Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (31 page)

Rainbow and Stars was not Rosemary’s only New York venue. She was also a regular at events at Carnegie Hall. In June 1989, she appeared as part of the JVC Jazz Festival alongside Dave Brubeck and jazz pianist Marian McPartland. Two years later, she returned, for the first time as the headline attraction. In a show called
Rosemary Clooney and the Arrangers
, much space was given over to her work with Nelson Riddle, whose son Christopher conducted some of his father’s arrangements. New York jazz critic Gary Giddins saw the show as a seminal moment in changing perceptions of Rosemary. “Two emphatic highlights of the evening were her interpretations of ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,’” he wrote, “as arranged by Matz, and ‘The Shadow of Your Smile,’ as arranged by its composer, Mandel. In both instances, she sang the little known verse, using it to build tension before embarking on the well-known chorus. The first performance was a lesson in reading a lyric. I don’t think I’d ever found myself really hearing the words before. Choosing her high notes with deliberation and hitting them like chimes, and phrasing cagily so that her chest tones were as full at the ends of her phrases as at the beginnings, she opened up the song, dramatized it, made it new. Similarly, with the help of a dilatory tempo that understated the usual Latin rhythm, she reclaimed “The Shadow of Your Smile” from the countless readings that made the song a cliché in the ’60s.”
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Rosemary’s change of tack at Concord Records manifested itself in an album of World War II songs called
For the Duration
. Rosemary recorded the album in October 1990, three months after the death of her Uncle George, whose picture in wartime uniform adorned the cover. Brother Nick penned the sleeve note, detailing the songs that Rosemary had first encountered “as a bobby-soxer” during the war years. Giddins again was enthusiastic about the collection, saying it was “perhaps the finest overall achievement since her comeback and one of the four or five best albums she has made in the past 40 years.” Rosemary’s voice, he wrote, “with its decisive disposition, heady vibrato, and unmistakable humor, reclaims these songs not as nostalgia for a bygone age but as a shared musical past that can be revisited without sorrow or recrimination.”
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The titles included two songs, “No Love, No Nothin’” and “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old” that expressed the loneliness of the girls left at home, from which another reviewer said Rosemary extracted “every ounce of fun.”
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At the other end of the scale “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover” represented the war’s most optimistic song, notwithstanding that fact that its American composers, writing about the war zone on the south coast of England, ignored the fact that there are no bluebirds in Britain. It mattered not. Rosemary’s rendition, sung just to Oddo’s piano, brought new life to the song that had been a wartime anthem across the Atlantic.

As Rosemary moved on and through the ’90s, her annual outings on Concord, plus her regular visits to Rainbow and Stars, began to act as a barometer of the inevitable physical and vocal decline that began to set in. Although Rosemary’s artistry was never questioned—
Variety
’s 1990 comment that the show offered “a post-graduate seminar in how to perform in a night club,” could have stood for each year of the decade at the Rockefeller venue
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—she was undeniably aging. Her features that had retained a youthful sharpness in 1988 soon began to take on a jowly appearance. The glasses that had once been seen only in private were now ever present. More ominously, Rosemary’s weight once more began to increase, all adding to the matronly appearance that she was now beginning to display.

Rosemary had never been one to cling onto a fading youth, but her weight gain concerned those who were close to her. Sherm Holvey was one. “I tried everything I could,” he said, “but there was no way to change her behavioral patterns.”
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Dante DiPaolo discovered the same thing. “She was stubborn when it came to things like that,” he said. “If she wanted to do something, you weren’t going to stop her. Forget about it.”
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Other friends, such as Michael Feinstein and Ron Shaw, each broached the subject of her weight to no avail. For one fleeting moment, Shaw was surprised to hear Rosemary raise the subject with him as she tucked into a plentiful dinner, the irony behind the timing of her comments strangely passing her by, he said. There was interest too from a major diet and weight-loss organization, seemingly prepared to offer a very hefty payment-by-results sponsorship, but Rosemary refused to commit.

