Clooney Bio Hits the Right Notes

At a music store in Westwood, on a shelf filled with quickie biographies of flavor-of-the-month “stars,” one title is a standout--”Girl Singer” by Rosemary Clooney with Joan Barthel (Doubleday, $24.95, 336 pages). Here is a heartfelt memoir that recounts one of the enduring and near-mythic success stories in American pop music, a saga that carries Clooney from a backwater town on the Ohio River to a glittering career in show business.

“Smiling till our gums hurt, we played the opening of a big Rexall drugstore at Beverly and La Cienega,” recalls the Kentucky-born Clooney of her West Coast debut in 1947. “Never in my life had I seen so many beautiful people in one place. ‘I’ve got to come and live here someday,’ I said.”

Clooney’s memoir consists of both fairy tale and soap opera. Abandoned by both mother and father, Rosemary and her little sister were supporting themselves as singers when she was 16 and young Betty was only 13. After the dues-paying years on the road and in New York, Rosemary ended up in Hollywood with a hit record (“Come On-a My House”), a movie deal (“The Stars Are Singing”), and a famous husband (Jose Ferrer). The young girl who had once consoled herself by singing along with Cole Porter, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby on a Zenith console radio was now hobnobbing with the same stars on their own turf.

“When Cole Porter gave dinner parties at his house in Brentwood,” recalls Clooney, “he’d insist that everybody sit down and watch ‘The $64,000 Question.’ ”

Clooney, who wrote “Girl Singer” with novelist Barthel, author of “A Death in Canaan,” recalls her life with both charm and honesty. For example, she dishes about an ovarian cyst that was misdiagnosed as a pregnancy when she was an unmarried young woman just starting out in show business: “I wasn’t pregnant, but I have been,” she confesses. “I was having my share of romances.” She recalls how she discovered Jose Ferrer’s chronic infidelities when she overheard him boasting about his latest sexual conquest in prurient detail. And she writes about her own struggles with addiction, weight gain, nervous breakdown and the other heartbreaks that seem to be obligatory in celebrity memoirs.

She even feels free to heap abuse on the song that made her a star, dismissing “Come On-a My House” as “a quasi-Armenian pseudo-folk number” and complaining about the “cheesy accent” that producer Mitch Miller forced her to use in recording the song. One of many surprises in “Girl Singer” is the disclosure that the hit song was jointly composed by literary luminary William Saroyan in an unlikely collaboration with Ross Bagdasarian, the music promoter best known for the Chipmunks!

At the same time, Clooney evokes a certain time and place in American pop music in rich detail. She recalls the theater where a backstage placard warned the performers: “No hells or damns in your act. Keep it clean.” A “folderoo,” she pauses to explain, was a greenback folded and handed to a disc jockey in a nightclub men’s room as a payoff for playing a new record on the air. And she reveals the advice that a motherly Marlene Dietrich bestowed upon her, ranging from “the two best dry cleaners” in town to the principles of lingerie: “You should wear only underwear that matches your skin, darling.”

Lest we forget how and why Clooney earned her stardom, “Girl Singer” includes a partial discography by Michael Feinstein, and a companion CD of Clooney’s recordings, “Songs from the Girl Singer,” is available on the Concord label. But even without the soundtrack, “Girl Singer” is memorable and pleasurable as an eyewitness account of a life in show business at a time when Beverly Hills was still a small town and the men and women whom we now regard as icons were still creatures of flesh and blood.

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One of Rosemary Clooney’s early musical collaborators was jazz trumpeter and big-band leader Harry James, whose lively but lonely story is told by Peter J. Levinson in “Trumpet Blues: The Life of Harry James” (Oxford, $30, 334 pages). James may have been a member of the “Hollywood royalty,” as Levinson puts it, by reason of his marriage to “film goddess” Betty Grable, but he was ultimately reduced to artistic, emotional and financial despair.

“I’ve been sued so many times,” James observed toward the end of his troubled life, “and I’ve never won a case yet, even against my own sons.”

There is a mythic quality to the career of Harry James, but, unlike “Girl Singer,” his biography does not include a happy ending. Despite his success as a bandleader during World War II--or perhaps because of it--James alienated the jazz purists and the critics, and when the bobby-soxers turned to other stars, he sank into the obscurity that is the dark side of American pop culture. At the heart of “Trumpet Blues” is a man who never savored his own success.

“Fundamentally, despite all his success and high living, Harry James led a sad and misguided life,” concludes Levinson. “His womanizing didn’t really reflect his sex drive as much as it did his . . . loneliness and insecurity.”

A companion CD for “Trumpet Blues” is available from Capitol Jazz, and the revival of interest in swing music suggests that Clooney and James may have a new generation of fans. But Levinson holds himself to a high standard of bluntness and candor: “Sixteen years after his death,” Levinson concludes, “Harry James’ musical greatness is almost completely forgotten.”

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