Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (25 page)

On October 18, 1977, Rosemary joined the Crosby family for a private funeral service at Culver City’s Holy Cross Cemetery. Enigmatic to the end, Crosby had left clear instructions about his funeral that excluded everyone but his closest family. Kathryn Crosby had felt that it was inconceivable that her husband should be laid to rest without his closest friends in show business. Rosemary joined Bob and Dolores Hope plus Phil Harris and his wife, Alice Faye, at the dawn service. As she sat through the Mass, she allowed her mind to wander back over the 26 years that she had known Bing Crosby. She thought of their recording dates and the radio and TV shows they had done. She remembered his love and his wisdom as well as his orneriness, his refusal to reenact the final scenes of
White Christmas
for visiting royalty, and the bizarre piety that caused him to offer separate bedrooms to her and Dante whenever they visited with him. She also remembered the man who more than anyone had paved the way for a new, second career for her. As the morning sun rose and Crosby’s casket was lowered to rest alongside that of his first wife, Dixie Lee, Rosemary reflected not only on the man from whom she “had learned so much about singing [and to whom] I now owed my resurrection” but also on her own future.
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Where, she asked herself, do I go from here?

R
osemary Clooney did not know it but she already had the answer to the “where next?” question. On September 6, 1977, she opened in
4 Girls 4
at the Beverly Doheny Plaza, an old Hollywood movie house now converted to a small theater. As the name of the act implied, the show brought together four ladies each with long solo careers behind them, but now working together, partly as a group and partly as four solo acts. Described in advance publicity as a “musical Mount Rushmore,” a label that displeased Rosemary, the members of
4 Girls 4
were Rosemary, Margaret Whiting, Rose Marie, and Barbara McNair. Whiting was a 1940s vocalist, the daughter of songwriter Richard Whiting and an early protégé of Johnny Mercer. Rose Marie had been a child star in the early ’30s, but was best known to contemporary audiences as Sally Rogers in TV’s
The Dick Van Dyke Show
. The fourth member of the group, and the least known to most audiences, was African American TV actress and nightclub artist, Barbara McNair.

The idea for
4 Girls 4
belonged to Rosemary’s manager, Bill Loeb, who managed all four girls. Each was working but, said Loeb, finding bookings was a constant struggle. “I thought I would put four old blonde [
sic
] broads together and make one show out of it,” he said.
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Loeb was not the first impresario in the ’70s to tap into the nostalgia market, but what was unique about his idea was that it brought together four performers who each had their own personal claim to stardom. That in turn brought its own challenges. The four girls might have had lots in common—age, longevity, and a catalog of marriages and divorces—but each also had her own ego and star status. “We fought at least once a day,” Rosemary said in 1983, “but we got along.”
²
For Rosemary, sharing the spotlight with three others also provided a degree of shelter. She
was, on her own admission, still tentative onstage, and much as the Crosby show had done,
4 Girls 4
provided some refuge, allowing more time for her stagecraft to rebuild.

Loeb’s idea might have been simple in concept but he soon discovered that making it work in practice required attention to detail. “Who’s on first?” was a hackneyed showbiz phrase but still potentially the reason for a major fallout. All agreed that they should open the show together with an ensemble number. The girls also knew that they had to close together, perhaps with some special material. The big question however was how to arrange the meat in the sandwich. Loeb’s idea was that each girl should do a 25-minute solo spot, but in what order? Nobody wanted to be the first at bat. The first compromise idea was to rotate the order across shows, but the resultant chopping and changing was a recipe for disaster. A coin toss left too much to chance—Rosemary and Margaret Whiting were similar in style and needed space between them. Finally, Whiting broke the deadlock and offered to open. From there, the order fell naturally into place. Barbara McNair would follow Whiting and play through to the interval, with Rose Marie’s raucous humor then providing a lively restart. That left Rosemary coming on last and de facto, top of the bill.

