Filming went smoothly, except when Mickey, as in the script, bit off the end of a cigar. As he bit it, his front baby tooth fell out. The director was upset, until Nell replaced the tooth with the piece of the gum she was chewing. Since this was a silent film that didn’t require any dialogue, the problem was solved.
Assistant director LeRoy was quite impressed with young Sonny Yule. “I’m going to write a lot of gags for you, kid, you just wait and see,” LeRoy remarked.20 For his one day of work, Sonny was paid seven dollars.
This second film helped Sonny get noticed and signed by agent John Michaeljohn, who managed to place Sonny in some local vaudeville shows where he sang his standard “Pal of My Cradle Days,” but he was ultimately unable to land Sonny any film roles, so he released him as a client. It turned out to be a huge break, because in came Harry Weber. Weber was a successful agent and manager for several actors, including the legendary comic Ben Turpin. His posh fourth-floor offices on Wilshire Boulevard impressed Nell and Sonny. Weber was convinced the young boy had the right talent to be successful in films. As Mickey described him to us, “Harry looked more like an ex-boxer than an agent. He was kinda stocky, bald, and had this long crooked nose.” He went on to say, “We called him ‘Hurry-up Harry.’ He always called my mother and said, ‘Hurry, Nell, and get the kid to Metro,’ or ‘Hurry, Nell, and grab the streetcar, hurry, hurry.’ We actually moved to an apartment on Hoover Street so we could be closer to the bus and streetcar lines due to Harry.”
With Weber, Nell made another attempt to get Sonny cast in Roach’s Our Gang comedies. Weber set up a meeting with the then-director of the series, Robert McGowan. McGowan liked young Sonny but felt he just wasn’t right for the part, and didn’t hire him. Weber continued to send Sonny on countless auditions. In fact, Sonny and Nell were running around so much to make auditions that the boy didn’t have time to go to school. He and his mother were struggling just to survive, and frankly, education was not considered a matter of importance.
In the meantime, Nell and Joe Sr.’s divorce had become official in 1925. Besides Nell’s “special dates” to earn much-needed money, she was not seeking a new beau. However, around early 1927, her friend June set her up on a blind date with a car salesman who worked for her “benefactor,” Cadillac dealer Don Lee. Nell’s date, Wynn Brown, sold used cars for Lee at his downtown Los Angeles lot. Tall and good looking, he was about seven years younger than Nell and, more important, single, having been divorced. He had a son about Sonny’s age who lived back in Indiana, where Wynn was born in 1900. Wynn was attracted to the vivacious Nell and instantly bonded with her young son.
Nell married Wynn in 1929, and they moved into a tourist bungalow facility, a motel with separate cabins, near the Los Feliz area, which they also managed. Mickey recalled, “He liked my mother and he liked me. He didn’t seem to mind when Nell came down to see him with me in tow, and many a night. Before they closed the lot at ten p.m., I would fall asleep in the backseat of her car as they talked . . . Wynn Brown and I became good friends . . . Wynn and I palled around together. He took me fishing, to baseball and football games, prizefights and wrestling—just about what the doctor ordered . . . slowly, but surely, I came to love Wynn Brown and I asked him if I could call him Dad. He held me close and said, ‘Your real Daddy wouldn’t like that.’ He paused. I said nothing. I hardly even thought about my real daddy. I didn’t remember much about him. Then he said, ‘But if you want to call me Dad, I don’t think anyone will tell him.’ So Wynn Brown became my dad.”21
Then there was a break: Weber signed Sonny to a long-term contract with First National Pictures, a former association of theater owners that had formed its own film studio that merged with Warner Bros. in 1928. (Its banner was used by Warners in its promotion until 1938.) It seemed the deal would finally place Sonny on the cinematic map. On December 7, 1926, Hollywood insider Jimmy Starr wrote of Sonny Yule in his Cinematters column in the Los Angeles Record: “Wonderful actress Colleen Moore said she discovered him as a new actor with her in Orchids and Ermine and the tyke gets a long term contract just for that.”
Unfortunately the deal was short lived. Sonny was released from the contract without being placed in any roles, and it is not clear why the studio never used him. This attempt to break into film became yet another dead end.
