Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (10 page)

Rosemary crisscrossed the country twice more during the spring of 1953 before settling down in Hollywood for her third Paramount commitment, which went into production on May 4, 1953.
Red Garters
was a spoof western that co-starred Jack Carson, Gene Barry, Guy Mitchell, and Joanne Gilbert. Rosemary took the part of saloon singer Calaveras Kate, a role originally conceived with Betty Hutton in mind. The story centered on Mitchell’s character, Reb Randall, a “gallivanting cowpoke”
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who arrives in the town of Paradise Lost, Limbo County, California, seeking the killer of his brother. From then on however, the film offered a burlesque of the traditional western shoot-out. “In
Red Garters
, the bullets are the musical numbers, the guns are songs and the rest is dancing and romance,” said Paramount’s advance publicity. The film was certainly ahead of its time, although Paramount was concerned that much of the satire would pass over the heads of ’50s audiences, to such an extent that the film’s credits opened with a text crawl explicitly stating that the movie was a spoof. Often compared to the more successful
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
, it would be two generations before cinema critics came to understand the film’s underlying surrealism.

Yet another Livingston and Evans score offered up a selection of “mighty purty” numbers. Rosemary, Guy Mitchell, and the rest of the cast worked their way through them but none registered as hit material. “The best that is to be said of them,” wrote Bosley Crowther, “is that they’re numerous and give the singers a chance to move.” Like other contemporary reviewers,
Crowther homed in on the film’s cinematic presentation. Its garish use of Technicolor, minimal sets, and artificial décor unashamedly brought the Broadway stage onto the movie set. It was, he wrote, “breezy and bouncy entertainment that seems to be strung on copper wires that are constantly being jingled and twanged like the strings of a guitar. The only trouble … is that it lacks a good story and first-class songs.”
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Red Garters
marked the conclusion of Rosemary’s movie-making apprenticeship. Although she had played a performer in all three films, their styles were all quite different. Rosemary had shown herself to be adaptable and confident on the big screen, with an easygoing and likable personality that transmitted well to the audiences. Her next outing would be the long awaited
White Christmas
but Rosemary had shown already that she was ready to move up to Paramount’s top table. Before she did, her private life was about to take a definitive turn.

While filming
Red Garters
, Rosemary was still enjoying the company of both Ferrer and DiPaolo, but when Dante landed an archetypal part as Matt, the leader of the town boys in
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
, the shooting plans took him off on location to Sun Valley, Idaho. His absence allowed Rosemary’s love for Joe Ferrer to develop to the point that the only thing that stood in the way of marriage was the refusal by Phyllis Hill, Ferrer’s estranged wife, to agree to a divorce. Finally she relented and their divorce came through in Mexico in July 1953. Ferrer was in Dallas, starring in
Kiss Me Kate
at the Dallas State Fair when he got the news. Rosemary was at home in Los Angeles with brother Nick and Dante, who was back from Idaho. Marriage plans were set, although with news of the Ferrers’ divorce in the papers, the challenge for Joe and Rosemary was to find a way of getting married as quickly as possible without the event becoming a media circus. Rosemary, on her own admission, took the secrecy a step too far. Leaving for Dallas, she made no mention of her marriage plans to Nick, or more significantly, to Dante. She would not see or speak to him again for over 20 years. “Not my proudest moment,” she said in later life.
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When Rosemary got to Dallas, she found Ferrer in the midst of a typical whirlwind existence. As well as being committed to eight appearances per week in
Kiss Me Kate
, he was also preparing an English version of the play,
The Dazzling Hour
, which he had translated from the French and was working on with playwright, Ketti Frings. With Texas state law demanding a three-day waiting period before a marriage could take place, there was no prospect of a wedding avoiding the press. Ferrer’s solution was for him and Rosemary to get up early and drive 90 miles across the Oklahoma border to the town of Durant. There, on July 13, 1953, Rosemary Clooney became the third Mrs. José Ferrer, an 85-year-old county judge conducting the
service. Ferrer was 41, Rosemary 25 years old. The job done, Ferrer was back in Dallas by nightfall and spent his wedding night starring in
Kiss Me Kate
before hosting a cocktail party for Olivia de Havilland. Rosemary could not have cared less. Marriage to Ferrer, she told a magazine a few weeks later, is “the most stimulating thing in the world.”
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The world it seemed was her oyster. Whereas her character, Terry, in the opening scenes to
The Stars Are Singing
, had brushed off an aspiring suitor with the words “I’d rather have my picture on the cover of
Downbeat
than marry you and have a house full of kids,” Rosemary was about to discover that, in the real world, both were possible—at a price.

