The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  The McGuire series began with the release, on September 4, 1927, of Mickey’s Circus. This first McGuire film was written by creator Fontaine Fox himself and introduced the characters he had made famous in his syndicated strip. The cast of characters included the tough, cigar-smoking Irish kid Mickey McGuire, the title character, a streetwise leader of a gang called the Scorpion Club who got into trouble in each film and got out of it only by his wits.

  Mickey had a younger brother, Billy McGuire, who followed him around everywhere. Billy was portrayed by three-year-old Billy Barty, who was later known for his short stature—as an adult he was three feet, nine inches tall—and who went on to a long career as a character actor in film and television. (Mickey and Billy began a close a friendship that lasted until Barty’s death in December 2000.)

  We interviewed Billy Barty in Studio City, California, in 1994, at which time he described his first encounter with Mickey: when he was hired to play Billy McGuire. Barty remembered that he first met Mickey on the set of the first McGuire short. Like Sonny, Barty had appeared onstage with his parents, starting at two years old. He joked, “Mick loved me. I’ve been his only costar who had to look up to him.” He also told us, “I was with Mickey in many films and TV shows until recently [1994], when we were in the Western The Legend of O. B. Taggart that Mick wrote. He also had our school friend [from the Lawlor School for Professional Children] Gloria DeHaven in the film. Mick was always someone I looked up to. I literally was always bowled over by the awesome talent that was part of him . . . he just never stopped. We were kids together, and now we find ourselves as old men together. And even as old men we were kids.”8 Billy McGuire, though sometimes regarded by his older brother, Mickey, as a nuisance, was always loyal, and in films such as Mickey’s Race, it was Billy McGuire who saved the day.9

  Mickey McGuire’s sidekick in the short films is an African American named Ham, actually Hambone Johnson, portrayed by Jimmy Robinson. His is a stock character out of the minstrel show tradition, an exaggerated stereotype. While Mickey McGuire often exploits Ham, making him do impossible chores, Ham is loyal, even though he often asks Mickey why he has to do the things Mickey tells him to do. When we look back on the Hambone-McGuire relationship, we should remember that this was the era of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, Jim Crow laws across the South, and the Ku Klux Klan. It was a different America.

  Every great hero has to have an antagonist: Hector to Achilles, Lex Luther to Superman, the Joker to Batman, Megyn to Rachel, Reggie to Archie, Sharon Waxman to Nikki Finke. Mickey McGuire’s antagonist is Stinky Davis, a wealthy, arrogant, snobbish son of the Toonerville mayor, Henry Davis. Stinky makes life miserable for Mickey and the members of his Scorpions, deriding them and challenging them at every opportunity. But time and again, in the tradition of the hero, Mickey manages to turn the tables on Stinky, pulling off the impossible without Stinky’s even realizing how Mickey does it.

  Actress Delia Bogard portrayed Tomboy Teri Taylor, the only girl in Mickey’s gang who, though wearing a dress and bloomers, is treated exactly like the boys and holds up her end, particularly in a fight—and there are more than enough fights in the Mickey McGuire films.

  The strongman of the group is a character named Katrink, whose remarkable strength belies his normal size. When there is a situation requiring someone to lift an impossibly heavy object in a moment of crisis, that job falls to Katrink.

  Mickey’s Circus boasts many firsts. It was the first starring film role for Sonny Yule. It was the first of seventy-eight Mickey McGuire films by Darmour, and the first for Al Herman, who directed or oversaw the production of many of those films. It was also the first entry to feature a four-year-old “midget,” as little person Billy Barty was then known. It is also the first of many “lost” silent film comedies that will be restored, in this case through a partnership between the San Francisco–based National Film Preservation Foundation and the esteemed EYE Filmmuseum of Amsterdam, after a print of the film was discovered in the Netherlands.

