By Etan Rosenbloom, AVP of Marketing + Communications, ASCAP•April 16, 2024
April 16, 2024 marks the heavenly 100th birthday of Henry Mancini, one of the undisputed all-time greats of music for the screen. Mancini was a highly-esteemed, prolific film and TV composer, with four career Oscars for his work on Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Days of Wine and Roses (1962) and Victor/Victoria (1982), and Emmy nominations for his music to Peter Gunn (1959) and The Thorn Birds (1983).
He was also that rare screen composer whose scores and songs transcended their original media.The slinky, jazz-inflected themes for Peter Gunn and the Pink Panther films have become part of that collective musical canon that we just know. The same goes for his songs “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses” (both co-written by the great Johnny Mercer). They were both chart hits in the early 1960s, and have since become part of the Great American Songbook, recorded by artists across the genre spectrum. In 2004 the American Film Institute placed both songs on their list of the greatest movie songs of all time, at #4 and #39, respectively.
Mancini joined ASCAP in 1952 and was a member until his death in 1994. During that time he was a frequent ASCAP award winner, and participated in our advocacy trips to Washington DC.And his legacy is still integral to how ASCAP supports our members today. Our most prestigious award for screen composers was re-named for Mancini in 1996. And through The ASCAP Foundation Henry Mancini Music Fellowship, funded by his late wife Ginny, many emerging film composers have received vital financial support early in their careers. As a centennial tribute to Henry Mancini, we’re proud to reprint the cover story from the spring, 1978 issue of
Henry Mancini - Doing it Right
By Tom Paisley
Many of today's successful artists have a flair for self-dramatization, and live in a flamboyant manner. They attend opening night galas, and are rarely photographed wearing anything but evening dress. Many of these "shooting stars" of the Arts will seldom speak of their work. One gets chitchat about the social season, discourses on what direction Music and Literature seem to be taking – almost anything but the work which has brought them to prominence. At times, it seems as though their own contributions are not significant enough to discuss.
Happily, Henry Mancini is not a star of this sort. He obviously loves his work as a composer of scores for motion pictures, and will talk freely about this most difficult of musical arts. He takes an extremely workmanlike attitude toward his profession. There is little of the "composer's anecdote" in a Mancini interview. You will hear no tales of how when Mancini was looking at the ocean one day, he was seized by a creative urge and dashed off a deathless piece of contemporary music. Is it possible these things never have happened, and are a myth perpetuated by novels and films that find most composers' lives too dull to be good box office attractions.
Mancini clearly has a no-nonsense attitude toward his work. He composes, he says, only for specific projects. He works in a den/library-cum studio in his home. It's not soundproofed, and its proximity to the garage in his Holmby Hills home often makes it a passageway for the Mancini family into the rest of the house. Unintentional interruptions are not uncommon.
Further, he burns no midnight oil. He works usually for three hours in the morning, after breakfast. He says he's found he can accomplish more working from eight to eleven A.M. than he could with a much longer day and keeping exotic hours. In fact, a description of Mancini's workday sounds more like that of a man involved in the design of putty knives than in the creation of major film scores, and some may find it difficult to reconcile this matter-of-fact attitude with the results it has achieved: Three Motion Picture Academy Oscars and 13 nominations; 20 National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences "Grammy'' Awards, enough Gold Records (each representing a million dollars in sales or over) to cover a studio wall, and enough film credits to take up six double column pages in a recent cinema magazine article.
He is an innovator, though he denies it. His score for Peter Gunn, for instance, brought the jazz idiom to the filmed detective story, a form never noted for standout musical contributions. His choices of instrumentation, though sometimes initially thought to be outré, have proven to be exactly right for the effects he has sought. In scoring the suspense chiller Wait Until Dark, he employed a device which is still talked about. Using a pair of matched pianos, he tuned one instrument a quarter tone lower than the other. For particularly eerie sections of the film, he would have one piano play a given phrase, then the other would echo it, a quarter tone "off.” The effect was not only as haunting as desired; it gave the musicians who played the pianos an unsettling sensation. One even complained of dizziness! Mancini modestly deprecates this contribution, saying that: "Quarter tones aren't new, they've been used for a really long time. But in this particular device, it was new."
