Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (12 page)

The honeymoon lasted almost 10 weeks as the couple took in Great Britain, Ireland, France, and Spain during their time in Europe. It was Rosemary’s inaugural trip, but Ferrer had first traveled to England almost 20 years earlier. That, together with his film work in Paris, meant that he was a more than able tour guide. The Ferrers spent several weeks at Claridges, one of London’s top hotels. British actor John Mills loaned them a car, John Huston hosted them in Ireland, although inevitably there were some work commitments to fit in. Ferrer’s movies meant that he was a well-known face in Britain, and Rosemary’s record of “Half as Much” had reached #3 in the emergent British pop charts during 1952. As a country, England had been slow to recover from the ravages of World War II and still lived in a black and white world. Audiences were fascinated by the colorful glamour of American show business. Performers such as Judy Garland, Mickey
Rooney, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and Danny Kaye had all been recent visitors, topping the bill at the London Palladium, which was one of the first sights that Rosemary was keen to see. She and Ferrer watched the 1952 Palladium pantomime, a Christmas tradition in England where major stars played roles in children’s fairy stories. They saw comedians Frankie Howerd and Richard Hearne play in
Dick Whittington
before heading in the evening to the Victoria Palace, home of the English Marx Brothers, The Crazy Gang. Rosemary was, she said, “sick with laughter.”
²²

Rosemary’s work commitments included live appearances on both radio and television. Her British radio debut was in bandleader Cyril Stapleton’s
Show Band Show
, where she and Ferrer performed their “Man” and “Woman” duets, repeating the performance on television on
Starlight
on January 13, 1954. Both shows were live and commercial free, the BBC still holding a monopoly on all broadcasting in Britain. Rosemary was struck by the amount of time available for rehearsal. Preparations for
Starlight
began at 1:00
P.M
., more than eight hours before the 20-minute live broadcast. While she found the facilities lagging behind what she would expect in an American TV studio, the generous rehearsal time gave Rosemary the opportunity to relax, much more than she was used to before an appearance on American television. In February, Rosemary made her first British gramophone recording, although the venue for the session, Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, was a cavernous, town hall-like building rather than a purpose-built studio. Perhaps feeling the need to fill out the space, British arranger and conductor, Wally Stott gathered the largest orchestra that Rosemary had ever worked with, the string section alone numbering in excess of 50. Rosemary recorded two titles that day, “While We’re Young” and “Love Is a Beautiful Stranger” although both were rejected for technical reasons. Back in California, she rerecorded identical versions, using backing tracks laid down by Stott in Conway Hall.

The Ferrers were back in New York in early March 1954 in time for Rosemary to collect the
Look
magazine award for most promising newcomer before flying back to California. Rosemary immediately renewed her radio partnership with Crosby, including a special edition of his General Electric Show to (mistakenly) mark his 50th birthday on May 2.
²³
The pairing reprised the Ferrer/Clooney “Man” and “Woman” duets, with Rosemary adding a solo on “You Make Me Feel So Young.” Rosemary had recorded the song in New York in December and later in 1954, it was part of Rosemary’s second 10’’ LP concept album. This time, the theme was songs about youth and the eight titles also included its title track, “While We’re Young” (using the London backings), “Younger Than Springtime,” and covers of two recent
Billboard
hits, “Young at Heart” and “Too Young.” “Few singers put as
much feeling and warmth into a ballad as Rosemary Clooney,”
Billboard
said in its review,
²⁴
although the album would have benefited from one or two more titles taken at a higher tempo to give a change of pace.

Rosemary had put the finishing touches to the album at two May 1954 sessions in Los Angeles with the Paul Weston Orchestra before moving on to other business. One curiosity was a reprise of “Grieving for You,” the song that had announced her presence as a solo vocalist five years before. Rosemary’s 1954 version remained unreleased until 1960 when it appeared on a compilation album. A comparison between the 1949 and 1954 versions shows just how much ground the young singer had covered in the five years. Although Rosemary’s perfections of pitch and diction shone through in both recordings, the 1954 rendition revealed a singer now able to fully exploit the emotions behind the love-lost lyric. Weston’s orchestration used a saxophone quartet, and the interplay between Rosemary’s vocal and the four saxes anticipates the partnership she would build with Scott Hamilton on her Concord albums in the ’80s. Although Rosemary takes no liberties with the melody and offers no improvisation, Rosemary’s second “Grieving for You” makes justifiable claim to be her first “jazz” vocal.

