The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  Jeanine Basinger is the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies, Wesleyan University, and trustee emerita at the American Film Institute.

  Prologue

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  The Last Movie

  The Victorian home on Valerio Street in Van Nuys, California, sits heavy with memories that hang over the present, resonating across a near-century of motion picture history. You can see the home from a distance, standing in contrast to the stucco plaster Spanish-style homes, with big picture windows in front, that line the streets of this San Fernando Valley community. An artifact from a gilded age, today it is a movie set again. On the first floor, as the audio mixer snakes his cable to a mike boom and fiddles with the dials on his Cantar sound recorder, Margaret O’Brien adjusts herself nervously into the cushion of an upholstered love seat in the sitting room. You remember Margaret O’Brien, don’t you, the MGM child star famous as “Tootie” Smith, smiling through tears as Judy Garland sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to her in Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 classic, Meet Me in St. Louis?

  Margaret O’Brien is in wardrobe, wearing a high-collar dress from the 1890s. She fidgets slightly as the set electrician adjusts one of the lights above her just before the Canon’s digital camera lens in front of her chair comes into focus. Sitting right next to her, wearing a pullover sweater and sweat pants, is her old friend from when they were stars together. His is an all-too-familiar face, albeit through sagging cheeks, heavy jowls, a balding head now ringed with snow-white hair, a face marked with lines of age, but smiling a puckish smile of youth, and his eyes still dancing with a delight belying his ninety-three years. It is Mickey Rooney. It is Andy Hardy.

  From behind the camera the actors hear director Brian Barsuglia bark, “Roll sound.”

  “Rolling.”

  “Camera speed.”

  “Speeding.”

  “Slate it.” A production assistant snaps the slate closed.

  “Scene twenty-two, take one.”

  “Action!”

  The scene begins.

  O’Brien turns her head away from the two men, also in Victorian wardrobe, standing over her chair. One of the actors is Zan Alda, Alan Alda’s nephew. The other is David Beatty. Then she looks at Mickey Rooney beside her on the chair. He is playing Mr. Louis to O’Brien’s Mrs. Stevenson. Off camera, a script assistant feeds Mickey his line.

  “It’s okay, dear, tell them,” Mickey’s character says. “Tell them what you saw. What you told me.” Mickey’s Mr. Louis is the proprietor of a Victorian house of ill repute, an opium den, a place where gentlemen of means, no matter how acquired, can purchase the evening’s delights they seek, no questions asked. Characters Mr. Louis and Mrs. Stevenson are talking about the mysterious Edward Hyde, the alter ego of Dr. Jekyll, who committed a murder the night before in that very house, in that very same room, bludgeoning an unfortunate man to death with his cane.

  “It was horrible, Mr. Louis,” Margaret O’Brien’s character complains. “Awful. How many times must I relive this ordeal?”

  Mrs. Stevenson witnessed the murder, and retelling the story of the bloody violence she saw is traumatic for her. She is reluctant to speak. But Mickey Rooney’s character, her employer, cajoles, urges, and then commands her to relate the details of the crime. Mickey dominates the scene, improvising the lines he’s fed because he wants his character to finish with a flourish. He argues with David Beatty’s character, the detective interrogating him and pushing him to incriminate the villain, no doubt a return paying customer.

  Beatty glares at Mickey and once again demands, “Did you see Mr. Hyde? What does he look like?”

  “I don’t know,” Mickey’s character says, now veering off script. “But I must go. Time [beat] is fleeting.”

  This is a small scene, perhaps no longer than seven minutes of camera time, but critical because it identifies the killer in this remake of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Mickey Rooney and Margaret O’Brien, bringing to the film a wisp of glory from the golden age of studio-produced motion pictures, underplay their roles just enough to show the rest of the cast what veterans can do when the camera comes on.

  “Mickey was the only one at the studio that was ever allowed to call me Maggie,” O’Brien said after the filming of the movie. “He was undoubtedly the most talented actor that ever lived. There was nothing he couldn’t do. Singing, dancing, performing—all with great expertise. Mickey made it look so easy. He seemed fine through the filming and was as great as ever,” she said, adding, “Mickey was in my first film [Babes on Broadway, 1941], and I was in Mickey’s last film, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Her comments echoed what Spencer Tracy, who costarred with Rooney, once said about him: “Mickey Rooney was the most talented man in the history of movies . . . He was whatever he was portraying.”

