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Sunday, January 2, 2000
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In Brief
HIGHS AND LOWS IN THE LIFE OF A GIRL SINGER
BY YVONNE CRITTENDEN
Look at Rosemary Clooney today and it's hard to imagine that this vastly overwight woman with the sadly rough pipes was once probably the best-known pop singer in the business.

In her autobiography, written with Joan Barthel, Clooney writes about her amazing life, from her first public appearance at age three, singing on stage in her small Kentucky hometown, to becoming a legend, appearing with the likes of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra adn Tony Bennett, and more than holding her own.

Clooney had a rough start --- her father was an alcoholic and her mother dumped Rosemary and her sister with their grandmother and set off for the bright lights of California, taking only son Nicky (father of George Clooney, of ER Fame) with her.

Young Rosie grew up fast, learning to hide her fears and insecurities behind a bright, smiling personality. At 25 she married much older, sophisticated actor Jose Ferrer, who fathered her five children but made no secret of his serial infidelities.

Undaunted, Rosie took on the major financial and personal responsibility for her large brood, and somehow managed to carve out an enduring singing career which took off with her first hit record, the quirky Come On-A My House, a novelty song she hated but which gained her international fame.

She was famous on radio, TV, the moview and nightclubs, became addicted to prescription drugs for depression after her career faltered with the advent of rock 'n' roll, had a nervous breakdown, lost and regained a fortune, and hit the comeback trail culminating in an appearance at Carnegie Hall in 1991 at the afe of 63.

Now happily married and matriarch of a large family, Rosemary Clooney is a survivor who, unlike "girl singer" Judy Garland, overcame her demons. (Doubleday)

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Monday, January 10, 2000

Rosemary Clooney's Second Coming
By Roxane Orgill

New York -- "You'll manage," Rosemary Clooney's mother said whenever she left her young daughter with a grandmother or an aunt, whoever was handy, for long periods, even years. So Ms. Clooney managed. At 16, when she and her 13-year-old sister, Betty, were alone and need money to buy food, Rosemary got them a job singing on the radio. By the time Tony Pastor's big band came through Cincinnati two years later, she and Betty had enough experience to join the band as "girl singers."

But when success came, quickly, in her 20s, Ms. Clooney let herself be managed -- by booking agents, record and movie producers, and her husband, Jose Ferrer. An American girl singer of the period who was not taken care of by others would be hard to find. In Ms. Clooney's case, being managed led to disaster: a painful marriage and divorce, addiction to pills and, finally, a breakdown. She eventually recovered, and constructed a second, more deeply musical career.

This vivid life is chronicled in a new "autobiography," "Girl Singer" (Doubleday), by Ms. Clooney and Joan Barthel. It's the second attempt at telling the Rosie Clooney story, and it's more truthful than the first book, especially concerning her troubled relationships with her parents and Ferrer. But the companion pair of compact disks, "Rosemary Clooney: Songs from the Girl Singer" (Concord Records), makes the better yarn. Ms. Clooney chose the songs, and while they are not always her finest recordings, they tell the more important story of Rosemary Clooney the musician.

The tale begins with "Sooner or Later," recorded in 1946, when she was 17, and having a ball with the Pastor band. Her singing, though, is so stylized, breathy, and false, it's comical. Ms. Clooney's true voice emerged three years later in her first official solo recording with the band, "Bargain Day." The song is gloomy and cynical, an odd choice for a girl-next-door type with an easy, caramel-colored voice. Her natural delivery, coupled with a discreet use of vibrato, was probably a gift. Her sole training consisted of the time the engineer at station WLW in Cincinnati said, "Turn your head away from the microphone when you're sounding a B or a P" -- and listening to Frank Sinatra's records.

One year later, she was recording with her idol. Sinatra's first choice had been Dinah Shore, but she had refused because she hated the song. Ms. Clooney, as the newest singer on the Columbia Records roster, was in no position to say "no." Their duet, a cornball ditty called "Peach Tree Street," was "dead on arrival" when it hit the stores, she says, but it's fun to hear.

