Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (16 page)

Pianist and arranger Buddy Cole was central to these engagements and increasingly was becoming the preeminent musical support for Rosemary. Cole was in many ways the antithesis of Nelson Riddle, Percy Faith, and the other “big orchestra” arrangers whom Rosemary had worked with. At heart, Cole was a keyboard player—piano, celeste, and his real love, the pipe organ. He had started out playing piano in a cinema accompanying silent films, working his way up the ladder to become a cinema organist. Eventually, Cole would install a three-manual, 27-rank pipe organ in a specially constructed home studio. The demise of silent movies was career ending for cinema organists and Cole moved into the dance band arena with Frankie Trumbauer and Alvino Rey before joining the John Scott Trotter orchestra in 1947. Trotter had been Bing Crosby’s musical director since the mid-’30s and it was as the pianist in Trotter’s band that Cole came to know Bing, and ultimately, Rosemary. At heart, Crosby was still a jazz singer and felt most comfortable working with a small group of musicians with whom he could improvise. When Crosby moved on from his long association with Trotter, Cole was the man he turned to sustain him through his transition out of network radio and into mainstream television. And what was good enough for Bing worked for Rosemary too.

“Buddy was an interesting pianist,” Rosemary told jazz critic Gary Giddins. “I don’t think he was one of the best ones that worked with either one of us, but he could do the small group things and he was good about going to Bing’s house to rehearse and to my house. And he was funny. Bing got along with him too. He liked him, fine, so it was just kind of a personal comfort thing.”
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Cole was at the heart of a 1957–58 season radio show for Ford (
The Ford Road Show
) that featured Rosemary and Bing, albeit on alternate days. Commencing in September 1957, the five-minute shows ran daily Monday to Saturday and twice on Sundays. Each show featured Rosemary or Bing, with announcer Ken Carpenter. All the songs—no more than one or two short renditions per show—were prerecorded, backed by Cole and a three-man rhythm section. The informality suited everyone. Cole explained in 1962 that many of the arrangements he used were undocumented. “We do maybe 4, 6, 8, 10—I’ve done as many as 20 songs in a day with Bing. A lot of these were head arrangements, not written.” Cole also traded on the interchangeability between Bing and Rosemary. He recorded each of them doing solos on songs such as “You’re in Kentucky Sure as You’re Born” and Ellington’s “Do Nothin’ ’Till You Hear from Me,” using the identical arrangement and tempo for both singers, a reflection not only of the compatibility of their voices but also the fact that they both possessed an uncanny musical ear. Like Mitch Miller, Cole was also keen on adding effects to the recording once he had the basic track captured. “We play
these things back through a speaker or on a headset and then set about adding instruments and other sounds, electric guitar, organ, kettle drums, shot guns, chimes, whatever you want to add,” he said.
¹³

The shows ran through to August 31, 1958, by which time Cole held almost 200 Clooney vocals. Decca Records acquired 14 of these in 1959 and released a dozen on its Coral subsidiary label as a long-player called
Swing Around Rosie
. Cole was an inventive pianist but his weakness was his fetish for the pipe organ. He would frequently dub it over the piano accompaniment that he played on a recording session. Just about every track on
Swing Around Rosie
has the organ sound somewhere and its raucous sound—akin almost to Mitch Miller’s harpsichord—made for a harsh listening experience. It was only when it was applied in a softer, church style, as on the standout track “Moonlight Mississippi,” that it complemented rather than competed with Rosemary’s voice. The organ pipes found a more natural home in June 1959 when Cole orchestrated an album of hymns for MGM. Using just a quartet of musicians that she worked with on her radio show, but with the significant addition of the Ralph Carmichael Singers, Rosemary recorded 15 hymns over three sessions. Rosemary’s Catholic upbringing meant that she was unfamiliar with most of the spiritual material because it originated in Protestant churches. “I had to learn them all from scratch,” Rosemary said in 2000.
¹⁴
Her vocals were suitably reverential, although she never managed to attain the same affinity with the material that similar albums by Perry Como and Gordon MacRae/Jo Stafford displayed.

Rosemary’s offerings for Coral and MGM were creditable, but her most significant recording work during her freelance period was for RCA Victor. It led ultimately to her signing an exclusive deal with the label in 1960. Her RCA sessions began in the summer of 1958. Having just completed her two intensive engagements in Reno and Las Vegas, Rosemary—by now seven months pregnant—might have been expected to take a break. Instead, she embarked on a series of recordings that rivaled her work with Duke Ellington as the most significant of her pre-breakdown career. Once more, it was a collaborative event with Rosemary’s partners this time being Bing Crosby and Billy May.