  Tracy’s comments echo those of Sir Laurence Olivier, who, when asked to name his favorite, said, “Mickey Rooney is the greatest actor America every produced.”

  In an interview later in his life, Mickey explained why he was able to portray the roles he played so effortlessly. He revealed his secret when he told his interviewer that he “never acted,” but always played himself. He was the character, not the actor.

  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde director Brian Barsuglia said that he first met Mickey on Valentine’s Day 2014, at a dinner with Mickey’s stepson Mark Aber Rooney and Mark’s wife, Charlene. Margaret O’Brien was at that dinner. “During and after dinner Mickey was surrounded by fans. He was very gracious, posed for pictures and signed autographs. He was constantly bothered during dinner, but was very nice about it,” Barsuglia said, although with his stepchildren he was far more contentious. Three weeks later, on March 8, Barsuglia filmed Mickey’s scene with O’Brien on a set where Mickey was surrounded by both cast and crew asking for advice. “Asked to explain his long career and the secret of it, Mickey said, ‘Work hard, persevere, do your work, and get a good attorney,’ ” Brian told us. Mickey revealed to the crew, “Everyone stole from me,” remembering his dealings with managers, agents, studio heads, and their lawyers. The director remembered that Mickey was especially cordial. He stayed on set after his scene, to watch Margaret O’Brien film her scenes, and then stuck around for lunch to talk with everyone. For Mickey, this was not just a film shoot; it was an occasion to step back into a role he had played since the 1930s: being an actor on a film set.

  “Mickey was a hundred percent lucid,” said actor David Beatty, who played opposite Rooney and O’Brien in the scene. Rooney had difficulty physically, moving slowly and with great effort. But when the scene required him to stand, he stood, albeit shakily. There were set hands nearby to catch him if he fell or complained of dizziness, and a script assistant was there to feed him lines when he needed it. What dialogue he didn’t like he made up, but it fit the scene. Beatty described him as completely aware and totally in the moment for the scene, a consummate professional. “Mickey had an instinctual feel of how lines should sound as they were read,” he remembered, and Rooney even talked to the film director about changing dialogue he thought could be improved.

  After the crew wrapped for the day, Beatty said he pulled Mickey aside for ideas on improving his own craft, asking him, “What is your advice on being an actor?” Mickey replied, “Son, my best advice I can give you is that you better have a damn good lawyer.”

  “Mickey was not only in the moment; he had a charisma about him and an awareness of his character,” Beatty said. When he started the scene with Rooney and O’Brien, Mickey said to him, “Welcome to history.” He was that much aware not only of his moment in the scene and in the picture, but of the importance of his coming together with another great child star for a performance that would ultimately outshine the rest of the picture.

  Mickey’s performances on camera in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and in Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014), opposite Dick Van Dyke and Ben Stiller, are in sharp contrast to the Mickey Rooney
who, his daughter Kerry Rooney Mack told us, suffered from bipolar disorder and was on the mood-stabilizing psychotropic lithium for many years, bouncing from hypergrandiosity to deep bouts of bitter depression.

  In his later years, Mickey, because of his own situation, became an advocate for people experiencing elder abuse at the hands of their caregivers. His pleadings in court regarding this issue suggested that he had led (ironically enough, just like Dr. Jekyll) a double life. He was the consummate on-screen and on-stage performer, seeking to transform his teenage persona into a sought-after mature character actor. But as the years wore on, he was also the off-screen victim of those life vicissitudes that can beset a teenager who never grows up even as he grows old, stuck like an insect fossilized in amber. He constantly worried about his deteriorating finances, and claimed he was plundered by everyone around him, from shady business managers to agents to members of his own, very extended family.

