The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  The theater audience exploded in laughter, and everyone was amazed at this four-year-old’s ability to think on his feet. Sonny repeated this feigned error at every performance after that, with consistently successful results. Before long, he had every adult performer wishing the boy had not been given that special work permit by Governor Al Smith.

  In the 1920s the Pat White troupe traveled throughout the East, Midwest, and even into southern Canada. The troupe stayed in cheap show business boardinghouses, cooked in their rooms, and lived an itinerant existence. And this became Sonny’s preschool education.

  THE BURLESQUE THEATERS THAT Joe, Nell, and Sonny Yule worked in were not at all like the later version of burlesque, performed by strippers such as Gypsy Rose Lee, Betty Page, and Tempest Storm, who reigned from the 1930s to the 1960s—the type of burlesque that many remember from the stage and screen version of the musical Gypsy. The burlesque the Yule family appeared in from around 1912 to 1928 was far tamer and far less risqué. Nell once told writer Arthur Marx, the son of Groucho Marx, her thoughts on the burlesque she appeared in: “Our burlesque was very different. In Jack Reid’s Record Breakers, you had to be able to dance. You couldn’t just go out and show your body.”

  At that time, it was a much cruder version of vaudeville. The sketches were far broader and the songs were louder. The ticket prices were also much lower than those for vaudeville or the legitimate stage. Burlesque’s appeal then was more to the masses of immigrants and the blue-collar folks, who loved its over-the-top humor.

  The Yules and Pat White’s Gaieties worked for shows on what was called the Columbia Wheel, also known as the Eastern Burlesque Wheel as well as the Columbia Circuit, an organization that booked burlesque shows in American theaters between 1902 and 1927. The burlesque companies would travel in succession around a circuit of theaters, which ensured steady employment for performers and a steady supply of new shows for the participating theaters. For much of its history, the Columbia Wheel advertised relatively “clean” variety shows featuring pretty girls. Eventually, though, the Wheel was forced out of business due to competition from cinemas and from the cruder stock burlesque companies.9

  William Friedkin’s 1968 The Night They Raided Minsky’s, starring Jason Robards Jr., Forrest Tucker, a young Elliott Gould, and veteran Bert Lahr, depicts the era in burlesque in which the Yules worked. It gives a realistic view of burlesque in 1922, and is loosely based on the legendary Minsky brothers, who produced burlesque shows at the Little Apollo Theater on 125th Street. The film succinctly depicts end ponies like Nell and top bananas like Joe Yule. Many of the famous performers of the day, such as Bert Lahr, W. C. Fields, Red Skelton, Sophie Tucker, and Fanny Brice got their start in burlesque. At one time, the Wheel had more than 350 affiliated theaters. However, by the late 1920s, motion pictures had irreparably damaged burlesque. By 1927 the Wheel was down to 44 theaters. Yet in the early 1920s, musical revues such as Minsky’s dominated the burlesque circuit, and Sonny Yule, at age four, was just beginning to flex his entertainment muscles.

  Sonny was now a performer in his own right—and now often billed as “Red” Yule, reflecting his shock of red hair. With his fame eclipsing that of his father, he was becoming the star of the family, and Joe Sr. was harboring deep resentment. Nell spoiled Sonny. If there was money for just one steak dinner in the dining car, Nell would insist that Sonny, not her husband, get it, while she and Joe dined on cheese sandwiches. If Sonny tore his suit, they’d splurge on a new one for him, even though their clothes were getting threadbare.

  Joe began to despise his son and wife. His drinking and womanizing were severally curtailed because of his professional and family responsibilities. He missed several shows due to his drinking, but was kept employed by Pat White thanks to the popularity of his son, who had become a valuable member of the troupe. Pat White often used Sonny as a shill in front of the theater, hawking the show, along with his appearances. As Mickey remembered, his spiel was “You, sir! Have you seen our show? Twelve beautiful dolls, the notorious Red Yule, Sid Gold, and Sonny Yule, and the music of Harry Humphrey’s orchestra. Yes sir, step right up! Only a few seats left . . . down front.”10

