Good Housekeeping

Here is further background material for the essay L'Après-Midi d'un Strayhorn on our Substack publication Tone Parallel...

Links to original sources and no copyright infringement intended. 

On Being Mrs. Jose Ferrer

Good Housekeeping  May, 1956

by Rosemary Clooney as told to Margaret Lee Runbeck

Source

I have no illusions about my voice,

and I guess the best you can say for me

is that I'm wholesome-looking.

I don't know what my husband sees in me,

but there's plenty that I see in him.

I suppose there's seldom a marriage about which somebody didn't say, "What on earth do they see in each other?" Or maybe, if the speaker is a friend of the husband, he says, "What do you suppose he sees in her?" Or vice versa.

But my marriage is different. People don't ask that question behind my back. They blurt it out to my face. Sometimes, barely introduced to me, a person will say, "Rosemary Clooney, there's something I'd like to ask you. What does an artist like Jose Ferrer see in you?"

And what do you suppose I answer? If I like him at all, I say, "Come on-a my house." (In case you've forgotten, that's the title of one of my records, which sold over two million copies.) I ask the questioner to dinner because, as the Chinese proverb says, "One picture is worth ten thousand words." I've found that the sight of Joe and me together is the best possible answer I could give.

People who are more tactful ask the question this way: "How do two such--well, such different--people get along as you do?"

I know why we are so happy, and the secret is based on a very definite fact. Maybe before I finish this, I'll decide to tell exactly what that secret is. It might help other wives, no matter what kind of men they are married to.

All the tihngs on the surface on the surface of Joe and me--the things that "show"--would make anyone wonder what we see in each other. After all, Jose Ferrer is one of the world's more serious actors, a top director, a good writer, an accomplished musician. Jose Ferrer, some people say, has done much for the American theatre. I could say frankly that he is one of the great exponents of the arts, a fact I know is true; there's no use my trying to sound modest about it. After all, I had nothing to do with making him important. And me? Wel, I'm just a gal who loves to sing popular songs and who's had the breaks along the way.

I haven't any illusions about my voice. It's nothing wonderful musically speaking. The people who like me a lot--like Mitch Miller, who picks out the songs I do on records, and Marlene Dietrich, who's become one of my best friends--say my way of singing has warmth and heart, so that people don't feel so lonely after they've listened to a record of mine. I know children like my voice. And maybe, to go along with the cliche, dogs to too. But who says children are judges of art?

I've no illusions about my beauty either. I just look like anybody's kid sister. The best you can say for me is that I'm wholesome-looking, but I'm not sure that is very fashionable right now. My hair is the kind of blond that has to be washed every three or four days. The bend in it is its own, and if I let somebody persuade me to have a real wave put in, I look like a high-school freshman ready for my first date. I'm pretty tall, tall enough so that Joe and I can see eye to eye actually. And that's exactly what we do. On plenty of subjects.

I finished high school, and Joe had a lot of education, graduating from Princeton in 1933. Joe's still being educated, and heaven knows I am. (I better had be. I guess that does give us something in common right there.) Joe gets up at the crack of dawn, when most everybody else in Beverly Hills is sound asleep except the actors who are on a shooting schedule at the moment. He gets up early because he's taking tennis lessons, and singing lessons, and fencing lessons, and there just isn't time enough in the day to learn all that he is determined to do well.

I could concede indefinitely things that on the surface might make it seem we have nothing in common. Joe loves sports, and I can't even swim--though in the three years we've been married I haven't had the heart to confess that to him. Behind our house we have a big elegant swimming pool, and on warm afternoons our friend come over and swim. Joe loves that, and says, "Come on in, Rosey." And I say, "Can't. I'm the hostess. I've got to see everybody's comfortable." Especially, I've got to see that I'm comfortable, because floundering around, half drowning, would be anything but comfortable--for me or the spectators. Not being able to swim is really the only thing I've ever tried to deceive Joe about. But as of now he'll find out that I'm afraid of water more than knee-deep. And you know what he'll do? He'll hire a coach to give me swimming lessons. Joe hates chronic ignorance. He says anybody can learn anything. When somebody disagrees with that, he says, "Okay. Would you like to prove it? What'll we both learn to do right now?"

Joe loves to read, and I expected to save my reading until I was an old lady.

Joe's idea of a fine evening is sitting at home with our four dogs underfoot and some good intimate friends on hand. A big evening for me used to be games and noise and festivity.

Joe and I do have one pretty important thing in common. That's Bombo our son. I wear a charm bracelet, and the best charm on it is a double-picture locket. On one side it has Joe's picture, on the other Bombo's picture taken when he was ten days old. Joe and Bombo look just alike, and that I love, because my son is just some more of Joe to me.

