Did They Mention the Music?

The "rags-to-riches" story of Henry Mancini (1924-1994) could come straight out of one of the many movies he scored. The Academy Award-winning composer, arranger, and conductor was born the son of poor Italian immigrants in the grim steel town of West Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. Taught to play the flute by his father at age eight, Mancini took up the piano soon thereafter; the bona fide child prodigy later attended Juilliard. After a stint in the Air Force during World War II, he joined Universal Pictures' music department and thus began his lifelong association with the movies.
Highly prolific, Mancini composed and arranged countless scores for movies and TV shows, and recorded more than ninety albums. His many memorable film scores include Breakfast at Tiffany's, Touch of Evil, Days of Wine and Roses, The Glass Menagerie, The Pink Panther, 10, and Victor/Victoria. In addition to winning four Oscars, Mancini took home some twenty Grammys.
Newly revised to cover Mancini's last years and tragic passing, Did They Mention the Music? contains innumerable stories and anecdotes about the great show business talents with whom he worked over the course of his forty-plus-year career: Orson Welles, Blake Edwards, Johnny Mathis, Julie Andrews, Audrey Hepburn, Johnny Mercer, Luciano Pavarotti, and many others. Mancini was an intensely private man; however, Did They Mention the Music? is both revealing and eminently readable.

Gene Lees is the author of Oscar Peterson: The Will to Swing and Waiting for Dizzy, both published by Cooper Square Press. He lives in Ojai, CA.