Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (29 page)

Back home for Christmas, Rosemary renewed acquaintances with Danny Kaye on a
Merv Griffin Show
in December. She took some time off through the winter months, returning to the road in April 1984 with a 10-night spell at the Sands in Las Vegas. Another UK trip, this time to guest on
The Val Doonican Show
, followed. Doonican was an Irish crooner and a disciple of Crosby. The two had golfed together not long before Bing
died. Crosby had encouraged him to try to get Rosemary on his TV show, telling him that she was “the best duet singer around.”
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Back in Hollywood, she headlined at the Hollywood Bowl in a tribute concert to Harry James, before embarking upon a zigzag tour of the country. Within the space of a few days during July and August, she appeared in Cincinnati, and then Concord, New Hampshire, with Tony Bennett, plus dates in Long Beach, Boston, Syracuse, and Detroit. Despite the exposure, reviewers were still rediscovering her. Welcoming her to
Charlie’s
in the nation’s capital, the
Washington Post
said that her appearance would come as “a delightful surprise to those who only remember the wistful pop hits she made in the 50s.”
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The resurgence of interest notwithstanding, the harsh reality was that Rosemary Clooney needed to work for the money as much as for the enjoyment she got from her singing. Her finances had never recovered from her years of decline in the ’60s and ’70s. Michael Feinstein recalled that when he first became a regular visitor to Rosemary’s home on North Roxbury in the late ’70s, it was though time had stood still. She was, he said, still using “ancient audio equipment,” seemingly unchanged from the ’50s, surrounded by stacks of old 78-rpm records. The kitchen, the route by which everyone entered the house, was old and in poor condition, and there was no air conditioning. When the money started to roll in again through the success of
4 Girls 4
, Rosemary started to spend freely again, but little of it went on the house. When she died, the cost of modernizing it would have been greater than that of building a replacement, said Feinstein. The financial problems that Rosemary suffered did nothing to change her approach to money. “She usually just spent what she earned because money seemed to have little importance to her,” said Allen Sviridoff. Once again, she found the taxman at her door with a demand for tax arrears of $600,000. When Rosemary played a three-week stint at
Michael’s Pub
in New York in the spring of 1986, she found her earnings sequestrated by the city authorities. “They took every penny from those three weeks,” said Sviridoff.
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Rosemary’s personal financial problems were at odds with the person who was generally regarded as quite savvy when it came to money and sponsorship. It was an attribute seen most obviously when Rosemary took up a particular cause. In 1984, Sandi, the daughter of her cousin, Phyllis Holvey, had suffered a brain injury in a boating accident. Phyllis’s husband, Sherm, was the doctor who had orchestrated Rosemary’s own care and treatment after her breakdown. As well as wanting to help the Holveys, the injury resonated with Rosemary’s sensitivity to brain illness that had been triggered by Betty’s death. It sparked off an idea to do something that would benefit those in the Holveys’ position and also create a lasting
memorial to her sister. With Sherm Holvey as chairman, the Betty Clooney Foundation for the Brain Injured held its first event at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles on April 7, 1986.
The Singers’ Salute to the Songwriters
became an annual event, with artists giving their time freely to present a show that each year paid tribute to five or six composers and lyricists. Rosemary’s old friend, Ron Shaw, who had become CEO of Pilot Pens, arranged for his company to be one of the sponsors. The first event had Bob and Dolores Hope, Tony Bennett, Debby Boone, Diahann Carroll, and José Ferrer, among others, honoring a songwriting lineup that included Alan and Marilyn Bergman, Sammy Cahn, Cy Coleman, Barry Manilow, and Jule Styne. Rosemary herself acted as emcee and lead performer. Each event raised between $350,000 and $500,000. On April 12, 1988, Betty’s birthday, the Betty Clooney Center opened its doors in Long Beach, California, providing a day care facility for patients.
The Singers’ Salute
ran for a further eight years, raising over $3 million for the charitable cause and becoming in itself a major show business event, with over 200 stellar names joining Rosemary at the annual benefit shows.

