You’ll Place the Tune if Not the Name : Johnny Mandel has a low profile and a full resume of standards, film scores and arrangements. His business is to make others sound good--from Sinatra in the ‘60s to Michael Jackson in the ‘90s

Even if you don’t recognize Johnny Mandel’s name, it’s a fair bet that you’ve heard some of his music.

Mandel, the songwriter/arranger/soundtrack composer, wrote the lasting melodies to such evergreen standards as “The Shadow of Your Smile,” which won the Academy Award in 1965 for best song (in “The Sandpiper”), “A Time for Love” and “Suicide Is Painless: The Theme from M*A*S*H.”

Mandel’s profile is low because he’s not a performer. He used to play trombone but gave it up 30 years ago. As was true of Duke Ellington, his instrument is an orchestra. He’s in the business of making other people sound good.

A native New Yorker who is young-looking at 65, he was being interviewed in his Malibu home, a sprawling, dark buff, wooden affair that he shares with his wife, Martha, and their daughter, Marissa. The house sits on a bluff overlooking Point Dume beach. “I always wanted to write arrangements, ever since I was about 13,” he said.

And write he has. First there were charts for bandleaders Boyd Raeburn, Woody Herman and Buddy Rich in the ‘40s, then Count Basie in the ‘50s, Frank Sinatra in the ‘60s, Michael Jackson in the ‘70s, Shirley Horn in the ‘80s and Jackson, Horn, Natalie Cole and Barbra Streisand in the ‘90s.

He also knocked out his share of film scores, including ones for “I Want to Live”--one of the first jazz-influenced scores--”Being There,” “The Americanization of Emily,” “Agatha,” “Caddyshack” and the as-yet-unreleased “Brenda Starr.”

Mandel has no favorite creative milieu. “I’m like an Al Pacino or a Nick Nolte,” he said. “If I get a project I like, then I want to do it; I get into it. And there’s no problem about getting my musical voice across.”

His writing is spotlighted on three current albums with Cole, Jackson and Streisand. He penned orchestrations for seven tracks on Cole’s Elektra Records hit album, “Unforgettable,” as well as for a newly released single of “The Christmas Song.” He also provided string backgrounds for Jackson’s “Will You Be There” from his just-released “Dangerous” album on Epic Records, and arranged a version of “For All We Know,” sung by Streisand and included on the soundtrack album for the new Columbia Pictures release, “The Prince of Tides.” The vocal was not included on the soundtrack of the film.

Each singer had unique requirements, although Cole and Streisand both recorded their tracks live in the studio, with Mandel conducting his orchestrations. For Jackson, Mandel delivered a string sweetener--a background orchestral arrangement that is added to previously recorded vocal and instrumental tracks.

With Cole--whose 22-track collection of tunes recorded by her father, Nat (King) Cole, stayed at No. 1 on the Billboard Pop Album charts earlier this year for many weeks--Mandel discussed some rough outlines, such as keys or tempos. He then went off and crafted the scores to such tunes as Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” Charles Chaplin’s “Smile” and the title track, where an ingenious method of over-dubbing allowed Natalie to sing alongside her father’s version of the song.

“She’s got an incredible instrument, with a three-octave range, so I just tried to figure out the range where she would be most comfortable singing and wrote the chart there,” Mandel said, relaxing on a sand-colored couch in his light-filled living room, which looks out on the Pacific. “Then at the recording session, I’d conduct the orchestra on a run-through while she just listened; then she’d go into the studio and record the track live with the band.

“It’s ironic I did all ballads on the album when my background is in the big bands,” said Mandel, sinking back into the couch and smiling.

Streisand’s desire to sing “For All We Know” grew out of her enjoyment of an instrumental arrangement of the tune by “Prince of Tides” soundtrack composer James Newton Howard in the film’s score.

The singer and orchestrator got together in a studio in late spring and rehearsed the tune before Mandel put pencil to paper. “I played some synthesizer parts for her and she sang,” he said. “I worked out what chords I needed, then went home and wrote the arrangement.”

It took Mandel a week to score the chart, which is not fast, he said. But taking one’s time prevents costly delays later, during the recording session.

“I don’t like to fix things in the studio, so I really chew the carpet at home, sweat it out. Then when I take it into the studio, I know exactly what I want.”