  Joe remained angry at the world. He and Nell constantly argued. According to Arthur Marx, who interviewed Nell extensively, Joe Sr. was also physically abusive. He would often wander off after the show and not return till morning, smelling of “cheap perfume and liquor,” which would usually set off a row between the Yules. Sonny knew that his father was a drinker. Joe would say hurtful things to him when he came home drunk: “Everyone loved me, right?” Rooney remembered. “Except maybe my father when he was drinking.”11

  During one of the shows, Sonny, during a costume change, discovered his father with one of the showgirls performing fellatio on him. He let out a loud screech that brought Nell running to see if he was all right. “I had always thought that my dad had a problem with Punch, not with Judy,” Mickey recalled. After Nell discovered the tryst, she and Sonny went to Kansas City to live with her sister, Edna, and Edna’s husband, Wade Prewitt. They lived in a neat little house that had the amenities that Sonny was not used to after living in boardinghouses and hotels, such as a kitchen and a backyard. Nell and Sonny no longer had to worry about using the Sterno to cook in their boardinghouse bedroom. Sonny got to play games with the neighborhood children. Edna, who was fifteen years older than her sister, was almost like a grandmother to young Sonny. Her daughter, Margaret, at nearly twenty, was already grown.

  Eventually, Nell missed Joe and attempted a reconciliation in Chicago. She left Sonny with Edna in Kansas City, and for a while Nell and Joe traveled together in Pat White’s show, but Joe returned to his drinking and his women. He had enjoyed being single and carefree in Nell’s absence. After several breakups, Nell brought Sonny back with her for one more try. Not that Joe had requested to see his son or had missed him. “He didn’t give a rat’s ass about me. I was always that ‘goddamn kid’ to him,” Mickey recalled.

  Finally, after another bender by Joe, Nell announced that she could not go on any further. At the Chicago train station, where they were heading off to do another show, she instead bought tickets for herself and Sonny back to Kansas City. She told her husband, “Joe, we can’t go on. This isn’t fair to Sonny.” She reached into her crocheted boodle bag, counted out the family savings of forty dollars, gave Joe his half, gave him a last kiss, and left on the afternoon train. Joe gave her no argument. Sonny was not disappointed that Joe didn’t come running after them. “I was tired of him growling at my mother and [my] spending half of my life crawling under beds or behind sofas and cupping my palms over my ears so not to hear the drunken brawls. My mother told me that I wouldn’t blame her for not seeing my dad anymore. I said, ‘Good.’ ”12 Yule hooked up with another stock company that was based out of Chicago, and Nell filed for divorce in Kansas City on the grounds of desertion. Sonny would not see his father again for another eight years. But Mickey explained, off and on through his life, his father taught him a lot about show business, even though, he joked, “You never learn from your parents.” For a while, Nell was comfortable being back home and living a domesticated life. For the present, Sonny was simply the child, albeit a talented child, of a broken family.

  Nell carefully put away Sonny’s and her costumes, and Sonny went to kindergarten, a four-year-old has-been. His mother found work as a telephone operator, but that lasted only a few weeks. She then decided to open up a restaurant with her friend Myrtle Sutherland, whom she had known from childhood. The restaurant specialized in home-cooked meals and featured fried chicken and hot biscuits. The restaurant was a moderate success not because Nell was such a good cook, but because the price was right. At Nell’s restaurant, you could get a whole chicken dinner, including a glass of beer, for twenty-five cents.

  Kelly Rooney, Mickey’s eldest daughter, remembers fondly her grandmother’s fried chicken. “Nanny Nell was such a character. She used to play all kinds of tricks on u
s to make us laugh. But her fried chicken dinners were so incredible.”

  Rooney said he enjoyed his life in Kansas City in 1924. His Uncle Wade took him fishing for catfish while his Aunt Edna spoiled him with wonderful meals. “I loved the smell of catfish that Uncle Wade and I had caught, frying in Aunt Edna’s big black skillet. She would cook me a wonderful bowl of Cream of Wheat in the mornings . . . going with them to the Circle theater and seeing the silent movies there . . . eating hot buttered popcorn and the ride back home on the streetcar. In the summer evenings, we’d sit in the living room and wait with the front door wide open for the tamale man to come by on his bicycle . . . it was very idyllic.”13

