Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (11 page)

Miller’s tirade ended on a more positive note with the expectation that Rosemary’s role in
White Christmas—
“that’s gotta be good”—would enable her to reverse the tide. Rosemary’s participation in the long-awaited movie had been written into the contract she had signed with Paramount in 1951, with Crosby’s approval (“he had the final say,” Rosemary said later).
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In theory, the last word on the casting lay with producer Robert Emmett Dolan, who conducted a series of interviews for the roles. Crosby’s—during a lunch break while he was filming at Paramount in 1951—was a formality. Fred Astaire, Crosby’s original song-and-dance partner from
Holiday Inn
, was again the preferred choice for the second male lead. By the time shooting grew near, however, Astaire surprisingly declared himself unavailable.
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Donald O’Connor, fresh from his knockabout success in
Singin’ in the Rain
, was his
replacement until a bug, caught from the mule that was his co-star in
Francis the Talking Mule
, ruled him out too. Dolan turned to Danny Kaye as his third choice. Kaye was Hollywood’s “Mr. Versatile,” a fair singer and dancer, but also a fast-talking, rubber-faced comedian. His presence would bring an element of slapstick to the film that Rosemary, in particular, came to enjoy.

The chopping and changing in the male support role sat uncomfortably with a nervous Irving Berlin, who was almost ever-present on the set during the filming. Berlin had tossed in his own ideas about the casting, touting Ginger Rogers and Debbie Reynolds for the female leads. Dolan finally settled on Rosemary and Vera-Ellen as the junior of the two Haynes sisters (she was actually seven years older than Rosemary). Vera-Ellen was regarded as one of Hollywood’s most versatile dancers, but had one weakness for the part. She could not sing. Trudy Stevens, wife of bandleader Dick Stabile (who also had a minor part in the film), dubbed Vera-Ellen’s vocals, including the standout “Sisters” duet.
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Rosemary enjoyed her partnership with Vera-Ellen. “She was the opposite of me,” she said later. “Disciplined and very patient with me. If they could have dubbed my dancing, we’d have had a perfect picture.”
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The script for the film retained the concept of the holiday season inn from the 1942 original but moved its ownership away from Crosby’s male lead character to the retired General Waverly, played by Dean Jagger, and focused it just on the Christmas holidays. Crosby and Kaye were ex-army buddies, Bob Wallace and Phil Davis, who had served under the general. Working as a postwar song and dance act, they meet up with the Haynes Sisters at a nightclub in Florida. When Davis persuades Wallace to follow the girls for a Christmas booking in New England, they discover the general running a struggling inn, bereft of seasonal snow and Christmas guests. A hastily relocated Broadway show, an army reunion, and the magical appearance of snow combined to create a feel-good Christmas movie second only to
It’s a Wonderful Life
as a seasonal perennial. Despite a script that some reviewers saw as unimaginative, Paramount pulled out all the stops to guarantee the success of the movie—“short of casting John Wayne to play Santa Claus and the Marx Brothers to play the reindeer,”
Life
said, “nothing else could have been done.”
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The production budget of $4 million offered the luxury of a six-week pre-shooting rehearsal and enabled Paramount to film the movie in its new high definition VistaVision, a technological development that more than doubled the usual visual intensity of the colors.

For Rosemary, the three months working on
White Christmas
was a period of seventh heaven. “I loved it. I just loved it,” she said when she added a commentary to the DVD release on the movie in 2000. Irving Berlin was, she said, “just the perfect songwriter.” His score offered her a major
duet with Crosby as well as a sultry moment of her own with “Love, You Didn’t Do Right by Me,” arguably the best song in the picture; the plot required Rosemary to deliver the song as a message of reproach to Crosby’s Bob Wallace character, who she wrongly thought was trying to use the old general’s predicament as an “angle” to make a fast buck. Her soundtrack vocal, delivered in a nightclub setting, held just the right amount of “edge” in her voice to ensure that Berlin’s message of “you done me wrong” came through to maximum effect, something she was unable to recapture when she entered the recording studio for her own album of songs from the picture. Designer Edith Head had clad Rosemary in a shimmering black gown that perfectly captured the mood for the nightclub scene, a contrast to the flowing dresses and feathered fans that Head used elsewhere in the movie to cover up Rosemary’s terpsichorean limitations.