Her producer at Columbia was the legendary Mitch Miller, whose choice of material tended to drive his singers -- as diverse as Mahalia Jackson and Tony Bennett -- crazy, but it also made them stars. He found her a doozy in 1951, a novelty song in which an Armenian-peasant type asks a man to marry her. The accompaniment included a harpsichord plink-plinking away. Somehow, aided by Ms. Clooney's cozy warmth and clear diction on words like "I'm gonna give-a you peach and-a pear/ I love-a your hair," "Come on-a My House" worked.

The song brought about a quadruple increase in her fee and a job in Hollywood making movies. Meanwhile she married a brilliant, philandering actor, Ferrer, and quickly became pregnant with the first of five children. She didn't want to get on a plane to record "Hey There," so the persistent Miller flew to her. "I gave it my best shot," she said. Lucky for us. Her voice glows, and the song became a signature number for her.

It must have been love that led her to record with Ferrer, who couldn't hold a pitch or keep the beat. When she takes the tune on "You're Just in Love" and he sings the counterpoint, he sounds like a drunken bum muttering in the background.

By contrast, she and her partner in the sparkling "Sisters" were in perfect sync. The partner was Betty, of course, who returned to record the song several years after they had gone their separate ways.

Although Ms. Clooney is sometimes called a jazz singer, she's the first to admit she isn't one. "I'd call myself a sweet singer with a big band sensibility," she says in the book. "I have good time, and a certain way of phrasing, and I know where the beat is." But she can't scat sing, and it shows on a dull "Blue Rose" with Duke Ellington's orchestra, when her only lyric is "buh-bah-be."

She made her musical marriages with Bing Crosby and Nelson Riddgle. Bing was her buddy; singing with him was an "immense joy," evident in the number "On a Slow Boat to China." Riddle was her lover when he made the lush arrangement of "How Will I Remember You?" in 1961. Her voice is luscious, with an ache in it.

A chilling silence separates that song and the next. In the intervening 16 years, Ms. Clooney went to pieces and put herself back together, with the help of psychoanalysis and Bing Crosby, who invited her to sing with him. She re-emerged in 1977 with a new sound and a new label, Concord Records. Her voice was the color of dark caramel now. She sang with a jazz-pop combo, and she chose the songs with her musical director. Suddenly Rosie was swinging.

She still had a gift for transforming goofy novelties into gems, especially when they reminded her of something nice, like Dante DiPaolo. She married her longtime "roommate" in 1997, and the jaunty "Mambo Italiano" is an affectionate nod at him. She did a lot of reflecting in song, remembering her beloved Uncle George at war with a spare "There'll Be Blue Birds Over (The White Cliffs of Dover)." In 1998, she could deliver James Taylor's words, "The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time," with full understanding and gratitude.

She's still singing. I don't mean she croaks out a few songs for people who knew her when and would lvoe her no matter what. She's 71, overweight, and sometimes short of breath, and the luster in her sound has dimmed, but when she started to sing recently at Feinstein's in the Regency Hotel, a crowded, noisy room fell silent. In everything she did, the way she paced the songs, told a story, even introduced her musicians, she was polished, secure and serene. It was an intensely musical performance, too: the timing and diction, and, most of all, her sophisticated, knowing way with a lyric. On the line, "When glamour girls have lost their charm," she cast her eyes cellingward, charmingly. Ms Clooney does more than manage. She transforms a room into a joyful place.

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 11/14/99
The Girl Next Door
Rosemary Clooney recalls the highs and lows of her life as a singer.
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
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GIRL SINGER
An Autobiography.
By Rosemary Clooney with Joan Barthel.
Illustrated. 336 pp. New York:
Doubleday. $24.95.
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Nowadays any female singer who has logged a few Top 10 hits is routinely referred to as a ''diva.'' This promiscuous slapping of a label once reserved for temperamental opera stars onto pop singers who may still be in their teens is enough to make you pine for the good old days of ''chirpers,'' ''thrushes'' and ''songbirds.'' Those were three of the demure metaphors applied in the 1950's to singers like Rosemary Clooney, Patti Page and Doris Day, the reigning queens of mainstream pop during the Eisenhower years. As Clooney recalls in her alternately salty and touching autobiography, ''Girl Singer,'' she was marketed, first by Columbia Records and then by Paramount Pictures, as a smiling, ingenuous girl next door. And for years, until she suffered a mental breakdown in 1968, she believed in that image as much as anyone.

