Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (20 page)

The results never came close to creating the mood that the album’s title implied. Bob Thompson was capable of producing arrangements that were inventive and accommodating, but this time around, they failed to generate any sustained ambience for the album. Some choices seemed almost bizarre. The opening and closing tracks for the 12-song disc were both uptempo country songs, the Bryants’ “Hello Faithless” and an old western song, “Careless Love” that Rosemary had sung on
How the West Was Won
five years before. Cover versions of “Black Coffee” and “The Man That Got Away” added nothing to the Peggy Lee and Judy Garland originals. Ultimately,
Thanks for Nothing
was a ragbag collection of songs with a title that summed up its own inadequacy. On release, it generated little interest or sales potential. It reappeared in digital format 30 years later, but unlike its predecessor,
Love
, gained nothing from the passage of time. Rosemary herself led the way. “I was doing a lot of drugs and drinking a lot. Not singing too well. I’m not proud of that record, but it reflected my life,” she said in 2000.
¹⁰
There was no question that when Rosemary revisited some of the songs for Concord in later years, the resultant versions only served to make
Thanks for Nothing
even more insignificant.

Sinatra’s grand plans for Reprise as an independent label were shortlived. By the time Rosemary came to complete her final session for the label in November 1964, he had sold it to Warner Brothers. Reprise’s greatest success had been to reinvigorate Dean Martin’s recording career and the man responsible, arranger Ernie Freeman, took charge of Rosemary’s final session on November 2, 1964. That day she recorded four songs for release as singles. Three of the four featured the high-pitched vocal chorus that worked so well behind Dean Martin but not with anyone else. Sinatra, Crosby, and Vic Damone all linked up with Freeman to try to match his success with Martin but none succeeded. Rosemary was just the same. Only two of the songs recorded that day—“Stay Awake” and “A Spoonful of Sugar”—ever saw release. By 1964, Rosemary’s physical and mental health problems had begun to reflect themselves in her onstage performances.
When she appeared on the
Hollywood Palace
in January 1964, the unthinkable happened. Singing “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Rosemary struggled to stay on key. Later in the same show, she sang “Sleepy Time Gal” confidently but when she attempted to hit the song’s highest note on the line “you’ll love it, I know,” her voice cracked embarrassingly. Reviewers who used to praise her ability to deliver a lyric were now critical. On a
Porgy and Bess
medley at a concert in San Francisco, one local reviewer wrote that despite living next door to Ira and owning the Gershwin house, “she showed absolutely no affinity for the haunting music.”
¹¹

Rosemary’s decline, however, was not totally self-inflicted. From the moment that the Beatles appeared for three consecutive Sundays on
The Ed Sullivan Show
in February 1964, the American music scene changed. The impact of ’60s pop far exceeded anything that rock’n’roll had brought a decade earlier. In terms of its influence on the underlying music per se, it matched the emergence of jazz in the ’20s as a musical revolution. Record buyers wanted the Beatles and everything that came in their wake. The
Billboard Hot 100
in April 1964 contained 12 Beatles records, including the top five places. Sales clustered around a handful of artists. “Instead of twenty artists selling, say, a million records each, from the Sixties on it became a matter of a single artist selling 20 million records while the other nineteen went unrecorded or got dumped into the cutout bins,” wrote Will Fried-wald.
¹²
Many of Rosemary’s peers found that the familiar waters had turned icy and austere. Tony Bennett along with Johnny Mathis and others at Columbia Records now found themselves as second-string artists behind “bands called The Byrds and Paul Revere and the Raiders.”
¹³
Rosemary’s fellow ’50s novelty champ, Perry Como, had his last chart entry in 1962 and quit his weekly TV show a year later. He was absent from the recording studios for two years. Only a handful of the vocalists who had ruled the world in the ’50s would survive this revolution. The unlikeliest survivor of all was Rosemary Clooney.