Once again things looked bleak for Nell and Sonny, but then Weber saw an ad that intrigued him. Placed by film producer Larry Darmour, the ad called for child actors to play characters from cartoonist Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Folks, and it portended a fame that would ultimately change Sonny’s life and provide the stability Nell was looking for.
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Mickey McGuire
Mickey McGuire promotional photo, 1929.
PHOTO COURTESY OF G. D. HAMANN.
In 1908, illustrator and cartoonist Fontaine Fox had an inspiration. He described the moment an article that later appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on February 11, 1928: “After years of gestation, the idea for the Toonerville Trolley [initially called Toonerville Folks] was born one day up in Westchester County when my wife and I had left New York City to visit Charlie Voight, the cartoonist, in the Pelhams. At the station, we saw a rattletrap of a streetcar, which had as its crew and skipper a wistful old codger with an Airedale beard. He showed as much concern in the performance of his job as you might expect from Captain Hartley when docking the Leviathan.”1
Toonerville Folks centered on a cast of characters in a sleepy suburban town and its trolley car, which met the trains coming up from New York City. There was Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang, the Physically Powerful Katrinka, Little Woo-Woo Wortle, Aunt Eppie Hogg (the Fattest Lady in Three Counties), and Mickey McGuire, the town bully. The strip got its start in 1908 in the Chicago Post and was very popular from the beginning. In 1913 it was picked up for national syndication by the Wheeler Syndicate (and later, in the 1930s, by the McNaught Syndicate) and ran for nearly fifty years.
There were Toonerville silent film adaptations for Philadelphia’s Betzwood Film Company. These starred Dan Mason as the Skipper, with Wilna Hervey as Katrinka. There were about seventeen made altogether, and the series ended in 1922.
Fox, wanting to keep his films coming, continued to shop his characters from the Toonerville Trollies to Hollywood. Around early 1927, Hollywood producer Larry Darmour approached Fox about creating a series based on the McGuire character that would resemble and contain elements of Hal Roach’s immensely popular Our Gang shorts. Film critic Leonard Maltin commented, “During its heyday, the Our Gang series was imitated by numerous fast-buck producers of which the most successful was Larry Darmour. Darmour’s Mickey McGuire comedies had almost every element of the Our Gang comedies from Roach. However, its popularity and longevity could be attributed to the presence of Mickey Rooney. There were other similar rip-offs of Our Gang, which had various degrees of success. One series, The McDougall Alley Kids, . . . patterned itself so closely after Our Gang that the black youngster was named ‘Oatmeal’ [Our Gang had Farina].”
Larry Darmour, born in Queens, New York, to James F. Darmour and Julia Ducey on January 8, 1895, was the filmmaker who started Sonny Yule’s career in motion pictures. He was an innovator who learned about the functionality of the motion picture camera, understood its importance and value, and built his own apparatus, one that was lighter and was more portable, to record events. In 1912, at age seventeen, he took his idea to Frank Reich, one of the production heads of the French Gaumont Film Company, which had started a division in New York City, and became their first American cameraman. Later he would secure a more lucrative job with Myron Selznick and his Selznick Newsreel.
Larry Darmour joined the army in 1917, where he gained a reputation as a daredevil cameraman and captured great footage during World War I. After the war, he was sought after by every newsreel company as the preeminent newsreel cameraman. He also met a California beauty, Alice Whitaker, who convinced him t
o move to Los Angeles, where he first worked for Paramount Pictures and Adolph Zukor. But the ambitious Darmour wanted more, and sought to create a film production company in the tradition of Hal Roach and Mack Sennett.
His production unit’s first attempt at a series failed miserably. The films were copycats of popular comics such as Harold Lloyd and Fatty Arbuckle. For the Harold Lloyd knockoffs, he hired actor/writer/director Al Herman. Herman had been in films since the teens and had worked extensively with Western film actor Bronco Billy Anderson, where they were the only Jews cast in a Western.