The difference between a diva and a thrush, of course, is that a diva wields power, whereas songbirds in the 1950's were kept in cages controlled by men. One of the two men who ruled Clooney at the commercial peak of her career was Mitch Miller, the artists-and-repertoire chief at Columbia Records. It was he who forced her to record her first No. 1 hit, ''Come On-A My House,'' a novelty tune sung in a bogus Italian accent against a bouncing harpsichord accompaniment. Clooney, who was 23 at the time, detested the song. But it became the pop sensation of 1951 and led to a Time magazine cover story and a major recording career that lasted well into the early days of rock 'n' roll.

The other man who ruled Clooney during this golden time was her movie star husband, Jose Ferrer. Talk about a woman determined to have it all! While at the peak of her career, Clooney juggled recording sessions, singing engagements, movie roles and television appearances with motherhood; she had five children more or less one after the other.

It was during her honeymoon, Clooney recalls, that she overheard a telephone conversation in which Ferrer confided the intimate details of his relationship with another woman. When she confronted him, he informed her that he could not change, and she backed down and decided to close her eyes to his philandering, play the good little 1950's wife and mother, and be so perfect that he would have to be faithful.

The subtitle of ''Girl Singer,'' which Clooney wrote with the freelance writer Joan Barthel, might well have been ''Recovering From the 50's.'' For Clooney, recovery has meant accepting and embracing the one emotion that nice young women were not supposed to express in those squeaky-clean housewifely days: anger. But ''Girl Singer'' is not an angry book. Clooney has been through enough hell and had enough therapy not to be in a state of rage at the age of 71. But in its wise, homey way, her memoir gently grinds a number of axes.

The story she tells is a 1950's version of a basic show-business scenario: a dreamy ascent, then a fall from grace, followed by a more modest reascendance. It's the same story told daily on the VH-1 rock history series ''Behind the Music.'' But in the 50's version, cocaine was not the catalyst for self-destruction; it was pills and alcohol. In the case of Clooney, another catalyst was the toxic concept diagnosed by Betty Friedan as the feminine mystique. Although it did not have a name in the 1950's, Clooney unquestioningly embraced it until it failed her.

In the chapters of ''Girl Singer'' that follow Clooney's rise from robust Irish Catholic roots in Maysville, Ky., through band singer (with Tony Pastor) to America's sweetheart, the story reads like a modern fairy tale. Yes, there are snags along the way, including a troubled family. The singer who started out in a duo with her younger sister, Betty, still feels regret and some guilt at splitting up when a solo career beckoned. (Rosemary had the talent and Betty the guts, she recalls people saying, and she agrees with that assessment.) But give or take some faithless celebrity boyfriends (including Dave Garroway), the path to the top was largely unruffled.

Among the legends who flit through these chapters are Bing Crosby (a man so locked within himself that he couldn't take a compliment), Marlene Dietrich, Billie Holiday, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner. The one star besides the author who emerges as full-blown figure is Ferrer. Brilliant, egotistical, a voracious culture hound and compulsive womanizer, he seems an almost tragic figure, so insecure beneath his arrogance that as his career loses steam he clings to the telephone every night worrying that he will never work again.

When Clooney had her crackup -- a drug psychosis brought on by her indiscriminate ingestion of sleeping pills and tranquilizers -- it was a doozy. Among other hallucinations, she believed that the death of her friend Robert F. Kennedy (she was an ardent Kennedy Democrat) was a hoax. Her recovery involved years of therapy. Once she was well enough to perform, she found herself tens of thousands dollars in debt (she had never paid attention to checks she had signed) and her career in ruins.

A crucial helping hand on the road back was offered by Crosby, who invited her to tour with him. Thus began a solid recording career for the Concord Jazz label, and Clooney realized her dream of playing solo at Carnegie Hall. She married Dante DiPaolo, a former dancer whom she had dropped years earlier to marry Ferrer, who was 16 years her senior. Today she is recognized as a classic pop-jazz singer in the same artistic league with her former Columbia Records labelmate Tony Bennett.

