The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  For his part, Mickey said of the Hardy family, “Andy had a father who was a small-town judge as honest as Abe Lincoln, and a mother who was as sweet as my own. The Hardy family was so clean Andy only shook hands with her.”20

  However, one should not dismiss the series as Depression-era feel-good fluff from the Metro factory. It had one of the greatest impacts in movie history. Author and film historian James Robert Parish wrote in his book The Great Movie Series that the Hardy films were “geared to have strong but restrained humor, set in a sensible and warm atmosphere. Slapstick and wisecracks were carefully avoided in the homey series. Judge Hardy’s success with his children was due to his ability to be a guide, philosopher, and friend. In his heart-to-heart, fireside talks with his son, he moralized without being intolerably sentimental or sententious. The teamwork of the repertory group among the Hardy clan was hard to beat.”21

  By the summer of 1937, it was clear that the Andy Hardy films were becoming a significant money grab for MGM. Mayer and the Loews shareholders were getting rich from this profit machine—MGM received a neat two million dollars in clear profit on You’re Only Young Once—and the future seemed limitless. Everybody was doing well except Mickey, who was still stuck at his five-hundred-dollar weekly salary. No more, no less. Nell, who was aware of the huge earnings MGM was making, in part because of her son, made her move.

  Since Harry Weber’s illness, David Todd had been in charge of Mickey’s career at the Weber Agency. Nell was advised by all their friends that Mickey was being shortchanged. She hired noted Hollywood attorney Martin Gang to help Todd renegotiate the seven-year pact Mickey was being held to with MGM. Gang, of the law firm of Gang, Kopp, and Brown, had a list of high-powered clients including George Burns, Bob Hope, Olivia de Havilland, Myrna Loy, Lucille Ball, and Frank Sinatra.

  Kopp, Nell, and David Todd met with Nick Nayfack, the head of business affairs for Metro. Nayfack reminded Nell that MGM had taken a chance and hired Mickey when he was basically a “nobody.” Gang got Nayfack to admit that Mickey was grossly underpaid. MGM finally agreed to a $250 raise above the base salary of $150 he was receiving. But Nell was still unhappy.

  Enter the powerful head of the William Morris Agency, Abe Lastfogel. “Uncle Abe” came to visit Mickey and Nell and told them that the Weber Agency and David Todd were neither prepared nor able to provide the clout necessary for a star the caliber of young Rooney. Lastfogel sent gifts, took Nell and Mickey to lavish dinners, and even suggested that he could get Fred Pankey, Nell’s new husband, a well-paying job. Eventually, after much wooing, Lastfogel won, and in January 1938, after more than ten years with Weber, Mickey switched to the William Morris Agency.

  Immediately, Lastfogel launched a campaign to get Mickey a new deal at MGM worthy of his star power. He would constantly call Mannix, Nayfack, and even Mayer himself. One of Lastfogel’s “lieutenants,” Harry Friedman, on July 20, 1939, wrote an extensive memo to Lastfogel that contained a concise breakdown, picture by picture, of how MGM was ripping off Mickey. The actor was receiving a base $3,333.33 per film, plus the bonus that Martin Gang negotiated in 1938, for a total of $5,000 per picture. This amounted to $15,000 per year. It was the ammunition that Lastfogel needed to fight Mayer. He went directly to Mayer and told him how “unhappy” both Mickey and Nell were. With Mickey’s contract nearing completion, Mayer was not going to take a chance on the actor leaving and going to one of his rivals. Thus, at the end of 1939, Mickey received a new three-year contract that was a definite improvement. Under the new pact, Rooney would receive $1,000 per week, guaranteed for forty weeks the first year; $1,250 per week the second year; and $1,500 per week for the third year. Moreover, MGM held the option for four additional years, beginning at $1,750 per week and raised incrementally to $3,000 per week by year four. Mickey would also receive a $25,000 per-picture bonus with MGM and a guarantee of no fewer than two bonuses per year.22

