Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (21 page)

On March 16, 1968, her friend from her previous involvement in politics, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, declared his candidacy for president in the election due later in the year. Kennedy’s platform was essentially antiwar, a direct challenge to the incumbent Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson. It was enough to persuade Rosemary to pick up her political involvement that had lain dormant since the assassination of Kennedy’s brother five years earlier, although her attraction to Kennedy wasn’t purely due to his antiwar stance. Racial and economic equality and social reform were major campaign themes, essentially the same liberal Democratic ticket that Rosemary had learned from her grandfather in the ’30s.

Rosemary returned home from the Far East for a brief reacquaintance with her family before resuming the European leg of her world tour. On April 4, she was in Germany when the news reached her of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. The event prompted an outbreak of anti-American sentiment across Europe, which to Rosemary’s fragile mental state, translated into a personal attack on her. In London a few days later, she appeared on the popular late night talk show hosted by a genial Irishman called Eamonn Andrews. The show was usually nothing more than light banter between an assortment of celebrities, but this time, the topic turned to King’s assassination. When one guest, a black West Indian cricketer, launched an attack on America’s treatment of racial inequality, Rosemary took it personally. She responded vigorously but eventually broke down. “That was my warning signal,” she said later, “but instead of listening, I ran to Brazil and still more work.”
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Brazil and a date in Calgary, Canada, offered little respite from the accelerating treadmill that was now Rosemary’s life. By the end of May 1968, the
Kennedy bandwagon had gathered a pace that few thought possible two months before. Unnerved by a narrow victory in the New Hampshire primary that he should have won easily, President Johnson had withdrawn from the race within two weeks of Kennedy having declared his candidacy. It left the Democratic nomination as a fight between Kennedy, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, and the overt antiwar campaigner, Eugene McCarthy, who had been the first to challenge Johnson. When Kennedy won the primaries in Indiana and Nebraska, the nomination—and the White House—seemed there for the taking. All eyes focused on the next primary in California. On May 30, Rosemary joined the senator at a rally in Oakland, California, offering a rendition of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” The following week, she joined him in San Diego for another rally. A newsreel film from June 3 captured a wide-eyed Rosemary alongside Kennedy and fellow singer, Andy Williams. “I can look at myself and know that I was high,” Rosemary said later.
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Indeed, anyone seeing Rosemary’s behavior that night—the adoring stare into the senator’s eyes, the exaggerated body language and the lame attempts at humor—would have seen a person unrecognizable from the girl who had once charmed the nation.

Rosemary, with daughter Maria in tow, flew with the Kennedy entourage back to Los Angeles the next day and drove with him in an open-top car through the city. The next evening, June 5, Rosemary, along with Maria and son Miguel, were among the crowds inside the Ambassador Hotel to hear the news of Kennedy’s victory in the primary. As Rosemary waited stage left to greet the victorious candidate and offer her congratulations, the senator turned and took an alternative exit route through the hotel’s kitchen area. “The shots sounded like someone breaking light bulbs,” daughter Maria recalled.
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It was only when a Kennedy aide appeared, covered in blood, that the horror became apparent. Rosemary’s hold on reality lasted long enough for her to get the children away from the scene as fast as she could, using her celebrity status to get her through the security that had quickly sealed off the building. But in the days that followed, Rosemary’s mind substituted the reality that everyone else saw with a world of her own. Kennedy wasn’t dead. It was a conspiracy, a plan by something or someone to teach everyone a lesson. Even a telephone conversation with Kennedy’s widow, Ethel, failed to persuade Rosemary that the blood she had seen in the Ambassador Hotel had been that of the murdered senator.

Three weeks after Kennedy was buried in Washington, DC, Rosemary traveled to Reno for a three-week season at Harold’s Club. She was on the edge—“running, forever running, without knowing why,”
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she said later. Her twisted and confused mind had positioned her in the middle of an enormous conspiracy. No one was safe from her bottled up angst and she
saw everyone as a threat. A taxi driver who dropped her back at her hotel after one performance, innocently remarked that she was now “safely back at headquarters.” The word had connotations for Rosemary that she could never later explain but it turned her, she said, into “a harridan,” who berated the taxi driver with uncontrollable venom.
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The singer who took the Reno stage every night was walking a mental tightrope. One slip was all that was needed to take her over the edge and spinning down into the abyss. On July 8, 1968, Rosemary Clooney finally lost her footing.

