Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (22 page)

The year 1969 came and went with practically nothing in Rosemary’s engagement diary. In April, she returned to the nightclub scene for a two-week stay at the Blue Room at the Tropicana in Las Vegas, offering a hollow set of performances when she went through the motions of singing but with none of the flair and feeling that were her trademarks. The onstage Rosemary was also unrecognizable from the svelte blonde that audiences
remembered from television appearances with Bing and Dean Martin little more than two years before. With other demons to slay, Rosemary’s passion for food, and with it her weight, had become uncontrollable during the months of her recovery. She mushroomed from 120 to 200 pounds in a matter of months. “I didn’t look anything like myself,” she later wrote, “which pleased me because I could hide inside that fat lady. I was still hiding, not nearly ready to come out but having to work in order to live.”
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Rosemary returned to the Tropicana in July and November, with a two-week engagement at Bimbo’s 365 Theater-Restaurant in San Francisco her only other major booking in between; 1970 was even worse. Fellow veteran of the Robert Kennedy campaign Andy Williams offered Rosemary a guest spot on his weekly TV show in October, but Rosemary’s appearance was limited to one song—inevitably “Come On-a My House.” Rosemary sang pleasantly but seemed detached from the show going on around her, lacking sufficient confidence even to join her host in the customary duet.

A more significant television appearance came on April 13, 1971. Merv Griffin had been a friend since the mid-’40s when, as a singer with the Freddy Martin band, he and Rosemary had first met. Griffin went onto to become one of America’s leading talk show hosts and one who was always ready to welcome Rosemary onto his show, just to keep her in the public eye. In later years, said daughter Monsita, a call to Griffin was always the first one her mother would make if she were about to go on the road with something to promote.
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In 1971, however, the roles were reversed. At the depths of her illness, Griffin had been one of the first people from show business to encourage Rosemary to set her sights once more on the big time, and her appearance as one of his guests was the first of several she would make over the coming years in the wilderness. The Griffin show was a start, but other than a week co-hosting the popular daytime
Mike Douglas Show
from Philadelphia, it was Rosemary’s only television appearance during 1971. Indeed, a week in Las Vegas at the Fremont and a fall appearance at the Big Band Festival at Madison Square Garden were her only bookings for the year. Without a recording contract, there was no prospect of using records to plot her recovery path, and in the general absence of doors opening, Rosemary, it seemed, had only one option if she wanted to work. She must lower her sights.

No one knew quite how low they would need to go. Kemmons Wilson had founded Holiday Inns of America around the time Rosemary had been a cover piece for
Time
magazine. Since then, they had gone on to become part of the American landscape. Holiday Inn’s iconic logo was a waypoint for many travelers but for Rosemary, it came to represent a place to work. In particular, it was the revolving restaurants that characterized many of
the downtown Inns that she remembered—“those things that go round and round at the top.”
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In an effort to compete against more established hotels, some Inns offered a weekend cabaret and it was these that offered Rosemary her chance. “The Holiday Inn bookings told me I could make a living. It might not be the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion or the Hollywood Bowl, but at the Holiday Inn, Hawthorne, that group of people knew I could sing well. And I did,” she said in 1992.
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It wasn’t just the Holiday Inns that gave Rosemary a lifeline. Her 1972 bookings included such other unlikely venues as the Kahler hotel, Rochester, Minnesota; the Ramada Inn at Portsmouth, Rhode Island; and the Blue Moon Restaurant in Chicago. Wherever she went, Rosemary found a warm, if surprised welcome. “What are
you
doing working in a place like this?” was a common question. But despite the status of some of the venues, Rosemary’s professionalism in this period of her career was the thing that shone through, her performances reflecting the same effort and commitment that she would have given had the venue been a world-class concert hall. It wasn’t until Rosemary traveled to Denmark in the summer of 1972, however, that her engagements became anything more than a job. Playing at Copenhagen’s open-air Tivoli Gardens, Rosemary rediscovered her love of singing for the first time in years. “It was like coming outdoors after being locked in for a long, long time,” she wrote.
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Rosemary’s “Holiday Inn” period ran through 1972 and into the following year. Merv Griffin offered three more TV appearances during 1973, one of them strangely prophetic in that it placed Rosemary alongside Helen O’Connell and Kay Starr, two singers with whom Rosemary would soon share the stage in
4 Girls 4
. Meanwhile, Rosemary continued her up-and-down recovery. The therapy sessions with Dr. Monke were less frequent, but intensive nevertheless, and there were still occasional setbacks. While working at the Lookout House at Fort Wright, Kentucky, she stayed with brother Nick. He later recalled the harrowing experience of sitting up all night with an apparently comatose Rosemary. Nick held her wrist through the night to satisfy himself that there was still a pulse. When he found a bag of pills in her case, he feared the worst and confronted his sister about it. Rosemary responded in kind, insisting (legitimately) that the pills were no more than vitamins that Dr. Monke had prescribed. She left the house in tears, a temporary rift in her relationship with her brother that quickly healed.