''Girl Singer'' is written in the warm, intimate and sometimes blunt style of Clooney's stage patter. The book is suffused with her love of her family and suggests that the sibling loyalty (of her brother, Nick, and her sister, Betty, who died of a stroke) has sustained her during the most difficult years. Clooney's writing conveys the same kind of honesty as her singing. A rich, complicated life is evoked in a voice that filters strong emotion through a hard-earned commonsensical wisdom.
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Stephen Holden reviews music, film and theater for The New York Times.

Clooney Tunes
By SHERRYL CONNELLY
Daily News Staff Writer 11/14/99
GIRL SINGER, By Rosemary Clooney with Joan Barthel, Doubleday, $24.95

Rosemary Clooney has, of course, been down the road and, yes, around the bend. Now 71, she recalls the journey the glory years that gave way to her prolonged breakdown and what came after. Clooney, the child of a poor and fractured family, always sang. She was 21 when Columbia Records brought her to New York. She was blond. She was beautiful. She had a very good time.

She became a star with the novelty hit "Come On-a My House," a faked Armenian folk song with lyrics by William Saroyan. Her champagne tour of New York's nightlife continued until she married the brilliant actor Jose Ferrer, 16 years older than she. A good life seemed only to get better until she discovered a truth Ferrer barely bothered to hide from her he was an "incorrigble womanizer."

Determined to have the marriage she longed for, Clooney bore five children in five years. Relocated to Beverly Hills, she supported the family with her best-selling record sales as well as her work on television and in the movies. Socially, their crowd met the Hollywood gold standard Bacall and Bogart, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Gary and Rocky Cooper, Dean and Frank, too.

Marlene Dietrich was another pal, and introduced Clooney to sleeping pills. In the years to come, when her marriage ended she and Ferrer actually divorced twice and her career slipped away, she vastly expanded her pharmaceutical repertoire. For a time an affair with Nelson Riddle seemed to promise a happy tomorrow, but it, too, ended badly.

In 1968, Clooney took the stage in Reno and told an audience, "I'm sick of singing for you jerks." In a psychotic state, she drove her white Cadillac up a mountain road on the wrong side, screaming: "That's one for you, God!" everytime a panicked driver escaped her juggernaut.

Recovery took years, as did regenerating her career. But she came out in a better place. She reconciled with a former lover Dante DiPaolo, whom she had left in the lurch when she ran off with Ferrer in 1973. Though her name recognition today has something to do with being George Clooney's aunt, she still has professional bookings, which she limits to one a week.

Clooney's life has been a hard one of highs and lows. Now, and for some time, she has been living the in-between. It's a place from where you can look back equivalent, perhaps, to a barstool at 3 a.m. and reflect. "Girl Singer," definitely a bittersweet evocation of her life and times, is the result.

Come On-a My Life
By Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post - whose e-mail address is yardley@twp.com.
Wednesday, November 3, 1999; Page C02
GIRL SINGER: An Autobiography
By Rosemary Clooney with Joan Barthel
Doubleday. 336 pp. $24.95

The film appearances of Rosemary Clooney have been less than distinguished or memorable, but in the right hands and with the right leading lady her own story is the stuff of the movies. Born in 1928 in a small town in Kentucky, she started singing almost as soon as she could speak, got her first radio job when she was 16, started her apprenticeship at the tail end of the big-band era before she was 18, had her first hit record five years later, had numerous amorous liaisons before marrying a celebrated actor, went into a tailspin induced by drugs, divorced, hit bottom, pulled herself back into the limelight while finding artistic satisfaction for the first time and married the sweetheart of her youth in her 70th year.

Those are just the bare bones of it. Like many who have achieved success in show business, Clooney is a person of deep insecurities and self-doubts, which gives her a psychological connection to many who live in comparative anonymity. Still, she lives in another world. Bouncing back and forth between New York and Hollywood for half a century, with innumerable side trips to England and Europe, she made many notable friendships--Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Nat "King" Cole, Billie Holiday, Tony Bennett--and what's interesting about these is that they seem to have been genuine friendships as opposed to exercises in air-kissing.

