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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.