And I hope we will never part
Oh please stay with me Diana
DianaPaul Anka (1957)
Yes, he was only fifteen, a snot really, and way too young to make it with a 19-year-old. But he, Paul Anka of Ottawa, was madly in love with the woman who looked after his younger brother and sister, Diana Ayoub.
But Diana didn’t like him. She certainly noticed when he was lurking at her in church, but found him nothing more than funny. “Diana was my first crush,” Anka wrote in his autobiography My Way (2013). “Diana was my inspiration, the fantasy girlfriend and my imagined problem.” With the latter he was referring to the age difference of four years.
In the first sentence of his ode to Diana he immediately hit his obstacle: ‘I’m so young and you’re so old.’ When he finished the song, he played it to her on a piano. He was too shy to sing it word for word.
With a handful of songs, Anka, the son of a Lebanese restaurateur, went to New York in 1957. Producer Don Costa saw something in the then 16-year-old ambitious songwriter and his Diana. Only: weren’t the words too explicit to address a girl like that? Couldn’t it be an ounce less? No, the message had to be straightforward, Anka thought. In order not to scare Diana too much, he announced the arrival of the song in a letter.
Diana became a huge million seller, all over the world. Paul Anka was a teen idol at 16, his life would never be the same. He grew into a global star and continued to write songs, also for others. Afterwards, singers like Frank Sinatra (My Way) and Tom Jones (She’s a lady) highly regarded with his songs.
Of course, press mosquitoes at the time wanted to know who was shooting that Diana Diana used to be. Diana Ayoub found all this attention flattering and interesting at first. She allowed herself to be interviewed and photographed laughing together with Anka.
Unfortunately, things went from bad to worse. “I had journalists waiting for me at high school graduation,” she said. “Guys didn’t ask me out because otherwise their picture would be in the paper the next day. People came to my house all the time. Once my father found a staircase leading to my bedroom against the house.’
Thank God the interest waned and Diana was able to breathe again. She married, had two sons, opened her own clothing store, divorced and retired. She never heard from Paul Anka again, she had proved her worth in his view, there was nothing more. “She rejected me, and I had my song.”
In the Ottowa Citizen Ayoub bit off once more. It made no sense what Anka trumpeted about the big age difference: they were only one year apart. “Paul has no idea how much of an impact that song has had on my life,” she said. “I got all the fame, but none of the benefits.”