All the time I was expecting Bombo, I prayed that he'd be a boy, so he could carry on his father's name. I had him all named--Miguel Jose Ferrer. But Joe took one look at him and called him Bombo.

Most of the things Joe and I have in common, the real facts about us, don't show to the casual observer. They are the things we "see" in each other.

That's rather a wonderful expression when you take it literally. What we "see" in each other. Not what's there, but what we see. Each human being is really a whole crowd of people--heroes and villains, noblemen and tramps. Everyone has had the experience, I suppose of becoming someone quite unfamiliar to himself every time he runs into a certain personality. We often say, "That woman brings out the worst in me." Well, that is what she sees, so out if comes. In the same way, the person we love the most often brings out someone completely new in us--someone cleverer than we usually are, someone more lovable, more helpful, the self we hoped we could be, only more so. Joe says the psychologists have a word for it: they say that we tend to project the image we have of someone upon him, so that he acts the way we expect him to act. We unconsciously write the part he's going to play when he's on ourlittle private stage, and he speaks the lines--although afterward he may wonder what on earth came over him. We usually  see just about what we are looking for. No matter what we encounter outside, it's our interpretation that makes our world--and the people in it.

I was trying to tell you what Joe and I see in each other. I've given up the attempt to puzzle out what he sees in me, but I know plenty about what I see in him. I discover wonderful new sides to him all the time. And seeing new qualities in him makes me find new qualities in myself.

First of all, I love the way we laugh together. I've laughed more in the past three years than I did during my whole life before (and most of those previous twenty-three years were spent in what is called the entertainment world). Joe and I laugh together suddenly, sometimes in a crowd. Something amuses us, and we catch each other's eye and no words are necessary. We laugh with each other; but what is even more of a rest, we laugh at each other and never think of getting mad, because we've both discovered that if you love someone an awful lot you've got to laugh at that someone or you'd just burst with feeling. We laugh at each other, and I expect that is one of God's ways of keeping us from thinking we're pretty important. That's an occupational danger of our profession; things that might tempt a person to feel "important" happen even to somebody like me. For example, my home town, Maysville, Kentucky, now has a street called Rosemary Clooney Street!

I love the way Joe is so honest. For instance, he takes a real interest in my clothes. And the fact is, I take more interest in my clothes since I've been married to a man who knows the difference between the superlative and the mediocre. If I have on something new and Joe doesn't mention it, I sometimes make the mistake of asking how he likes it. Then I hear. He's so courteous by nature that he wouldn't bring up the subject unless I insisted. But once it's mentioned, he doesn't pull his punches; he tells me right out. Once in a while when I'm wearing something new and it's greeted with silence, I have sense enough not to question him. And the next morning somebody my size gets an unexpected present from Rosemary Clooney.

I love Joe's brain, and the way he won't accept any slipshod thinking from me. He has great respect for what he calls my womanly intuition, but he won't let stupidity pass for femininity. He sometimes quotes the proverb that he good is an enemy of the best. He says it should be the standard of everyone who wants to achieve.

I loves his calling me "Sweetie," because he doesn't suspect that it's an old-fashioned endearment that went out about the time I was born.

I like the way he always springs up to help with anything that is being done around the house. Even if I only go out to the kitchen to make a pot of his favorite tea in the afternoon, Joe follows me to see what he can do to help. That comes from a basic quality in him, an alertness to everyone else's needs.

I love his pride in being a Puerto Rican--and the pride that Puerto Rico has in him. They consider Joe their best ambassador of good will; he's practically a one-man cultural force on the island.

I love the way he plays with my little ten-year-old sister, Gail, who lives with us. When Gail needs another ten-year-old, there is Joe. Not acting, but really being. Last Christmas Joe made a drawing for our family Christmas card. It showed our big white house, and stretched out across the front of the lawn was us. All of us, including the four dogs--Cuddles, the great Dane who weighs 165 pounds; George, the affectionate basset hound who wants to kiss everybody; and the two little Pomeranians, who think they are as big as Cuddles. Gail was on the card, of course, and she was laughing into the cupped palm of her hand in the cute way she laughs. I didn't even know Joe had noticed that little mannerism of hers, but he had. Because Joe notices everything.

Then there is his humility, if you can forgive that pompous word. His humility, which makes strangers who don't recognize him--like the boy selling newspapers, the bus driver, or the barber--say, "There goes a real nice guy." And his empathy, which always sees the other fellow's viewpoint. For instance his name is pronounced Hosay Fer-air. But when people mispronounce it, as many do, he doesn't embarrass them by correcting their pronunciation. While we were in England, Joe called up a friend who was expecting his call. When he gave his name to the servant who answered the phone, there was a long silence. The servant obviously thought Joe was an impostor who was pretending to be the actor and didn't even know how to pronounce the name properly. So he said stiffly, "I'm sorry, sir. Mr. So-and-so is not at home." Joe knew his friend was at home, but rather than embarrass the servant he hung up, dressed, and went around to the friend's flat.

