Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (17 page)

The new RCA contract might have looked like a new beginning for Rosemary as a disc-maker but the truth was that by the turn of the decade, her record career had badly lost its way. The
Billboard
charts for the ’50s showed Rosemary in a creditable 11th place in terms of hit singles and weeks on chart, with Patti Page and Kay Starr the only female vocalists ahead of her. Rosemary’s hits, however, were already a distant memory, and whereas peers such as Ella Fitzgerald, Doris Day, and Peggy Lee were churning out album after album for their respective Verve, Columbia, and Capitol masters, Rosemary was flitting from project to project, and label to label, without any apparent sense of direction. Not that it seemed to matter. Television guest shots on
The Perry Como Show
and
The Bell Telephone Hour
brought the curtain down on her first full decade in show business, and in November 1959, she announced the news of her fifth pregnancy. Her immediate diary was full, with a busy schedule of radio, TV, and recording lined up before the next baby was due. The music scene was much changed from the one she had encountered when she went solo 10 years earlier, but despite the arrival of Presley and rock, there was little to suggest that singers such as Rosemary faced any real threat to their livelihoods. Indeed, the chain of events that would all but destroy Rosemary’s career began not with a singer called Elvis but with a politician called Jack.

R
osemary’s first two releases under her new RCA contract were the tracks recorded with Perez Prado under the title of
A Touch of Tabasco
, plus a new collection of standards to be called
Clap Hands—Here Comes Rosie
. As its title implied,
Clap Hands
was a lightly swinging album, orchestrated by Bob Thompson, with whom Rosemary had worked on
How the West Was Won
the previous year. Thompson put together a 23-piece band plus vocal chorus for three sessions in Hollywood in February 1960, with a collection of 12 songs, largely standards, which embraced most of America’s great popular songwriters. Lightly swinging albums were an early 1960s vogue for many of Rosemary’s peers, both male and female, and Thompson’s arrangements for the album were outstanding, providing a bright and sunny set of charts that still accommodated Rosemary’s vocal gifts to perfection. Songs such as “Aren’t You Glad You’re You” and “It Could Happen to You” were taken at a breezy tempo, yet still enabling Rosemary’s unique ability to translate the lyrics into a story to come through.
Clap Hands—Here Comes Rosie
was as good as any other album that Rosemary recorded in the ’50s and ’60s, even though it was subsequently overshadowed by her later collaborations with Nelson Riddle. Peter Hugh Reed, for the
American Record Guide
, best captured it, saying the album was “blessed with an unusually good selection of songs” and that “Miss Clooney exudes a joy of living and healthy musicality all too rare these days.”
¹

Two days after Rosemary wrapped up the final session for
Clap Hands
, CBS Radio premiered
The Crosby-Clooney Show
. In a radio career that extended back to 1931, the new 20-minute show was Bing Crosby’s last hurrah. It would run, at least in some parts of the country, until the curtain
finally fell on national network radio in November 1962. The
Crosby-Clooney Show
aired five days per week and featured the recordings that Bing and Rosemary had previously made for
The Ford Road Show
. In addition to their stockpiled solos, the pair also recorded a series of duets for the new show. All the songs were interspersed between specially recorded dialogue between Crosby and Clooney. The beauty of the show, from the performers’ perspective, was its portability. The chat between Bing and Rosemary was recorded wherever the two happened to overlap, including Palm Springs and Las Vegas, although much of it was put together in the living room of 1019 North Roxbury, an arrangement that suited both performers. “We did the commercials first, then we would break out some scotch and ice, then do the dialogue,” Rosemary told Pat Sajak later. “The only constraint was that we weren’t allowed to read each other’s lines.”
²
Booze, it seems, was a constant part of the Crosby-Clooney radio sessions. A recording engineer on some of the earliest Palm Springs sessions remembered Rosemary as “the lady who used to drink her whisky out of a water tumbler. I admired that lady; she could really take care of it.” (Rosemary’s ability to hold her liquor never left her. Writer Gary Giddins, who became a close friend during the 1990s, recalled an evening out when he, some 30-plus years her junior, determined that he would match her “vodka for vodka.” “I was under the table in half an hour,” he said.)
³

