less than he was worth when he played the hotel. Ah, but then again he was just another victim of the Vegas virus! That’s what all the fun was about. Madness!
All the performers kept an eye on what the others were doing, made the rounds, checked out each other’s shows. Saw what we liked and took what we could. I lured Tom’s conductor away from him in the end, a guy named Johnny Harris. He had one leg longer than the other, was very talented with a slight limp. Johnny had a lot of good years with Tom, then he came to work for me! It was fine with Tom, and there were no hard feelings.
I’ve always thought I was a pretty cool character, but my cool was seriously tested one night after doing Tom Jones’s TV show. The studio was way out of London, some 50 minutes away from the city. We finished late. I get back to the hotel, and I’m up in my suite, one of the four suites upstairs at the Dorchester Hotel. This was in the 70s, when the Dorchester was the place; they had butlers tending to you, real old English butlers straight out of the movies. I get back to the hotel around one in the morning. I call room service and I order some food. The butler says, “Most certainly, Mr. Anka, but Liz Taylor’s down the hall and she’s not well. I need to serve her first, so I’ll be a little while.”
“Look,” I said. “Please take care of her, I totally understand. Bring the food whenever you want; I’ll jump in the shower.” So I jump in the shower, thinking I have a little time, and as I’m getting out, I just get the towel around me as the doorbell rings.
“Ahh, food,” I think. I’m not dressed, but who cares? I open the door … and there’s Elizabeth Taylor, standing in front of me in all her blazing glory, and with those eyes. She’s actually holding two cats. I mean, I know she’s a big animal lover, but seeing her standing there with cats in her arms is a surprise—and she’s dressed in this sheer-looking nightgown. I’m just staring at her, going, “Aaddadaadaadaaa … How’s your pussy … cats?” I finally manage to spit out. “Uh, I mean how’s your … ” God, what did I just say? Did I just ask her how her pussy was? Have I lost my mind? It was the most stupid, sputteringly stiff moment of my life. She was very sweet, very understanding; I guess she’s used to it.
“Thank you very much for being so considerate about the food,” she says. “I’m not feeling well.” I’m like “wawelllllwaawa!” I couldn’t put the words together—all that came out was this tongue-tied babble. All I could think about was keeping the towel up. Standing there dripping like some wet seal and all that would come out of my mouth was, Aahhhh.
There are times when you feel you’re so cool, but there are times in all our lives, no matter how sophisticated we think we are, we meet that one person we idolize and dream about and we just lose it. That has to go down as my supremely stupid moment … or at least somewhere in the Top 10.
After Anne and I got married, we didn’t start having children right away, but eventually we had five girls. I was thrilled, I loved every minute with them, and yet for me there was always that wrenching dichotomy between my life on the road and my life with my family. The performer versus Dad. Missing my wife and children, not seeing them often for months at a time. The family man with five daughters heading to the next gig, the entertainer returning home, trying to adjust to being just a dad. It’s hard to explain what it was like, how hard that transition was from five-star hotels to changing diapers. The way I would float in and out of my girls’ lives, trying to attend their school recitals, falling asleep in the middle of a performance and Anne nudging me. “Paul, wake up, you’re going to miss the whole thing.”
I’d pop up in their lives and then disappear again, like a funny irreverent phantom. Given my crazy schedule, I can’t imagine what it was like for my kids growing up. It was anything but normal. It doesn’t matter to them how many hits you’ve had—to them you’re just a dad. You don’t get a pass for being a pop star when they’re little—they don’t even know what a pop star is. So, you’re two completely different people. But at the end of the day I was still Dad. When I think of my kids, memories rush in. Traveling through Europe with five kids, driving through the hills of Mexico in a Jeep that kept backfiring while the kids laughed their heads off. The glorious chaos of it all.
I remember going into my children’s rooms at night, the excitement of reading aloud to them from Peter Pan or The Wind in the Willows, sending them off to sleep with Goodnight Moon, or, more often than not, me falling asleep myself while telling them stories and snoring so loudly they couldn’t go to sleep! Then the teenage years—with five daughters! Those were tough times for me coming off the road, exhausted and wired—the poignancy of missed birthdays, school plays, games, awards. It was a balancing act, trying to keep my equilibrium between these two worlds. In other words, it was hardly a traditional family arrangement.