I love Joe's patience and his good disposition. He never gets irritable about details. When we took our first transatlantic airplane trip together, we had 22 pieces of luggage; a bassinet; a baby; Geroge, the basset hound (who cried all night); Harriet, the baby's nurse; and ourselves. Joe took care of everything. Both the baby and George kept on crying and finally decided that the only place they were comfortable was Joe's lap. Somehow he manged to hold them both, almost smothered in baby and dog.

Harriet said to me, "I wish some of those people who think he's just a big fine actor could see him now." For a minute that startled me. The fact was that I had completely forgotten he was a big fine actor; I thought he was just a big fine husband and father, and a hero worshiped by a dog. And that, I guess gives away the secret of the fine art of being Mrs. Jose Ferrer.

I first met Joe when I was singing with Tony Pastor's band. Jose Ferrer was trouping around doing personal appearances to promote Cyrano de Bergerac, because the producers were afraid the American public might consider it highbrow. I was so impressed by Jose Ferrer's reputation that I could only stutter and blush when he glanced at me. But during the year we kept running into each other in one palce and another, and finally the great actor faded away and the great man took his place. By the time we were ready to be married, I knew just Joe. I had forever lost my chance of seeing a close-up Jose Ferrer the actor.

That is the way I've kept itl. I am a stranger, just one more fan in the audience, when there's a new play opening. I admire that gifted artist on the stage, and I never once say to myself, "I'm married to that actor." Because the man I am married to is somebody entirely different. He's somebody no one else can ever know the way I know him. There's the many-sided artist who shows himself to other people, and then there's my own private Joe. He comes home from the theatre or studio and, like any other husband, closes the door on the world so he can be alone with his wife. That's what I think is the wonderfulness of marriage. The rest of a man's world--whether it's the corner grocery store, the teller's window in a bank, the schoolroom, the law office, or the machine shop--knows the man in a certain way. But the real person, the person inside, can be known only by his nearest and dearest. That person can't even be seen from the outside. And that's what Joe and I "see" in each other.

Rosemary and Time

Here, for reference, is the first of two articles referred to in the forthcoming Tone Parallel essay on the album Blue Rose.

Links to original sources and no copyright infringement intended. 

 Girl in the Groove

TIME

23 FEBRUARY, 1953 

Written by Carter Harman

Source

Times have changed for the brick building at 207 East 30th Street. Manhattan, that was once the Adams Memorial Presbyterian Church. The stained-glass windows are bricked up, the pews are gone, and in place of the organ there is a glass-fronted control room which bristles with switches, plugs and dials. Instead of such rousing hymns as Onward! Christian Soldiers and Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus, the old building resounded this week to the throb of a popular-music combo. And near the spot where a vested minister once stood at sermon time, a perky blonde in her stocking feet poised herself before a microphone and sang a little number about a fellow who wouldn’t take his hand off her knee.

The words & music might have been a mild shock to turn-of-the-century parishioners, but they were everyday business—and mighty good business—to Columbia Records, which leased old Adams Presbyterian five years ago for a recording studio. And for Rosemary Clooney, the long-legged blonde at the microphone, it was nothing more or less than her millions of fans have come to expect. Clooney and Columbia are partners in a booming U.S. business which can best be described as the manufacture and sale of the American ballad.*

With six other big record labels last year (Capitol, Coral, Decca, Mercury MGM, RCA Victor), Columbia shared in the pressing of something like $100 million worth of popular music. The product, boosted around the world by disk jockeys, record-players. TV, movies and old-fashioned stem-winding phonographs, is as ubiquitous as the American candy bar, the milkshake and the neon-lighted jukebox. And to ballad buyers, the voice of Rosemary Clooney, 24, has become as familiar as the voice of F.D.R. was to their parents.

Putting It Across. By Metropolitan Opera standards, Songstress Clooney is as innocent of musical training as a rose-breasted grosbeak. She never bothered to learn to read notes (“I can tell whether the tune goes up or down, but I can’t tell how far”). She disdains such long-hair affectations as warming up her voice (“What have I got to warm up?”). But in common with the new postwar generation of ballad vendors, including such contemporaries as Patti Page (Mercury), Peggy Lee (Decca), Joni James (M-G-M), Jo Stafford and Doris Day (both Columbia), Rosemary knows how to put a song across.