P
recisely what it was that tipped Rosemary Clooney over the edge that night in Reno will never be known. Opening night had come and gone without major incident, although Rosemary had entered the stage from the rear of the room, rather than from the side as was customary. Her premature arrival meant that the orchestra was not set up, nor were the lights and the sound ready. Once under way, she failed to find any real harmony with the club band. The drummer in particular, lagged the beat, while her singing, said
Variety
, was “faulted by obvious throat problems.” It was, said the review, “disappointing to those who know Miss Clooney as the consummate performer.”
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Disappointment was to become shock and horror when Rosemary took the stage for the first show on July 8, 1968. Charged with inexplicable anger, Rosemary stood in front of the band and ignored the cues from the musical director. As the band struck up “Come On-a My House,” Rosemary eyeballed her audience. When someone from the room called out a request for her to sing, Rosemary berated them. “You can’t imagine the price I’ve paid to sing a bunch of dumb songs for you.”
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As the band plowed on with the planned accompaniment but with no singer, Rosemary stood hands on hips before turning and marching off the stage without a thought for her audience. “They were nice people,” she said later, “all on my side.”
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Fearing that she was ill—and she was—the club owner arrived in the dressing room with a doctor, whose first thoughts were that the star had had too much to drink. Rosemary had indeed been drinking but was not drunk. To her, the entire episode was part of the “plot” that had been running ever since Kennedy’s assassination. Believing that the owner and the doctor
were there to silence her, she ran, taking a taxi back to her motel where she trashed her room. As dawn approached, she drove her car up the Mt. Rose Highway, heading toward Lake Tahoe. Rosemary described the journey many times in later life, saying how she purposely drove on the wrong side of the road to “play chicken with God.”
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Whether the journey was quite so reckless or whether it was just one more hallucination, no one knows. But regardless of how she got there, the Rosemary Clooney who arrived in Lake Tahoe was one very sick lady.

Rosemary was now in free fall. Comedian Shecky Greene was appearing in Tahoe and had received word about the events in Reno and called another doctor. Soon an ambulance arrived to admit her to the local hospital in Tahoe. Seeing that too as part of “the plot,” Rosemary threw her belongings out of the ambulance to leave a trail for the “rescuers” that she hoped would come. When tranquilizers failed to calm her mental state, her family arranged for an air ambulance to fly her to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, the same hospital where her children had been born. Sister Betty signed the committal papers, but Rosemary’s incarceration did not last. Despite the near total loss of touch with reality, there was sufficient lucidity left in Rosemary’s mind to summon her thespian skills and convince two doctors that it had all been a big mistake. Her behavior, she told them, was just the result of a mixup in the dosage of her prescription drugs. Truly, everything was just fine.

It took a medical mind, one that knew the old Rosemary intimately, to make the judgment that everything was not fine. Rosemary’s cousin and childhood friend, Phyllis, the daughter of her Aunt Rose, had married a young doctor called Sherm Holvey in 1949. Phyllis was more like a sister than a cousin to Rosemary, and she and her husband remained close friends of Rosemary and her family. They were the first port of call for any medical issue. Holvey’s specialty was endocrinology but his broader medical knowledge enabled him to recognize the symptoms of severe mental trauma. He also knew the doctor he wanted to treat her. Dr. Victor Monke was a psychiatrist to whom Holvey had referred patients before. He was, in Holvey’s mind, perfect for Rosemary. “Calm, paternal, unflappable, an extraordinary talent,” was Holvey’s description of Monke’s essential characteristics. “She trusted him. He walked her through the darkness into the light.”
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On Holvey’s recommendation, Rosemary committed herself to the care of Victor Monke at the Mt. Sinai Hospital, situated in the heart of Beverly Hills. It was no more than a five-minute drive from Rosemary’s North Roxbury home. Monke’s diagnosis confirmed Sherm Holvey’s instincts. His initial report said that Rosemary had suffered a “psychotic reaction with severe depression and paranoid features. Her symptoms included hallucinations,
fear, depression, violently aggressive behavior and an inability to distinguish between the real and the unreal.”
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Rosemary spent a month as an inpatient in Mt. Sinai, working in group therapy with other patients. The daily routine involved domestic tasks, such as making beds and scrubbing floors, anything that would return the 20 or so patients back to a routine of normal life. In later years, Rosemary’s description of the experience became a talk-show routine. She described her fellow patients, painting watercolors of their favorite pills and watching television shows trying to spot other “crazy” people. “It was like a little commune,” she told Tom Snyder in 1977, “all of us a little nuts.”
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One critical part of the experience, however, was that Rosemary learned to laugh again—at herself and at the world. When a bunch of flowers arrived from Bob Hope with a note saying, “I hope it’s a boy,” (“Well, that was the only reason you were ever in hospital before,” he later explained), Rosemary’s deep-throated laugh was the first indication to her family that recovery was under way.

