Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (4 page)

A 56-second acetate of the girls’ second song from their audition, a cover of the King Cole Trio’s recording of “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” provides the first evidence of how the young Clooney sisters sounded as they set out on their new career. There were many similarities about their voices. Both had near perfect pitch, and unsurprisingly, approached the phrasing of a song almost identically. In their upper registers, the voices were so similar that, even 65 years later, it is difficult to distinguish between them. What differences there were came from the fact that Betty sang a little lower than Rosemary and lacked some of the granularity that would become such a trademark of her older sister. Both agreed that Rosemary was the natural lead singer for the partnership, with Betty’s superior ear for harmony making her a perfect foil. The same could not be said about their physical appearance. Each girl had inherited their mother’s dark coloring, but Rosemary had transformed herself into an elegant blonde from an early age. Betty had more of her mother’s facial characteristics as well as her coloring, including a longer, thinner face. Closer examination of their nose and mouth features would reveal a likeness, but from a distance, it was the way they sounded rather than how they looked that told the audience that this was a natural sister act.

With a contract in their pocket, the girls now felt confident about their ability to pay their own way. They approached their Aunt Jean, their mother’s sister, about moving in with her branch of the Guilfoyle family in suburban Cincinnati. She said yes, and even when their father returned home whistling “Kentucky Babe” (a sign of sobriety, Rosemary later recalled), the girls decided to stay put. Once bitten, twice shy. They enrolled at the Our Lady of Mercy Academy in downtown Cincinnati, close to station WLW, where they quickly became regular features on two shows. First, they worked on
Crossroads Café
, an afternoon show that featured host Rita Hacket and a
big band in the studio, before moving on to a late night show.
Moon River
was the station’s flagship offering, 30 years before Johnny Mercer would immortalize the title in an Academy Award-winning song. The show aired between 11:30 and midnight every night, commercial free to maintain a restful ambience.

The girls were true to their commitment to take some music and singing lessons and were soon picking up other work around the city. They sang with a band led by a boy named Billy Petering, playing high school dances and other local festivals. Petering became Rosemary’s first serious beau. Then a local bandleader named Barney Rapp heard them on the radio and hired the girls to sing with his bigger ensemble. The Rapp band primarily played music for dancing but provided a home to a succession of up-and-coming vocalists, including a young blonde singer from Cincinnati called Doris Kappelhoff. It was Rapp who was credited with changing her name to Doris Day after hearing her sing “Day by Day.” Rapp had started his career in New England before moving to Ohio, where he played and broadcast from hotels and nightclubs as well as making records on the Victor label. The Clooney girls became his regular singers and this, together with their radio work meant that they were soon taking home over $100 every week—each. It was a world away from the hand-to-mouth existence that had characterized much of their earlier lives.

The nine months that the girls spent singing with the Barney Rapp band gave them their first real experience of show business. They played some big clubs in Cincinnati, including the Beverly Hills Supper Club and the Castle Farms Club, where the Paul Whiteman orchestra had played in the ’20s. Rapp also doubled as an agent for the sisters, providing them with bookings with other bands such as Clyde Trask’s orchestra. It was Rapp’s role as a work-finder that was ultimately to prove his most significant contribution to the career of Rosemary Clooney. One day, early in 1946, Rapp ran into an old buddy named Charlie Trotta, trumpet player, sometime vocalist, and road manager for the much bigger Tony Pastor outfit. “Tony wants a new girl singer,” Trotta told him, “got any ideas?” Rapp’s reply was to the point. “A girl singer?” he said. “I can do better than that. I can find him two.”

T
ony Pastor boasted a musical pedigree that ran solidly through the halcyon years of American big band swing. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1907, Pastor began playing the saxophone at the age of 16. Growing up in nearby New Haven and playing with the John Cavallaro band, Pastor met and befriended a young clarinetist named Artie Shaw. The elder of the two friends by three years, Pastor became something of a role model for the young Shaw, who, for a time, seemed happy to take on the role of bag carrier for him. Soon, the two musicians were playing together, first with Irving Aaronson and his Commanders and then with Austin Wylie’s orchestra. Shaw though, was a driven man. It wasn’t long before he had formed a band of his own and when he did, in 1936, Pastor was a natural selection as the saxophonist.

