Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (2 page)

But not everything was as it seemed. The 1960s found the show business marriage going sour. The Ferrers became fodder for the divorce court reporters. The hit records had long since dried up, and by the time she stopped producing babies, Hollywood had moved on from the girl-next-door musicals. Rosemary took refuge in prescription medication and politics. When an assassin cut down her friend, Robert F. Kennedy, as Rosemary looked on, her life went into tailspin. A few weeks later, it crashed dramatically down to
earth on the stage of a Reno nightclub. Long years of mental health therapy followed. Professional oblivion dawned.

That Rosemary came back was in itself remarkable. That she was able to do so in a way that artistically outshone her first career was astounding. Few, if any, performers have achieved such an artistic juxtaposition. Once dismissed as a voice only for Mitch Miller’s novelty songs and gimmicky recordings, Rosemary now became the interpreter par excellence of the American popular song. Cowbells and harpsichords made way for an ensemble that comprised America’s finest jazz musicians. Not everyone, not even Rosemary herself, thought that she had become a jazz singer, but when asked if there was a finer exponent of vocal timing, rhythmical appreciation and lyrical interpretation, few could name anyone better. “That’s jazz,” her friend and mentor, Bing Crosby, once sang and to many, it was.

Now, a decade and more after her death, the question of how Rosemary Clooney will be remembered is apposite. History often claims 20/20 hindsight, but left to its own devices can make mistakes. Anyone using
Billboard
’s pop music charts for an assessment of Miss Clooney’s career would conclude that she enjoyed a four-year spell of popularity, excelled as a singer of trite ditties, but was never heard of again once the world spun its first Elvis Presley record. After the success of
White Christmas
in 1954, her movie career sank without a trace. And anyone scanning the library shelves would find two autobiographies that, like any self-penned memoir, were more about opinions and memories than objectivity and fact. Neither represents the historical chronicle that her career deserves. More recent studies of the art of popular singing have begun to redress the balance, yet the complete story of her career remains to be told.

Rosemary Clooney was arguably the most versatile popular singer in history. She marched to Mitch Miller’s beat while breaking new ground with Duke Ellington for the first genuine pop-jazz collaboration. She could count rockabilly, country and western, pop, jazz, hymns, lullabies, Christmas songs, mambo rhythms, and barbershop harmony among her repertoire. She could schmaltz and schmooze with Crosby in one scene in
White Christmas
, and become a sultry siren in the next. Duet partnerships with the vocal aristocrats such as Crosby, Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Perry Como stood alongside knockabout collaborations with the likes of Gene Autry, Marlene Dietrich, and Guy Mitchell. What other singer stood toe-to-toe with jazz legends such as Ellington, Benny Goodman, Harry James, Count Basie, and Nelson Riddle and then, years later, could act as a pied piper for a new generation that included John Pizzarelli, John Oddo, Scott Hamilton, and Warren Vaché?
Late Life Jazz
provides the first full, objective record of the career of Rosemary Clooney. It seeks to present material
drawn from contemporary accounts of her life and music making alongside more recent, retrospective opinion, including our own. In this book, we seek to offer a definitive chronicle and critical appraisal of the life and career of a remarkable lady, one who was proud to be “George’s aunt,” but who was also so much more.

W
hen Rosemary Clooney assembled an album of songs to mark her 50th anniversary in show business, she asked her brother Nick to write a sleeve note. Looking down the playlist, the TV talk show host and journalist raised an eyebrow at the opening selection. “‘Danny Boy?’ Why ‘Danny Boy?’” he asked his elder sister in a call to her at home on the West Coast. A few months later, Terry Gross, interviewing Rosemary for
Fresh Air
on National Public Radio, asked the same thing. Her answer to Gross was typical Clooney—direct, quick-witted, and brutally frank. “It got the Irish song out of the way,” she said. “‘Why didn’t you do an Irish song, Rosemary? An Irish song would have been nice on the album.’ You know how many times I’ve heard that?”
¹
But the answer she gave to her brother was more thoughtful. “Well,” she said, “it’s sort of the beginning of everything.”
²
The younger Clooney knew immediately what his sister meant. He was in Kentucky, she in California, but both of them knew that spiritually, their homeland was the glens and valleys that Rosemary sang about in every rendition of the Irish American anthem. It had been a long journey.

