“Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa?/ Or is it just your way to hide a broken heart?” Allowed just one minute in the oil painting’s high-security “viewing pen” this winter, visitors to the Louvre in Paris won’t get much time to decide. The Louvre drew a record 10.2m visitors last year — more than any museum, ever. That number is expected to rise this year as the Louvre mounts a blockbuster exhibition marking the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death — although his celebrated “Mona Lisa” remains in her separate chamber. With the crush making intimacy impossible, most tourists just snap a selfie and move on.
But fans of her enigmatic expression can spend as long as they like in the mellow company of the song she inspired back in 1949. “Mona Lisa” was written by American movie songwriters Ray Evans and Jay Livingston. The song was commissioned for the noir, espionage film Captain Carey, U.S.A. starring Alan Ladd as an American agent in Italy during (and after) the second world war. Sneaking around an Italian village, Ladd’s character needed somebody to alert him when the Nazis were coming. The plan was to use a “blind” busker to play a warning melody. Paramount told the duo the song had to “sound Italian” and be instantly recognisable, given its role in the plot.
Inspired by the 1947 hit, “Ballerina”, Evans and Livingston started with the title “Primadonna”, fitting a distinctive note melodic code to the syllables. The next day, Evans came up with the new title, “Mona Lisa”. Both film and song underwent further title changes, until the songwriters eventually reverted to “Mona Lisa”. The mystery of the “Mona Lisa” (who is she? What is she thinking?) was a perfect fit for the film’s themes of subterfuge and uncertain romance. Performed for celluloid by bandleader Charlie Spivak with Tommy Lynn,the song was the first from a non-musical film to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
But the best-loved version was recorded by Nat King Cole(as the B-side to “The Greatest Inventor of Them All”) in 1950. The son of a Baptist minister, born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1919, Cole learned his keyboard skills from his church organist mother, Perlina, after the family relocated to Chicago when Nat was four. He began working as a pianist in his mid-teens and gradually won fans for his silky-smooth croon. His 1943 US hit, “Straighten Up and Fly Right” (based on one of his dad’s sermons and co-written with Irving Mills) crossed music’s racial divides, topping both the US’s Harlem and Hillbilly charts.
Cole was a perfect fit for “Mona Lisa”. Like the woman in the song, he maintained a serene vocal and facial surface, despite being victim of repeated racist jibes (and one attack that hospitalised him). His sound offered safe, steady and sentimental audio harbour for those traumatised by war. You can hear him using all his easy warmthto thaw a “cold and lonely lovely work of art”. Six years after the release of “Mona Lisa”, he became the first African American with his own network TV show.
The song became an easy listening standard, given a country jukebox treatment by Moon Mullicanin 1950, strummed’n’hummed by Elvis Presley(sounding like a gondolier in a home recording of 1959) and twanged from the guitar of Duane Eddyin 1961. In 1954, partygoers carolled the song across the courtyard from James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Cole’s version got an onscreen reprise on the soundtrack to Neil Jordan’s British gangster film, Mona Lisa (1986).
Cole’s daughter Natalie included a Spanish guitar-laced version of “Mona Lisa” on her 1991 album Unforgettable… with Love, featuring songs previously sung by her father. Most recently, the song was covered by American jazz singer Gregory Porterin 2017. Raised by a single mother, Porter would listen to Nat King Cole records and find the voice of a father there. “When my mother was sick, when she did pass,” Porter told NPR, “I went and re-medicated myself with his music. It has an important place in our household. I can smell the greens on the stove and the cornbread in the oven when I hear Nat's music. I wanted to have his music come through my body, come through my vocal cords, and sing it as an expression of appreciation for him.”
What are your memories of ‘Mona Lisa’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Cool Note; Track Music; Red Dirt; RCA/Legacy; TP4 Music; Universal Music Division Decca Records France
Picture credit: Echoes/Redferns