The musician, who wrote My Way and Puppy Love among others, talks career longevity, shrewd business and which star bullied him in his youth
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n 1956, when Paul Anka was 15 years old, he idolized Chuck Berry. So, when the star came to play his home town of Ottawa, Canada, the ambitious kid made sure to sneak backstage with his guitar to play him a song he’d just written. “I started singing Diana to Chuck Berry when, suddenly, he stops me and says, ‘That’s the worst song I’ve ever heard in my life, go back to school.’”
Rather than slink away from such a pronouncement, however, Anka used it as a spur. “Revenge is a motivator like you won’t believe,” the 84-year-old star said with an eruptive laugh the other day. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to show him.’ That attitude has prevailed for me through my entire life.”
It didn’t hurt that, within a year, his dewy Diana became a global colossus, rising to No 1 in the UK and the US, making him the first Canadian artist to top the American charts while insuring he wouldn’t spend one more day at school. The next year, his equally lush single You Are My Destiny broke the top 10 in both countries, a triumph he tripled in 1959 and ’60 with mooning touchstones like Lonely Boy, Put Your Head on my Shoulder and Puppy Love.