As she prances up to the mike, Rosemary drops her cough drop into her palm, makes a moue at the control room and opens her mouth. If the tune has a bounce, her slim Irish face lights up and her trim, spring-legged figure jigs happily; her smile can be heard as well as seen. If the words are sad, her face takes on a little-girl-lost look. The moment her stint at the mike is through, she pops her candy back in her mouth, swigs at a bottle of Coke.

Turks in the Well. The Clooney voice is known to the trade as both “barrelhouse” and blue, i.e., robust and fresh, with an undercurrent of seductiveness. It can spin out a slow tune with almost cello-like evenness, or take on a raucous bite in a fast rhythm. In a melancholy mood, it has a cinnamon flavor that tends to remind fans of happier days gone by—or soon to come. Moreover, thanks to the malocclusion of the Clooney jaw, her voice carries just a hint of a lisp. A word like “kiss” comes out a bit like “kish,” and “caress” like “caresh.” Like Bing Crosby, who attributed some of the distinctiveness of his early bu-bu-bu-boos to a node on his vocal cords, Clooney gets a sound that no competitor quite duplicates. In the ballad business, where distinctiveness is worth more than a clear high C, her voice is instantly recognizable.

Much of the ballad public, with a passion for oversimplification, prefers to believe that Rosemary Clooney was created overnight by one record, an Armenian-American calypso called Come On-a My House (“I’m gonna give-a you everything . . .”). Come On-a My House did make the public Clooney-conscious. Whipped up by Author William Saroyan and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian on a cross-country automobile junket more than ten years before—and purposely patterned after ancient Armenian folk songs—Come On-a went nowhere until Clooney’s recording. Then it leaped from the ranks of the mere hits (any disk that sells 200,000 copies) into the enchanted circle of million-copy smashes. The song itself has keen likened by at least one fan magazine writer to the sounds a drunken Turk might make shouting down a well. The fact is that Clooney did as much for the song as the song did for her.

Rosemary Clooney does not have a “stage” voice. Like Dinah Shore and half a dozen other microphone buggers in this era of the electronic vocal, Rosemary has been turned down for Broadway shows. But by all the signs, her steady success is assured so long as the ballad business lives, as it lives today, by making records.

Gone Are the Days. During the ’20s, ’30s and part of the ’40s, music publishers got along well enough without much help from the record industry. In the early days, such a hit as Glow Worm might sell two or three million copies of sheet music for them. After it was launched in vaudeville or a Broadway show, its principal salesman was a fast-talking song plugger whose job it was to visit bandleaders and coax or coerce a performance out of them. If he could get a song on Kate Smith’s radio program he had done a good week’s work. His pitch might run from “Please play this song—if only to ease the pain of my ulcers” to “What prizefight or show would you like to see?” Although such a plugger was usually no musician, he was blood brother to the tired-looking gent behind music-store counters, pumping out sheet music on the piano.

Today the key plugger is a suede-shod salesman with a Windsor-knotted tie who goes by the Tin Pan Alley title of “professional manager.” His job is to convince record manufacturers that his publisher’s song is headed for the bestseller lists. There is plenty of music for record men to choose from; after a weary week of listening, they are ready to believe that every third person in the U.S. is a would-be tunesmith. But since the only way to be sure of not missing a hit is to listen to everything, most companies assign experts to plow through the plankton-like mass of material. The Tin Pan Alley title for the top picker in each record company is “A & R man” (for Artists and Repertory). The A & R man’s job is to be music-hungry seven days a week, while maintaining a gourmet’s selectivity.

Listen for the Throb. At Columbia, the A & R man is spade-bearded, sagacious Mitchell William (Mitch) Miller (TIME Aug. 20, 1951), a long-hair (Eastman School) who for the last two years has guided his label to the No. 1 position among pop-record producers. Once a week he throws open the doors of his audition room in the hope of hearing a tune that is “right” for one of his stable of singers—Johnnie Ray (Cry), Jimmy Boyd (I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus), Frankie Lame (High Noon). Jo Stafford (Jambalaya), or Clooney. In four or five hours he receives a parade of professional managers, may sample 50 or more new songs while he sits spooning yoghurt or munching hard-boiled eggs.

Mitch Miller listens for simple tunes and simple ideas—something insistent and fundamental enough to throb its way into the distraught ear of the 14-22 age group, which buys almost all the records worth counting. If Miller were to summarize his prescription for teen-age appeal, it might very well go like this: “Keep it simple, keep it sexy, keep it sad.”

The popular American ballad has, in fact, been written to much this prescription for generations—though the degrees of moroseness and suggestiveness vary with presumably deeper tides. People no longer actually perish in the contemporary ballad, as they did in Stephen Foster’s day, e.g.—

Nelly was a lady,

Last night she died . . .