  Mickey, only eighteen, was protected under the Coogan Law until he was twenty-one. This California law to protect child actors was written after child actor Jackie Coogan was left broke by his mother and stepfather. Thus, two-thirds of Rooney’s money would be put into an irrevocable trust fund in the California Bank, not to be touched until he was sixty years old. The other third went into a separate trust for Rooney’s mother. Nell was also allowed $800 per month for living expenses for herself, and Mickey was given $100 for his own use.23

  From the bonuses, Mickey and Nell bought a rambling two-story Spanish-style house on Densmore Drive in Encino for $75,000. It was near Clark Gable and Carole Lombard’s ranch. The house was on five landscaped acres with walnut, lemon, and orange trees throughout the property, and the customary swimming pool. Tour buses and sightseers’ cars provided a constant stream of traffic passing the house. According to Arthur Marx, “The way Nell decorated the house on her own with contemporary Barker Brothers furniture. It really was rather ordinary.”24

  Despite the new contract terms and the bonuses, it still was not enough financially. The agents, attorneys such as Martin Gang, and his associates took their substantial cuts; and then there was the commission to William Morris. A memo from Martin Gang to MGM requested that “all taxes on moneys paid into Mickey’s trust fund and on Mickey’s contract salary should be paid from the trust; also all commissions payable on the moneys payable into the trust should be deducted.” Gang noted that this was necessary because it was “impossible for Mickey and his mother to get along on his $40,000 per year salary under their present set-up, for under present existing conditions they are in the red approximately $6,500 after taking into consideration all their necessary expenditures.” So, after starting at $150 per week at Metro and making about $7,800 in 1934, with all the new raises and bonuses, Mickey and Nell were now struggling on more than $100,000.25 As Arthur Marx told us, “Who would have dreamed that there would come a time when being $6,500 in the red would look pretty good to Mickey?”26

  The Andy Hardy character was indelible to Mickey Rooney, and he remained Andy Hardy to many fans worldwide almost seventy years later. Upon Mickey’s death, reporter David Hinckley in the April 7, 2014, New York Post wrote, “Mickey Rooney was still Andy Hardy to Americans, despite a life of turmoil. Despite a life with more wreckage than Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears combined, Mickey Rooney somehow never stopped being Andy Hardy.” As Karen Kramer, the widow of producer Stanley Kramer, told us, she grew up watching Andy Hardy and had a schoolgirl crush on Rooney. When she saw him decades later at an anniversary celebration of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, he was Andy Hardy all over again.

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  Mickey and Judy and the MGM Backyard Musicals

  Mickey and Judy in one of the backyard musicals.

  PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBERT EASTON.

  Judy turned to drugs because she was in pain and because drugs made her feel good. As one of the MGM kids, she’d been treated for most of her life to magical, instant, solutions to everything . . . She could never accept herself so she was always on the run.

  MICKEY ROONEY

  Sometimes movie history is made when the chemistry of two stars acting, singing, and dancing together explodes across the screen, and the totality of their joint performance exceeds what either one has done individually. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers both performed in solo roles, Ginger winning an Oscar for Best Actress for the 1940 Kitty Foyle, and creating a lasting character in Roxie Hart, but together in movies such as Top Hat, Flying Down to Rio, and The Gay Divorcee, Ginger and Fred were beyond magic. Studios look for such combinations. The protosexual friction between Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn generated a flashing electricity as they played off each other for over thirty years, and the on-screen romantic interplay between Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in Joe Versus the Volcano, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail was an expression of pure happiness as the two conveyed to audiences the belief that love will always find a way. But one of the most exciting song-and-dance
combinations in motion picture history was that of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, friends since they were students together at Ma Lawlor’s Professional School in 1930 and continuing their friendship when both became contract players at Metro.

  Mickey entered the MGM system a year earlier than Judy, and was almost immediately propelled to the edge of stardom by A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His career quickly accelerated, while Judy was used only marginally. They both attended the studio school together, and remained schoolmates and friends. Mickey was two years older than Judy, which at that age was a wide chasm, and they were more like childhood siblings than a romantic couple.

