Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (30 page)

Life on the road was no easier than it had been back in the touring days of the Pastor band, but Rosemary still found it irresistible. “I like the road,” she
had told Larry King in 1987,
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even if the “road” usually involved air travel, which Rosemary hated. She was a nervous flyer in much the same way that she appeared to be a nervous performer, at least in the few minutes before she was to go on stage. Her pre-show routine had never involved anything resembling the vocal warmup that a trained singer might regard as a necessity. “The extent of Rosemary’s vocal warmup,” said daughter-in-law, Debby Boone “was to hum the first few bars of ‘The Best Is Yet to Come,’ take one good cough and she was good to go.”
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Preparing her throat involved nothing more than sucking on a cough drop, as she paced about. “I hate this.” … “I can’t keep doing this.” When the moment came to walk out on stage though, “mama would spit out her cough drop, cough twice, and step out of the shadows,” said daughter Monsita.
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Whatever nerves there had been disappeared as soon as Rosemary reached for the microphone and started to sing.

The onstage Rosemary had always cut a confident and commanding figure. Her customary singing position was to stand close to the piano, barely a yard from the ever-present figure of John Oddo at the keyboard. Her body movement was minimal—“I gave up high kicks long ago,” she once said. Like her mentor, Bing, one foot tapped regimentally to the beat. One hand—it could be left or right—gripped firmly on the microphone while the other finger-snapped to the tempo. Some singers of Rosemary’s vintage developed a technique of moving the mike closer for deeper notes and further away for anything when a vocal crack might become apparent. Not Rosemary. Her control of her voice remained impeccable. Whatever variation in sound she needed to produce came purely from her use of her vocal cords. The microphone remained an instrument to hear and transmit, not compensate and conceal. It never became a crutch.

Many of the musicians who worked with Rosemary stood in awe of her instinctive musicianship. That Rosemary didn’t read music was an irrelevance. “She learned a song quickly,” said pianist and composer Ian Bernard. “Second time through, she knew it. Betty was the same. They both had an innate musicality that you can’t teach.”
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Others working with Rosemary for the first time quickly learned how formidable a presence she could be. “You had to bring your A-game,” said guitarist John Pizzarelli. “She knew everything that went on, on the bandstand. She’d been there and seen the tricks.”
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It was not that Rosemary was difficult or over-demanding, but equally, she did not suffer fools. Michael Feinstein said that Rosemary was easy to get along with—mostly. “If she was not in a good mood, or if something had rubbed her up the wrong way, she could be very tough,” he said. Sooner or later, everyone, it seemed, felt the force of Rosemary’s tongue. When Feinstein himself inadvertently crossed her on what seemed a triviality, Rosemary delivered a broadside. “So what?”
Rosemary’s daughter, Maria, told him when he sought solace. “You’ve been dodging a bullet for years.”
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Even the audience was not totally immune from the force of Rosemary’s wit and occasional short temper. Dealing with the occasional drunk or heckler went with the territory in the nightspots of New York and Chicago, and Rosemary’s usual technique for handling them relied on turning the reprobate into the butt of one of her jokes. “Excuse me, sir, but I work alone,” was usually her first response, followed if necessary by “You have no lines here, sir.” Occasionally, something more forthright was necessary. “There’s a bus leaving in ten minutes; be under it,” she once told a transgressor. Only once was Rosemary drawn into a situation where she overstepped the mark. During one of her sojourns at Rainbow and Stars in New York, Rosemary found herself confronted by a persistent heckler who resisted all the usual hints. Deborah Grace Winer witnessed the encounter. “The first time he interrupts on this round, she makes a quick zinger (and everybody laughs); the next time, and the next, she wisecracks, and then finally she stops the show cold, and says plainly, ‘Listen—are you going to shut up, or what?’ She goes on to tell him that he’s got to be quiet. ‘Because you see,’ she tells him, ‘when you keep doing that, what you’re doing is you’re throwing off my concentration. And then I can’t do a good show. And all these people came out in this weather, and paid their money, and I really want to do a good show for them. So you’ve just got to shut up.’ The room is stunned into silence. ‘And if you don’t want to shut up,’ she goes on, ‘well, then, I’ll be happy to pick up your check. OK?’ She says it all pleasantly and matter-of-factly, and the guy has been sitting there, wordless for the first time all night, looking up at her with a smirk of embarrassment.”
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The battle was won but the price was Rosemary’s rapport with the audience. That night’s bubble was broken beyond repair. “It was like, ‘Whoa, the teacher yelled at us,’” said Winer.
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It was Rosemary herself who was the loser. When that show was over, there was none of the usual conviviality with friends backstage. She was distraught, said Winer.

