Rosemary Clooney (b. May 23rd, 1928)
REALLY ROSIE
Rosemary Clooney on Who's Worth Singing About
F. Scott Fitzgerald is often quoted as claiming there are no second acts in American life. Try telling that to Rosemary Clooney. Some 40 years since such commercial hits as "Come On-A My House" and "Mambo Italiano," Clooney is riding a new wave of popular acclaim and critical respect as a nonpareil interpretive singer. Her latest recording Brazil finds her masterfully reworking Brazil's great bossa nova standards. Will Friedwald of Barnes & Noble.com spoke with the Clooney about the other vocal legends who've crossed her path during her incredible seven-decade career.
Barnes & Noble.com: Over the years, you've known just about every one of the great popular singers. I know that Billie Holiday became a friend of yours.
Rosemary Clooney: That's right, she was my daughter's godmother. She said, "Well,I think that it would be a good thing if I was her godmother because it takes a bad woman to be a good godmother." I remember once when Billie was singing at a little place down on Hollywood Boulevard. Joe [Jose Ferrer, Clooney's first husband] and I went to see her with Dinah Shore, who was a friend of mine, and her husband George [Montgomery]. We had been at the tennis matches, and Dinah said,"Let's go hear Billie Holiday." And, you know, I thought it was a fine idea because Billie and I had been friends for a while by that time. Well, I already knew that Billie could be brutally honest under certain circumstances. And her set was coming up, and she stopped at our table before the show and said to me, "What are you sitting with her for?" -- meaning Dinah. And now I'm smiling and laughing and, like, "Isn't this a funny joke?" like I was trying to pretend Billie wasn't saying that. So I said, "Oh Billie, you know Dinah here, you know George, and you know my husband, Joe, and you know what fans we are of yours, and we just can't wait for your show ...what are you going to sing?" I was babbling, talking nonsense just to shut her up because I knew what the next words were going to be. She said, "Don't sit next to her. You could catch bad singing." My God, I just wanted the floor to swallow me up! But Dinah was ever the lady, you know, she acted as if it just never happened. She didn't hear it, and that was the end of it.
B&N.com: You were also close to Judy Garland, weren't you? Which of her songs are your particular favorites?
RC: I like the songs like "Look for the Silver Lining," the ones that she sang with such hope. When she could be optimistic in the face of such utter despair. She projected an underlying dramatic thing of "I am really on my last legs here, but there's hope." She was an actress,for God's sake, and a damned good one. So that's the reason she could do that. She was the conduit between the writer and the audience and she made you feel. Hell, she could do it in a conversation. I remember being over next door at Ira [Gershwin]'s; he lived next door to us. This is after Joey, Judy's son, was born, and it was also around the same time that she was nominated for an Oscar for "A Star Is Born." We were seeing each other occasionally, mostly at Ira's. This one time she got me in a corner, and she was talking about the birth; it turned out that Joey had been a premature baby, and she couldn't take him home, and she knew that I understood because I had had a premature baby. My middle child was two months early, and I wasn't allowed to take him home for almost six weeks. So I'd go visit him at the hospital, which was murder. And she said, "Isn't that the worst, to stand there, you know, with the glass in between you and your child..." But the way that she said it, I found myself starting to cry! She could move somebody with the simplest of statements. Like Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday, she just always told the truth in her music.
B&N.com: Which records of Ella Fitzgerald's stands out for you?
RC: That's a hard one -- there are so many. Obviously, the ones with Nelson [Riddle], and her Songbook series.I like her early recordings especially, the ones I first heard as a little girl, because it was such a revelation that anybody could make that sound. In fact, I probably liked her more than Billie early on, because with Billie,there were all these layers of drama that I couldn't appreciate when I was a little girl. Later on I could understand them a lot more.But Ella was more immediate. Well, Ella was like a child in person.She was very, very, very simple. She had simple tastes, and she was like a little girl, she even spoke with a little girl voice.
B&N.com: Didn't your first review compare you to her?
RC: Yeah! In Downbeat. I carried that clipping around with me for years and years until the paper completely disintegrated. But it was in my wallet, and I would take it out every now and then, especially after a bad night, or if I was in a bad hotel with a bad band and I would say, "Well, somebody thought that I sounded like Ella once!"
B&N.com: What singers stand out for you today?
RC: Well, there's my dear friend Michael [Feinstein].
B&N.com: What's your favorite of his records?
RC: "Isn't It Romantic." Absolutely. I think that he touches every right chord for that -- I mean emotionally. I think that that's probably the most moving rendition of that song that I've ever heard. But I think that in his heart, as wonderful as he plays and sings, Michael isn't a performer at all, he's an archivist. That's what he really is. His greatest joy in life is finding things. He can go into small towns and find records and other things that nobody has heard. He found one that I did with Bing [Crosby] that I had never heard, and he played it for me the night before last in his car.It just blew me away!
B&N.com: Who else do you like?
RC: There's a singer by the name of Sam Phillips that I'm crazy about.I think she might have started out as a folk singer. I don't know how to describe her. I can't pigeonhole her exactly. She's a writer as well. She sent me a song with a friend of my son's. My son has a friend by the name of T-Bone Burnett who produces records, and she's married to him. We spent the evening together about a week ago,and he brought me this CD. I'd met Sam, but I'd never heard her. So she said, "I've got a song I'd like for you to hear." So she sent me this song that is just absolutely wonderful. It reminds me so much of Billy Strayhorn.
B&N.com: You've said on the notes to your new album, Brazil, that you've been listening a lot to the two classic Frank Sinatra -- Antonio Carlos Jobim albums, as well as the album that Jobim made with Nelson Riddle.
RC: Yes, in fact, I borrowed the Sinatra-Jobim arrangement of "I Concentrate on You." Actually, I didn't even borrow it, I just stole it outright. I think that those albums were extraordinarily deep, even for Frank.I think that he was very touched by those songs and worked on them in a way that he never worked on anything else.
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