I never knew a greater natural singer than Rosemary Clooney. This big, beautiful blond girl from northern Kentucky would stand up and sing as naturally as some gorgeous bird.
Mike Nichols, the great director, once said, “She sings like Spencer Tracy acts.” It was the highest compliment. But it also sort of overlooked the hours Rosie had spent in rehearsals, auditions, and smoky little clubs just over the Kentucky-Ohio state line when she was a teenage act with her sister and they worked every night, just hoping for a break.
Sometimes Rosie’s great natural talent could cloak the troubles she wrestled with, even after—especially after—she was a household name.
Rosie and I started out together at Columbia in the early 1950s. Frank Sinatra had left for Capitol Records, and Mitch Miller was looking to come up with a new generation of singing talent. I like to think he had a great eye for talent (I mean, he signed me and Rosie, didn’t he?).
But Mitch often had some peculiar ideas about what to do with good singers. Mitch loved novelty songs that I guess he thought stood out from all the truly great popular music during that time.
Mitch was a great classical oboe and English horn player. I think he thought that, in a way, all popular songs were novelty items by comparison to the classical music he loved, even the most clever compositions by Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, and Yip Harburg.
During the same years that Rosie recorded great signature songs such as “Tenderly” and “Hey There,” Mitch “convinced” her to sing “Come On-a My House” in 1951. It is almost certainly the worst song ever written by a great writer (William Saroyan). Bill and Ross Bagdasarian (who would later give the world the Chipmunks, a whole novelty act) wrote the song as a lark while driving across New Mexico. It was apparently based on Bill Saroyan’s Armenian family.
I say “convinced” because although Mitch would argue with me about those kinds of songs and usually wind up sighing, swearing, and relenting, he threatened Rosie with contract cancellation, even after she’d made “Come On-a My House” the biggest single in America. She followed this with “Botch-a-Me” in 1952, and “Mambo Italiano” (which Bob Merrill, an otherwise great songwriter who would later write Funny Girl, wrote on a napkin and dictated to Mitch Miller from a pay phone in an Italian restaurant).
In her later years, Rosie told the New York Times, “I felt trapped and fabricated in the fifties, living up to other people’s expectations.” But she also admitted, “At the same time, you can’t quarrel with success. If it hadn’t been for ‘Come on-a My House,’ I probably wouldn’t be here now.”
Rosie became so well known for those novelty songs, she said, that fans used to ask her to sing “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window,” another Bob Merrill song that was actually a huge hit for Patti Page. But Rosie said, “They probably figure if it’s a bad song, I must have done it.”
Rosie knew hard times close up. Her father was a problem drinker, and her family broke up when she was fifteen. Her mother and younger brother, Nick, moved out to California (Nick would grow up to become a respected newsman, movie presenter, and social activist, and—notice I kept this for last—the father of a guy named George Clooney). Rosie and her sister, Betty, stayed with their father. They began to sing outside the house, as much as anything to get out of the orbit of their father and their depressing home life.
WLW, just across the Kentucky River in Cincinnati, was one of America’s great “clear channel” radio stations in the 1940s. When Rosie and Betty won the WLW talent contest in 1945, the broadcast beamed across the country. WLW created a show for the Clooney sisters and put them on the air seven nights a week (they earned $20 a night, Rosie once told me). Soon she was on her own, singing with big-name big bands and appearing on radio and television shows. Movies came calling.
Then, of course, the whole country fell in love with Rosemary Clooney in 1954, when she sang “White Christmas” along with Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, and Vera-Ellen in the final, tear-filled scene. Bing owned that song, of course. But go back to see and hear it: you’ll hear Rosie’s great, clear, warm voice carry above all the others.
Rosie’s career went into overdrive after that. She was on all the television variety shows and toured with her old friend Bing Crosby. But in other ways, things were falling apart.
Rosie married José Ferrer twice. He was a great actor, and that turned out to be the problem: he carried on a series of affairs with other women that he tried to conceal with his dramatic skills. Rosie loved and forgave him time and time again, but his infidelities wounded her.