Only one record company stayed true to the old” style singers. Capitol Records, perhaps because it had the Beatles on its roster, continued to promote singers such as Peggy Lee, Judy Garland, and Nat “King” Cole. In 1963, Bing Crosby signed a two-record deal with them, the second album planned as a follow-up with Rosemary to their
Fancy Meeting You Here
collaboration from 1958. Reprise still held Rosemary’s recording contract but seemed more than happy to grant permission for her to work on the new duet project with Bing. So, the old firm of Crosby and Clooney went to work late in 1964 and over three sessions, recorded
That Travelin’ Two-Beat
. The album lifted much from its predecessor from six years before. It had the same theme (travel) and the same arranger (Billy May), and where the first had
been the brainchild of one songwriting partnership (Cahn and Van Heusen),
Two-Beat
relied on another pairing, that of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. The result was a spirited and lively album but, as with many follow-ups, one that never quite matched the original. Livingston and Evans composed some new material, including the title track, as well as providing some updated lyrics for some of the older material that Bing and Rosemary chose to include. Thus, the 1883 song about a Dublin fishmonger, “Molly Malone,” became an updated “Daughter of Molly Malone.” A classical piece, Johann Strauss’s “Tales from the Vienna Woods” became the “New Vienna Woods,” while the Latin standard “Cielito Lindo” became “Adios, Senorita.”

Critical response to the album was lukewarm and few reviewers thought that it matched its predecessor. Some said the Livingston and Evans reworkings were too elaborate and complicated. Others thought that May’s typically bombastic arrangements, complete with bells and whistles, owed more to a marching band or circus act than it did to the purported Dixieland theme. Perhaps the greatest difference, however, was in the duet performances of Bing and Rosemary. Until the
Two-Beat
album, they had always appeared as equal partners, working in a genuinely collaborative style.
Two-Beat
, however, was Crosby’s show. His voice opens virtually every track and makes almost all the running. The reason, it later emerged, was that the duets, like Rosemary’s outing with Sinatra the year before, were studio creations. Crosby put down his vocals first with Rosemary filling in the gaps later. The emergence of a rehearsal recording in which Jay Livingston sang Rosemary’s part (“You’re very brave, Mr. Livingston,” said Crosby at the end of the session) was the first indication that the duets were spliced together. At the time, union rules held that lead singers should be present in the studio at the same time as the musicians playing on the sessions. As a result, the spliced nature of the duets was concealed from public view for over 40 years.
¹⁴
Certainly when Rosemary joined Crosby on the
Hollywood Palace
early in 1966, their duet medley from the album was more spontaneous and more like the equal partnership that had characterized their previous work together. Rosemary’s TV appearance with Crosby would be the last time the two would work together for nine years.

The
Two-Beat
album was to all intents and purposes the last act of Rosemary’s first recording career. When her Reprise contract was not renewed, she was again forced to work on a freelance basis. It was something that Rosemary had done before, between 1958 and 1960, but times had changed; 1965 came and went without a single visit to a recording studio, and 1966 brought just one session. On August 25, she recorded four titles for United Artists with rock producer, Bill Justis. It was a session that Rosemary erased from her memory. Two of the songs were pseudo-rock
creations, arguably the worst recordings that Rosemary ever made. Deborah Grace Winer, writing about them for a compilation release in 1999, described them as “distressing—the forced rawness of the voice, manic drive and sheer awfulness of the material.” These might not have been the first time that Rosemary recorded kitschy material, she said, but the difference then was that Mitch Miller’s commercial fodder had at least been a vehicle for an emergent talent. The United Artists session in 1966 showcased an “accomplished artiste struggling to keep her way, flailing in material that is beneath just about anybody.”
¹⁵

By 1966, Rosemary’s problems, on stage and off, were becoming increasingly apparent. On the surface, her
Hollywood Palace
appearance with Crosby cast her with a modern hairstyle and canary yellow gown that glittered and gleamed. When she moved, however, her body and legs looked rakishly thin, while her eyes appeared distant and unsmiling. In June, she appeared for two weeks at the Three Rivers Inn in upstate New York. Her between-songs dialogue with the audience hinted at the problems in her life, although her remarks about “answering the unasked questions” seemed to be directed more toward herself than her public.
¹⁶
Longtime friend, Ron Shaw from Miami, was in Syracuse on business and took the opportunity to see the show and seek out Rosemary backstage. The shock was profound. When he knocked on her dressing room door, “out came this woman. Yes, physically she was Rosemary Clooney, but in every other aspect, it wasn’t. This woman was so high on drugs.” Gone was the familiar friendly greeting and hug. When Shaw spoke to her, her reply was like someone reading from a script. Their meeting ended with a terse “thank you very much” at which point she turned and closed the door in his face, he said.
¹⁷
Others, even closer to Rosemary, noticed it too. Nick Clooney saw his sister’s sense of humor disappear. A gentle joshing from him during a phone call had usually extracted a humorous response. Now it brought silence, or worse still, outright anger. Other conversations were simply incomprehensible, Rosemary at times talking in riddles. Worse still was the frustration of trying to stem the flow of drugs going his sister’s way. “I’d take away a shopping bag full of them,” Nick Clooney said, “flush them, bury them, anything to get rid of them” while all the time enduring the frustration of “not knowing where the real stash was.”
¹⁸

