Rosemary Clooney’s life started pretty much as it meant to go on, she being born in May 1928 into a Kentucky family nursing a desperately unhappy marriage and an alcoholic father. In 1941 her mother fled the coop with their brother Nick for a California-based sailor. At the end of the Second World War Rosemary’s and sister Betty’s father literally disappeared for good on V-J Day. Still at school, the two girls won an open singing audition at a radio station in Cincinnati, just 45 miles up the Ohio River from their Kentucky hometown, Maysville. The Clooney Sisters secured a regular radio slot that was noticed by big band leader Tony Pastor, who immediately hired them. In 1948 Betty chose to return to Cincinnati; Rosemary stayed another year before launching a solo career through a contract with Columbia Records, the label she’d been recording with while under Pastor’s baton.

At Columbia she came under the aegis of A&R guru Mitch Miller. A born arbiter of public taste with a penchant for making the worst type of kitsch and novelty songs into massive hits, Miller led Clooney down the road of ‘Come On-a My-House and ‘Mangoes’, making her an international star but also giving her a reputation for singing pop trash that she would find hard to shift. Indeed, when she made the classic Blue Rose with Duke Ellington in 1956, near the end of her time with Columbia, few were prepared to accept Clooney’s role in the music’s success.

When the hokey hits dried up and her TV career began to wobble, Clooney quite naturally concentrated on raising an eventual five children she and actor husband Jose Ferrer spawned during an eventful marriage that finally ended in divorce in 1961. Clooney’s own inclinations had always been for the Great American Songbook and good jazz, as the Ellington collaboration had suggested. That this tended to scare her record companies, always looking for hits and short-term results, was only natural, but when in 1961 RCA refused outright to release her follow-up album to the hit LP Rosie Solves The Swingin’ Riddle (made with top-notch arranger Nelson Riddle, hence the title), she was only too glad to jump ship soon after to her friend Frank Sinatra’s new Reprise label. In a personal display of good faith, Sinatra bought the masers to the unreleased album from RCA, reckoning that the combination of one of his favourite singers, combined with one of his favourite arrangers, Nelson Riddle, more or less guaranteed success.

Well, it did, of a kind. Some people claim Love, as the album was named on its release in 1963, as Rosemary Clooney’s best ever record. It has been said that Clooney herself thought it contained her best work. Others have pointed to the passionate affair Clooney was then engaged in with arranger Nelson Riddle as evidence that this was a record regarded as very special indeed by both principals. The choice of material underlines the album’s basic theme – songs like ‘Invitation’, ‘I Wish It So’, ‘Imagination’, ‘More Than You Know’, ‘You Started Something’ and, finally, that classic of remorse, ‘It Never Entered My Mind’, chart the natural curve of an affair and perhaps anticipate the end Clooney and Riddle knew was inevitable for their own illicit passion.

Inevitable or not, the affair’s demise soon after the album’s completion didn’t resolve Rosemary Clooney’s private dilemmas and compulsions: that much is evident from the second – and last – album she made for Reprise, Thanks For Nothing. The title alone tells us what was paramount in Clooney’s mind in 1963, when this album was recorded (it was released in 1964 but enjoyed no greater commercial success than Love). Supported by sympathetic arrangements from Bob Thompson and the expert production of Sinatra’s top man, Sonny Burke, Thanks For Nothing enjoyed the same high production values of Love but not the sanguine spirits: like Sinatra’s great chronicle of lost love, Only The Lonely, this too is an album of loss and loneliness, as indicated by the chosen material - ‘All Alone’, ‘Baby, The Ball Is Over’, ‘The Man That Got Away’, ‘I Gotta Right To Sing The Blues’ and, finally, ‘Thanks For Nothing’ from Cole Porter’s pen. Heartbroken is the word for it when you listen between the cracks, and this selection from the album follows Clooney’s road to a forlorn conclusion. She made just one further album, a return to a duet format with Bing Crosby on the Capitol label, before her breakdown in 1968, detailed in her autobiography. In yet another case of life imitating art, she’d anticipated her later fate five years earlier on the story told by the two albums that form the basis of this collection.

Keith Shadwick

Series Coordinator: Florence Halfon
Compiled by Florence Halfon
Liner notes by Keith Shadwick
Cover photo:.
Artwork by Etienne
Mastered by Giovanni Scatola

This compilation (P) & (C) 2007 Warner Music UK Ltd.
Made in the EU.