Song of the Day 10/1: Rod McKuen, “Jean”
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.
Having known Rod a little, he still did a lot of work after the 80’s but in the 90’s health issues for both him and “brother/partner” Edward slowed him down a bit. his album with Sinatra “A Man Alone” is one of my favorite albums
He wrote something like 1,500 songs, which is kind of incredible considering he couldn’t read music or play an instrument.
This is a good article from a couple of years ago on his disappearance from public consciousness.
https://slate.com/culture/2022/10/rod-mckuen-bestselling-poet-songs-what-happened.html?
OK,Mr. Smarty-Pants Communist, how do you square McKuen’s rep with THIS??:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG6zxDDtf3Q
At first, I thought the songwriting credit for Rod McKuen was a joke. Turns out it wasn’t.
What’s forgotten about the movie, and Smith’s Oscar winning performance, is that the character she played, Jean Brodie, supported Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War. It actually gets more of a mention in the movie than it did in Muriel Spark’s novel.