Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (7 page)

Back in the Columbia studios (the one-time Adams Memorial Presbyterian Church) on New York’s East 30th Street, Rosemary was developing her first niche specialty. Songs for kids were a big part of the disc market in the early ’50s and all the big labels gave them significant attention. Indeed, for the Hollywood-based Capitol Records, children’s songs accounted for one third of its revenue. The artistic challenge of producing a record targeted at juvenile ears sat comfortably with Rosemary. “The arrangements can be cute, but your diction has to be perfect,” she said. “Kids have to understand every single word, because you’re telling them a story and they insist on hearing it. Never sing down to children. If you do, they recognize it and can’t stand it.”
¹⁴
Rosemary was also conscious that most kids’ records featured a male voice. “Children won’t buy most women’s voices,” she said “because mothers are around the house every day and discipline comes from mothers. Sing it like you’re a man with a feminine voice,” was her tip.
¹⁵
It worked. Rosemary produced a string of successful children’s records, culminating in “Suzy Snowflake” which sold a quarter of a million copies in 1951. By 1955, Rosemary’s children’s titles had notched up sales of over 1 million for Columbia.

Rosemary was well aware that one of her stablemates at Columbia was her idol, Frank Sinatra. Nevertheless, a call from Joe Shribman in April 1950 came as a total shock. “Sinatra wants to make a record with you,” he told her. It was a dream come true although Rosemary soon discovered that Sinatra’s request was anything but the endorsement she craved. Sinatra needed a duet partner to promote a song that he had co-authored called “Peachtree Street,” a forgettable song about the main street of Atlanta, Georgia. He told Manie Sachs that he wanted Dinah Shore, Columbia’s #1 female vocalist on the disc with him. Shore turned him down, saying the song was so bad that she wanted nothing to do with it. Sinatra threw a temper and, as a rebuff to Shore, asked Sachs for the name of the last girl singer that he had signed. That, Rosemary later explained, was how her dream duet came about. Although the two of them gave a lively performance,
Dinah Shore’s assessment turned out to be correct. “When ‘Peachtree Street’ hit the stores, it was dead on arrival,” Rosemary later wrote.
¹⁶
There were other duets with Sinatra before he left the label, including the inane “Love Means Love” and an even worse catalog song, “Cherry Pies Ought to Be You,” but both suffered the same fate as “Peachtree.” It was the beginning of two uneasy relationships, Rosemary’s with Sinatra and Sinatra’s with his record label. A year later, during her Las Vegas debut at the Thunderbird, Sinatra had been working down at the Desert Inn and used his time on stage to rubbish Rosemary’s early recordings. “The worse fake accent I ever heard,” he said.
¹⁷
Sinatra’s venom, wrote James Kaplan, was directed at Mitch Miller rather than Rosemary, but she nevertheless took it as an affront (as did Miller who “exploded,” said Kaplan, when the comments were fed back to him.)
¹⁸

By the time “Peachtree Street” hit the shops, Manie Sachs had departed for RCA and in his place sat the goateed Mitch Miller. One of his first recruits was a young singer from Detroit, Michigan, called Al Cernik, the son of Croatian immigrants. Renaming him Guy Mitchell (“my name is Mitchell and you seem to be a nice guy, so we’ll call you Guy Mitchell” goes the apocryphal story), Miller quickly paired him with Rosemary for four duets, including two songs from the new Irving Berlin musical
Call Me Madam
, “You’re Just in Love” and “Marrying for Love.” The resulting single reached #24 in
Billboard
, a creditable showing for two newcomers who bested competition from more established names, including collaborations between Dinah Shore and Russell Nype, and Dick Haymes and Ethel Merman.
¹⁹

Mitch Miller’s uncompromising approach to changing the sound that buyers would hear on a Columbia record resulted in a series of battles royal, none more so than that between him and his star vocalist, Frank Sinatra. When Sinatra refused point blank to record two songs that Miller pushed in his direction, a split became inevitable. Miller took the songs instead in the direction of Guy Mitchell and both “The Roving Kind” and “My Heart Cries for You” became massive hits. The success further accentuated Miller’s self-confidence, not that it was needed. Other singers too found the new regime hard to take. Tony Bennett subsequently described his relationship with Miller as being almost a permanent state of war, with compromises being made all the time by one side or the other about the songs he recorded. Rosemary’s musical instincts had her firmly in the Sinatra and Bennett camp although her desire for success meant she was less likely to dig her heels in the way Sinatra had. What’s more, her first exposure to Miller had brought no indication that he was a musical revolutionary. She had first met him toward the end of her days with the Pastor band. Miller, then on the lookout for new talent for Mercury Records, had complimented
her on “Grieving for You.” “Nice sounds” he said. Interviewed in 1955, Miller remembered that first encounter. “I was alerted by Rosie’s voice in “Grieving for You” right away. It had depth and heart,” he said.
²⁰

