Composer’s Life a Song to Remember : Music: Frank DeVol of San Juan Capistrano has composed scores for dozens of Hollywood films and has also been an actor and comedian. O.C. Musicians’ Assn. will honor him tonight.

A string of some of the 1950s and ‘60s best-known movies--”Pillow Talk,” “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?,” “Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte,” “Cat Ballou,” “The Dirty Dozen,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”--all carry the same simple credit: “Music By DeVol.”

But movie scores are only part of the story on San Juan Capistrano resident Frank DeVol, who’ll be awarded an honorary lifetime membership from the Orange County Musicians’ Assn. tonight at the association’s quarterly general meeting. It takes a bucketful of hyphens to list everything the 83-year-old musician-arranger-composer-actor-comedian has achieved.

DeVol’s saxophone was heard on a fistful of recordings from big-band leader Horace Heidt. He arranged and conducted recording sessions for Kay Starr, Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald, Robert Goulet and Tony Bennett as well as being responsible for Nat (King) Cole’s classic treatment of “Nature Boy.”

He was a radio personality in the 1940s and a television personality in the medium’s early days. He also wrote and conducted music for both, penning one of the baby-boom generation’s favorites, the theme for “My Three Sons.” In the ‘70s, he appeared as bandleader Happy Kyne on the cult-favorite comedy series “Fernwood 2-Night.”

And the professional side is only part of the story when considering DeVol, who married one of America’s true sweethearts, the late singer Helen O’Connell, shortly before his 80th birthday. This is a man who’s lived one heck of a life.

“He was never a guy out looking for a big name,” said his friend and fellow composer-arranger-performer, Billy May, who’ll attend tonight’s presentation. “But he was responsible for a lot of great things.”

DeVol, renowned for his low-key sense of humor, is modest about his sweeping career.

“I just never turned down any work,” he explains.

Born in Moundsville, W.Va., DeVol was raised in Canton, Ohio, taking up the violin at age 9, following in the footsteps of his father, who led the local vaudeville theater’s band.

“I had quite a deal,” DeVol said in phone conversations last week. “My dad was the orchestra leader, my mother had a little store. I was like a latchkey child, but I could always go to theater and hang around backstage.”

Ironically, his first piano teacher told him he’d never make a good musician.

“It was all too easy for me,” he said. “I had the technique, but not the ability to put the feeling, put the emotion into the music. It took me years to figure it out.”

DeVol joined the local musicians’ union when he was 14 and began to play violin and piano in his father’s orchestra, making $35 a week for appearances at a Chinese restaurant in Cleveland. He saved his earnings and finally bought a saxophone.

“I learned to play it going around to the clubs and sitting in with the musicians. I could play the ‘C’ scale, but when it came to sharps and flats, I’d have to nudge the guys next to me and ask them how to play it. That was the only studying I ever had to do.”

In the late ‘30s, he was playing and arranging for the Horace Heidt orchestra. When guitarist Alvino Rey left the band, DeVol began to arrange for him.

DeVol came to California with George Olson’s band in 1936 to play the Coconut Grove and decided to make California his home. He was working the graveyard shift for Lockheed in 1943 when he received the first of many offers of work he couldn’t turn down.

“I got a call from radio station KHJ of the Mutual Network, where I had worked with the Alvino Rey orchestra and they said their bandleader had walked out the night before and would I come over and fill in. It was a musical program with a 24-piece orchestra. I said fine, and ended up staying a year-and-a-half.”

Before long he was working as musical director for such radio personalities as Ginny Simms, Rudi Vallee, Jack Smith, Dinah Shore and Jack Carson.

“It’s strange how things turn out,” DeVol said. “Nobody knew my name or who I was, just that I was an arranger.”

His work as an on-the-air radio personality also developed by chance. While working for Simms, he was asked to fill in and read some “second man” parts, “since I happened to be there. So I said ‘sure,’ read the part on the radio and got a laugh. So the next week they gave me another part to read and then another and all of a sudden I became a comedian. It took me out of the lower ranking of being just a composer-arranger,” he said, with a bit of mischief in his voice.

In the early days of television, DeVol was a regular on the “Pantomime Quiz” which included Vincent Price as one of its regulars. He became the emcee for “Words About Music” and the “Platter Panel.”

“We had a group of four disc jockeys and people would bring in their old 78 recordings and we’d talk about them, interviewing the songwriters and singers.”

Odd circumstances also led to his involvement in the film industry.

“I was trying to get the MCA agency to give me a picture to do and they kept saying, ‘We can’t give you a picture, you don’t have any movie credits.’ ”

But a friend--who once borrowed $25,000 and didn’t pay him back until DeVol contacted an attorney (who represented the friend as well)--provided a break. To show he had no hard feelings, the man offered to get him a movie job, though there was only $3,500 for the entire music budget, which included paying the 18 musicians. Despite the negligible pay, DeVol took the offer.

“Well, I never turn anything down, so I did it. And they liked what I did so they hired me for another and then another, which was the ‘Big Knife’ for Robert Aldrich. I ended up doing 16 pictures for Aldrich.”

All together, DeVol worked on more than 50 films, gaining five Academy Award nominations. At one point, at the urging of Mitch Miller, who DeVol replaced at Columbia Records as the company’s artist-and-repertoire agent, he dropped his first name.

“ ‘You know, you’re name’s kind of stagy,’ Mitch told me. ‘Why don’t you just change it to DeVol? Put it on records and everything you do.’ ”

Active in the recording business at the same time he was composing for film, DeVol, who wrote Diana Ross’ hit “The Happening,” also released a number of albums under his own name including “Fabulous Hollywood” (“That’s the worst,” he laughs) and a collection of pop-tune arrangements for full orchestra called “Portraits” (“The best of them,” he crows).

“I listen to the things I did back then, my own albums, the things for Ella (Fitzgerald) and say to myself, ‘Why did I do it that way?’ I know more now. You never really stop learning from your mistakes.”

DeVol speaks in his most endearing tones as the conversation turns to his second wife, Helen O’Connell, whom he married in 1991.

“I first met her in 1950. I was leading a dance band at the Palladium but didn’t have a singer. Because I was in television and doing comedy acting, I was taking dramatic lessons and who should come in but Helen and a girlfriend. Well the girlfriend told me Helen needed work and I said I needed a singer, so I hired her. She had just gone through a divorce and she had three little girls. After we were married, she told me she had $5 to her name that day.”

O’Connell stayed with the band two months. Ironically, one of the recordings she made with the band was a duet with DeVol singing second vocal on a tune titled “You Can Marry Me.”

The two became reacquainted in the late ‘80s after DeVol’s wife of 53 years passed away. They eventually married.

“Helen told me she made sure she married Frank in August,” says friend and fellow composer May. “His birthday was in September and she wanted to get married while he was still 79. She didn’t want to tell her grandchildren that she was marrying some 80-year-old guy.”

“We had a 40-year past without having been through it together,” DeVol said of O’Connell, who died in September, 1993. “We knew all the songs, the songwriters, the musicians and orchestra leaders so we had plenty to talk about. She needed me and I needed her.

“We used to go on cruises, on which she’d perform, and 25 guys a day would come up to her and tell her how much they loved her back when they were young. They would tell me what a lucky guy I was. And I was.”