Concept albums and emergent jazz vocalizing were fine, but Mitch Miller was still on a mission to get Rosemary back into the hit parade. He achieved his goal twice over with two titles that Rosemary recorded the day after her second “Grieving for You” session. Both the hit singles came with new songs. “Hey There” was the primary ballad from the musical
The Pajama Game
, which opened on Broadway on May 13, 1954. Miller knew that the song would be a hit for someone and had already tried it out on Johnnie Ray before insisting that Rosemary record it. Miller flew into California for the sessions, accompanied by harpsichord-man Stan Freeman. Paul Weston retained the baton, but the strings and syrupy saxes gave way to two keyboards, manned by Freeman and Edwin LeMar (Buddy) Cole, who would become Rosemary’s closest musical confidant until his death in 1964. Rosemary’s recording of “Hey There,” delivered with supreme tenderness in her vocal, was a testament of the talent of Mitch Miller. Behind her voice, Miller used both Freeman and Cole on harpsichords but played pianissimo, in contrast to the raucous way in which Miller had previously had Freeman play. Miller’s penchant for over-dubbing also enabled him to replicate the original Broadway presentation of the song, placing Rosemary in conversation with her inner self, playing out the story behind the lyric to vivid effect. The disc hit top spot in the
Billboard
chart in August 1954, staying there for six weeks and spending six months in the charts. Other than “Come On-a My House,” no other song attached itself to Rosemary with greater endurance.

For the “B” side, Miller had come across a new country song. Stuart Hamblen, one of radio’s first singing cowboys and sometime songwriter, had been on a hunting trip and come across a deserted cabin. Inside lay the body of its last resident. Hamblen wrote “This Ole House” as a serious epitaph to the dead man’s last days but the song quickly took on a novelty feel, abetted by the honky-tonk piano and harpsichord partnership that Miller orchestrated for Freeman and Cole. Add the ultra-deep voice of Thurl Ravenscroft—the voice behind Tony the Tiger, the new marketing emblem of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes—into the chorus and the result was a sparkling novelty record that surprised everyone by gaining just as many plays as “Hey There.” Eventually, Columbia was forced to split market the two songs and “This Ole House” became the song that displaced “Hey There” at the top of the charts, registering a three-week stay of its own on the summit.

More duets with Ferrer and Dietrich followed during the summer of 1954, plus a nostalgic reunion with sister Betty for an authentic version of the “Sisters” number from
White Christmas
. The duet with Betty prefaced a further set of recordings of songs from the film that became Rosemary’s third purpose-made album, released in the autumn of 1954 to tie in with the movie. Ordinarily, a big budget movie of the scale of
White Christmas
would sire a soundtrack album, but with Crosby and Kaye contracted to Decca, Clooney at Columbia, and Vera-Ellen providing lip-syncs only, there was no prospect of the soundtrack recordings being released. Peggy Lee and Trudy Stevens joined Crosby and Kaye on an album that did its best to claim “official” status as the record of the film, while Rosemary’s eight-song offering took a similar title but bore none of the Paramount images. Rosemary may have felt ill at ease singing solo versions of songs that she had come nowhere near in the picture—Kaye and Vera-Ellen’s “The Best Things Happen While You’re Dancing” being the prime example—although her solo rendition of her duet with Crosby (“Count Your Blessings”) made the album worthwhile.

Miller also wanted Rosemary to record a non-
White Christmas
song on the final session for the album, one that he had in mind for another assault on the charts. It required her to step out of the snow and schmaltz of the movie and dust off the phony Italian accent once more. Mitch Miller had commissioned Bob Merrill—the man behind several of Guy Mitchell’s hits—to write a song that capitalized on the mambo craze that enveloped New York in 1954. “Mambo Italiano” was no closer to genuine mambo than
White Christmas
’s fake icicles were to real snow, but in Miller’s hands, it mattered not. It was a tribute to Rosemary’s versatility that in the course of a single afternoon she could deliver the tenderness of “Count Your Blessings,” commit larceny on “The Best Things Happen While You’re Dancing,”
and then pull off another of Miller’s novelty tunes to great effect. “Mambo Italiano” became yet another Top Ten hit for Rosemary, entering the
Billboard
charts in November 1954.

