The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  With Mannix looking over Rooney’s shoulder and studio head Louis Mayer looking at his studio’s bottom line and renting Mickey out to other studios for huge profits as if he were a piece of real estate, Mickey had only one job: to keep making pictures. “They made loads of cash with Andy Hardy and they did not want me to screw up that idea from the public . . . So they kept me working. I made probably over a billion of today’s dollars for them. I was their cash cow . . . I think Lewis Stone [the actor who played Judge Hardy] was making more than me. Look at what stars make now . . . If I had had better people watching over me things would have been different . . . I blew through twelve million dollars.”

  Mickey believed, as he compared himself to entertainers today, that the people he had hired (attorneys, agents, and managers) were working for the studio’s interests more than for his own. “MGM had everyone by the balls,” he said, acknowledging that his life and career were both under Louis B. Mayer’s control as long as he was a contract player at MGM. His public image was crafted, just like Judy Garland’s and Lana Turner’s, and he had to inhabit the role of Andy Hardy even in real life. He admitted that even during the late 1930s, when Americans were still suffering through the Depression and families were under the extreme financial pressure of finding enough food to put on the table, the Andy Hardy movies pointed to a time of family values, when basic American ideals were preserved in a small-town culture. Andy Hardy may have bounced off the envelope of acceptable behavior, but the wise old Judge Hardy always brought his son back. This, Mickey said, was the heart and soul of the appeal of Andy Hardy: Everything would turn out for the best in the end. “They were Americana. They had great values. Families wanted to be like the Hardys. Everybody wanted to be like Hardy,” Mickey explained. These were his golden years, but they were destined to change after he came back from World War II and was physically too old to inhabit the teenage character that had propelled his career.

  As the stardom of his teenage persona faded, Mickey sought to rebrand himself, recreating the Andy Hardy character in roles that enabled him to explore different aspects of his maturing talent. But according to business consultant and memorabilia marketeer Nelson Deedle, it was as if Mickey lived only for the moment and had no long-term financial resources to provide for his future. His plan was to keep on earning money, a good plan, but you have to keep the money you earn in order for it to work. Mickey didn’t. As a result, when his gambling, drinking, tax penalties, and court-ordered support payments drained him completely, and after all his finances were depleted by his managers, Mickey had to resort to anything he could do to bring in money. He turned to memorabilia. “He never thought he’d live into his nineties, so he had financial difficulty. He hadn’t planned financially,” Deedle told RadarOnline.3

  After completing his scene for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Mickey returned to his rented house just outside Studio City, where he was living with his stepson Mark Aber Rooney and Mark’s wife, Charlene. It was near the end of his life, after his separation from eighth wife Jan, and he spent his last few days there signing autographs. According to Feinberg, the Abers had called the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to see if they could sell his two awards. But the Academy said no.4

  Recipients weren’t allowed to do that, according to Nelson Deedle, who speculated that the Oscars would have fetched between fifty thousand and seventy-five thousand each. “He earned the awards and should have the right to sell them,” Deedle told RadarOnline. The sale would have made a difference. Mickey was cash-strapped and desperate because he owed the IRS hundreds of thousands of dollars. He owed the California Franchise Tax Board back taxes, and he had outstanding medical bills. Mark Rooney and his wife were taking donations to help Mickey meet expenses, but the money went out as fast as it came in. As a result, Mickey and Deedle arranged to sell autographs to fans at a show in California that would bring in thirty-five bucks, cash, each.

  Ray Courts, the godfather of the Hollywood autograph extravaganzas, featured Mickey in many autograph shows throughout the United States. Ray recalled in an interview with us, “It was quite sad. A man of his age should not have to resort to this after his fine and long career. He had the highest pension from SAG. However, he showed up once, on a Saturday, when he wasn’t scheduled. He needed to buy a plane ticket to Mexico where he was going to shoot a movie. He had blown [the] money [they’d given him for it] the day before at Santa Anita. So he came to the show to get the money for his airfare.”