When it came to parenting, I was doing the best that I could. And that includes my marriage too, my relationship to my beloved Anne Anka. And then, as with my kids, I had to be away from her for long periods of time. Which made me feel vulnerable and disheartened at times. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, being a husband and a father and a pop star over a 39-year marriage. But you can see we stayed close, Anne and I, over all those years, through all the ups and downs that touring and being away caused, and we’ve remained best friends to this day.
If you’re in pop music, you’ve got to deal with the changing of the guard every few years. By the time the 70s arrived I was well aware of the cyclical nature of the game. Pop music is a creature of the moment; it thrives on the mood of its time. Either you hook into that or you’re not going to be part of it. What most people don’t understand—and this goes for performers too, the ones who most often suffer because of it—is that pop music is contemporary music, contemporary to a specific time, maybe three to five years tops. Another generation comes along with new attitudes, the culture shifts, and the music changes. Pop music has to stay contemporary with the next group of teenagers—and in reality, the trend often reverses itself, which is a particularly painful situation.
We’d had the innocent, ecstatic joy of 50s rock ’n’ roll, then came the early 60s, which were dominated by Brill Building songwriters and manufactured boy idols, followed by the Beatles and the Brit Invasion. But these changes were all more or less familiar—the music was based on melody—and the business itself remained more or less the same.
Aside from the cycles in the music biz, I believe an individual has a creative juice cycle and that it can get used up. Well, after 13 years I was wondering if I could still find a new place for myself in the business. I knew I could survive performing my old hits—but what else was I going to do?
The melodic nature of pop music may not have changed all that much up through the mid-60s, but, by the late 60s, musical trends were changing rapidly. You try to keep your integrity because the next wave, whatever it is, is going to be threatening—and I’d learned early on that, when it happens, you’re no longer going to be a focal point anymore when it does.
Near the end of the 60s—the whole acid-rock period of the Monterey International Pop Festival, with the emergence of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin—you had a truly convulsive revolution in pop music. It was the first time we’d experienced anything like that, the first time we ever saw anyone work an instrument the way Hendrix could with his teeth or behind his back. The first time we had ever heard anyone use their voice like Janis—someone who could somehow sing two notes at the same time. That was the next real kick in the head after the British Invasion. It’s easy to talk about it in retrospect, but who in hell could have ever imagined this would happen? That out of Monterey would come two forces of nature like Hendrix and Janis?
Whoever knew there would be the Beatles and the Stones? Or that the Beatles could go from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to “A Day in the Life”? These weren’t just cultural changes; we were looking at our own mortality as performers in terms of making a living in the industry. You were asking yourself, How can I compete with that? I felt totally intimidated. You are sitting there going, “What just happened?”
These new managers mirrored the change in the music as it evolved. When hard rock and flower power came in, the business and the infrastructure changed. Younger people began to take over the business. It got very interesting.
Then, suddenly, Janis and Hendrix were gone, and everybody thought things would calm down a little. But a new crop of singer-songwriters emerged, such as James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and Carole King.
Along with the music, the music business changed. You went from General Artists Corporation, a company that had been around since the beginning, to these younger guys like Albert Grossman, Andrew Oldham, Jon Landau, and David Geffen. Geffen wanted to be my manager in the 60s, and had I not been with Irv, it was something I would have done.
Jerry Weintraub was a classic case of the showman-like promoter. He was married to Jane Morgan, who was also a client. I wrote a song for her called “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye” under the name of Dee Merrick. At that time I wanted to write under another name. I can’t remember why.
Jerry was one of the guys around New York that I knew and liked. Very resourceful, smart, and ambitious. Creative. He went to Colonel Parker, offered him a million bucks to promote Elvis Presley. That got the Colonel’s attention, and he started doing Elvis’s tours.
