Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (26 page)

Rosemary’s next Concord outing brought a change of material.
With Love
, recorded in November 1980, had its origins at the Gershwin session the year before when Rosemary expressed a wish to Carl Jefferson that she might do an album of contemporary tunes, but with the same group of jazz musicians.
With Love
was the result. Scheduling necessitated some changes of personnel, but with Hamilton, Vaché, Cal Collins, and Nat Pierce forming the core and Jake Hanna returning with the drumsticks, continuity was preserved. Similarly, the final list of songs for the new album contained only five that could be described as contemporary, with standards “Hello Young Lovers,” “Just In Time,” and “Tenderly” also there. New or old, it mattered not as each song was given a lengthy treatment, Rosemary’s top drawer vocals nestling into a vibrant setting that retained enough individuality to allow each of the seven musicians to place their own signatures on the songs. Rosemary reserved her best vocal for the Oscar-winning “The Way We Were,” which proved to be especially popular in Japan and paved the way for several live appearances there. Its popularity masked an uncharacteristic error by Rosemary in the opening lyric, however. Where Alan and Marilyn Bergman had written “scattered pictures,” Rosemary sang “shattered.” “I guess that’s how I feel about romance,” Rosemary told Michael Feinstein when he pointed out the mistake.
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The only difficulty that any reviewer had on
With Love
was deciding which of the nine tracks shone brightest. Warren Vaché’s cornet piece on the remake of “Tenderly” gained as many plaudits as the vocal itself, as did Cal Collins’s guitar extemporization on “Hello Young Lovers.” It was the new Rosemary Clooney, however, who gained most of the attention. In an interview with
Stereo Review
, she offered some insight into the way in which recent events in her life had influenced her approach to singing. “I think that today I have a better approach to everything, that I can deal with the feelings I have now instead of any of the residual feelings from back then. All that garbage has been cleaned out. When I find a piece of material that’s new to me now, such as Billy Joel’s
Just the Way You Are
, or Paul Anka’s [
sic
]
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Alone at Last
on the new album, I can meet it and sing it on its own terms. There’s no more of that wistfulness I used to have no matter what song I was doing, which came from my wondering, ‘God, am I ever going to get out from underneath all this?’ There’s no feeling any more
that I have to fit the song to that ‘thing,’ that performer named Rosemary Clooney, which I had created and which wasn’t me at all.”
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Despite the critical acclaim and decent sales, not everything in the Concord garden was rosy. The contractual relationship with the label was informal and relied heavily on the personal relationship between Rosemary and Carl Jefferson. The two got on well—mostly. Jefferson, said Concord Executive Vice-President John Burk, was “a gruff ol’ guy” who was “tremendously proud of having played a role in establishing the second part of Rosemary’s career.”
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The relationship between them, however, could be unpredictable. Allen Sviridoff concurred, describing it as a “love-hate” relationship that could easily go off course. Rosemary, he said, enjoyed poking fun at the expense of Jefferson’s alter ego in her description of him as a “used car salesman.” Clooney had been important in establishing the fledgling record label as a force in mainstream music, but, said Sviridoff, “without Jefferson, she might never have had the musical resurgence that she had.”
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Despite the inherent symbiosis, however, the Concord partnership was not guaranteed. One of Sviridoff’s first priorities was to put the commercial arrangement onto a firmer footing, one free from the vagaries of the personal relationship.

Allen Sviridoff still had a role in
4 Girls 4
although it was becoming increasingly apparent to him that Rosemary was the key performer in the group. “From a promoter’s standpoint, she was the most salable. I don’t want to take away from the fact that five years of promotion of
4 Girls 4
certainly helped her. But you have to remember that Rosemary Clooney was, for want of a better comparison, the Madonna of the early 1950s,” he said later.
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Sviridoff was much taken by the way one of Rosemary’s contemporaries, Tony Bennett, had been reinvented and reinvigorated by a new management approach and he saw the same potential in Rosemary. He knew that it was a long-term game—“it might take ten years”—but there was time. Rosemary was 53 years old, two years younger than Bennett, and still had a long career ahead of her if she wanted it.

