Tales of Tony, Part 8
Tony and Rosemary
Tony and Rosemary
Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney were like brother and sister; I’ve been around both of them together, and I also got to know Tony’s older sister, the late Mary Chiappa, and the relationship of Tony and Rosemary was very similar. He was like a big brother to her, and he thought the world of her - he just absolutely adored her. (He wasn’t alone, so too did Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and, more recently, Michael Feinstein.) Tony was probably closer to Rosemary than any other fellow singer. He told me that many times, but, in a way, he didn’t have to tell me directly. You could see it by the way he talked about her, or how he acted when she was around. They were la famiglia, as the Italians would say, or, in Yiddish, mishbooker.
Rosemary and Tony met in 1948 at a broadcast of the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts program, in which they were supposed to be competitors but emerged as lifelong friends. They first bonded over a mutual love of the great jazz singer Mildred Bailey. Rosemary won the talent contest, and for the rest of his life, Tony agreed that was as it should be. “She was a much better singer than I was at that point,” he told me many times, “women always are. They can get in touch with their feelings and just communicate better.”
“Rosemary was a natural,” he told me in 1998, whereas, “I personally had to work to sing. American men are more self-conscious about being free. Ladies have an aesthetic quality. They admire flowers, they admire beautiful pastel colors. They're in touch with softness and aesthetic stuff. And men are always accused of being sissies if they feel that way.
“Men have been taught you're not supposed to cry, you're supposed to be macho, you're supposed to be this and that. So it's hard to muster up emotion and have freedom with that. If you're a man, you kind of do a Gary Cooper or a Jimmy Stewart, where you're stuttering to get out what you're saying.”
Whenever I asked Rosemary about that Talent Scouts competition, she would always laugh and say, “That’s the only time I ever beat Tony at anything!”
(Incidentally, Rosemary made albums with titles like Swing Around Rosie and Rosie Solves the Swingin’ Riddle, but I never heard anyone who really knew her - including Tony Bennett, Gary Giddins, and Michael Feinstein - address her as anything other than Rosemary.)
After Talent Scouts, they also worked on another early TV program, and another competition, titled Songs for Sale. (They talk about that in a 1996 appearance together on The Rosie O’Donnell Show. YouTube link below.) Rosemary told me about a time when they were appearing together on a tour under the auspices of Columbia Records. They traveled from town to town, and often they were interviewed or profiled in the local papers. Rosemary vividly remembered an incident in which they had a meeting with an “inquiring photographer” from the Washington Times-Herald. 1951 or ‘52, Rosemary didn’t think anything about it - it was only almost a decade later that she realized that this particular journalist was notable for a different reason.
As Rosemary remembered, “Night after night we were on the road, and something interesting happened. We played the Hippodrome in Baltimore, and then the Capitol in Washington, D.C. and we got into a theater and there was a young woman who came - the inquiring photographer, who came around and took our pictures together. And she was from The Times-Herald and it was Jacqueline Bouvier.”
It was one of those memories - which aren’t always 100% factual - that get implanted in one’s noggin. In 1951, Rosemary wouldn’t have paid any attention to the Times-Herald’s young reporter, and she probably didn’t think about her again until 1960. That was the year when Senator John F. Kennedy won the Democratic Primary and then the general election that Fall, an election a number of her showbiz friends, especially Frank Sinatra, were deeply involved in.
When Rosemary recounted that moment for me in 1998, she gave me the impression that she had been wondering for almost 50 years if that ever really happened. “Did Jackie Kennedy really take our picture in 1951?”
In 1998, the internet was in its infancy and there was no way to look for that story online. In the early part of his career, Tony’s big sister Mary had been responsible for keeping his scrapbooks and clippings. So I started going through the books, page by page. And bingo! Eventually I found it.
Not long after, I was together with Rosemary and Tony and I presented the clipping to her. In all the years I knew her, I had never seen her so happy. (Ironically, I do still have the xerox of that clipping, but it’s pretty much unfindable, in the middle of my storage room in Jersey City. If anyone reading this has access to a newspaper database that includes the Washington Times-Herald, please do me a favor and see if you can find this story!)
Rosemary’s reaction was thrilling, but Tony’s was even more so. He hadn’t thought about that incident in almost 50 years. He had actually met the President and the First Lady at a White House jazz event in 1962; a recording from that concert, pairing Tony with the Dave Brubeck Quartet, would be issued in 2013. But Tony was thrilled to see Rosemary’s reaction.
Tony was that kind of guy - if you did something nice for him, he never forgot it. But if you did something nice for somebody he loved, that meant even more for him, There was nothing I could have done for him that would have meant more than doing something that made Rosemary happy. In fact, every time I saw him - even for years afterwards, this was always the first thing he said. “That was so nice, what you did for Rosemary. It made her so happy.”
At around that time, Rosemary told me about a recent health scare that she recently had, in which she had been in a coma for five days. She said that when she woke up, “the first thing I saw was flowers from Tony. God bless him, the moment he found out, the flowers were there. He's always been that way, he's been very very caring and knowledgeable about what's gone on in my life. He's been there for me an awful lot. I never felt for a moment that I couldn't pick up the phone and ask him for a favor.”
She also added that it was during this coma that she had a dream - one that she later amplified into a stage joke that she would tell her audiences. ”While I was in this coma I had some dreams. It was about Grammy time, and I dreamed that I won! And there were about 15 Tony Bennetts that all were in a semicircle on the stage, and each one of them gave me a Grammy! And I was terribly pleased.” So was Tony when he heard the story; he also laughed hysterically.
Coincidentally, the last major memory I have of the relationship of Tony and Rosemary also involved the Grammy Awards. I saw her for the last time at her final performance in New York, at the Westbury Music Fair in the Fall of 2001. (There’s another story there which I’ll tell at some point, I also had the honor of doing the notes for one of her final albums.) She died in June of 2002.
A few months after Rosemary passed, Tony was once again nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop album. I was at the ceremony - I had been nominated for my contributions to Peggy Lee: The Singles Collection (produced by the inestimable Cy Godfrey). Unlike myself, Tony actually won.
By 2003, the Traditional Pop award was not presented in the evening show, the televised portion of the program - the main event - it was held in the afternoon. And, in a masterstroke of planning by the show producers, the schedule was such that Tony was rehearsing or doing a soundcheck somewhere else for his number in the evening show at the very moment his award was being handed out. So when the award was announced and Tony’s name was called, he wasn’t there.
But then, all of a sudden, he was.
Tony was 75 at this point, and he was in good shape - he would live another 20 years - but he had obviously been running a long distance, and in his tuxedo and dress shoes, no less. He was completely out of breath. I was kind of surprised; Tony was never jaded or blase about something as important as winning a Grammy award, but I couldn’t think why this particular one meant so much to him, after he had already won so many.
I soon found out why. Tony picked up the statuette, held it up for all to see, and announced to everyone present, “This is for Rosemary.”
Disclaimer: These are my memories of these incidents, nothing more, nothing less. I apologize in advance in case they may not line up precisely with anyone else’s account of what transpired on those occasions.
Four Episodes of Sing! Sing! Sing on KSDS (88.3 San Diego) spotlighting the life and legacy of Tony Bennett:
SSS 59 2023-08-12 Tales of Tony
SSS 58 2023-08-05 Tony Bennett sings the George & Ira Gershwin Songbook
SSS 57 2023-07-29 Tony Bennett - Van Heusen, Burke, Cahn, Styne, Sondheim, Comden & Green
SSS 5 2022-07-30 Tony Bennett @ 96: The Johnny Mercer Songbook
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