202 CLOONEY, GEORGE Collingwood) on Jack Paar’s Morning Show, also on CBS. At the Morning Show, a rival to NBC’s groundbreaking news format of the Today show, she met and worked with Pupi Campo, the Morning Show Latin bandleader and her husband-tobe. Rosemary and Betty were together in New York City as separate acts, but the sisters remained close, always encouraging each other professionally. They made a few more recordings together, including the somewhat autobiographical Irving Berlin tune “Sisters,” from White Christmas (1954), on the Columbia label. Betty also recorded songs for RCA and for Coral, a subsidiary of Decca. During the mid-1950s, Betty spent a few years as a regular on the Robert Q. Lewis Show, a CBS daytime television variety series. She guest starred on the prime-time Lux Show Starring Rosemary Clooney in 1957 on NBC and made a string of other guest television appearances, before she retired from show business to raise a family a few years after her marriage to Pupi Campo in 1955. Campo and his band performed as a feature act for many years in Miami, Fla., and later in Las Vegas. Betty returned to network television news briefly on NBC’s Today. She supported John Chancellor as one of the Today Girls in 1961 and later as a guest sponsor performer for Hugh Downs in 1962 and 1963. Betty also worked with Barbara Walters, who had just started as a news researcher, writer, and reporter on Today. The Clooney sisters remained close and supported each other in challenges, usually related to their husbands’ infidelities. After a few guest cohost performances on brother Nick Clooney’s WCPO and WKRC variety television shows in Cincinnati, the sisters discussed comeback plans for a reunion tour in the mid-1970s. It never came to pass, because Betty died of a brain aneurysm at age 45 in 1976. Her funeral mass was at St. Viator’s Catholic Church in Las Vegas. In Betty’s honor, Rosemary and Nick established the Betty Clooney Foundation in 1983 and the Betty Clooney Center in Long Beach, Calif. (opened in 1988), which treats persons with traumatic brain injury. Beginning in 1986, major Hollywood performers, including Tony Bennett, Carol Burnett, Bob Hope, Linda Ronstadt, and Frank Sinatra, participated in Rosemary and Nick’s fundraiser for the foundation, entitled “Singers’ Salute to the Songwriter,” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. The fundraiser continued into the early 1990s. Betty’s four children, listed by birth chronology, are Rosemary Cari Leary, Cathi Campo Muckle, Carlos Campo, and Christina Stretz. Cathi performed with Rosemary Clooney in the 1990s at live concerts and made a popu lar recording of the “Coffee Song,” which the Clooney Sisters had performed. “Betty Clooney Dead at Age 45,” CE, August 6, 1976, B2. “Betty Clooney Dies at 45 in Las Vegas,” NYT, August 8, 1976, 41. Bliss, Edward. Now the News: The Story of Broadcast Journalism. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991.
Clooney, Nick. “Betty’s Legacy in Song,” KP, July 19, 2006, B1. ———. Faxes to Paul A. Tenkotte, January 28, 2007, and February 8, 2007. Clooney, Rosemary. Girl Singer: An Autobiography. New York: Doubleday, 1999. Hyatt, Wesley. The Encyclopedia of Daytime Television. New York: Billboard Books, 1997. Kinkle, Roger. The Complete Encyclopedia of Popular Music and Jazz, 1900–1950. Vol. 2. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1974. Records of Betty Clooney’s NBC television appearances between 1949 and 1963, NBC News Archives, New York City. Wood, Carlyle. TV Personalities: Biographical Sketch Book. Vol. 1. St. Louis, Mo.: Carlyle Wood, 1954.
John Schlipp
CLOONEY, GEORGE (b. May 6, 1961, Lexington, Ky.). Writer, director, and actor George Timothy Clooney is the son of Nick Clooney and Nina Warren Clooney and the nephew of Rosemary Clooney. George has a sister, Ada, who is one year older than he. Due to the peripatetic nature of the radio and television broadcast business, in which Nick Clooney made his living, there were many moves during George’s formative years that taught him what would be needed to succeed in show business. He began first grade at Blessed Sacrament School in Fort Mitchell and later attended St. Michael’s School in Columbus, Ohio, and the Western Row and St. Susanna schools in Mason, Ohio, before the family moved to Augusta, Ky., for his high school education. Always a sports fan, George had hoped to play football, but Augusta High School, from which he graduated in 1979, offered only basketball and baseball. He participated in both, eventually trying out, unsuccessfully, to play professional baseball with the Cincinnati Reds. Although his career took several years to develop, George’s livelihood turned out to be in television and motion pictures. He attended Northern Kentucky University at Highland Heights and, very briefly, the University of Cincinnati. In spring 1981 his cousins Miguel and Rafi Ferrer (two of his Aunt Rosemary’s sons) and their father, José Ferrer, went to Lexington to do a movie. They invited George to the set. For George, this exposure to acting was love at first sight, and he never looked back. When his father, Nick, tried to persuade George to stay in school by saying, “At least with a diploma, you’ll have something to fall back on,” George replied, “If I have something to fall back on, I’ll fall back.” George cut tobacco, sold lemonade at the Labor Day festival in Augusta, and drew caricatures of people to get enough money together for his trip to Los Angeles to become an actor. In fall 1981 he climbed into an old Monte Carlo automobile, and three days later he had arrived in his newly adopted hometown of Los Angeles, ready to do what was necessary to become an actor. Odd jobs, “cattle calls” (highly competitive acting auditions), trading work for acting lessons, auditioning, dashed hopes, showcases, readings, and new friends all
George Clooney at his 1979 graduation from Augusta High School.
followed, but no acting jobs materialized for George for almost two years. Slowly, small television appearances that he made led to several unsuccessful television pi lots. Then in 1984 George was cast in a role for a new television program called ER that was soon canceled. Ironically, George’s great TV success came with a second show also named ER. His engaging portrayal of Dr. Doug Ross, ER’s handsome children’s medical specialist, quickly transformed George Clooney into a household name. George had appeared in a half dozen small fi lms before his portrayal of Dr. Ross on television brought him to the attention of major movie producers and directors. Never one to shrink from an opportunity or from his responsibility, George lived up to his five-year contract with Warner Bros. for ER while, with the company’s help in scheduling, he also made six movies. Half of them were fi lmed during ER’s summer hiatus, and the others during regular tapings of the successful hospital drama. Clooney was Dr. Doug Ross in scrubs in the mornings; then in the afternoons, he would jump on his bicycle and pedal across the Warner production lot to various sound stages where he made From Dusk to Dawn (1996), Batman & Robin (1997), and The Peacemaker (1997). George has proved his versatility with success in farranging movies that include Three Kings (1999); O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000); The Perfect Storm (2000); Ocean’s Eleven (2001); Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002); Intolerable Cruelty (2003); Ocean’s Twelve (2004); Good Night, and Good Luck (2005); Syriana (2005); Michael Clayton (2006); and The Good German (2006). In 1998 George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh formed the Section Eight Production Company, which drew upon the combination of Clooney’s acting and directing talents in the production