Rosemary’s weight continued to vary, although by now the size range was never less than large. Her attempts to kick her lifelong smoking habit complicated the efforts to regain her former figure. Smoking was something that had been endemic in both the Clooney and Guilfoyle families, and lung cancer or emphysema had accounted for the deaths of many of her
relatives, including her mother at the age of 64. Both Nick and Rosemary had been three-packs-a-day smokers in their younger days. Nick had quit in his mid-30s, but Rosemary never did. Her smoker’s cough—exactly like their mother’s, said Nick—told anyone in the family when Rosemary was in the building, and from the ’70s on, her smoking added a huskiness to her voice that, unexpectedly, added to its appeal. Rosemary’s attempts to kick the habit eventually became a mini-soap opera within the family but she was, said daughter Monsita, “not fun to be around when she stopped. It was not pretty.”
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Eventually, those close to Rosemary realized that the public protestations at having kicked the habit merely masked a surreptitious cigarette now and then. Michael Feinstein said that the smell of tobacco was always there when he visited the downstairs cloakroom at North Roxbury. Eventually, he said, Rosemary realized that she was fooling no one. “I’m just going to the bathroom for a smoke,” became a regular line. In later years, Rosemary did eventually cut down to no more than 10 cigarettes per day, fewer still after her near fatal illness in 1998.

December 1973 brought a chance encounter that would turn out to be another milestone on Rosemary’s journey back to full health. Clad in a matronly headscarf and driving her open-top Corvette back home to Roxbury Drive—“naturally, from a psychiatrist’s office, where else?”
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—she stopped at a red light. A 1956 Thunderbird drew up alongside. “Rosella? Rosella,” said its driver. It was Dante DiPaolo, Rosemary’s dance teacher and some time beau, the same Dante she had left by the swimming pool when she departed Hollywood to marry Joe in 1953. “Nobody had called me that, before or since,” Rosemary said later.
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“Call me,” she told him. As the lights changed, she shouted her number, which Dante hastily finger-lined into the accumulated dust on his dashboard. They had dinner the next night and from then on were inseparable.

The year 1974 finally brought a concerted effort by Rosemary to get her career back on track. In March, she secured a booking for a CBS-TV special called
Grammy Salutes Oscar
, a tribute to the popular songs that had won an Academy Award. Gene Kelly hosted a show that included other artists such as Jack Jones, Dionne Warwick, and silent screen star Buddy Rogers. Rosemary took the opportunity on the back of the show to go public about one of the demons she had been fighting. She told journalist Nancy Anderson that she had recently shed 60 pounds, with the help of a personal trainer and a strict diet. Publicly, the story was still that Rosemary’s absence from mainstream show business was due purely to domestic priorities and that she had spent the past five years as a “homemaker and cook.” Feeding a family that included three growing boys meant that there “was so much food around that I let the pounds creep up before I realized it.” Now, she said, “my
children are so grown-up and are doing so many things on their own that they don’t need me at home all the time. I want to work—do television, record, do most anything just so I can get out of the house.”
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Nevertheless, there was realism, almost pessimism, about the extent of her ambition. “Who’d want to gamble on me now?” she said in another interview, contrasting her absence with the durability shown by other 1950s contemporaries such as Perry Como and Dinah Shore. “I’ve been away a long time.”
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Nancy Anderson’s assessment that Rosemary’s diet had given her “a figure more like that of a beauty queen than the mother of five” was sympathetic to a fault, although her efforts had indeed been earnest. Three weeks after the
Grammy
show, Rosemary appeared with Nick and her sister Betty in a Midwest regional TV show called
A Summer Song
. During the ’60s, Nick Clooney had built his own career as a TV journalist and anchorman, eventually hosting his own morning show on local stations in Cincinnati. It was Nick rather than either of his more musical sisters who was the draw for the show, which aired across five stations in the region. Filmed at the King’s Island Theme Park in Mason, Ohio, the show, said Nick, was seen by Rosemary as an opportunity to put herself back in the shop window. She intended to use the tape of the show in a marketing push to get herself once more in front of promoters and publicists.