  Thanks to a deal Mayer struck with Judy’s agent, a former bootlegger and pimp named Frank Orsatti, Garland was earning three hundred dollars a week. Mickey, at that time, was paid five hundred a week plus some minor bonuses. But the money they would soon earn for the studio when they began performing together would eclipse that of many of the other romantic pairings at the studio, because both entertainers possessed the ability to play off one another psychically, going beyond what the screenplay and the director called for.

  The ten movies that Mickey and Judy appeared in together, which were all at MGM, under their studio agreements, were: Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (1937), Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938), Babes in Arms (1939), Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940), Strike up the Band (1940), Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941), Babes on Broadway (1941), Thousands Cheer (1943), Girl Crazy (1943), and Words and Music (1948).

  Rooney’s and Garland’s chemistry was obvious to Louis Mayer from their very first performance in the 1937 Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, which generated such a positive audience reaction that Mayer and his ad hoc board of advisers (referred to as the College of Cardinals) were convinced that they were looking at sheer magic, something that went beyond acting. The two were playful and innocent, a pair of friends joyfully cavorting together captured on-screen and framed so beautifully that it became abundantly clear to Mayer and his top execs that this combination should go on for as long as audiences wanted. Although Louis Mayer, when presented with a pitch for a new film, liked to pull out box office figures from similar features and look at the numbers to predict a bottom line, he sometimes allowed himself to be engulfed by the magic of a really good film. And that’s what happened with Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.

  In the film, for the first time in her career, Judy Garland (whose previous film was Broadway Melody of 1938, in which she sings “You Made Me Love You” to a Clark Gable photo) received top billing. Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry was the first MGM film for Ronald Sinclair. A Motion Picture Herald news item on July 31, 1937, noted that, in the picture, Douglas Scott was to replace Freddie Bartholomew, Mickey’s frequent costar and the leading male juvenile lead at MGM, who at the time was involved in a contract dispute and lawsuit with Metro. Also, much to Mickey’s delight, parts of Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry were shot on location at Santa Anita racetrack, Mickey’s home away from home. Even though the film did not have a huge box office return, Mayer, to his credit, quickly recognized the magic and electricity created by Garland and Rooney in their scenes together. The Hollywood Reporter, on March 17, 1938, wrote that a sequel to this film was to be made entitled Thoroughbreds Together, which never occurred.

  Louis Mayer knew what he was watching was pure gold, and upon his directive, Judy was rushed into the Andy Hardy film Love Finds Andy Hardy, to exploit her chemistry with Mickey. Judy was an instant romantic fit, playing Andy’s platonic friend Betsy Booth, who desperately wants more than friendship with Andy. Then came Judy’s monster hit The Wizard of Oz, after the filming of which she was rushed into Babes in Arms, along with her Oz costar Margaret Hamilton. Based on the 1937 Broadway play by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Babes in Arms was adapted and tailored to both Rooney and Garland, with added songs by Oz composers Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, and by MGM composers Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown.

  Produced by Arthur Freed, Babes in Arms was written by Jack McGowan, Kay Van Riper of the Hardy writing team, and Annalee Whitmore, and was directed by Busby Berkeley in his first film at Metro after gaining fame for his work at Warner Bros. Curiously, most of the Broadway songs written by Rodgers and Hart were cut, except for the title tune, “The Lady Is a Tramp” (later made famous by Frank Sinatra), which was used as background music during a dinner scene; and Garland’s heart-stopping rendition of “Where or When.” Freed and Brown wrote a new song for the film, “Good Morning,” that later gained more notoriety in Singin’ in the Rain as performed by Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds. Babes in Arms, which also featured one of the best tap dance numbers of Mickey Rooney’s entire career, became a huge hit, one of the ten biggest of the year, earning almost four million dollars in the domestic gross and nearly two million in pure profits. At nineteen years old, Mickey was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor.