  Film professor and historian Lou Sabini commented, “The discovery of Mickey’s Circus in the Netherlands has excited many serious collectors of silent film and was highly sought after. It is our first glimpse of an important film icon, Mickey Rooney. It gives the film scholar a peek at his skills in his first starring role at the age of six. In the film, Mickey and his gang create their own circus, with Rooney as the ringmaster. It is apparent that he has the charisma and energy to be the central character and to carry the spotlight. It really is an amazing debut. I am rather excited to view a restored print of the film, as it is considered to be a classic. Interestingly, Mickey was billed as Mickey Yule—for this film only. He became Mickey McGuire in all the following films.” Sabini also said that Mickey’s popularity launched Darmour into other short films.10 The writers for the McGuire series were Joseph Levering, George Gray, E. V. Durling, and noted silent comedian Larry Semon. Al Herman continued to direct most of the shorts, even as he also started directing some full-length feature films for Darmour. His assistant, Jesse A. Duffy, replaced him for a few entries, along with Earl Montgomery. Sabini added, “The money from the McGuire films allowed Darmour to eventually start to move beyond the shorts and to create low-budget features that utilized his own studio space on Santa Monica Boulevard. This is an early indication of then–Sonny Yule’s potential star power and his role as an earnings machine, which would ultimately help to sustain MGM through the Depression.”

  The McGuire shorts became one of the first licensed character sets from print cartoon to make it into a live-action film series. In so doing, it became one of the first of what would become a number of “Mickey Rooney firsts” over the ensuing eighty-five years of his career, firsts that would transform the entertainment industry.

  According to Sonny’s costar Delia Bogard in a 1989 interview, the McGuire films, most of which were filmed on location in what is now North Hollywood, were more like playing than working. “We played on camera,” Bogard said. “And we played in between scenes, too. . . . It was fun.” The Mickey McGuire clubhouse was in Studio City, right behind Republic Studios, and the cast named it the Scorpion Club. There were no stand-ins back then, Bogard remembered, “So Mickey, Billy Barty, and I did our own stunts.” It was rigorous, she said, because the McGuire films were all about action, even after they began making talkies in the 1930s. They had plenty of stunt gags, physical stunts reminiscent of burlesque humor, such as pies in the face. “We had to stand there and take the pie right in the face with our eyes wide open,” Bogard said. In films such as Mickey’s Circus, and many others, the cast had to work with animals of all kinds. “We worked with chickens, goats, bears, alligators, and even a lion. But the lion was toothless, and that helped a lot.”11

  There was an incredible amount of energy on the set, Bogard remembered, primarily because Sonny Yule and Billy Barty played off one another so well, each infusing the other with energy. The films were packed with action, and that helped pump up the energy. Also both Sonny and Billy Barty had the ability to act the clown when a scene called for it. After a scene, Bogard said, “watching Sonny and Billy play off each other, the crew would be so entertained they would actually clap because they were so happy. These would be one-take scenes. If they had to do two, the second one wasn’t so good.” Mickey himself said years later, “I always played it for the laughs.”

  “I DID TWO HUNDRED twenty Mickey McGuire comedies”—only seventy-eight shorts, or two-reelers, each running for twelve to eighteen minutes, were produced—Mickey boasted in his 1980 SAG interview, “and we used to shoot them in two days per picture.” Full-length features back then, he said, were shot in eight to ten days.12

  “I remember the Larry Darmour studios well,” Mickey told his SAG interviewer. “It was a rickety old building in Hollywood where the production offices were. I went for lunch there one day, and they had a bunch of broken-down offices. I could see a silhouette in one of the offices. I was dressed in wardrob
e. I had my big shoes on, my derby hat, my checkered shirt. I was dressed as Mickey McGuire. The silhouette was moving and I called out, ‘Hello.’ I opened the door and said, “I’m Mickey McGuire, what is your name, sir?’ He said, ‘My name is Walt Disney.’ I said, ‘I don’t know you, Mr. Disney.’ He said, ‘I want to show you something.’ So he took me into his office and said, ‘Sit on my knee. I want to show you this picture.’ So I climbed up on his knee, and he showed me the picture of a mouse. I said, ‘It’s a wonderful picture, Mr. Disney, what do you call him?’ He says, ‘Mortimer Mouse.’ And I said, ‘That’s wonderful.’ And he said, ‘Thanks, Mickey,’ and he stopped and said to himself, ‘Mickey.’ Then he looked directly at me and said, ‘How would you like it if I named this mouse after you, Mickey Mouse?’ And I said, ‘I’d like it, but right now I have to go and get a cheese sandwich.’ That is a true story that happened when I was about seven.”13

  There was never confirmation from Walt Disney, Disney Studios, or any other source to verify this story. Walt Disney always claimed that his wife suggested the change of name from Mortimer to Mickey Mouse. The source of her inspiration was never identified.

