Cinema
Rosemary Clooney
Mark Steyn
It's slightly unsettling to think that these days Rosemary Clooney is best known as George Clooney's aunt. But then George's dad, Nick Clooney, a big TV and radio guy, was always known as Rosemary Clooney's brother. I would bet we'll be listening to Rosie long after we've stopped watching George.
Her singing career falls into two neat halves. In Act One, she had some of the biggest hits of the day, but the day being the Fifties they tended to be toe-curling Mitch Miller ethnic novelty hits — 'Mambo Italiano' (Italian novelty song), 'Come On-a My House' (Armenian novelty song), 'Botch-a Me' (botched novelty song). Then in 1968, at a fundraiser for Robert Kennedy, she was standing just a few feet from him and watched in horror as he was assassinated. A few days later, back on stage, she was asked by a fan to sing 'Come On-a My House', swore at the audience, stormed off and was stopped shortly afterwards careering wildly along the wrong side of a curvy, dangerous mountain road. After the breakdown. hospitalisation and therapy, she re-emerged in the mid-Seventies older, wiser, huskier, darker — her take on that Second World Warhorse 'I'll Be Seeing You' is a tour-de-force of aching emotion. I'll miss that Rosie enormously. About seven years ago, I congratulated her on a Grammy nomination. She thought Sinatra would win. 'I don't care how old he gets,' she said. 'Put him in front of a mike, he's still dangerous.' That's the way I felt about her, and I'm sorry I'll never again have the pleasure of opening up a new Rosie CD.
On the other hand, I once splashed out a couple of hundred bucks on a three-box 15CD exhaustive retrospective of the early years and, my God, what a hellish listening experience: the voice is pleasant and accomplished, but the songs are mostly terrible and, even when they're not, the arrangements are abysmal. Never mind 'Mambo Italiano', these are the ethnic novelty songs too dumb even for the Hit Parade — you mean you've never heard the great Irish love song 'My O'Darlin', My O'Lovely, My O'Brien'? Rosie credits the post-Kennedy therapy with teaching her how to express emotion in song, which should give those of us generally contemptuous of the head doctors pause for thought.
But the curious thing is that, even at a time when her singing was immature, her acting wasn't. She's the most grown-up thing about White Christmas (1954), at least when compared to cutesy Vera-Ellen and campy Danny Kaye. At 26, Rosie was seven years younger than Vera-Ellen but somehow comes off as the older sister. She's the 'mother hen' as she explains shortly before the gals go out and sing 'Sisters' to a nightclub audience including Kaye and Bing Crosby. Danny prefers V-E, Bing likes Rosie, and they wind up giving 'em a hand skipping town ahead of the sheriff. 'We like to take care of our friends,' says Kaye.
'But we hardly know each other,' Rosie points out.
'Well, we'd like to take care of that, too.'
In those days, Paramount saw her as the sensible girl, trembling perilously close to homely. Edith Head dressed her and always pulled those black Fifties dresses in a couple more inches but she showed a lot less leg — or arm — than any other starlet that decade. Frank Loesser knew better. He turned her down for Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls because he said she didn't sound like a virgin — singing, that is, not talking. You can see what he meant just ever so briefly in White Christmas, in the number Irving Berlin wrote especially for her, the smoulderingly torchy 'Love, You Didn't Do Right By Me'. Forget the black polo-necked gentlemen of the chorus mincing around behind her — they are, as we say, evocative of the period and typical of the genre — and look at Rosie, a vision of bruised sensuality in black strapless gown and elbow-length evening gloves.
She never got anything quite that good again, though Red Garters at least lives up to its title. Rosie's in a merry widow, garter circling her thigh, and packing a pair of sixshooters. The male dancers, implausibly clad as cowboys, are, as usual, nancying around at her feet, but, among them, was a chorus boy called Dante DiPaolo, whom she didn't see for another two decades when he pulled up alongside her at a stop light in Los Angeles and wrote her phone number in the dust on his dashboard. They got married in 1997. Red Garters was supposed to be a spoof of Hollywood westerns, upending every horseopera convention: the cavalry fails to show up in time, in the big shoot-out the hero misses, etc. A funny concept, killed by a plonker of a director who shall be nameless (George Marshall). The Stars Are Singing left you wondering why: Rosie did 'Come On-a My House', which came on-a like Schubert compared to her other numbers — 'Lovely Weather For Ducks' and 'Feed Fido Some Rruff'. In Deep In My Heart, a Sigmund Romberg biotuner starring her then husband Jose Ferrer, she appears briefly for one duet that, along with Gene and Fred Kelly doing 'I Love To Go Swimmin' With Wimmin', is the highlight of the film:
`Mr And Mrs
Two words that to me Stand for all that is tenderest Mr And Mrs How happy we'd be On an income the slenderest ...'
Ferrer and Clooney are terrific together, and the number's utterly charming, even if its vision of monogamous domesticity is one the legendary stick-man never dreamt of falling for. Strangely, for all the musicals she did, the only production that attempts to make any powerful connection between the drama and the songs is an episode of ER nephew George got her to guest on a couple of years back, playing an Alzheimer's patient who can only communicate intelligently through lyrics.
For a game old broad utterly devoid of showbiz histrionics, Rosemary Clooney led a life improbably stuffed with high drama and freakish coincidences. They made a TV movie of it back in the Eighties, but there's plenty left for a full-scale Hollywood feature. George Clooney could play his dad, and Mel Ferrer his.
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