I knew Jerry long before that, when he was still carrying hatboxes and gowns from gig to gig for his wife, but even then he was a smart guy, and he knew the business. He evolved out of the motion-picture business into his own big management firm. Jerry is the ultimate showbiz spieler—which is why he called his autobiography When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead. Somewhere in his book he says, “I knew Paul Anka before he was Paul Anka.” And he did. I’ve known Jerry since the 50s, and we’re still very close friends. A lot of love and respect here.
Jerry Weintraub is Mr. Showbiz. He’d show up in Vegas, come backstage with, say, Neil Diamond or another of his famous clients to say hello—always a big thrill. He’s represented or promoted a boggling mix of artists: Charles Aznavour, Pat Boone, Jackson Browne, George Burns, Eric Clapton, John Denver, Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, Connie Francis, Jerry Garcia, Waylon Jennings, and Elton John.
I spoke to Jerry the first time I played at the Aladdin Vegas. How the hell he happened to pop up at all these different events in my life I don’t know. He’s a kind of showbiz Zelig. He’s a flamboyant, colorful character, easily the charismatic equal of any of his clients. Jerry’s the classic showbiz entrepreneur who’s been there throughout history. Aristophanes knew this character, Ben Jonson wrote plays about him, Billy Wilder immortalized him, and Woody Allen bottled him in Broadway Danny Rose. Woody and Jerry once worked in the same office building, and Jerry speculates that Woody may have based the Danny Rose character on him, from listening to his spiels in the elevator, yelling at his dumbstruck clients: “You’re not just a juggler—but an artist! Do you hear me, an artist!”
In the 70s or 80s, when I was living in Vegas and had my jet-plane company, I got a call from Jerry. He asked me to fly in a newborn baby from Vegas to L.A. It was his adoptive daughter.
In 1969, in Monte Carlo I was actually crowned backstage by the Monte Carlo Sporting Club ballet dancers at their performance of their ballet Femmes. That was the kind of coronation I could get into. The Nice L’Espoir reported that it was the first time “la jeune grande vedette Américaine” (big young American star—that would be me) had performed in Monte Carlo, a city I would get to know a whole lot better as time went on.
Hanging around the Rat Pack, I had separated myself from my generation, but I wasn’t their contemporary either. I was some 25 years younger than Sinatra and Dean Martin, and 16 years younger than Sammy Davis Jr. Generationally I was in a kind of limbo. I was apart from my generation, but I felt very much in tune with its dissatisfactions—with the war, the government, and outdated cultural attitudes.
On the morning of October 4, 1969, I was apparently feeling upset about a lot of things. “If you just work as a star, you’re mad,” I told The Sydney Morning Herald. “In spite of everything I’ve gotten out of life, I’m deeply worried. I feel like it’s getting harder, more dangerous. Today, young people at least know where it’s at. When I was young they didn’t have the grim knowledge and power they have today. In our country, 65 percent of the country is under twenty-five. My generation were puppies in their teens. Not now. And every time the kids have gone out to make noise, they got what they wanted. They sat still through my early years and got nothing but promises. They live in fear of the bomb. I know, because I’m with them every hour, every day. And they live in hatred of the government we have. Religion is dead for them. I still believe in God, but at twenty-eight, I’m an older generation man, God means nothing to them. What they want is not in an afterlife. It’s a chance to change this one. They want the vote. Why the hell, they say, can we have one? We can serve in Vietnam, can’t we? We want a vote at eighteen. I’m going to end someone’s life, they say, well, why can’t I decide what guy is going to send me to kill? Their parents have no answers.”
As we fell into the 70s and 80s, everything became disposable. We learned to live in a disposable society. It was always funny to see all those changes, what with the Neil Bogarts, the Jon Peterses, and the Peter Gubers. The movies—Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider—reflected the new climate in Hollywood. The power started being taken away from the Old Guard.
It just wasn’t my time. You sit there saying to yourself, “Maybe the older I get, things may revert, and maybe I could be ‘in’ again.” That sort of thing happens a lot in pop music. It was getting to the point where I was old enough to become new again. You are constantly watching the demise of this or that person or style of music. That’s what life is all about. Construction and destruction. Something comes in and defuses something else. It has been an interesting trip, to say the least.
I began waiting to see what I could do next. I had a family I loved, I had kids to raise … but I also had this career that was not where I wanted it to be. The business as I knew it had been wiped out.