  Nell, however, was bored. She missed the excitement of show business. Reading the trade news in Variety religiously, she was convinced that her Sonny had the makings of a star in the movies. When she read that producer Hal Roach was casting for child actors for his new series called Our Gang, short films about a group of rowdy kids who keep getting in and out of trouble, she convinced her business partner, Myrtle, to go with her to California. They could sell the restaurant, buy a car, and take their chances in Los Angeles. Myrtle, who was also single, “paused and looked around her and adjusted her apron, flecked with blood and stinking of chicken gizzards and livers. Then she said, ‘When do we leave?’ ”14

  It took four weeks for them to drive to Los Angeles from Kansas City. They wanted to preserve what little money they had, so they roughed it on their journey west: They slept in a pup tent, bought food and cooked it on an open fire along the road, and rented roadside cabins for only fifty cents per night. Sonny claimed that Nell even caught a rabbit, near El Paso, Texas, and cooked it over a mesquite fire.

  The three eventually reached California and rented a cheap apartment, using up their meager savings. Nell took Sonny to the casting call at Hal Roach Studios that she had read about. The assistant director told her they would hire Sonny for five dollars per day as a background actor; the other kids were getting twenty to twenty-five dollars per day. Sure, this was the reason she’d brought Sonny to Los Angeles, but five bucks a day was not enough for them to live on, she thought. She turned the job down. By Christmas, they were flat broke. They had to move to where the work was. In Oakland, Nell took a job as a chorus girl, which paid only twenty-five dollars per week. Nell just couldn’t make ends meet. She sold Myrtle her share of the Model T they’d bought together, and she and Sonny returned to Kansas City to live with Edna and Wade.

  In Kansas City, Nell ran into one of her old friends, Dorothy Ferguson, who was also a chorus girl. Dorothy introduced her to George Christman, who managed a theater in Kansas City and was trying to put together a burlesque troupe to tour the West. He hired Nell as an end pony, and agreed to allow her to bring Sonny on the tour. As Mickey remembered it, “There were eleven of us in two cars. We slept out of doors, not in a tent this time, but right out under the stars . . . this time it only took us eleven days.”15

  The show failed quickly, and once again, Nell and Sonny were broke and living in Los Angeles, where the tour had ended. Nell knew she was getting too old to be an end pony and that the only future they had in the business was through Sonny’s talents. However, there were thousands of kids auditioning to be the next Jackie Coogan, the child star in the Charlie Chaplin film The Kid. Casting directors didn’t see Sonny as right for the parts he went up for, and he was rejected at every audition. Nell was desperate and ended up taking a job as a telephone operator once again. She also managed a bungalow court, which paid no money but gave them a place to live. While she worked days, Sonny kept occupied at the Daddy Mack Dance Studio on Melrose Avenue, where Nell had enrolled him. Daddy Mack was a short, overweight former dancer who taught the fundamentals of dance to kids hoping for a chance he advertised to “make millions like Coogan.”

  Another former vaudevillian, Will Morrissey, ran a school for hopeful child stars and was also casting a small musical revue at the Orange Grove Theater on Hope Square in downtown Los Angeles. Although there was no room for Nell in the chorus, she did meet lifelong friends actresses Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell there, and Morrissey hired Sonny at the casting call when he performed his old favorite “Pal of My Cradle Days.” Sonny was paid the whopping salary of fifty dollars per week, which was sorely needed.

  Sonny was singing for the Morrissey revue when fate stepped in. Famed Los Angeles Times drama critic Edwin Schallert had seen the show and took notice of Sonny crooning his song. He singled him out with a special mention in his review. Schallert was the father of noted character actor William Schallert (The Patty Duke Show, True Blood, Desperate Housewives, How I Met Your Mother, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine). In an interview with us, William Schallert, who was around Sonny’s age, remembered his father being shocked at the talent of such a young child.

  Nell thought that this was their big break. She quit her jobs as a telephone operator and managing the bungalows and moved them into a small cottage complex, called the Bugs Ears, on Burns Avenue, just above Hollywood Boulevard. However, the job with the Will Morrissey Revue lasted only five weeks. Unemployed again and with their funds dwindling to nothing, Nell and Sonny went on dead-end casting calls all over the city. They were desperate. “We’d been reduced to eating rutabagas for dinner. If I didn’t land something soon, we’d be eating dandelions,” Mickey recalled.

