Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (34 page)

R
osemary Clooney died peacefully at her home on North Roxbury Drive on June 29, 2002, with her family around her. Her passing came after a six-month battle with lung cancer that had been first diagnosed during December 2001.

The shocking news of Rosemary’s illness had come at the end of a typically busy year that had taken her on a travelogue around many of her favorite venues. She had kicked off with an appearance close to home at the Louisville Palace on March 3, 2001. The concert marked the final show in the Bank One Louisville Pops concert series. Brother Nick acted as MC and Rosemary performed an hour’s worth of songs. Her list included “We’re in the Money,” which she dedicated to nephew George, and a rendition of “Thanks for the Memory,” just with piano, bass, and drums. One local reviewer said it was “riveting in its sweetness.”
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From Kentucky, she flew to Florida for three separate dates before returning to New York and her third spell in less than a year at Feinstein’s. During her two-week stay at the new club, she took time out to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Manhattan Association of Cabarets and Clubs (MAC).

Rosemary’s show at Feinstein’s positioned her alongside a new set of musicians in the form of the Big Kahuna and Copa Cat Band, a 12-piece swing band from Honolulu. The Hawaiian musician, Matt Catingub, had formed the band two years earlier, earning plaudits with two debut albums on Concord. Catingub and Rosemary had first met in 1995 when both appeared at Carnegie Hall in a Frank Sinatra tribute concert. The son of jazz vocalist, Mavis Rivers, Catingub was a musical jack-of-all trades who had cut his teeth early in the music business. Still shy of his 40th birthday,
Catingub had been working with singers and bands since his teens. Will Friedwald’s assessment was that “he knows practically everything there is to know about accompanying a vocalist.”
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After their Carnegie meeting in 1995, Catingub had conducted at several concerts for Rosemary, working alongside the ever-present John Oddo. When the idea came forward to put the Big Kahuna Band behind her on an album, Rosemary was immediately enthusiastic. Catingub’s musicians were young, several of them aged between 18 and 20, but the age gap posed no problems for her: “72 looking at 27” was how she described herself on one TV appearance with the young band.
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“She loved working with the band because she saw it as a throwback to her early days, touring with the Tony Pastor band,” Catingub said.
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Like many musicians before him, Catingub could not help but be impressed by the strength of Rosemary’s stage presence. She might have needed help onto the stage, “but once there, wow, look out,” he said. Their show together at Feinstein’s was built around the
Sentimental Journey
CD that Rosemary had put together with Catingub’s entourage, partly from a studio session at Skywalker Sound and partly with material recorded at the Rosemary Clooney Music Festival in Maysville. Catingub had been struck by Rosemary’s approach to the recording. With no warmup—“she just walked in,” he said—Rosemary had rattled through the songs very quickly, Catingub having provided her with the arrangement demos on CDs ahead of the recording sessions. With a young band, the occasional mistake was inevitable, but Rosemary had taken it all in her stride. The new band—the album’s subtitle was “The Girl Singer and Her New Big Band”—gave a freshness to the CD that set it apart from her more recent Concord outings. Its content owed much to the big band swing recordings that she had done for the label almost 10 years earlier, and the songs were once again selected for their meaning to Rosemary and her life and times. The two obviously autobiographical choices were “I’m the Big Band Singer,” written by Rosemary’s old friend and ex-big band vocalist Merv Griffin, and “The Singer,” a tribute to Sinatra written by two of his musical acolytes, Vinnie Falcone and Joe Cocuzzo. “Rockin’ Chair” was a memory of Mildred Bailey. “My favorite singer,” Rosemary had said in 1998,
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(“she was Bing’s favorite too,” she told Jonathan Schwartz), and there were three songs with links to Bob Hope. They included “Ya Got Class,” a Hope-Clooney duet from the 1953 film
Here Come the Girls
, with Catingub himself becoming the latest, and last, addition to Rosemary’s long line of duet partners. The album had more fizz than anything Rosemary had recorded since her Concord tribute to Nelson Riddle in 1995 and the same sense of pep and vigor accompanied her to Feinstein’s. Writing what would be his final review of a Clooney performance,
