Still a Girl Singer
By TODD S. PURDUM
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- She has a lived-in laugh, a deep, rueful chuckle
made of good times and bum times, of cigarettes and singing and long, hard
nights on the road. Somewhere around the first sip of the second cocktail
in her elegant old living room, it dawns on a visitor just what a life Rosemary
Clooney has lived.
For 46 years, she has made her home in this rambling house, where George
and Ira Gershwin wrote their last song, "Love Is Here to Stay." The silver
frames that line her bookshelves and piano hold photographs of Marlene Dietrich,
John F. Kennedy and her movie-star nephew, George, who started his Hollywood
career as a gofer and chore boy here. When she talks about Bing and Bob,
Dean and Frank, they are not legends, but friends.
"I did Bing's radio show, always, and later we did a 15-minute daily show,
five days a week that we taped in this room," she said. "We would sit around
the table sort of like this, and then they'd set up the microphones, and
we'd break out some Scotch." They would circle their own lines, but not read
them in advance, so that when they performed the scripts, it was always
spontaneous.
Spontaneous is Ms. Clooney's default mode. At 71, she is a survivor of a
swinging era whose greats are almost all gone. She still sings the old songs
the way they were meant to be sung, and she tells priceless stories of watching
the fights on television with Crosby and his date for the night, the young
Grace Kelly, in sweater set and pearls. But Ms. Clooney is no nostalgia act.
She is the spiritual godmother to younger singers like Linda Ronstadt, and
she has just recorded a duet of "The Boy From Ipanema" with Diana Krall,
the hot young jazz pianist and singer, to be released next spring.
It was not quite twilight, and Ms. Clooney and her husband, Dante DiPaolo,
a dapper Hollywood hoofer she fell in love with nearly 50 years ago at Paramount
studios and then jilted to marry Jose Ferrer, were sitting at a needlepoint
chess table Ms. Clooney had made for Ferrer between nightclub shows at the
Waldorf-Astoria.
"He didn't take it with him," Ms. Clooney said dryly of the man she married
and divorced twice and with whom she had five children. Ferrer's smiling
picture still hangs in a prominent place in her den.
As the day's last minivans full of stargazing tourists glided by the crape
myrtle tree in the front yard, the conversation drifted gently over the past.
But the evening was actually a rare lull before Ms. Clooney would plunge
headlong into the future again.
First would be a trip to her hometown of Maysville, Ky., just down the river
from Cincinnati, to raise money to rebuild the theater where her first film,
"The Stars Are Singing," had its premiere in 1953. Then there would be a
two-week stint, through Oct. 16, as the opening act at
her friend Michael Feinstein's new 150-seat supper club at
the Regency Hotel in Manhattan. "And we have the power of the pencil!" Ms.
Clooney said of their ability to sign for their drinks and food, with the
glee of one who knows too well what it's like to cook on a hotel hot plate.
Finally, next month, comes the publication of "Girl Singer" (Doubleday) her
new memoir, co-written with Joan Barthel, along with a compilation album
of career hits, reissued by her longtime label, Concord Jazz, and a book
tour that is to include an appearance on "The Rosie O'Donnell Show."
Ms. Clooney's first autobiography, "This for Remembrance" (Playboy Press,
1977), was made into a television movie starring Sondra Locke, with Ms. Clooney
dubbing the vocals. The book is out of print, and badly out of date, since
it was published just as she was beginning a tentative comeback, with Crosby's
help, after a nervous breakdown, years of addiction to prescription drugs
and one-night stands in suburban Holiday Inns.
"Since then a lot has happened," she said.
Before then, too. As a child, Ms. Clooney was passed to relatives by her
divorced, dysfunctional parents, and started singing on the radio in Cincinnati.
At 18, with her sister, Betty, she went on the road with Tony Pastor's big
band. "Come On-a My House," an improbable fake Armenian folk song with a
hokey harpsichord accompaniment and words by William Saroyan, made her a
solo star at 23. She then made five movies in quick succession, including
"White Christmas," with Bing Crosby.
Her marriage to Ferrer produced five children in five years. (Bob Hope called
it "Vatican Roulette," and after the third one, he and Crosby gave her track
shoes and starting blocks; Tennessee Ernie Ford insisted, "You've got to
find out what's causing this.") But Ferrer, 16 years her senior, was an
incorrigible womanizer, as she learned on their honeymoon. They split up
for good in 1966.
