Paul Anka, the face of the new Fontainebleau Las Vegas
Paul Anka knows how to celebrate both. “My Way,” was the way.
The 82-year-old entertainment legend was the first entertainer at Fontainebleau Las Vegas’ BleauLive Theater. Entirely appropriate for the star who has graced Vegas sages, and all stages, since the early 1960s. Justin Timberlake’s arena-fashioned show, a version of his upcoming tour production, followed.
In a remarkable case of planning, after a nearly 20-year saga of multiple owners, the resort’s gala opening fell on owner Jeffrey Soffer’s 55th birthday. Tuesday was the 108th birthday of the man for whom Anka wrote “My Way,” Frank Sinatra.
Anka had written the lyrics to the song he sang at the blue-hued hotel specifically for Old Blue Eyes.
“I was hanging with the Rat Pack, here in Las Vegas and also Fontainebleau in Miami. On one of those occasions, Sinatra was in town, he was doing a movie. We had dinner, and he explained he was going through some soul-searching and was retiring from show business,” Anka said in a phone chat, prior to singing ahead of Timberlake’s performance at the invite-only event. “He was going through this rough patch with (his then-wife) Mia Farrow, he wasn’t the guy that we knew.”