  One can only imagine that his future might have been different if, according to producer Norman Lear, Rooney had accepted the part offered him: Archie Bunker in Lear’s All in the Family. Lear had called Rooney and offered him the plum role. After explaining the part to Rooney, the actor was taken aback. “Norm,” he told Lear, “this character is so racist, I’d be worried that they would shoot you down in the street.” This was in 1968, soon after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy.

  On April 6, just about a week after his scene in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde wrapped, Mickey, who had set up a marathon autographing session so he could send the photos to Nelson Deedle and other autograph dealers, sat down for lunch at the house he shared with Mark and Charlene. He told his stepson he wasn’t feeling well; was tired, short of breath, weak—all warning symptoms of heart disease. Mickey said he was in need of a nap. Mark told his stepfather he had to run errands, but that he would see him when he got up. When Mark came back from the store, however, Mickey still wasn’t up. Maybe he still wasn’t feeling well, Mark and Charlene thought. Time to check on him. It was just shy of three in the afternoon when Mark knocked on Mickey’s door. There was no response. Mark opened the door.

  He found Mickey still in bed in his room, but he was struggling for air. He was unresponsive, barely conscious, and his breathing was shallow and heavily labored. He seemed to be in great distress and gasping for breath. He was literally drowning in his own body fluid. Mark called 911, and paramedics responded within minutes. First, the EMTs tried to wake Mickey as they set up an oxygen flow. But he was still unresponsive, and the oxygen didn’t improve his breathing; his lungs were already filled with fluid. Finally, at 4:00 p.m., his breathing stopped completely, at which time the EMTs pronounced him dead.

  “AYE, BUT TIME IS short.” Mickey’s very prophetic and improvised line resonated in Dr. Jekyll. It would be his very last line in front of a camera in his very last movie.

  In a commentary on his life from his autobiography,5 Mickey writes, “Had I been brighter, the ladies been gentler, the liquor weaker, the gods kinder, the dice hotter—it might have all ended up in a one-sentence story.”

  Mickey had been a performer since the age of one and a half, when his father first dragged him onto a burlesque stage, where he wowed the audience. He had been minded by producers and studios throughout his teenage years, and then by a manager who used him as a cash cow until he was in his late thirties. He always played a version of the same character, whether as the telegram boy in The Human Comedy, the song-and-dance partner of Judy Garland in Babes in Arms, or Andy Hardy—until a cathartic moment when he portrayed the developmentally challenged Bill. He worked until a week before his death, no longer Andy Hardy but still a movie legend, eking out a living by playing any part offered to him by producers seeking a bit of film history. Mickey’s story is the story of show business in America, from a live burlesque house at the beginning of the twentieth century, through motion pictures, to television and beyond. And it all began in the drawer of a wardrobe trunk in a tiny room on Willoughby Avenue in Brooklyn.

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  Born in a Trunk

  Sonny Yule (at one and a half years old) with his father, Joe “Red” Yule.

  PHOTO COURTESY OF KELLY ROONEY.

  I was born into a burlesque family,” Mickey said in a Screen Actors Guild interview when he had turned eighty years old. “I was born into the theater.”

  In 1894 the
Ewells immigrated to America from Scotland with their two-year-old son, Ninnian Joseph. Ewell, born in Glasgow in 1892, would later change the spelling of his surname to Yule and drop the Ninnian. The young family moved to one of the toughest sections of Brooklyn, just south of Greenpoint, where, after two years, Joe’s mother, Alice, died of influenza. With his father working at whatever odd jobs he could find, Joe had to take care of his younger brother, Jimmy. The two learned quickly how to handle themselves on the streets and in their family’s cramped apartment on Willoughby Avenue.

