Henry Mancini

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Preston Neal Jones

Although he was a highly gifted composer/arranger capable of scoring films of any genre, Henry Mancini is probably best known to the general public for the jazzy, light-hearted, cocktail-confection themes from Peter Gunn and The Pink Panther, and as the melodist behind such wistful songs as "Moon River" and "The Days of Wine and Roses." A product of the big-band era who ended up in Hollywood in the early 1950s, Mancini served his cinematic apprenticeship as a staff composer (mostly for "B" movies) at Universal. His big break came in 1958 when writer-director Blake Edwards offered him the opportunity to score the private-eye series, Peter Gunn. Mancini's main-title theme pioneered the use of jazz music in TV background music and became a hit single from one of the best-selling LP's of all time. Soon Mancini scores were gracing some of Hollywood's most stylish big-screen productions, and his music was almost as much a star of these films as Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, and John Wayne. Record albums and concert tours helped to make the shy musician from Pennsylvania one of the few film-composers whose name had public recognition. Although Mancini died suddenly in 1994 while working on his first Broadway musical, his legacy is a lasting one. The adult, sophisticated comedies and romances graced by Mancini scores are no longer made in modern Hollywood, but his songs have become standards, an indelible contribution to the soundtrack of our lives.

Mancini was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 16, 1924, but grew up in West Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. His Italian immigrant father was a steelworker who loved music and insisted that his only child learn the flute and the piccolo. Young Hank played in the school band and also studied piano, but his most important instruction was self-administered: listening to recordings of the popular big bands, young Mancini taught himself how to arrange music. More formal schooling came later from Pittsburgh theater arranger-conductor Max Adkins. Although Adkins created an opportunity for his student to audition an arrangement for the great Benny Goodman in 1942, the famed clarinetist did not think the young man was ready yet for the big time. (Ironically, years later, Mancini would arrange the music for the film The Benny Goodman Story.) Mancini spent a fruitful year studying at the Julliard School of Music in New York, but a draft notice interrupted his education. A brief encounter with Glenn Miller saved the young man from the perilous duty of a tail-gunner and transferred him into an Air Force band. Following the war, Mancini became pianist and arranger for the newly-formed band of Miller veteran Tex Beneke, a move that proved decisive for Mancini's personal and professional life. Hank fell in love with Ginny O'Connor, a member of Mel Torme's singing group, The Meltones, and they were soon married. O'Connor eventually joined another group, the Mello-Larks, and when the singers made a short film at Universal, Mancini got the assignment to arrange their music.

Joseph Gershenson, head of the studio's music department, offered the young musician a couple of weeks' work on an Abbott and Costello picture, and this assignment stretched into a six-year apprenticeship in the art and craft of film scoring. With his Beneke background, Mancini was a natural to assist Gershenson on 1953's The Glenn Miller Story, and their joint work was nominated for an Academy Award the first of eighteen for Mancini. (He would eventually win four Oscars.) Mancini's on-the-job training involved composition for virtually every genre at the Universal film factory, from westerns to Ma and Pa Kettle comedies, from gangster movies and mysteries to such science-fiction/horror thrillers (often in collaboration with Herman Stein) as The Creature From the Black Lagoon and This Island Earth. Because the budgets often didn't allow for complete original scores, Mancini would frequently be assigned to cobble together music from the scores of older pictures. This afforded Mancini another opportunity for self-instruction, studying the work of such veteran film composers as Frank Skinner, Hans J. Salter, and Miklos Rozsa.

But Mancini was about to make his own distinctive mark on film scoring. The first sign of the new direction which Mancini would be taking film music came in 1958 with his score for Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. A neglected film in its day, but regarded as a cult classic--particularly in the version which restores Welles' original editing--Touch featured a most unusual score. For his gritty film noir set in American and Mexican border towns, Welles decided against the customary practice of providing a dramatic underscore. Instead, nearly all of the music heard in Touch was source music: the music which would realistically be heard coming from radios and jukeboxes. Nevertheless, with his jazz and pop expertise, Mancini managed to make this music suitably menacing. In its way, it was as essential to the film's mood and as memorable as the famous zither source music in Carol Reed's The Third Man (which had starred Welles). Unfortunately for Mancini, the influx of television was causing the movie studios to cut back on their payrolls, and, shortly after Touch of Evil, the composer was let go. Ironically, it was television that proved to be Mancini's salvation. Writer-director Blake Edwards, who had known Mancini at Universal, was about to start a new private eye series for NBC, Peter Gunn. Bumping into Mancini by chance one day, on the spur of the moment Edwards offered Mancini the job of scoring his upcoming program.