Rosemary’s first session with Miller in January 1951 produced an immediate success. Miller had heard a new country song, first sung by Alabama’s guitar-based Delmore Brothers, called “Beautiful Brown Eyes.” As it was a plaintive country song, Miller went to work in his classic big production style, multitracking Rosemary’s vocal and throwing in a big echo chamber for good measure. The results were astounding. The disc sold 400,000 copies and put Rosemary on the cover of
Downbeat
. It also brought her an improved contract, with royalties up to 5% and a guarantee of $250,000 over five years. “Beautiful Brown Eyes” reflected Miller’s open door policy toward the material that he would use. He cast his net far and wide. Crossovers and covers were consistent parts of the repertoire that Miller gave his artists, although it was his affinity for nonsense and novelty songs that usually defined the battle lines.

None more so than “Come On-a My House.” The song that would become indelibly linked to the name of Rosemary Clooney for the rest of her career was written in 1939 by two cousins, dramatist and author William Saroyan and Ross Bagdasarian, who later used the stage name of David Seville when he became the man behind Alvin and the Chipmunks. Saroyan was an Armenian American and took the idea for the melody from an old Armenian folk song. The song wasn’t new—the two cousins had recorded it for Coral Records in 1939. It came to Miller’s attention through a demo record by Kay Armen. Miller had in mind an arrangement behind Rosemary that centered on a harpsichord, a keyboard relic more usually associated with Bach than the world of pop. When he explained this to Rosemary and played her the demo, she was aghast. “I don’t think it’s for me,” she told him. Miller’s response, she said later, was patient but ultimately, forthright. After briefly attempting to persuade her of the commercial potential of the song, Miller decided on a different approach. “Let me put it this way. You show up tomorrow or you’re fired!” he told her. In later years, Rosemary would dine out on that story, but without any sense of malice. “Truthfully, all I ever wanted in those days was a hit. I wanted terribly to be a success,” she told
Stereo Review
in 1981.
²¹
“You get so pompous when you’re young,” she told interviewer Diane Sawyer 10 years later. “I took myself so seriously. Mitch was trying to put it in a nice way. But when he said I’d be fired, I understood that.”
²²
Despite her willingness to fall into line, the relationship between Rosemary and Miller was never an easy one. Singer Michael Feinstein thought that Rosemary had never really liked Miller—“he was a vulgar man. He had a dark soul,”
²³
Feinstein said, although Rosemary’s
manager in the final years of her career, Allen Sviridoff, thought that the relationship mellowed over time. “I worked with them together in the eighties half a dozen times and I never saw any signs of Rosemary not liking him,” he said.
²⁴

Rosemary did show up to record “Come On-a My House” but in a bizarre twist, the key instrument, the harpsichord, failed to arrive. Rosemary and the musicians hung around for a couple of hours but when it was apparent that Miller’s piece de resistance was not going to appear, she asked Stan Freeman, booked on the date to play the missing keyboard, what else he knew. Opening up the piano, Freeman played an elegant introduction to Alec Wilder’s “I’ll Be Around” to which Rosemary added an exquisite vocal that showcased “her purity of line, nuance of lyric, musical taste and rhythmic instincts.”
²⁵
A hastily improvised arrangement to “The Lady Is a Tramp” followed, with Rosemary singing to the backing of a freely swinging jazz trio for the first time in her recording career, prefacing her later Concord style by some 25 years. The two recordings might have been little more than fillers at the time they were made and indeed lay dormant in Columbia’s vaults for four years before tiptoeing onto a 1955 compilation long player. Nevertheless, they were landmarks in the developing maturity of Rosemary’s art.