Larry Darmour, one of early entrepreneurs of silent short films, made his movies on a tight budget and thus became one of the producers working in what was known as Poverty Row (what today would be called B movies), more a descriptor than a location—though many Poverty Row production companies were located along Gower Street in Hollywood. Although most of the Poverty Row studios were gone by the early 1950s, succumbing to the economic competition from television and the Hollywood antitrust case (United States v. Paramount Pictures2), which barred studio ownership of exhibition theaters, studio owner Harry Cohn’s Poverty Row studio ultimately morphed into Columbia Pictures.
Darmour had been a writer and cameraman for cowboy actor Fred Thomson, who was starring in films for the Film Booking Offices, run by Joseph P. Kennedy. Thomson introduced Darmour to Kennedy, who approached Darmour with an idea for kids’ shorts similar to the Our Gang series, which was already becoming popular in the era of silent films. Darmour suggested using the character Mickey McGuire from Toonerville Folks as a basis for the shorts. Kennedy told him he would finance both the licensing of the rights to the cartoon characters and a separate production unit, run by Darmour, to shoot the films to be released through Pathé. And thus Darmour Studios was created, and Darmour sought a character-set license to exploit the Toonerville characters from Fontaine Fox.
Darmour—whom film critic and historian Leonard Maltin characterized as a “fast-buck” low-rent, low-budget, churn-out-as-much-as-you-can-in-the-shortest-amount-of-time studio head3—set up shop on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood at what used to be Pacific Film Laboratories. With his studio facility in place, Darmour approached Fontaine Fox, who licensed, in the form of a lease, the character Mickey McGuire for the series at a thousand dollars per short. However, as a precondition for granting the license, Fox demanded and received final approval for the casting of McGuire.
MORE THAN TWO HUNDRED seventy-five child actors showed up for the audition. Sonny Yule was one of them. At that time, Sonny was unemployed. He had been working for five dollars a day for the Hal Roach Studios—until Nell demanded more money, and he was fired.
Nell and Sonny caught a break when a talent scout friend of Nell’s tipped her off that a producer was casting for the part of the “tough kid” for a series based on Fox’s Toonerville Folks. Although Weber had spotted the ad for the casting call, it was Nell’s friend who brought it to her attention. The scout told Nell that Sonny was sufficiently tough and homely enough to qualify for the role.4 Nell agreed to bring her son to the casting director, but when Sonny came home from school that day, he was more eager to play with his friends than audition for a part. Yet Nell was not about to give in. Money was tight, and she had just been fired from her job as a telephone operator, a job that was keeping the two of them fed and sheltered while she looked for parts for Sonny. To persuade her son, she laid out on a table several Toonerville Folks strips from newspapers and said, “We’ve got some studying to do.” She showed him the Mickey McGuire bully for which he was to audition, slowly reading the strip dialogue to him, and made him study every detail of the character. By bedtime, Sonny knew Mickey McGuire as well as himself—because the character was much like the Sonny character he had played on the burlesque stage.
The next morning, Sonny and Nell arrived at the Darmour Studio only to find the outer office already jammed with other stage mothers and their sons, all eagerly waiting for their turn to audition. Nell looked around at the boys, many of whom looked like they could easily play McGuire. Every one of them had dark black hair, just like the McGuire character in the strips. Then she looked down at her son and decided that she could not have him test for the part with his blond hair. She didn’t want the studio moguls to have to use their imaginations to visualize Sonny as a brunette. In a moment of great inspiration, she jumped up from her seat, grabbed Sonny’s hand, and dragged him out of the office to the shoeshine stand on the studio lot, where she explained her plight to the bootblack. When Sonny returned to the audition, he was no longer blond.5
Back in the studio waiting room, a dark-haired Sonny and Nell now waited patiently for their turn to be tested. One by one, the other boys and their mothers were called into the office. Each time a new candidate was summoned, Nell said a silent prayer, putting the hex on the unsuspecting moppet. She watched as, one by one, each boy left the office head down, having failed to satisfy producer Larry Darmour and director Al Herman. (Al Herman had worked for Hal Roach Studios and had become good friends with one of Roach’s most valuable assets, director/writer Robert McGowan of the Our Gang series.) The perfect Mickey McGuire was the key element to the success of the series, so a lot hinged on selecting the right young actor. Nell was heartsick, not out of compassion for the losers, but at the idea that Sonny might be rejected, too. She said another silent prayer.