Meanwhile, Rosemary’s 1985 Concord album, her 10th, had deviated slightly from the individual songwriter theme.
Rosemary Clooney Sings Ballads
was an Allen Sviridoff suggestion—“because she was such a good ballad singer”—and featured 10 songs, all with solid pedigrees in American music. The collection anticipated the three further songbook albums that she would record with the inclusion of songs by Johnny Mercer, Johnny Burke/James Van Heusen, and Rodgers and Hart. Rosemary returned to her individual songwriter theme the following year with an album devoted solely to the music of Van Heusen. As a composer, Van Heusen enjoyed two enduring partnerships, first with lyricist Johnny Burke, followed by an equally successful teaming with Sammy Cahn. These alliances gave Van Heusen the unique standing of having been the songwriter-of-choice for America’s two most significant vocalists, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Cahn and Van Heusen had also been behind Rosemary’s 1958 collaboration with Crosby on
Fancy Meeting You Here
. Rosemary chose to reprise one of the songs specially written for that album, “Love Won’t Let You Get Away,” recording two vocal tracks that enabled her to sing both her own and Crosby’s original parts. The Van Heusen collection also featured a repeat by Rosemary of two songs that she had recorded during her RCA years in the early ’60s. “It Could Happen To You” appeared on the
Clap Hands! Here Comes Rosie
album in 1960 while “Imagination” had been one of the tracks on the much-vaunted
Love
album a year later. Both offered interesting comparisons with Rosemary’s new Concord versions. Neither song was taken at a significantly different tempo in the rerecording, but Rosemary’s
original vocals had been couched in big band arrangements. They had been good but to a degree were straitjacketed by the highly prescriptive orchestrations. Now in the setting of a jazz sextet, Rosemary’s freedom to balance her voice against each of the instruments is striking. While her singing on these songs would not pass the O’Day/McRae improvisation test, it clearly demonstrates an ability to treat the voice like an instrument itself, varying the tone and texture of her delivery to match her surroundings and complement her fellow musicians.

Rosemary’s touring schedule during 1986 brought her close to home with a 10-night engagement at the Vine St. Bar and Grill in Los Angeles. While there was no question that cavernous venues such as the Hollywood Bowl offered bigger bucks, Rosemary’s management realized that smaller, intimate settings were ideally suited to her emerging musical persona. Vine St. was one such, with a capacity of 100 and top ticket price of $20. It had been almost 40 years since Rosemary had played a Hollywood nightclub. That had been in the Tony Pastor days when she and Betty had appeared at the Hollywood Palladium, just a couple of blocks away. Rosemary offered two different shows each night. The first, at 9:00
P.M
., was built around her
Blue Rose
album. Later in the evening, her second appearance showcased songs from her Irving Berlin Concord album. Philip Elwood found her to be “a remarkably free musical soul; she takes chances with songs and interpretation. And, years ago, she learned how to bounce vocally off of instrumentalists, to make them part of her act.”
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Gerald Nachman, writing in the
San Francisco Chronicle
said, “Clooney just keeps on getting better. [She] is so much more interesting, and real, today than during her ‘prime.’ She was only famous then. Vocally, this is the prime of her life.”
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Nightclubs on the West Coast were one thing, but Rosemary’s team had a bigger priority. They needed to find the right venue for her in New York. “Everything happens in New York City,” was Rosemary’s maxim, said Allen Sviridoff. Audiences there were different, more sophisticated and more demanding, and the reviewers carried more weight. The income from the booking was almost irrelevant. Good reviews and good profile would offer massive paybacks in terms of the business they would generate for the rest of the year. Sviridoff’s first try-out venue in New York had been at Park Ten, on Park Avenue and 34th Street, in May 1985. Her appearance there brought a set of top-class reviews. Influential critic, John S. Wilson in the
New York Times
, anticipated the autobiographical theme that would soon come to dominate her performances. Noting that her first career was still represented in her act (there was a chorus still of “Come On-a My House”), Wilson observed that “now, three decades later, with a rougher and more colorful voice, she can sing songs that have character and she can mix pop,
jazz and comedy to create a rounded performance that depends, in some measure, on the years of living she has experienced since she first came in view.”
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Rosemary’s next settling point in New York was the tax-afflicted booking at
Michael’s Pub
before moving onto the
Blue Note
club at 131 West Third Street in Greenwich Village. Since opening in 1981, the club had quickly established a reputation as one of the leading jazz venues in New York. Rosemary’s presence there “validated the jazz aspects of her style,” Sviridoff said.
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A five-night stint in March 1987 was sufficient to generate two separate reviews in the
New York Times
and she was back again in January 1988 for a second visit. The music of Irving Berlin, with his 100th birthday approaching, dominated that show. Johnny Mercer was also featured, having been the subject of Rosemary’s latest Concord venture, recorded during the summer of 1987.
The Blue Note
was fine but Sviridoff was still looking for a venue that could provide Rosemary with a regular place in New York. She had another Carnegie Hall date lined up for May, and though the famous venue would figure prominently in Rosemary’s career through the following decade, it could never be the solution that Sviridoff was seeking. Finally, it came his way. Rosemary’s New York venue was to be found on the 65th floor of the Rockefeller Center. She was about to reach for the stars.