When opening night came, the show was still a work in progress. McNair, caught in the midst of some domestic problems, arrived only at the last minute. Missing most of the rehearsal, she was never able to gain command of the orchestrations that Frankie Ortega had put together and some friction with the musicians spilled over into the act. The closing number utilized some special lyrics to the old song, “Side by Side,” although none of the four could remember them without the help of cue cards. Ultimately, the detail did not matter. Richard Houdek in the
Los Angeles Times
said that the show was “fun primarily because the participants were having a good time. Their hastily devised finale, a chaotic, sometimes harmonious rendition of “Side by Side” might be embarrassing to anyone but four real pros who have no problems with themselves or each other.” Rosemary’s larger than expected size was clearly a surprise to Houdek, who described her dress as like “one of those bird outfits in ‘The Magic Flute,’” although his later comment that she was “so gentle and disarming that she could wear a paper sack and hold an audience” offered a degree of mitigation.
³

Audience reaction went beyond anyone’s expectations. “At the end, the entire crowd rushed down to the stage,” Whiting wrote later. “I could see arms outstretched and hands reaching for us. It had never happened to me before. In fact, I had never seen that kind of overwhelming approval.”
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Tickets for the rest of the week sold out immediately, and when they closed,
an offer came in for three weeks at the Huntington Hartford Theater in Hollywood. Three of the girls said yes, but McNair decided that the show wasn’t for her. At 43, she was the youngest of the group by six years from Clooney (and 10 and 11 years, respectively, from Whiting and Rose Marie). “I didn’t really fit in with the other ladies because they were from a different era,” she said later.
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The three remaining members talked to a number of possible replacements, including Connie Haines, Jo Stafford, and Kay Starr, before settling on former Jimmy Dorsey vocalist, Helen O’Connell. Despite being the oldest of the revised foursome, O’Connell brought glamour to the act. “She was gorgeous!” Rose Marie said. “In her sixties, she looked like she was twenty!”
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Looks were one thing, but the girls quickly realized that O’Connell brought something else too; a giant ego and a desire to take control. “She’s gone now, but Helen O’Connell was a pain in the ass,” Rose Marie recalled. “Helen caused all kinds of trouble by saying things and doing things and then coming around and saying, ‘I’m sorry. Forgive me.’ There were times when we never talked to her.”
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Even the settled batting order had to change, with O’Connell demanding that she and Rosemary should alternate in the second and fourth spots.

The revamped
4 Girls 4
opened on November 22, 1977, at the Huntington Theater to a celebrity audience. Lucille Ball, Bob Hope, Milton Berle, and Danny Thomas were there to witness a show that pushed all the right buttons. “We caught the public’s imagination,” Margaret Whiting wrote later. “There was a whole audience out there, wondering what had happened to their lives, wondering indeed what had happened to ours.”
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The show was a smash and soon Bill Loeb was fielding offers from top venues across the country. Four sets of schedules, however, meant that it was May 1978 before the foursome could take to the stage again. When they did, they broke house records at the Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans, before taking the show to Savannah, San Diego, Anaheim, and San Francisco.
Variety’s
reviewer said that the Fairmont show in San Francisco was a success because “all know how to work a house and glean the most from their mature pipes. They’re immensely solid pros.”
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For the next 18 months,
4 Girls 4
could do no wrong, and as Rosemary’s fifth decade in show business dawned, the momentum showed no sign of abating. No matter what tensions might arise between O’Connell and the rest of them, the four girls had been around too long to allow any backstage fallouts to impair their onstage professionalism. When they hit Dallas in March 1979, the review from the local press sounded a familiar tone. “It all comes together so naturally and so beautifully, it’s hard to believe the act is only a year and a half old,” wrote Diane Werts.
¹⁰

By 1980, the $20,000 a week that
4 Girls 4
had commanded when they started out, had jumped to $60,000. It was big money, and welcomed especially by Rosemary, whose finances had still not recovered from the nonearning years that followed her breakdown. The return to a busy touring schedule also sat well with her. Son Gabriel said, “Performing was the yin and the yang of her existence.” If his mother was not on the road for a spell, he added, she would “get twitchy. She needed to have spells in her life where she was in a hotel room, where the most important issue of the day was ‘What time is Showtime?’”
¹¹
There was further proof that she was now firmly back in the public eye when tissue manufacturer, Georgia-Pacific, polled audiences and found that Rosemary topped a list of 15 celebrities, about whom they had asked the question “Who do you trust most?” It led to a lucrative contract for a series of TV commercials for Coronet towels.

