Jimmy Stewart is a diplomat-" Mr Evans' memory was a little faulty here: Stewart was playing a doctor. "And Hitchcock said, 'I don't know what kind of a song I want, but it's got to be the kind of song that a mother would sing to a little child.' The picture takes place in Europe and North Africa. "We had never met him before," Ray Evans recalled a few years ago. But Stewart's agency, MCA, told Hitchcock they'd only give him Stewart if he took another of their clients, Doris Day, as co-star. "Que Sera Sera" was a deal-clincher: Alfred Hitchcock wanted Jimmy Stewart for The Man Who Knew Too Much, his 1956 Hollywood remake of one of his early British films. Well, that's assignment work: no composer walks down the street going, "I've got this great title for a song: 'The Mole People'." But to pull it off with such brio is impressive: Livingston & Evans were hired to write a number about mole people and they almost dug themselves out of that hole, people. If you asked him nicely, Livingston would sing the title song he composed for The Mole People, a 1956 sci-fi film about a lost community of albinos living under the earth's surface: A lot of the rest of the time, they wrote title songs, which isn't the easiest occupation. Everyone was so superior." So they stuck to Hollywood and wrote "Buttons And Bows" for The Paleface, "Mona Lisa" for Captain Carey USA and the only good urban Christmas standard, "Silver Bells", which Bob Hope sang in The Lemon Drop Kid.
Every once in a while, they tried the theatre but, as Livingston put it, "I hated Broadway. Livingston & Evans were partners for over sixty years.
#What movie is que sera sera from professional#
The only other professional Ray and Jay partnership I know of are two financial advisors who used to host "The Ray & Jay Financial Show" Monday evenings at 7pm on CJAD Radio in Montreal. In the absence of Ira and Myra Gershwin, they were the only songwriting team that rhymed. "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:
#What movie is que sera sera from tv#
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. A couple of weeks later, I was in a joint in Vermont, and another young chanteuse sang it in contemporary style, somewhat less successfully.
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