Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (15 page)

Mid-’50s sales of
Blue Rose
were unspectacular but its importance in the careers of both its protagonists cannot be overstated. For Ellington, it took him back to Columbia and opened the door for
Ellington at Newport ’56
, which became the best-selling album of his career and launched a resurgence
that sustained him until his death in 1974. For Rosemary, it convinced the girl singer from Maysville that she was more than just a chirruping hit-maker. The experience of working with Ellington, she said, “validated me as an American singer. My work would not fade with my generation. I had now moved into a very exclusive group.”
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A
fter the birth of her second child in August 1956, Rosemary’s first priority was to complete the remaining episodes of the TV show that her pregnancy had forced her to shelve. Shooting resumed on October 1, with Rosemary often working a full eight-hour day. “It takes a lot out of you,” she told a local reporter, adding that at the end of the first week, it was dispiriting to realize that “we’ve still got 11 to go.”
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By mid-November however, the rest of the series was safely in the can and Rosemary was free once more to throw herself into other things.

As early as May 1956,
Billboard
had carried a speculative report that Rosemary was on the point of signing a record deal with Capitol Records. Such a move would have cleared the way for a legitimate, on-disc partnership with Nelson Riddle, but even though the breakdown in her relationship with Mitch Miller was an open secret, she continued to record for Columbia until early into 1958. Aside from the TV spinoff album with the Hi-Lo’s though, it was a period lacking in shape and direction. There were no other albums, although Columbia issued another dozen or so singles featuring Rosemary during this period. These included songs from Broadway shows such as
My Fair Lady
and
West Side Story
, and a spirited “Pet Me Poppa” from the film of
Guys and Dolls
that paired her with an emergent Ray Conniff. Rosemary also returned to country vein for “Nobody’s Darlin’ but Mine” and another collaboration with Gene Autry on “You Are My Sunshine.” There was, however, only one single that made any chart impact. That came with a song called “Mangos,” from a November 1956 session, led by former Les Brown arranger Frank Comstock. The strongly Latin-flavored disc reached #10 in the
Billboard
disc jockey chart in April 1957 (#23 in the
best-seller chart) but represented an unwelcome bookend in Rosemary’s recording career. “Mangos” would be the last disc bearing the name of Rosemary Clooney that would appear in an American singles chart. Nevertheless, Columbia briefly had their hopes raised that her hit-making days could be recaptured and rush released a two-sider that harked back to her halcyon days. Neither of the two sides, “Sing, Little Birdie”
²
and a Calypso-style accented “Who Dot Mon, Mom” scored, and the disc effectively brought the curtain down, both on her Columbia career and her days as a hit parade singer.

By the spring of 1957, Rosemary was pregnant again and once more looking at a period of enforced absence from the stage and screen. There was just time before her pregnancy began to show to fit in a guest spot on the
Steve Allen Show
in New York, en route to England to join Ferrer who was filming
I Accuse!
Arriving in England during April, she immediately topped the bill on
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
, the hit show from the new British commercial television channel. Some radio work for the BBC followed plus a fleeting visit to Holland on April 25 for an appearance on Dutch radio in a program called
Showboat
. The appearance of a major Hollywood star was big news in Holland. Newsreel pictures of her arrival, with three year-old Miguel in her arms, appeared in cinemas all over the country and made the front page of the national papers.

