Rod McKuen never identified with a particular sexual orientation, saying “I can’t imagine choosing one sex over the other, that’s just too limiting. I can’t even honestly say I have a preference.”
The poet, writer and musician was active in the LGBT community, joining the San Francisco chapter of early gay rights organisation The Mattachine Society in the early 1950s.
Throughout his career he often gave performances to aid LGBT organisations, and later to raise funds for AIDS research.
Over his career McKuen published many books of poetry – selling over 60 million books, he won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word recording, and put out over 200 albums, and wrote over 1,500 songs.
He collaborated with Jacques Brel, translating many of the Belgian songwriters works into English, and also worked with Henry Mancini, John Williams and Anita Kerr. His songs have been recorded by Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Chet Baker, Dusty Springfield, Nana Mouskouri, Cyndi Lauper, and many others.
Madonna has sampled his work for her records, and he’s composed film scores for memorable movies including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which starred a young Dame Maggie Smith.
After surviving a tough childhood in California, he was born on this day in 1933, McKuen left home as a teenager and began doing a series of professions ranging from lumberjack to ranch hand, railroad worker and stuntman. While he didn’t have a great education, he always loved writing poetry in his journals.
He was born Rodney Woolever, but changed his name to the best approximation of what he could recall his mother telling him his biological father’s name was. Later in life he would hire private detectives to track down his lost parent, and it has been suggested his father may have been a man from Utah named Rodney Marion McKune.
During the Korean war McKuen worked as a propaganda writer and newspaper columnist, and afterwards he settled in San Francisco reading his poetry in clubs alongside Beat poets including Jack Kerouac and Alen Ginsberg. Later he began incorporating folk songs he’d written into his act.
In the 1960’s he moved to France and met Jaques Brel. McKuen was instrumental in translating the Belgian writers’ songs into English. Ne me quitte pas became If You Go Away, a song now considered a classic, it’s been recorded by Shirley Bassey, Cyndi Lauper, Belinda Carlisle (in the original French), and while it’s never been given an official release, Madonna has also laid down a version in the studio.
Another Brel song Le Moribond became Seasons in the Sun, a hit for Terry Jacks in the 1970’s and Westlife in the late 1990s.
In the late 1960’s McKuen teamed up with Anita Kerr and The San Sebastian Strings for a series of albums that featured ambient mood music and McKuen’s spoken word creations. Madonna sampled Why I Follow the Tigers for her 1998 single Drowned World / Substitute for Love.
In 1969 Frank Sintra commissioned an entire album written by McKuen and arranged by conductor Don Costa. A Man Alone: The Words and Music of Rod McKuen featured the song Love’s Been Good to Me.
While he made many albums one of the more memorable and provocative was 1977’s Slide…Easy In. The gatefold cover of the LP featured the arm of adult film actor Bruno grabbing a can of vegetable shortening labeled ‘Disco’. The pun was the real-life product Cisco was known to be used by gay men as a sexual lubricant.
The album also featured the song Don’t Drink the Orange Juice a reference to anti-LGBT campaigner and Christian singer Anita Bryant. Brant was the spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission, and at this time gay bars stopped stocking orange juice in protest to her campaigns. Instead of screwdrivers, gay bars introduced the Anita Bryant Cocktail which was made from vodka and apple juice.
The closing track on the album is called Full Moon Over the Atoria Hotel. Until the previous year The Astoria Hotel had been home to the legendary Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse and club where Bette Midler’s career began.
While he continued writing poetry, later in his career McKuen created larger works including film scores, symphonies, and chamber pieces for orchestras. In 1989 he provided the voice for the character of Archimedes in Disney’s The Little Mermaid.
McKuen lived for many years in Beverly Hills with his partner Edward Habib. Their large rambling house featured one of the biggest record collections in the world.
In 2015 at the age of 81 he passed away after catching pneumonia. While his work was prolific, critics have often labeled his work kitsch and disposable.
Image: Rod McKuen photographed by Parkenings from Wikipedia. Shared via a Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 4.0. This post was first published in 2025.
