Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (3 page)

Andrew Clooney was 25 years old and his new wife 19 when they set out on married life. It was a union built on shifting sands. Rosemary later described it as being “like a soap opera,”
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characterized by frequent separations. The pattern continued throughout Rosemary’s childhood, although her mother and father were reunited often enough to produce two more children, Elizabeth Anne (Betty) in 1931 and Nicholas (Nick) three years later. Rosemary’s memories of her childhood were often colored with bitterness. While her father could usually be found in a saloon bar, she remembered her mother as being more interested in selling ready-to-wear clothing than raising children. Frances Clooney was not the first woman to put her career ahead of her children, but in Kentucky in the 1930s, it was an unusual trait. She was “a natural saleswoman, garrulous and born with the gift of making people feel important,” Nick Clooney said of his mother.
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Rosemary eventually came to see some of the same characteristics in her sister, Betty. The pushiness, the eye for an angle, and the ability to close a sale were essentials on the bottom rung of the show business ladder, and it was Betty who used them to gain the girls’ first foothold. The lifestyle of their parents, however, did nothing to create a stable home environment for the three Clooney children. “I don’t think Betty and I and Nicky spent more than two weeks in the same house with them,” Rosemary said.
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The consequence was that the wider Clooney and Guilfoyle families—aunts, uncles, but more especially their respective grandparents—essentially raised the three children, who grew up like orphans.

The town of Maysville where Rosemary Clooney was born had a population of 6,500 at the census that came two years after her birth. The population had tripled in size in the 100 years since the town had attained city status, but it was a growth rate that was only one fifth the national average. What increase there was came largely from expansion of the city’s boundaries. Despite Kentucky’s reputation as an early home for the first wave of Irish immigration, the flood of other nationalities into the United States around the turn of the 20th century largely passed by the Ohio townships. Maysville owed its origins to the Ohio River and had soon developed into a thriving port, an outlet for the export of hemp and tobacco, but it was slow, organic growth, hardly likely to radically alter the makeup and character of
the town. A wrought-iron industry later developed in the town, but at the time of Rosemary’s birth, Maysville remained a predominantly agricultural settlement where tobacco was king. Even into the 1980s stockyards could still be found close to the center of the town itself.

Rosemary’s earliest memory of a place she could call home was the apartment that her grandpa and Grandma Clooney kept above the jeweler’s shop on Market Street. It was, she later said, a stylish house where she and Betty experienced the sensation of being loved for the first time in their lives. Andrew Clooney senior was quick to involve his granddaughters in his political activities, persuading them to sing at fund-raising events and taking them along to the public meetings that were a regular part of his life. He also promoted Rosemary’s friendship with a black girl, Blanchie Mae Chambers, whose mother worked as a maid at the Central Hotel in town. It provided Rosemary with her first experience of the racial segregation that dominated the South, and her grandfather’s rebuttal of it stayed with her all her life. Blanchie Mae remained a lifelong friend, and pointedly, when Rosemary returned to Maysville for a triumphant motorcade procession in 1953, it was her childhood friend who sat alongside her, although even then, she had to be passed off as her maid.

This first, brief period of stability in the early life of Rosemary Clooney came to an abrupt end in 1939 with the death of her paternal grandmother, Cynthia. Despite acknowledging that she had always been her grandmother’s favorite, Rosemary felt no sense of loss. “I remember thinking ‘I should be feeling more than I am feeling,’” she said later.
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What loss Rosemary—and her siblings—did feel came because their grandmother’s death also took them away from the grandfather they loved. In 1937, two years before Cynthia’s death, Maysville along with countless other towns along the length of the Ohio River, had been consumed by one of the worst floods in history. Despite Canute-like tones of defiance, Andrew B. Clooney had seen his business premises devastated. His spirit broken by the flood and then by the loss of his wife, he was in no position to look after three grandchildren on his own.