Above all, though, it was the experience of working over a prolonged period with Crosby that stood out. Their radio collaborations in the 12 months leading up to the film had cemented their friendship, and when Crosby invited her to join him and his close friends Phil Harris and Don Cherry at his Pro-Am golf clambake in January 1953, it was a sign that she was already part of his inner circle. Others could only watch and marvel at her ability to break through the ice curtain. Danny Kaye, said Rosemary, so wanted to be close to Bing and spent most of his time on the set trying to make him laugh. When he did, in a take of the Wallace and Davis send up of the “Sisters” number, the effect was such that director Michael Curtiz used the outtake in the final cut. That moment, however, was the exception. Kaye’s disappointment at his inability to break through was apparent to all. “Bing wasn’t close to a lot of people,” Rosemary recalled. “Danny wanted to be close to Bing—but it wasn’t easy.”
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But Rosemary held a magic ticket. “My fondest memory is being able to deepen and develop my friendship with Bing. That’s what came out of the picture that I was left with for the rest of Bing’s life. It was very important to me,” she said.
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Commercially, the film was a massive success. Making more than $12million, it was Paramount’s biggest grossing film of 1954. Its opening day take at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on October 14, 1954, was $25,000—a one-day record for the theater. The critics’ response was more muted. Bosley Crowther for the
New York Times
said, “the confection is not so tasty as one might suppose. The flavoring is largely in the line-up and not in the output of the cooks. Everyone works hard at the business of singing, dancing and cracking jokes, but stuff they work with is minor. It doesn’t have the old inspiration and spark.”
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Variety
singled out Rosemary’s “Love, You Didn’t Do Right by Me” as the “standout song presentation” adding that “Miss Clooney does quite well by the story portions and scores on her own
song chores.”
¹³
It was faint praise for a difficult role that Rosemary carried off with confidence and considerable aplomb. With Kaye and Ellen’s characters both written as fly-by-nights and Crosby’s imperious presence holding center stage, it was Rosemary’s Betty Haynes who was called upon to provide the emotional highs and lows of the movie. “The seminal moment in her film career,” was brother Nick Clooney’s summation of the importance of the film to his sister.
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With Rosemary’s filming commitment for
White Christmas
coming hard on the heels of her wedding, a honeymoon trip to Europe was postponed until January 1954. Marriage, however, did bring one significant change to Rosemary’s daily routine when Joe Ferrer presented her with a new home. The actor had purchased a large, Mediterranean-style house at 1019 North Roxbury Drive from the actress Ginny Simms. It was a surprise for his new bride—Rosemary had not even seen the house before Ferrer had written Simms a cash check for $150,000. The house—and its history—would remain an indelible part of Rosemary’s life, and be her main home from then until her death. Dubbed “The Street of the Stars,” North Roxbury Drive sat in the heart of Beverly Hills and provided homes to at least two generations of Hollywood aristocracy. Eddie Cantor, Hedy Lamarr, and Jack Haley all lived there, and by the time the newly wed Ferrers arrived, their neighbors included Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Jack Benny, and James Stewart. Subsequent generations included Diane Keaton and Peter Falk. Singer Michael Feinstein recalled the street’s durability long after the tinsel had left other parts of town. “When I first visited Los Angeles before moving here, and took the obligatory movie-stars tour, I was struck by the fact that so many of the celebrities they mentioned were deceased,” he said. “Except, as it turned out, on Roxbury Drive, because such a collection of celebrities still lived there.”
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Feinstein came to know the street well, and in particular the house next door to Rosemary at 1021. Lyricist Ira Gershwin—for whom Feinstein worked before launching his own career—had lived there since the 1930s. And therein lay the story of one of the ghosts who occupied Rosemary’s house next door: 1019 North Roxbury Drive was built in 1928 and first owned by the actor Monte Blue. When Ira Gershwin and his brother George arrived in Hollywood in 1936, the house was available for rent. The two brothers plus Ira’s wife Lee moved in. The house quickly became a meeting place for the Gershwins’ ex-New York friends such as Harold Arlen and Oscar Levant (who eventually took a house farther down the same road) and their new Hollywood brotherhood that included Fred Astaire and Paulette Goddard. During their 11-month residency, the Gershwins wrote most of their film songs in the house that was to become Rosemary’s home. She felt the history throughout her time
there. “You know what I feel an architectural connection with?” she told a journalist in 1999, “‘A Foggy Day.’ I once played a tape of it that I’d done on a television show for Ira and he said he was working in the living room one night, and their piano was in the same place where mine is now, and George came bounding in from a dinner party that he’d left early, dropped his coat and said ‘Ira! It can’t be “a foggy day in London.” It’s gotta be ‘a foggy day in London
town
!’ And now that’s with me every time I sing that song: he thought of it in the middle of a dinner party and didn’t even stay to finish the dinner.”
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Tragically, George Gershwin’s time at 1019 was marked increasingly by severe headaches. He wrote his final song, “Our Love Is Here to Stay” in what became Rosemary’s living room before succumbing to a brain tumor. Ira, unable to face the memories that 1019 contained, bought the house next door when it came on the market shortly after his brother’s death. He lived there until his own death in 1983, although to some, the house at 1019 was forever “the Gershwin house.” When Fred Astaire arrived for Ira’s funeral in 1983, he unconsciously walked straight into what was now Rosemary’s home.