Loeb’s departure meant that Rosemary had lost her booking agency as well as her manager. As a replacement, Sviridoff targeted David Hanson at International Creative Management (ICM), the agency that handled some of the promotion for
4 Girls 4
. Sviridoff persuaded him that Rosemary’s potential matched that of Bennett and together, they developed a strategy that was designed to put her in front of the same audience groups. The best and most obvious means of doing that was by placing her alongside Tony Bennett himself. It meant, said Sviridoff, accepting second billing and less money, but in the long term, it was a price worth paying.
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With Bennett and Clooney fellow survivors of the Mitch Miller era at Columbia,
it was an easy combination to make. The first manifestation of Sviridoff’s plan came in November 1982, when Rosemary played a week at the Valley Forge Music Fair in Pennsylvania, alongside Bennett and the Count Basie Orchestra. One week later, the same three stars played the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island. More dates with Bennett followed in 1983, and by the time the pair hit Harrah’s in Reno in July, it was Rosemary who was winning the hearts of the reviewers.
Variety
said that Clooney came off the better of the two, “not because her songs or arrangements or voice is better, but simply because Rosemary Clooney is feeling her music and lyrics and communicating them.” Her treatment of “The Way We Were,” the reviewer said, “gave every ounce of feeling to a series of memory slides, not just of Clooney’s career but of American history.”
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Her medley of Ira Gershwin’s lyrics was, it said, “stunning.” Sviridoff’s tactics meant that Rosemary came to the attention of Bennett’s agents and promoters as well as his audience. Roger Vorce was one of the founding partners of the Agency for the Performing Arts (APA). He was, said Sviridoff, “a genius in the agency business.”
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After much chasing and cajoling, Vorce agreed not only to handle Rosemary, but also to recruit Hanson as a West Coast representative. This created the infrastructure that oversaw Rosemary’s career for the rest of her life.

Sviridoff’s long-term plan for Rosemary was one thing but his priority in 1981 was keeping the
4 Girls 4
show on the road. Even before the dispute with Bill Loeb, some of the tensions inherent in the group were beginning to spill over. When the four appeared on the Mike Douglas Show in 1979, Rose Marie’s contempt for Helen O’Connell was clear for all to see. “Oh, why don’t you go and get your hair combed,” she snapped at one point. Things finally came to a head at Caesar’s in Atlantic City in June 1981. When Rose Marie overran her slot one night, significantly cutting into Clooney’s spot, Rosemary’s Irish temper blew. Margaret Whiting recalled the incident as the last straw for Rose Marie. “She retreated to her room, got one of her migraines, and couldn’t do the second show; it was the only time I remember that she couldn’t perform. That’s when she made her decision to leave.”
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Rose Marie herself attributed the breakup as being solely due to Helen O’Connell. “Helen seemed to think that
4 Girls 4
belonged to her,” she wrote in her autobiography.
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“I was almost having a nervous breakdown because of her,” she said later. “She was a very hard person to live with and to work with.”
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Margaret Whiting quickly followed Rose Marie in leaving the group. Whiting had always been the one with the greatest sense of ambition for
4 Girls 4
. She had tried to persuade the others to set their sights on Broadway, or even a
Golden Girls
style TV sitcom, although she denied that frustration had been a factor in her decision to
quit. “I had already announced some time before that I thought five years with
4 Girls 4
was enough’” she later wrote.
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Whiting’s departure marked the end of the original foursome. Helen O’Connell moved quickly to try to ensure that legal ownership of the act now resided with herself and Rosemary. Veteran comedienne Martha Raye was recruited to fill the gap left by Rose Marie, while Kay Starr came in to take Whiting’s place. By the time
New 4 Girls 4
took to the stage for the first time in St. Louis on December 2, 1981, the act was starting to resemble a game of musical chairs. It had been further complicated by Rosemary and Margaret Whiting’s decision to launch their own spinoff act. Opening on November 17, 1981, the duo played two weeks in New York at the New Ballroom on West 28th Street. In
Fancy Meeting You Here
, the two singers presented a cut down version of the original
4 Girls 4
, the highlight of which was a 55-song medley, “Daddy and the Boy Next Door.” Daddy, of course, was composer Richard Whiting, while the boy next door was Rosemary’s long-time neighbor, Ira Gershwin. Whiting had flown out to Hollywood to rehearse the show at Clooney’s home when Michael Feinstein arrived with a message that Ira wanted to see the two ladies right away. “So we went,” Rosemary told the
New York Times
. “Me in my terrycloth slippers and robe, Margaret dressed to the nines, as usual. We sang our medley for him. I had never sung for him before and I felt as though I was 10 years old.”
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New 4 Girls 4
dominated Rosemary’s life through most of 1982 with a series of one-nighters, plus longer stays at venues such as the Royal Poinciana Playhouse in Palm Beach and the Bayfront Center Theater in St. Petersburg, Florida. Kay Starr and Martha Raye brought energy and unpredictability to the act, while Rosemary and Helen O’Connell now blended their hits with more contemporary material for their individual slots, O’Connell winning particular plaudits for “Don’t Cry Out Loud.” Bill Loeb was by now long gone from the scene, but there was no question that his formula for “four blonde broads” had proved to be highly commercial. In March, Rosemary starred in a TV special built around her
With Love
album and filmed in Los Angeles the previous summer. A trip to England for some TV and radio work also offered a respite from the
New 4 Girls 4
schedule as well as reminding the public that Rosemary was more than just part of a girl group.

