The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  Mickey was hitting his stride as he finished Captains Courageous. He was being sought after by the best directors, his films were proving to be big moneymakers for MGM, and he was being recognized as one of the leading juvenile male actors in Hollywood. The next film he was scheduled to shoot, was a “programmer” for director George Seitz. A programmer is another name for a B movie, a low-budget film that is used as part of a double feature to fulfill a studio’s distribution requirements to theater owners. B movies began when theater owners, who would book performers alongside films, asked studios for cheaper films to replace the more expensive live acts, the last vestiges of vaudeville.

  This B film, the first in the Andy Hardy series, would reunite Mickey with his Ah, Wilderness! costars Lionel Barrymore and Spring Byington in a family “dramedy” based on the Broadway play Skidding, and renamed A Family Affair. In it, he would play a character who would forever change his life.

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  The Make-Believe World of Andy Hardy’s America

  Lewis Stone and Mickey in Judge Hardy and Son (1939).

  PHOTO COURTESY OF THE MONTE KLAUS COLLECTION.

  In the midst of these ominous times,” President Bill Clinton said to his biographer, Janis F. Kearney, describing the lives in Arkansas of his mother and father during the late 1930s, “Americans found ways to forget their lots in life for moments, even hours, at a time. Some of the era’s most memorable movies . . . such as . . . the Andy Hardy movies . . . drew record crowds. Actors such as Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, and the Three Stooges became symbols of make-believe lives during that period.”1

  Bill Clinton saw that, for his family in Hope, struggling as they did during the Great Depression before World War II and years before he was born, an idealized world of a family run by a respected judge who had to wrangle his children, especially his son, who was straining at the leash, was not just entertainment; it was the promise of a dream. The Andy Hardy movies were for America what they became for their star, Mickey Rooney: a cornerstone.

  For seventeen films that spanned more than twenty years, Rooney was everybody’s all-American teenager/young adult. Rooney’s Andy was the standard, the ideal for every teenager not just in the United States, but worldwide. And that ideal would last intact right through the 1980s. Andy Hardy was the model child you wanted your child to emulate. He was the clean-cut all-American young man who was respectful to his elders, ambitious, patriotic, and pious. And for many children, Andy Hardy’s life in small-town America was the ideal life. Yet this was not the real Mickey Rooney, only a character.

  Although in real life Rooney had very few of Andy Hardy’s traits, and certainly none of the character’s background, he subconsciously became, at least in the public’s perception, the real Andy Hardy. By an early age, Mickey had seen it all. By age fifteen, Andy Hardy, however, was a refreshingly naïve teenager from a privileged, upper-middle-class midwestern family whose father was a judge and who had mundane worries.

  Actress Spring Byington (December Bride), who played Mickey’s mother in A Family Affair, Ah, Wilderness!, and The Big Wheel, always spoke fondly of this part of Hollywood history and Rooney’s role in it. She told author Alvin H. Marill, “His Andrew Hardy—that’s how I like to refer to him—was the idealized small-town teenager of the day, respectful, honorable, eager to please his parents and to have those father-son chats with the judge that were part of every film. Mickey was the perfect son that every mother of the time would have loved. That’s not to say that his public off-screen life, as laid out in the movie magazines of the ’30s and ’40s and the Hollywood columnists like news hens Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and later, Earl Wilson, Ed Sullivan and Sidney Skolsky mirrored that of the Judge’s son.”2

  The first appearance of the fictional Hardy family was at the Pasadena Playhouse in November 1926, in a two-week showcase called Skidding. Written by Aurania Rouverol, who was born in Utah in 1886 into an apostate Mormon family, the play featured the prototype of Andy Hardy, a character who would create a mold for the all-American teenager for the next ninety years.

