Paul the Comforter

In the main, the ducktail warblers of popular singing--the Fabians, the Bobby Darins, the Frankie Avalons--are as interchangeable as bottle caps. Like the others, Paul Anka was a veteran performer before he was 20. His hair is a studied sculpture in coal tar and astrakhan. His voice sounds as if his shirt collar is too tight. But Anka is also a songwriter and the tunes that have made him are his own.

Since he was 14, Anka has written some 200 songs, picking them out on guitar or piano. In fact, since he composes more tunes than he can profitably record himself, he writes for other singers as well (Patti Page, Bobby Rydell, Connie Francis). Not content with a bestseller career in the jukebox circuit, he has spread out into nightclubs, TV and movies. Last summer, landing on a Normandy Beach in a scene for 20th Century-Fox's The Longest Day (TIME, Sept. 8), he performed so valorously that General Dwight D. Zanuck has since expanded his role and called him back to Europe. Wherever he goes, in the U.S. or on song-promoting tours as far away as Japan, he is mobbed by teen-age nuts of all races. In Puerto Rico, when frenzied admirers besieged him in a department store, police popped him into an oversized box and carried it to the store's roof, where a helicopter took him to safety.

Anka is a devoted admirer of Elvis Presley, but onstage his style consciously avoids imitation of the master. Planting his mitey (5 ft. 4 in., 135 lbs.) frame firmly on the boards, he neither rocks nor rolls, and his pelvis is so steady that it could house a seismograph. "I go out there to comfort the people," he says. His ministrations are weakest when he is doing old standards like Stardust or his gasping version of Hello Voting Lovers. But his fans are really there to hear Anka sing Anka, and he always scores with Diana, You Are My, Destiny, Put Your Head on My Shoulder, etc.

Syrian in derivation and Canadian by birth, Paul Anka was raised in Ottawa, where his father ran a restaurant called The Locanda. At twelve, Paul organized his own trio, at 14 he sold his first song--to a small record company in Los Angeles. Blau Wildebeeste Fontaine sold a mere 3,000 copies, disappointing the ambitious youth, who felt that the world was passing him by. But then came the climax of a lifetime. "It was in the spring of my fifteenth year," he recalls solemnly. In stirring tribute to an older woman (she was pushing 18), he wrote Diana:

I'm so young and you're so old, This, my darling, I've been told . . . Including both words and music, the entire creative process took four minutes, and Paul Anka was soon in New York, auditioning the song for ABC-Paramount. When Diana hit the top of the charts, Anka abruptly gave up his academic career and set off to plug the song from coast to coast.

Today, from an office on Manhattan's West 57th Street, Anka runs a musical empire that includes Paul Anka Productions, the Spanka Music Corp. and the Flanka Music Corp. A rug on the reception room floor has an immense orange anchor woven into its grey background, symbolizing the most improbable theme song in the history of Tin Pun Alley: Anchor's Aweigh, with which Anka opens and closes his performances.

With a suite on Central Park South, a house in New Jersey and his father on the Anka-Spanka-Flanka payroll, Paul zips around in a black Lincoln Continental convertible, sometimes writes as many as six songs a day, and is working on a Broadway musical about teen-age American students in France. Figuring that his fans will be with him for what seems like forever ("Remember, those little girls are going to grow up and be 29 someday"), he is trying to make good on a promise he cooed to them in song last year: / hope that I can sing for you Five years from today.

When I'll be in my sos With my hair turning grey.

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