Clooney has her self-doubts, but she seems never to have doubted that she could make it as a singer. By the time she was in high school she "felt sure" she could support herself: "My confidence seemed to come naturally, based on my early and continuing interest in music. I'd listened to so many singers that I just somehow knew I could do it as well as almost anybody." In 1946 she and her younger sister, Betty, joined the big band of Tony Pastor, which "was a defining experience in my life." The "discipline and unbroken attention" demanded when she was "singing from a bandstand with a full orchestra" shaped her singing for the rest of her life:

"I've never thought of myself as a jazz singer," she says in "Girl Singer." "I know a lot of people--musicians, mostly--do think of me that way, because I have certain jazz attributes that I can incorporate into whatever I'm singing; I have good time, and a certain way of phrasing, and I know where the beat is. But my definition of a jazz singer is an improvisational musician, like Ella [Fitzgerald], or Carmen McRae, or Mel Torme. I have very little in the way of improvisational skill, because I don't read music . . . and I don't have the ear for it. I'd call myself a sweet singer with a big band sensibility."

As a young woman she could get by on the sweetness and clarity of her voice and the girl-next-door quality it suggested. Under the decidedly mixed influence of Mitch Miller, who ran the pop shop at Columbia Records in the 1950s, she had a monster hit in 1951 with "a quasi-Armenian pseudo-folk number called 'Come On-a My House,' " which made her famous and, for a time, wealthy, but it also put her into a novelty-song rut from which she did not really emerge until the late 1970s, when she began to record for a new label called Concord Jazz.

In between "Come On-a My House" and the two dozen albums she's thus far recorded for Concord, Clooney went through her own private soap opera. She had many romances, but the big one was with Jose Ferrer, a brilliant if excessively flamboyant actor whose sophistication and patina of erudition "dazzled" her. They married in 1953. Clooney wanted to be "the perfect Fifties Wife," to "have babies," so she had six of them. But Ferrer was compulsively unfaithful--"You knew before you married me the kind of man I am," he told her. "I can't change"--and was glad to let her be the family's principal breadwinner; they separated, got back together, but in the end divorced.

By then Clooney had gotten herself into a lot of trouble with sleeping pills. In the summer of 1968, at the age of 40, she cracked up and "was locked up in the psychiatric ward" of a hospital. She gained weight at an alarming rate--she says now she's come to terms with her size--but she got what seems to have been tough, sensible counseling, and her friends came to her aid. Merv Griffin brought her onto his television show to talk about what had happened to her, Bing Crosby took her on tour, and then along came Concord, which has produced many of the finest jazz recordings of the past quarter-century.

Over the years, she says, "I'd earned a freedom, an artistic authority, that I'd never dared to imagine." Her voice isn't what it used to be--whose is?--but she's learned how to get across the meaning of lyrics and how to find a song's inner music. She's happy with her singing and happy, so it seems, with her life, which is to say the story has what Hollywood loves above all else: a happy ending.

© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

From Biography Magazine, November, 1999

Michael Sauter's Review of Girl Singer

"Nowadays, she's best known as George Clooney's aunt, someone who used to be a popular singer. But as she reminds us in this bittersweet autobiography, Rosemary Clooney spent two decades in the bright spotlight of her own: as a post-war-big-band headliner; vocalist of such novelty hits as "Mambo Italiano" and "Come On-A My House"; Bing Crosby's co-star in White Christmas; wife of actor Jose Ferrer; and friend to Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, and other luminaries of her time. Where was the real Rosie amid all her public images? That question has taken the better part of a lifetime to answer.

Aided by co-author Joan Barthel, Clooney begins her search for herself with a crisply impressionistic recap of her rise from a smalltown Kentucky childhood to Hollywood fame and fortune. But while the narrative is studded with indelible anecdotes about fellow stars (Marlene Dietrich is lovingly recalled donning an apron and helping with the housework while Clooney was down with the flu), the people closest to Clooney tend to be les well-defined--her alcoholic father, often absent mother, little brother Nick, and younger sister Betty--and need most of the book to fully come alive. Even Ferrer, father of her five children, remains somewhat thinly drawn until a wrenching divorce brings him into sharper focus.