  Aurania, according to her daughter, Jean Rouverol Butler, in an interview fifteen years ago, was an independent spirit who really “did not want a husband, just children, and was just looking for a sperm donor.”3 Aurania had married a bank teller in Utah in 1912, but left him after the birth of her son and daughter, to seek her fortunes in Los Angeles. “She just kidnapped us and left,” recalled Jean. Aurania was an early feminist who believed in her abilities. She never sought the “bourgeois life of the middle class.”4 In Los Angeles, she worked first as an actress, appearing in various silent films. But her true love was writing. After her play was produced at the Pasadena Playhouse, she was determined to succeed as a writer and moved with her two children to New York City, where she would attempt to find investors to help get her play on Broadway. Once she relocated, she supported herself as a script reader for the Shubert Organization. Within a year, she found an interested producer for her intergenerational-family drawing-room comedy, Skidding, in Hyman Adler, who then hired Marion Gering, a highly regarded dramatic director, to stage and direct the play. The action would be centered on only one set, the living room of Judge Hardy in “a certain town in Idaho” (the fictional town of Carvel).

  On May 21, 1928, Aurania Rouverol debuted Skidding, at the Bijou Theatre on Broadway, where her story of an Idaho judge, James K. Hardy, and his family captured a pre-Depression small-town family dealing gently and benevolently with the changing social values they had come to rely upon. It starred prolific character actor Walter Abel, who had played d’Artagnan in the film The Three Musketeers; Clara Blandick, later Aunt Em in The Wizard of Oz; and young Charles Eaton as Andy Hardy. (Eaton came from a famous acting family and was a top juvenile performer.) Skidding had an ignominious Broadway opening and was panned by every critic in New York City. Acerbic critic George Jean Nathan wrote in The American Spectator on May 22, 1928, “If this play runs longer than two weeks, I will resign my position.” The play was highly successful, lasting 429 performances before closing on July 17, 1929. (Nathan did not resign.)

  Jean Rouverol Butler recalled, “Although they papered the house for the first four weeks, inviting people to fill the audience seats, it caught on after that. Irving Thalberg bought the property and hired my mother to adapt screenplays in Los Angeles. It’s quite interesting that by the time they adapted Skidding, Mickey had a featured role as the youngest son, Tommy, who meets the Hardy family. The ironic aspect here is that the all-American Hardy family was really adapted by her son-in-law, my husband [Hugo Butler].”5

  Paradoxically, Hugo Butler, a highly regarded screenwriter for MGM, was later blacklisted by Senator Joe McCarthy in 1950, and exiled to Mexico with his wife for over ten years, along with Academy Award screenwriters Dalton Trumbo (Spartacus) and Ring Lardner Jr. (M*A*S*H). It was Butler, a strong proponent of the American Communist Party, who set the template for the seventeen Hardy films, beginning with the first, A Family Affair. He was also consulted on a majority of the later movies in the series. Thus, the Hardy series was created by a feminist who eschewed the traditional middle-class family values of small-town America, was adapted for the screen by a card-carrying Communist who despised the bourgeois values held by the Hardy family, and starred a rebellious juvenile from a dysfunctional family who was the very antithesis of his clean-cut on-screen character. Together they created the prototype for the American family that has resonated for generations, not only in motion pictures but in television situation comedies as well. Millions of families have striven mightily to model their lives on this fictional family who set the pattern for television families such as the Andersons of Father Knows Best, the Cleavers of Leave It to Beaver, the Stones of The Donna Reed Show, the Nelsons of Ozzie and Harriet, the Bradys of The Brady Bunch, the Keatons of Family Ties, and the Huxtables of The Cosby Show.

  Hugo and Jean, an actress as well a noted wri
ter along with her husband, shared their utopian radicalism and joined the American Communist Party in 1937. They were recruited by their friend, screenwriter Waldo Salt (The Philadelphia Story, Midnight Cowboy, Coming Home). Rouverol states in her autobiography, Refugees from Hollywood: A Journal of the Blacklist Years, “It wasn’t a difficult decision. The political climate encouraged it . . . [W]e had hoped that perhaps revolution was not inevitable after all, that a peaceful transition to socialism might be possible. But perhaps the most telling reason was that most of our friends, who were screenwriters, were already members.”6

  Hugo Butler wrote the screenplay for other Metro film classics, such as Young Tom Edison, which starred Mickey Rooney; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, also starring Rooney; Edison, the Man, with Spencer Tracy; and Lassie, Come Home, with Elizabeth Taylor.