One day later, Stan Freeman moved over from the piano to lay his fingers on the now-delivered harpsichord and Rosemary got to work on Miller’s magnum opus. Without the first idea of what an Armenian accent would sound like, she reverted to the Italian-American dialect that was so familiar from her Tony Pastor days. Miller was happy as long as the accent sounded vaguely European, although Rosemary also found that, despite his platitudes about “the sound,” Miller paid attention to detail. Rosemary was uncertain about the hidden meaning in Saroyan’s lyric. Was the invitation she was giving to “Come On-a My House” a euphemism for sex? Was that the interpretation she should give? Taking time out from arranging the layout of the studio to maximize the impact of the harpsichord, Miller took the young singer aside for a word of advice. “This song could be taken as ‘come and have sex,’ but what you’re looking for is marriage,” he told her. “When he said that, I understood, and that’s what I did,” Rosemary said in 1997.
²⁶
Five takes later, Miller had the result that he wanted. He ordered the disc to be rush released, with an immediate run of 100,000 copies. Two weeks later it was in the shops.
Billboard
praised Clooney’s “electrifying” performance and Miller’s “rousing, live sound”
²⁷
and when Rosemary heard the record stores on Broadway all blaring out the disc, she knew that she had something big. The record entered
Billboard’s
charts on July 7, 1951, and stayed there for 20 weeks, eight of them at #1. It transformed Rosemary’s life and
career. Over the remaining 50 years of her performing life she was barely able to make a live appearance without singing her Armenian folk song.
Life
magazine ran a feature on her;
Time
featured her on its cover. The one-room apartment was traded for something bigger at the more prestigious Hampshire House, and whereas she had normally squeezed in at the back of the Copa to see Sinatra, now she was ushered to a prime table. Seemingly overnight, Rosemary Clooney was rich and famous.

Miller followed up the success of “Come On-a My House” with two more harpsichord-driven releases. “You have to work out a gimmick that’ll get people’s attention and hold it,” Miller told
Time
magazine.
²⁸
He was true to his word. “If Teardrops Were Pennies” came from the same session as “My House” and as well as the harpsichord, featured another Miller trademark with Rosemary again multitracking her voice. The disc was a minor hit in September 1951, as was “I Wish I Wuz (Hi Ho, Fiddle De Dee),” which Rosemary recorded in August of that year, with bass, drums, guitar, and yes, harpsichord behind her. For all her unease with such trite material, Rosemary carried off her vocals with great aplomb, bouncing along with Terry Snyder’s drumbeat and singing with a smile in her voice. It was a technique she learned from Maurice Chevalier, she told Larry King in 1997, and one that in turn, she passed on to Michael Feinstein.

Mitch Miller was anything but a one-trick pony, however, when it came to picking material. After “I Wish I Wuz” reached only the low 20s in
Billboard
’s charts, he changed tack and looked for a crossover song as the next vehicle for Rosemary. Just as he had done for Tony Bennett’s first big hit, “Cold, Cold Heart,” he found it in a Hank Williams recording. “Half as Much” reunited Rosemary with arranger Percy Faith and she delivered a vocal full of precision and relaxed confidence that reflected the belief that a major hit record can bring. The results almost matched the success of “Come On-a My House.” Entering the
Billboard
charts in May 1952, the record stayed there for 27 weeks, with three weeks at #1.

A string-filled Percy Faith arrangement was again in evidence for Rosemary’s next Columbia session in November 1951. With the Clooney bandwagon firmly rolling, Miller invited his lead songstress to pick a song of her own choosing for the session. Rosemary picked “Tenderly,” a 1946 song from the team of Walter Gross and Jack Lawrence that was a personal favorite.
²⁹
The song had come a long way from its origins as a three-four time waltz in the mid-’40s. By the time Rosemary had it on her song stand, there were several existing versions of it. Trumpeter Randy Brooks had been the first to make an impact with it as an instrumental piece in 1946. In 1950, the song had given the Lynn Hope Quartet their solitary chart entry with it, although among all the preceding versions, it was a 1947
recording by Sarah Vaughan that stood out. Vaughan’s rendition, strongly influenced by the style of Billie Holiday, took the song away from its dance tempo origins and turned it into a haunting jazz ballad.

When Mitch Miller heard Rosemary’s first take on the song, he flipped open the talkback switch in the recording booth and told his singer that he would be out to talk to her. Miller’s refusal to follow the practice of other A&R men and give instructions over the open studio mike was something that Rosemary and the other Columbia artists respected. Instead, Miller would come out of the booth and speak privately to the performer. On this occasion, Miller’s observation to Rosemary was that the song was intimidating her. She was too much aware of the other performances that had gone before her, he told her. “You’ve got to approach this as if it were the first time a recording was ever made of ‘Tenderly.’ I want your interpretation of it,” he said.
³⁰
Nevertheless, despite Miller’s coaching, Rosemary’s 1951 recording was bland—
Billboard
called it a “heartfelt warble”
³¹
—when compared to the expressive versions she would add later in her career. Released as a single, the results for Rosemary were modest, reaching #17 during a six-week stay in the record charts, although as years went by, it proved to be one of her most durable records. In 1956, it was voted #6 in a
Billboard
poll of all-time favorite records
³²
and such by then was its association with Rosemary that she adopted it as the theme for her new weekly TV series. The song became a regular feature of Rosemary’s stage act, Rosemary often introducing it as “my favorite song.” When she reinvented herself in a jazz idiom in the ’80s, she rerecorded a much improved version for Concord Records.