The home-leaving lyrics for “Danny Boy” were penned by Frederic Weatherly in 1910. Fifty years before, Rosemary Clooney’s great-grandparents-to-be, Nicholas Clooney and Bridget Byron, had made their separate ways across the Atlantic Ocean. Nicholas was born in County Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1830 and was in his mid-20s when he made the crossing. Bridget, at 19, was six years his junior when she emigrated to the United States in 1855. They came for one reason alone—survival. Ireland was starving. The staple diet of the island was the potato, and one acre of the crop would feed an Irish family for a year, as it had done for centuries. But in 1845, the potato crop rotted within days of
being taken from the ground. The blight continued into the next year and the years beyond. It became one of the greatest humanitarian tragedies of the 19th century. Famine, disease, and eviction followed quickly in the wake of the crop failure. From 1847 to 1850, between one fifth and one sixth of the Irish population died each year, either from starvation or consequential diseases such as cholera. In 1851, the population of Ireland stood at 6.5 million. Without the famine, the Census Commissioners estimated that the figure would have exceeded 9 million. The choice for the Irish was stark; stay home and likely die or take a chance on the sea crossing. By the end of 1854, 2 million Irish—one quarter of the population—had opted for the voyage across the Atlantic. They came first in sailing ships, enduring a harrowing six weeks at sea, mostly below deck and often in conditions more suited to the transportation of animals than human beings. One in every hundred who left Ireland failed to survive the voyage. Steam replaced sail during the 1850s, and though the crossing conditions eased, life for those who made it to the New World was often little better than what they had left behind.

The first wave of Irish immigrants to the United States had arrived earlier in the century and had been skilled laborers, in demand for the turnpike and canal projects across the eastern United States. The famine refugees, however, were uneducated and unskilled. Shantytowns grew up, with houses that were little more than huts and sanitation almost nonexistent. Racial discrimination was rife. “No Irish” was a common sign posted where men stood in line for work. Often, it was the womenfolk who came first, paying for the passage by taking work as indentured domestic servants. The price of the Atlantic crossing was a period of servitude. Irish maids were so predominant that they became known as “biddies,” a derivation from the most common Irish female name, Bridget. Once settled, husbands and sons would join them.

Nicholas Clooney and Bridget Byron settled separately in Mason County, Kentucky, and eventually became man and wife there on May 24, 1862. Boston and New York had become the primary locations for Irish settlers, but Kentucky had provided a home for both Scottish and Irish immigrants since the time of the American Revolution. The first settlers were Protestants, before a more Gaelic influx began in the first decades of the 1800s. By 1839, the
Covington Western Globe
was reporting that Irish navvies were the major workers for new infrastructure projects such as the Covington & Lexington Turnpike.
³
Railroad expansion quickly followed, although until 1845, the influx of immigrants from Ireland was still little more than a trickle.

When he came to the United States, Nicholas Clooney first lived as a lodger with the Knox family, who were also recent arrivals from Ireland.
The Knox’s home was in Maysville, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. Maysville dated back to 1784 when a settlement known as Limestone was established, just where Limestone Creek flowed into the Ohio River. Within three years, Limestone had become Maysville, named for John May, one of the founders of the state of Kentucky. Situated 400 miles downstream from Pittsburgh, Maysville marks the northern boundary of the state, 60 miles northeast of Lexington and approximately the same distance southeast of Cincinnati. Some 10 miles away sits the town of Mayslick, also named for a member of the May family, John’s brother, William. Mayslick provided a home for two other Irish families who had forsaken their homeland. The Sweeneys had arrived among the first wave of Irish immigrants while the Guilfoyles were part of the post-famine influx. When a Sweeney married a Guilfoyle, the union produced a son who would grow up to be Rosemary Clooney’s maternal grandfather.