  In 1935, Clarence Brown directed the screen version of Eugene O’Neill’s stage hit Ah, Wilderness!. Adapted by the great MGM writing team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, this coming-of-age story has the dark Jungian undertones typical of O’Neill’s exploration of the human psyche, in which he cantilevers the outward manifestations of his characters against their private and otherwise unseen (except to the audience) primal motivations. Yet it mostly captures the comings and goings of family life in small-town America on the Fourth of July in 1906. In 1935, America, as well as the boy at the center of the story, was coming of age, and even though it was not slated as a major film, Ah, Wilderness! would become a sleeper hit for MGM that year.

  In September 1937, Louis B. Mayer secured full control of studio production. Now, after Irving Thalberg’s death, Mayer would be able to shape the films at MGM to express his particular vision. Though Thalberg had produced MGM’s most prestigious ventures, he had just nixed a proposal to produce a film based on Margaret Mitchell’s soon-to-be-published book, Gone with the Wind. Although Thalberg said it would be a “sensational” role for Gable, and a “terrific picture,” he decided not to do it, saying, “No more epics for me now. I’m tired. I’m just too tired.” Thalberg famously told Mayer, “[N]o Civil War picture ever made a nickel.”7

  With Thalberg gone, Mayer was in control, and he wanted more profits, not break-even or money-losing prestigious artistic films. He maintained his control of studio production by sending hefty profits back to Nicholas Schenck, the chairman of Loews Inc. and owner of MGM Studios in New York—also a studio head for whom the bottom line was most important. Due to Schenck’s stringent management, MGM was successful, becoming the only film company that continued to pay dividends to stockholders during the Depression.8

  Mayer’s instincts were correct: The combination of Americana and the idealized family sold tickets. He’d seen how the film Ah, Wilderness!, which was made for under two hundred thousand dollars, had turned a huge profit, and he wanted another vehicle in that vein. MGM began reviewing all the properties in its library. It was writer/producer Sam Marx, the executive story editor at MGM, who recommended a film version of Skidding. Sam Marx told writer Arthur Marx:

  In 1928, I saw a play in New York called “Skidding” by Aurania Rouverol. It was a play about a small town and judge and his family and very charming. I remembered it when I moved to Metro in 1936 and decided I wanted it for the “B” unit at Metro, which was under the supervision of Lucien Hubbard. But I practically had to get him down on the floor with my knees on his neck to make him buy the play . . . Anyway . . . we picked up the property for something like five thousand dollars. Maybe less. But Hubbard had so little confidence in the project that he wound up letting me produce it under his supervision. And quite frankly, I had no feelings about it turning into a blockbuster either. I figured it was going to be a nice little picture.9

  When Marx and Hubbard presented the project to Mayer, he loved it. According to Marx, Mayer was reminded of his own provincial and proper childhood in St. John, New Brunswick. His father, Jacob Mayer, was much like Judge Hardy in his strictness; and as in the Hardy family, his word was the law. Mrs. Hardy reminded Mayer of his mother, in a gentile version. The story reworked his memories of his nineteenth-century Jewish family into a twentieth-century WASP version. But here was the oddity. For Mayer, desperately assimilating himself into American culture through his films, the underlying story of his 1937 A Family Affair was still subversive: corruption in American small-town politics challenges the moral rigor of Judge Hardy. Whereas Ah, Wilderness! was about psychological corruption (Uncle Sid’s drunkenness, Richard’s night of carousing after his romantic importuning is summarily rejected, and Essie’s seeming obliviousness to the metastasizing difficulties in her family), Skidding and its film adaptation, A Family Affair, had the undertones of financial corruption and how it tainted politics and even seeped into the heart of an otherwise upstanding American family.