  The Ewell brothers found easy money during amateur nights at the Alcazar Theatre and at Hyde and Behman’s. Joe showed a definite flair as a rough-and-tumble comic on the stage. At the age of twelve, he was spotted by a traveling burlesque show called Perry’s Dandies and was offered a job as part of the cast. He took along his brother, Jimmy, and the Yule Brothers, as they now called themselves, traveled in a similar circuit as the Keaton Family. Joe and Myra Keaton’s act was billed as the “Roughest Act That Was Ever in the History of the Stage,” and featured their young son, Buster, who was the same age as Joe Yule, and later became a good friend of his. Joe and Jimmy Yule tried to emulate the Keaton Family act, but their bookings were erratic; they simply hung on and scraped by. According to fellow burlesque comic and later television star Phil Silvers—he played Sergeant Ernie Bilko on The Phil Silvers Show—“Joe Yule played some burlesque houses with me. He was strictly second rate. Not a Rags Ragland [a popular burlesque comic and Broadway performer]. He was a schlep comic. He played all the second-rate joints. He was fucking drunk half the time . . . make it all the time.”

  Since Joe knew the routines as well as the bits of business that he’d seen in the other shows (standard skits such as “Crazy House” and “The Doctor Sketch”), he jumped at the chance to fill in wherever he could. And despite Phil Silvers’s assessment, Yule must have done a creditable job, because theater impresario Pat White ultimately made him the company’s “top banana,” or the starring act.

  The term top banana (and second banana for the comic sidekick) was coined by comedian Harry Steppe, whom many comics tried to emulate. His routines, including the famous “Slowly I Turned” sketch ( . . . step by step, inch by inch . . . ) and the “Lemon Bit”—both later used by Abbott and Costello and the Three Stooges, among others—were the gold standard for comics like Joe Yule. According to Mickey Rooney, his father stood in the wings as a prop man during several of Steppe’s performances and then later, in the tradition of most performers, used elements of the other comic’s act.

  Unlike his friend Buster Keaton, who was drafted, Joe enlisted in the army, in 1917; he served as a doughboy on the battlefields in Belgium. When he returned after the war, he had a difficult time finding any work as a performer. His brother, Jimmy, who had also served in the army, went to work in New York City’s Garment District, having left show business. But Joe felt at home in the theater and had no thoughts of leaving it. He had no responsibility other than to watch out for number one, so he quickly latched on as a property man, the stage hand in charge of managing props for the performers and the show, in Percy Williams’s vaudeville theater in Brooklyn. There were always jobs for young men who were willing to work the long hours. He then landed a gig as a prop man for a touring vaudeville troupe called Jack Reid’s Record Breakers, which was in Manhattan for a short stand. This job would involve travel, which Joe looked forward to. New places, new girls. And it was in this touring troupe that he would meet Nellie Carter, a young dancer.

  Burlesque of the early 1920s consisted of bawdy variety shows featuring dancing girls and comedy sketches much like what Abbott and Costello later performed in their “Crazy House” and “Who’s on First?” sketches, rather than the risqué strip shows it had morphed into by the mid-1930s. Mickey was defensive about the burlesque of the early twentieth century, and was known to point out that it was different from the later stripper-driven performances of Gypsy Rose Lee or Ann Corio, the faces of burlesque. He once wrote, “ ‘Your mother was in burlesque? What didn’t she wear?’ Such lines have no basis in the true history of show business or in the show biz lives of the Yules.”

  Mickey Rooney’s mother, Nellie Willa Carter, born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1893, was also a performer. The third child of Palestine E. “Palace” Carter, a coal miner, and Sarah “Sallie” E. Wait, Nellie had two older sisters, Maggie and Edna, and a younger brother, Harry. In 1899, when Nellie was just five, her mother passed away, and seven years later, her father died of lung disease. Nellie went to live with her older sister Edna, who by that time was married to a steamfitter for the local school, Wade Prewitt. Edna had just given birth to a young daughter, Margaret Elizabeth, and Nellie helped out with her young niece. Their older brother, Harry, had left to seek his fortunes elsewhere.