The solution was for the Clooney children to move in with the Guilfoyles. Their new home with their grandmother Guilfoyle was on West Third Street. Life there could not have been more different from living with their late grandmother Clooney. The two women were like chalk and cheese, and despite a shared interest in the children that their two off spring had neglected, their relationship had never passed beyond the formality of “Mrs. Clooney” and “Mrs. Guilfoyle.” But where Cynthia Clooney was refined and formal, Ada Guilfoyle was a practical woman of great strength, warmth, and love. Her youngest child was only three years older than Rosemary and
the addition of three grandchildren meant that the family she now supported had expanded to 12. Having grown up on a farm and then taught school, Ada Guilfoyle seemed to possess all the skills necessary to raise a large family. She supplemented her time around the house by working nights as a practical nurse. Even when the children had flown the nest, Grandma Guilfoyle could be called upon to go the extra mile. Once when Rosemary was touring with the Tony Pastor orchestra, the entire band descended on the Guilfoyle household with no warning. She killed, dressed, and cooked 22 chickens to feed her houseguests. “Best Southern fried chicken I ever tasted,” said Gene Cipriano, one of the band members who shared in the feast.
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Perhaps the only common ground between the Clooneys and the Guilfoyles was their shared love of music. Her grandfather’s apartment had boasted a fine piano among its furnishings, plus a radio set. Rosemary’s father had an excellent singing voice and his sister Olivette led a small band that played for parties at the local country club. Rosemary’s grandfather Guilfoyle had been known for his love of dancing, but it was his daughter Ann—Rosemary’s aunt—who had the most significant musical influence on the young Rosemary. Ann Guilfoyle had started to build a career as a nightclub singer, working in Lexington at several clubs and often performing with some of the touring bands that passed through town. Nick Clooney recalled his Aunt Ann as a glamorous figure, always well dressed, smelling of the most expensive perfume and the first to have anything that came on the market that might seem cool. “She always had a new car,” he said, “despite being a terrible driver.”
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Her show business lifestyle led to frequent confrontations with her mother, Ada, whose attempts to rein back her daughter were validated when Ann died tragically from an accidental drugs overdose at the age of 25. Her life—and death—provided Rosemary with her first exposure to the light and darker sides of the show business world.

With such a heavy musical influence from both sides of the family, it was no surprise that Rosemary started singing almost as soon as she learned to talk. Her stage debut came just before her third birthday when her aunt Olivette arranged for her to sing “When Your Hair Has Turned to Silver” on the stage of the Russell Theater, Maysville’s downtown movie house. Not long after, Rosemary was singing “Home on the Range” at one of her grandfather’s political gatherings and her first review came in 1933 when the
Middlesboro Daily News
reported that she had sung three songs at the conclusion of Maysville’s centenary dinner in the Central Hotel.
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She was still only five years old but music, it seemed, was in her blood.

It wasn’t just music. It was apparent from Rosemary’s stage debut in 1940 that she was also born with a natural stage presence. The occasion
was a St. Patrick’s High School production of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. Rosemary had set her heart on playing the part of Snow White, opposite her cousin and would-be beau, Joe Breslin. In the end, Rosemary had to settle for the part of the witch, a role that she nevertheless played with considerable relish. A fellow cast member, Marion Byron Gilligan, remembered with a shiver Rosemary’s hideous laugh as she handed the poison apple to Snow White, an unsuspecting Rose Marie Tierney. Another classmate, Wanda Ring Anderson recalled a memorable footnote to the same scene. Just as the witch offered the apple, her taped-on nose fell off, landing right in her basket. Without missing a beat, Rosemary went on with her lines. “She stole the show even then. She was a regular comedienne,” Wanda said.
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The
Snow White
production marked the end of Rosemary’s years in Maysville, at least for the time being. Later that year, her uncles George and Chick opened a filling station business in Ironton, Ohio, and the entire Guilfoyle family moved the 73 miles to join them. It proved to be an unlucky town. During their time there, Chick was injured in an accident, his sister Christine developed a brain tumor, and their sister Ann succumbed to a drug overdose. When the filling station business failed, the family moved to Cincinnati, where George took a job for the Baldwin Piano Company. Briefly the family all lived on Fairfax Avenue in Cincinnati, and Rosemary attended Withrow High School. It wasn’t long, however, before they were on the move again, this time to Indian Hills Road, where Grandma Guilfoyle took over an old farmhouse. It would be the last of the homes that the Clooney children would share with one of their grandparents.

