B009HOTHPE EBOK (32 page)

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 was shmoozing me, trying to buy my catalog. Tom was 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 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 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 ten grand.” I get him on the flight and, I kid you not, he gives me the ten 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 twenty-five thousand dollars 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 eleven thirty. 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 if 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 fifty 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 ten.

*   *   *

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 father and a pop star over a thirty-nine-year marriage. But you can see we stayed close, Anne and I, over all those years, through all the ups and downs 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, and 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 thirteen 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-sixties, but, by the late sixties, 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, 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.