Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (5 page)

The ballad aside, the June 5 recording session was otherwise notable for requiring Rosemary to adopt a false accent for the first time, something that would soon become commonplace once she came under the influence of Mitch Miller. The phony-Italian accent, however, was for the future. This time, Rosemary was called upon to handle a piece of Irish brogue before moving onto a Caribbean calypso. The Irish accent was needed for “My O’Darlin’ My O’Lovely My O’Brien,” although there was precious little about it that her great-grandparents would have recognized as authentic. The dose of West Indian was equally unconvincing on “Bread and Butter Woman,” which
Billboard
dismissed as a “weak calypso styled ditty” when it eventually saw release, some two years after it was recorded.
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Alongside the Columbia recording contract, the Pastor band could also boast radio and film credits. CBS radio hooked up with the band during its time at the Hollywood Palladium to broadcast
One Night Stand
, a show that featured the Pastor orchestra along with another guest band that joined the show from a remote location. Described by announcer Bill Ewing as a “lush thrush,” Rosemary took solo spots with such songs as “That’s My Desire,” while also joining Pastor for more boisterous numbers such as “A Rainy Night in Rio” and “Moving Along.”
Billboard
reviewer Alan Fischter was at the Palladium for one of the shows and wrote that the Clooney Sisters “pass the eye-and-ear test with plenty to spare.”
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On the screen, the band appeared in
Two Blondes and a Redhead
as well as starring in one of Universal’s “name band” shorts. Both movies were filmed during their stay on the West Coast in the summer of 1947. The “name band” movies were typically one-reelers, built around a single band and often filmed in a single day. Typically, the films ran to a budget of around $10,000, most of which was eaten up by the band’s fee. It was the Pastor short—production number 2312—that offered Rosemary her first big screen appearance: Rosemary and Betty reprising their Barney Rapp audition piece on “Hawaiian War Chant.” In another scene, set in a picture house, Rosemary cuddled up to her boss for an unctuous romantic duet called “Movie Tonight,” notwithstanding the age difference between them that made Pastor old enough to be her father.

The Hollywood retreat over, it was back on the road for the Clooney Sisters. Saltair in Utah, Lubbock in Texas, and Sheboygan in Wisconsin were but three of dozens of other anonymous locations where the band played onenighters.
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From September 1947, however, the band’s priorities changed. The record industry was bracing itself for another strike by the American Federation of Musicians (AFM). Just as he had done in 1943, union president James C. Petrillo was threatening to bar his members from entering a recording studio. The 1943 dispute had centered on royalty payments and had taken the music business by surprise. It lasted over a year and the big record companies saw their outputs dry up to a trickle for the duration of the ban. Five years later, the issue was similar, although Petrillo also had a new piece of labor legislation, the Taft-Hartley Labor-Management Relations Act, in his sights. This time, the big companies were determined that they would be ready. They began stockpiling. It wasn’t just the bands who were affected. The strike precluded any musician from accompanying a solo vocalist in the studio. The response of the major labels was to have all their contracted artists in the studios as much as they could before the cessation began.

A band such as Tony Pastor’s was firmly in the middle of the dispute and in the last three months of 1947, they made several visits to the studios in New York to add to their pile. The sessions offered Rosemary some good solo opportunities, although ironically, it was a song recorded and stashed away for over 15 months that came to be regarded as a milestone in her recording career. “Grieving for You” dated from 1920 and began life as a ragtime piano roll. Rosemary had started singing it early in her tenure with Pastor. Drummer Henry Riggs recalled her singing it at the Oriental Theater in Chicago in one of her first solo spots. Such was the emotion in Rosemary’s rendition, said Riggs, that the audience received the song in stunned silence for 10–15 seconds before leaping to their feet and roaring their approval. Riggs was amazed, he said, that “this little girl could sing with so much passion.”
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By the time Rosemary recorded it more than a year later, it was apparent that she had learned much from her apprenticeship as a band singer. Just as her idol Frank Sinatra credited Tommy Dorsey’s trombone as giving him a model for breath control, Tony Pastor’s tenor sax styling was clearly influencing the young girl singer, a point that
Billboard
picked up in its January 1949 review of the disc. “Rosemary Clooney delivers an intriguingly hushed vocal in a style reminiscent of her boss’s tenor sax offerings,” it said.
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When the disc was finally released, late in 1948, it reached #11 in
Billboard
’s disc jockey chart, staying there for five weeks.