  As Ed Gjertsen II said in a commentary on CNBC, Mickey claimed that he was the victim of financial elder abuse. He died with only eighteen thousand dollars in the bank, a minuscule sum for an artist who, at the height of his on-screen glory as a teenager, earned for Louis B. Mayer’s MGM more than a hundred million dollars by 1940. Just consider that sum in today’s dollars. For his performances in the Broadway musical Sugar Babies, he earned tens of millions of dollars. But it was all gone.

  By 1962, after he’d married his fifth wife, Rooney had filed his first bankruptcy petition. His business dealings; partnerships with those who, he claimed, scooped money right out of his accounts; and his multiple marriages and divorces, he said, were the cause of his financial undoing. However, there was much more to the story.

  Decades later, when he was ninety, Mickey testified before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, according to Sherisse Pham writing in the New York Times (March 3, 2011), that he was financially exploited by those who managed his money and was kept from making the “most basic decisions” about his life and finances. When he complained about it, he testified, he was told that he didn’t know what he was talking about. “I felt trapped, scared, used, and frustrated,” Rooney told the senators. But he also said that he was afraid to tell friends about it.1

  In September 2011, attorneys representing Rooney filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court against his stepchildren. The pleadings, according to a statement from Rooney’s lawyers Holland and Knight, alleged that Mickey’s stepson Chris and his spouse financially and verbally abused him over a ten-year period, taking money from his accounts and leaving Rooney powerless over his assets and personal life. As a consequence of that filing, the parties, two years later in October 2013, settled for $2.8 million in a stipulated judgment. To date, this judgment has not been paid.

  Scott Feinberg, writing for The Hollywood Reporter and in an interview with us, said that he had interviewed Mickey on several occasions, including at the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party in February 2014 and at a Paramount Studios memorial for the legendary producer and Paramount executive A. C. Lyles on September 30, 2013. (Lyles and Mickey had both been married to actress Martha Vickers.) Feinberg said that on July 3, 2013, he conducted his one-on-one in-depth interview with Mickey and his wife Jan, and his stepson Chris Aber. During that interview, held at the Thousand Oaks Grill in Thousand Oaks, California, and captured on video,2 Feinberg remarked that he was struck that Mickey was literally in tears about his business affairs and finances being controlled by crooked business managers and representatives, who would not follow his wishes. Rooney burst into histrionics more than once during the interview and, in Feinberg’s words, became “ballistic” and had to be calmed down. Mickey had become very bitter during his last years, angry about fans who approached him, angry with his family, and angry that, to put it bluntly, he was no longer Andy Hardy. He constantly complained to anyone who would listen about fans who came up to him in public, “It’s rude. I can’t stand it. It’s like they have to have a piece of you. Fuck ’em. They never leave me alone. For eighty years it never stops.”

  “They love you,” his stepson Chris said. But Mickey, extolling the value of his autographs, didn’t stop: “Love me, my ass, they’ll go and sell it and make money off me. If I had the money they make off me, BULLSHIT!” he screamed. After his family tried to explain that the fans were only expressing admiration, Mickey continued, even more exasperated, “Give me the money, fuck being admired.” These were not the complaints of a teenage boy testing the bonds of Middle America small-town family life. These were the ravings of an old man struggling against the passage of time and trying to hang on to his memories. He said once, looking back on his Andy Hardy successes, “When I was nineteen, I was the number one star for two years. When I was forty, nobody wanted me. I couldn’t get a job.”

  The years had indeed passed the character of Andy Hardy right by, as had American society itself after the Great Depression and World War II. By 1950 the Mickey Rooney of the MGM glory days was essentially an anachronism, a figure of the past haunting low-budget film noir, a thirty-year-old has-been, as he described himself. The publicity he received in newspapers and gossip columns was snarky and condescending. He had become a laughable figure, a dead man walking. Former child star and Mouseketeer Paul Petersen, who played Jeff on The Donna Reed Show, knew that feeling well, explaining to us that “At eighteen you are the center of the world. By the time you’re thirty, fans approach you and say, ‘I used to love you on television.’ ”