R
osemary’s move to the West Coast had brought both a change of scene and a change of style to her recording work. Her first session in Los Angeles since the Pastor days teamed her with trumpet legend Harry James in the Radio Recorders Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard on May 23, 1952. With it, Rosemary clocked up a number of “firsts.” It was her first solo Columbia session outside New York, her first “album” session, and the first time that her voice would be heard on a 33-rpm microgroove long-playing (LP) record. LPs were a fast-growing phenomenon in the early 1950s. Columbia had pioneered a recording revolution by introducing them in 1948. For the next two years, Columbia and its major rival, RCA, engaged in a “War of the Speeds,” RCA offering a competing 7’’ microgroove disc that played at 45 rpm.
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Both of the recording giants had assumed that the standard shellac 78-rpm single was an immovable object and that their 33-and 45-rpm offerings were both vying for one alternative spot alongside the 78. When it quickly became apparent that both of the new formats offered unbreakable and better sounding vinyl discs, it was the crackly 78 that was consigned to oblivion. The first LPs were 10’’ in diameter, the same as for the 78 so that record dealers could use the existing browsers in their stores. There were some 12’’ LPs, but initially, these were limited to classical music releases. The early 10’’ LPs held eight titles, four per side, but developments in groove technology soon extended this capacity to ten. By the mid-’50s, the disappearance of the 78—and with it the 10’’ browser—removed any remaining barrier to the 12’’ LP becoming the industry norm.

LPs also brought a new musical concept with them, that of the “album.” The notion of an album of songs was not new and had first appeared just
after World War II. Still working only with 78-rpm, two-sided discs, record companies had started to offer a spiral-bound “album” of four discs, thus offering an eight-title set. The first albums were basic, to say the least, with plain covers and no obvious linking theme between the songs they contained. Soon, however, singers such as Perry Como took the concept a step further, recording eight titles that were similar in style and content for release in a purpose-made album/booklet.
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When the LP finally displaced the 78s-in-a-book, the term “album” nevertheless stuck, becoming in due course the “concept album,” named to describe a collection of songs linked by a common attribute or theme.

Rosemary’s California sessions with Harry James produced an 8-track 10’’ LP that genuinely fell within the definition of a concept album. Mitch Miller was behind the project and chose as the theme, songs that had won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. The album included the first winner, “The Continental” from 1934, and ran through to the 1951 winner, “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening.” Recorded over two sessions in May, the album offered Rosemary her first real opportunity to record an extended offering of the types of songs that were close to her heart. Harry James was a fading star but the arrangements for the album gave him the opportunity to play some trademark trumpet solos that were a model for sympathetic pairing of instrument and voice. Rosemary sang the songs in an uncomplicated, almost conversational style, and while none of the renditions overtook the original Oscar-winning performances, the result was an album that further enhanced Clooney’s standing as a mainstream vocalist. A single from the album, “You’ll Never Know” briefly figured in the
Billboard
Disc Jockey chart while the album itself reached #3 in the magazine’s fledgling album charts.

Further sessions during 1952 gave Rosemary more opportunities to diversify her recorded output. In June, she teamed up with country singer Gene Autry for two Christmas singles. Autry had developed a particular association with holiday songs through his recordings of “Frosty the Snowman” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” The latter, a chart-topper at Christmas 1949, was based on a 1939 poem by Robert L. May. May’s brother-in-law, Johnny Marks had set the poem to music and sought to repeat the trick with another historic poem, “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” which Autry and Rosemary used as the “A” side of their 1952 single. While not repeating the success of “Rudolph,” the Autry-Clooney Christmas collaboration delivered another Top Ten hit. Rosemary followed up with another duet partner with links to the Christmas market. Jimmy Boyd was a 13-year-old boy with his heart set on a country music career when Mitch Miller rocketed him to the top of the 1952 Christmas charts
with “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” Boyd’s country origins shone through in the two duet titles he recorded with Rosemary in January 1953, although neither “Dennis the Menace” or “Little Josey” repeated his success in the charts.