Out on the road, the girls had the company of Dante DiPaolo. Dante was Rosemary’s man but got on well with the three other girls, cooking for them, pressing their gowns, and even running midnight errands when one of them needed some medication. For a spell, DiPaolo was the nearest thing the girls had to a road manager. By the end of 1979, however, the touring schedule had grown to the point that Rose Marie thought they needed someone in that role full time. The other three, all with an eye on the bottom line, took some persuading before hiring Allen Sviridoff in time for their opening at Lake Tahoe in February 1980. Sviridoff was a generation younger than the four girls, a baby boomer but one raised on the Broadway musical rather than rock. Starting out as a lighting engineer, he had moved into production management with Mitzi Gaynor and then Ginger Rogers, with whom he was working in Buenos Aires when a mutual friend told him about the
4 Girls 4
opportunity. There was no question that there was a big job to do. The girls were now appearing 40 weeks out of 52 and traversing the country like never before. Sviridoff soon made an impact. Rosemary later described it as like moving from amateur to professional status. “Everything was seen to,” she remembered. “It was something like the way of life, and the way of working, I’d been accustomed to; it was well worth the added expense.”
¹²

Sviridoff’s role soon grew and within a year, he had taken over as the production manager for
4 Girls 4
and eventually as manager for Clooney on an individual basis. When they played the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island in May 1981, a chance remark from a promoter revealed that the underpinning contracts for the show were not as the girls had understood them. The issue was around payments to a booking agent. The girls claimed to have made it clear to Bill Loeb that if he needed to pay an agent to help with bookings, it should come from his share of the take, not theirs. The
Westbury experience, however, suggested that there were some double contracts in place—one that the four girls saw but a different one for the venue. Loeb consistently denied any wrongdoing, referring only to the dispute as “mix-up over contractual arrangements.”
¹³
“There was no double-contracting at all,” he said. “There were contracts made, and all of the girls saw what they were. The agent at the time was getting his regular commission, and the money that was left over after his commission was split up.”
¹⁴
Eventually, lawyers were called in and a settlement reached, but confidence in Loeb had been broken. For Rosemary, it marked the end of the road with him. She asked Sviridoff to take charge of her affairs, a role that he performed for the rest of her career.

Sviridoff’s approach to taking charge of Rosemary’s career brought with it a change of emphasis. Seeing himself as more of a business partner than a manager, Sviridoff took the role on with nothing more than a handshake and a commitment to an open, honest relationship. One of his first tasks was to put more into Rosemary’s individual career outside of
4 Girls 4
. She had continued to take individual bookings alongside the
4 Girls 4
bandwagon, but when Sviridoff took charge, there was, he said, only one confirmed solo booking in her diary.
¹⁵
More to the point, Rosemary’s solo offering had not moved on from the spot she had put together for the Crosby shows some four years before.
4 Girls 4
was essentially a nostalgia show, as was her solo act. It went down well with critics and audiences alike, but with Rosemary still in her early 50s—and now the youngest of the reconstituted
4 Girls 4—
Sviridoff thought that she was being undersold. His sights were set on building a second career for her that would sustain through the next two decades.

One critical piece in the jigsaw was her relationship with Concord Records. Since she had cut her debut album in 1977, there had been four more outings on Concord. During 1978, she recorded two tribute albums. First was the inevitable homage to Crosby on
Rosie Sings Bing
and then
Here’s to My Lady
, a tribute to Billie Holiday. Rosemary had met the enigmatic “Lady Day” in the middle ’50s, forming a friendship that led to Holiday becoming godmother to Rosemary’s daughter, Maria. The two tribute albums were followed by the first in a series of records dedicated to individual songwriters. Rosemary’s longtime neighbor, Ira Gershwin, was the first subject in a collection of 10 songs that picked up not only his work with his brother George, but also collaborations with Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern. Ira, Rosemary said later, had always been her favorite lyric writer. “He had a way of putting words in your mouth,” she said, making his songs easy to sing.
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Ira was prevailed upon to contribute a sleeve note for Rosemary’s album, although it took some persuasion from Michael
Feinstein, then working as an archivist for him, to make something happen. Ira, said Feinstein, was reluctant because he thought that the idea of writing a note on a collection of his own songs would be “self-serving and egotistical.”
¹⁷
Feinstein persevered and eventually persuaded the elderly lyricist to put his name to a two-line letter that included a four-word postscript. “I loved every word,” it read.