Frank’s way: how Anka wrote Ol’ Blue Eyes’ hit

The writer of the most enduring pop songs of all time - My Way - has told how he wrote it for Frank Sinatra after 'Ol Blue Eyes took him for dinner in 1969 and threatened to quit the business. Paul Anka was 27 years old. He had already bought the publishing rights to the melody - a 1967 French pop song called Comme d'habitude by Claude Francois - and put the sheet music in a drawer at his New York apartment.

"I thought it was a shitty record, but there was something in it," he recalls in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. Then Frank Sinatra called. "He says, 'Kid, we're going to dinner tonight.'"

Dinner was in Florida, with "a couple of mob guys", Anka recalls. Then Sinatra dropped his bombshell. "He says, 'I'm quitting the business. I'm sick of it, I'm getting the hell out.' I was floored by this - no more Frank, no more parties."

Anka returned to New York, got the sheet music out of the drawer and played it on his piano, subtly changing the melodic structure. "At one o'clock in the morning, I sat down at an old IBM electric typewriter and said, 'If Frank were writing this, what would he say?'

"I used words I would never use: 'I ate it up and spit it out.' But that's the way he talked. I used to be around steam rooms with the Rat Pack guys - they liked to talk like mob guys, even though they would have been scared of their own shadows."

Anka finished the song at 5am. "I called Frank up in Nevada - he was at Caesar's Palace - and said, 'I've got something really special for you.'" Now 66, Anka claims it was the only time in his songwriting career that he was certain he had written a hit.