Gabriel Vicente Ferrer was born two months prematurely on August 1, 1957. Initially there was concern for the infant but his condition soon stabilized and by the following month, Rosemary was back at work again. With improved timing, NBC had announced one week before Gabriel’s birth that Rosemary would star in a live, half-hour television show on Thursdays from 10:00 to 10:30
P.M
. The first show aired on September 26, 1957, from the NBC studios in Los Angeles. “Welcome to ‘The Lux Show’” said Rosemary, in what became her standard opening line, “on behalf of Lux Soap, Lux Liquid and Rinso Blue.” The shows essentially followed the format of the previous series, but the bigger name sponsor brought more money, more polish, and a higher-caliber guest list. Dik Darley continued as director, Frank de Vol picked up the orchestral baton in place of Nelson Riddle, while the ex-Glenn Miller singing group, the Modernaires, replaced the Hi-Lo’s. The first show featured Tennessee Ernie Ford and Jane Wyman among the guests and was an immediate success. “Miss Clooney has come a long way, leaving a number of her fellow vocalists far behind in the personality derby,” wrote Bob Bernstein in
Billboard
. “This girl can really carry a show of her own, especially with the informal air and good scripters she’s been given.”
³
Time
magazine concurred. “Of all the new musicals, the best was the simplest,” it said. “Whether delivering barrelhouse or blues, songstress Clooney’s voice has a
distinctive cello quality that makes her refreshingly different from the sound-alike mass.”
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Upcoming guests included actors William Bendix and Charles Laughton (who joined Rosemary in a medley of Al Jolson songs), plus Broadway star Carol Channing. Rosemary was indeed a natural TV host, retaining her pleasant but not over-glamorous appearance and delivering her dialogue in a relaxed manner, noticeably more slowly than the “rat-a-tat-tat” style that characterized both her live cabaret and off-stage speaking voice.

Rosemary was three weeks into the Lux run when she took time out to appear on one of the most widely promoted shows of the television season. It was for a product that would turn out to be one of the biggest all-time flops. The Ford Edsel, named after one of Henry Ford’s sons, was intended to be Ford’s masterstroke for 1958, an all-new car that would take America by storm. When it appeared, it did anything but. With a cumbersome looking grill and stereotyped rear fins, the product failed to live up to the pre-launch hype and proved to be one of the most spectacular flops of the 1950s. A major part of the 1957 launch, however, was a live, one-hour television show hosted by Bing Crosby with a stellar guest list that included Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, and Rosemary. Crosby, Sinatra, and Armstrong had all appeared together the previous year in the hit movie
High Society
and Rosemary’s inclusion on the guest list reflected not only her closeness to Crosby but also her by now established position in the upper echelons of show business.

Unlike the car that it promoted, the show was a massive hit. It gained the
Look
magazine award for “Best Musical Show, 1957” and earned an Emmy nomination for “Best Single Program of the Year.” Broadcast live, the show, however, did not go without incident. On the set, Crosby was a hard taskmaster when it came to the basic disciplines of performing. Always first to arrive, and word perfect, Crosby expected any guest on one of his shows to meet the same standards. Frank Sinatra had a martinet side to him too, although that came out more in his work in the recording studio than on a live performance. On stage or television, his roguish streak made him inclined at times to just wing it. Crosby’s relationship with Sinatra was cordial, publicly at least, but in private, Sinatra’s lack of discipline appalled him. Rosemary later recalled how a fretting Crosby whispered to her during rehearsals that Sinatra was “gonna blow it.” His prediction seemed right when Sinatra and the orchestra fell over themselves on “Blues in the Night” until Sinatra righted himself with a piece of vocal dexterity that neither Crosby nor Rosemary saw coming. “Bing and I just looked at one another,” she later wrote. “The Voice could get away with anything.”
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It was a skill that the Ford Motor Company would have liked to emulate. All the cast were
given Edsel cars to use during rehearsals. Only Crosby and Clooney took up the offer. Rosemary later said that the only Edsels she ever saw were the ones they gave her to drive. Coming out of the CBS building, her purple Ford awaited her, looking, she said, “like the
Normandie
in dry dock.”
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When Rosemary grabbed the door handle to get into the car, it came off in her hand. Henry Ford Jr. had followed her out of the building and was right behind. “I turned to him, holding the handle out,” Rosemary said. “Mr. Ford. About your car … “
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Ford’s response was to make his own black Edsel available to Rosemary, but the incident was a harbinger for Ford’s flagship car. By 1960, the car was history, costing the Ford Motor Company millions of dollars and making the name Edsel synonymous with failure.