In today’s sad songs, people merely sob or suffer from wounded pride. Moreover, Nelly is no longer a lady Stephen Foster would have understood. She tells her boy friend: “Come on-a my house,” or howls “hold me, thrill me, kiss me.”

Clooney’s record romances are warm but strictly licit. When she tried Come On-a My House the first few times, she just couldn’t make it sound right. Mitch Miller descended from the control room and gave her a bit of advice: “Think of it this way, Rosie. You’re asking that boy over to your house because you’re going to marry him.” That made everything all right.

Find a “New” Sound. When Miller has found a song for a singer, he calls in the musical arranger, looking for the best way to lift the tune out of the humdrum category. The first objectives: a “new” sound effect—e.g., reverberating echoes or the use of such unlikely instruments as braying French horns or a jangling harpsichord—and an insistent rhythm. To top off the arrangement, Miller asks for a full, rich sound. Sometimes this can be had by a clever distribution of instruments, sometimes it calls for a big orchestra and a massed chorus.

What happens next is standard procedure at all record companies. Advance copies are sent out to as many as 2,000 of the nation’s 5,000-odd disk jockeys—the real middlemen of the ballad business. No A & R man can soundly predict how a new disk will take. But company salesmen as a group are good prognosticates, and certain cities, such as Philadelphia and Boston, seem to be particularly seismographic in detecting the rumble of an approaching hit. If the signs are good, the company may press as many as 150,000 copies in the first edition, and then pray for the record to hit. Last year the seven major labels went through all this 2,868 times. Of that number, 81 songs (2.8%) wound up as hits.

Kentucky Melody. Rosemary Clooney comes from historic ballad country, about ten miles upstream from the place where Eliza nipped across the ice ahead of the bloodhounds. She was born on May 23, 1928, the daughter of a housepainter in Maysville, Ky. (pop. 8,600). Her sister Betty came along three years later and, two years after that, a brother, Nicholas. Later her parents separated, and Rosemary, moving from relative to relative and town to town, has never settled down since (though, nowadays, two blocks of a Maysville street is officially known as “Rosemary Clooney Street”).

Grandfather Andrew J. Clooney, onetime Democratic mayor of Maysville, set her to singing. One Maysville legend is that the Clooney Sisters, aged 6 and 3, made their debut from his electioneering platform, and wowed the voters with a performance of Home on the Range. In any case, the ham in Rosemary was smoked out early: she was in fourth grade when she played the wicked queen in Snow White and terrified the audience with her intensity.

Growing up, Rosemary and sister Betty were always close and almost always singing. An argument about which one was to take the melody and which the harmony might start in the bathroom before 8 in the morning and continue all the way to school. When Rosemary was 17, they fell into a sister singing act at Cincinnati’s WLW and were on their own.

For $20 a week each, the girls were on daily call to sing everything from hillbilly tunes to a soporific midnight show called Moon River. Then one day Bandleader Tony Pastor came through Cincinnati on the lookout for a new singer. The Clooney Sisters, swimming in a local pool when the summons came, rushed out and sang an audition with hair plastered down around their faces, but their voices landed them the job.

Chaperoned Show Business. It was show business, all right, but the Clooney Sisters hardly lived a glamorous life. They drew $125 a week apiece, but sent most of it home. They were featured performers, but, even on the bandstand, they dressed in peasanty blouses run up by their economical grandmother Guilfoyle. They were on the road most of the time, playing dance halls, Italian socials, college proms, barn dances in tobacco warehouses until 2 a.m. Afterward they would pile into their bus and ride through the night to the next stop. The girls were chaperoned by their Uncle George Guilfoyle. He would hold the second seat in the bus for the girls (Bandleader Pastor would have the front one), and Uncle George would guard protectively from the third.

Rosemary got most of the solos because her voice was in the busiest range—Betty’s was three notes lower. In 1946 she made her first solo recording, a long-winded little item called I’m Sorry I Didn t Say I’m Sorry When I Made You Cry Last Night. It so impressed the Pastor band managers, Joe Shribman and Charlie Trotta, that they became her personal managers. “You could feel heart in that record,” says Shribman. Three years later they guided her into the big time: she got a contract with Columbia Records.

Worldly World. She found herself in a jungly world of high-pressure pluggers, struggling songsmiths and all-important disk jockeys. It was a world where she came to “own” only 75% of herself, with her managers and booking agents owning the other 25%. Above all, it was a world where the click or smash hit was the ultimate goal, where clearance (by payment to publishers’ societies ASCAP and BMI) was necessary for permission to play a song on the air; a world where cut-ins (giving a performer a share of a song’s profits), hot stoves (open bribes) and other forms of payola were standing operating procedure; a world of concern with P.D. (public domain, the graveyard, or seventh heaven, where tunes land when their copyrights run out); of romance (a verb meaning to shower disk jockeys and musicians with attentions in return for performances).

