Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (13 page)

There was just time between Rosemary’s Sands’ debut and an upcoming tour of Great Britain for her to fit in three more recordings sessions for Columbia. They were her first since she had recorded an appropriately titled “Where Will the Dimple Be?” three weeks before the birth of her son. For two back-to-back sessions on June 13/14, 1955, Rosemary traveled to New York. It had been 18 months since she had last recorded in Columbia’s
studio on 30th Street, a period characterized by a growing estrangement from Mitch Miller. In January 1955, Miller had laid bare his frustration at Rosemary’s Hollywood lifestyle in an interview for the
Saturday Evening Post
. It had done little to foster relations between them and made an enemy of Joe Ferrer. The two dates in June would be the last time that Miller would personally lead the orchestra on a Clooney session. The two primary numbers that Miller lined up for Rosemary bore all his usual trademarks. It was hard to believe that phony-accented novelty material could plummet any lower than “Botch-a-Me,” but “Sailor Boys Have Talk to Me in English” reached a new depth. Rosemary’s performance was spirited and bright, but the material was trite beyond belief.
Billboard
surprisingly, found it “a charming novelty” but any hint of chart success was restricted to an appearance in the Australian charts at #21. The “B” side, a song called “Go on By” by composer of “This Ole House,” Stuart Hamblen, actually achieved #10 when flipped in Australia, but not even the reappearance of the harpsichord could bring American or British success.

Rosemary attributed the decline in her relationship with Miller to his loss of control over her life. With her home now in California and the distractions of a growing family, Columbia’s A&R chief could no longer snap his fingers and demand that she be in the studio at 9:00
A.M
. the next day. In truth, Miller’s time as the most successful record producer in the business had already passed. He loathed rock’n’roll almost more than he loathed Joe Ferrer, but there was no question that the arrival of Elvis soon made Mitch Miller’s presentations sound like products of a bygone age. Mitch had turned down the opportunity to buy out Presley from Sun Records and similarly rejected Buddy Holly, judgments suggesting that his ability to anticipate the record buyers’ next fad had begun to wane. He had one more Guy Mitchell 1956 best seller in him, a 1956 hit with “Singing the Blues,” but thereafter, Miller was forced to reinvent himself as the leader of a cozy choral group. “Sing-along with Mitch Miller and his Gang” eventually came to define Miller’s popular legacy to such an extent that it was his sing-alongs rather than his groundbreaking productions that dominated his obituaries when he died in 2010.

Rosemary might have found that the gateway into the American charts was closing, but another was opening wide in England. “This Ole House” and “Mambo Italiano” had both topped the British charts in 1954, while “Where Will the Dimple Be?” hit #6 in January 1955. With husband Joe due in England in the summer to film
Cockleshell Heroes
, it made both domestic and business sense to put together a UK tour. The tour opened in Glasgow, Scotland, on July 4, 1955. The Glasgow Empire theater had a fearsome reputation on the British music hall circuit as the graveyard of
English comedians, although American visitors generally received a more sympathetic hearing. The show marked Rosemary’s debut on a British stage and was well received by the British music press. Key to endearing herself to the Scots was an ability to make fun of herself. “When I started singing, everyone told me to watch my diction,” she told them. “Well, I worked hard to attain the target I had set myself and then my first record came along and it had some really classic pronunciation!”
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With that, she launched into the song that the audience had been screaming for—“Come On-a My House.” The Glasgow audience was nothing if not vociferous, and Rosemary was quick to respond to their requests. It was “Botch-a-Me” and “Mambo Italiano” that they wanted, not “Tenderly.”