Rosemary maintained that the house contained another ghost whose presence predated the Gershwins. Russ Columbo had come to national prominence in 1931 as America’s first Italian American crooner. His emergence mirrored the solo debut of Bing Crosby and for a time a battle of the baritones developed, with some seeing Columbo as a serious long-term rival to Crosby
¹⁷
. Columbo’s looks—he was far more photogenic than Crosby—made him an obvious target for Hollywood, where he moved after signing a contract with Twentieth Century Pictures in 1933. He found 1019 North Roxbury available for rental and made the house his home. Twelve months later, Columbo met his death in a freak shooting incident involving his friend, photographer Lansing Brown. The accident occurred while Columbo was visiting Brown’s home at 584 N. Lillian Way,
¹⁸
but Rosemary maintained until her death that Columbo had met his end in the den at North Roxbury. The source of the confusion, said Michael Feinstein, was Crosby himself who, despite acting as pallbearer at Columbo’s funeral, had transposed the location of his rival’s death. Whenever he visited Rosemary’s house, Crosby refused to even set foot in the den.
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Ghosts or not, 1019 soon became a happy home for Rosemary. As part of the sale, Joe Ferrer had also taken on Ginny Simms’s butler, who headed a staff of seven servants that the Ferrers employed. Although not of the scale of some Hollywood mansions, the house boasted a swimming pool and tennis court and all the trappings of a movie star’s home. A separate wing provided a home for the servants while the upper floors hosted several
bedrooms, bathrooms, drawing rooms, and “a huge room, windows on three sides, that Joe planned to use as his art studio.”
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The main focal point of the house, though, was the enormous sitting room that overlooked the front of the property. Joe made the den his own although as time went by, the house increasingly came to be Rosemary’s. With her husband spending much of his time in New York, a routine developed whereby he paid the bills on their New York apartment while Rosemary picked up the tabs for North Roxbury. In the mid-’50s, each partner in the marriage was earning enough for the bills to be nothing more than bookkeeping trivia, but in time, the expense of North Roxbury would be one of many challenges to confront Rosemary.

That, however, was for the future. Rosemary spent her first months in her new home living alone, with Ferrer working on four projects in New York. Her filming commitments on
White Christmas
were at the Paramount lot five miles away and she was happy to head home each afternoon. Shooting started and finished early to allow Crosby to get in a few holes of golf before heading to his Mapleton Drive mansion, less than a mile from Rosemary’s. When finally both Rosemary and Joe were free of commitments, the recent-if-not-newlyweds headed to London for their honeymoon. They stopped briefly in New York to allow Ferrer to make his recording debut in two duets with his new wife. Despite limited vocal talent (“He sounds like a bull seal in heat,”
²¹
Mitch Miller said), Ferrer was more than enthusiastic about pairing up on disc. Johnny Desmond, the ex-band singer, had a record out called “Woman,” written by Dick Gleason, who had also written a companion piece called “Man.” It was perfect material for a husband and wife team, and Columbia had the disc out within two weeks of the session on December 10, 1953. Desmond’s version was the bigger hit but the Ferrer/Clooney collaboration notched up a top 20 spot in January 1954.