New York Times
critic, Stephen
Holden, said that the band’s “big, brawling sound brings out the swinger in Ms. Clooney,” and “visibly stirred new energy into the singer.”
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With the album finished, Rosemary made plans for a nostalgic return to London in June 2001, in tandem with Michael Feinstein. As a dry run, the twosome appeared at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts in Los Angeles during April. In May, she was back in Vegas, again with Catingub’s band, before joining Feinstein on a plane to London. They had two shows planned, at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank on June 18 followed two days later by a repeat performance at the National Concert Hall in Dublin. By now, she and Feinstein had developed a double act to complement their individual performances. Duets on “Our Love Is Here to Stay” and “Isn’t It a Pity” were standard items, as was a piece of repartee about the latter song. “I don’t know if you know this, Rosemary,” Feinstein would say, “but ‘Isn’t It a Pity’ is Barbra Streisand’s favorite Gershwin number.” “Can I tell you how little I care?” was Rosemary’s response, spontaneous and unrehearsed when Feinstein first tossed in the line but one that went so well that it became a regular part of the act. Despite their rehearsed jokes, Feinstein by now knew Rosemary well enough to also expect the unexpected. Another frequent duet for them was Irving Berlin’s “You’re Just in Love.” “You introduce this song,” Rosemary once said to Feinstein onstage, adding as an aside to the audience “he knows everything.” Feinstein went through a brief history of
Call Me Madam
and Ethel Merman, only for Rosemary to interject one night—“Aha! I gotcha! Perry Como and I sang the song on radio before the show opened. So
I
introduced this song, see.”
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After returning from Europe, Rosemary took the summer off to recharge her batteries. On September 10, 2011, she was booked to perform at the Southern Governors’ Conference in Lexington, Kentucky, with brother Nick as master of ceremonies. Vice-President Cheney was guest of honor. Cheney flew back to Washington that evening, while Rosemary headed to her home in Augusta, prior to her next concert date, due four days later at the recently redeveloped Evansville Auditorium and Convention Center in Indiana. She awoke to witness the 9/11 terrorist attacks unfolding on television before her eyes. “Like everyone else,” she told a local journalist, “I couldn’t stay away from the TV the last few days.” She had, she said, considered canceling the show but decided to go ahead. “I needed to sing,” she said, “that’s what I do.”
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In recent years, Rosemary had often taken to closing her shows with Irving Berlin’s “alternative national anthem,” “God Bless America,” but when she sang it in Evansville, it took on an altogether different significance. “Arguably the best moment of the entire evening came when she sang and led the now-standing crowd in ‘God Bless America,’” said the reviewer. “Tears were openly shed. And not just because
of the lyrics and their current significance, but also because Clooney truly makes a lyric come to life.”
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In October, Rosemary headed for the Westbury Music Fair with the Big Kahuna Band before making her final national television appearance on ABC-TV. Hosted by Barbara Walters,
The View
represented one of fate’s uncanny coincidences: 24 years earlier, Walters had also been the host when Bing Crosby had made what became his last national TV appearance. Rosemary was there to plug her new CD but sang “Count Your Blessings” as a special request to try to capture the upside of life post-9/11. Back home in California, her next appearance came at the Davies Hall in San Francisco before Rosemary and Dante, along with other family and friends, flew to Hawaii for a holiday. Hawaii was a favorite retreat for her, but on this trip, she agreed to add in a couple of concerts at the end of the vacation. The decision presented an opportunity for her to work with the Honolulu Symphony Pops orchestra, under Matt Catingub’s direction. At the time, the orchestra was pitching for a recording contract with Concord, which decided to record the concert with Rosemary as an audition for the band. It was a fortuitous decision. A few months after Rosemary’s death in 2002, the concert recordings were released under the title
Rosemary Clooney—The Last Concert
. The disc captured Rosemary in fine form and excellent voice, clearly reveling in the company of the young musicians around her.