Rosemary’s most significant exposure of 1982, however, came in a film where she was heard but not seen. In 1977, she had written
This for Remembrance
, an autobiography ghosted for her by author Raymond Strait. The book’s origins came from her disclosure to Merv Griffin that she had undergone therapy. Rosemary’s willingness to discuss it led to an approach from
Ladies Home Journal
for a feature that appeared in March 1976. Rosemary’s story caught the eye of the book publishing market and a contract soon followed. Strait taped hours of interviews with Rosemary to come up with the book, which took its title from
Hamlet
. It majored on Rosemary’s breakdown, the details of which occupied its first 80 pages. Written in a candid and open style, the book was almost a self-penned exposé, laying bare the wreckage of Rosemary’s life since the mid-’60s. When it appeared, Rosemary worked hard to promote it, becoming a TV talk show regular. There, she offered the same openness that she had displayed in the tapes for Strait. When Tom Snyder asked her why she had been so open about such personal issues, her reply was characteristically blunt. “Because that’s the reason the publisher gave me an advance to do it,” she said.
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When Snyder developed the theme, asking Rosemary and Helen O’Connell why they worked so hard at this stage of their lives, Rosemary was first in with the answer. “Money,” she said, raising no more than an eyebrow to Snyder’s follow-up suggestion that everyone assumed “they were loaded.”

Over the next few years, Rosemary’s account of her breakdown—the story of the white-knuckle ride up the old mountain road in Reno, the cocktails of pills and the insider’s account of life in a psychiatric ward—made good television, to the point that it almost became an act in itself. It was as if the old Rosemary, bursting with guilt, frustration, and betrayal locked up inside her, had now turned full circle. In its place, sat the ultimate earth mother, scarily uninhibited and seemingly prepared to engage with anyone’s agenda on whatever terms. “I’m freer because I don’t give a damn,” Rosemary said later. “I can say almost anything I please. It has freed up a lot of feelings.”
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The release that Rosemary felt also freed up another side of her. Those who knew her offstage loved her raucous, laugh-out-loud sense of humor, but it was a side to her character that stayed essentially private until the post-breakdown Rosemary emerged. “I’ve never seen your sense of humor the way I am seeing it today,” Snyder said to her during the interview in November 1977. “You’re funny. You’re really funny.”
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One talk show appearance stood out against all others. however. During 1982, Rosemary was the featured guest of TV psychiatrist, Tom Cottle in his
Up Close
series. In an hour’s interrogation, shown over two consecutive days, Rosemary faced her demons, up close and personal. It was riveting, if harrowing, television. Twice she was forced to stop as tears overcame her. She talked openly about her early life, her unresolved issues with her mother, and the death of Betty. The starkest moments of the interview came however when she discussed the events of 1968. “I knew I was losing it,” she said when she talked about the wounded servicemen she had seen in the Philippines and the way she had reacted.
Bobby Kennedy, she said, had offered a personal as well as a political lifeline. “You pinned your psychological well-being on him?” Cottle asked. “Yes,” was the answer. “I couldn’t accept that he had been shot,” she said. “I really think I broke then. I just couldn’t believe it.”
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