Nicholas and Bridget Clooney raised seven children, the sixth of whom, Andrew Bartholomew Clooney, was to become the most influential figure in Rosemary Clooney’s early life. He was born on June 25, 1874, and as a first-generation American, quickly set about exploiting the opportunities that the United States offered. Quick and smart, Andrew Clooney flirted with a career in the law before settling for a role as a small town watchmaker and jeweler, working from a first-floor store on Maysville’s Market Street. Andrew Clooney’s passion was politics. He founded a free newspaper in Maysville and his left-of-center views anticipated Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal radicalism by a generation. “Closer to libertarianism than we would like” was Nick Clooney’s recollection of his grandfather. One of Nick’s earliest childhood memories was of his grandfather being forcibly held down for a typhoid shot during the 1937 Ohio flood. “He regarded it as an invasion of his body,” Clooney said.
⁴
Andrew Clooney’s involvement in local politics saw him serve two terms as the Democratic mayor of Maysville in the 1930s, later also acting as a city commissioner at the time of the flood. His grandchildren adored him. They loved the trinkets and goodies that he collected during his mayoral duties and would bring home for them as much as they loved the warmth and humor of his personality. A tall, elegant man with a bush of white hair, Andrew B. Clooney told bedtime stories to his grandchildren and created within them a warm sense of love and reassurance. “He never talked to us like children,” said Nick. “He talked to us as if we were adults.”
⁵

Andrew Clooney’s wife was not part of the Kentucky Irish heritage. She was Crescentia Koch, the daughter of a Huguenot family originally from Alsace-Lorraine on the French-German border. Their arrival on the banks of the Ohio had preceded even that of Rosemary’s Irish ancestors.
The Kochs quickly Anglicized their names. Crescentia soon became Cynthia (although her grandchildren always called her Molly), while her pronunciation of her surname usually came out as “Cook” rather than its German-sounding derivation. The Kochs had grand ideas for their daughter, and a union with an Irish shopkeeper with dangerous political leanings was hardly the marriage they had in mind. As she shared this frustrated ambition, it found an outlet in her personality. Cynthia’s grandchildren found her a distant and materialistic woman, whose attempts to convey love and affection came across as superficial and false. She was “a Southern belle,” Rosemary recalled in 1956, who “knew all the feminine things—perfume, music, how to paint a tray or square a canvas with violets and roses. She was just born to please a man,” she said.
⁶
Nick Clooney recalled his grandmother as an elitist woman, gifted and talented, but angry and frustrated that her talents—and her husband’s—had not taken them further up the social ladder. Nevertheless, the marriage between the Clooney and Koch offspring was a sound one. It produced two children, a daughter, Olivette born in 1900, and a son Andrew Joseph Clooney, born on October 13, 1902. Andrew J. Clooney became Rosemary’s father.

Rosemary’s mother, Frances Guilfoyle, was the eventual product of the marriage of Cornelius Guilfoyle to Rosanna Sweeney in Mayslick on August 26, 1869. The marriage produced 11 children. The third eldest was Michael Guilfoyle, born in 1874, who became Rosemary’s grandfather. His wife, Martha Adelia (Ada) Farrow was the daughter of a failed pioneer farmer who had taken his family out west to Kansas in a covered wagon, only to be driven back east by the first harsh winter. Along with Andrew B. Clooney, Ada Guilfoyle would become the other dominant influence on the early life of her granddaughter Rosemary. Michael and Ada married in 1904 and had nine children, including Frances Guilfoyle, Rosemary’s mother. When Michael Guilfoyle died in the street of a brain aneurysm in 1928, Ada Guilfoyle was left with the challenge of raising the family on her own.

The character of her daughter, Frances, and the man she had chosen as her husband, Andrew J. Clooney, multiplied that challenge. He had inherited none of his father’s drive and ambition and soon settled into a life of shiftless vagabondage. Rosemary later wrote that her father had decided even before she was born that “his dreams were submerged at the bottom of a bottle.”
⁷
“Daddy spent a lot of time in various saloons in Maysville,” she said. “There weren’t too many, but there were enough for him.”
⁸
Andrew Clooney fathered his first child, a son, also called Andrew, in 1921. The child’s mother, Annie Elsie Ennis, took the Clooney surname and at her death in 1929, was described as a widow, although no record can be traced of their marriage or divorce. Married or not, they had separated some time
before Ennis’s death. By then Andrew J. Clooney was undeniably married to Frances Guilfoyle. That wedding took place in St. Patrick Church in Maysville on August 15, 1928, at which time Andrew and Frances were already the parents of a daughter. The baby, registered under the name of Rose Marie Clooney, had been born in Maysville on May 23, 1928.
⁹
Her accepted Christian name soon became Rosemary, although friends referred to her as “Rose” throughout her life.