Rosemary’s preparations for her recording sessions were not much different from the way she approached a live show. To her, a session was just another live appearance, something that surprised some of the newer arrivals to the record business. John Burk joined Concord Records in the late ’80s as vice-president and was immediately struck by Rosemary’s insistence on working live with the musicians. She used a recording booth in order to get maximum separation of her voice track but at a time when most singers had moved to recording with just prerecorded backing tracks, Rosemary insisted on being in there with the band. More surprising to Burk was her preparedness to sing a song through from start to finish.
When Rosemary had first begun recording in 1946, the industry knew no other way of making a record, but by 1989, a disc had become an amalgam of mixes and edits. It made Rosemary’s completist approach look delightfully old-fashioned. More surprising still was the number of occasions when Rosemary would nail the recording on the first take. John Pizzarelli made a guest appearance on one track for a 1993 date for Concord. When he expressed surprise that their first take of “It’s Only a Paper Moon” had prompted a call of “next number,” Rosemary’s response to his puzzlement was simple. “Well, we were good,” she said.
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On the same session, Rosemary toiled through a dozen or more takes on Dave Frishberg’s “Do You Miss New York?” only to conclude that her first attempt had been the best.

Rosemary’s ongoing relationship with Concord had progressed from the on-the-hoof spontaneity of 10 years before, with John Oddo’s talents now ensuring that each album was easily replicable on stage. The routine of one album per year felt comfortable, both to Rosemary and Concord, and was carefully planned. “There was a reason behind every album and every song on every album,” said Allen Sviridoff.
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Each new Concord offering meant that Rosemary was able to offer a new repertoire each year for the concert halls to which she made annual pilgrimages. The style and nature of her recordings, however, was about to change, but not before Rosemary had delivered two more albums built around the catalogs of the great songwriters. In the autumn of 1988, she put together a collection of songs ostensibly drawn from Broadway shows. The 12 titles gave Rosemary license to select from the work of such composers as Burton Lane, Frank Loesser, and Noel Coward although it was a new song that stood out from the rest. Strictly, “Where Do You Start?” had no locus in a
Show Tunes
album in that it did not come from a show. Rosemary liked the song as soon as she heard Michael Feinstein sing it and was determined to find a way of including it in her next album. Having heard Feinstein sing it on Broadway seemed reason enough. The song’s theme of picking up the pieces of a failed relationship resonated with Rosemary. It soon became a regular part of her stage act and anticipated the shift toward an autobiographical focus that would dominate her work through the next decade.

