Paul Anka got 50% of his own song, the one he wrote and recorded with Michael Jackson in 1983 but was released this week. He says he also got the promise of another song he wrote and recorded with the dead pop star to be included on a forthcoming album of previously unreleased material. That song is called “Love Never Felt So Good.”

But honestly, being a victim of theft never felt so good as Anka — a songwriting and performing superstar for five decades — cleaned up yesterday. He told me he got 50% of all the mechanical and publishing royalties to “This Is It” plus some points still being negotiated.

He’s not mad. But he does tell the story of how this happened. “Michael and I were recording two duets for my album in 1982 in Las Vegas. This was before “Thriller.” “I Never Heard” was one of them. Later when we were supposed to meet at the recording studio in Los Angeles, Michael didn’t show. The tapes were gone. The engineer told me Michael took them.”

Anka — furious — appealed to Jackson’s lawyer at the time, who was also his lawyer. Jackson eventually turned over the tapes, which belonged to Anka. “But he must have made copies,” Anka told me. “He took his copy and re-recorded the vocal, erasing mine. And that became ‘This Is It.’”

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Michael Jackson’s “new” single, called “This Is It,” isn’t really his. And it’s a PR nightmare.

The song is registered with BMI Music Licensing to Michael Joe Jackson and to Paul Anka. They wrote it together in 1983 and called it “I Never Heard.” It was released in 1991 by a singer named Safire.

Anka has settled for 50% of everything, according to published reports, which is common in these situations. It most recently happened when John Legend nicked the famous song “Stormy” for his “Save Me” single. The writer, Buddy Buie, became Legend’s partner. It’s also happened to Mariah Carey (”Emotions” was a rewrite of Maurice White’s “Best of My Love”) and to many other stars.

It was only before Michael died that he dusted off the old track. It’s unclear whether or not he told producer John McClain that the song dated back so far. It seems likely he didn’t.

Maybe Michael got “Anka” mixed up with “Branca,” the name of his lawyer. They do rhyme.

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Michael Jackson’s new single “This Is It” — its existence was first reported here, exclusively.

Now it’s out this morning, and “This Is It” should be called “This WAS It.” The single sounds more or less like Michael’s never-released 2001 charity single, “What More Can I Do” and his 1985 hit, “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You.”

The new single is a mess. It has no actual chorus, and — to make matters worse — it has background vocals added by some of Michael’s brothers. Jackson would never have wanted that.

“This Is It” was produced, or concocted, by John McClain, Jackson’s longtime friend and one of the executors to his estate. McClane tried unsuccessfully to get the Jackson 5 back together in 2002, after Michael’s solo concerts in 2001. At the time, he was assisting in Michael’s management with Trudy Green of HK Management.

Well, the song is not great. For a theme song, and a way to market the “This is It” movie, it’s fine. But there are better songs among the few Michael left behind in the vaults. There’s one, left off of “Bad,” called “Saturday Night Woman,” that’s supposed to be a real, er, thriller. Maybe it will turn up on a CD of unreleased material.

The film about Michael Jackson’s tour rehearsals, “This Is It,” is being kept fairly secret right up until its opening.

“This Is It” is set to open on Wednesday, October 28th, released into theaters for two weeks by Sony. But so far no advance screenings have been scheduled other than one for the cast and crew, in Los Angeles, on Monday the 26th. The location is being kept hush-hush, too.

One screening for the Jackson family was cancelled, I am told, when Michael’s brother Randy insisted on bringing a guest. Sony said no, and the screening proceeded without any family members.

Many showings of “This Is It” have already sold out in advance. Sony is readying a CD soundtrack which will be released the same week, to capitalize on the film’s popularity.

A source who’s been working on “This Is It” told me yesterday: “The tragedy is, the film is great. The public is finally going to appreciate Michael Jackson, and it’s too late.”

Meantime, the book of Michael Jackson taped interviews, by Shmuley Boteach, has not been much of a hit. It’s listed around number 332 on amazon.com. The average customer review is 2 out of 5 stars.

Michael Jackson’s family is grasping at straws if they think they “have something” on Michael’s executor, John Branca.

According to reports today, the family — egged on by none other than Jackson hanger-on Brian Oxman — thinks they’re going to oust Branca on some kind of technicality. Oxman claims he has some “smoking gun” about Branca being fired by Jackson in 1990 — only to be rehired three years later. In 2006, after over 25 years on and off, Branca and Michael parted company. A week before Michael died, he rehired Branca.

The irony here will be that Brian Oxman is involved. Oxman, who used to doze off in open court — I mean, snore — during Michael’s criminal trial in 2005, was fired by lead defense attorney Thomas Mesereau. Oxman’s entire connection to Michael was that he represented Randy Jackson when his brother, Jermaine, conducted a takeover of his wife and kids. Oxman was Randy’s divorce attorney. He has hung on to his slim attachment to Michael ever since, sort of the way Harold Lloyd famously hung from the clock in the movie, “Safety Last.”