A Summer Song
was filmed in the summer of 1973, and Rosemary’s diet had brought some change to her appearance, but she nevertheless cast a very different image from the one most people remembered. Dressed mainly in a loose fitting, white caftan-style dress with shoulder length blonde hair, seemingly unstyled, Rosemary looked anything but a reborn star. Uncertain and lacking in confidence, Rosemary was largely overshadowed by the vibrancy that her sister Betty displayed on the screen. Her rendition of Frank Loesser’s “I Believe in You” was disappointing, one of the rare occasions when she struggled with the timing of a song. It was only when she returned to familiar ground that her class became apparent. Lipsyncing “Tenderly” to a recording made for the show, her voice displayed the purity of tone that had always defined her singing.

Despite the marketing,
A Summer Song
made little difference to Rosemary’s attempts to reestablish herself. July 1974 saw her back in the recording studios, this time in the very unfamiliar surroundings of Motown Records. Rosemary was now reduced to recording demos of songs for other artists to consider. It was a new low in her career. Nevertheless, there were more appearances and support from Merv Griffin, and two appearances with him, in 1974 and 1975, offered the first indication that Rosemary’s career was on the way back. A chance, almost casual question in the first of them opened the way for Rosemary to reveal publicly the trauma she had
gone through. “Were you in therapy?” Griffin asked, to which Rosemary replied with a simple “yes.”
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A year later, Rosemary arrived as part of a gathering of stars paying homage to Tony Bennett. “She sang ‘What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?’” Griffin said later, “And I’ll be darned, nobody moved in the theater.”
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The song, a 1969 Oscar nominee, had a lyric by Alan and Marilyn Bergman to Michel Legrand’s melody. Its theme of refound love was apposite given Dante’s reentry to her life. Rosemary’s rendition was flawless, perhaps the first public appearance by the new Rosemary who would finally cast off the perennial associations with Mitch Miller’s harpsichord. Looking slimmer (but still not slim), Rosemary sang the song with barely any movement other than in her face. Holding the microphone static and some distance away from her, it was the surest indication that Rosemary’s gifts of reading a lyric and bringing it to life were undiminished.

The revival, however, was never going to come overnight. Another longstanding show business friend, Dinah Shore, also rallied to the cause and offered Rosemary several spots on her
Dinah!
talk shows, but despite the “news” of her breakdown and recovery, Rosemary still looked like a has-been. Only a wave of ’50s nostalgia seemed to offer any real prospects. “I’ll be singing some new songs and naturally the ones I recorded that people will expect to hear,” she told local press ahead of a New Mexico appearance. “I’ll be doing all of the million sellers and we’re giving a couple of treatments on some of the older ones to bring them a little more up-to-date.”
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The future, it seemed, was in the past. A record deal from the budget label K-Tel in 1975 seemed to confirm that all anyone wanted to hear from Rosemary was ’70s stereo versions of the hits that had made her famous. For all the misery of her late ’60s recorded efforts, the five songs she recorded for K-Tel, tinny remakes of “Botch-a-Me,” “Come On-a My House,” “This Ole House,” “Hey There,” and “Half as Much” were arguably the saddest outputs of any recording studio visit.

When restoration came, it was from an unexpected source. Rosemary’s affection for Bing Crosby remained undimmed although the two had seen little of each other during her difficult times. The reason in part, was a function of nothing more than geography and competing priorities. Anxious to shield his second family from the Hollywood lifestyle that had damaged his first, Crosby had moved from Beverly Hills to a San Francisco suburb during the mid-’60s. Now into his 70s, Crosby’s priorities had more to do with his teenage children and his own leisure time. Although his stature was such that he could still open any door in the world of show business, he seemed content to grow old and fade away. His occasional TV appearances traded off his past glories. When Rosemary had first been admitted to the Mt. Sinai hospital, Crosby, on safari in Kenya had written a three-page letter, saying
that if there was anything he could do, all she needed to do was ask. Beyond that, however, the contact had been sparse. Bing had monitored Rosemary’s breakdown more closely than she realized, but emotionally, he was ill equipped to deal with it. Where Rosemary’s response to a similar situation would have been to hug and shower a downtrodden friend with affection, Crosby’s approach was to stand in the shadows, watching and waiting for the opportunity to help without having to confront the issue.