There was one final songwriter tribute to discharge before the change of direction.
Rosemary Clooney Sings Rodgers, Hart & Hammerstein
was an obvious, if unusual, theme that Richard Rodgers’s publishing arm had suggested. Singers normally treated Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein as separate entities, but Rosemary’s album offered 12 titles, six with lyrics by Lorenz Hart and five by Oscar Hammerstein II. The remaining song—“The Sweetest Sounds”—was a comparatively rare example of words and music by Rodgers himself. Rosemary worked with the usual six-piece band
on the session but with some changes of personnel. Jack Sheldon took on the trumpet/cornet spot normally filled by Warren Vaché, and to good effect, adding his vocal to Rosemary’s for what
Downbeat
called “a typically wacky mile-wide-smile duet on ‘People Will Say We’re in Love.’”
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Another new feature was the appearance on five of the tracks by the L.A Jazz Choir, a vocal ensemble put together by choral specialist Gerald Eskelin in 1980. The group acted like a string section on songs such as “Little Girl Blue” and “My Romance” in a style not dissimilar to that of the Hi-Lo’s on Rosemary’s 1950s television series. It was not a move that found much favor with supporters of Rosemary’s new style. “A bit hokey,” said
Downbeat
.
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Other reviewers were fulsome with their praise of Scott Hamilton’s saxophone and Chauncey Welsch’s trombone (“a revelation”) while offering little more than a footnoted acknowledgment that there had been a choir present too. As with previous songbooks, Rosemary was able to add a personal touch from her firsthand knowledge of the composers. “You have to do Rodgers,” she told one interviewer, “although I didn’t particularly like him as a man. He was very rude to me the first time I met him.”
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Rude or not, there was no question that Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart had given one part of New York the song that served as its anthem. They wrote “Manhattan” in 1925 for the show
The Garrick Gaieties
. Rosemary had included it in her
Show Tunes
album and when Allen Sviridoff finally came up with the venue he had been looking for in New York, the song was a shoo-in for her February 1989 opening. The venue that Sviridoff found was of similar vintage to Rodgers’s classic song. The Rockefeller Center, a complex of 19 commercial buildings sitting between 48th and 51st streets, had risen from the ashes of the Great Depression in 1932, the largest privately funded building project the world had seen. Although built primarily for commercial use, entertainment had always been part of the building’s raison d’être. It provided a home to the Radio City Music Hall and to the entertainment giant, RCA. The music hall was located on the ground floor of the complex. Higher up, on the 65th floor, John D. Rockefeller had also created an entertainment facility—the Rainbow Room—which quickly established itself as one of New York’s hottest nightspots during the ’30s. Noel Coward, Beatrice Lillie, and Duke Ellington were among those who played there to great acclaim. Fifty years on, David Rockefeller, grandson of John D., invested $25 million in a facelift that now offered a smaller venue alongside the Rainbow Room. During daytime, it was known as the Evergreen Club, but when night fell, it became Rainbow and Stars. With seating for little more than 100, fine dining, and unparalleled views of the New York skyline, it was destined to take on the mantle of its famous predecessor of the ’30s. When it opened for business in the New Year of 1989, the
priority was to find a big New York name to establish the room. Tony Bennett was the obvious candidate, with Rosemary next in line. It was the beginning of a nine-year association with the venue that came to mean as much to her as any other she had ever played. Deborah Grace Winer thought that the venue “embodied everything about what she had arrived at and who she wanted to be. She valued it above everything else that she did. It literally represented the tippy-top of New York,” she said.
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While never lucrative in their own right, Rosemary’s annual visits brought attention and profile. Her ability to attract and woo the city’s most influential critics, none more so than
New York Times
columnist Stephen Holden, was key to her success, although that particular relationship was not easy. “She was scared to death of him,” Allen Sviridoff recalled.
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Just why was never clear. Rosemary had always been savvy in the way she built and sustained relationships with the critics, but it was perhaps the professional distance that Holden liked to keep that put him out of reach. Her fears were unfounded because Holden was almost always on her side, never more so than on her first night. “Rosemary Clooney exudes comfort, coziness and serenity, just as her friend and champion, Bing Crosby, once did. If her delivery is not as soft as that of a crooner, she also never really raises her voice. The tone she adopts for both ballads and up-tempo songs is warm but matter-of-fact. Like Crosby’s, her technical proficiency is such that her singing seems nearly effortless, though of course it isn’t,” he wrote.
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Variety
was similarly enthusiastic, describing her phrasing as “miraculous as ever” and her voice as having the “consistency of coconut milk.”
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Other critics picked out Rosemary’s rendition of Hart’s lyric to “Manhattan,” including her comment that it was a song she had sung “a thousand times but never in such a perfect setting.”
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Ever the traditionalist, Rosemary’s rendition was faithful to Hart’s original 1925 lyric, including its reference to the ’20s musical,
Abie’s Irish Rose
, which, by the modern era, was usually replaced by a reference to
My Fair Lady
.

Over the next nine years, Rosemary would devote a winter month each year to Rainbow and Stars. The stints were hard work, two shows a night from Tuesday to Saturday, often in the depths of the New York winter. Each year, the show built its own momentum, seats selling steadily in advance and picking up apace once the run opened. By the second week, Rosemary was into her stride. By the third, she was beginning to tire and by the fourth, she couldn’t wait for the run to end. But still she came back. During her early visits, she sang a chorus of “Come On-a My House”—“Now you
know
I’m going to get round to that one. Just hang in there with me,” she told the audience. Eventually, she decided that it was so far out of step with the rest of her repertoire that she found the courage to drop it.