The Shaw band was not the overnight success that its leader expected, and he experimented with several different instrumental combinations before finally breaking through with a recording of “Begin the Beguine.” The strain of leading the band and keeping his own ambition in check took its toll, however, and Shaw suffered the first of several collapses in 1938. Nevertheless, it was still a surprise when, a year later, he suddenly quit the band, leaving it to carry on without him. The band members looked to Pastor to take over as leader but he too had other plans. Although his first attempt at leading his own band in the early 1930s had not gone well, he too retained the ambition to step out on his own. Boston agent Cy Shribman had already offered backing to Pastor if he chose to make a break from Shaw, and the demise of the Shaw band offered the opportunity that he had been waiting for. With Shaw’s musicians talking vaguely about setting
up a cooperative, Pastor decided that his time had come. “I had a chance to go out with my own band, so who needed a whole band of partners?” he said.
¹

Pastor’s musical credentials came from the mellow tone of his tenor sax playing, although it was his exuberant singing style that came to define his new band’s personality. Strongly influenced by Louis Armstrong’s vocals, Pastor’s exaggerated phrasing and croaky voice complimented his bright and bouncy personality. “Short and round, good-humored and easygoing” was Rosemary Clooney’s later summation of him.
²
As well as his solo vocals, Pastor was also a regular duettist, sharing the microphone with Johnny McAfee, who also led the sax quintet in the band, plus a succession of girl singers that included Dorsey Anderson, Eugenie Baird, and Virginia Maxey. It was the latter’s departure in 1946 that created the vacancy that the Clooney Sisters would fill.

The Pastor audition came without any warning for Rosemary and Betty, so much so that they were out swimming when Barney Rapp tracked them down and told them about his conversation with Charlie Trotta. “They were just a couple of fresh-looking kids when we hired them,” Trotta later recalled. “They were doing a local radio show after school when they came to sing for me. They’d come straight from swimming. Their hair wasn’t combed. They had on flat-heeled shoes and no stockings. There was no piano, but they sang a full arrangement of ‘Patty Cake, Patty Cake Baker’s Man’ without missing a note.”
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Pastor was immediately taken by them. “They were smart kids, but they were only babies,” he told George T. Simon years later. “They had good ears and some corny arrangements of their own. But Ralph Flanagan, who was writing for us, gave them some good new arrangements.”
⁴

Rosemary and Betty signed a five-year contract on November 30, 1946, appointing Rapp and Trotta as their “exclusive business managers, personal representatives and advisors,” and granting them 10% commission on their earnings. Their Uncle George (Guilfoyle) countersigned the deal as their “duly appointed and acting guardian.” The agreement provided the Clooney Sisters with a conduit into Pastor’s band and an entirely new way of life. Pastor’s outfit was the ultimate road band. Although a regular on the airwaves and a not infrequent visitor to the recording studio, the band made its money from clambering aboard a bus and heading from town to town. One estimate was that the band traveled a million miles throughout the United States during the 1940s.
⁵
Life for a singer with a traveling band wasn’t easy. Usually, the band’s arrangements were written to a dance tempo, with the singer often the last to see them. Equally, the singers were expected to handle just about any type of material—ballads, up-tempo
swing, and novelty—again with little chance to rehearse their numbers before they were called on for their turn at the microphone. For a girl singer, there were other complications. Among them were where to change, where to do makeup, and not least, how to deal with a succession of musicians with an eye to some extracurricular activity. The list of girl singers who wound up marrying a member of the band they toured with was a long one. The list of affairs and one-night stands was longer still.

How to protect Rosemary and Betty from the wolf-trap that they were about to enter was a pressing question for the Clooney and Guilfoyle families. The answer came in the form of Uncle George who agreed to travel with the band and act as the girls’ chaperone. “No nun in a Catholic convent took better care of her girls than Uncle George did of us—often to our total frustration,” Rosemary later recalled.
⁶
Gene Cipriano and Henry Riggs Guidotti, sax player and drummer, respectively, in the band, recalled that the chaperoning was highly effective. “They were squeaky clean,” said Riggs. “The only time we ever saw them was on stage, on rehearsal, or on the bus.”
⁷
Cipriano remembered Uncle George as an ever-present figure, who made sure that his two nieces were regular Sunday churchgoers and wholesome eaters. “They were hooked on mushroom omelettes,” he said.
⁸
“Hooked” was an operative word in the Pastor band. Soft drug use was rife. “We were pretty high above the ground most of the time,” Henry Riggs said, a reference to the widespread use of marijuana among the musicians. Looking back almost 50 years later, Rosemary Clooney concurred. “They were on everything but roller skates,” she said.
⁹