Murdo Mackenzie, one of Crosby’s longtime radio associates, was the man behind a show that very much reflected the sexist stereotypes of its day. “We aim this at a lady audience,” he said in 1961. “The tone of the conversation has to be light and we also toss in odd bits of information.”
⁴
Looked at now, it is hard to see “light” as anything other than a euphemism for boring triviality. The discussion topics for Bing and Rosemary included such hot items as “the eccentric behavior of salmon after a still has overflowed into their stream” and “the significance of the fact that men out-faint women by three to one during Las Vegas marriages.”
⁵
But despite the banality of the scripts, the series contained some musical gems. With Buddy Cole again orchestrating, Bing and Rosemary resisted the temptation to reprise any of the titles from
Fancy Meeting You Here
and offered instead a series of both fun and sentimental duets. Among the 27 songs they recorded for the show were “Hey Look Me Over,” “Ain’t We Got Fun,” a beautiful rendition of the Arthur Schwartz/Howard Dietz song “Something to Remember You By,” plus several medleys.

Rosemary’s fifth child, Rafael Francisco Ferrer—named for his paternal grandfather—had made his appearance on March 23, 1960. Rosemary took five weeks off after the birth but was back at work for more recording sessions early in May. Although she was now full steam into her work for
RCA, she had one carryover commitment for MGM, which she completed on April 29, 1960. The four songs she recorded that day appeared with eight others in an album called
Rosemary Clooney Swings Softly
. MGM marketed the album as though it had been newly recorded as a concept album, whereas in reality it was a compilation of various titles she had recorded between 1954 and 1960. These included her remake of “Grieving for You,” which MGM leased from Columbia. The album continued its somewhat confusing existence when MGM acquired the Verve jazz label from its founder Norman Granz in 1961. Subsequent issues of the album appeared under the Verve imprint, Rosemary’s only appearance on that iconic jazz label.

With her commitment to MGM completed, Rosemary was free to resume work for RCA. On May 10, she recorded four titles with Nelson Riddle for release as singles, although these were mere hors d’oeuvres to two album projects that would follow. Since he had first worked with Rosemary on television, Riddle’s stock in the music business as architect of vocal swing had continued to rise. An ongoing relationship with Sinatra, plus albums with Judy Garland, Dinah Shore, and Ella Fitzgerald extended his reputation, and almost every top vocalist was queuing up for his services. Indeed, while working on the first album with Rosemary, he was skipping between studios, conducting his charts for Dean Martin’s
This Time I’m Swingin’
album for Capitol at the same time.

Rosie Solves the Swingin’ Riddle
might have been a remake of
Clap Hands—Here Comes Rosie
. Again, all 12 songs on the disc were standards, this time digging even deeper into the archive of the great American popular song with three titles dating back to pre–World War 1. The ’20s were represented by the Rodgers and Hart classic “You Took Advantage of Me” whereas other titles included Hoagy Carmichael’s “I Get Along without You Very Well” and two Vernon Duke songs, “April in Paris” and “Cabin in the Sky.” The only remotely contemporary number was “Get Me to the Church on Time” from
My Fair Lady
, a song and an arrangement that would stay in Rosemary’s repertoire well into the 1990s. Riddle put together a 31-piece band for the album sessions, featuring many of the musicians who had been part of the orchestra when it supported Rosemary on TV. The double play in the album’s title was not the first time that Riddle’s name had been taken to imply an unsolvable puzzle,
⁶
a theme that continued into the album sleeve, which showed an unfamiliar image of Rosemary, clad in red sweater and black slacks, seated on a chessboard with Riddle’s head adorning the king-piece that sat alongside her. In the sleeve notes, penned under his name, Riddle included the somewhat disingenuous comment “Rosie, you are not the first to solve the Riddle. My wife and kids did it years ago.”
(Maureen Riddle, his daughter, later remarked that one of the conundrums about her father was that he “could figure out a 47-piece orchestra but he couldn’t figure out six kids and a wife.”)
⁷

Rosie Solves the Swingin’ Riddle
, like the
Love
album that followed it, was a project that benefited more from the subsequent revelation of the affair between its two protagonists than from its inherent musical qualities. Indeed,
Billboard
’s contemporary review was seemingly written more in hope than expectation. “The swingin’ fiddles of Nelson Riddle provide just that distinctive touch that might make this a big one for Miss Clooney,” it said.
⁸
Greater acclaim only arrived when the album reappeared in digital formats more than 30 years after its release. Riddle’s biographer, Peter J. Levinson, in his 2004 sleeve notes to the CD reissue, suggested that the “familiarity” between Rosemary, Riddle, and the session players was “significant to the success of the recording.” He saw the opening track, “Get Me to the Church on Time” as an example. “The exhilaration with which Clooney approaches the song is echoed by the repetitive phrases Riddle utilizes in underlining the melody. A gentle swinging feeling is established by the combination of the brass and Frank Flynn’s chimes,” he wrote.
⁹
Nevertheless, when the album first appeared in 1961, it hit the shops at a time when Rosemary’s appeal as a music maker was starting to wane, and it made no impact on the album charts of the time.

