Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (9 page)

Miller’s instincts were once again spot on. “Botch-a-Me” spent 17 weeks on the
Billboard
charts, peaking at #2 in both the best-seller and disc jockey listings. The disc’s success was axiomatic of the change that Miller had brought to Columbia Records. Shortly after the recording session,
Billboard
ran a piece headed “Columbia Pop-Disk Primacy apparent in Billboard Charts.” The article analyzed the strike rate of various record companies in terms of hits generated as compared to records released. Miller’s Columbia in the first quarter of 1952 had a hit rate twice that of its nearest competitor: 13 hits from 108 releases, a strike rate of 12%. Next highest came Mercury with 6% (seven hits from 112 releases), with Capitol third at 3%, marginally ahead of RCA which weighed in at 2.78%.
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Miller was riding the crest of a wave and Rosemary Clooney was one of the main reasons.

“Botch-a-Me” was not the only song slated for Rosemary’s session on April 18. “On the First Warm Day,” a song associated with cabaret artist, Mabel Mercer, was given the full harpsichord treatment before Rosemary was joined in the studio by the most unlikely of duet partners, screen legend Marlene Dietrich. Signed by Columbia in 1950, Dietrich had already begun recording with Miller and had met Rosemary on a radio show the year before. A friendship blossomed and Miller decided to capitalize on it by uniting the voice of Lili Marlene with that of his Kentucky songbird. For the “A” side of the single, Miller once again raided the country music charts. He settled on “Too Old to Cut the Mustard,” written and recorded the previous year by another Kentuckian, “Jumpin’” Bill Carlisle, famous as his name suggested, for taking a standing leap in mid-chorus of his songs. Clooney and Dietrich kept their feet firmly on the ground for their rendition, Dietrich’s “familiar Teutonic foghorn”
¹⁶
demanding a basement key, but one that suited Clooney too. As well as the main record, Miller had his pairing record a 23-second introduction to the disc. Dietrich caricatured her famous slurred drawl on the word “Hello,” before Rosemary joined in, delivering a clever mimic of her partner’s greeting.

The single reached #12 in the
Billboard
charts.
Time
magazine called the disc “a bit of hillbilly horseplay” and drew out the contrast between Rosemary’s wholesome image and the “glamorous Grandma Dietrich,” a distinction that Rosemary acknowledged. “Yeah,” she admitted, “I guess it’s a
compliment to be called the wholesome type. With what I’ve got to work with, as a
femme fatale
I’m dead.”
¹⁷
Despite the differences in age, appearance, and background, Rosemary and Dietrich became even firmer friends on the back of their modest chart success. When Rosemary headed for Hollywood, the German star did everything that she could to pave the way for her, writing to everyone associated with Paramount. As a result, Rosemary later recalled, she got the best of everything. Early in the shooting schedule for
The Stars Are Singing
, the foreman in charge of the scene-shifting gang approached Rosemary one day. “Everything okay?” he asked. The puzzlement was apparent on her face. “I got a letter from the Kraut,” he said, “so I just wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
¹⁸

Despite Rosemary’s “plain Jane” image, her off-stage love life continued to occupy the gossip columnists. As she departed for Hollywood, it was the suggestion of a liaison with the actor Joe Ferrer that attracted the most attention. The two had met on a TV show in New York while Ferrer was promoting the film
Cyrano de Bergerac
. Ferrer had made the role his own, first on Broadway in 1946 and then on film, a role that won him an Academy Award for Best Actor. The two of them were increasingly seen together around the New York party scene, prompting Walter Winchell, in his nationally syndicated column, to predict wedding bells as early as October 1952. The queen of the gossips, Louella Parsons, thought it would take longer but agreed with Winchell that “she [Clooney] will eventually marry Ferrer.”
¹⁹
Parsons was right, although the path to the altar would be far from smooth.

Joe Ferrer was born into a well-to-do Puerto Rican family in 1912. His education took him to Switzerland and then to Princeton University, where he graduated in 1933. He made his Broadway debut in 1935. By the time he met Rosemary, Ferrer was much in demand, combining acting, directing, and producing on Broadway and in Hollywood and pocketing a quarter of a million dollars a year for the privilege. Fluent in several languages, Ferrer was the embodiment of a man who filled the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run. “Joe announces seven projects,” one Hollywood director once said of him, “and surprises the life out of you by doing six after you’ve just figured out mathematically that he can’t possibly manage four.”
²⁰
Off-stage, Ferrer was a witty cosmopolitan, a lover of jazz, show business parties, and the good life. At one time he was taking lessons in tennis, fencing, singing, tap dancing, yoga, and judo all at the same time. He liked to paint, cook, bake a cake, and play piano. Looks were not his strong suit—one magazine said “his ears are uncompromisingly large and set at an angle unfavorable to his head. He has a nose that advances boldly in several directions, in contrast to his chins (he has two) which recede
determinedly beneath a large mouth full of prominent but otherwise noteworthy teeth. He has a wide chest that outmatches his narrow shoulders, a long waist and short legs.”
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Despite his physical defects, Ferrer’s impact on Rosemary was electric. “A charming man, tremendously talented—and diametrically opposite to any man I’d ever met,” she said in 1982.
²²