  For nearly six years, Sonny worked constantly, creating more than twelve shorts per year as Mickey McGuire. Darmour and Herman encouraged him to talk his very worst. “The tougher he gets to be in real life,” Larry Darmour told the surprised Nell, “the easier it’ll be for him to play Mickey McGuire.” Over the course of the productions, Sonny Yule rarely had a minute to himself as he trudged from scene to scene.

  His schooling before Darmour hired him was almost nonexistent. Back in Kansas City, Sonny had been homeschooled by Nell and her sister, Edna, although neither was well-schooled herself. Then, when he got the part of McGuire in 1927, Nell was forced to enroll him in public schools, in accordance with California law. Months after he entered the local public school, Nell finally had the funds to place him in the Lawlor School for Professional Children, which gave them the flexibility to work at the studio. Lawlor compensated for Sonny’s missing kindergarten, first grade, and nearly most of second grade.

  The Mickey McGuire shorts were a huge hit from the very moment audiences saw Mickey’s Circus. But for young Sonny Yule, the shooting was a grueling experience, with Darmour and his directors driving the cast as hard as they could to churn out as much footage as they could in the amount of daylight they had. In essence, given the heavy physical nature of the McGuire films, the schedule amounted to flogging them to perform scene after scene.

  The series made Larry Darmour very wealthy and put his studio on the map—albeit as a Poverty Row producer, but lucrative enough to allow Darmour and his wife to build a beautiful beach house and an estate in the Hollywood Hills. While it didn’t make the Yules wealthy like Darmour, Nell and Sonny were enjoying more prosperity than they had ever experienced. With $250 per short and ten shorts per year, they earned about $2,500 annually. During the summer breaks, usually about ten to twelve weeks, they’d tour the country, with Sonny making personal appearances on the B. F. Keith–Orpheum vaudeville circuit as Mickey McGuire, performing some of the material he’d done on the burlesque stage and mimicking his McGuire bits, and thus merchandising himself and the McGuire name. Keith-Orpheum had just been acquired by Joe Kennedy and RCA chairman David Sarnoff. To allow Nell to tour with Sonny and to set up the Keith-Orpheum deal, Darmour demanded a fee of $1,500, a backdoor form of a license fee for use of the character’s name and a kickback because Sonny was a Darmour contract player. Nell reluctantly paid up, even though Sonny’s personal appearances proved to be far more lucrative than his weekly salary from Darmour. At one particular venue, Sonny and Nell were paid about $2,500 for a three-day stint. Nell usually demanded some cash under the table as well, cash she could pocket and not have to report to Darmour. As she told author Arthur Marx decades later, she did not have high hopes that this McGuire “gig would last very long, and we needed to make hay while we could.”14 This was only one of the reasons Nell resented the $1,500 she was forced to pay to Darmour to do the vaudeville tour, and she subsequently sought to raise the fee that Sonny would be paid for each McGuire picture.

  In early 1931 the McGuire films made the changeover to talkies, and through Sonny’s agent, Harry Weber, Nell demanded a raise to $500 per short. To make their point, Sonny, held back by his mother, did not show up for work on two of the shorts, which included the 1931 Mickey’s Helping Hand, for which Darmour cast Katrink actor Marvin Stephens in the role of Mickey McGuire. Audiences came away unhappy, and after numerous complaints from the theater owners and from RKO, Darmour acquiesced and gave Sonny his raise. By this time, Sonny essentially ceased being Joe Yule Jr. As Mickey told us, “I was being called Mickey anyway by everyone after the first couple of pictures. Even my mother took to calling me Mickey, and so did my friends and teachers at school.”

  The new technology of sound posed a huge problem for Darmour: The cost of wiring the studio for sound was astronomical. Many of the Poverty Row studios were forced out of business. Yet heads were rolling at every studio, as the inevitable talkie revolution ended careers and devastated studios financially. Full-feature dramatic films were the first to see the change, in 1927, with the inaugural talkie, The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, but the comedy shorts lagged behind. The Roach Studios, by this time the premiere studio producing comedy (with Laurel and Hardy, Our Gang, Will Rogers, and others) was still doing well in 1928 with silents. However, Hal Roach knew he needed to wire the place for sound, and made the changeover in mid-1929.

