Rosemary, Our Shining Star

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When I was in Bloomington, Indiana a couple of weeks ago I paid respects to a couple of the town’s music greats, Hoagy Carmichael and Bobby Helms. Today I paid my respects to Rosemary Clooney, one of Kentucky’s greatest gifts to music. Rosemary Clooney was born in 1928 in Maysville, which is on the Ohio River. (A quick note: it’s Maysville, not Mayfield. Mayfield is where the terrible tornado hit in 2021, and that’s over in the western part of the state; while Maysville is in the northern part of the state, not too far from Cincinnati.) She was born into a hard life, coming along just before the Great Depression hit. Her father was a house painter who dealt with alcoholism, while her mother was an office worker. When Clooney was 15, her mother took off to California with her brother, Nick, leaving Rosemary and her younger sister Betty in Kentucky in the custody of their father. One day he went out and never came back, leaving the two girls, ages 16 and 13, alone. Thankfully, they had talent. They were hired for $20 a week at WLW in Cincinnati to perform. With the powerhouse wattage of the station (it’s frequently called “the nation’s station” even today because it can be heard in distant parts of the country at night) the girls came to the attention of a band leader, Tony Pastor, who hired them. The tour guide at the Rosemary Clooney House explained that Betty was not cut out for the long stints of one-night stands in a band, and came back to the Cincinnati area to be a local performer. That left Rosemary on her own. Thankfully, she had a powerful voice to carry her. She was signed to Columbia Records in 1951, and immediately ran into trouble. Mitch Miller, who was the chief A&R man at Columbia, wanted Clooney to record “Come On-a My House,” a silly song written by Ross Bagdasarian (better known as David Seville, the inventor of the Chipmunks music act and the man behind the song “Witch Doctor”). She detested the song, thinking it was stupid. Miller (who, by the way, would later badmouth the “silliness” of early rock and roll ) gave her an ultimatum: record it, or be fired. She recorded it. The rest is history. The song was #1 for six weeks and sent Clooney on her way to being one of the biggest female entertainers in records, radio, television, AND film. Life wasn’t all good, though, as is the case with a number of celebrities. The hard upbringing and abandonment by her parents weighed on her, especially after marrying actor José Ferrer. Ferrer was a notorious womanizer, having affairs with multiple women while Clooney was having a baby a year for five years running. She divorced him on the grounds of adultery. He said he’d changed, so she remarried him, only to discover he hadn’t. They split for good in 1967. It was about at this time that Clooney began a downward spiral. She was taking sleeping pills to help her as well as tranquilizers (not unusual in the 1960s: see the Rolling Stones’ song “Mother’s Little Helper”) and adopting her father’s alcohol habit. What reportedly pushed her over the edge was June 5, 1968: she was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, helping to campaign for Bobby Kennedy, and saw him get shot. A few weeks later, she had a nervous breakdown onstage and ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Clooney was one of the first public figured to talk openly about her mental illness (diagnosed as bipolar disorder). In her 1977 autobiography This For Rememberance, she detailed the ugly parts of fame and the emotional toll it took on her. The tour guide at the house said that, once she was able to kick the pill habit and alcohol, she never relapsed. Clooney was able to reinvent herself, not as a “50s pop singer” in an “oldies” package, but as a veteran performer and interpreter of popular standards. When she died in June, 2002 of lung cancer caused by years of heavy smoking, the entertainment world mourned the loss: not just because her nephew, George, had become famous, but because she had been a shining star in multiple entertainment genres. Her recovery and comeback also helped countless people inside and outside the entertainment industry accept and deal with mental illness and addictions as medical problems, not “a personal weakness.” The photo is Rosemary’s grave, at St. Patrick’s Cemetery in Maysville, Kentucky. She died in Los Angeles but chose to be buried in her hometown. She’ll always be our shining star. Here’s Rosemary’s version of “If Teardrops Were Pennies”: