Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (8 page)

Rosemary’s successes in the recording studio in 1951 catapulted her to the top step on the show business ladder. A three-week booking at the Thunderbird in Las Vegas brought a paycheck of $3,500 per week, a figure that was 150% of the
annual
income for a white family in the United States at that time. Two years previously, Rosemary had been making $150 per week. Back in New York, she appeared in the
Crusade for Freedom
telecast, the first coast-to-coast television transmission, followed by a succession of guest spots on TV and radio with such luminaries as Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, and Milton Berle. Off-stage, though, not everything in the garden was rosy. In June 1951, her half-brother Andrew, whom Rosemary had only recently got to know, drowned in an accident in the Ohio River. Prior to that, Rosemary had been hospitalized in November 1950 with what turned out to be an ovarian cyst but which, until diagnosed, bore all the symptoms of an unwanted and career-ending pregnancy. “I wasn’t pregnant but I could have been,” Rosemary later wrote, a comment that reflected the liberal lifestyle of her early bachelor girl days in New York.
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One of
several suitors was Dave Garroway, the founding host of NBC’s
Today
show from 1952 to 1961. The gossip columnists had the two of them walking down the aisle. “TV’s Dave Garroway and the nation’s top-selling girl singer Rosemary Clooney are sniffing orange blossoms,” Dorothy Kilgallen cryptically noted in her syndicated newspaper column. In December 1951, another columnist, Jimmie Fidler was telling his readers that the twosome was “altar-dated for late December.” Rosemary later denied that there had ever been any hint of marriage on either of their minds, although she was, she said, still seeing Garroway when he moved to New York for the
Today
show in 1952. But said Rosemary, she was seeing others too.

It wasn’t just suitors who were knocking on Rosemary’s door in the fall of 1951. Ever since the dawn of talking pictures in the late ’20s, a natural career progression for a successful singer had been from records and radio into the movies. By the time Rosemary made her Las Vegas debut at the Thunderbird in September 1951, most of the major Hollywood studios had someone in the audience to assess her potential for the big screen. The scouts quickly saw that Rosemary, with her sharp features, pleasant personality, and quick sense of humor, had everything they wanted. Contractual offers soon followed and in October 1951, Rosemary signed a seven-year deal with Paramount Studios. Once more, it meant a change of scene for the young songbird from Kentucky, this time out west to Hollywood. Movie stardom was waiting but so too were two very unlikely consequences. One was that she would become one of the few truly close friends of the biggest name in show business. The other was that she would find the place that she called home for the rest of her life.

I
n August 1951, three weeks before Rosemary’s appearance at the Thunderbird, Bing Crosby settled into the den at his holiday home at Hayden Lake, Idaho, and dictated a letter to Paramount Pictures producer, Pat Duggan. The topic was the remake of Crosby’s 1942 movie
Holiday Inn
, the film in which Crosby had introduced the song “White Christmas.” Irving Berlin’s song, driven by Crosby’s recording of it, had become a World War II symbol of home for American GIs, and by the end of the decade, it was an indelible part of an American Christmas. Paramount had featured the song in another Berlin-based movie,
Blue Skies
, in 1946. Soon after, the idea of remaking
Holiday Inn
in full color gathered its own momentum, this time with the name of the song also becoming the title for the movie.

Crosby’s association with the song meant that he was central to the casting. He was enthusiastic about the proposition but bothered by the casting of the female lead. “I think we have a good script and we can have a good picture but the delicacy of this female casting problem can’t be overstated,” he wrote. “How about a dame called Rosemary Clooney? Sings a good song and is purportedly personable.”
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Quite where Crosby’s information—and enthusiasm for Rosemary—came from was never revealed. The two had not met at that time and with Crosby spending most of his time on the west coast, it is unlikely that he had seen any of her New York performances. His suggestion of Rosemary for the part was not much more than a hunch. But, as hunches go, it was undeniably a good one.

