The first time I met Rosemary Clooney, I mentioned the movie White Christmas, to her, indicating I was a small child when I saw it on television for the first time, and had never forgotten her.

It’s something I’m sure she must have heard almost every day of her life from the year the movie was first released until practically the day she died. But her reaction to my comment was typical of this wonderful, strong, intelligent and enormously warm and loving woman: She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me on the cheek.

Over the next nine years I would see Rosemary perform on dozens of occasions, and each time – with a few exceptions – I would visit her backstage and spend a few minutes with her. On most of those occasions I would bring along – or send back in advance – a blue rose. It was my little tribute to a brilliant album she had recorded with the Duke Ellington Orchestra in the late 1950s.

In this way our relationship developed into a warm and easy acquaintanceship. I think the word “friendship” is probably too strong a word to use for what passed between us: She didn’t invite me out to lunch or stop at my home in the New York metro area when she was in town. But it was very special to me, nonetheless, and I like to think it was special to her as well. I think it was.

Often as she stepped onto the stage during a show, for example, she would find me in the audience and give me a shout-out by name. She had a martini sent to my table on my birthday one year, and once dedicated a song to me during a concert. Sometimes I’d bring my parents along, and take them backstage with me, and they’d talk with Rosemary about old songs and children and grandchildren, that sort of thing.

Her manager, Allen Sviridoff, later told me that every so often when he’d step into her dressing room before a performance, when she was getting her makeup done, she’d gesture toward a blue rose sitting on a nearby table and say casually, “Matt’s here.”

“We used to see this fella with a blue rose every once in a while when we played the east coast,” Sviridoff joked with me recently. “She always knew when it was you, Matt, and that was quite special to her.”

More than just my favorite entertainer, Rosemary was one of my favorite people, and it seems remarkable to me still, all these years later, that this amazing artist whose career spanned over fifty years, who sold millions of records and appeared in one of the most beloved films of the twentieth century, would welcome me into her world, if only for a handful of minutes every few months.

Holiday blockbuster

For me, and for millions of people around the world White Christmas and, by extension, Rosemary Clooney, represented an essential part of the holiday season. Over the last 54 years, its appeal has only become stronger: Last week the live theatrical production of White Christmas was the number one show on Broadway, and the DVD of the movie was the number one musical comedy on sale at Amazon.com.

Made at a cost of $4 million when it was first released on movie screens in 1954, the movie took in $30 million in total domestic box office grosses that year. Adjusted for inflation, population growth and purchasing trends, that represents, by some estimates, $233 million in current dollars.

Being in White Christmas changed Rosemary’s life forever, and she owed her appearance in the film to Bing Crosby, who suggested her for the role of Betty Haynes.

“How about a dame called Rosemary Clooney?” Bing wrote to the brass at Paramount Pictures during the initial round of casting for the film. “Sings a good song – and is purportedly personable.”

She was signed to a seven-year contract but made just a handful movies for the studio. Some of them were hits, but none of them were as big as White Christmas.

“This was the picture I wanted to do more than any other, with my friend Bing Crosby, my friend Danny Kaye and my friend Vera Ellen” Rosemary said on the commentary track of the 2000 DVD release of the movie. “All the people that were close to me.”

All that said, White Christmas isn’t perfect, and its weaknesses lie largely in its often contrived script, which benefitted hugely from Crosby’s 1950s hipster ad-libbing (bandleader Artie Shaw called Bing “the first hip white guy in America”).

Though she loved the movie dearly, Rosemary was the first to acknowledge the script’s inadequacies, laughing over taxicabs that magically appear in otherwise vacant alleys and some oddly illogical behavior by her own character.

But overall the film represents the pinnacle of the old studio system’s expertise and professionalism. Directed by Michael Curtiz, who also gave the world Mildred Pierce and Casablanca, it featured a sparkling collection of songs by Irving Berlin, gorgeous costumes by Edith Head, crystalline Vistavision color photography and brilliant choreography by Bob Alton.

“To start with, on White Christmas the choreographer was a man named Robert Alton, and he was the one choreographer that all the dancers in town loved to work with,” said George Chakiris, who played the small part of a chorus boy in the movie and later went on to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in West Side Story. "He was funny, he knew everybody’s name and he was famous in both the theater and the MGM era of musicals. He worked hard and was wonderful work for. Nobody called him ‘Mr. Alton.’ Everybody called him Bob."