  Larry Darmour knew he also had to make the change, to compete with Roach, so in late 1929 and early 1930 he had his studio converted to sound. It was easier and cheaper for Darmour than for other film production companies: RKO was far more technologically advanced than many of the studios, since it was partly owned by RCA, whose labs had created its own systems for sound on film. David Sarnoff, one of the founders of RCA and ultimately the National Broadcasting Company, had worked for the Marconi Company in radio and understood the technology of audio capture and distribution.

  Sound offered another problem outside of cost: talent. Some actors could handle the changeover to speaking dialogue; others did not fare so well. Our Gang comedies, for instance, were completely recast in 1929 to accommodate child performers who were adept at reading lines. But the McGuire films made only one change: Delia Bogard, was replaced by Shirley Jean Rickert, who had previously been in the Our Gang films. Delia Bogard later reflected, “I completely understood when I was replaced. I no longer fit the part. I really had grown close to Mickey, Billy, Mavin, Jimmy, and the others. We were like a family. I knew I had outgrown the part and I knew it was just a matter of time for Mickey to be booted as well. Billy could go on playing his part forever.”15 (Delia went on to perform onstage as a dancer, and appeared in some supporting film roles.)

  Actress Shirley Jean Rickert had gained some notoriety as the “blonde girl with the spit curl” in the early sound films of Our Gang. When Darmour offered her mother the astounding sum of $225 per short to join the McGuire films, she jumped at the chance. Rickert played Tomboy Teri for the last two years of the series. Lou Sabini talked to Shirley Jean Rickert in 2002 about her work with Mickey. She said, “It was a lot of fun working on those films. Mickey and Billy were also sweet, but Mickey was always pulling off pranks. He was always fun.”16

  As sound films impacted film production, Darmour was looking at ways to cut costs even though he had already acquired a reputation as a low-budget, shady producer. Actor Sidney Miller, who worked for him on the Mickey McGuire series called him “a real angle-shooter. He always was looking for how to connive. He paid my parents under the table for me to work for him when I was free even though I was under contract to Warner Bros.”17

  By 1930, Darmour was clearly getting tired of paying the thousand-dollar royalty to Fontaine Fox for use of the Mickey McGuire name. With Sonny Yule now being recognized, even in vaudeville, as Mickey McGuire, Darmour t
hought up a scheme to change Joseph Yule Jr.’s name legally to Mickey McGuire, thus demonstrating that he needed no copyright for the McGuire films, even though he had contractually agreed to pay Fontaine Fox a license fee for the characters. Darmour insisted that Nell change her son’s name, saying he would pay her a seventy-five-dollar weekly salary if she agreed.

  Thus, on November 16, 1931, Joseph Yule Jr. and his mother, Nell Carter Yule, through Darmour’s attorney at Loeb and Loeb, petitioned the local Los Angeles County court to change their names from Joseph and Nell Yule to Mickey and Nell McGuire. Thus, Sonny briefly became Mickey McGuire. However, Fontaine Fox knew that Darmour was attempting to avoid paying him his per-picture royalty—and he was correct. After the name change, the checks stopped coming.

  In a copyright lawsuit filed against the Yules, Darmour, Al Herman, and RKO Films, Fontaine Fox charged them with fraud. Darmour answered the claim with a countersuit, asserting that Mickey McGuire had the right to use his legal name as an actor. It took over two years for the court to decide the issue. In May 1934, the court found in favor of Fontaine Fox. The litigation settlement awarded damages to the owner of the cartoon character, and compelled the twelve-year-old actor to refrain from calling himself Mickey McGuire on- and off-screen.

  THE MICKEY MCGUIRE SERIES had become a financial success, surviving the advent of sound, and maintained its popularity for seven years, often rivaling Hal Roach’s Our Gang series. In fact, the McGuire films were distributed well into the 1940s, and RKO used the shorts as a bargaining chip when negotiating with some of its B movies, forcing theater owners to take lesser low-budget RKO films if they wanted the McGuire two-reeler. It was an early example of what would become known as block booking, a system perfected in the 1930s by Adolph Zukor at Paramount. The barter was popular with theater owners, who’d market the eighteen-minute short films in order to sell the low-budget RKO films that came with the “block” of films they’d received. Ultimately, the popularity of the Our Gang films, with their stronger television distribution, forced the McGuire series into obscurity. Today the McGuire films are remembered mainly by film historians or film buffs, eclipsed as they have been in people’s minds by the Our Gang films.