Rosemary’s vocal powers were similarly atrophied by the passage of time. The decline was less obvious and more easily managed, but both her weight and long history of smoking contributed to a diminution in her vocal range and an increasing breathlessness in her singing. The change was more apparent to Rosemary than to anyone else. Although critic Gary Giddins was enthusiastic about
For the Duration
, Rosemary told him that she thought it was the first album where the flaws in her voice were apparent. Stephen Holden noticed the change too on her mid-’90s dates in New York, but thought her “innate musicality” concealed it to such an extent that few in the audience would have picked it up. Rosemary handled it, he said, by changing her phrasing to fit an increasing number of short breaths. Ken Peplowski, who played clarinet on some of the Rainbow dates, concurred, saying that at times, she could “barely squeeze out the notes, but still managed to make the most of what she had. Still honest,” he said.
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As ever, Rosemary was willing to confront the issue head on. In an appearance with Larry King later in the decade, she claimed that since stopping smoking (publicly, at least), she had noticed an improvement. “But there’s
always a way to overcome it,” she said. “People don’t talk with long, long breaths.”
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Rosemary’s remarkable ability to seemingly do more with less carried her through three more Concord albums between 1991 and 1993. First came
Girl Singer
, her first big band album since the Woody Herman collaboration. Using her favored description of herself as the title, the album paid tribute to the great swing bands and their female vocalists.
Do You Miss New York
, recorded in 1992, was for many people the closest representation on disc of Rosemary’s Rainbow and Stars performances. Despite the use of Dave Frishberg’s memoir to the city as the title song, the album was more a set of personal reminiscences than a New York–themed set, including tributes to Lena Horne and Nat “King” Cole and the inclusion of an Ellington song, “I Ain’t Got Nothin’ but the Blues” that had originally been intended for the
Blue Rose
album. Not for the first time, however, it was Nelson Riddle who stole the show, Rosemary reusing, to great effect, his arrangement of “I Get Along without You Very Well” (“that used to be our song, kind of,” she said)
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that had first appeared on
Rosie Solves the Swinging Riddle
. In 1993, Rosemary returned to the travel theme for
Still on the Road
. Vocal arranger Earl Brown was now a significant member of the Clooney team, writing many of her vocal arrangements and guiding her through new and unfamiliar material. For the new album, Brown co-wrote the title song, a melancholic reminiscence of the less glamorous side of the life of an itinerant singer. The cover illustration for the album offered an image of the 1950s Rosemary (“40 years younger and 80 pounds lighter,” she said), waiting for a train at the Maysville station. There were many echoes of Crosby in the album, recorded in the year of his 90th birthday, a milestone that Rosemary had celebrated with a Carnegie Hall concert in his honor. “Ol’ Man River” recreated the arrangement that he had used to close their shows together in the ’70s, while on “Road to Morocco” Rosemary recreated the fun of the Hope and Crosby duets, in tandem once again with trumpeter Jack Sheldon. Rosemary also chose to revisit the perennial lament of Irish homesickness, “How Are Things in Glocca Morra,” a song she had included on the
Show Tunes
album just six years before. This time, Rosemary added more intimacy to her reading but the loss of depth and range to her voice over that period was apparent. Despite the obvious vocal decline, however, it was once again a simple voice and piano offering that stole the show. “(Back Home Again in) Indiana” was a 1917 song, recorded by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and seemingly forever locked into a breezy ragtime tempo. In the hands of Clooney and Oddo, it became a melancholic tale of early days, growing up in the Midwest. Rosemary’s interpretation
put the song alongside “Glocca Morra” as a plaintive recollection of a long-lost home.