Rosemary and Riddle’s follow-up to the
Swingin’ Riddle
album enjoyed a similar, late life renaissance. Entitled simply
Love
, this next album was recorded over three sessions in March 1961. It was a time when the personal relationship between Rosemary and Riddle was at its most intense. Rosemary discarded the swinging theme of her three previous albums in favor of an intimate collection of love songs, all chosen personally by Rosemary, and many of them little known. Friends, including film composer Bronislaw Kaper (“Invitation”) and pianist Ian Bernard (“Find the Way”) wrote several of the songs. This newer material sat alongside such standards as the Gershwins’ “Someone to Watch over Me” and Rodgers and Hart’s “Yours Sincerely.” Rosemary also included “You Started Something,” a song she had first recorded in 1948 with Tony Pastor. Riddle scored the piece for trombones as a private joke between him and Rosemary. “Nelson knew I’d been going with a trombone player when I first recorded it, so he wrote the new arrangement for all trombones,” she said in 1995.
¹⁰

When the album was made, Rosemary’s affair with Riddle was an open secret to most people in the music business, but not everyone. Composer Ian Bernard recalled the session where Rosemary recorded “Find the Way.” “She was crying at the end of the session,” he said “and I thought I had written the most emotional song in the world. It was 20 years later before I
found about the affair with Nelson.”
¹¹
Al Schmitt, however, the recording engineer on the session, told Riddle’s biographer, “you could see the relationship between Nelson and Rosie was special—it wasn’t just arranger and singer. There was a lot of touching, and whenever there were breaks, they were together talking.”
¹²
Rosemary in her second autobiography talked of the “yearning and regret” inherent in all the songs, even though the affair was still some time away from its unfulfilled denouement. In time, one song—“How Will I Remember You,” a 1951 composition by Carl Sigman and “Tenderly” composer, Walter Gross, came to be regarded as the anthem for the Clooney-Riddle affair. Sung in 1961, it was but one of several “lost love” songs on the album. When Rosemary put together an autobiographical compilation of songs for Concord in 1995, she reprised the song in tribute to Riddle.

By the 1990s, some reviewers had started to acclaim
Love
as Rosemary’s greatest work, but at the time of its completion, her new employers, RCA, were so disappointed by her recent sales that they declined to release it. It was two years later before the album appeared, by which time Rosemary had moved on again, this time to Frank Sinatra’s fledgling Reprise label. As part of the deal to sign Rosemary, Sinatra bought the unreleased tracks from RCA and issued
Love
as a Reprise album. Even then, it generated little interest, not even meriting a
Billboard
review. It was when Rosemary’s post-breakdown renaissance was at its peak that people started to pay attention to it. When it appeared on CD in 1995, one reviewer called it “the most ravishingly beautiful album of Clooney’s career,”
¹³
while James Gavin’s notes for the reissue highlighted the simplicity and honesty of her “sweet, husky voice.” In the early ’60s, though,
Love
was an album that was out of step with the public image that Rosemary still enjoyed. To most record buyers, she was still the girl-next-door, now grown up and living out an idyllic Hollywood marriage but expected to be a purveyor of happy songs and glad tidings. Her audience still expected every heart-wrenching ballad to be matched by a piece of novelty material. And thoughtful and intuitive though her readings were, Rosemary’s voice still had the sweetness of youth about it. Few in the early ’60s would have called it “husky.” The earthy raspiness that she developed in later life added a dimension to her work—particularly apparent on her rerecording of “How Will I Remember You”—but it was not there at the time she recorded
Love
. The album might now be seen as the first time that Rosemary reached inside herself to reflect her life’s experience in her work, but that only became apparent when the true story of her life began to emerge.
Love
was a 1960s product that needed a 1990s Rosemary to sell it, and even now, its apparent testament to a failed love affair overstates its artistic merits.