Songfacts®:

• This is a haunting, bluesy song which states the hope that the rest of this person's life will be spent with the singer.
• This song made a comeback when it was featured in commercials for the Journey Diamond collection, reinforcing the message "diamonds are forever." >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Mike - Santa Barbara, CA, for above 2
• Married lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman, who wrote the themes to In The Heat Of The Night, The Way We Were, and The Thomas Crown Affair, wrote this with composer Michel Legrand for the 1969 movie The Happy Ending. Jean Simmons and John Forsythe star as a middle-class couple who seem to have it all, but their marriage is falling apart.
  
  "To all intents and purposes in the early part of the film, they seem like a couple to be envied," Marilyn said at the ASCAP "I Create Music" Expo in 2007. "Nobody outside of the two of them, not even their daughter, realizes the stress and strain of their marriage. The picture opens with a flashback to when they were young. The director/writer, Richard Brooks, who was writing the picture for his wife Jean Simmons, said, 'I want you to write a song that when you hear it for the first time it is like a proposal of marriage.'"
  
  Alan explained how the song's meaning changes throughout the film: "The second time you hear the song, sixteen years later in the film, the wife has picked up and walked out of her life, leaving her husband and her daughter. Not even knowing where she's going. The director said, 'I want the song to be heard again, but you cannot change a word or note. But this time when she goes into a bar and selects this song off the jukebox, I want it to mean something entirely different.'"
• The song (performed by Michael Dees for the film) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, but lost to "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
• In 1972, Sarah Vaughan recorded this for her album, Sarah Vaughan with Michel Legrand, which featured songs by Legrand and the Bergmans. Legrand won the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying a Vocalist for Vaughan's rendition of the song. In 2006, Billy Childs, Gil Goldstein, and Heitor Pereira won in the same category for a version featuring Chris Botti and Sting.
• This has also been covered by Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Mel Torme, Julie Andrews, Peggy Lee, Barbra Streisand, and Shirley Bassey.
• The same day the Bergmans finished the song with Legrand, Barbra Streisand came to their house for dinner and the title caught her eye as she passed the piano. She asked if she could hear it, so they sang it for her. Then she asked if she could sing it, and they captured her first effort on tape. Then she asked to record it for the movie. That was a trickier proposition.
  
  "We told her that the director, Richard Brooks, wanted it sung by an anonymous male voice," Alan Bergman told Billboard Magazine. "Barbra said, 'I'll sing it anonymously.' We weren't sure how to tell Barbra that it would be very difficult for her to sound (A,) Male and (B) Anonymous! So we left it to Richard to dissuade her. But she did record the first single."
  
  Streisand recorded the tune in September 1969 for her would-be album The Singer, which ended up being shelved when Clive Davis, then president of Columbia Records, pushed her to record a contemporary pop/rock album, What About Today?, to appeal to the shifting trend towards rock on the charts. Her version of "What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life?" came out in October of that year but failed to chart. She also included the song on her 1974 album, The Way We Were, and re-released it as the B-side to the title track.