He was the kind of choreographer, Chakiris said, who could work easily with actors like Kaye and Clooney who were not trained dancers. Nonetheless, Rosemary had a dancing coach behind the scenes. During the early days of the six-week rehearsal period in 1953 she worked with an old Hollywood hoofer named Dante DiPaolo, and later with a specialty dancer named Bea Allen.

“She could move well, but she was expected to dance,” said DiPaolo, who dated Clooney briefly in the 1950s and became her second husband nearly forty years later. “What actually happened was, the choreographer was one of my dance teachers and used to get me these jobs in movies. So I was in the chorus with George Chakiris, where he got his start. The choreographer would say, ‘Dante, take Rosie over there and work with her with what she needs to do.’”

During these early weeks of rehearsals, an interesting twist of fate would change the lives of Clooney, DiPaolo and Chakiris in ways none of them ever imagined. DiPaolo was called into an audition with the legendary choreographer Michael Kidd, who was prepping Seven Brides for Seven Brothers over at MGM at the same time White Christmas was filming at Paramount. DiPaolo was immediately offered a role as one of the “town boys” in the movie.

“I wasn’t in White Christmas because I auditioned for Seven Brides, and I told Rosie that I got offered the part and she said, ‘Take it. It will be great for your career.’”

The two performers were then growing closer romantically, but accepting the Seven Brides role would mean they would be separated for three months. He took the part regardless, and it turned out to be a real attention-getter, leading to several other offers. Years later he would say it did more for his career than any other role.

Meanwhile, Chakiris, too, was being courted by the team atSeven Brides for Seven Brothers. But he was more interested in staying on White Christmas and landing one of the four male chorus parts in the Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me number, where Rosemary appears memorably in a spectacular figure-enhancing black velvet dress with a diamond broach on her lower back.

“The number had yet to be filmed, had yet to be staged, actually,” Chakiris said. “But Bob Alton said he might use me in it. In the interim they were doing Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at Metro, and Matt Maddox, who was one of our most fabulous dancers, called me and asked me to come over and audition for Michael Kidd as one of the dancers in it. And I didn’t want to do it because I was hoping for Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me.

“So I very nicely made an excuse and didn’t go. Then he called me up another time and I felt obligated to audition for Michael Kidd. I gave the worst audition of my life, because I really didn’t want to be there. So of course they didn’t hire me. But I was happy because I got Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me with Rosie, which was a dream come true. It’s where I wanted to be.”

It was a perfect showcase for the handsome young dancer, who started getting fan mail for the first time as a result, some of it addressed simply to “The boy with Rosemary Clooney in White Christmas, care of Paramount Pictures.”

“There was a two-page color spread in Life magazine on the film, and in a lower left-hand corner there was a shot of Rosie with the four of us from the Love You Didn’t Do Right By Me around her,” Chakiris said, “and girls cut that picture out and circled me and wanted to know who I was.”

Years later Rosemary autographed a copy of that picture, with the other dancers cropped out, and gave it to Chakiris, who still has it today.

Enter Joe Ferrer

Three months after he left the White Christmas set to work on Seven Brides, Dante reached out to Rosemary again, but by then she had already announced her engagement to acting genius Jose Ferrer, known to his friends simply as “Joe.”

“I’m sure the phones on studio sets are different now, but in 1953 there was one phone on the wall, so nobody could really have a quiet, private conversation, but I remember Rosie sometimes going to the phone to talk to Jose Ferrer, and you could just see the glow and the happiness on her face,” Chakiris said.

DiPaolo remained close to the couple, even while quietly continuing to carry a torch for the singer.

“I would go with them both to the fights or whatever,” DiPaolo said. “I was kind of the third party.”

Clooney adored Ferrer and had five children with him, but he made little secret of his womanizing, and from the start their marriage was somewhat troubled. Irving Berlin took notice, adding a few pointed lyrics to Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me.

About 40 years later I was visiting Rosemary backstage at a New York cabaret when I mentioned how great it must have been to have Irving Berlin write Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me specifically for her.