Finally, late in the afternoon, Sonny was summoned. If Nell had entered that room with trepidation, Sonny was bursting with his usual confidence that shone like a bright light. First Al Herman, who was casting the talent for McGowan, interviewed Sonny. He then led the boy to a brightly lit stage with a barnyard set. He quickly explained to Sonny the action for the test scene. Herman wanted to closely monitor Sonny’s ability to focus and concentrate, as McGowan had taught him.
When Herman yelled, “Camera!” Sonny sneaked around the corner of the make-believe barn, his tiny face emitting impish charm while wearing the rough, tough scowl Nell had coached him to wear in mimicking Mickey McGuire’s aggressive character. Then he sat on a box and, crossing his short legs, pulled a rubber cigar out of his pocket and started to chew on it like an inveterate smoker. Al Herman was impressed. He called, “Cut,” and then told Nell and Darmour, “Let’s try him in costume tomorrow.”
Early the next morning, when Nell brought Sonny back to the studio, he was outfitted in the derby, checkered shirt, and ragged trousers associated with the Mickey McGuire character. Now in wardrobe, he returned to the stage and repeated the scene from the previous day, strutting, swaggering, scowling, and chewing on his rubber stogie with a confidence and toughness that exuded McGuire, the camera laying down Sonny’s every move on film. The following morning, when Darmour, Fox, and Herman viewed the screen test, they knew they had the Mickey McGuire they’d been looking for. Fox was certain that the millions of fans of the comic strip would instantly recognize and fall in love with this kid as McGuire. They were ecstatic, and phoned Nell to bring Sonny back to the studio for a third day. Out came the shoe polish again.6
What they did not realize, even though they might have interviewed Nell about her son’s experience, as well as Sonny, was that by six years old, Sonny Yule was already a seasoned performer, with a repertoire of characters to draw from, while most of the other boys who had auditioned for the part didn’t have any—and certainly couldn’t compete with Sonny Yule, who at the time he auditioned for the role of McGuire, was working for a local vaudeville show.
“Your boy was great in the test,” Al Herman told Nell.
Darmour told her, “We want to sign him to a five-year contract.”
Because Nell had kicked around in the business since she was a teenager, she was not going to sell her son cheap. She saw the excitement in Darmour’s eyes.
“How much does it pay?” she questioned.
“Fifty bucks a week,” Darmour responded.
Nell decided that this was too important to handle herself and called Sonny’s age
nt, Harry Weber, to come immediately to the Darmour Studios to help her negotiate. After some brief haggling, Darmour agreed with Weber to a salary of $250 per short film. And after the meetings were over, there was this exchange:
“Of course there’s one thing, “Herman said. “Before we can actually finalize a deal.”
Nell looked worried. “What’s that?”
“Sonny’ll have to have his hair dyed black,” Herman grinned. “That shoe polish is not going to fool anyone.”7
ONE REASON FOR WHAT would quickly become the success of the Mickey McGuire series was that McGowan was a natural with kids. He knew just how to explain scenes and comic business to his young actors to elicit convincing performances from them. Al Herman secured his job as the director of the McGuire shorts because of his friendship with McGowan. Darmour paid McGowan around five hundred dollars per short, under the table, to help Herman develop the early scripts and for suggestions in emulating and recreating the Our Gang essence in the McGuire shorts. It was this legendary McGowan touch passed along to Al Herman that helped make the McGuire series a huge hit.
With Sonny now cast in the title role of Mickey McGuire, Darmour put in place the financing for the series. Through Joseph Kennedy, Darmour secured both the distribution, through Kennedy’s FBO Studios, and later through RKO, and the funds to produce the films. (He was already shooting a low-budget domestic series called Toots and Casper.) The goal was to shoot the series for less than $7,500 per short—cheap, even for 1927—and look for a quick return. Darmour, as he did throughout his career, sought to create a carbon copy of other popular film series and cash in on its similarity. Most of the series he created had a short shelf life, lasting less than a year.
The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney Page 6