Come On A Back To Her House

The second version is a cool update, with Clooney, now 63, backed by a hearty big-band arrangement. Here is a mature voice, with no truck for that earlier nonsense. Molded? She can barely even be bothered. This reading is effortless and offhand. She sounds amused but unflappable, casually delivering Cole’s wry punchlines in a singing voice as close to conversation as any since Billie Holiday. Experience, for better or worse, has done a good singer some good. “I used to be able to stretch a note to the purest, thinnest fiber,” she said on a recent afternoon during her monthlong stand at the New York cabaret Rainbow and Stars, which ended last week. “I can’t do that anymore. That pure, long sound … my breath gives out. " But what she has lost in wind she has largely gained in savvy. The song is a good match for her: half a novelty tune, grown respectable with age, now resoundingly at home in a world that long ago seemed to have outgrown it. Like Cole and his song-for that matter, like Frank Sinatra, Nelson Riddle and Doris Day-Clooney has crept quietly out of camp and back into the public consciousness, recording and performing with regularity and dignity. “People want to hear real songs again, “she said. “It’s very gratifying.”

It has been an improbable enough journey. Born in Maysville, Ky., in 1928, Clooney was shuttled between her alcoholic father and her mother (and, as commonly, her grandparents), singing with her sister in matching dresses sewn by their grandmother. They joined WLW in 1945, partly to escape their father, and left high school to tour with Tony Parsons’s jazz band. By the mid-5Os, she had a string of million-selling novelty hits with songs like “Come on-a My House " and “Botch-a-Me, " her face on the cover of Time and a feature role opposite Bing Crosby in “White Christmas.” It was a decadent era for pop music, high on blondes but low on enduring songs, waiting for rock and roll to sweep it aside. But for all the artifice, it was a rich time. With her husband, Jose Ferrer, she moved into a Beverly Hills house that George Gershwin once lived in. Gershwin’s brother Ira was her next-door neighbor.

But things fell apart. Her marriage collapsed, and the strain of raising five children and pursuing a somewhat waning career got to her. She got addicted to pills and started abusing audiences. Her professional life in a tailspin, she threw herself into the 1968 presidential campaign of Bobby Kennedy. After Kennedy was shot, just yards from where she was standing, Clooney snapped, landing in Mount Sinai Hospital. “I felt very alone,” she said. “Even the people who knew me didn’t know. A few did, though. Bob Hope sent me a huge bouquet of flowers to the psych ward. The card said, ‘I hope it’s a boy’. "

After eight years of therapy, she gradually returned to performing, this time without the novelty spin. Her Concord Jazz albums, many of them tributes to composers like Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart, recall the lesser-known side of Clooney, the one that recorded with Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington. “I don’t consider myself a jazz singer, " she says, probably too modestly. “I’m not inventive enough in my phrasing. I just sing the notes.” That she does, and with what is still peerless ease. Once a kitschy bauble, best known for her contrived ‘5Os novelty tunes, her ’70s Coronet paper-towel commercials and her very public nervous breakdown, she has come back simply by singing good songs very well. And that should be enough. Straightened up, she’s flying right.

title: “Come On A Back To Her House” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-27” author: “Michael George”

The second version is a cool update, with Clooney, now 63, backed by a hearty big-band arrangement. Here is a mature voice, with no truck for that earlier nonsense. Molded? She can barely even be bothered. This reading is effortless and offhand. She sounds amused but unflappable, casually delivering Cole’s wry punchlines in a singing voice as close to conversation as any since Billie Holiday. Experience, for better or worse, has done a good singer some good. “I used to be able to stretch a note to the purest, thinnest fiber,” she said on a recent afternoon during her monthlong stand at the New York cabaret Rainbow and Stars, which ended last week. “I can’t do that anymore. That pure, long sound … my breath gives out. " But what she has lost in wind she has largely gained in savvy. The song is a good match for her: half a novelty tune, grown respectable with age, now resoundingly at home in a world that long ago seemed to have outgrown it. Like Cole and his song-for that matter, like Frank Sinatra, Nelson Riddle and Doris Day-Clooney has crept quietly out of camp and back into the public consciousness, recording and performing with regularity and dignity. “People want to hear real songs again, “she said. “It’s very gratifying.”

It has been an improbable enough journey. Born in Maysville, Ky., in 1928, Clooney was shuttled between her alcoholic father and her mother (and, as commonly, her grandparents), singing with her sister in matching dresses sewn by their grandmother. They joined WLW in 1945, partly to escape their father, and left high school to tour with Tony Parsons’s jazz band. By the mid-5Os, she had a string of million-selling novelty hits with songs like “Come on-a My House " and “Botch-a-Me, " her face on the cover of Time and a feature role opposite Bing Crosby in “White Christmas.” It was a decadent era for pop music, high on blondes but low on enduring songs, waiting for rock and roll to sweep it aside. But for all the artifice, it was a rich time. With her husband, Jose Ferrer, she moved into a Beverly Hills house that George Gershwin once lived in. Gershwin’s brother Ira was her next-door neighbor.

But things fell apart. Her marriage collapsed, and the strain of raising five children and pursuing a somewhat waning career got to her. She got addicted to pills and started abusing audiences. Her professional life in a tailspin, she threw herself into the 1968 presidential campaign of Bobby Kennedy. After Kennedy was shot, just yards from where she was standing, Clooney snapped, landing in Mount Sinai Hospital. “I felt very alone,” she said. “Even the people who knew me didn’t know. A few did, though. Bob Hope sent me a huge bouquet of flowers to the psych ward. The card said, ‘I hope it’s a boy’. "

After eight years of therapy, she gradually returned to performing, this time without the novelty spin. Her Concord Jazz albums, many of them tributes to composers like Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart, recall the lesser-known side of Clooney, the one that recorded with Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington. “I don’t consider myself a jazz singer, " she says, probably too modestly. “I’m not inventive enough in my phrasing. I just sing the notes.” That she does, and with what is still peerless ease. Once a kitschy bauble, best known for her contrived ‘5Os novelty tunes, her ’70s Coronet paper-towel commercials and her very public nervous breakdown, she has come back simply by singing good songs very well. And that should be enough. Straightened up, she’s flying right.