“Yes,” she said, “And it had that lyric, ‘To send me a Joe who had winter and snow in his heart.”

It suddenly dawned on me that Berlin was referring to Jose Ferrer as the “Joe” in the song.

“I never picked up on that,” I told her.

“Oh, but I did, and so did Joe!” she replied. “And so did Bing and Danny!”

White Christmas was the showcase movie for Paramount the year it was released, and as such the set was visited by a galaxy of celebrities, from Humphrey Bogart and Jerry Lewis to Marlene Dietrich, as well a couple of foreign dignitaries.

“I was there when the king of Greece showed up,” said veteran Hollywood columnist James Bacon, now 95. “Bing fled when the king was there. I didn’t think he liked that kind of publicity.”

In fact, according to Rosemary, Bing had other reasons for leaving the set early that day. In a retrospective interview she granted for the 2000 release of the White Christmas DVD, she said the long, complicated finale of the movie was finally in the can when director Curtiz told the cast and crew that the king and queen of Greece were coming to visit, and that they should all pretend to re-shoot the finale to give the royal couple something to remember.

“And I hear Bing beside me groan and say, ‘Not me,’” Rosemary said. The crooner instead decided to go “over the wall” and spend the afternoon playing golf. Crosby being Crosby – he was then one of the top box office stars in the world – nobody raised an eyebrow.

“I knew Rosemary from the time she was 18 years old and she was picked out of the Tony Pastor band and signed with Columbia Records and Paramount,” Bacon said. “She was a sweet girl. God, she was great. She went from a band singer to a movie star and it never changed her.”

Chakiris concurs: “The wonderful thing about Rosie, when you see her on the screen, is that she was exactly as you knew her in real life. She didn’t become another person in front of the camera. I thought she was such a fantastic performer because she was herself. She was truly herself, but in the most wonderful way.

“She was just darling and adorable and sweet and nice. She was a lovely, lovely person. I had a real love for her. You can always love people for their professional abilities, and with Rosie you certainly had that. But with Rosie it was hard not to love her as a person. She was just, just… Well, she was Rosie. She was great.”

Life post-“White Christmas”

The years after the release of White Christmas were a mixed bag, professionally, for Clooney. There were more hit records, but there were no more starring roles in films.

“I was pregnant for the next five years (after White Christmas), you see,” Rosemary would tell audiences during her holiday concerts in later years. “And they weren’t writing a lot of movie roles for pregnant women in those days.”

Instead she launched a popular TV variety show that ran for three years in the late 1950s, with the producers careful to mask her baby bump behind potted plants, barn doors and furniture. Just before her death a collection of film canisters containing episodes of the program were discovered in the basement of her Beverly Hills home, and were promptly released on DVD.

In the 1960s, she and Ferrer divorced, and that – combined with an addiction to prescription medication and other personal disruptions – led to a tumultuous emotional time for the singer.

“When Rosemary was getting a divorce from Jose Ferrer – she found out he was fooling around on her – I covered the divorce trial,” said Bacon. “She sat there with her head down the whole time.”

A close friend of former Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, Rosemary performed at the Ambassador Hotel on the night he was assassinated in 1968 and was present in the ballroom when the gunshots rang out in the kitchen nearby.

It may have been the last straw for her fragile mental state at the time. A breakdown followed, and years of psychoanalysis after that.

Slowly, things began to turn around for her. A chance encounter with DiPaolo reignited their relationship, and an invitation to tour with her White Christmas co-star Crosby in the early 1970s put her back in front of large audiences again.

“Bing thought she was the best of the girl singers,” Bacon said. “Later on, when he went on tour, he could have chosen anybody to tour with him. He could have taken someone like Peggy Lee, but he asked Rosemary instead.”

Near the end of the Crosby tour, Clooney signed with the small Concord Records jazz label, and began recording regularly again. One of her early Concord releases – which sold modestly in the U.S. – even became a big hit in Japan.

She was also booked with a trio of other singer-comediennes to form a nightclub act called “Four Girls Four,” which performed to sold-out audiences nationwide. It was during this period that she met Sviridoff, who was the tour manager for Four Girls Four. In 1983 he began managing Rosemary as a solo act.