A heartbreaking and ill-fated affair with the arranger Nelson Riddle, the
rise of rock 'n' roll and her own growing dependence on a rainbow arsenal
of uppers and downers left Ms. Clooney on the edge. When her friend Robert
F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 as she waited to greet him at the Ambassador
Hotel in Los Angeles, she snapped. Weeks later, convinced Kennedy was still
alive, she stormed off a stage in Reno and drove her white Cadillac covered
with flower decals up the wrong side of a mountain road to Lake Tahoe in
the dark, yelling, "That's one for you, God!" every time an oncoming car
veered out of her way. That got her placed in the locked ward of Cedars-Sinai
Hospital with other severely depressed patients.
"I was confused at first," Ms. Clooney said. "Not confused," she amended.
"I was crazy. But Phil Silvers was there, and he was walking up and down
the halls, really nervous, highly charged, and I thought, 'Well, this is
just pretend, you know."' Her sense of unreality was heightened by the fact
that one of the therapists on the ward was Betsy Drake, who had been married
to Cary Grant. "Who could take that seriously?" she said.
It was serious enough: Ms. Clooney was in therapy for the next eight years,
kicked her drug habit, and began to rebuild relationships with her children,
then 8 to 13, who had been largely raised by Ms. Clooney's mother -- a bitter
twist, since her mother had abandoned Rosemary and her younger sister, Betty,
when they were young.
She never really reconciled with her mother before she died in 1973. It was
only a few weeks later that she became reacquainted with DiPaolo. As she
was stopped at a traffic light in Beverly Hills in her Corvette convertible,
he pulled up in his Thunderbird and called out, "Rosella!" She had not laid
eyes on him in 20 years, but she invited him to dinner.
A few months later he moved in, becoming her road manager and indispensable
man. Two years ago, tired of explaining their domestic arrangements to Ms.
Clooney's nine grandchildren, they were married in the church in Maysville
where Ms. Clooney was baptized.
Decades before, when she dropped him for Ferrer, DiPaolo said, "Oh, I crashed.
I mean, I really couldn't understand that at all."
Ms. Clooney said gently: "He was the kindest man that I've ever known. He
was also funny."
But in those years, Ms. Clooney said, she was too busy running away from
her own insecurities to pick a man like DiPaolo. And her Hollywood life was
heady, in a household that featured butler, cook, housekeeper, upstairs maid,
laundress, secretary, gardener and pool man, on a block where the neighbors
included Jack Benny, Lucille Ball and James Stewart. There were friendly
evenings with Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, after-dinner coffee with Nat King
Cole at the piano, girl talk with Dietrich and Billie Holiday, nights in
Las Vegas watching Frank Sinatra.
"I don't think he was happy in a lot of ways," Ms. Clooney said of Sinatra.
"I think that's why the kind of immature things that Sammy and Dean and Joey
Bishop and all those guys did when they were together. That was the fun that
he had that he'd never had when he was a kid, and he could be in charge."
Sometimes now, she said, she sees her nephew George (his father is her brother,
Nick) seeking safety in a somewhat similar camaraderie. "I see him hanging
with his friends, the guys that play basketball," she said. "They're his
guys, and they have to go on their golfing trip every year. I see that, and
I wonder if it's the same kind of thing."
Ms. Clooney knows the loneliness of fame. In her new book, she recalls a
Christmas Eve party at Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall's in the mid-'50s.
Her own career was on a roll, but she felt strangely depressed. She caught
sight of Spencer Tracy, who asked what was wrong.
"I don't know," she writes. "I've never been to a party on Christmas Eve.
I guess I'm just homesick."
Tracy said, "Get used to it."
"I guess maybe it was just a couple of burned-out Catholics," Ms. Clooney
recalled. "Sometimes I felt way out of my depth, you know."
Today, her Christmas Eves are very different, with Champagne and caviar in
her big house on North Roxbury Drive full of family and friends. Her eldest
son, Miguel, is an actor in New York, as is her youngest, Rafael. Gabriel,
married to the singer Debby Boone, is an artist and Episcopal priest at a
Beverly Hills church near her house. Her older daughter, Maria, raises Arabian
horses in the Santa Ynez Valley near Santa Barbara. Her daughter Monsita
is married to a television executive and raising a family.
Ms. Clooney has made some concessions to age and knee surgery, and now sings
only one show a night. But she keeps trying new things and said a new album
of Brazilian songs, with the guitarist John Pizzarelli and featuring the
duet with Ms. Krall, was the hardest music she ever had to learn. She said
she'll keep singing as long as she can stand, and if she can't, she'll sit,
as Mabel Mercer did.
But she has yet to schedule the sessions with a voice coach that Bob Hope's
90-year-old wife, Dolores, recently gave her as a present.
"She still sings, beautifully," Ms. Clooney said of her old friend. "But
I'm too old to take a lesson now."
AT HOME WITH ROSEMARY CLOONEY
Copyright
1999 The New York Times Company
