Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (19 page)

After concluding the overdubs for the country album, Rosemary was back across the Atlantic again. This time, she was en route to Monte Carlo
to answer a call from Princess Grace to sing at a Red Cross benefit. Rosemary traveled via London. At Heathrow, the figure waiting to greet her was none other than Joe Ferrer. Rosemary played down reports of a reconciliation, saying that their get-together had purely been to discuss matters relating to the children. But said one press report, the two had “embraced ardently.” What’s more, when pressed, Rosemary seemed to allow more light through the already half open door. “I think it’s too early to talk about it,” she said.
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One columnist at least could see the writing on the wall. “Princess Grace was beautiful and charming—but José, dancing attendance on Rosemary, almost stole thunder,” Dorothy Manners wrote a few days later. “He flew in from London a few hours before she was to sing and joined John Mills’s big party in Rosie’s honor. Rosemary forgot a hat she used in one of her songs, and it was José who dashed back to the hotel to get it for her. Don’t know whether this means a reconciliation—but he is certainly the eager beaver where she is concerned.”
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Despite her busy crisscrossing of the Atlantic—Rosemary would be back in London again in October 1962 to star at the prestigious
Royal Variety Performance
at the London Palladium—Rosemary’s loneliness had continued through the autumn of 1962. Ferrer had been a regular visitor to the house on Roxbury Drive and to the still young family, accustomed to their father being away much of the time, his absence seemed little different from his being away on a long movie shoot. And despite his philandering, Ferrer’s presence brought out a side to Rosemary that no one else did. Even in later years, long after their marriage was finally over, her children would recall that Ferrer never failed to ignite a spark in her. Daughter Maria recalled that when the two of them were together, “daddy would walk in, proud as a peacock, and momma would turn into a 16-year-old giddy little girl.”
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Son Rafael also found that the “love and the bond” never went away. “He would sit in the chair in the den that he used to sit in and she would fuss over him, asking if he wanted a drink or some food. I was looking at a woman I never saw before,” he said. “She didn’t wait on people.”
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Those close to Rosemary knew that she still loved Joe. Indeed, some said she never stopped loving him, and in early 1963, there was still a part of Rosemary that believed she could get him to change his ways. She convinced herself once more that the idyllic family lifestyle that she craved for was not just a pipe dream. When, early in 1963, press reports confirmed that Joe Ferrer had returned to the matrimonial home, there were eyebrows raised but no great intake of breath. Ferrer’s return, with their divorce unfinalized, meant under California law that Rosemary’s suit became null and void the instant that he returned to live in the marital home. It didn’t matter to Rosemary. For now at least, the Ferrers were back in business.

T
he second time around marriage to Joe Ferrer was doomed from the day the actor moved back into 1019 North Roxbury. “Funny, talented, hard to live with,” was her summary of her former husband in 1997. “But,” she said, “sometimes he was so easy to live with that you got fooled—‘Hey, this is gonna be a cinch.’”
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Looking back, most of Rosemary’s family members agreed with her assessment that Ferrer was a “wonderful father,” but most were far less kind when it came to describing Ferrer as a husband. Indeed, it was Ferrer the father rather than Joe the husband that Rosemary truly welcomed back into the family home, but for a time, they resumed the “traveling Ferrers” modus operandi. There were even rumors of another pregnancy and hopes for a sixth child, although by the autumn of 1963, the story line had changed back to the familiar one of rows and breakup.

The marriage limped along for another two and a half years before permanent separation became a reality in April 1966. Rosemary petitioned for divorce in August of that year. The final settlement came 12 months later. When the case came before the Santa Monica Supreme Court on September 13, 1967, both parties charged the other with “extreme cruelty.” “It’s an unfortunate story where a man and woman fall in love, get married, and then find they could not get along,” Ferrer told the press.
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Rosemary made no public comment. The settlement was essentially the same one that had been handed down five years before. Ferrer paid a token $1 per month alimony and monthly support of $1,500 for the children. The house remained in trust for the five offspring, with Rosemary retaining the right to live there for the rest of her life.