Streisand is a quick study, said Mandel, who trained briefly in symphonic writing at the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School of Music in the early ‘50s. “The recording, done in June in Capitol Records’ Studio A, didn’t take long,” Mandel said. “Barbra came in, and we did eight or nine great takes, each one of which could have been a release.”

The collaborations with Cole and Streisand are the type that allow Mandel, whose writing is marked by its rich sense of melody and smooth, flowing rhythm, to play a major role in the outcome of a recording.

“The person who writes the orchestration really determines the sound of the record, along with the artist, of course,” he said. “When I do records like these, I visualize in my head what the finished master is going to sound like, from beginning to end, as I’m writing.”

Mandel’s efforts with Jackson enhance the mega-star’s finished product, certainly, but have less to do with its overall sound. For “Will You Be There,” as with the memorable “She’s Out of My Life” on 1979’s “Off the Wall” (both Epic Records), Mandel concocted string parts that were added to Jackson’s already recorded vocal tracks. “This last time, we used a huge orchestra, maybe 60 pieces,” he said.

Jackson meticulously oversees each recording, Mandel said. “We talk about the arrangement quite a lot, ahead of time, and you have to pay close attention because Michael knows exactly what he wants. He’s very clear. And he has great ears. He hears everything.”

Jackson is always on hand for the over-dub sessions, the orchestrator said. “I’m in the studio conducting the band; he’s in the booth.”

Mandel never shops out his orchestration chores, for that’s the way he truly gets his musical personality across. “You can’t find anybody that can be you. It might be different. It might be better than anything you ever thought of, but it’s not you,” he said.

His over-the-garage studio has a bank of synthesizers in one corner, numerous photographs and plaques, Mandel’s Oscar (shared with lyricist Paul Francis Webster) and a large 60-second clock used for determining the exact length of film and TV cues. There’s also a piano and a desk.

“I arranged music 20 years before I ever composed, so I can’t divorce orchestration from the process,” he said. “It’s too personal a thing, the way you mix musical colors, just like a painter. That’s what drew me into music.”

Mandel’s career as a writer was given a jump start when he was a teen-ager in Manhattan. He took arranging lessons from established bandleader Van Alexander, who wrote “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” a big hit for Ella Fitzgerald with Chick Webb’s band in the late ‘30s. “He told me to try and get anybody to play my music to see if it works,” Mandel recalled.

At first, “anybody” was his high school band. Then came rehearsal bands and finally the professional units of such people as Herman (with whom Mandel played trombone in the famed Third Herd alongside Stan Getz and Zoot Sims) and Basie in 1953-54. “The thing about Basie is that he always made you feel wonderful, whether he was playing music or not,” Mandel said.

Writing scores for radio dramas and song and dance acts prepared Mandel for composing for film. “There I was writing to the clock, and to action, which is just what film writing is,” he said. “When I did my first tracks for ‘I Want to Live’ in 1958 and they came out right on the button, I said, ‘Hey, I like this.’ ”

The film scores led to Mandel’s third career as a songwriter. A theme was needed for “The Americanization of Emily,” so he wrote the waltz “Emily.” He wrote “The Shadow of Your Smile” in a coffee shop next to Schwab’s on the Sunset Strip, with trumpeter Jack Sheldon’s gutsy interpretation in mind. “I never wanted it to turn into the schmaltzy ballad it did,” he said. “I don’t write schmaltz.”

Later came “A Time for Love” from a movie he hated, “An American Dream,” and “Close Enough for Love” from “Agatha.” These works and 15 others are collected in the newly published “Johnny Mandel Songbook” (Hal Leonard Publishers).

Mandel’s tunes are written in the style of classic Tin Pan Alley and Broadway and film composers such as Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers and Cole Porter. With the success of records such as Cole’s and those by singer/pianist Harry Connick Jr. or Linda Ronstadt, does Mandel see his kind of music in the midst of a resurgence?

“The old days aren’t going to come back, but there will be more and more people who will be listening,” he predicted. “The Natalie Cole record was bought by a lot of people under 25. This music has durability. It has withstood stylistic changes. Just because interpretations of it have sounded dated, why throw away the music? There are modern ways of doing it.”

And Johnny Mandel knows the ways.