Bing Crosby had been the biggest name in show business for over 20 years. Starting his career in the late 1920s, Crosby had arrived on the music scene just as a wave of new technology was transforming the industry.
Electrical recording, the invention of the microphone, and the explosion of radio all opened the way for a new style of singing. Where Crosby’s predecessors had, of necessity, needed the lung power to hit the back row of any theater, Crosby had been the first singer to realize that if the microphone could hear him, then so could everyone else. His intimate singing—crooning—put the emphasis on the lyric of a song rather than its dance tempo. Crosby was not the first to spot the opportunity but his baritone voice and innate sense of jazz phrasing soon made him the most popular and influential singer that the world had ever seen.

Crosby’s career path took him from radio to the movies. In Hollywood, he further enhanced his reputation as a romantic lead, light comedian, and in time, a dramatic actor, winning the Academy Award in 1945 for his portrayal of a modernist Catholic priest. The Oscar marked the beginning of a spell of Hollywood dominance for Crosby and for five straight years from 1944 to 1948, he was the top box office star. Add to that the fact that he was already the biggest selling recording artist ever and the star and host of the iconic
Kraft Music Hall
on radio, and the extent of Crosby’s dominance becomes clear. Clark Gable and subsequently, Elvis Presley both carried the title of “The King” but no individual star, before or since, ever straddled so many concurrent show business peaks as Bing Crosby. Much of his enduring popularity came from the character that he portrayed in his radio shows and on the screen. Affable and easygoing, the public Crosby came to typify Middle America. He was the guy-next-door who breezed through life with a smile and a song, a pipe draped from his mouth, casual and carefree, yet someone who always seemed to come out on top. His appeal was global and reached out to all ages, sexes and races. Tony Bennett said that at his peak, Crosby was “bigger than Elvis and the Beatles combined.”
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Decca Records said that Crosby’s voice in 1945 had been heard by more human beings than that of anyone who had ever lived. In short, Bing Crosby was the world’s first mass media star and in the late ’40s, was the most famous man in the world.

Off-stage, the private Bing was a different and far more complex individual than the one he portrayed on the screen. He was one of the few entertainers to have received the benefit of a full classical education at a Jesuit college, and a quick, intelligent man, Crosby suffered no fools. Somewhat shy and withdrawn by nature, Crosby also found it difficult to deal with emotion, either in giving or receiving. He could at times be distant and appear chillingly cold and insensitive. “Perhaps,” said Alistair Cooke at the time of Crosby’s death, “he was one of those people who, though not at all selfish, are deeply self-centred: what they call ‘a very private person.’ Because he couldn’t identify with other people’s troubles, he was able to
appear, and to be, everybody’s easy-going buddy.”
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Part of Crosby’s coping mechanism was a cocoon that he built around himself. Anyone who entered uninvited found himself or herself in an icebox. Few, if any, words would be spoken but the daggers in his crystal-clear blue eyes could cut a man—or woman—dead. There were other things a long way from the public image that Crosby created. He and his wife Dixie Lee had four sons, but the harmonious family life that the fan magazines portrayed concealed fissures both within the family and the marriage. Dixie had suffered from depression and alcoholism for many years while the boys discovered that when it came to balancing discipline and love, Crosby usually erred on the side of the former. “When I want to be especially flattering to one of my offspring, I say ‘Nice goin’” and let it go at that,” he wrote in his autobiography.
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Taken all together, it meant that Crosby was a difficult man to get close to, a situation not helped by the reverence heaped upon him by the entertainment community. Until Elvis Presley burst upon the scene a few years later, there was not a singer on the planet who did not stand in awe of Bing Crosby. Rosemary felt it as much as anyone else. “Maybe it would be a good idea if I tried to explain the worship that other singers have for Bing,” she said in a 1954 magazine feature. “Show people can talk all night about singers, Perry and Frank and the whole lot—and then there is
Bing
. The man is an institution all by himself and he has a way of spinning out a melody that no other singer can touch. He stands alone.”
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Such statements sat uneasily with Crosby. He was too intelligent not to realize the presence that he had, but too emotionally inhibited ever to deal easily with it.

