"You're Ray Livingston," I said, introducing myself. He was a thin man who was generally the tallest composer in the room. I met Livingston over the years at various songwriters' gatherings. Other than that moment of vocal glory, Jay belonged to a line of Hollywood songwriting teams who, unlike their Broadway counterparts, never became household names - Warren & Dubin ("I Only Have Eyes For You"), Robin & Rainger ("Thanks For The Memory"), Fain & Webster ("Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing"), and Livingston & Evans. He'd done it on the demo, and the production company decided they liked it just as it was, with Livingston warbling:
Aside from that moment of glory, when kids met Jay Livingston, they were impressed not that he was the guy who wrote the theme song to "Mister Ed", the celebrated TV show about a talking horse, but that he was the guy who sang it, too. The closest thing to celebrity was when they got to play the songwriting team bashing out a parody "Buttons and Bows" at the New Year's party in Sunset Boulevard. It was written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, and, if you've never heard of 'em, don't worry about it they never did. She had not cared for it when she first heard it, although it became her biggest hit and the theme of her TV show. Que sera sera." But, evidently, Doris was by then more proscriptive than she was when she introduced her boffo shoulder-shrugging hit. "Whatever will be will be," as Buddy might well have barked in a withering riposte. If the President's chocolate lab were to be left intact, she argued, he would be liable to prostate problems which might cause embarrassing urinary accidents on grand White House occasions. Nonetheless, Buddy's perky blonde nemesis was insistent. Of all the potential perils the modern world has to offer, the possibility that Doris Day will publicly call for your castration must rank as pretty low. At one point, Miss Day wrote to the White House demanding he be neutered – the dog, that is. "That's really my philosophy." Tell it to Buddy, Bill Clinton's late pooch. "Que sera sera," Doris told me a few years back. The future's not ours to see", and I certainly did not see that.īeyond such personal associations, the song remains Miss Day's. A year or so on, I was back in Miquelon at the same restaurant and inquired of the owner about the aforementioned charming waitress: She had committed suicide in France, and for a while the lyrics rang a little mordant with me - "Whatever will be will be. Starr also famously sang Yellow Submarine, which was written by McCartney, with help from Lennon and 60’s pop hippy Donovan.A couple of weeks later, I was in a joint in Vermont, and another young chanteuse sang it in contemporary style, somewhat less successfully. Starr contributed the line “writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear” and suggested making “Father McCartney” darn his socks. The Beatles finished the song in the music room of John Lennon’s home at Kenwood. I couldn’t think of much more so I put it away.” ‘Daisy Hawkins picks up the rice in the church’. The first few bars just came to me, and I got this name in my head. The name that came to him, though, was not Eleanor Rigby but Miss Daisy Hawkins: “I was sitting at the piano when I thought of it. Like many of McCartney's songs, the melody and first line of the song came to him as he was playing around on his piano. Tell me ma, me ma.”ġ966The Beatles – Eleanor Rigby and Yellow SubmarineĮLEANOR Rigby was released simultaneously on both the album Revolver and on a double A-side single with Yellow Submarine. The song has a special fondness on Merseyside, as it’s regularly sung at English football matches when a team is progressing to Wembley Stadium, with the lyrics: “Tell me ma, me ma. Incidentally, Jay’s brother, longtime Capitol Records executive Alan W Livingston, was the man who signed Frank Sinatra and The Beatles to Capitol. The song received the 1956 Oscar for Best Original Song with the alternative title Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera), bagging Livingston and Evans their third Oscar.
From 1968 to 1973, it was the theme song for The Doris Day Show, becoming her signature song. So they were a clear choice to write the song for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 film, The Man Who Knew Too Much, starring Doris Day and James Stewart.ĭay’s recording for Columbia Records was a hit around the world.
The pair – now regarded as two of the creators of the great American songbook – had already won the Academy Award for Best Original Song twice – in 1948 for the song Buttons and Bows, written for the movie The Paleface and in 1950 for the song Mona Lisa, written for the movie Captain Carey. JAY Livingston and Ray Evans were a dream team when it came to composing film music.