But blue-eyed Rosie was ready for anything her world could throw at her. She was nice to the press and romanced the disk jockeys. She made a children’s record in which she did not sing a note, instead spoke in motherly tones to a mewling harmonica. She was not surprised to find that her first hit had lyrics that ran:

Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes,

Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes,

Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes,

I’ll never love blue eyes again.

Double Mozzarellas. Her managers keep her on an allowance, but she has managed to slake part of her thirst for furs (including a $7,000 Aleutian mink coat after the success of Come On-a My House), to keep a three-bedroom house in Beverly Hills and share an apartment in Manhattan’s dressy Hampshire House with Jacqueline Sherman, 27, a well-to-do Chicago girl who is her friend, duenna and general chief of staff. On free evenings, she hits the theater and nightclub circuit like any other customer (current steady escort: Actor José Ferrer).

One of her enthusiasms is Italian food, and her appetite, for such a willowy (5 ft 6 in., 120 Ibs.) creature, is remarkable. One recent evening she ate, in order of their appearance: an antipasto salad, a heavy Mozzarella cheese appetizer, a heaping plate of lasagna, a chocolate eclair, a dish of sherbet, an after-dinner drink of rum, brandy, chocolate and crème de cacao. Still feeling a little hungry, she then ordered another portion of Mozzarella. With the same verve and energy, she keeps the long-distance wires hot to some 60 disk jockeys, as well as to her sister Betty (a nightspot singer who records on the Coral label) and several other members of the Clooney and Guilfoyle families of Maysville, Ky.

Miss Crosby? After she made Come On-a My House, it was inevitable that Hollywood would talk itself into discovering Clooney. Her biggest appeal, after all, is to the very teen-age audience that the moviemakers are trying to lure away from television sets. As for practical Rosemary, she has always had her eyes firmly fixed on the movies. “It gets me out of the hit-record class,” she says. “Even a B-player is hot stuff in Monessen, Pa. On records you’re only as good as your last release.”

Paramount gave her a screen test, coldly classified her appearance as “unprepossessing but took a high shine to her etching voice. After a breaking-in period she was funneled into a script called The Mars Are Singing that had aging Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior, youthful Soprano Anna Maria Alberghetti (TIME, May 8, 1950) and a performing dog to recommend it, but little else. To Rosemary the director parceled out a couple of routine songs, Haven’t Got a Worry and Lovely Weather for Ducks, and a reprise of Come On-a My House; it began to look as if the already overloaded script might topple.

It was saved by the impact of the untutored but emphatic Clooney personality At night, when the daily shots were screened, it became apparent that she was pulling the yarn together. Paramount took a new tack: in the course of shooting, it reoriented the picture toward Newcomer Clooney.

Meanwhile, the technicians had gone to work on the “unprepossessing” Clooney features. From a cameraman’s standpoint she had several flaws. Her nose was too wide, her legs too skinny. Her face was too long and jaw a bit prognathous. With careful placing of the lights, most of the faults disappeared. Her long face was doubly ‘corrected,” by arrangement of the lights and by designing a wardrobe which featured high, square-cut necklines and bow ties on her simpler dresses.

By the final version, she couldn’t have looked prettier to Paramount tycoons if she had been fitted with Lana Turner’s head. When Paramount’s advertising director saw the finished product in Manhattan he turned to his secretary and bade her take a wire to Producer Irving Asher in Hollywood. “Say this ” he instructed. “This girl is Miss Crosby! Don’t let anybody teach her to act!”

Back to Church. The Hollywood juggernaut got rolling. The Stars Are Singing got its world premiere in Maysville three weeks ago, with national release set for early March. And Paramount has already assigned her to several more pictures; in Here Come the Girls (with Bob Hope) she blossoms as a dancer, too.

Rosemary Clooney has a thoroughly serious attitude toward success in Hollvwood. But she is not for a moment forgetting her work at the old Adams Memorial Presbyterian Church. She is making as many recordings as she ever did. In a world of stupendous and colossal plugs the one she values most just now is a simply worded little statement by Mister Crosby himself. He made a detour from his own path to shuffle around to her set one day. I just want to tell you,” Bing said that I think you’re the best singer in the business.”

* The latest ballad, like the earliest, is simply a singable song that is also danceable. In Tin Pan Alleyese, the word has a more limited meaning: the slow, romantic number, as distinct from the rhythm tune and the novelty song.

If Beale Street Could Talk...