The rapprochement with Ferrer had done nothing to stem Rosemary’s increasing reliance on prescription medication. In a revealing interview in 1982, she told TV psychologist Tom Cottle that the drugs had started not long after the birth of her fifth child. By the end of 1963, it had reached the point that each performance would end with “a big bouquet of ‘let’s go to sleep’ pills.”
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When she woke up each morning, the first thing on her mind was whether she had enough pills for the next night. The actress in her became adept at developing story lines that made sure she could get her pills without arousing suspicion. If she was touring, she told Terry Gross in 1997, her first call would be to the house physician, saying that she had forgotten her medication and could she have a couple of tablets. Usually, the apparent innocence of the request led to a large box coming her way, even on a couple of occasions, boxes of 100 pills. “It became a habit very quickly,” she said. “Then it became very hard getting off.”
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To the casual observer, there was still little sign of the turmoil that was now the behind-the-scenes story of Rosemary Clooney. When she made her first-ever professional appearance in San Francisco at the Fairmont in March 1963, one local reviewer still saw the pure and decent girl from the 1950s. The only difference was that she was now “brighter and sexier. Her act is refreshingly natural; a few quips, a lot of personality and 19 songs. When it’s over, you feel like you’ve known the attractive blonde singer all your life.”
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A year later,
Variety
covered Rosemary’s appearances in British Columbia and found her “as warm and personable as ever.”
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In later years, Rosemary was dismissive of her ’60s work. “I sounded like a 1950s jukebox all the way through the next decade,” she said in 1989,
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but it was a harsh self-assessment. “Come On-a My House” and “Mambo Italiano” might still have been de rigueur, but Rosemary’s repertoire also included medley tributes to Bing Crosby and Billie Holiday plus classic material from her
Blue Rose
album. Buddy Cole was still her regular accompanist, orchestrating a version for her of “Now You Has Jazz” from Crosby’s 1956 movie
High Society
. Cole’s premature death in November 1964 at the age of 47 was the first of several personal tragedies that Rosemary had to deal with over the coming years.

With her family now aged from four to nine, Rosemary was anxious to limit her time away from the children. It meant that she spent less time working in clubs and more time in television studios. Even when she did appear on stage, she took the children with her, after a fashion. Five more-than-life size cutouts became part of the act. Her closing number was always Disney’s “M-I-C-K-E-Y Mickey Mouse,” later replaced by the theme from TV’s
Batman
. “The kids’ favorites” she told her audiences. Stage appearances were, however, becoming fewer and fewer, and it was now through television rather than any other medium that American families
gained most of their exposure to Rosemary Clooney. She was a regular guest on weekly shows with the likes of Garry Moore and Johnny Carson and a familiar face on ABC’s
The Hollywood Palace
variety show. There was diversification too. In January 1963, she had played a straight role in “The Losers,” an episode of
The Dick Powell Show
in which she appeared opposite Lee Marvin and Keenan Wynn. Game shows such as
Password
and
I’ve Got a Secret
, a comedic appearance opposite Red Skelton, and commercials for Florient air cleaner and Acrilan all created an image of Rosemary as a jack-of-all-trades celebrity, at the expense of her more customary self-branding as a “girl singer.” Rosemary’s willingness to take whatever work came her way reflected not only her need to make ends meet but also the apparent reality that as a singer, her best days were behind her.

The reunion with Joe only worsened Rosemary’s financial position. Despite the unfavorable press coverage of the first divorce hearing, their lifestyle was still expensive. The house on Roxbury Drive was costly to run and the growing family ever more demanding. A mid-1964 court case positioned Rosemary against her former manager, Joe Shribman, each filing suits against the other. Shribman’s suit claimed $20,000 in unpaid commissions while Rosemary’s alleged mismanagement and waste in activities undertaken on her behalf. In December, Rosemary was again in the crosshairs of the IRS, who claimed tax arrears of $49,124 for the years 1959 and 1960. By the time Rosemary’s divorce from Ferrer came through in August 1966, she was effectively bankrupt. Her annual earnings were now below the $20,000 mark and her personal debts almost three times that amount. Once again, Rosemary turned to the pill bottles for solace from her real-world troubles.