Rosemary was destined to gain firsthand exposure to the complexities of Bing Crosby much sooner than she anticipated. The final casting of
White Christmas
was still over a year away when Rosemary arrived at Paramount in May 1952. As she took her first tour around the lot with publicist A. C. Lyles, she heard that Crosby was in residence, filming
Road to Bali
with his occasional screen partner, Bob Hope. Rosemary knew too that her agent, Joe Shribman, had booked her a guest spot on Crosby’s radio show later in the month, but did not expect to suddenly find him cycling toward her as she strolled down one of the avenues. He stopped, dangled one leg onto the floor, and waited while Lyles made the introductions. “He said something about a radio show we were to do together and asked if I knew when it would take place,” Rosemary recalled. “And I, with all the savoirfaire of the Missing Link,” mumbled ‘Sometime in the 20s.’”
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Rosemary had meant sometime later in the month—the recording was set for May 26—but it had come out as the typical tongue-tied hero worship that Crosby hated. “Nothing makes Bing so uncomfortable as people who are impressed,” Rosemary said later.
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Knowing that she had laid an egg, Rosemary had the
foresight—and the courage—to take matters into her own hands. Later that day, she sought out Crosby’s personal villa and knocked on the door. She told him that she wanted to explain what had happened. “I’m not a numbskull,” she said, “I was just terribly thrilled to meet you, that’s all. I hope you understand and I hope to see you around sometime.”
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With her piece said, Rosemary turned and marched off. It was the kind of response that Crosby respected. A few days later he invited her for a drink. It was the beginning of a friendship that would endure to the end of his life.

The Paramount image creators had work to do with Rosemary long before there was any open suggestion that she might share top billing with Crosby. On her initial screen test, an internal Paramount report had described her appearance as “unprepossessing.”
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It was true. Rosemary herself said that she had turned up “looking like somebody’s grandmother,”
¹⁰
ignoring advice that pointed out how unflattering a glittery white dress could be. “She looked like a star-spangled Christmas angel,” one Paramount executive caustically remarked.
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Rosemary’s great asset, apart from her voice, was that she came across as wholesome—pretty without being glamorous; attractive without being sexy. Some at Paramount said that her nose was too wide and her legs too skinny, her face too long and her jaw overly prominent. But Irving Asher, who would produce Rosemary’s screen debut, thought that Rosemary’s essential prettiness was all that mattered. “Rosie has a wonderfully expressive face,” he said. “It ought to be let alone and not glamorized to try and make her look like everyone else. Just photograph it the way it is.” Asher too was struck by her naturalness. “I always call her Miss Crosby,” he added, “because her manner is like Bing’s. She has an off-hand way. If anyone teaches her to act, they’ll do her a great disservice.”
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Paramount’s backroom team, which included dress designer, Edith Head, got the treatment of Rosemary just right. “She couldn’t have looked prettier to Paramount tycoons if she had been fitted with Lana Turner’s head,”
Time
magazine said when her first film came out.
¹³

Rosemary’s initial filming commitment in Hollywood ran from May to July 1952. Before heading west, she spent the first four months of the year busy in New York. There were radio appearances on NBC’s
The Big Show
and
The Mario Lanza Show
, but increasingly, it was television that was now prominent. She guested four times on Perry Como’s TV show along with appearances on
Royal Showcase
with Bert Lahr and Joel Grey and
Celebrity Time
with Pat O’Brien. Her most significant pre-Hollywood commitment, however, was a Columbia recording date on April 18, 1952. After the country feel of “Half as Much” and the strings of “Tenderly,” Mitch Miller was back in harpsichord-mode for another piece of novelty nonsense. “Botch-a-Me (Ba-Ba-Baciami Piccina)” dated back to 1941. It was written by Riccardo
Morbelli and Luigi Astore and first popularized, in Italian, by Alberto Rabigliati. By the time it appeared on Rosemary’s music stand, Eddie Stanley had added a set of English words, rarely surpassed in their banality. Nevertheless, in keeping with Miller’s philosophy, it was the sound of Rosemary’s laugh-filled voice, bouncing to Freeman’s harpsichord and Terry Snyder’s percussion, that would sell the records. “This one has all the ingredients of a big hit. It’s an appealing novelty item, with a driving beat,” said
Billboard
.
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