After Rosemary’s discharge in August 1968, the group therapy sessions would continue for another seven years, initially every day before dropping to three days per week. The recovery was slow and painful. Monke’s first task had been to break Rosemary’s dependence on drugs, a process that involved the same traumas of withdrawal and denial that afflict any addict. Rosemary’s behavior through the immediate months was uncertain and unpredictable. The children spent lengthy spells away from her, staying with Betty and with their father. When they did return home, they found that the normal rules of family life had been suspended. “We were never sure which person was coming back,” daughter Maria said. “It was a lot of years before she became a safe person to be around.” Her mother, she said, slept a lot during that time, the sleep interspersed with outbursts of rage and screaming, “not at you, but about issues that became important to her.”
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Brother Nick characterized his sister’s recovery as a “series of ongoing incidents and adjustments”
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as Rosemary sought to restore the balance to her life.

Inevitably there were casualties in that process. Three years into her recovery, Rosemary felt the need to take control of her home back from her mother. Her ejection, initially to Las Vegas to live with Betty before finally returning home to Kentucky, had a destabilizing effect on the family. Many people, including Rosemary’s daughters, viewed “Nana” as the one person who had brought stability to their lives. “Someone I loved and adored. A steadying force in our lives,” said Monsita Botwick.
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Her sister, Maria, echoed the same sentiment. “She was our day to day figurehead,” she said. “When that is taken away, life doesn’t seem very secure. My mother went away to work and came back. Our grandmother was there all the time and
to a child, it was unnerving to have her leave for good.”
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Rosemary’s relationship with her mother never did heal, however. Asked later if the past had been resolved before her mother’s death in 1973, Rosemary’s response was “not nearly enough.”
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The world that Rosemary reentered late in 1968 was full of harsh realities. With no work and no money coming in other than Ferrer’s alimony, she was broke and facing a significant hospital bill for the therapy that she needed. One of her first acts was to return to the courts and seek an increase in the payments from her former husband. Ferrer was as shocked and concerned as anyone by Rosemary’s breakdown and did not oppose the request to increase his monthly payments from the token $1 to a sustainable $1,250. His monthly payment of support for the children also went up, eventually reaching $2,500. It was enough to keep the family’s heads above water but not much more. Gone were the days of servants and domestic staff at North Roxbury. Instead, Rosemary found herself in a domestic routine that did not come easily. While eventually she did become a very good cook, other domestic routines remained out of reach. “Shrunk all my sweaters” was daughter Maria’s recollection of her mother’s talent as a laundress.

As well as losing touch with reality, Rosemary had also lost her love of singing as the ’60s had progressed. Like the rest of her recovery period, it would be several more years before that returned. Nevertheless, Rosemary remained a performer at heart. She needed to work, not just to bring money in but also to satisfy her innate need to be out front, entertaining and engaging with an audience. Work, however, was no longer easy to find. The abrupt ending to her engagement in Reno had been publicly explained as an attack of influenza. Even before that, Rosemary had told her audience at the Harold’s Club that the engagement would be her last and that after it was over, she would retire and become a “full-time mother.”
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That stance was soon modified with the clarification that Rosemary would continue to make records and television appearances and that her retirement would only be from live stage work. But what Rosemary or her recently appointed manager Bill Loeb said to the press mattered little against the show business jungle telegram that transmitted its own messages. Rosemary Clooney, it said, was trouble. “I couldn’t get arrested,” was how she later summed up her problems in finding work.
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