“Rosemary was known for her recording career, but this one film stuck with the American public and was so important in their lives for all these years,” Sviridoff said of White Christmas. “She was very grateful for it, and we were able to create the White Christmas tour that went on for a good 12 years or more. It was very lucrative.

“The great thing was that Rosemary continued to be associated with the holiday because of her appearance in this film and her great friendship with Bing Crosby. So people wanted to see her this time of year.”

He said the affection for Rosemary “was very genuine, because she really was Christmas. To everybody in Beverly Hills, Rosemary celebrated Christmas the way it was supposed to be celebrated. She loved it for the holiday that it was – for the religious holiday that it was as well as for the family holiday that it was. The parties at her house at Christmastime were just like White Christmas. Everybody wanted to be there. I remember one night the CEO of NBC showed up at her front door singing Christmas carols, because he just had to be there. He said, ‘I have to be at Rosemary Clooney’s house at Christmas.’ It was phenomenal.”

Sviridoff said the doors to the Clooney house were “thrown wide open” on Christmas Eve, with guests stopping by anytime from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. with no need for an advance phone call or an invitation.

“It looked like one of the sets from White Christmas every year, because she had three Christmas trees on the ground floor of her house, and of course all the décor all over the place,” he said. “Rosemary was never shy about gifting her family and friends, and her living room – which was enormous – had hundreds and hundreds of gifts strewn under the main Christmas tree.”

Another holiday tradition for Clooney family and friends was the inevitable arrival of an “audio Christmas card” from Rosemary.

“She used to send us, at Christmastime, a cassette tape with Christmas wishes and songs,” Bacon said. “We still have all of them.”

“Oh, we did that for eight or ten seasons,” Sviridoff said of the Clooney audio holiday offerings. “Actually we were in a recording studio making a track of White Christmas for something, I can’t remember what it was, and I said, ‘Rosemary, why don’t we do personal greetings over the interludes?’ She loved the idea and pretty soon everybody had to have one.

“So it grew. I think the first year she did 50, and then it was 100, then 200, then 300. The bad part about it was that we didn’t do it in the digital world, where it would have been really easy to put together.

“What we did was, we’d record a song in the studio and then Rosemary would sit there and read her greetings. Then the poor engineer would sit there for days, inserting all of the names and greetings. It was quite a perfect gift for people, and it got to be that if you didn’t get one of these from Rosemary Clooney, it just wasn’t Christmas.” 

“White Christmas” revisited

Soon after taking on a management role in her career, Sviridoff began setting up dates billed as White Christmas Parties, in which Clooney would sing holiday songs and tell “behind the scenes” stories in between clips of the movie.

“I was trying to come up with something to intrigue one of the Atlantic City casinos to bring Rosemary in by herself, because prior to that we had done either Four Girls Four or a co-bill with somebody like Tony Bennett or Bob Hope,” Sviridoff said. “The Sands Hotel bit when I asked if they’d consider ‘Rosemary Clooney’s White Christmas Party.’”

While the show started out fairly small, it soon grew, and Clooney was eventually booked to do up to twenty dates during the holiday season.

Concertgoers to the 750-seat Sands theater were treated to a stage set designed to emulate the final scene in White Christmas. At certain points in the program, a large movie screen would drop down from the ceiling and a clip from the movie would be shown. A huge local choral group sang backup for Clooney, and during the grand finale, artificial snow fell from the rafters.

“People really appreciated her,” said Jim Wise, who was PR director of the Sands during the years of Clooney’s Christmas concerts there, and is now vice president of marketing at Mohegan Sun at Pocono Downs. “While she was an icon of pop when she performed her holiday shows, she was down to earth and self-deprecating and a real joy.”

Attending one of the “White Christmas Parties” was like revisiting the classic film, or like spending an hour with an old friend. Sviridoff said the experience was similar for Clooney.

“Truly, everybody made Rosemary feel like she was recreating the movie all over again. It was wonderful.”

There were challenges to producing the show, however, especially early on, in the days before commercial videotape. Sviridoff sought out actual film clips from a TV producer from Philadelphia and a private film collector.