  Without having received any formal education, Nellie was still ambitious, and at fourteen grew restless in her sister’s home and started to resent being a nanny to Margaret. She wanted to travel, to visit the great towns in America and beyond. Nell heard from a friend about an opportunity for a dancer in a stage show called Miller’s Maidens. Nell loved to dance, and saw this as an opportunity to escape what she regarded as an empty existence. She auditioned and got the job as a chorus girl at what was, to her, an astounding salary of fourteen dollars per week. (She had been earning two dollars weekly in an S.S. Kresge dime store, the parent of Kmart.) Nell’s dream was to be like the great entertainer Lillie Langtry, who was earning a thousand dollars a week and appearing in first-class theaters.

  The act that Nell joined featured a small-time comic named Bobby Barker and Barker’s brother, Owen, as the piano player and the comic playing a “dope,” along with six dancing girls. They performed skits and songs accompanied by a four-piece band.

  Mickey recalled, “The band was not the Philharmonic and the company was not the Old Vic.”1

  For three years Nell scrambled around with the troupe, performing in small-town theaters throughout rural Oklahoma and Utah. After catching the eye of a fiddle player who was in a larger traveling burlesque company, he recommended her to his boss, Jack Reid, to replace one of the dancers who had left their revue.

  Jack Reid’s show, Jack Reid’s Record Breakers, was a huge troupe touted in ads as the “Largest Cast in Burlesque—50—MOSTLY GIRLS—50.” Their revue, which closely resembled the Ziegfeld Follies but was saltier, featured lots of dancing girls (also called “hoofers”), singers, jugglers, magicians, and suggestive acts, and had secured booking at the top theaters in the Midwest and East Coast on the Columbia Circuit, an association of theaters like today’s television station affiliates, where performers would be booked to tour. They played the venues where, Mickey wrote in Life Is Too Short, there “were sidewalks instead of cow paths and Indian trails around the theaters.”

  Nell was hired for the chorus line. There were usually two rows in a chorus line: The twelve tallest girls would dance in the back row and the twelve shortest girls in the front row. The back-row dancers were called showgirls, and the front row, ponies; the dancers at either end of the front-row line were called end ponies. Nell, who was five-foot three, became an end pony. She also appeared in bits with some of the comics. She loved the life of a theater vagabond and considered the troupe her “family.”2

  Nell stood out as the end pony, and was noticed by many reviewers. The Milwaukee Sentinel on June 27, 1918, wrote, “[T]here is a little redheaded pony on the left end by the name of Nellie Carter, who is one of the hardest workers in the business. She is little now, but if she continues for the entire season as she was for the opening, she will be about four ounces lighter than a cork.” Although many credit Rooney’s stage talent to his father Joe Yule Sr., it may have been Nell who had that great energy and charisma that Mickey exhibited.3

  FILM CRITIC ROGER EBERT first popularized the expression “meet cute” in his review and commentary for the DVD of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, whose screenplay he cowrote. Ebert described
the scene where law student Emerson Thorne bumps into the female character Petronella Danforth. Ebert admits that he, as the screenwriter, wrote into the script a “classic Hollywood meet cute.” He explains the meet cute as a scene “in which somebody runs into somebody else, and then something falls, and the two people began to talk, and their eyes meet and they realize that they are attracted to one another.” Think of James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan in the 1940 The Shop Around the Corner or Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the modern remake, You’ve Got Mail. It was essentially a meet cute for Nell and Joe.

  In a story Nell Carter told author Arthur Marx, Joe Yule had just started as a prop man for the Jack Reid show when Nell first met him backstage. She had sought out the new prop guy as she was about to go onstage because she needed a costume. But all Yule managed to dig out of his trunk was an evening dress large enough to fit a much heftier woman. Nell shook her head. “That’s no good,” she said. “I need a costume I can dance in, not get buried in.”