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Chaperoned Show Business. It was show business, all right, but the Clooney Sisters hardly lived a glamorous life. They drew $125 a week apiece, but sent most of it home. They were featured performers, but, even on the bandstand, they dressed in peasanty blouses run up by their economical grandmother Guilfoyle. They were on the road most of the time, playing dance halls, Italian socials, college proms, barn dances in tobacco warehouses until 2 a.m. Afterward they would pile into their bus and ride through the night to the next stop. The girls were chaperoned by their Uncle George Guilfoyle. He would hold the second seat in the bus for the girls (Bandleader Pastor would have the front one), and Uncle George would guard protectively from the third.
Rosemary got most of the solos because her voice was in the busiest range—Betty's was three notes lower. In 1946 she made her first solo recording, a long-winded little item called I'm Sorry I Didn t Say I'm Sorry When I Made You Cry Last Night. It so impressed the Pastor band managers, Joe Shribman and Charlie Trotta, that they became her personal managers. "You could feel heart in that record," says Shribman. Three years later they guided her into the big time: she got a contract with Columbia Records.
Worldly World. She found herself in a jungly world of high-pressure pluggers, struggling songsmiths and all-important disk jockeys. It was a world where she came to "own" only 75% of herself, with her managers and booking agents owning the other 25%. Above all, it was a world where the click or smash hit was the ultimate goal, where clearance (by payment to publishers' societies ASCAP and BMI) was necessary for permission to play a song on the air; a world where cut-ins (giving a performer a share of a song's profits), hot stoves (open bribes) and other forms of payola were standing operating procedure; a world of concern with P.D. (public domain, the graveyard, or seventh heaven, where tunes land when their copyrights run out); of romance (a verb meaning to shower disk jockeys and musicians with attentions in return for performances).
But blue-eyed Rosie was ready for anything her world could throw at her. She was nice to the press and romanced the disk jockeys. She made a children's record in which she did not sing a note, instead spoke in motherly tones to a mewling harmonica. She was not surprised to find that her first hit had lyrics that ran:
Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes,
Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes,
Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes,
I'll never love blue eyes again.
Double Mozzarellas. Her managers keep her on an allowance, but she has managed to slake part of her thirst for furs (including a $7,000 Aleutian mink coat after the success of Come On-a My House), to keep a three-bedroom house in Beverly Hills and share an apartment in Manhattan's dressy Hampshire House with Jacqueline Sherman, 27, a well-to-do Chicago girl who is her friend, duenna and general chief of staff. On free evenings, she hits the theater and nightclub circuit like any other customer (current steady escort: Actor José Ferrer).