  Mayer overlooked all this because the Andy Hardy story was pure Americana and afforded him an opportunity to feature the studio’s hot young juvenile, Mickey Rooney. It also had all the elements that had helped Ah, Wilderness! succeed. Mayer was, by this time, very impressed with Mickey. He noted to Sam Marx that Rooney had a bottomless well of energy and inventiveness to draw from. He felt the young actor had manic, cheerful dynamism.

  Skidding was not completely to Mayer’s taste. Mayer, governed as he was by traditional conservative values and by a longing, as most Jewish immigrants had in the early twentieth century, to assimilate into American society, albeit on their own terms, thoroughly disliked Aurania’s feminist and socialist values. He also did not like the stage-bound set of the property—the play was centered on one set, the Hardy drawing room, in and out of which characters made their entrances and exits—and wanted to see it reconstructed as more cinematic. And the dialogue was more declamatory than dramatic. Mayer thought it simply lacked cinematic value and needed to be broadened. To do this, Sam Marx summoned Hugo Butler, who had just met Aurania’s actress daughter, Jean. Thus, although he didn’t know it yet, the second film Butler would work on was the stage play written by his future mother-in-law.

  Most people at Metro were nonplussed by the Skidding project. The team in Howard Strickling’s publicity department, for example, referred to the Skidding adaptation as “that potboiler with Lionel Barrymore that the B-picture guys are working on.”10 Also there were no plans beyond this one film for Skidding. Writer Kay Van Riper suggested to the film’s producers, Sam Marx and Lucien Hubbard, that the title be changed from Skidding to A Family Affair, to reflect the Hardy family dominating the film. George Seitz, one of Mayer’s favorite directors was assigned to the project, and the MGM “family” was included in the production, including sound director Douglas Shearer, art director Cedric Gibbons, and musical composer David Snell, who created most of the familiar themes of the Andy Hardy movies.

  On February 3, 1937, Elizabeth Yeaman wrote in the Hollywood Citizen-News about the upcoming film:

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  MICKEY ROONEY JOINS CAST

  Mickey Rooney today joined the cast of “Skidding” at MGM, thereby completing the quintet of players who were featured in “Ah, Wilderness!” If the producers just added Wallace Beery, they would have the cast almost complete for “Skidding.” Furthermore, “Skidding” is planned as a human interest family comedy of the general type of “Ah, Wilderness!” It will have to be good to claim a corner in the same category with the Eugene O’Neill play. “Skidding” concerns a judge engaged in a political fight and his family. Lionel Barrymore will play the Judge, Spring Byington his wife, and the others are Eric Linden and Cecilia Parker.

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  Obviously, somewhere between February 3 and March 12, when the picture was shipped out, the name was changed to A Family Affair.

  Mickey told writer Alvin Marill that “Barrymore didn’t want to play the wise old Judge Hardy in a ‘b’ movie, but he, like everyone else, was under contract. One of the many actors MGM had on call. Since MGM had nothing else for Barrymore at the moment, he to
ok the part.”11 Mickey also said that the studio had originally cast child actor Frankie Thomas—a character actor in the Saturday matinee serials Tim Tyler’s Luck and Nancy Drew . . . Reporter, and a lead actor in the 1950s television series Tom Corbett, Space Cadet—as Andy, however, he was growing too fast, and he tested “too tall” for the part.12 For Mickey, height was “on hold” because he had simply stopped growing. Despite this, and even though Mayer was already impressed with Mickey’s talent, he was forced to screen-test for the part, to make sure he had the right look. Ann Rutherford, who later played Polly Benedict in the series, remembered, “They thought that having a short Andy Hardy would be a little more amusing and more touching.”13