Working on the show had meant a break in Rosemary’s usual schedule. The routine of her own show meant rehearsals Monday to Thursday followed by the live broadcast. After the show, Rosemary would fly overnight to New York to spend the weekend with Ferrer, who was in New York most of the time preparing for his role in
Oh Captain
. She would return to the West Coast on Sundays, before starting the routine all over again the following morning. It was a physically demanding lifestyle, which compounded the emotional highs and lows of a young family and a marriage that was also becoming high maintenance. “Joe was supportive of my work, but I think he was also envious,” she said many years later. “He constantly took singing lessons because he marveled at the ease with which I sang, and he wanted to be able to do the same thing. I gradually realized that one of my functions was to be a kind of once removed audience for him. … He was moved more by performances than by life itself. He could cry when an emotion was produced on-stage but not in actual life.”
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Other guests on Rosemary’s weekly show during the fall of 1957 included Boris Karloff, who reprised his horror spoofing that had gone down so well in Rosemary’s previous series. This time, Karloff sang “You Do Something to Me,” before Rosemary joined in the mood with “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” The November 28 show was a family affair, with Betty, brother Nick, and kid sister Gail joining José Ferrer among the guests, the songs including the inevitable “Sisters” and “You’re in Kentucky Sure as You’re Born.” Through Christmas and into 1958, the shows continued week in, week out. Reviews were generally favorable although by the spring of 1958, one local journalist at least was spreading rumors that Lux planned to drop the show after the current season.
The San Mateo Times
was a small paper but its staff included Bob Foster, who since 1948 had been one of the first television correspondents in the Bay Area. Foster was well connected and spent most of his days wandering around the West Coast television studios looking for gossip. Ultimately, his predictions of
Rosemary’s TV demise turned out to be right but for the wrong reason. “I checked a bit further and found that the sponsor had actually decided to drop the show last January [1958],” he wrote, “but suddenly the show perked up; the ratings climbed and the response grew, so the sponsor decided to hold off and reconsider.”
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When they did review the show’s status during the summer, the decision was made for them. Rosemary was pregnant again and with the baby not expected until October, she would be in no position to start a new season.

From January to June 1958, the weekly show continued to dominate Rosemary’s life almost to the exclusion of any other work. In January, she completed what was to be her final recording session for Columbia before her contract expired in March. Frank de Vol conducted on three songs. Two of them came from the familiar pens of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, “Surprise” and “You Don’t Know Him.” These constituted Rosemary’s final single release for Columbia. A further session in February, also with de Vol, saw Rosemary record “What Is a Baby,” a promotional title for Gerber Baby Foods, and “I Wonder,” a track that eventually saw release on the MGM label. Indeed, MGM Records turned out to be Rosemary’s next port of call as a recording artist as she moved into a two-year spell of freelancing. As well as MGM, she would also record for Coral and RCA Victor.

The first new project for MGM Records positioned Rosemary once more as the foil for her husband’s vocal ambitions. Over the four days of March 14–17, 1958, the two of them recorded the full score of
Oh Captain
, all the songs written by the Livingston and Evans partnership. An attractive cover, showing the two of them in naval caps, concealed the increasing stress within the marriage, as indeed did their vocal performance. “The score of Broadway’s
Oh Captain
provides a delightful romp for the noted husband-and-wife duo, and a fine debut for Miss Clooney on the MGM label,” said
Billboard
. “Ferrer sings with charm and persuasiveness … and a smooth-voiced Rosie is a treat to the ears in ‘Morning Music of Montmartre.’”
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Ferrer was the guest again when the curtain finally fell on Rosemary’s Lux show on June 19. The end of the grueling weekly schedule was no reason however for a spell of relaxation, despite Rosemary being in the sixth month of her pregnancy. With babies and nannies in tow, the Ferrers traveled by train, straight from the final TV broadcast, to San Francisco and then onto Reno, where Rosemary had a nine-day booking at the Riverside. From Reno, the troupe headed to Vegas where Rosemary played two shows a night for two weeks at the Sands.
Variety
welcomed her back to the Strip after an absence of almost three years. “She appears onstage in a tent dress, explaining that she’s not doing it to follow the current styles, but simply because she’s pregnant,” the magazine said.
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