  It was about the same time that I lost my innocence. When the money stopped coming in, my mother got desperate. I wasn’t even six years old, but I knew something had changed. Mother started to see a lot of different men, entertaining them in our little apartment. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and hear the tinkling of glasses in the front room. Next night I’d hear whispers and sometime squeals and moans. Once, I got up and peeked around a hallway corner into the dimly lit living room to see some money changing hands. Carefully, quietly, I tiptoed back to my room and threw myself on my bed and covered my head with my pillow. I know, my dear mother, you did it for me.16

  This no doubt affected Sonny. There are countless studies of children who become aware of their mother performing as a prostitute. It destroys childhood trust, destroys loyalty, and engenders a feeling of insecurity in the child. Dr. Ana-Maria Mandiuca wrote in the study, “The Impact of a Prostitute Mother on the Child Life Circumstances” that in the long term, “mothers anticipate the risk of marginalization of their children as future adults if they would be informed of the mother’s occupation. In addition, experts identify the risk of developing deviant behaviours in the sphere of their sexual life, as future adults.”17 One only has to look at the careers and family backgrounds of some of our country’s most notorious serial killers, such as the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, as examples of Dr. Mandiuca’s assessment.18

  Ohio child psychologist Dr. Marcia Crowne told us about the effect of the mother being recognized by her child as “selling herself” for monetary gain: “In short, there are certainly risks for substance abuse of your own; certainly a lack of boundaries; higher risk of childhood sexual, physical, and emotional abuse; higher risk of a lack of education; higher risk of intimacy issues; higher risk of early sexual activity of your own; statistically no high school diploma; statistically a much lower chance of post high school or adult education. In Mickey’s case, there is no question that it had a major effect on his relationship with women and his own children that may have manifested in his lack of responsibility or authority. With eight children and eight wives and countless other relationships, he certainly is a textbook example of this syndrome.”

  Fate stepped in again when, in response to Edwin Schallert’s review in the Los Angeles Times, Fox Films sent a scout to watch young Sonny. He was hired on the spot after Nell convinced the casting director that Sonny already had a tuxedo from his days in burlesque and, thus, the studio cold save money on his wardrobe.

  Sonny Yule’s first film was a Fox two-reeler, Not to Be Trusted, released in 1926. Mickey played a con man and a midget. According to Mic
key (but otherwise unconfirmed), his costar was the burly Bud Jamison, a veteran comic who had appeared with the likes of Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Stan Laurel, and who would later became part of the Columbia shorts stock company and a familiar face in countless Three Stooges films. Jamison took a liking to Sonny, and was an early influence on the boy. Mickey told us, “Bud knew my Pop and had worked with him. He taught me how to play to the camera.”

  Mickey recalled in an interview with film historian Alvin H. Marill, “I was a midget and a con man who worked with a crack burglar that was played by Bud Jamison. I pretended to be a kid and an orphan that was up for adoption by a rich couple, even though I was really only six.” Nell was on the set with Mickey, of course, and it was there that she met actress June LaVere, who had a small part in the film as a maid. LaVere had a notorious reputation as the mistress of a very wealthy Los Angeles Cadillac dealer, Don Lee, who also owned a radio station. Nell and June became close friends, and June was a great source of news and juicy Hollywood gossip for Nell. She was also a great influencer in Hollywood, and recommended Sonny to her friend director Al Santell for a role in a big-budget film at the Vitaphone Studios, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. The film was Orchids and Ermine and starred Colleen Moore, a major star whose films were eagerly awaited by fans. Santell and his assistant, the future director Mervyn Leroy, both appreciated Sonny’s talent and were pleased that he had his own wardrobe of suits. They hired him on the spot. Now, by his second film, Sonny was getting typecast as a midget.

  Santell wanted Sonny’s look to be as authentic as possible, so he brought in Warner Bros.’ legendary makeup artist Perc Westmore to turn Sonny into an adult little person. (Perc was the head of the studio’s makeup department for more than thirty years. He later performed his magic on Paul Muni in the original Scarface, Errol Flynn, Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, Jimmy Cagney, and many others.) Mickey recalled, “He did my face, pasted a small mustache on my upper lip, and then covered it with glue. I can still smell that glue. It must have had ether in it or something like that.”19