 

… from “His Master’s Voice” Record Review, July-August, 1949 (No. 4907)

W. C. Handy’s Beale Street Blues has never been more enchantingly presented than it is by Duke Ellington in this latest record by his band of one of  the classic items of the jazz repertoire.

In his lovely slow arrangement of the piece the Duke has gone all out to capture the nostalgia and musical charm of early folk music known as the blues. Following an introduction (based, incidentally, on a phrase the Duke used in his Black, Brown and Beige suite) Jimmy Hamilton’s lovely clarinet is heard rhapsodizing above rich toned trombones to produce music that is gripping in its intensity. Then Harold baker’s trumpet takes over, backed by the reeds, to produce a more caressive mood. Later the mood reverts to poignancy as Ray 

Nance’s pungent trumpet is heard, this time over the whole ensemble, the voicing of which is something worth hearing for itself alone. 

Rockabye River is, if possible, even more enthralling. Another captivating slow melody, it variegates between the frantic yearning of fiercely growling trumpets and the more restrained heart appeal of some of the loveliest alto saxophone playing that has been heard, even from the inimitable Johnny Hodges.

Both records are Ellington at his most soul-stirring best and will go straight to the hearts of jazz and more conventional music lovers alike.

Get Reel

 

Nothing sets an archivist's pulse racing quite like a pile of boxed reel-to-reel tapes. Eleven such specimens were auctioned recently on eBay, as pictured above. The text ran:

Item description from the seller

Duke Ellington REEL TO REEL Possible MASTERS Remastered by Jack Towers LOT of 11 I recently accquired these large format Reel To Reel Tapes from a person that buys out houses, estates, storage units and the like. They do smell musty but look pretty clean and well preserved. I mention the possiblity that these might be Masters and Remastered by Jack Towers because a lot recently sold for quite a bit and these have the same boxes and handwriiting on them. I am starting these at a much lower price and letting the experts and risk takers do what they do best. I will quickly respond to any and all questions and the only things that I can gurantee are that you will get the exact ones pictured, that I will ship them safely and quickly, and that I am being 100% honest as to how I am selling them. I hope these do end up with someone that will love them, play them, and really enjoy them. I have added shipping options. I am hoping that Fed EX shows up as the default option. I have included Media Mail but please check it against Fed Ex as Fed Ex may be less and provide a faster service. It is much less than Priority Mail. If it does not please check it first before emailing me because you should see a drop in shipping rates if it is not displaying as the defalult. If you do not want priority mail please let me know asap because I box things up and ship them out very quickly. I cannot use Priority Boxes so adding a note to your payment will get it packed up quicker.

The name of the late Jack Towers is often appended to sales of such tapes. Such was the case with a second lot auctioned some weeks earlier.

The contents of the tapes, so far as we can tell from what is written on the boxes and the notated inserts, are, in part (those Columbia studio sessions fro the fifties) reflected in the contents of several of the LPs on the Up-to-Date label issued by Jerry Valburn through the 1980s. A friend and colleague of Jack Towers, the provenance of these particular tapes is perhaps confirmed with this association.

To the contents of the tapes themselves and a little detective work may shine a light.

The tape labelled Fairfield Jazz Festival 28 July 1956 is likely correct. This recording found its way onto a commercial issue and may be heard here.

The tape labelled Taniment Playhouse 27 June, 1959 again corresponds to a recording which does exist among collectors. A couple of the tracks have appeared on this album. The full discographical information courtesy ellingtonia.com) is as follows:

Concert, Playhouse

Cat Anderson, Harold Baker, Andres Marenguito(t); Clark Terry(t,flh); Ray Nance(t,vn,v); Britt Woodman, Quentin Jackson, John Sanders(tb); Jimmy Hamilton(cl,ts); Russell Procope(cl,as); Johnny Hodges(as); Paul Gonsalves(ts); Harry Carney(cl,as,bar); Duke Ellington(p); Jimmy Woode(sb); Jimmy Johnson(d); Lil Greenwood, Ozzie Bailey(v)

Take The "A" Train (theme)

¬ Black And Tan Fantasy

- | Creole Love Call

_|The Mooch

Perdido

Sophisticated Lady

Sonnet To Hank Cinq

What Else Can You Do With A Drum? - vOB

Autumn Leaves - vOB

Hand Me Down Love - vOB

Tenderly

V.I.P. Boogie

Haupé

Flirtibird

All Of Me

Take The "A" Train - vRN

Take The "A" Train

Skin Deep

Medley

-      1. Don't Get Around Much Anymore

-      2. Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me - vOB

-      3. In A Sentimental Mood

-      4. Mood Indigo

-      5. I'm Beginning To See The Light

-      6. Sophisticated Lady

-      7. Caravan

-      8. Satin Doll

-      9. Just Squeeze Me - vRN

-    10. It Don't Mean A Thing - vRN

-    11. Solitude

-    12. Things Ain't What They Used To Be

I Got It Bad - vLG

Walkin' And Singin' The Blues - vLG

¬ Diminuendo In Blue

_| Wailing Interval

Jones

The Carrolltown tape has been mis-labelled 27 June 1959, perhaps transposing the tainment tape date. The correct date is likely 22 June 1957. This recording was made available commercially on the Doctor Jazz label as All Star Road Band. 