Rosemary’s friendship with Crosby had continued to bloom since their film and radio work during 1953–54, although until 1958, their respective recording contracts had precluded any commercial sessions between them. Crosby’s exclusive contract with American Decca had expired in 1955, allowing him to enter a range of experimental, freelance-based deals with labels such as Verve and Capitol. Crosby’s working relationship with RCA began in 1957 with a jazz album,
Bing with a Beat
, alongside jazz trumpeter,
Bob Scobey. Many regarded it as the finest concept album of his career. RCA therefore seemed a natural choice when lyricist Sammy Cahn came up with an idea for teaming Bing and Rosemary on an album whose storyline had the dual themes of travel and rekindled love. Cahn’s idea had two former lovers meeting up unexpectedly. He and his partner, Jimmy Van Heusen, wrote a new song, “Fancy Meeting You Here,” which told the story of that encounter and opened the way for 10 more retrospective songs that extended around the world as the two former lovers looked back on their time together. Another new song from the same partnership, “Love Won’t Let You Get Away,” capped off the album as the two lovers finally accept the inevitability of their being together.

The album cast Rosemary and Crosby as lovers, but was a strictly fictional concoction. For almost all of the time that Rosemary had known Bing, he had been a single—and highly eligible—man. Crosby’s first wife, Dixie Lee, had died in November 1952; after that time Crosby had been seen around Hollywood with a variety of young, female partners, a list that included Grace Kelly and Inger Stevens. Despite his availability and Rosemary’s proclivity for affairs, the relationship between the two of them was never a sexual one. “Not even a one-nighter,” Rosemary said in her autobiography.
¹⁵
Instead the chemistry between the two of them was more akin to the relationship Crosby had with his golfing and hunting buddies. Rosemary’s elder daughter Maria said that her mother was “Bing’s only female friend. They talked about anything—musicians, lyrics, boxing. When the two of them were in a room together, the rest were non-existent.”
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The ease and camaraderie inherent in their relationship was apparent throughout the three recording sessions that were scheduled during July and August 1958.

Fancy Meeting You Here
was, from Sammy Cahn’s perspective, a case of killing two birds with one stone. The year before, he and Van Heusen had written “Come Fly with Me” for Frank Sinatra and used that as the title song for an album of 12 round-the-world songs. Two of them, “Isle of Capri” and “Brazil” also appeared in the
Fancy Meeting You Here
listing. As well as the overlapping theme, the two albums also had in common the “falstaffian”
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presence of Billy May as arranger and conductor. Like Nelson Riddle, May had built his reputation at Capitol Records, both with solo albums and as an arranger for Nat “King” Cole.
Come Fly with Me
was the first of many albums with Sinatra in a partnership that would run through to 1979. For Rosemary, the experience of working with May, so soon after her exposure to Riddle, could not have been more different. Where Riddle was tasteful and ornate in his arrangements, May was loud and brash. A typical May arrangement put the brass section to the fore and made regular
use of two trademark devices, the trumpet mute and a saxophone glissando, widely known as his “slurping saxes.” Singing to a Billy May arrangement required a totally different style from one used in working with Riddle.

Riddle and May were also opposites in their approach to their work. “Recording with Billy May is like having a bucket of cold water thrown in your face,” Sinatra once said. “Riddle will come to a session with all the arrangements carefully and neatly worked out beforehand. With Billy you sometimes don’t get copies of the next number until you’ve finished the one before.”
¹⁸
Rosemary concurred. She recalled May’s copyist working alongside him, frantically transcribing to the point that the musicians were working off copies with the ink still wet. May’s last-minute style posed problems too for Crosby. “I knew the way Bing worked,” Rosemary said. “We’d know which songs we’d have to do that day. And he would be prepared when we walked in.”
¹⁹
Buddy Cole’s presence on the sessions—indeed he actually conducted the first on July 28—dissipated some of Crosby’s unease and what emerged was a set of lively and imaginatively scored duets. Much of the vocal work between Crosby and Clooney was complex and intricate, none more so than Frank Loesser’s “You Came a Long Way from St. Louis.” The two singers were called up on to handle an intertwined melody and countermelody which gave way to a counterpoint rendition from Crosby of “You Can Take the Boy Out of the Country,” newly added by composer Bob Russell just for this session.

To keep a freshness in their exchanges, Crosby used a technique imported from his movie partnership with Bob Hope. Where the lyrics included some personalized interchange between him and Rosemary, Crosby would come up with a variation of his own, but which he would throw in only at the last minute. It caught Rosemary unaware and accounted for the genuinely spontaneous laughter that could be heard on some of the tracks, never more so than in her reaction to a line about breakfasting with Bardot (“you know somebody should knit her a hug-me-tight, she’s gonna catch her death of cold,” Crosby tossed in. “What the hell is a hug-me-tight?” Rosemary said later). When the album hit the shops—complete with a suitably travel-oriented cover photograph that used suitcases and trunks to conceal Rosemary’s pregnancy—the results were well received. In England, the at times highbrow magazine
The Gramophone
, said, “it is the infectious easygoing good humor of the record which remains in the mind. That, and an occasional twist of lyric; no record can be neglected which ends a nostalgic and twang-ridden version of the “Isle of Capri” with ‘I’ve often felt that we both might have stayed there, if it weren’t for those stale mandolins.’”
²⁰
Time
magazine said that the album offered “infectious musical dialogue
between two of the sassiest fancy talkers in the business” and that it offered “the most intriguing of musical entertainments since Noel Coward had his famous chat with Mary Martin.”
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Fifty years later, jazz critic Will Friedwald’s assessment of the album was that it is “rightfully regarded as one of the best duet vocal albums ever.”
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The acclaim given to the album was not matched by record sales, however. “It didn’t sell at all,” Rosemary told Johnny Green in 1961, musing that the vocal interplay between her and Bing might just have made the album too complex for the casual listener.
²³

Rosemary’s fourth pregnancy ended on October 13, 1958, with the birth of her second daughter, Monsita Teresa Ferrer. The joy of the birth was briefly clouded by the New Year’s Eve news of the death of Grandma Guilfoyle. By then, Rosemary had already returned to work, and rehearsal commitments for
The Perry Como Show
in New York kept her from her grandmother’s funeral. When the show went out live on Saturday, January 10, 1959, Rosemary substituted Como for Crosby in one of the duets from
Fancy Meeting You Here
. The early months of 1959 saw Rosemary back to the familiar, intensive work schedule that characterized her between-pregnancy periods. She joined Crosby for the entertainment part of his annual golf clambake at Pebble Beach; guested on the George Burns and Garry Moore shows; and in March 1959, took part in a TV tribute to Manie Sachs, the man who brought her to Columbia Records and had recently passed away. March also saw her record two duets with Bob Hope, both songs from his latest picture,
Alias Jesse James
, and these in turn prompted a guest appearance on TV with the comedian in May to promote the newly issued RCA single.

The summer brought a more intensive recording schedule. Three sessions in early June were sufficient to capture the tracks for the
Hymns from the Heart
album with Buddy Cole. In July, Rosemary had two days of RCA sessions, again in part with Crosby, for a double album of songs associated with the Old West, before starting work in the label’s Sunset Boulevard studios on another project, one that added yet another dimension to her repertoire. This latest project placed her alongside the mambo-king, Perez Prado, and eventually saw release as the first output under her exclusive deal with RCA, which she signed in January 1960. Prado was a Cuban legend and if not the originator of the “mambo,” he was certainly its most effective exploiter and the inventor of the dance that came to characterize the music. His early ’50s residency at the Park Plaza Ballroom in New York became the focal point for the craze. Rosemary herself had been caught up in the rush for mambo records at that time. Perry Como’s “Papa Loves Mambo” had been the biggest commercial success and was closer to “pure mambo,” but nevertheless, by title alone, “Mambo Italiano” had also given
Rosemary a seat on the bandwagon. Mambo in purest form was difficult to describe. In essence, the term meant a rhythm structure that could be played at a fast or slow tempo. Usually, the saxophones in a band set the rhythm, with the brass carrying the melody. And in Prado’s hands, it was a lively sound that spawned several albums and a batch of hit singles for him and RCA during the ’50s—although by the time he teamed up with Rosemary in 1959, his hit-making days were over. Rosemary approached the sessions with some trepidation. Prado and his band spoke little English, she had no Spanish, and so it was polyglot husband Joe who helped her learn the phonetic pronunciation required for some of the numbers. Despite Rosemary’s characteristic sure-footedness with the vocals, the album suffered from a strangely inconsistent combination of songs that producer Dick Peirce assembled, ranging from obvious selections such as “In a Little Spanish Town” and “Magic Is the Moonlight” to less appropriate jazz titles such as “Mack the Knife” and “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’.”