Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (6 page)

With her 21st birthday approaching, there was no question now that Rosemary would go solo as soon as she could take matters into her own hands. Seeing potential in both his nieces, Uncle George had begun talking to Joe Shribman about solo careers for both girls. Shribman, however, saw George Guilfoyle as an amateur in a professional world and convinced Rosemary that he and Trotta were the men to lead her to the Promised Land. Matters came to a head when they delivered that message to Uncle George. It was a difficult conversation, carried out with Rosemary in the room. Guilfoyle refused to believe it unless he heard it from Rosemary herself. When he asked her to her face if she believed that he would be a burden, her answer was unequivocal. “Yes,” she said.
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Rosemary’s decision to go solo marked the end of the road for Betty Clooney too. In years to come, Betty was often portrayed—particularly by Rosemary—as a figure of virtuous self-sacrifice. “She wanted me to have a chance; she wanted me to go to New York and knew that we could not do that as a sister act,” Rosemary said in a TV interview later in her career.
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There were other explanations offered too—that Betty was fed up with the touring regime or that, being the younger of the sisters by three years, she had missed out on her teenage years and wanted to fill that gap in her life. There were elements of truth in these stories, but no more. Nick Clooney said that his younger sister always knew that vocally, she did not have the goods to match her elder sibling. “She was a world class singer,” he said but when the chips were down, “there were four notes that Rosemary could hit that Betty couldn’t.” The idea though, that Betty Clooney’s performing ambitions had been fulfilled by the brief period with the Pastor Band and that she was keen to go home to recapture her lost youth was, said Nick, “all baloney.”
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Betty’s driven nature was never likely to be satisfied with a brief taste of show business, most of it spent on a bus traveling the highways and byways of North America. Nevertheless, the split came and Betty had little option but to return home to Cincinnati. She continued to perform, appearing on local television, and in the early ’60s she was a regular on
NBC’s
Today
show. She recorded for the Cincinnati-based King Records and Decca’s subsidiary Coral without ever matching the hit stream of her older sister. Rosemary’s decision to go solo caused no lasting damage to the relationship between the sisters, but it was only in later life that she revealed the angst that it had caused her. “It bothered her for the rest of her life,” Nick Clooney said.
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The closest Rosemary came to acknowledging it came in her 1997 interview with Terry Gross, who asked her how she had felt, leaving Betty. Rosemary’s answer was a compassionate statement of irresistible ambition. “I felt sad; I felt grateful,” she said, “and I went.”
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Rosemary’s timing was ultimately dictated by nothing more than an accident of birth but could not have worked more to her advantage. Columbia Records was one of the first among the major disc-makers to look for new talent to lead them into the 1950s. They cast their net widely. When they hauled it in, they found it containted a young girl singer from Kentucky and a classically trained oboist from Rochester, New York. Rosemary Clooney was about to meet Mitch Miller.

R
osemary Clooney signed a solo contract with Columbia Records on May 24, 1949, the morning after her 21st birthday. She would remain with the label for nine years and record over 250 commercial sides, displaying a versatility in material that few artists, before or since, have matched. Her repertoire included children’s songs, Christmas songs, country and western, and ballads from the Great American Songbook, while her disc partners ranged from Benny Goodman through Frank Sinatra to Marlene Dietrich. Her recorded output led to 20 separate appearances in
Billboard
’s weekly record charts, with four number ones and a further three Top Ten hits.
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These included timeless ballads such as “Hey There” and “Tenderly,” lilting country songs such as “Beautiful Brown Eyes” and “Half As Much,” and jazz standards in the form of “Memories of You.” Yet for all the quality in that list, Rosemary Clooney’s 1950s reputation is all about phony-accents, nonsense lyrics, and banal melodies. “Mambo Italiano,” “Botch-A-Me (Ba-Ba-Baciami Piccina),” and above all else, “Come On-a My House” defined the sound of Rosemary Clooney in the ’50s and the two decades beyond. The emergent songbird from Kentucky became the queen of the novelty songs but on her head, she wore a crown of thorns. It would take over 25 years for her artistic reputation to fully recover.