Despite having been with Tony Pastor for little more than a year, it was apparent that one of the Clooney Sisters was developing her vocal skills
faster than the other. It was not surprising. Most singing groups—Paul Whiteman’s Rhythm Boys which spawned Bing Crosby, Dorsey’s Pied Pipers (Jo Stafford), even another sister act, the Boswell Sisters (Connee Boswell)—had seen one of its members develop ahead of the rest. It was also the case that most of the enduring sister acts had been threesomes rather than doubles. The Andrews Sisters, the Fontane Sisters, and the McGuire Sisters were the most notable contemporaries of the Clooneys, but all were trios who traded on the greater harmonic interplay that three voices offered over two. It wasn’t until the emergence of the Bell Sisters in the early 1950s that American music saw a sister duo successfully strike out alone. Rosemary’s fictional partnership with Vera-Ellen to create “the Haynes Sisters” for the 1954 movie
White Christmas
implied that the twosome model was more common than was actually so.

Solo stardom was beckoning, but as 1948 dawned, there were still thousands of miles to be traveled on the band bus. The remoteness of their lifestyle had been brought into sharp focus in November 1947 when Rosemary and Betty had stepped off the bus in a nondescript country town somewhere in middle America to be told offhandedly that there had been a phone call at the hotel. Andrew B. Clooney—“papa”—had passed away suddenly at the age of 73. There was no opportunity even to get home for the funeral. Rosemary and Betty found their own way of paying their respects before the Pastor circus rolled on once more. Rosemary was by now featured prominently, interspersing novelty duets with Pastor alongside more serious ballads such as “You Started Something.” There were two clear styles to her singing: the hushed, slightly nasal sound of her solos contrasting with full-throated (and often phony-accented) delivery of the more comedic duets. The ability to adapt her style at the drop of a hat was an early indication of the versatility that would characterize her work during the next decade.

The Pastor band would prove to be one of the most durable of American touring ensembles, but it was part of a dying race. The heyday of the big bands had come during the years leading up to World War II, but after 1942, their popularity had started to slide. There were many reasons, although the loss of musicians to the draft, the AFM strike of 1943, and the shift in musical tastes toward the singers were the primary ones. After the war, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Harry James, Tommy Dorsey, Les Brown, and others all folded their ensembles within weeks of one another. In their place, their former singers—Peggy Lee, Frances Wayne, Helen Forrest, Jo Stafford, and Doris Day—set out on their own. Pastor stayed on the road longer than most before finally settling in Las Vegas in 1957. “I got in on the very last good days of the big band business,” Rosemary said in 1961.
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The band might keep on touring but there was little Tony Pastor could do to stop his girl singer from overtaking him as the main attraction. In February 1948, she appeared in a solo spot on
Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts
on CBS radio. By now, Uncle George’s role had extended to that of manager as well as chaperone and he was instrumental in gaining the opportunity for her. Rosemary sang a ballad called “Golden Earrings” and it was enough to earn her a tie for first prize. A young Italian American singer called Joe Bari came third. Within a few years, he, now named Tony Bennett—and Rosemary would stand together on the front line of Mitch Miller’s assault on the popular music charts, and some would say, on his assault on good taste and quality in popular song. Later still, Bennett and Clooney would compete in the same category for the prestigious Grammy Award, always with the same result. When Rosemary looked back on her 1948 triumph, it was, she wrote, “the only time I ever won anything against Tony Bennett.”
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Bennett himself recalled their encounter as part of his concert performances in 2010. “Rosemary Clooney and me were the American Idols of the 1950s,” he told audiences. “She was my sister in show business.”
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The first public indication that Rosemary would leave the Pastor band to pursue a solo career was a
Billboard
report in November 1948, which said that after the band’s current engagement in New York, she would step out alone. Accurately, if prematurely, the report indicated that Rosemary’s solo career would be overseen by New York agent, Joe Shribman, the nephew of Tony Pastor’s original backer, Cy Shribman. Joe was also the main agent for the Pastor band in New York. “When Rosemary heard Shribman and Charlie Trotta talk about her as a solo talent,” Nick Clooney recalled, “it sparked her ambition.” It also sparked a difficult time in the lives of everyone affected by the potential breakup of the Clooney Sisters. Pastor’s drummer, Henry Riggs recalled that the deal to take Rosemary out on her own was done without Pastor’s knowledge. “Charlie Trotta and Joe Shribman cut Tony Pastor out of Rosie’s contract,” he said. “It broke Tony’s heart.”
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The deal would also cut Uncle George out of Rosemary’s career, although until she reached her 21st birthday, his consent was still needed to any new contractual arrangement. With that date still six months away,
Billboard
was forced to backtrack on its scoop and was soon reporting that the Clooney Sisters had returned to the Pastor fold.
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That meant another winter on the road. In December alone, the band traveled over 1,500 miles—from Clear Lake, Iowa, to Madison, Wisconsin, then onto Monessen, Pennsylvania, and then a 483 mile slog to Hartford, Connecticut—all the stops coming within days of each other. Into 1949, an extended engagement in New York offered some respite as well as the opportunity to try out a new medium. Television had first reared its head
in 1939, only to find its progress halted by America’s entry into World War II. Ten years later, America found itself enjoying an affluent peace and television was one of the main beneficiaries. At first, its growth curve was far from spectacular. At Christmas 1948, the US population was approaching 150 million, yet there were only 350,000 television sets in use. Twenty-seven television stations were on the air. Most of these—and 75% of the sets—were around the New York metropolis. Within a year, the number of sets had jumped to 2 million, and in another 12 months was up to 8 million.
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From then on, television became an unstoppable bandwagon.

