Not just a ‘girl singer’

In accepting the award, the 77-year-old Bennett said, “I’ve been very fortunate to receive 11 of these wonderful Grammys, but, if I may, I’d like to give this one to Rosemary Clooney.”
Competing in the same Grammy category as “A Wonderful World” were “Bette Midler Sings the Rosemary Clooney Songbook” and “The Last Concert” by Rosemary Clooney, who had died at age 74 on June 29, 2002, after a six-month battle with lung cancer.
Bennett’s magnanimous gesture was actually rooted in a long history and friendship with Clooney. On “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” TV show in February 1948, singers Rosemary Clooney and Joe Bari were among the contestants. Clooney won with a performance of “Golden Earrings,” edging out Bari, the stage name of Anthony Dominick Benedetto, who would later change it to Tony Bennett. “I can’t recall what number I performed,” Bennett noted with bemusement in his 1998 autobiography, “The Good Life.”
In Clooney’s 1999 autobiography, “Girl Singer,” she wrote, “That was the only time I ever won anything against Tony Bennett.” During the 1990s, several of her recordings lost out to Bennett’s for a Grammy. Among them was “Girl Singer” (Concord), her 1992 album, which had a front-cover ink sketch of Clooney that was signed by the artist, “Benedetto.”
In February 1998, Clooney was in Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital with viral meningitis, encephalitis, and a fever reaching 107 that left her near death. When she came out of unconsciousness two days and nights later, a doctor surprised her by asking, “Did you see a white light? A long tunnel maybe?” Clooney’s reply was tartly comical. “No, I didn’t,” she told him. “But I’ll tell you what I did see. I saw myself standing on a stage, winning the Grammy. And the prize was handed to me by Tony Bennett. And not just one Tony Bennett, but 14 or 15 Tony Bennetts, standing in a semicircle.”
On Feb. 28, 2002, just four months before her death, Rosemary Clooney finally received her coveted Grammy, for lifetime achievement, though she was too weak at the time to claim it in person. A few years earlier, she had jokingly confided to Bennett: “I should be in the [Grammy] category for women over 60 who were born in the Ohio Valley.”

Irish descent
Born on May 23, 1928, in Maysville, a Kentucky city on the Ohio River, Rosemary Clooney had Irish blood on both sides of her family. The ancestors of her father, Andrew Clooney, came from Kilkenny, while the lineage of her mother, Frances Guilfoyle, extended back to Cork.
Sadly, the relationship between Andrew and Frances Clooney ranged from tempestuous to estranged, and Rosemary, her sister Betty, who was three years younger, and Nicky, their brother born three years after Betty, were frequently shuttled between parents or other relatives. But this instability in their childhood only served to strengthen the bond among the three siblings.
Music was never part of the problem in their upbringing. Andrew Clooney played the ukulele and had a good singing voice, and he often praised the vocals of Bing Crosby heard over the radio. (Even then, Rosemary preferred the singing of Frank Sinatra, though she’d later record with both icons.) All of Rosemary’s uncles were musical, her aunt Olivette led a small orchestra, and her aunt Ann sang in local clubs and played Billie Holiday records at home.
With adult encouragement, the first public performance by Rosemary Clooney was on stage at the Russell Theater, Maysville’s movie house, where she sang “When Your Hair Has Turned to Silver, I Will Love You Just the Same.” She was three years old.
As the two sisters grew older, they sang together. In April 1945, 16-year-old Rosemary and 13-year-old Betty Clooney entered an open audition for a singing spot on WLW, a 500,000-watt radio station in Cincinnati, where the Clooney children now lived. The two girls, still carrying their schoolbags, won the audition and began singing professionally on the radio for $20 a week.

Rising career
The Clooney Sisters, as they were known on radio, caught the attention of local bandleader Barney Rapp, who had previously discovered another Ohio Valley singer, Doris von Kappelhoff, before she became Doris Day. Rosemary and Betty started to sing with Rapp’s big band, and when the better-known, more widely traveled big band led by Tony Pastor was looking for a new girl singer, Rapp recommended the Clooney Sisters. Neither girl had ever been outside the tristate area of Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. Now they would be singing in front of a big band playing mainly one-nighters from New Jersey to California.
Rosemary and Betty sang with the Tony Pastor Band from 1946 to 1949. Both sisters had fine voices well-suited to each other, but Rosemary got the lion’s share of critical praise. During the first recording session by the Clooney Sisters with Pastor’s band in 1946, they cut two songs together. But it was Rosemary’s solo vocal on “Sooner or Later” that drew this plaudit from Downbeat magazine: “perhaps the nearest thing to Ella Fitzgerald we’ve ever heard.” Just 18 years old, she was already being compared to one of the greatest jazz singers in history.
Rosemary herself resisted this linkage. “I’ve never thought of myself as a jazz singer,” she said. “I’d call myself a sweet singer with a big-band sensibility.”
Even with these constant demurrals from Clooney, what jazz and pop critics heard in her voice back then was similar: flawless timing, clear diction, excellent pitch and intonation, warmly appealing timbre, impeccable phrasing, good range, graceful sense of swing, and an honesty and intimacy tending to envelop everything she sang.