A week later, she took to the stage of the London Palladium, arguably the most famous theater in the world and described later by Bing Crosby as the “Mecca for all strolling players.”
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As with Glasgow and all music hall theaters, the Palladium followed the “two shows a night” routine that had characterized variety in England since before the war. Shows commenced at 6:15 and 8:45
P.M
., the first house aimed at the working man, who often arrived with an empty lunchbox under his arm, before playing to a more refined audience in the second house. Television had not yet killed variety in Britain, and Rosemary topped a bill that included Authors & Swinson (“masters of mime”), the Theda Sisters (“aerialists”), and comedian Leslie Randall (“A Fool among Friends”). Tickets prices ranged from half-a-crown to 14 shillings and sixpence (50 cents to $3.00).
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With Buddy Cole at her side, Rosemary was a smash. A xenophobic
New Musical Express
contrasted Rosemary’s “tender footsteps” with the recent “invasion of America’s virile beef-cake song-punchers,” adding that her nurturing of the audience was “an object lesson in the art of developing polite applause into a deafening crescendo.” It was a comment that could equally apply to a 1990s Clooney performance. A somewhat sour London
Times
reviewer said that Rosemary was run close by “the Scandinavian Theda Sisters who swing on the trapeze with a perilous and agile gracefulness,” adding that the reviewer’s own “pangs of disappointment [at Rosemary’s performance] were certainly not shared by the warm-hearted audience.”
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In England, a 10’’ LP
Rosemary Clooney at the London Palladium
appeared, featuring live recordings from the show. (Back home, Columbia substituted unissued studio versions of songs such as “Ebb Tide” and “From This Moment On,” with false applause dubbed in. The album came out as simply
Rosemary Clooney—On Stage
.)

Rosemary said that the births of her children were the happiest days of her life. Motherhood sat comfortably with her, and while the staff at 1019 expanded to include a nanny and a governess, the children became an
integral part of her daily routine. In 1954, the household expanded when Rosemary’s nine-year-old half-sister, Gail, arrived to live with them. After the failure of her second marriage, Rosemary’s mother had announced that she planned to go on the road with Rosemary’s sister Betty. She intended to put Gail into boarding school. It was Joe who suggested that Gail come and live with them. For Rosemary, it was déjà vu, a reenactment almost of the abandonment that she had suffered firsthand throughout her childhood. Worse was to follow. When Betty married bandleader Pupi Campo, her mother became persona non grata for the newlyweds. Mama doesn’t have any place to go, Rosemary said to Joe, realizing almost as the words left her mouth that the statement was untrue. Frances Clooney was still in her 40s and had a family of her own back in Maysville. But Ferrer’s solution was that of a man accustomed to having a large family around him. She can live with us, he said.

Rosemary had been the victim of deceit for most of her life, but with the arrival of her mother, she began to fall victim to self-deception. She later said that she had welcomed her mother into her home for a whole set of wrong reasons to do with trying to repair the wounds from her early life. There was self-deception too in her marriage. She loved Ferrer and was fascinated by the rich and varied seams that flowed through his life, but the enchantment came at a price. During their honeymoon in England, Rosemary had overheard Joe talking to a male friend and recounting the details of a recent sexual conquest. When she confronted him about it, there was neither denial nor any promise of reform. Ferrer had simply said that he would arrange for Rosemary to go home. It left Rosemary feeling that if the marriage ended there, almost before it had begun, the fault would be hers. She decided to stay and turn a blind eye, convincing herself that she could change Ferrer and denying the reality that the seeds of destruction in the marriage were already sown. The philandering continued and soon became even less concealed. “Fidelity didn’t mean anything to him,” she said shortly before Ferrer’s death in 1992. “It wasn’t important in his life, but it was so important to me.”
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Rosemary, said brother Nick, “was simply shocked to find out how Joe Ferrer expected it to be. She seemed convinced that she could change that.”
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Eventually, Rosemary was forced to acknowledge that she had never felt able to be herself in the marriage. “I don’t know what Joe expected of me,” she told Dinah Shore in 1989, “but I thought he expected something other than what I was, so I was never really myself with him.”
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Nevertheless, the early years of Rosemary’s marriage to Ferrer were far from unhappy. Both loved Beverly Hills and the Hollywood lifestyle—parties, nightclubs, exclusive restaurants—although for Rosemary, it was the opportunity to just be with her man that was the main thing. The Ferrers were
regulars at dinner parties hosted by the Gershwins (Ira and Lee), Cole Porter, and Gary and Rocky Cooper. Bogart and Bacall became good friends, as did Bob and Dolores Hope, and George Burns and Gracie Allen. Rosemary and Joe’s own parties were Monday night affairs, picked by Joe as the quietest night of the week, but as a result, one on which nobody could have a reason for saying no. Nat and Maria Cole were regular visitors, Rosemary recalling how Nat would always smoke between courses and then “tippy-toe down to the piano and just play.”
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Composer Ian Bernard recalled that the North Roxbury house seemed like a “madhouse” much of the time, with the constant parties, people coming and going, performing and singing and the whole thing lorded over by Ferrer. “He ruled the roost,” said Bernard.
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In January 1956, Rosemary signed with NBC for a 39-show season of half-hour TV shows. Because he wanted the shows to emphasize Rosemary’s singing, Joe Shribman arranged for them to be filmed using 35mm premium film stock. The technique allowed Rosemary to prerecord her vocals as she would on a Hollywood film set and then lip-sync to them during the filming. It meant that the quality of the sound recordings for the series was comparable to studio-made records.
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Rosemary’s first choice for musical director on the series had been Les Brown, but MCA, who had the contract to produce the shows for NBC, had Nelson Riddle under contract. Riddle had come to national prominence earlier in the 1950s at Capitol Records, and his work with Frank Sinatra and Nat “King” Cole meant that many in the music business regarded him as the music-for-voice arranger par excellence.