The man who engineered the deal to take Rosemary to Columbia was Manie Sachs,
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head of Artists & Repertoire (A&R). Sachs started life as a salesman in the dress business, the same industry as Rosemary’s mother. When he moved into the music industry, it was his interest in sales and marketing rather than an inherent musicality that inspired him. Nevertheless, he rose to become one of the biggest and most influential people in
the business. He made his name at Columbia Records, before leaving to become vice-president of RCA in 1950. When he first joined Columbia in 1939, it was on the back of a family investment. Columbia Records was part of the wider CBS family. The brand had been one of the founding fathers of the American recording industry but had fallen on hard times during the Depression, so much so that by the time CBS chief William S. Paley reacquired it in 1936, the name was almost defunct. Paley set about restoring Columbia Records to its former glory and Sachs played a key role. He brought names such as Harry James, Dinah Shore, and Doris Day to Columbia and when he added a young Frank Sinatra to the roster, the turnaround was complete.

By the time Sachs signed Rosemary Clooney in 1949, change was on the horizon once again. With sales dropping through the floor, it seemed that every A&R manager worked in an office with a permanently revolving door. One of the first—and least expected—casualties was Eli Oberstein at RCA. Oberstein was another industry giant, but reputations, it seemed, counted for nothing. When RCA went looking for a replacement, they turned to Manie Sachs, making him an offer that he couldn’t refuse.
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Sachs’s departure left a vacancy at Columbia. Executive VP and head of classical records, Goddard Lieberson, remembered a classmate from his days at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. His name was William Mitchell (“Mitch”) Miller.

Miller was an unlikely choice for the simple reason that his DNA seemed rooted in classical music. After graduating from Eastman, Miller moved to New York. His instrument was the oboe. It was a specialty that worked in his favor, the laws of supply and demand usually working on his side. Miller worked with various classical orchestras as well as joining some of the CBS radio ensembles (he was in the band that had orchestrated Orson Welles’s iconic
War Of The Worlds
broadcast in 1938). The move from the orchestra pit to the control booth came in 1947 when he joined Keynote Records as head of classical A&R. When Mercury Records acquired Keynote soon after, Miller found himself in unfamiliar territory. Assigned to a role in Mercury’s pop music division, it proved to be the making of the man. Miller quickly signed Frankie Laine and Patti Page but more significantly, set about changing the way pop records were made, utilizing every possible type of sound that he could think of. Laine’s vocals were soon set to the accompaniment of galloping hooves and cracking whips. It heralded a sea change in the recording business and it was this that attracted the attention of Goddard Lieberson.