“We had no source for it back then,” he said. “Certainly there were no videotapes and we had no access to the film at that time. A collector gave us a copy of his print, and we edited the print and used an actual 16 millimeter print of the film as footage for years and years. That was one of the tough parts, although all those tours were a real joy.”

And they were enormously popular as well.

“The reaction was tremendous everywhere,” Sviridoff said. “I cannot tell you a time when we played a city where she did not a) fill the place and b) it didn’t create the same reaction of joy on the faces of all the people who saw it and left there happy.”

I sometimes witnessed first hand the deep emotional impact the show had on patrons. On one occasion in the late 1990s, I attended one of the Sands White Christmas concerts and, at the conclusion of the concert went to the stage door to see if I could get a backstage visit with Rosemary. I told the guard who I was, and asked him to please mention my name to Sviridoff.

A young woman dressed all in Christmas red and green overheard me, and she tapped me on the shoulder.

“Are you going to meet Rosemary Clooney?” she asked.

I told her I wasn’t sure. It really depended on how Rosemary was feeling and whether she had other plans immediately after the show.

“If you talk to her,” the woman said, “Would you tell her how much I love her? And that when I was a little girl, my mother used to sing me to sleep with a song from White Christmas – Count Your Blessings Instead of Sleep?”

She added that her mother had died of cancer recently, and experiencing the concert made her feel that her mother was still near to her. One of her fondest memories of her mother’s last year was sitting together and watching the movie on the TV in her hospital room, holding hands like they had done when they watched it together when she was a small child.

I promised to tell Rosemary about her, and I did.

I think I got a little choked up repeating the story when I was backstage, and so did Rosemary.

In 1996, Clooney recorded a brand new Christmas CD for Concord Records entitled – what else? – White Christmas. It was her biggest hit in decades, reaching the top of the jazz charts and selling over 100,000 copies.

Five years later, during the 2001 holiday season, I got a couple of calls and emails from Pam Schlereth, who had known Rosemary for 30 years and was a nanny for her grandchildren. She was going to be in New Jersey to attend a Clooney concert at the Count Basie Theater in Red Bank and asked if I wanted to accompany her. I begged off because it was occurring on the night before a Christmas party at my apartment, and I was expecting 30 guests the following day. There was still too much prep work to do.

It turned out to be Rosemary’s final concert, a collection of traditional American standards and holiday favorites. Although the theater’s backstage area could not accommodate guests of the performers, Schlereth later told me she had gotten a chance to visit with Rosemary that night, and the singer had told her that she had been diagnosed with lung cancer and would soon be having surgery to remove it.

Kathy Brown, who has spent years of her life keeping Clooney’s legacy alive through her Rosemary Clooney website (www.rosemaryclooney.com) also attended that final concert. She happened to be staying in the same hotel as Rosemary and Sviridoff, and the next morning she encountered the singer, her manager and DiPaolo in the hotel lobby.

There was a brief, poignant meeting between Clooney and Brown, who later said that Rosemary seemed more tired than usual. She didn’t realize that Rosemary was ill. She gave Clooney a Christmas card and said goodbye.

“God bless you,” Rosemary told her before climbing in the back of her awaiting car.

It was perhaps Rosemary Clooney’s last moment of public life. She would soon withdraw from the world and into the care of her Mayo Clinic doctors. She died six months later, on June 29, 2002.

Among those who flew to Beverly Hills to comfort Rosemary’s family when the news of her passing became public was Kathryn Crosby, Bing’s widow, who met both Bing and Rosemary for the first time on the “White Christmas” set in 1953.

Of course Rosemary Clooney still lives on through her recordings and especially in annual viewings of the holiday perennial that remains beloved by people around the world. It was beloved by Rosemary herself, too, as she makes clear in her final words on the White Christmas DVD commentary.

“I loved it. I just loved it,” she says with that warm, throaty laugh of hers as the words “The End” flash across the screen.

“Can we start it over?”

A version of this article originally appeared in the Lock Haven Express.

Paramount is planning a re-release of the DVD of White Christmas in 2009. Interviews and filming took place in Augusta, KY on December 19 at The Rosemary Clooney House which is home to the largest collection of White Christmas memorabilia in the world.

Click here for an article about the filming and click here for information about Augusta's White Christmas parade.