Mancini goes further in reducing the creation of Art to commonplace. Recalling his first film score attempt, he said "The first thing was very simple: trying to get enough music to fit the exact amount of what was needed on the screen. That's the basic problem of the film composer. I mean that's the basic technical problem, to make it fit. Now, to make it fit, a shoemaker can make it fit, that's what you make shoes for, or you make shirts that fit. You tailor them. But what it's made out of is another thing. The fit is technical. What it is, is something else."
The "something else'' Mancini has contributed to his field, as well as his hit songs (which he considers merely parts of his film scores) have placed him among the ranks of America's finest composers – in or out of films. To find the source of that something else, one must reflect on the life of the man. For as surely as his attitude may reflect a craftsman's attack, the man does not deal in shoes or shirts. He is a creator of music.
Henry Mancini was born in Cleveland, Ohio on April 16, 1924. His father, Quinto, and his mother, Anna, were immigrants from the Italian province of Abruzzi. Soon after Henry's birth, the family moved to the steel mill town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. It was here that Henry grew up, attended high school and began his musical career. The memories of Aliquippa are still strong for Mancini. He recently premiered an extended work for orchestra entitled “Beaver Valley '37,” which he acknowledges to be autobiographical (Aliquippa is located in the Beaver Valley of the Ohio River). He speaks warmly of Aliquippa.
"I lived in a small town, an Italian community in Pennsylvania; well in West Aliquippa, the smallest part...across the well-known tracks...literally. It was a very ethnically-oriented upbringing, you know. My mother and an Italian community. I grew up eating Italian food three meals a day. Just the way they did it in the Old Country. My parents came from Italy as teenagers themselves, so they brought everything with them. I'm very thankful for that, because it gives me something to relate to as far as things I like and things I was brought up with.
"I started taking lessons on the flute at age eight. It was just thrust upon me by my father, who played. I think the piano was just something I wanted to do. So my father bought a piano. He thought he was getting a great deal on it. It turned out it had a cracked sounding board and was out of tune all the time. I forget who sold him that. He must have paid at least 20 dollars for it.
"I practiced a good deal, though I was very sports-oriented as a kid. I used to play ball, football...everything. My father used this. Knowing I wanted to get out there, he'd say: 'You practice 'til this time, then you can go play!’ So that's what I did."
Though a steel mill town, there was evidently no lack of music in Aliquippa. This may have been due to the influence of the Italian community. Mancini recalls how he "played in every kind of band there is: Sons of Italy, High School, later even the Army Band. I've come up through the ranks, so far as Band Music is concerned. We used to have this Sons of Italy Band that played at Feasts…"
(In the Catholic faith, each saint has his or her own Feast Day, which is a combination of religious and secular activities. In Europe, certain cities and even some trades have their own Patron Saints. Americans of Italian descent still observe Feast Days here, and the tradition of having Patron Saints for individual Italian communities in the New World is still strong.)
"Every town had a saint, or a couple of saints they would pay tribute to during the summer, when the weather was nice. In our town, St. Anthony was one of them. They used to get a statue of the saint from the church, put a ribbon around him and then parade through the streets with the band playing. Yeah, parade…going all through the streets...people would come up and pin money on St. Anthony. And the band would play. We’d be marching along, and unless you’ve ever seen an Italian Band marching, you haven't seen anything. No matter what the tempo of the piece is, everybody is walking at a different pace!
"But those are the bands that I played with. We used to get paid to do these Feasts. It was usually a weekend and on Saturday night there was a concert. Sunday morning there was a parade around town to get money for the Saint. Then Sunday night was the final big concert, with the fireworks. For all that, we got three dollars.