  The film version of Babes in Arms showed audiences something vibrantly new and bursting with excitement. Just watch Mickey at the head of the throng of teenagers in Babes, leading an army of youth, marching in optimism and joy even during the throes of the Great Depression. While their parents might have scrounged for pennies to buy the next bottle of milk, here was an entire generation rising to the music. Sure, they did not know what lay before them: war, bodies piled on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, the incineration of entire cities, death camps. These were our parents who fought that war for us, and now they’re gone. But on that screen, with that music, with that joy, captured on celluloid in majestic chiaroscuro, they are forever young.

  Mayer’s instincts about pairing Mickey and Judy had been correct. The film proved to be a triumph, and Mayer saw dollar signs for a Garland and Rooney team. He now had Judy with the Oz film, and Rooney with the Hardy films and a slew of other features, all returning large revenues for the studio as audiences showed no letup in their desire for more Rooney and more Garland. Accordingly, Mayer rushed into production Strike up the Band, with the same creative team, now supervised by Arthur Freed, whom Mayer believed was a genius. MGM empowered its recent steal from Warner Bros., flamboyant director/choreographer Busby Berkeley, to realize his vision by staging elaborate routines featuring Mickey and Judy and the band they sought to have perform on a national stage. The next two films, Babes on Broadway (1941) and Girl Crazy (1943), employed the same team. Babes in Arms (1939), those two, and Strike up the Band are often referred to as the “backyard musicals.”

  Berkeley and Garland had several blowout arguments during filming of the backyard musicals, after which the studio removed him as director. However, Rooney was amused by Busby. Mickey wrote, “He was hard on all of us . . . he could be quite charming with his flashing eyes and a smile that warmed everyone around him . . . [H]e had an alcoholic’s perfection . . . [B]oth vaudeville kids, Judy and I were troupers enough not to complain. This is after all, what we lived for. If we weren’t working, we’d have complained. But we did work.”1

  Film historian Lou Sabini remarked to us that “Those films, which have been called the ‘backyard musicals,’ were considered to be low-budget musicals for MGM, while it certainly would have been a major production for most other studios. These films were about teens putting on a show that spotlighted not just the leads but various other young performers who were part of the MGM studio system. The concept, which started strong, started to wear thin.”2

  Producer Arthur Freed clearly wanted to duplicate the first film, Babes in Arms, in its two sequels. Fred Finklehoffe, who had created the second outing, Strike up the Band, wrote a carbon copy for the final film of the backyard quartet, Babes on Broadway. Burton Lane wrote the music for the songs, with Arthur Freed’s brother Ralph and E. Y. “Yip” Harburg as the lyricists for various numbers. Freed would write the score’s biggest hit, “How About You,” but Harburg would have the more lasting relationship with Lane, with whom he would later write the Broadway hit musical Finian’s Rainbow. In order to introduce a wider variety of musical style
s into the score, Freed assigned Roger Edens, Garland’s longtime mentor at MGM, to arrange the score.

  Berkeley kept things hopping in Babes with his elaborate staging of the production numbers. He spent days endlessly rehearsing before shooting, in marathon sessions that upset the front office by going over the projected budgets. At one point, Louis B. Mayer even sent his minions to the set to see why Berkeley was belaboring the shooting schedule. Berkeley got rid of them in his usual way: He climbed on the camera boom and had technicians raise him so high that the executives couldn’t talk to him. After they left, he got the entire number on the first take, releasing the company early for the day and saving the studio thousands of dollars.

  Toward the end of the musical series, the critics were beginning to notice that the stars were getting a bit old for this “gee whiz, let’s put on a show” theme. Rooney was now involved with Ava Gardner, and Judy had her own love interest. Thus, by the last of the backyard musicals, Babes on Broadway, it was obvious that the child stars Garland and Rooney had clearly grown up off-screen. In fact, during the third week of filming Babes on Broadway, Garland eloped to Las Vegas with composer David Rose. She asked for a few days off for a honeymoon, but Mayer forced her back on set the next day, disappointed that she had deprived him of the chance to garner publicity with a lavish wedding. Meanwhile, Rooney’s soon-to-be first wife, Ava Gardner, was watching him perform in Carmen Miranda drag, on her first day at the studio. This was Hollywood after all.