Going solo
In 1947, 19-year-old Rosemary Clooney and the Tony Pastor Band recorded “I’m Sorry I Didn’t Say I’m Sorry When I Made You Cry Last Night.” She sang the song in a near whisper when a case of nerves and the heartache of a failed romance overtook her. To her surprise, some deejays started hailing it as a “new style” of popular singing. That was ridiculous, of course, but this so-called “platter chatter” created a buzz eventually attracting the interest of a major record label.
Betty Clooney had returned to Cincinnati, where she continued to sing and also started a TV career, by the time her older sister signed a solo contract with Columbia the morning after her 21st birthday in 1949. In the fall of that year, Rosemary Clooney made her TV debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” singing for 20 seconds after the opening act, a trained seal. The gifted “girl singer,” a moniker she always liked and even preferred, was now gaining national exposure.
Despite the seeming can’t-miss combination of Rosemary Clooney and Frank Sinatra, her longtime singing idol, their duet on the fluff-filled song “Peachtree Street,” complete with empty-headed patter between them, met with a mercifully quick commercial demise in April 1950. It was one of Clooney’s early stumbles in choosing material and made her skittish about what to sing in the future.
That’s where Mitch Miller both helped and hurt. Before “Sing Along With
Mitch” became a national TV pastime, he was the head of artist-and-repertoire at Columbia. He was considered a starmaker, having helped to launch the recording careers of Johnny Mathis, Patti Page, Frankie Laine, Guy Mitchell, Vic Damone, and Johnnie Ray. Miller steered Clooney to the song “Beautiful Brown Eyes,” for which he conducted the music, and Rosemary had her first outright hit in January 1951. The single was whipped cream, not whip-smart, but it sold 400,000 copies and put her face on the cover of Downbeat.
In the summer of that year, Mitch Miller urged Clooney to record a novelty song written by Ross Bagdasarian and William Saroyan, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his 1939 play, “The Time of Your Life.” Based on a legitimate, venerable Armenian folk melody, the inanely worded song had previously failed for another vocalist, Kay Armen. “I thought the lyric ranged from incoherent to just plain silly, I thought the tune sounded more like drunken chant than a historic folk art form, and I hated the gimmicky arrangement,” Rosemary wrote acerbically in her autobiography, “Girl Singer.”
The song was “Come On-a My House,” sung by Clooney in an artificial Italian accent with near-demonic harpsichord playing from future comic satirist Stan Freeman. Recorded on June 6, 1951, it became a smash hit, selling two million copies and quadrupling her concert fee to $14,000.
Still, Clooney was distraught over the prospect that she would be forever associated with such “nonsense.” What made the runaway success of “Come On-a My House” all the more vexing was that a day before in the studio, she gave two of her finest vocal performances ever on Alec Wilder’s poignant “I’ll Be Around,” with Stan Freeman playing piano exquisitely, and Rodgers-and-Hart’s “The Lady Is a Tramp,” in which she tucks the line, “For Frank Sinatra I whistle and stamp.” Mitch Miller was credited as musical conductor on both songs, suggesting he could elicit substantive work, yet they were considered insufficiently commercial at the time and weren’t released until four years later.
Rosemary Clooney’s fears of looking foolish were allayed in November 1951 when she recorded one of her most enduring, if string-heavy, studio hits, “Tenderly,” with the Percy Faith Orchestra. Commercially and, at last, artistically, 1951 proved to be a watershed year for the 23-year-old singer.

A move into movies
Other novelty songs, such as “Botcha Me” in 1952 and “Mambo Italiano” in 1954, also had Clooney adopting a fake Italian accent. Each sold extremely well, and between the two she released the far more aesthetically pleasing “Hey There,” which sold two million copies. Those hits and others kept her mainstream career profile high.
Hollywood beckoned as well. Clooney had a pretty, girl-next-door sheen movie studio execs found exploitable. Her first starring role in a film was 1953’s “The Stars Are Singing,” where she played a woman who does dog commercials but wants a singing career. It was a frothy mess of a movie musical, with only Clooney critically lauded for her vocals.
Still, 1953 was another good year for Clooney. On February 23, she made the cover of Time magazine, becoming the first female singer to achieve that honor. Also, Bing Crosby, then the most popular entertainer in the world, wanted her for a motion picture he was about to do: “White Christmas.”
A partial remake of 1942’s “Holiday Inn,” which was filled with Irving Berlin songs that included the Oscar-winning “White Christmas,” the movie “White Christmas” was essentially another slim plot wrapping for more Berlin songs, including the title one again. The highest-grossing film of 1954 and a yuletide favorite on DVD today, “White Christmas” included “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep,” a song proving how well-matched Clooney and Crosby’s voices were. Four years later, the two would collaborate on “Fancy Meeting You Here,” a skillfully executed, breezily enjoyable album with a travel theme running through such songs as “On a Slow Boat to China,” “Hindustan,” and “It Happened in Monterey.”

Summit singing
Rosemary Clooney’s film career largely sputtered after “White Christmas,” and in the mid-1950s she hosted a network TV show and a syndicated variety program.
Meanwhile, her recording career gained critical luster with some exceptional, if not always commercially successful, albums. Still dodging any notion that she was a jazz vocalist on top of a pop star, Rosemary had recorded in the 1950s with the Harry James Orchestra and the Benny Goodman Trio and Sextet.
She also received an unsolicited compliment for her singing from Billie Holiday, who once startled Clooney in a nightclub with this toast: “To girl singers, especially us Irish singers.” Holiday told Clooney she was “one-eighth” Irish through her great-grandfather, Charles Fagan.
During that decade, Rosemary Clooney’s pinnacle performance as a singer, combining the inherent charm of pop with the stylistic challenge of jazz, was “Blue Rose,” her collaboration with Duke Ellington and his orchestra. Recorded over January-February 1956, it was the famous meeting that never was.
Clooney was having a difficult pregnancy with her second child by actor-husband Jos