Lest this story give the impression that Aliquippa and Western Pennsylvania were a cultural desert, it must be added that Mancini did study music "legitimately'' while he grew up. He was a student of Max Adkins, conductor and arranger at Pittsburgh's Stanley Theatre, and played flute in the Pennsylvania All State Band. On finishing his studies at Aliquippa High, young Mancini was accepted by the prestigious Juilliard School of Music in New York City. But the year was 1942, and shortly after beginning his courses at Juilliard Mancini was drafted into the Army.
After his discharge from the Army in 1945, he joined the Glenn Miller-Tex Beneke Band as pianist-arranger. It was at this time that the Mancini the public knows began to emerge. It was also while with the Miller Band that he met his wife of 30 years, the former Ginny O'Connor. She was then singing with the band's vocal group, and had also sung with the almost legendary Meltones. Ginny and Henry were wed in Hollywood in 1947.
Married, and soon a family man (his son Chris was born in 1950, and twin daughters, Monica and Felice in 1952), Mancini continued to study and refine his art. Among his tutors were composers Ernest Krenek, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Dr. Alfred Sendry.
1952 was a pivotal year, for it was then Mancini went to work for the Music Department of Universal-International Studios. Many who have read about Mancini have gained the impression that once he began at U-I the streets turned to gold and trucks loaded with laurels began pulling up in front of the Mancini home. Actually, he worked on some 100 films…ranging in scope from The Glenn Miller Story, for which he received his first Academy Award nomination, to the somewhat less acclaimed, Abbott and Costello: Lost in Alaska. Mancini still thinks fondly of the score he did for Orson Welles's masterful Touch of Evil, which has become something of a film buff's favorite and a Late Late Show staple on TV.
As Mancini recalls the early days at Universal, "I wanted all my life to write for films and it's what I learned to do at Universal. I was there for six years…six of the best years. It was like taking a master's or doctorate in film writing, because I did everything that came along for six years. At that time, they were making 30 or 40 pictures a year, and I'd go from one right to another.
"We had a staff up there and I learned a great deal, both about life and writing. There was a fellow named Herman Stein, who was a fine composer. Usually, Herman and I were assigned to do a picture…usually they were 10 reel pictures. We might flip a coin and say: 'Okay. You take the first five and I'll take the second five.' If I happened to get the love theme in my five, then I gave it to him. If he happened to get some other theme in his five reels, he'd give it to me and we'd be working back and forth...''
Though his work at Universal gained him some recognition and a degree of security, it wasn't until his association with producer Blake Edwards that the name of Henry Mancini became extensively known outside of the Movie Industry. It was Blake Edwards who produced the fantastically successful Peter Gunn TV series. How Mancini came to write the score is somehow typical of Hollywood.
"I've known Blake for years. He was a friend of my wife's during the heydey of MGM Studios. At that time, Ginny was a member of the Meltones, which was one of the finest vocal groups ever assembled. Mel Tormé had it, and they made some great records. They were kind of the insider social group of people who didn't have any bread at the time. So they were invited to a lot of parties and they would sing and Mel would play. It was a whole gang that hung out together and went to the various parties. Blake was in that social group. He was a writer. Ginny knew Blake from before, and after a few parties when I came out (to LA) we got to know each other.
"I had done a couple of things before for Blake, only because I was assigned to him. He was doing work at the Universal lot. We had been on the periphery of being great friends, and we met one day by accident when he was at Universal, on the lot. He was thinking about the Gunn thing he was going to do, and it was just on the street where he asked me to do it.
The score to "the Gunn thing'' turned out to be a major stepping-stone in Mancini's career. Not only did the TV show itself establish Mancini's music firmly in the public's ear and mind, it led to another Blake Edwards series, Mr. Lucky, and two more Grammy' Awards to match Hank's first two for Gunn. In 1960, he also received a Grammy for his Jazz tour de force, The Blues and The Beat. But the motherlode was yet to come.
"In Breakfast at Tiffany's, we were confronted with doing this song…Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics…and I did my job first. Normally if there's going to be a love theme in a film, I do that, and the lyricist comes in afterwards. So we were supposed to tell in two minutes or so, an awful lot about Holly Golightly, who was played by Audrey Hepburn. I thought of it as her 'Over the Rainbow'...kind of her hopes and dreams and something that told a great deal about her; a wistful kind of thing. So I came up with…for lack of a better phrase…a sophisticated Country song, which I think ‘Moon River’ basically is. It's a very simple kind of a piece. Once I got that, the writing of it was actually less than an hour.''