In between the Autry and Boyd sessions, Mitch Miller had experimented with Rosemary in a more overt country setting. In September 1952, he put her on a plane to Nashville, Tennessee, and paired her with the emergent country-crooner, George Morgan. Morgan was one of the hottest country names at the time, having taken over from Eddy Arnold at the Grand Ole Opry in 1948 and then scoring a string of country hits. Although the Morgan-Clooney duets flopped commercially, the session was, artistically at least, an eye-opener for Rosemary. When she turned up at the Castle Studios at Nashville’s Tulane Hotel—the first purpose-built recording studio in the country music capital—she found the band still working out the basic arrangements for the four songs she was due to record. Only one of the five members of the band could read music. It was a world away from the high-production style that she had grown accustomed to in New York. Rosemary’s voice sat easily with country music and blended well with Morgan’s. The session, however, was undermined by the weakness of the four chosen songs. Two were never released, and the single that emerged, “Withered Roses,” was neither crossover nor country. Released on Columbia’s Country & Western series, it fell quietly between the two stools.

Rosemary’s sessions with Dietrich, Autry, Boyd, and Morgan meant that she was developing a reputation as an accomplished duet singer, hardly surprising given the experience of her formative years alongside her sister, Betty. Rosemary’s ease with matching her voice to that of another singer set her apart from many singers who found the setting too stifling. In Rosemary’s case, however, a duet offered the opportunity to relax and take a few more risks with her vocals than was often the case in her solo offerings—never more so than in her association with her most famous duet partner that began in the summer of 1952. The recording of the radio show with Bing Crosby that had caused her to become all tongue-tied had taken place on May 26 for broadcast on June 11, 1952. The immediate rapport between Crosby and Clooney was apparent from the light-hearted banter between them before Rosemary’s rendition of “Tenderly.” Crosby’s musical director, John Scott Trotter, offered a characteristically unobtrusive backing to Rosemary’s note-perfect vocal before she joined forces with the host on “Zing a Little Zong,” a song from Crosby’s most recent picture for Paramount. Rosemary discovered that she and Crosby sang in the same key, a major plus factor when it came to structuring duets. There was more to
their partnership, however, than a mere matching of vocal ranges. “I’ve recorded with almost every singer in the business,” Rosemary said in 1954, “but I never get the feeling that I have when I sing with Bing. It’s a strange sort of communion. With other singers, you wonder how they’re going to phrase the next line, have to watch their faces for some expression that will let you know. With Bing, I stand across from him in front of the mike and I don’t even have to look at the music. I know how he’ll handle the next bit of the lyric and I sail right in with him. I don’t know how I know. I just know.”
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Rosemary’s sentiments were clearly reciprocated. Over the course of the next two radio seasons, 1952–53 and 1953–54, she made 19 guest appearances on Crosby’s General Electric radio show.

Guest spots with Crosby were one thing, but 1953 came and went without Rosemary managing to add to the run of chart successes she had enjoyed in the preceding two years. Mitch Miller and the Columbia team tried just about everything to restart the hit stream with no success. There were ballads, children’s songs, Christmas songs, four more duets with Dietrich, and harpsichords and French horns, but nothing scored. Miller cut a frustrated figure, spending most of his time in New York while his star songstress was 3,000 miles away. Two years on, he was in no doubt about the reason for Rosemary’s drought. “You seen her films?” he told one interviewer. “They stink. Not a hit song in any of them. They don’t know what to do with her out there.” It wasn’t just the material that angered him. “You know why there are no hit songs from her pictures? The disc jockeys cooled on her. When she was working back here, she was always in the studio of some D.J. or other, giving an interview or helping him plug. They knew what she was doing and where she was, so they mentioned her name and spun her discs. Next thing they know, she’s in Vegas and she’s got a Hollywood contract. Next thing you know, she’s married this José Ferrer and suddenly she’s with books. She’s got culture and she’s got him.”
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