Rod McKuen, a ubiquitous poet, lyricist and songwriter whose work met with immense commercial success if little critical esteem, died on Thursday in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 81.
Mr. McKuen, who died at a rehabilitation center, had been ill with pneumonia, his half brother, Edward McKuen Habib, told The Associated Press. Information on other survivors was not available.
Mr. McKuen, whom The St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture described as having been, at his height, “the unofficial poet laureate of America,” was the author of dozens of books of poetry, which together sold millions of copies.
For a generation of Americans at midcentury and afterward, Mr. McKuen’s poetry formed an enduring, solidly constructed bridge between the Beat generation and New Age sensibilities. Ranging over themes of love and loss, the natural world and spirituality, his work was prized by readers for its gentle accessibility while being condemned by many critics as facile, tepid and aphoristic.
Mr. McKuen’s output was as varied as it was vast, spanning song lyrics, including English-language adaptations (“Seasons in the Sun”) of works by his idol, Jacques Brel; music and lyrics, as for “Jean,” from the 1969 film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” for which he received an Academy Award nomination; and musical scores, including that of the 1973 television film “Lisa, Bright and Dark.” He also appeared as a singer on television, on many recordings and in live performance.
“There was a time not long ago when every enlightened suburban split-level home had its share of Rod McKuen,” The San Francisco Chronicle wrote in a 2002 profile. “His mellow poetry was on the end table (‘Listen to the Warm’), his lovestruck music and spoken-word recordings were on the hi-fi and his kindly face was on the set, on ‘The Tonight Show’ and Dinah Shore’s variety hour.”
“Some flowers on the table in a jar,/a few have dropped their petals,/A few more brave it on,” Mr. McKuen wrote in “après vous,” an unpublished poem from 1987 that appears on his website, rodmckuen.com. It continues:
Your dress arches, falls across a chair-back,
My socks, your underwear are left unreconciled,
confetti scattered pre-parade.
Crumpled bills, some pennies and a quarter from
an out-turned pocket make a still-life
where they spilled.
Mr. McKuen’s verse found little favor with reviewers.
“What McKuen guarantees is that a certain California sexual daydreaming can be yours for the asking even if you do move your lips rapidly as you read,” Louis Cox sniped in The New Republic in 1971.
But while he may never have won critical laurels, his lyrics were esteemed by many renowned performers. Frank Sinatra released the album “A Man Alone: The Words and Music of McKuen” in 1969; Mr. McKuen’s songs were also recorded by Johnny Cash, Perry Como, Petula Clark, Barbra Streisand and many others.
Rodney Marvin McKuen was born in a charity hospital in Oakland, Calif., on April 29, 1933. He never knew his biological father, and he was reared by his mother and an abusive alcoholic stepfather. After making several attempts to run away, he left home for good at 11. Over the years, he worked throughout the American West at a series of odd jobs that might well have come from the pages of a John Steinbeck novel — ranch hand, disc jockey, railroad worker, rodeo cowboy and newspaperman.
Settling in San Francisco in the 1950s, he began writing poetry, delivering his work at readings alongside the likes of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; Mr. McKuen also sang at Bay Area nightclubs and was briefly a contract player at Universal Pictures. He later lived in Paris, where he became a close associate of Brel’s.
Although poetry and songwriting gave Mr. McKuen a partial outlet for the pain of his childhood, there was an aspect of his youth that he could not speak of until many years later — sexual molestation by an uncle and aunt.
“The fact that my stepfather had beaten me up when I was a kid wasn’t hard for me to talk or write about,” Mr. McKuen told People magazine in 1982. “I had both arms broken and my ribs caved in several times, but physical injuries on the outside heal. Before now, though, I have never been able to come forward and talk about having been sexually abused when I was a child. Those scars have never healed, and I expect they never will.”
He was the author of a well-received memoir, “Finding My Father: One Man’s Search for Identity” (1976), about his quest for his biological heritage.
If critical acceptance eluded Mr. McKuen, by his lights it did not matter. He lived for many years in Beverly Hills, in what The Chicago Tribune described as an “eight-bedroom, 15,000-square-foot mansion filled with more than 100,000 CDs and half a million records.”
It was his robust commercial success that had soured the critics, he said.
“I only know this,” Mr. McKuen told The Chronicle in 2002. “Before the books were successful, whether it was Newsweek or Time or The Saturday Evening Post, the reviews were always raves.”
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