The "very simple kind of a piece'' won for Mancini his first two Oscars (Best Score; Best Song), and no less than FIVE Grammy Awards for:Song of the Year, Best Performance by an Orchestra, Best Soundtrack Album, Record of the Year and Best Arrangement! It has since been recorded over 600 times, all over the world! Yet, ever diffident in the face of fame's thunderclap, Mancini is quick to share credit with his lyricist on “Moon River,” the late Johnny Mercer, himself a titan of pop music.
"I think Johnny Mercer was great," says Mancini. "He had something that's purely American...He had the ability to zing it. Take that phrase from ‘Moon River,’ 'huckleberry friend.' No one had ever heard it before, but the instant they heard it, everyone knew what it meant!''
The American listening public seemed to know what Henry Mancini meant as well. The next years brought more honors where there seemed to be no room left for honors. To name but a few: Oscar number three came along for Best Song, “Days of Wine and Roses” (also a Mercer lyric), 10 more Grammys for work ranging from “Baby Elephant Walk” from Hatari! through his bestselling recordings of “Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet” and “Theme from Z.”
Space must be reserved for Hank's fabulous beast, The Pink Panther. Through the medium of a syndicated cartoon series, his Pink Panther theme is instantly recognizable to an entire generation of kids who never saw the comedy series of films from which the theme derives. They know the music and identify it with a favorite cartoon character. As children never seem to forget childhood songs, these are the roots in which immortality is found, though Mancini himself would probably dismiss such a thought. Too busy with his next project, no doubt.
Were writing for films and TV not enough, Mancini keeps a heavy schedule of concerts each year. Over the years, he has conducted almost every major symphony orchestra in the Western world. Surely, such a white-tie, jetsetting life inspires great changes in Mancini's attitude toward his Art?
"When we do a concert,'' says Mancini, "the orchestra is well-rehearsed and prepared. Nothing is left to chance. And the audiences respect and admire this, you can tell. The coordination of everyone starting together, doing the same thing, then stopping together. The audiences love watching this fine musical precision."
Craft, workmanship, precision…my job…doing what I was trained for. These are words and phrases heard again and again from Mancini. In all probability, they'll be heard again from him. A man who practices a most demanding musical Art, yet calls it a business; a job. But he does own a Rodin sculpture…a collection of oils which include Foujita. He sketches and he paints in water colors. He travels worldwide at a rate which gives pause even to today's mobile society. Yet, he has a family relationship that has been praised by magazines and Sunday papers.
But hints of a different Mancini can be noted. Even, as he would say, "on the job.” In a recent interview for a film magazine, he was asked about his score for the motion picture Charade, which earned him a 1963 Oscar nomination. How did that theme come?
"Audrey Hepburn comes back to this empty room, and all she has is a suitcase. She's sitting on the suitcase in a very dimly lit room and she's very down. But just before Cary Grant comes in, the director has her all alone, to kind of set the mood. And that's where the theme for Charade comes in: that moment, where I knew it…'' The interviewer then asked Mancini "Was it literally her performance that inspired the theme?" "No, it was her face,'' he replied. It is in such an aesthetic light that one might wish to remember the music of Henry Mancini.
Mancini himself has stated how he would like his music remembered. "Often! And I would like to be thought of as having done the right things more often than the wrong things. Nobody is perfect…'' There seems to be little doubt that Mancini has done the right things more often and more consistently than almost any other composer for the cinema. As to the "Often!" part, one has only to go to the movies or turn on your TV or radio. Listen to Mancini, as millions do.
Tom Paisley was a freelance writer, novelist and member of ASCAP. He served as Contributing Editor to HIGH FIDELITY magazine, and as a biographer of artists for both RCA and CBS Records. His highly acclaimed novels include THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS.