In the meantime, I ran after a performing career. I thought if I could be a performer and have those kind of legs, I would always work. But as to what to write, that was my dilemma—I had to bide my time. I kept waiting for my chance, to see how my writing could lead me into that next thing. You’re always waiting for that next window, but you can never really anticipate these changes until they arise.
I had tested this song a few years before it came out, and the disc jockeys told me they couldn’t put a record out with a singer talking about his wife having a baby; it just wouldn’t fly. Anne had postponed having children for a couple of years after we got married, but then they came one after another: Alexandra was born November 25, 1966. It was a natural birth, and I went through it with Anne. “I now understand the word ‘miracle,’” I told the Philadelphia Daily News a few days later. Right after she was born, I had to leave for Philadelphia to do The Mike Douglas Show. Amanda was born in ’68, Alicia in ’70, Anthea in ’71, and Amelia in ’77. I had written “(You’re) Having My Baby” as a tribute to Anne.
When I thought the time was right, I began thinking how to approach “(You’re) Having My Baby,” so as to make a delicate subject like this sound as heartfelt as possible. I’d met Odia Coates when I was producing the Edwin Hawkins album for Buddah Records, and he introduced her to me. My cousin Bob Skaff, who at that point was a United Artists executive, suggested I make “(You’re) Having My Baby” a duet. Odia had a great voice, she came out of gospel, and she was the daughter of an evangelical minister. All the great black acts came out of gospel: James Brown, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles. I’ve always been into gospel, and I had an idea: I would try to integrate gospel into my songs. Odia sang with me on “(You’re) Having My Baby,” one of the first black-and-white duets, and it went to number one in 1974. We went on to make more hits with “One Man Woman/One Woman Man” that same year, plus in 1975, “I Don’t Like to Sleep Alone” and “(I Believe) There’s Nothing Stronger than Our Love.” Sadly, we lost her to breast cancer in 1991—she was only 49.
“(You’re) Having My Baby” was a song I thought nobody would object to—who could possibly be against that? But it ended up stirring up quite a bit of controversy. We were growing up as a country, things were evolving, and obviously the situation of women was changing radically. A whole new wave was starting. Some women’s magazines thought it was condescending, and hipsters naturally found it corny. Rolling Stone hated it. The National Organization for Women gave me their “Keep Her in Her Place” award, and Ms. magazine called me “Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year.” But there really is no such thing as bad publicity. It generally ends up doing something for you; controversy is always a plus. In the end, I never needed to get up on a soap box to answer my critics, because suddenly everybody was coming to my defense. Even Time magazine said, “What are you getting on this guy’s case for? We’re in a war. We’ve got a drug plague. We’ve got shit going on in our country. Give him a break, he’s writing a song about his wife.” Overnight, with all that heat, the record went to number one. Go figure.
Everyone has a dark side, but in those days no one guessed that there could be a dark side to Michael Jackson. However, I saw it early on, and it wasn’t pretty. I had a cool run of stuff in the early 70s, but at some point I decided to get back to writing with other people. I love collaboration and the diversity it brings to a song.
When I first met Michael Jackson I knew he was immensely talented—this was before Thriller and his huge hits—and I began to think about collaborating with him. I’d known the Jackson family for a while. They used to bring their kids to Caesars to see my shows when they were young. They were a theatrically driven family. You could see that. I knew of Michael’s talents, saw him growing up—everyone knew it was going to happen. Later on I met Michael again, through a guy named David Gest, a real go-getter who eventually married Liza Minnelli.
I first sat down with Michael Jackson and talked about collaborating in 1980. We started working together at my house in Carmel. It was a fun place to be—he was using my guesthouse, playing with my girls in the Jacuzzi. He clearly had a real fondness for kids—he was very childlike himself and related to them on their own level. When Michael and I talked, we were rapping. Even then he had this fascination with plastic surgery, a major obsession, obviously.
