For all the tributes to Dame Maggie Smith since her death last week, I haven’t seen a single one mention the No. 2 hit that it’s composer said was written for her.
Every story mentioned Smith’s Oscar for Best Actress for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” the film adaptation of Muriel Spark’s lauded 1961 novel. But none mentioned the theme song Rod McKuen wrote for the movie, possibly because America prefers to forget how much it once loved Rod McKuen. When he performed it on a video for the Ed Sullivan Show, he said he wrote it “for a marvelous lady named Maggie Smith.”
McKuen’s popularity is impossible to explain to anyone born after, say, 1969, because he virtually disappeared by the Reagan years. But his albums and books of Hallmark-level poetry were everywhere when the film came out. McKuen released the song as a single, but his version went nowhere. It was the cover by Bill Swofford, who recorded under his middle name, Oliver, that hit No. 2 that autumn.