A
s Rosemary Clooney headed toward her 60th birthday, she was arguably at the zenith of her second career. It was also the happiest and most contented period of her life. Onstage, she still cut a glamorous figure. The attempts to lose weight might be a thing of the past, but there would be no significant addition to the number she registered on the scales, at least for a few more years. And she carried her weight well. Always clad in immaculately cut gowns that disguised much of the excess, her facial features remained sharp and attractive, the chiseled profile that reflected her Irish descent still undeniably a strong and handsome attribute. Her hair was well styled, mainly blonde in color, and her demeanor was generally one of high energy and enthusiasm. The image that Rosemary presented onstage reflected the contentment she felt off it. Her children were now all mature adults, and while her seven grandchildren were a source of fun and amusement, she also enjoyed the absence of parental responsibility. “I can just turn the key in the lock and go,” she said in 1991.
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A major reason for Rosemary’s contentment was the presence of Dante DiPaolo. Since their reunification in 1973, the two had been constantly together. It was a relationship built on deep mutual affection and companionship. And it was quirky. On the surface, the two appeared to bicker endlessly—“like watching Burns and Allen,” said one friend.
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Almost always, Dante was the loser. Rosemary’s wit had always been razor sharp and when combined with her directness and lack of patience, it made her a formidable adversary. Dante was the exact opposite. It had always been his feet rather than his head that did the talking. To many he was delightfully vague, a dreamer of a man. One favorite musing was what it would be like
to open a nightclub on Mars. “What the Hell does that mean?” would be Rosemary’s impatient response to Dante’s occasional ruminations. At times, some thought that she overstepped the mark, using words such as “brutal” to describe Rosemary’s treatment of her partner. The upfront turbulence of the “Rosemary and Dante Show,” however, disguised a deeply symbiotic relationship that was light years away from the destructive passion of her marriage to José Ferrer. “The difference was that Dante was damned good to her,” said one friend.
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“Whenever he was on the road with her, she was happy,” said another.
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“Dante was a nurturer,” said Deborah Grace Winer, “a provider of comfort, someone who took worries away. Home was wherever he was.”
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There was no question too that Dante offered Rosemary the support that she needed, and when she needed it most. Allen Sviridoff was very clear that Dante’s presence impacted both Rosemary’s public and personal life. “There might not have been a second career without him,” he said.
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And brutal or not, Rosemary always paid Dante a salary for the support he gave to her career.

Rosemary celebrated her 60th birthday on May 23, 1988. She marked the occasion with an appearance close to home at the Convention Center in Cincinnati in a concert that celebrated both the 125th anniversary of the Red Cross and the bicentenary of the City of Cincinnati. Unknown to her, the concert organizers also tagged on a special celebration in honor of her own birthday. Turning 60 did nothing to slow Rosemary down, and for the next five years, she was constantly on tour. During those years, her schedule included over 350 concert appearances, five more Concord albums, charity events, TV specials, chat shows, interviews, fairs, summer balls, and presidential dinners. She worked both ends of the generational spectrum. Her quasi-mother/son relationship with Michael Feinstein developed into a regular concert pairing, as did her friendship with rock singer Linda Ronstadt. One of the last projects that Nelson Riddle had worked on before his death in 1985 had been a set of crossover albums with Ronstadt. The bond with Riddle that both artists felt they shared led to an unexpected and unlikely pairing. At the other end of the scale, Rosemary renewed her friendship with Bob Hope, now nearing 90 years of age but still active. Their work included a USO tour to the newly unified Berlin, a throwback to Hope’s legendary forces’ shows that had extended from World War II through to Korea and Vietnam. When Hope finally gave up live appearances in the mid-90s, his wife Dolores, barely a few years younger, picked up the microphone and revived her own career as a singer that had petered out in the ’30s, even sharing a two-week billing with Rosemary in New York in 1997.