Leith Stevens

Film and television composer Leith Stevens achieved his greatest renown through the music he supplied for Marlon Brando’s landmark picture The Wild One. He entered the world in Mount Moriah, Missouri, on September 13, 1909, already displaying prodigious talent that allowed him, at eleven, to accompany vocalists throughout the Kansas City region on a professional basis and, by sixteen, to make his first appearance on the podium. A Juilliard Foundation Fellowship granted in 1927 took him three years afterward to Chicago, where he joined the Chicago Opera Company as pianist, after which he settled once more in New York City as an arranger for CBS Radio. In 1939 he moved to Hollywood, where he wrote and conducted music for the Edward G. Robinson radio series Big Town; three years later he delivered his initial motion-picture score, for the RKO feature Syncopation. Throughout World War II he oversaw radio broadcasts for the U.S. Office of War Information, and on his return to Los Angeles he participated in founding the Composers and Lyricists Guild of America, later presiding over the organization for eight years. Although he contributed anonymously to major studio releases such as the 1946 perennial It’s a Wonderful Life and 1953’s The War of the Worlds, Stevens produced his most distinctive work for modest B-films, bringing percussive, bebop-tinged textures to little-seen noirs including Crashout and Private Hell 36 months ahead of comparable innovations by Henry Mancini and Elmer Bernstein; his jazz score for the 1953 The Wild One, realized by Shorty Rogers, joined Brando’s historic portrayal to provoke the ire of conservative critics. His first Academy Award nomination arrived in 1956 for the main theme of Julie, followed by another in 1959 for The Five Pennies and a third in 1963 for A New Kind of Love. On television he furnished scores for Lost in Space and multiple seasons of Mission: Impossible, while also releasing two albums under his own name—Jazz Themes for Cops and Robbers on the Coral label and Exploring the Unknown. Employed as musical director at Universal, Stevens died on July 23, 1970; earlier that day his wife perished in a car accident, and after informing relatives and friends of her passing he himself suffered a fatal heart attack.