As Christmas 1954 approached, Rosemary Clooney had become one of the biggest stars in American show business. She had successfully mastered the four mediums of television, radio, films, and records. The obvious pun was that everything in the garden of 1019 Roxbury Drive was rosy. Indeed, things were more than rosy; they were positively blooming, none more so than Rosemary herself. When she married Ferrer, Rosemary had been quite public in her pronouncements about wanting a family. “I want six children,” she said in September 1953, “three more than Mother and three less than Grandma.”
²⁵
The Ferrers wasted little time in making her wish come true. By the time
White Christmas
hit the nation’s movie screens, Rosemary was pregnant. Five babies would arrive over the next five years. Her life—and her career—would never be the same again.

M
iguel José Ferrer was born in St. John’s Hospital, Santa Monica, on February 7, 1955. Daughter Maria arrived in August 1956; another son, Gabriel came a year later, followed by daughter Monsita in October 1958, and finally a third son, Rafael, in March 1960. All of the children were given names for members of Joe’s Puerto Rican family. A sixth pregnancy later in 1960 ended in an early miscarriage. One casualty of Rosemary’s near-permanent pregnancies was her film career. “They don’t write that many pregnant parts,” Rosemary said later.
¹
After
White Christmas
, Rosemary appeared in only one more film, a walk-on role in husband Joe’s
Deep in My Heart
, a biopic of composer, Sigmund Romberg. There were other opportunities. For a time, Rosemary coveted one of the roles in
On the Waterfront
, and in 1955, she tested for the role of Sergeant Sarah Brown in the film version of
Guys and Dolls
. The role required an actress who could plausibly enact the transition from Salvation Army moralist to the love interest for the character of Sky Masterson, eventually played in the film by Marlon Brando. Frank Loesser, who composed the music for the show turned Rosemary down. “He said that I might look like a virgin, but I didn’t sound like one,” she said later.
²
Joe Ferrer was keen for Rosemary to do a Broadway show with him and there would be occasional TV movie roles in years to come, but despite her innate talent as an actress, Rosemary’s heart was never in a nonmusical career. When asked in 1999 whether she had unfulfilled ambitions as an actress, she was unequivocal. “No,” she said. “Acting’s tough. I take my work under my hat. I can sing anywhere. All I have to depend on is a musician, myself and the words.”
³

After the birth of Miguel, Rosemary was quickly back to work. Radio was losing ground to television with every week that passed, but early in 1953, she had commenced a twice-weekly, 15-minute radio show for NBC. The shows resumed on February 22, 1955, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In March, she appeared on
The Woolworth Hour
for CBS, a music and variety show with a guest list that included the George Shearing Quintet, Ann Miller, and Billy Daniels. On TV, she and Joe were the featured guests on Ed Murrow’s
Person to Person
show on March 11, and at the end of the month, Rosemary sang the Oscar-nominated “The Man That Got Away” at the 27th Annual Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood. In April, she was the mystery guest on
What’s My Line?
. Rosemary’s ruse for concealing her identity from the blindfolded panel was to adopt a cut-glass English accent. The charade lasted for only two questions. The first remark that provoked a laugh from Rosemary revealed the deep-throated guffaw that was so familiar to all who knew her.

Rosemary’s busy post-childbirth activity meant that she needed to get back to her usual slim-line self in rapid time. A booking at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, at the personal invitation of its co-owner, Frank Sinatra, provided an added impetus. Working with a masseuse “with hands of iron”
⁴
and an ex-boxer personal trainer, Rosemary found a routine that worked so well that she repeated it after each pregnancy. That she was able to bear five children and maintain her original figure was nothing short of remarkable, especially considering her formidable appetite for food.
Time
magazine in its cover feature of February 1953 had said, “One recent evening she ate, in order of their appearance, an antipasto salad, a heavy Mozzarella cheese appetizer, a heaping plate of lasagna, a chocolate éclair, a dish of sherbet, an after-dinner drink of rum, brandy, chocolate and crème de cacao. Still feeling a little hungry, she then ordered another portion of Mozzarella.”
⁵
Bing Crosby was a regular teaser of Rosemary’s eating habits, nicknaming her the “Buffet Bandit of Bourbon County.” Paramount was so concerned about her food addiction that they assigned a bodyguard to follow her around the sets and monitor her eating. “It’s like being haunted,” she said. “He follows me everywhere I go, watches me like a hawk when I eat.”
⁶
But for now at least, Rosemary’s coping strategy worked. She would retain her svelte appearance well into her 40s.