The sisters’ debut with the Pastor orchestra came on July 10, 1946, at the Marine Ballroom on the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. Wearing plaid taffeta gowns crafted by Grandma Guilfoyle, the girls took a deep breath, looked at each other, and stepped onto the bandstand. Their opening duet
¹⁰
went over well, but Rosemary soon found trouble with the solos that Pastor had handed her. None of them had been scored in the right key for her and when she reached for a high note in the first one, her voice broke into a comical, discordant croak. “In my mind I was already on the train back to Cincinnati, and I wanted to cry. But before all those people?” she told an interviewer a few years later. Instead of crying, Rosemary smiled at the 3,000 faces looking at her from the ballroom floor and received a heartening roar of applause. Next time she hit the note right on the nail. “It was easy then,” she said. “I knew they were with me.”
¹¹

The girls soon fell in with the band’s summer touring schedule, traveling throughout the Ohio valley and beyond. In late August 1946, the band played a week at Orsatti’s Casino, New Jersey, before heading into New York City. It was Rosemary’s first taste of Manhattan and also her first
experience of entering a recording studio. The recordings that the band made during the visit were for the little-known Cosmo Records and featured several songs from the 1946 Disney hit movie
The Song of the South
. The Clooney Sisters appeared on five of the songs, although on four of them, their role was no more than as backing vocalists to Pastor himself. The fifth record was different and featured Rosemary in a duet with Pastor on the film’s romantic ballad, “Sooner or Later.” This time, the lead vocal went her way with the bandleader playing the supporting role. Rosemary’s husky, almost whispered rendition was a world away from the cheeriness of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” and announced the arrival of a serious female vocalist.
Billboard
said that Pastor and Clooney “made a fetching romantic twosome,”
¹²
although it was another review that stuck in Rosemary’s mind. It said Rosemary’s vocal was “the nearest thing to Ella Fitzgerald that we’ve ever heard.”
¹³

Through the autumn and into the winter of 1946, the Pastor band played up and down the eastern states, broadcasting on Saturday nights over station WCAE in Pittsburgh before returning to New York for a pre-Christmas booking at the New York Paramount. For Rosemary and Betty, the excitement of just being in New York was the predominant memory that they held of that time, far outstripping any musical or career landmarks that New York might have offered. Working at the Paramount gave Rosemary the opportunity to stand in the footprints of her idol, Frank Sinatra, at the theater that had marked the beginning of his bobby-sox era in 1943. For Rosemary, these early visits to New York marked the start of a love affair with the city that would last for the rest her life.

The year 1947 brought more miles and more one night stands for the band, but Rosemary soon gained sufficient prominence to merit a solo turn at the microphone, in addition to the Clooney Sisters’ normal spot. She had also managed to escape from the watchful eye of Uncle George long enough to start an affair with the band’s guitarist, Milt Norman. It lasted several months until Uncle George – and Pastor – found out. The affair was exposed during the band’s lengthy sojourn in California during the summer of 1947, an itinerary that included an extended spell at the Hollywood Palladium, some filming for Columbia Pictures, and recording dates under a new contract with Columbia Records. Pastor fired Norman as soon as he found about the affair, although the guitarist had planned to leave the band in California anyway. Norman hoped to persuade Rosemary to stay with him, but when she came to do her solo spot on the recording session, she had already decided that the affair had no future. When Norman played the lilting opening bars to “I’m Sorry That I Didn’t Say I’m Sorry (When I Made You Cry Last Night),” Rosemary looked across from the microphone,
knowing how prophetic the lyric had become. It would not be the last time that Rosemary Clooney would find herself in a recording studio, voicing a lament to a lost love. Whether it was the tears she was holding back or simply her innate ability to read a lyric, Rosemary delivered a vocal that was full of emotion, singing in a voice that was barely above a whisper. The style anticipated the half-spoken delivery that characterized Marilyn Monroe a decade later. The result was striking. Columbia promoted the disc heavily, and America’s new emperors of the airwaves, the disc jockeys, gave it play after play.