Still the merry-go-round continued to spin. Family life continued in Beverly Hills but it was Rosemary’s mother who was becoming the family rock, fueling feelings of both guilt and jealousy in her daughter. Rosemary needed money and as with all things in her life, threw herself into the task hook, line, and sinker. Concert dates took her to New York, Miami, San Francisco, and Vegas, while on TV, she filled in for a time as co-host of
The
Mike Douglas Show
. No one seemed quite sure any more as to which Rosemary would show up. Hank Fox in
Billboard
gave her top marks for the show he saw at the Americana Hotel in New York: “every song she sings, every move she makes, manifest the same conclusion—a top notch, professional entertainer”;
¹⁹
yet when a
Variety
reviewer took in her show in Florida two months later, the verdict was quite different. She was, the review said, “not in particularly good voice or in the best of moods, often sounding weak and cracking on ballads and upbraiding the onstage drummer for tempo differences on one tune and publicly chastising the light man for following her off stage a few moments later.”
²⁰

More of the same followed in1967, but with the added complication of a long-running affair with a young drummer, referred to later by Rosemary only as “Jay.” An April engagement at the Waldorf-Astoria went well, although when Rosemary appeared on Joe Franklin’s TV show, an argument with the host resulted in her walking off the show, live on air. Nevertheless, a four-week summer engagement at the Desert Inn in Vegas was a success, and in September, Rosemary guested on NBC’s
Dean Martin Show
, one of the biggest shows on TV at that time. Musical director, Lee Hale, recalled that everyone connected with the show knew that Rosemary could be unpredictable. Producer Greg Garrison issued an instruction that everyone “should be especially nice to her.”
²¹
The Martin show was always a chaotic affair, the host refusing to appear at rehearsals and turning up only for the actual shoot each Sunday. It meant that Martin was totally spontaneous, even if completely under-rehearsed, usually relying on cue cards for every piece of dialogue and song lyric. Nevertheless, the chaos that resulted was a hit with the viewers. Rosemary coped well, singing two solos and joining Dean in a medley of “Dean and Rosie” songs. “Dean and Rosie hugged their way through the medley, planting sincere kisses on each other at the end, and Rosie was obviously pleased,” Hale wrote.
²²

When 1968 dawned, Rosemary was making plans for a world tour, but the storm clouds were soon on the horizon, both for her and her country: 1968 would prove to be one of the most disturbing years in American history, with antiwar and race issues spilling over onto the streets, and high profile assassinations of luminaries such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Looking back on Rosemary’s life, friends and family would comment in later years that Rosemary chose to have her nervous breakdown in the year that the American nation did the same. In February, Rosemary had planned a concert tour to the Far East, returning via Europe before heading on to Canada and South America. Her affair with her drummer was still ongoing, despite a 15-year difference in their ages until her
paramour delivered a bombshell. He wasn’t going. Telling her that he planned to enter therapy to “get my life together,”
²³
Rosemary left for Japan and Thailand alone.

Throughout the tour, Rosemary was plagued by sleeping difficulties, her behavior becaming ever more erratic and unpredictable. Her Japanese hosts did everything they could for her, but nothing was right. She was fast becoming a tightly coiled spring, just waiting for the one event that would trigger the explosion. That event came a step closer when Rosemary took time out of her tour to visit American servicemen who had been wounded in Vietnam. Her tour had coincided with the Tet Offensive launched by the Vietcong on January 31, 1968. When Rosemary arrived at Clark Field, the base in the Philippines where the military hospital was located, she saw the full horror of the war. Consistently opposed to the fighting, Rosemary found herself taking messages from wounded soldiers and faithfully relaying them to wives and girlfriends when she returned home.