February 1994 saw a nervous Rosemary open another month’s season at Rainbow and Stars. Ten days before she arrived in New York, an earthquake had hit her home in Beverly Hills, bringing down a chimneystack. “I went through the Los Angeles earthquake, so truly, I’m very glad to be here,” she told an audience in Hamden, Connecticut, en route to New York. By the time she and Dante made it to their New York apartment for the run, Rosemary was fighting a head cold. A badly planned one-nighter in Toronto on January 29, just ahead of her New York opening, did little to soothe her mood. With weather forecasters full of doom and New York reeling from five big snowstorms, a flight to Toronto was the last thing she wanted. Much of the material for her Rainbow and Stars show was still unfamiliar and all that Rosemary wanted to do was settle into the run. “I wish you could start on the second night,” she told her first night crowd.
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As ever, her fears were groundless. Although the material, drawn mainly from
Still on the Road
did not please everyone, the critics once again lined up to sing her praises. “The album grows on you,” wrote Gene Seymour in
Newsday
, “even when the material isn’t always worthy of her. But nothing beats seeing her live. Don’t deny yourself the pleasure.”
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Rosemary’s cold was a minor ailment but there were increasing signs of more significant health problems along the way. She knew that she needed a knee replacement, a consequence of a fall on some ice in the ’70s and an injury inevitably aggravated over time by her excessive weight. In September 1994, she was hospitalized for the removal of a kidney stone—“five children in five years but nothing was more excruciating than the pain of a kidney stone,” she said
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—while in November of the same year an attack of bronchial pneumonia caused her to miss her White Christmas Party shows that had become an annual mini-tour. The lost dates included a sellout booking at the Lincoln Center in New York, but despite the setbacks, the Clooney bandwagon continued to roll. She took time out from her singing to appear in two episodes of the medical drama
ER
, playing the part of an Alzheimer’s sufferer who wandered around the hospital, spontaneously breaking into song. It earned Rosemary an Emmy nomination and was her only experience of working with the next rising star of the Clooney clan, nephew George. The son of her brother, Nick, he had boarded with Rosemary in Los Angeles when, as an aspiring young actor, he had trailed his way around the studios looking for his first break. He had also taken a turn chauffeuring Rosemary and the other
4 Girls 4
to various gigs. “There was nothing sweet and subtle about driving those broads around,” he said later. “In the backseat, Martha Raye would shout, ‘Georgie, pull the
car over, I have to take a leak.’ Then she’d hang a leg out the window and do her stuff while I kept looking forward. Meanwhile, my Aunt Rosemary would say, ‘Honey, don’t turn around. You’ll learn too much about the aging process.’”
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Rosemary ended 1994 looking forward. The next year would see her 50th anniversary in show business, the same anniversary that she had helped Bing Crosby celebrate in 1976, fueling her own comeback. Crosby’s celebration had come in the year of the American Bicentennial, prompting him to come up with the term “Demi-Centennial” to describe his own milestone. It was a phrase that Rosemary was eager to adopt for her own golden anniversary. During October and November 1994 she entered the Group IV recording studios in Hollywood to put together her most personal album yet for Concord. Titled simply
Demi-Centennial
, it assembled 16 songs, each with its own particular significance for her. Her opening choice was “Danny Boy.” the selection that had puzzled brother Nick when he came to write the sleeve notes. Later, when the album provided the basis for a series of concerts, the same song also provided an amusing moment for bass player Jay Leonhart. Rosemary used “Danny Boy” regularly as an opener. One night, he recalled, she got to the high note that climaxes the line “I’ll be
there
in sunshine or in shadow.” As ever, her warmup had been virtually nonexistent and when she went for the note, first time through, nothing came out. “John Oddo went into the break and she whispered across to me ‘sing that high note for me,’” he said. Second chorus, he did just that. “No one overheard Rose tell me to sing it,” he said, “so both the audience and the rest of the band were slightly astounded that I would jump in and sing. But Rose requested it, and who was I to say no?”
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Beyond “Danny Boy,” the
Demi-Centennial
album included a duet with Rosemary’s niece, Betty’s daughter Cathy Campo, on “The Coffee Song,” plus other titles for Tony Pastor, Nelson Riddle, and Dante. When she sang “Falling in Love Again” in tribute to her friend Marlene Dietrich, Rosemary eschewed the boasting that was inherent in Dietrich’s rendition in favor of a treatment that brought out the helpless vulnerability of the femme fatale, unable to resist the attractions of a new lover to the extent that the final line—“can’t help it”—became almost a cry of despair. “That’s what I heard when Marlene sang it,” Rosemary said.
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There were inherent messages in the album for her children and grandchildren plus memoirs of friends such as Tony Bennett, Bob Hope, and of course, Bing. The album also formed the basis for Rosemary’s first music video, filmed at a specially recorded concert at Disneyworld later in 1995. It gave Rosemary the opportunity to poke fun at her association with novelty songs. She was, she said, constantly asked to sing, “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”—Patti
Page’s chart topping hit from 1953. “I recorded so many bad songs that they figure that if it’s a crap song, then I must have done it,” she said. “I can only hope that Patti Page is working somewhere tonight and that someone is asking her to sing ‘Come On-a My House.’ It would be fair.”
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There seemed little doubt then that Rosemary’s 50th anniversary was just another staging post in a career that was now becoming legendary. There was no hint that Rosemary had any thoughts about retirement. “I don’t know what I’d do,” she told Larry King. Spending more time with the kids and grandkids would be good she said, but not enough. “I have to sing.”
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With the 50th anniversary duly chalked off, Rosemary moved smoothly into the 51st year of her professional career without breaking stride. Her bookings were plentiful and her ambitions high. But she also had a surprise in store. Wedding bells were about to peal.