Andrew and Frances Clooney were still, at best, intermittent presences in the lives of their three children. Frances had by now moved on from her job as a sales clerk in the dress store, first to a store manager position and then into a traveling sales job with the Lerner dress company. She loved the job and life on the road. Each week, she would send a $5 bill back home to her children in Cincinnati, but the postmark on the envelope was the closest the kids came to knowing their mother’s precise whereabouts. Things changed yet again in 1942, however, when the divorce that had long seemed inevitable finally became a reality. The newly single Frances Clooney returned home, taking an apartment on Clinton Springs Avenue in Cincinnati. It was to be only a brief return. Within weeks, she announced that she planned to remarry and that her husband-to-be, Bill Stone, was a sailor in California. Worse still, she was taking Nick with her to California, but leaving Rosemary and Betty in Kentucky. She told the girls that she would send for them once she was settled on the West Coast, but the promise was like all the others that the girls had heard before—hollow and unfulfilled. When
the day came, the tearful sisters could only watch as their mother disappeared once more, this time waving to them through the back window of a cab that carried her and their younger brother to the railroad station. They saw neither of them again for two years. It was a traumatic separation for all three children, especially Nick. “I knew my sisters far better than I knew either of my parents,” he said.
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Frances Clooney’s departure was followed by another surprising twist in the lives of Rosemary and Betty. As one parent rode out of town, the other made a surprise return. Seemingly reformed and chastened by his now sole responsibility for his daughters, Andrew Clooney junior managed to kick his drinking habit and found a job with the Wright Aeronautical defense plant in Cincinnati. He took an apartment on Elberon Avenue and the girls moved in with him. For a time, life was good. The job paid decent money and better still, most of it came home with Andrew at the end of the week. At a time when most Americans had shifted their focus to the war in Europe and the Pacific, Rosemary and Betty found that wartime offered them a brief interlude of domestic stability. They were able to get to know their father almost for the first time, sharing their musical interests with him, singing, and debating the merits of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, heard on records on the jukebox in the Fountain Square drugstore. It seemed too good to last, and it was. Andrew Clooney’s spell on the wagon lasted almost as long as America’s involvement in the war in Europe, but by the time VE Day arrived in May 1945, his old habits had returned. Earlier that year, he had returned home just long enough to gather up the defense bonds that he had saved through the war and disappear in a cab, taking the savings with him. Rosemary and Betty, still only 16 and 13 years of age, were left alone. It was time to start looking after themselves.

The question was how? Both girls were still of school age
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and had no prospects of earning enough money outside school to buy food and keep a roof over their heads. They made a few cents here and there collecting deposits on empty bottles but it was nothing more than pin money for two teenage girls. They knew, however, that they could sing, and the saleswoman’s genes that Betty had inherited told her that if they could get the right people to hear them, they could make enough money to live. The right people, she said, could be found downtown at Station WLW in Cincinnati. Self-proclaimed as “The Nation’s Station,” WLW had first taken to the airwaves in 1922 with one of the most powerful broadcast transmitters of any American station. Its 500-kilowatt output was capable of reaching listeners as far away as Canada and South America. WLW was primarily a music station; better still, it ran open auditions every Thursday evening. The sisters decided to try their luck. It was only as they sat and waited for their turn
that the girls had their first experience of stage fright. “When our names were called out,” Betty Clooney later recalled, “we suddenly realized how scared we were, even Rosie, on whom I counted for support.” The girls sang “Hawaiian War Chant,” an authentic Hawaiian song (but not a war chant) that dated back to the 1860s and had enjoyed a late ’30s revival, courtesy of English lyrics by Ralph Freed. Tommy Dorsey’s band had a hit record with the tune, and while the girls didn’t know all of the Hawaiian lyrics that were interspersed through the song, they took a chance that no one else did either. To fill the gaps, they added some Hawaiian sounding ‘ee’s’ and ‘ooh’s’ and got away with it. “They asked us up to do another,” said Betty. “Then the program director came out of the control room and said that if we would take some lessons in mike technique, they could use us.”
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The contract was worth $20 per week, a small fortune to the girls.