Despite the title of the CD, Rosemary’s actual last concert appearance came almost a month after she returned from Hawaii. On December 14, 2001, she appeared at the Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis, in a Christmas show before flying to Red Bank, New Jersey, where she repeated the show the following night at the Count Basie Theater. By then, the storm clouds that Rosemary had sung about in Berlin’s “God Bless America” lyric, were gathering in her own life. Some abnormalities detected during a routine physical led to her undergoing a chest x-ray at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. It showed a shadow on Rosemary’s left lung. Further tests were planned for the New Year. Rosemary spent what would be her final Christmas at home with her family before returning to Mayo in January. It would be five months before she saw her home again. On January 9, 2002, the news broke that Rosemary had lung cancer. Two days later, she underwent surgery for the removal of the upper lobe of her left lung. Recovery was slow. Hopes that she might be well enough to attend the Grammy Awards in New York in February soon disappeared, and it was son Miguel who collected a Lifetime Achievement Award on her behalf. It was not until May that she was well enough to leave the clinic and return to California in time to celebrate Mother’s Day and then her 74th birthday with her family. For a brief time, there was hope for a recovery and resumption of touring. Allen
Sviridoff visited her at North Roxbury and found her sitting up and asking about where they were working next. There was talk of the next Rosemary Clooney Music Festival in September and of a 75th birthday concert at Carnegie Hall in May 2003. It was not to be. On June 26, 2002, Reuters ran a press release from the family saying that Rosemary was undergoing treatment at home for a recurrence of the disease. Its tone was despondent. “She’s comfortable and she’s surrounded by her family,” it said. Michael Feinstein, appearing in Cincinnati at the time of Rosemary’s death, told the
Cincinnati Enquirer
that Rosemary had been “frightened and surprised” by the recurrence, which came only three weeks before her death, “but she immediately made peace with the fact that she was going to die,” he said.
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Nick Clooney spoke to his sister on the telephone on June 28 and found her spirit strong. “What hurts?” he asked. “Nothing” came the reply. When he asked how her throat was and if she could still sing, Rosemary sang “When October Goes” down the phone line. The song was a posthumous collaboration between lyricist Johnny Mercer and Barry Manilow, after Mercer’s death. His hitherto unpublished verse with its poignant theme of times passing away had been a favorite of Rosemary’s ever since it first appeared. Mercer’s lyric had never been more appropriate. “She sang it strong,” said Nick.
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It was Rosemary Clooney’s last song. Her condition rapidly deteriorated to the extent that Nick and his wife Nina were still en route to California when the news came that around 6:00
P.M
. on June 29, 2002, Rosemary Clooney had passed peacefully away.

The funeral Mass took place at Good Shepherd Catholic Church on July 3, 2002. Her body was then transported to Maysville where a second service was held on July 5 in St. Patrick Church. It was where Rosemary had been baptized and recently married. She was laid to rest in St. Patrick Cemetery under a simple white marble headstone that bore just her name and the dates of her birth and death. Her home on North Roxbury Drive survived her, but not by much. Despite local conservationists’ efforts, the house fell victim to the wrecker’s ball in the summer of 2005.

Tributes filled the pages of the world’s press. All of them told the remarkable rise, fall, and rise again story of Rosemary’s life, and most took the line that Rosemary had defied time and gotten better as she got older. “Clooney’s singing was a perfect marriage of warmth and wit, with a tone that could be both sultry and nurturing and a sense of rhythmic intuition admired by jazz and pop connoisseurs alike,” Elysa Gardner wrote in a piece that was representative of obituaries from around the world.
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Even those for whom the birdlike qualities of the young Clooney voice resonated most strongly acknowledged the completeness of the vocalist that she became. In a summation piece for the
New York Times
, Terry Teachout said that he
viewed her 1960s albums with Nelson Riddle as her legacy. “But,” he added, “I’ll remember Clooney the Elder, the unglamorous, utterly self-confident performer who treated the stage of Carnegie Hall as if she had just bought it at a garage sale. By then, she looked like a double-chinned grandmother who favored caftans and sensible shoes, but she sang like a worldly, pain-toughened woman who knew everything about life and love. We should all have such a last act.”
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Friends and family remembered other characteristics of the woman they loved. The bear hugs, the inimitable laugh, the cough, the acerbic wit, the Irish temper, the honesty, the fun, and the love for her children and grandchildren. Mother confessor, earth mother, the world’s grandmother were all labels that sat easily with Rosemary Clooney but none as much as “Girl Singer,” the one she prized most. “I was a singer when I was a three-year-old child,” she had said in 1999 “and I was a singer at 70. I have been a mother, a wife and all those things but first and foremost, I am a singer. It’s what I really love to do and it’s what I will be. Always.”
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