Anyway, Michael and I start messing around with the songs we were working on. I was very impressed with the way he went about the writing process. He knew how to make his way around a song, not only because he had an incredible vocal quality, but he also had a capacity to make complicated singing licks from an initial one-finger tune played for him on the piano. He didn’t seem at all like a disturbed character when he was working. He was just very tenacious, very focused on what he needed to do. But you could tell he was also wildly ambitious and capable of anything; I sensed an absolutely ruthless streak.
The concept of the album I was working on for Sony, Walk a Fine Line, was collaborations with other artists: Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, David Foster, and Chicago, plus the two tracks I was doing with Michael. But the thing is, while we were doing Walk a Fine Line, Michael was also doing tracks for his album Thriller. Well, Thriller comes out and is an absolute smash, and of course I can’t get Michael in the studio to finish what we are doing. But I had tapes sitting in the studio in L.A., at Sunset Sound I think it was—all the tapes from when we were working together. It was right around then I started to see Michael’s true colors. It happens.
I’m trying to finish my album, and suddenly I couldn’t get him on the phone. Then he sent one of his people over to the studio and they actually stole the tapes we’d been working on.
When I heard about this, I went, “What? Michael went in and just took them? Holy shit!”
Then Michael disappears, and only after weeks of threatening did I get the tapes back—finally. But I knew then that this kid was headed for trouble.
I just thought it was a terrible thing to do. How do people become ruthless? What mania takes them over is always a mystery. What happened? This boy was a child when I first met him. Who knew what went on in that family? I saw him a few years after the disappearing-tape affair, at a law office, ironically.
I worked many years with my two loyal and smart lawyers—and close friends—Stu Silfen and Lee Phillips on this issue. They were involved all the way through in the negotiations regarding the posthumous release of Jackson’s song “This Is It.” The song was originally titled “I Never Heard,” when it was written in 1981 for the album I was recording. In the end we prevailed—I got 50 percent of the credit and “They did the right thing,” I said at the time. “There were only honorable people involved. I don’t think that anybody tried to do the wrong thing. It was an honest mistake.”
Some time after the stolen-tape incident, Michael called and asked to meet me. I could tell he was disturbed and sorry, but I mean, what could you say? This was a major talent who got derailed too early in his life. It was never a good situation, and see where he wound up. You could almost sense it coming.
For example, between the Jacksons and the Osmonds, there was always a certain rivalry despite the fact that they were two family groups supposedly competing with each other in a friendly way. But Michael could be scathing about the Osmonds. He thought they were a kitsch exploitation group compared to the Jackson Five.
While we were working together he’d call the Osmonds and talk them up in a nice, chatty manner, and as soon as he’d hung up he’d rip them apart behind their backs. The Osmonds were not in good shape at that time. Donny is a nice guy—he and Marie both are. He has kind of kept it together the best that he can. It’ll be interesting to see what he can make out of the next phase in his life.
Teen idols have a tough afterlife. I know because I was one—and so was Donny Osmond. His subsequent career, after the Osmonds’ initial hits, was checkered, to say the least. His trajectory as a performer is somewhat similar to many people that began very young. They start out as kids and then, like me, they have a big problem dealing with the next phase. In 1972, Don Costa had the bright idea of Donny recording two of the songs I’d had hits with as a teenager, and they both became hits for him too. “Puppy Love” was number one in the U.K. and number three in the U.S., and “Lonely Boy” got to number three in the U.K. and into the Top Twenty in the U.S.
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.
Earlier, Steve Wynn and Michael 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.
While we were living in Vegas, I got a place in Sun Valley because the heat became insufferable. My daughter Alex went on to become a ski instructor and lived in Aspen for many years. It was a safe and healthy place to raise kids. In 1975, I got to work on a project that involved my family and expressed my love for them. That was the Kodak commercial “The Times of Your Life.” Even though I had previously licensed my songs to several companies, I’d never wanted to do commercials. I was always very careful what kind of product was linked with my songs. You associate Kodak with family snapshots, wedding pictures, photos of your children. Kodak came to me with the idea, with Jack Gilardi, my friend and agent at ICM. I loved the concept, and together we put this piece together. I produced the record, which became a Top Twenty hit. The campaign was very successful, and I was really happy to be a part of it. All of my kids were in it, and I think that’s why it was such a hit—it connected.
