"The Shadow of Your Smile"

If you have ever seen the film or watched the television show, “M.A.S.H,” you already know the most famous song ever written by the composer of this week’s Sometimes a Song, Johnny Mandel. Whether you love or hate the movie, the theme song is pretty memorable — the tune, that is. Johnny Mandel composed that piece of music not knowing that it would be the film’s theme song, before the screen play was even written. Director, Robert Altman, had determined that a planned scene called “The Last Supper” must include “the stupidest song ever” and that the song must be titled, “Suicide is Painless.” Altman had planned to write the lyrics for this song himself, but couldn’t manage it. So he passed the task along to his then 14-year-old son, who dashed off in five minutes a lyric which Altman considered “stupid enough” to fill the bill. Then he handed the lyric over to the musical genius under contract for the production, to set the “stupid song” to a really catchy tune. Johnny Mandel, who did most of the composing, arranging, and orchestration for “M.A.S.H,” did not find out that the producers had decided to use this “stupidest song ever” for the film’s theme until he showed up to watch the pre-release screening. After seeing the opening, Mandel stomped out in disgust over how his composition had been presented. Ironically, Mandel’s “M.A.S.H” theme became his most commercially successful composition ever, but in the instrumental form and not as a vocal. It seems that most singers were not interested in recording “the stupidest song ever.” The lyric was dropped entirely from the modified PG version of the film, re-released few years later in an effort to boost the public’s initially sluggish reception of the television series. And there was some literal poetic justice for the composer in that!

Johnny Mandel was not a lyricist, but a formally trained and superb musician and arranger, graduate of both The Manhattan School of Music and Julliard, who in his lifetime worked with and for the likes of Count Basie, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, Tommy Dorsey, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and many other big bands and fine singers. His first film score, for Robert Wise’s “I Want to Live” (1958), earned him wide critical acclaim and a Grammy nomination. But it was the love theme from his score for “The Sandpiper” which won him the Academy Award for Best Original Song (1964) and a Grammy for the Song of the Year (1965). Mandel had first asked Johnny Mercer to write the lyrics for his absolutely beautiful love theme, but Mercer said he wouldn’t do it because that the tune was too much like a Hoagy Carmichael song, “New Orleans.” So the lyric byline went to Paul Frances Webber, who, fortunately for him, shared the accolades and the royalties with Mandel. Mercer soon regretted his decision, and Hoagy Carmichael himself generously commented that he loved “The Shadow of Your Smile,” and didn’t associate it at all with his own tune. How’s that for more poetic justice? And so I give you as this week’s song Johnny Mandel’s wistful and musically delightful composition, “The Shadow of Your Smile,” sung by the first popular singer to record it, Tony Bennett, with an arrangement written by the composer himself.

For anyone who might be wondering, here’s the song that Johnny Mercer said was too like Mandel’s tune. I hear the strain that Mercer must have had in mind, but I agree with Hoagy that the songs are not at all alike. So we can add a little noblesse oblige to our back story today.

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