  By the 1960s, Mickey was portrayed as a stodgy, cigar-chomping womanizer who hung out at racetracks and had a drinking problem, a tragic has-been. He was laughed at in almost every newspaper story, described as “pint-sized” and with other condescending terms. However, he was only in his mid-thirties. As actor George Clooney once said, talking about psychological stresses on young performers, he was happy that he didn’t reach stardom until he was in his thirties, adding that if he had been a child star, he would have been dropping cocaine into his eyes by the time he was thirty-five. If he hadn’t had such fame as a kid, Mickey would have been considered, at thirty, a youthful rising star displaying superior talent. However, even earlier, by 1955, Rooney was considered an archaic figure, a shadow of the past. His friend character actor Billy Barty watched his “brother” from the Mickey McGuire films being “deconstructed” and said in our interview, “They put him on a pedestal as an idol [and] then proceeded to find his flaws until he became a mortal like them.”

  Mickey suffered from the catastrophe of success. He had nearly ten strong years at the top of the world at an early age, and then spent the next sixty years trying to regain that fame and repeat former triumphs. Paul Petersen calls it the “Jurassic Park effect,” in which you become the fossil of what you were.

  Many of Mickey’s problems, particularly how he would face his elder years, stemmed from his dysfunctional, although professionally successful, childhood, when he was the primary breadwinner for his family. One might even suggest that his parents didn’t raise him; he raised them. Consequently, Mickey spent most of his adult life looking for a mother figure to take care of him the way his own mother, Nell, had tried but failed to do when he was a young performer. He attempted to earn a living as best he could, at the one thing he knew how to do best: entertain. He also continued to lose money even faster than he could earn it, by doing the one thing he could not do well: gamble. He’d try to pick a horse that could win at Santa Anita or draw to an inside straight at late-night poker games at the old Beverly Hills Friars Club. As Mickey often said about his horse racing addiction, “I lost two dollars at Santa Anita and spent three million trying to get it back.”

  Feinberg, navigating a byzantine route through a web of business managers and Mickey’s autograph-signing representative and memorabilia expert, Nelson Deedle, explained that in order to secure the exclusive sit-down with Mickey, he was told he would have to pay five hundred dollars in cash under the table to Mickey’s stepson Chris. Mickey, his representative said, couldn’
t be trusted with the money. They agreed on a two-hundred-dollar check to Mickey’s stepson, a check that had to be hidden from Mickey’s view so he would not take it and gamble it away.

  Feinberg said that he was struck not only by what Mickey said during the interview, and his frequent outbursts and rants, but by the actual physical dynamics of the encounter. First, he said, was Mickey’s need for approval from his wife Jan, pausing after many a phrase to look at her to see if he had made her angry. Scott said that Mickey displayed a palpable fear of his wife, who was much taller and decades younger than he, as well as physically intimidating to the frail Rooney. Feinberg videotaped the interview, but remarked that he had to stop the camera several times, especially when Mickey said something his wife considered inappropriate. At one point, Scott said, she kicked Mickey so hard under the table that his chair almost fell over. Mickey let out a blood-curdling shriek and then started crying and screaming. Although his wife pretended not to notice Mickey’s reaction, it was clear, Feinberg said, that Mickey had been kicked, and hard. This happened several times during the interview, and Mickey would burst into tears more than once. Yet, throughout, Mickey would repeat to Scott Feinberg that his wife was “his everything,” waiting for her to give him either a look of approval or an angry glare.

  MICKEY SAID THAT HIS youthful stardom, frozen as he was into the Andy Hardy character, impinged on his personal life. The studio wanted him to remain the squeaky-clean teenager in public that he played on-screen, even as he, in his private life, sought to have relationships with every young starlet he could find. He needed sexual gratification. “I was a kid. I dated everyone . . . I dated Lana Turner before she hit it big . . . She wanted to marry me . . . I taught Ava Gardner how to fuck. Then she was the best fuck I ever had . . . She called me her ‘sex midget.’ . . . I wanted to marry her right away but Louis Mayer said, ‘no.’ ” No matter what sexual escapades Mickey sought to enjoy, his relationships were tempered by the studio that had employed Eddie Mannix, Mayer’s head of security at Metro, to watch over Mickey and keep him in line. “Step out of line,” Mickey revealed, “and Eddie Mannix talked to you. He was a tough guy and he made sure you kept your nose clean.” Rooney called Mannix Mayer’s “whip.”