Johnny Mandel
Composer of the theme for Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H who won an Oscar for Shadow of Your Smile
JOHNNY MANDEL, who has died aged 94, was a Grammy- and Oscarwinning composer and arranger best known for Suicide Is Painless, the theme for the 1970 film M*A*S*H, Robert Altman’s savage take on the idiocy of war, and for the subsequent eponymous television series, and Shadow Of Your Smile, from the 1965 film The Sandpiper, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
Active in the music industry from the Second World War, Mandel began his career as a trombone player in swing bands and worked with everyone from Jimmy Dorsey, Count Basie, Nat King Cole and Buddy Rich to Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand – and even Michael Jackson.
As a session musician and scorer of live shows for the “Rat Pack” in Las Vegas, Mandel became adept at picking up visual cues and marrying them to music. This skill led him, from the late 1950s, into composing film scores, and over the next 40 years he earned credits on more than 30 movies.
When Robert Altman hired him to score M*A*S*H, he told Mandel he needed a song to accompany one of the scenes – “the stupidest song ever written” and that it should be called “Suicide is Painless”.
Altman himself took a stab at writing the lyrics, but decided they were not stupid enough. “He said, ah, but all is not lost,” Mandel recalled. “I’ve got a 15-year-old kid who is a gibbering idiot. He’s got a guitar, and he’ll run through this thing like a dose of salts.”
The song, with Mandel’s wistful and ambiguous melody and lyrics by Mike Altman, was performed in the film by Ken Prymus, the actor playing Private Seidman, who sang it during the faux-suicide of Walter “Painless Pole” Waldowski (John Schuck) in the “Last Supper” scene.
Altman later decided to use the song as the film’s main theme, when it was sung by uncredited session singers. But the lyrics were too dark for the makers of the television series and Mandel created an instrumental arrangement for the show.
The instrumental version became a No 1 hit in the UK Singles Chart in 1980, while a cover of the song by the Manic Street Preachers reached No 7 in 1992.
John Alfred Mandel was born in New York on November 23 1925 to Alfred, a clothes manufacturer, and Hannah, an opera singer. He grew up with the sound of jazz 78’s and big bands on the radio, music that fascinated him so much that at the age of 13 he began taking lessons in arrangement with the band leader Van Alexander (who had written A-tisket,
A-tasket for Ella Fitzgerald). He had piano lessons, but switched to the trumpet and trombone, later studying at the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School. “I never wanted to play an instrument that you plucked or struck,” he once said. “I wanted to play an instrument you could kiss.”
He began his career aged 17 playing trumpet with the jazz violinist Joe Venuti’s group, then trombone with several other bands. By the age of 25 he had played with everyone from June Christy to Count Basie; and from Buddy Rich to Woody Herman and Artie Shaw.
The Basie connection came about in 1953 after Mandel had written some arrangements for the Count: “One day he had an opening in the brass section and called me. I thought someone was kidding – I said, ‘Sure, you’re Count Basie and I’m Snow White.’ But he said, ‘No, really. Meet me at the Woodside at noon; the bus leaves from there’.” Mandel’s arrangements for Basie included Straight Life and Low Life.
By this time Mandel was also composing background music for radio and television programmes. Moving to California in the late 1950s, in 1958 he was commissioned to score his first film – Robert Wise’s film noir I Want to Live. His innovative jazz score opened the way for other jazz composers to enter the film music business
Themes from several of his films became pop standards, including Emily (the title song from The Americanization of Emily (1964) with lyrics by Johnny Mercer), which was recorded by Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams and Barbra Streisand, and A Time for Love (from An American Dream (1966) with lyrics by Paul Francis Webster), which won a Best Song Oscar nomination.
Webster also supplied the lyrics for Shadow of Your Smile (which won Mandel a Best Original Song Oscar in 1966), after Mercer had turned down the opportunity, claiming Mandel’s tune was “a steal” from Hoagy Carmichael’s New Orleans.
“Johnny thought Hoagy would freak,” Mandel recalled. “Then the song became a big hit. Every time I saw Mercer he would pound his head. ‘I turned that down! Sonofabitch!’ ”
The song and the score for The Sandpiper won Mandel two Grammys. He also won arranging Grammys for albums by Quincy Jones (Velas, 1981), Natalie Cole (Unforgettable, 1991) and Shirley Horn (Here’s to Life, 1992).
In 2010 he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Johnny Mandel, born November 23 1925, died June 29 2020