The news of Rosemary’s television series came nine days after she had announced her second pregnancy. What had originally been planned as a leisurely shooting program now became a race against time. It was one thing for a sitcom star to build a pregnancy into the script, but quite another to have a singer crooning a tender ballad “looking,” said one reviewer, “like an ad for maternity duds.”
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As the series progressed, the sets increasingly featured Rosemary behind a large vase of flowers, or standing behind a high fence or stable door. Even so, by the time stars such as Tennessee Ernie Ford and Guy Mitchell arrived to film their guest spots, Rosemary was beginning to cut a matronly figure. Dik Darley and the production team managed to get around 20 of the 39 shows in the can before Rosemary’s pregnancy progressed to the point where it could be concealed no longer. The remaining shows were filmed during October and November 1956, after the birth of daughter, Maria.

The shows opened with a silhouette of Rosemary singing a snatch of “Tenderly,” which was adopted as the show’s theme. The camera then cut to the Hi-Lo’s, the four-man close-harmony group who were regulars on the
series. Each week, one headline guest was also featured. The list included other singers (Julie London, Buddy Greco), actors (Tony Curtis, Charles Coburn), or singer-songwriters such as Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer. The shows were basic, low-budget affairs (although the primary sponsor was Foremost Dairies, then the third largest dairy company in the world) with simple sets and minimalist scripts. The shows were syndicated to various regional stations across the country with no standard running order. Some of the shows that Rosemary had recorded after the birth of her daughter actually went out ahead of ones in which she was pregnant.

Most stations used one particular show as the opener for the series, however. In it, Rosemary joined husband Joe in a vaudeville-style song-and-dance partnership built around Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen’s “Love and Marriage.” Joe, wearing a hairpiece beneath a trilby hat, was in his element, delivering what one reviewer called his “pleasant interruption.”
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Generally, the reviews of the show were good. Praise came for Rosemary’s resistance to the temptation to turn herself into a comedienne or a dancer, and doing just what she did best—sing. Occasionally, the show ventured into more ambitious territory, as when Boris Karloff guested, delivering a caricature of his famous scary movie roles. In a spoof of
Little Red Riding Hood
, Rosemary sang “I Can’t Escape from You” before joining the actor in a light-hearted duet. The show featured prominently in
Billboard’s
“TV Program & Talent Awards” for the 1956–57 season, winning the “Best Half Hour Music Show” award in the Syndicated Film category, while Rosemary also topped the poll for “Best Musical Show Performer.”
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The shows made no attempt to compete with the broader variety format that the top music shows on TV offered, most notably those fronted by Perry Como and Dinah Shore. Essentially, Rosemary’s half-hour each week was all about music, and there was no question that what stood out most was the quality of her vocals, framed by the immaculate work of Nelson Riddle. “He was the first arranger who really looked at the words to a song and asked what they meant to me,” Rosemary said to Terry Gross, host of NPR’s
Fresh Air
in 1997. “He understood my feelings about what I was trying to say, or sing and he would advance that.”
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While Rosemary’s “trademark” songs such as “Come On-a My House” and “Mambo Italiano” had to be accommodated in the series, the shows were best remembered for her presentation of many classic standards. “Moonlight in Vermont” was one of several featured songs that Rosemary never recorded commercially, her TV version displaying a wonderful reading built on a delightfully sympathetic Riddle arrangement. Rosemary did record most of the songs used on the shows at some time, although many had to wait until her jazz years with Concord, which would include an album dedicated to Riddle.