The Jackson family’s constant attacks on Branca are laughable, and ironic. It was Branca who engineered the purchase of ATV Music aka the Beatles catalog for Michael in the 1980s. After his brief absence, it was Branca again who merged ATV Music with Sony’s music publishing company, got Michael $90 million, and set him up for life. Without that deal, Jackson would have been destitute — and so would the Jackson family as they lived off of Michael’s largesse.

Indeed, it was only during the times that Michael was separated from Branca that he got into real trouble. And it was a stroke of luck that Michael returned to Branca this past spring. Otherwise, Jackson’s children’s interests could have been left in the hands of far more disreputable types — not naming names here — whose interests were purely self-centered.

Some people have no shame.

Now the Michael Jackson estate has filed suit in Los Angeles against a bunch of people who’ve hijacked Michael’s old Heal the World Foundation. They’re passing it off as their own and claiming Michael is their president emeritus.

This is too much. The real Heal the World was shut down several years ago. Nevertheless, two people who had nothing to do with Michael Jackson — Melissa Johnson and Mel Wilson — decided to reactivate the name, apply for a bunch of trademarks, and carry on as if Michael were running the show from the grave. He is not. This new Heal the World Foundation has nothing to do with Michael Jackson at all. But you have to give these people credit for chutzpah: they have photos of Michael on their website, and write about him like they’re old friends.

What’s next? We can only imagine.

Just in case Michael Jackson’s fans are interested, there is currently no — I mean zero, none — charity officially sanctioned by his estate or left behind by him in his name.

It’s sort of amazing watching Shmuley Boteach, a rabbi with no congregation other than an unwitting public, selling out Michael Jackson. He’s just published a book of interviews he taped with Michael back in 2000-2001. All the money goes to Boteach. There’s no charity involved. (Ironically, Boteach also recently published a book called “The Blessing of Enough: Rejecting Material Greed, Embracing Spiritual Hunger.”)

That wasn’t the case in 2000 when I met both Michael and Boteach together one November night. It was at the home of PR guru Howard Rubenstein. Boteach had convinced Michael to start a new charity with him called Time for Kids. They were going to teach parents to spend time with their children.

There were about 3o people in the Rubensteins’ Fifth Avenue living room. Boteach gave a long speech about Michael being the “most misunderstood” celebrity in the world, said he loved children so much he had mannequins of them in his Neverland bedroom. That revelation went over like a lead balloon.

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Are people daft? Sometimes I think so. Witness the story of Omer Bhatti, the faker who wants to be Michael Jackson’s son.

When Omer was 12, his biological parents Riz and Piz Bhatti took him from Oslo to Tunis, dressed him up like Michael Jackson, and had him moonwalk in the lobby of a hotel. This was in 1996. There are plenty of witnesses.

Jackson’s tour crew saw this spectacle and thought Jackson, who no longer traveled with 13-year-old Jordan Chandler, would get a kick out of it. He did. He literally kept Omer, and retained his parents. They spent the rest of Jackson’s tour with him. When they returned to Neverland, Riz became a chauffeur. Pia was the original nanny for Prince Michael I. Omer became Michael’s ward.

In 2005, when Jackson was on trial for child molestation, at least two people who’d known him a short time, told me that Jackson told them Omer was his son. It was a lie. But Jackson needed a reason to explain why this boy was living in his house.

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Here’s something new I can tell you now exclusively: Michael Jackson’s “This is It” film will  include a brand new song, which Michael wrote for the tour.

The song is called “This is It.” After Jackson died, it was finished by producer John McClain, who is also one of Michael’s executors.

The new song will be included in the film and on the two-CD soundtrack scheduled for release right after the movie has its two-week run. I told you months ago when the movie was being shopped that it would be accompanied by a soundtrack. As I pointed out, Jackson has never had a “live” album.

Even the Jackson family should be surprised by the new song, but they’ll hear it when they see the first draft of the movie, sources say, in the next week.

A clip of the song “Human Nature,” sung by Michael Jackson during concert rehearsal, has turned up on YouTube.

The song, I am told, is not even being used in the movie “This is It,” set for release on October 28th. But someone somehow got hold of it, and here it is.

The weird part is that Sony’s security surrounding “This is It” is said to be overzealous and out of control. One insider told me recently: “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

I guess it didn’t work so well, unless the “Human Nature” clip was intentionally leaked.

But it does show Michael singing very well, moving well, coherent, with it, and right on the money. This should shoo off the naysayers who claimed that Jackson was being “worked” into the ground and couldn’t handle rehearsal. He’s clearly ok here.