Rosemary’s recording career had been the cornerstone of everything she had done since the day Mitch Miller had read her the riot act over “Come On-a My House.” By 1963, however, Rosemary as a hit maker, was history. Her two-year deal with RCA had come and gone almost unnoticed. Album sales had been disappointing and her attempts to make it back on the singles charts had disappeared without trace. Rosemary’s arrival at Reprise Records, newly founded by Frank Sinatra, did nothing to slow the trend. Reprise was Sinatra’s attempt to finally wrest artistic control away from the faceless owners of the big labels and their record producers—the same issue that had soured his own relationship with Mitch Miller back at Columbia. When he announced the creation of Reprise Records in December 1960, Sinatra offered his signings creative freedom in what they recorded and eventually, ownership and publishing rights for their work. Cronies such as Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. were among the first major names to jump ship from their existing contracts. When Sinatra
himself called Rosemary late in 1962 with a request that she come to his new label, Rosemary had other things on her mind but said yes all the same. “Sure,” she said, adding later that she “never knew what the deal was—still don’t today.”
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As with any new venture, Sinatra needed sales to justify the contracts that he had handed out to a mixed bag of current stars, up-and-comers, and has-beens. Rosemary was fast approaching the third category. Three Reprise singles came and went in quick succession, each offering different styles that were little more than shots in the dark in an attempt to find a hit formula. Artistically, the best song among them was “The Rose and the Butterfly.” Rosemary delivered a tender vocal with characteristic purity of tone, singing largely to just guitar accompaniment. It was good listening for the Clooney fan but hardly juke box material. The rest of the sides had Rosemary battling a vocal chorus on two tracks (including an ill-conceived remake of “Mixed Emotions” from 1951) and offering a version of “A Hundred Years from Today” that musically, was a near-clone of her “Hey There” hit record from 1954.

Alongside the singles, Sinatra lined up Rosemary as one of a lengthy list of stars who made up the “Reprise Repertory Company.” Taking four Broadway shows as the source of the material, Sinatra, Martin, and Davis joined forces with other new recruits such as Bing Crosby, Jo Stafford, and Dinah Shore to put together the “Reprise Repertory Theater” series. Rosemary took two solos—“How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” and “Look to the Rainbow”—on the
Finian’s Rainbow
album and joined Sinatra in a duet version of “Some Enchanted Evening” for
South Pacific
. These recordings perhaps offer the first tangible evidence of the effect of Rosemary’s off-stage traumas on her singing. Her rendition of “Glocca Morra” was thin-voiced and soulless. She would return to the song 30 years later for Concord Records and at the age of 66, produce a timeless reading of Yip Harburg’s nostalgic Irish lyric. Her 1964 recording conveyed no message. “Look to the Rainbow” was much the same, while the duet with Sinatra continued the slightly uneasy vocal relationship that the two had encountered at Columbia. The recording was not helped by the fact that it was an artificial duet, commonplace now, but in the ’60s, still unusual. Rosemary and Frank recorded their vocals separately, leaving studio engineers the job of patching them together. Years later, Rosemary was scathing about her Reprise output. “There are some things at Reprise—‘Some Enchanted Evening’ among ’em—that I would rather bury,” she said on Merv Griffin’s chat show in 1982.
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Rosemary reserved most of her ire, however, for the one solo album that she recorded for Reprise.
Thanks for Nothing
was intended as a concept album around the theme of lost love, a theme often used by Sinatra himself
and an extension of the mood that
Love
had sought to create. The album sessions paired Rosemary with Sinatra’s producer Sonny Burke and arranger Bob Thompson, responsible for the upbeat charts on
Clap Hands—Here Comes Rosie
some three years before. The song list for the album raided Tin Pan Alley for such standards as Irving Berlin’s “All Alone” and Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things.” Alongside sat new songs from such writers as Felice and Boudleaux Bryant (better known for their rock-ballad offerings for singers such as the Everly Brothers) and Alan Bergman. Rosemary recorded 12 songs for the album over three sessions between September and November 1964. It would be her last solo album for almost 11 years.