Ferrer’s looks certainly did not slow him down when it came to attracting the ladies and his reputation as a Lothario was well set by the time he met Rosemary in New York in 1951. His second show business marriage was coming to an end. The first, to actress Uta Hagen, had lasted 10 years before ending in divorce in 1948. Ferrer had immediately remarried, this time to actress and dancer, Phyllis Hill. That union would last five years, although the two had separated long before Ferrer gained the divorce he needed to marry Rosemary in 1953. Despite his charms, Ferrer was not everyone’s cup of tea. “Rosemary Clooney has the best chance of becoming a top star of any newcomer to our town,” Hedda Hopper wrote. “She has talent and she can put over a song, but the movie public is becoming mighty critical of the stars personal lives, and some people say she can throw it all in the ash can by becoming Mrs. José Ferrer. Many movie-goers in the land don’t care for the gent.”
²³

The idea that Paramount’s new emblem of wholesomeness should be seen stepping out with a married man—even if he was separated—was not something that sat easily with the studio’s top brass. Ferrer was filming in Paris when Rosemary finished her first outing for Paramount in the summer of 1952. She planned to fly out to join him, only to be taken aside by Frank Freeman, a Paramount VP. Despite her protestations that the Ferrers’ marriage was over, Freeman handed down a stern warning. “Nobody loves a home-wrecker,” he told her. “Have you read your contract?” It was a reference to the ethics clause that all studios used to protect themselves—and their stars—from the adverse publicity that could result from a scandal. And with one of their bright and bouncy female stars, Betty Hutton, having just walked out on them, Paramount did not intend to let her potential replacement press the self-destruct button.

Rosemary’s rude awakening as to her moral obligations came at the end of the filming of
The Stars Are Singing
. Despite this being her debut outing, Rosemary shared top billing in a low-key movie that also starred Anna Maria Alberghetti and Lauritz Melchior. The plot concerns a young illegal immigrant, Katri Walenska (played by Alberghetti), whose singing leads to a spot on a TV talent show. She wins first prize, but her success results in her true identity being revealed, and with it, the likelihood of deportation. Rosemary took the part of Terry Brennan, a hopeful pop singer who first identifies Katri’s vocal talents and who is instrumental in arranging the TV
opportunity. Despite a less than enthusiastic reception from the critics—
New York Times’
Bosley Crowther called it “claptrap of the most reckless and uninspired sort”—there was enough in Rosemary’s performance to suggest that her future in Hollywood was bright. Her acting seemed confident and assured and her appearance—with more than a hint of similarity to June Allyson—was wholly consistent with the honest, do-gooder character she portrayed. “She’s a pleasant enough young lady,” Crowther added, “a little forced and self-conscious with the charm, and, for those who like modern balladeering done with vigor and bounce, she’s right there.”
²⁴
The score for
The Stars Are Singing
came from the partnership of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans and included “I Do, I Do, I Do,” “Haven’t Got a Worry to My Name,” and “Lovely Weather for Ducks.” A somewhat contrived opportunity was also created for Rosemary to sing “Come On-a My House” in a scene where her character, Terry, is railroaded into recording a demo of a song by an aspiring tunesmith, played on the screen by Ross Bagdasarian, the actual writer of the song. At the end of her rendition, Terry dismisses the song, much as Rosemary had originally questioned it with Mitch Miller. “A peach and a pear and a pomegranate? This isn’t for me. It won’t sell a record,” says Terry as she walks out.