Led by Perry Como and Milton Berle, singers and comedians were forsaking the script-in-the-hand microphone of the radio station for the chance to populate the small box in the corner of the living room. Rosemary’s girl-next-door image would ultimately prove to be more successful on television than on the big screen of Hollywood. Her TV debut came in March 1949 when she joined a lengthy list of jazz musicians as a guest on two editions of
Eddie Condon’s Floor Show
on NBC. Condon’s shows were live, half-hour affairs, loosely based on his New York jazz club. His guest list featured the great and the good of American jazz, as well as his regular New York cronies. Rosemary’s first appearance on March 5, 1949, offered her only one song – “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans”—but marked her first real association with American jazz.

If 1949 was a year of growth for the television business, it also was a year of unanticipated crisis for the recording industry. In 1947—the year before Petrillo’s second AFM strike—the record companies had witnessed their best ever year, with sales grossing over $200 million and sales of record players reaching 3.5 million. During that year, 375 million records had been pressed and nobody saw the hiatus of 1948 as anything more than a temporary hitch. With their stockpiles of recordings more than covering the gap left by the musicians’ action, the big labels were still pushing out their 1947 recordings into 1949 and beyond. What they failed to see was that the 18-month-old, shrink-wrapped diet they offered had not kept pace with what the public wanted to hear. It was, wrote music business historian Russell Sanjek, “too large an output, too startlingly alike.”
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Sales plummetted and at many of the big labels, the top executives were the first casualties.

None of this was apparent to Rosemary and the musicians she worked with on her final two sessions with the Pastor band in New York in March 1949. Most attention focused on the fact that Pastor, knowing that he would lose his star vocalist once the month of May turned, offered her the opportunity to put her name above that of the band for the first time on a song called “Bargain Day.” Although a landmark in billing terms, Rosemary’s
first accredited solo disc was pure 1940s, a plaintive lyric sitting atop a conventional melodic structure. Rosemary’s full-throated vocal was dictionally perfect but lacked the pathos she had displayed on “Grieving for You” some 18 months previously. Ironically, it was another song from the same session that offered a better beacon for her immediate future. The Clooney Sisters backed a Pastor vocal on “A-You’re Adorable.” The disc ran a poor second to the hit version by Perry Como and the Fontane Sisters but was a forerunner of the coming decade’s appetite for novelty songs. No one, not even Como himself, would be more associated with the decade’s appetite for tackiness than Rosemary Clooney.