Indeed, it's the dark side of Clooney's life that gives this book its staying power. From her failing marriage to the philandering Ferrer, her slow decline into drug use and mental breakdown, the painful process of putting her life back together, Clooney finds an openness and intimacy that eludes her when recalling earlier, happier times. The drug-induced psychosis that sent her to a mental hospital is harrowingly described. So is the night good friend Bobby Kennedy was assassinated--while she was sitting across the room. These powerful moments might have been even more effective had they contrasted with an equally vivid rendering of Clooney's salad days. No matter: It's still one hell of a life story. Even casual fans should rejoice that she survived to tell it."

Entertainment Weekly, November 26, 1999 by Charles Winecoff
GIRL SINGER: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Rosemary Clooney, with Joan Barthel Doubleday, $24.95
"I loved seeing the colors of the pills, like a bouquet in the palm of my hand," writes singer Rosemary Clooney of her addiction to prescription drugs in the 1960s. This candid account of her personal journey "from porch swing to padded cell" offers a surprising picture of the big-band diva (and aunt of George Clooney), whose fractured Kentucky childhood propelled her into a life of sometimes callous ambition. From her rise to stardom and her troubled marriage to actor Jose Ferrer to her live-on-stage breakdown in 1968 and her crawl back to sanity (and Carnegie Hall), Clooney's story is an eloquent tribute to the healing power of music. (A-)

From Booklist , October 1, 1999

Avid devourers of celebrity memoirs will get everything they like to get from singer Clooney, who details her hardscrabble Kentucky childhood, her first gig as a big band's "girl singer" at 16, her breakthrough with the hit novelty song "Come on-a My House," her rise to fame and into Hollywood society (lots of name-dropping in this part), her stormy marriage to actor JoseFerrer, her reluctant divorce, and her descent into drugs and depression, which culminated in an onstage crack-up. Fortunately, her story resolves more happily than most such showbiz sagas. Not only did she rediscover and eventually marry a lost love some 20 years after she had dumped him for Ferrer, but she reconstructed her singing career, meeting even greater critical acclaim, if less commercial success, than in her heyday. As eventful as Clooney's life has been, her book is most compelling when she talks about music--listening to Sinatra (later a friend) on the jukebox when a kid, learning to sing in front of a big band (which Sinatra likened to lifting weights), seeing Ella Fitzgerald perform in a 52d Street club. As much as her biggest fans may enjoy reading Clooney's honest account of her ultimately successful battles with her demons, they may also be a bit disappointed that the music takes a backseat once her personal life heats up. Gordon Flagg -Copyright© 1999, American Library Association. All rights reserved

From Kirkus Reviews

Clooney, who went from being one of popular music's original divas to America's sweetheart, unfurls her dramatic life story, aided by Barthel (A Death in California, 1981, etc.). Clooney started out in Maysville, Ky., where she and her brother, Nicky, and her sister, Betty, bounced around from family home to family home. Her parents separated often, leading the three children to spend time with uncles and aunts, but mostly their grandparents. Because of their unfortunate circumstances, the kids, particularly the two sisters, bonded tightly from an early age, and they started their professional singing careers as a sister act. When Rosemary got her first significant gig, with Tony Pastor's band in 1939, Betty was right there with her. Some of the book's most vibrant passages come from the era long before Clooney was a household name, when she and Betty were on their first major tour with Pastor's band. You can feel their teenage excitement over having gotten out of their small town. The most poignant part comes when Clooney writes of her painful decision to leave her Uncle George (who chaperoned the girls) and Betty behind when she was offered her big break. Clooney's early life, which has been much less well-documented than her marriage to actor Jos Ferrer and her addiction to prescription drugs, offers the book's most sincere and moving moments. From the time she reaches true stardom, Girl Singer bounds into sometimes clichd Hollywood melodrama, beginning with her troubled marriage, on through her many well-known friendships (from Bing Crosby to Ava Gardner), to her fall from grace, and culminating with her 90s comeback, which has seen her nominated for multiple Grammy awards, and her realization of a lifelong dream to play Carnegie Hall. However, those first chapters, and her obvious love for her family, offer such genuine, and often sweet, insight into one of America's most famous personalities that Girl Singer is a must for anyone with even a passing curiosity about Clooney. (16 pages b&w photos) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.