Sixty years after Mitch Miller’s arrival at Columbia, he remains one of the most controversial figures in American music history. Supporters and
detractors alike, however, all on agree on one thing: Mitch Miller transformed the role and the importance of the record producer in the music-making process like no one before or since. Rhythm and blues writer-cum-producer Jerry Wexler’s perspective was that “they should build a statue to Mitch Miller at 57th and Broadway.… He was the first great record producer in history.”
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Jazz critic Will Friedwald, in a 2010 obituary after Miller’s death at the age of 99, supported Wexler’s view. Miller, he said, “virtually invented the job of the pop-music producer,” going on to observe that “as singers replaced the big bands as the focal point of pop, the producers—formerly known as A&R (artists and repertoire) men—took over from the bandleaders as the industry’s decision makers and power brokers. By the start of the rock era, Miller had set an example that every music-world mover and shaker to come, from Phil Spector to Quincy Jones, Berry Gordy and even Simon Cowell, has emulated.”
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Miller’s great gift was being able to anticipate what record buyers wanted. The disastrous sales figures for the last years of the 1940s proved that this was no longer the sentimental music of World War II or even the big band swing that had dominated the music scene a decade before. America in the ’50s was embracing a new world of modernity and ease and was looking forward, not back. The message was one of change. Miller read the mood better than anyone else and realized that artistic purity counted for nothing. That was something to leave to his classical music colleagues. “If it sounds right, it’s right,” he said in a 2004 interview.
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His interest was all about the production and the sound that he could create in the studio, using every possible tool available to him. Reputations held as little merit for him as did artistic purity. Whether his singer was Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, or even Frank Sinatra mattered not a jot. In commercial terms, the approach worked but success came at a price. To this day, some music critics and historians have never forgiven him. “Under Miller’s influence, normal voices took on awesome, doom-filled proportions,” wrote
New York Times
music critic John S. Wilson, “gunned up by echo chambers, multiple taping and the endless use of sound gadgetry.”
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Others blamed him for the musical wasteland that became ’50s America. “A Sherman-like crusade in the 1950s on behalf of banality,” said another obituarist.
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Mitch Miller transformed careers, none more so than that of Rosemary Clooney. “Nothing much happened to me until I met Mitch,” she said later.
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It was true. Moving to New York, she had taken a small, one-bed apartment close to West 57th Street. Her contract with Columbia was a start, but it was hardly megabucks. The deal paid her $50 a side but with a guarantee of only eight sides a year and a net royalty of three cents per record sold. Her first singles appeared on Columbia’s cut-price Harmony label, retailing at
49 cents. For her debut release, Columbia paired a Bob Merrill-Monty Nevins song “Lover’s Gold” with an early Hal David composition, “The Four Winds and the Seven Seas.” That disc made no impact but the early signs of chart success came with a song that Rosemary recorded at her next session on September 14, 1949. “The Kid’s a Dreamer” was picked up and pushed hard by Philadelphia disc jockey Doug Arthur. Local sales of 65,000 gave Rosemary a minor hit. It was the first Rosemary Clooney record to bring her voice to a wider audience, although it owed its success to the power of promotion, Rosemary’s singing being little more than an exercise in clinical vocal precision. Confidence was building, however, and by the summer of 1950, she was beginning to find the relaxed casualness that would become a trademark. “Why Fight the Feeling,” an early collaboration with arranger Percy Faith in June 1950, was an example.
Billboard
, said it was “done with conviction” ahead of Faith’s “delicate and lively” scoring.
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With the regular paycheck from Tony Pastor a thing of the past, Rosemary needed more than just Columbia record dates to keep her solvent. Joe Shribman proved to be an enterprising agent, finding plenty of one-night bookings in New York and surrounding cities as well as lining up a regular diet of radio and TV appearances. Rosemary’s radio spots included one of the many popular musical quiz shows,
Sing It Again
on CBS radio plus a more regular spell as guest on Vaughn Monroe’s
Camel Caravan
show. Radio bookings were fine but it was television, especially in New York, that had everybody talking. Rosemary made her national TV debut on Ed Sullivan’s
Toast of the Town
show on Christmas Day 1949, a noteworthy debut although Sullivan’s show had not yet attained its instant passport-to-stardom status that it would acquire in the ’50s. Rosemary sang two songs, “A Dreamer’s Holiday” and “Why Don’t You Haul Off and Love Me,” the latter with a set of country and western dancers that anticipated the type of setting she would use in her own shows during the ’50s. Singing with greater expression and a fuller voice than on her records of the time, Rosemary’s expressive face, perma-smile, and seductive off-the-shoulder dress sent a clear message that here was a star in the making.

Other shows included
The Morey Amsterdam Show
and
Robert Q’s Matinee—
where Rosemary first met her future husband, José (Joe) Ferrer—plus another competition show,
Songs for Sale
, on which Rosemary shared the spotlight once more with Tony Bennett. The show was purportedly an opportunity for amateur songwriters to have Clooney or Bennett perform their songs in front of a panel of experts who would rate their chances. In practice, it was more about promoting the members of the panel than opening the door to new talent. But, as one reviewer said, “it didn’t matter. With the one exception, there were very good reasons why these songs had
never been published.”
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Tony Bennett concurred. The songs, he said, were “consistently mediocre.”
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What’s more, wrote Bennett, the time constraints on the show meant that he and Rosemary were seldom able to learn the songs in time for the live show and had to rely on cue cards for the lyrics. Rosemary’s brother Nick, who spent the summer of 1950 rooming with his sister in New York, recalled that matters were made worse by the fact that neither of the two singers could read music and had to try and memorize the melodies. “I remember well the look of horror on the faces of some of the songwriters as the melodies they had labored over became unrecognizable on national TV,” he wrote.
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