Paramount saw enough in
The Stars Are Singing
to convince them that Rosemary could indeed fill the shoes of Betty Hutton. Producer Irving Asher told the press that the first rushes of the shooting had shown him that Rosemary could handle more than the bit part that had originally been written for her. “I realized here was a girl who really comes over on the screen,” he said. “We re-wrote her part and expanded her into one of the star roles. She can do everything Hutton can,” he said, adding, sotto voce, that she was a good deal cheaper too.
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After newly installing her in Hutton’s old dressing room, Paramount offered its newest star an improved contract and lined her up alongside Bob Hope, Tony Martin, and Arlene Dahl, Ferrer’s Broadway co-star in
Cyrano de Bergerac
, for her next outing in
Here Come the Girls
. The film was little more than the latest Paramount vehicle for Hope’s stock character of a dim, comical coward who never quite catches on to the villainy coming his way. This time out, Hope played Stanley Snodgrass, an over-aged chorus boy who is suddenly elevated to the lead role in a show because the true lead (played by Tony Martin) is being hunted down by a local mobster. Rosemary’s role was that of his neglected girlfriend, Daisy Crockett, who is also a singer and dancer in the show. Rosemary was fourth in the billing, and the film offered her little opportunity to do anything other than sing three more Livingston and Evans songs and moon at Hope, her supposed boyfriend who in fact was old enough to be her father. When it saw release in time for Christmas 1953, the critics
struggled to find a good word to say.
Variety
suggested, “the laughs come from Hope’s inability to do any number right and his colossal conceit in believing he can do no wrong.”
²⁶
Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times
was less kind. Saving his only half-positive comment for Rosemary (“a wistful little song-bird”), he described the picture as “a witless and labored film” and one in which Bob Hope “had seldom looked worse.”
²⁷
“The whole thing is unfortunate for Miss Clooney,” said
Time
. “Every time she opens her mouth to sing, Hope shoves a gag in it.”
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Even Rosemary herself struggled to find something positive to say about it. Years later, when Hope’s wife Dolores joined her for some cabaret performances in New York, her regular joke was that the film had been so bad that even Dolores refused to watch it.

Nevertheless, the two months that Rosemary spent filming
Here Come the Girls
would turn out to be two of the most significant of her life. By now, she and Joe Ferrer were living together in Hollywood, although that did nothing to inhibit her attraction to a young dancer who had a minor part in the picture. Dante DiPaolo was two years older than Rosemary and hailed from Colorado, the child of Italian immigrants who had settled there. Dante had danced almost from the day he could walk, and by the age of nine, he had won so many local dance contests that his mother decided a career in Hollywood was his destiny. At age 13, he appeared in a Bing Crosby movie,
The Star Maker
, and by the time he met Rosemary, had built a career in movies and the theater in a succession of support roles. Dante was never the star but always a more than capable member of the chorus or someone who could hold down a semi-featured role. With Dante providing some dancing lessons for Rosemary on the set of
Here Come the Girls
, the two of them, along with rehearsal pianist Ian Bernard and dance coach, Bea Allen, became a “frolicsome foursome.”
²⁹
Eventually, the foursome became a twosome and a relationship between Rosemary and Dante developed. Whether either regarded it as ever likely to be a serious one seems unlikely, but with Joe Ferrer away filming
Moulin Rouge
in Paris and seemingly dating other girls, the gossip columnists had a field day reporting the cooling of the Ferrer-Clooney liaison.
³⁰
Nevertheless, Ferrer’s hold over Rosemary was such that when he turned up in Hollywood on December 23 for the premiere of
Moulin Rouge
, it was Rosemary who was on his arm. Predictions of a 1953 marriage for the Kentucky belle were strong.

Neither Ferrer nor DiPaolo were present the following month when Rosemary had a premiere of her own to go to. Paramount arranged for
The Stars Are Singing
to open at the Russell Theater, Maysville, on January 28, 1953. With Rosemary having achieved greater fame than any previous Maysvillian, the Town Council arranged for Lower Street to be renamed
“Rosemary Clooney Street.” Draped in a $7,000 Aleutian mink coat,
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Rosemary sat atop the back seat of a red convertible, her Grandma Guilfoyle and childhood friend Blanchie Mae Chambers alongside her. An 11-car motorcade drove through the town to the naming ceremony. Along the route, most of her aunts and uncles, plus her recently divorced—again—mother and half-sister Gail watched from among the crowds. The only missing faces were sister Betty, away working in Detroit, Uncle George who was now Betty’s manager, and brother Nick, now a radio announcer in Wilmington, Delaware. Arriving at the movie theater for the premiere, Rosemary was ushered on to the stage but resisted the clamor to sing “Come On-a My House.” Instead, she opted for “Moonlight and Roses” in honor of her maternal grandma, and “Home on the Range,” the song she had sung for “Papa” Clooney’s political gatherings when she was five years old. Six weeks later on March 10, 1953, Nick and Betty joined Rosemary for the New York premiere of the film, presaging its national release the following day. A week later, she and Joe appeared together at the NBC International Theater in New York to watch the Academy Awards ceremonies from Hollywood.