The Clooney who spawned a dynasty

by party animal - not! Fri 22 Jun 2018, 19:53

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by annemarie Fri 22 Jun 2018, 20:50

[size=33]The Clooney that spawned a dynasty[/size]

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By [size=13]SHINAN GOVANIStar Columnist
Fri., June 22, 2018
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Two Clooneys for the price of one.
That was the deal in Toronto this week, when the stage was set for Oxford-educated Amal Clooney — human rights lawyer and miscellaneous glossy-haired goddess — as well as her dad-in-law Nick Clooney, the former newsman and sirer of George.

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George Clooney and Amal Clooney on June 7 in Hollywood, Calif. (EMMA MCINTYRE / GETTY IMAGES FOR TURNER)

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Singer and actress Rosemary Clooney, circa 1955, was the first to make Clooney a household name, writes Shinan Govani. (ARCHIVE PHOTOS / GETTY IMAGES)

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Rosemary Clooney with her nephew George George Clooney in Beverly Hills, Calif., in 1998. (L. COHEN / WIREIMAGE)

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George Clooney and Amal Clooney on June 7 in Hollywood, Calif. (EMMA MCINTYRE / GETTY IMAGES FOR TURNER)

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Singer and actress Rosemary Clooney, circa 1955, was the first to make Clooney a household name, writes Shinan Govani. (ARCHIVE PHOTOS / GETTY IMAGES)

In town for a free-ranging conversation at Roy Thomson Hall as part of the Luminato fest, the intergenerational duo got me thinking about the first person to make Clooney a household name: singer Rosemary. Nick’s sister! Dynasties thicken in mysterious ways, and in this way her story bears remembering again — both in terms of the circuitry of fame, as well as some of the darkness of the 1960s.
After emerging as the archetypal girl-next-door in the 1950s, and sometime before making a near-unprecedented late-in-life comeback, Clooney’s almost 60-year career was put on ice for seven years, from 1968 to 1975. Effectively she’d vanished, gone missing from the rungs of fame. Imagine if a Taylor Swift or a Kelly Clarkson went suddenly poof! in our own age — the victim of a catastrophic breakdown, like Rosemary would experience during that span — and you may get the picture of what happened to George’s aunt.
But first, the origin story. Born in 1928 to the first Nicholas Clooney and Bridget Byron, her earliest years were flanked, notably, with political talk, thanks mainly to her paternal grandfather Andrew, who “instilled a liberal tradition into the Clooney line that lasts to this day,” as Ken Crossland, author of the book Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary, has described it. Andrew was an activist and local mayor, and it was at one of his rallies that Rosemary famously made her public singing debut, knotting together an interest in both politics and music that would eventually prove fateful.
With a career baptized during the “big band” era, Rosemary wound up travelling from a lowly Irish Catholic home in Kentucky to the summit of popular music. A contract with Colombia Records transpired. The comet of fame arrowed when she recorded the country-taking “Beautiful Brown Eyes,” and via her part in the film White Christmas. Hit followed hit followed hit.
At the height of her stardom, whilst splashed on covers of mags galore, Time summed up her voice as one that is both “robust and fresh, with an undercurrent of seductiveness. It can spin out a slow tune with almost cello-like evenness, or take a raucous bite in fast rhythm. In a melancholy mood, it has a cinnamon flavour that tends to remind fans of happier days gone by.”
The acclaimed director Mike Nichols put it even more succinctly years later. Rosemary, he said, “sings like Spencer Tracy acts.” An assuredness pan-served with a simple honesty.
All the camouflage of celebrity followed, but beyond all that lay — like something out of a Jacqueline Susann novel — lay a dark period of prescription pill addition, and a tremulous marriage made to the wayward actor José Ferrer. Soon, with five children and an unfaithful husband — plus faced with a changing music scene that had her ilk swept aside by the stirrings of rock ’n’ roll — “she had a creative block,” as the Daily Telegraph noted in its obituary when Rosemary died in 2002.
“Instead,” the Telegraph wrote, “she threw her energies into campaigning for John F. Kennedy ... By 1960, she and Ferrer were all but separated; the final straw was his inability to share her grief at President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. They were divorced in 1967.”
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Yet the strange connection between the Clooneys and the Kennedys was far from over. When Robert F. Kennedy decided to jump into the ring and make his own bid for the presidency in 1968, the “Mambo Italiano” singer was one of the first people he looked to for support. And by the time he contested the California primary in the spring, she was with him everywhere. Indeed, she was waiting for him at the Ambassador Hotel on that fateful day in June when when the shots rang out. She was standing just a few feet away when RFK was shot.
The experience took a toll.
Crossland paints the picture. It was eerie-real: “In the days that followed, she substituted the reality that everyone else saw with a world of her own. Kennedy wasn’t dead. It was a conspiracy...” Even a telephone conversation with RFK’s widow, Ethel Kennedy, failed to persuade her that the blood she had seen had been Kennedy’s.
Three weeks later came an even more decisive moment. While in Reno, Nev., to play some gigs, she famously stopped a show midway, berating the audience and then walking off stage. She was done.
That was 50 years ago this summer.
There was a stay at the hospital, and years of therapy — as Rosemary herself shared later. By the early ’70s, she was reduced to performing at county fairs. She sang because she needed the money, but “the more removed I became from my feelings, the less I sang well,” she recalled.
But then came one of America’s greatest comebacks. Her fortunes started to turn again at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in L.A. on St. Patrick’s Day, 1976. Bing Crosby, in the midst of a tour to mark his 50th anniversary in the business, asked Rosemary to join him. The evening was a sensation. Suddenly it was on: Rosemary Clooney enjoyed a renaissance as an interpreter of popular song. Indeed, as Crossland writes, “she reinvented herself in a jazz idiom ... and continued to sing until her death.”
Her greatest legacy? The way her story has seared into her super-famous nephew. George Clooney has said so many times.
“At 20,” he has reflected, “Rosemary believed everyone when they told her she was a genius. Eight years later, the music industry changed. Rock and roll arrived and instantly the female pop singers of her day were replaced.”
He further elaborated: “She didn’t become any less of a singer. People just didn’t want her kind of music any more. She did the drugs, the alcohol, the depression, the breakdown, the divorces.”
Before Facts of Life, before ER, before his own mounting of the A-plus list, before meeting Amal and having twins, there was aunt Rosemary. “She was a great lesson to me about how to deal with fame, which there is no handbook for.”
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The Clooney who spawned a dynasty

The Clooney who spawned a dynasty

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