"Rosemary Clooney Returns After Bout With Insanity"

(Newspaper article - unknown source)

Rosemary Clooney was once called "the best singer in the business" by Bing Crosby and "the nearest thing to Ella Fitzgerald" by a music magazine. Rosemary's been at the top of the ladder - but it shattered under her, plummeting her into nearly permanent insanity.

Buried under mountains of despair from drugs, overwork, ill-fated love relationships and other problems, Rosemary cracked. Her success, money, and much-loved children couldn't prevent the tragedy. At one point, she couldn't even believe she was the person who made such a hit in 1953 with COME-ON-A-MY-HOUSE and starred with Bing in WHITE CHRISTMAS among many fantastic successes.

Rosemary confesses she had a "miraculous" recovery and proves it in her autobiography THIS FOR REMEMBRANCE (Playboy Press), in which she details her traumatic early family life, her terrible plunge into insanity and the monumental struggle to get well. She tells intimate details of life with her actor husband, Jose Ferrer, and of life with her young lover.

Born May 23, 1928 in Maysville, Ky., one of eight children in an Irish Catholic family, Rosemary admits her father was an alcoholic and her mother "the most manipulative woman I ever knew."

"We were only all together for one summer!" still blonde Rosemary confesses. To escape the constant turmoil, Rosemary, a sister and brother took singing jobs, but Rosemary's feverish ambition left them behind. Drive, plus enormous talent, charm, beauty and nervous energy, quickly got Rosemary to the top. Mitch Miller literally ordered her to record COME-ON-A-MY-HOUSE - even though she hated the tune!

She fell blindly in love with Ferrer and guiltily lived with him in the early 50s, though it angered her mother, and would have ended her career if the public found out. They married, but on a Paris honeymoon, were robbed of everything just hours before Rosemary discovered Ferrer was already having a "sexual encounter" with a Parisian woman. This was the first of his infidelities which shredded her self-esteem - and drove her to work harder to try to regain it!

They had five children in spite of the problems, and Ferrer was a good father. Yet when the inevitable divorce took place, Rosemary leapt into the arms of a young lover, who adored her for two years and then suddenly walked out.

So she worked still harder and took drugs to relax, sleep, and keep going. She went on wild spending sprees and then tore up the expensive clothes she bought. She missed not seeing her children for months as she fulfilled commitments around the world.

The final straw was when her long-time friend Robert Kennedy was killed, seconds after she had sung with him on the stage. "My mind did a flip-flop," she confesses. She told everyone the stories of the murder were "a giant hoax." Soon, she was in the psychiatric ward.

Few knew the tragic details of Rosemary's life because she never let her emotions show. But a top psychiatrist; good friends, such as Bob Hope, Dinah Shore and Bing; her family, especially sister Betty, plus her own determination, put Rosemary back on the good road.

The country recently smiled with her as she sang on Bing's last, fateful Christmas show. Though now torn with the grief of his death, as she has been torn so often by death of family and friends, Rosemary now can cope. And she is deeply happy to reveal a close friend from her youth, Dante DiPaolo, is back in her life. True love obviously never dies, and after a half-century of storm, Rosemary's sea of life is calm.

Caption 1: Rosemary during the height of her singing career (left) and today. With the help of friends, she recovered from insanity brought on by despair from drugs, overwork, ill-fated love relationships and other problems.