She worked even harder to try to defeat her sadness. But then she began to take pills to help her work long hours, pills to help her sleep, pills to help her to wake up and start all over again. It was a prescription to put her into her own tailspin of depression and addiction.
“I loved downers,” she once wrote in her memoir, “almost any kind. Loved the colors of them . . . I would just have a bouquet in my hands at night.”
Rosie campaigned for Bobby Kennedy in 1968, when he ran for president. She was standing near him—close enough to touch him, close enough to feel that she should have saved him—when he was shot to death.
In many ways, Bobby’s death threw Rosie over another edge. She somehow convinced herself that RFK wasn’t really dead and it was all a cruel prank by the people who really ran the world. She would rant about it to everybody. But inside, I think she knew she was falling apart.
With bravery and daring, Rosie checked herself into the psychiatric ward of Mount Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Doctors helped her see that she might be suffering from bipolar disorder, in which she would swing from the highs of singing and the cheers of the audience who loved her to the lows of her loneliness in the middle of the night.
Rosie was in the hospital for a month. When she came out, it was hard for her to find work. People were a lot less knowledgeable and understanding about mental illness then, and Rosie had been admirably open about her challenges. She told me she had wound up singing in a lot of Holiday Inns. That’s good, honest work for a performer, just not where you’d expect to see the star of White Christmas and one of the best-selling and greatest singers in America.
But Rosemary Clooney was always a good friend, and her friends came through as she always had for them. Bing did a special show to mark his 50th anniversary in show business and told her, “Rosie, I won’t do it without you.” She joined him, got rave reviews, and began to tour. She cooked up a music-and-comedy show with Rose Marie, Helen O’Connell, and Margaret Whiting, called 4 Girls 4, that ran all over the country for eight years.
And she got back into the recording studio, this time on the Concord Jazz label, where she could finally sing the music that she loved and sang so beautifully. She recorded albums of music by George and Ira Gershwin (she lived in Ira Gershwin’s old home in Beverly Hills, too), Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, and many of the other greats.
A great collection, Ballad Essentials, has recently been rere-leased. It will remind you of the power of Rosie’s sincere feeling and beautifully lucid phrasing. Any male singer has to be careful when performing Arlen and Mercer’s “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” to avoid comparisons with Frank Sinatra (those of us who dare to record that great song are always in the shadow of such comparisons). But listen to Rosie’s version: she makes it truly her own. She pulls you along when she tells you that “But this torch that I found / Must be drowned / or it soon might explode.”
Rosemary Clooney was back. She had brought herself back. She had worked hard to bring herself to the point where she could use her talent to express herself, not hide from her challenges, and to fill and enrich her life, as well as the lives of her fans, with the music she loved.
Her beloved sister and old singing partner, Betty, died of a brain aneurysm soon after Rosie’s first new jazz recording. Rosie started a foundation in her sister’s name, the Betty Clooney Foundation for Persons with Brain Injury, and produced a great 1977 autobiography, This for Remembrance: The Autobiography of Rosemary Clooney, an Irish-American Singer, written with Raymond Strait. It was made into a television movie starring Sondra Locke, a fine actress who could only lip-synch Rosie’s songs. No one could sing as seemingly naturally and lyrically as Rosemary Clooney.
“I’ll keep working as long as I live because singing has taken on the feeling of joy that I had when I started, when my only responsibility was to sing well,” Rosie said.
I know that Rosie went through a lot. But she only wanted to share joys with people, including those of us who were her friends. When we got together, we laughed and joked about music, family, and show biz gossip. But she was always more interested in the stories of others. Singing was her life’s work, and her way of lifting her life out of the ruts of sadness into which she sometimes fell.
Unfortunately, Rosie was a lifelong smoker (so many of us singers were in those days; famous singers even did cigarette commercials). She developed lung cancer in 2001 and was gone the next year. But she filled her seventy-four years with music, swings of highs and lows, recovery, joys, and ultimate triumph. She was a dear friend and a special talent who reminds me, even today, how much hard work, highs and lows, and simple human honesty it takes to sing as freely, naturally, and gorgeously as Rosemary Clooney.
Bangkok
Provence