The tape labelled Ellington Cleveland Pops Orchestra 25 July 1956 is a concert which took place on that date at Severance Hall, Cleveland, Ohio.

The combined Cleveland Pops Orchestra and the Duke Ellington Orchestra played New World A-Comin’ in an arrangement by Luther Henderson. They were conducted by Louis Lane, the musical director of the Pops Orchestra and Ellington was the piano soloist. They also played Night Creature, another arrangement by Luther Henderson. Ellington conducted.

Following the interval, Ellington and his Orchestra played Skin Deep and a  Medley  with Jam With Sam and V.I.P. Boogie for the finale. 

The tape labelled Ellington Manchester is likely he concert which took place on19 January 1963 as part of the Orchestra's tour of the UK at that time. Again, from ellingtonia.com:

2nd Concert, Free Trade Hall

Cootie Williams, Roy Burrowes, Cat Anderson(t); Ray Nance(t,vn); Lawrence Brown, Buster Cooper(tb); Chuck Connors(btb); Jimmy Hamilton(cl,ts); Russell Procope(cl,as); Johnny Hodges(as); Paul Gonsalves(ts); Harry Carney(bar,cl,bcl); Duke Ellington(p); Ernie Shepard(sb); Sam Woodyard(d); Milt Grayson(v).

Take The "A" Train (theme)

Afro-Bossa (Boola)

¬ Kinda Dukish

_| Rockin' In Rhythm

Silk Lace (Caliné)

Eighth Veil

Pyramid

-Asphalt Jungle Theme

Guitar Amour

Cop-Out

Jam With Sam

Main Stem

Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me (New Concerto For Cootie)

Tutti For Cootie

Star-Crossed Lovers

Things Ain't What They Used To Be

All Of Me

Perdido

The Blues Ain't - vMG

Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me - vMG

One More Once - vMG

Duke Ellington(tk) acc. by Jimmy Hamilton, Russell Procope(cl), Harry Carney(bcl).

Monologue

Take The "A" Train (theme)

God Save The Queen

 

The remaining tapes,

Ellington Col 1938

Ellington Col 1939-40

Ellington Columbia 12-51

Ellington Columbia 58

would all seem to be studio recordings for Columbia, some of which were issued on the Up-to-Date series of albums.

Although the lot lists 11 tapes, there are, in fact 12 pictured. One tape is labelled (or mis-labelled) Ellington World Complete 1943. The title is struck through. And on the very top of the pile there appears to be a smaller tape in a box which does not seem to feature in the content descriptors.

Update:

Duke In Africa

15, 16, 17 January 2026 

Frederick P. Rose Hall, Broadway at 60th Street, New York, NY 10019

Duke in Africa is a powerful tribute to Duke Ellington’s profound connection to the African continent. This concert explores how the legendary composer’s works drew inspiration from African rhythms and cultural themes. 

Co-music directors, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s own Chris Lewis and Alexa Tarantino, lead the JLCO in a dynamic program featuring selections from Ellington’s works: Afro-Bossa (1963), a lively blend of Afro-Cuban and Brazilian rhythms; Liberian Suite (1947), written for Liberia’s centennial; and Togo Brava Suite (1971), a Grammy Award-winning composition.

Discover how Ellington’s music cuts across cultural boundaries, rooted in African traditions, and resonating with audiences worldwide.

There will be a pre-concert lecture before the show at 18:30 (EDT)

Details here.

Uptown Lockdown Uproar...

Uptown Lockdown with special guest Steven C. Bowie...

Do Be Frank (Be Do Be Do)

 

On 110th anniversary of the birth of Francis Albert Sinatra, the latest edition of Tone Parallel is published today.

Subscription is free and the newsletter is available here.

As an added 'extra', here is a 'soundboard' recording of the the first of six concerts Sinatra gave in support of Hubert Humphrey's run for office in 1968. The concert took place at The Oakland Arena on 22 May, 1968 and features, among its selections, Billy May's arrangement of All I Need Is The Girl from the Francis A and Edward K album, sadly with neither Edward K nor his Orchestra... (the ensemble being conducted by Sinatra's long-time pianist and ex-Charlie Barnet man, Bill Miller)