The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  Babes on Broadway marked the film debut for Margaret O’Brien, who recalled to the authors, “It’s rather remarkable that my first film was with Mickey and his last film was with me. A stunning coincidence. He was just such a great person and performer, right until the end.”3

  By the time Babes on Broadway was released, in late 1941, critics were complaining that both stars needed to take on more adult roles. Audiences loved them regardless, and though the film was a modest hit in comparison to Babes in Arms, it still wound up in the black for the studio. Even though it saw the box office decline for Babes on Broadway, the studio was undaunted in reuniting the Babes team for another go-round, casting Rooney and Garland, and attaching Berkeley as director, for Girl Crazy later that year.

  During this period, Mickey and Judy were at the mercy of Louis B. Mayer. E. J. Fleming, in The Fixers, writes that the studio ruthlessly exploited Judy in Babes on Broadway, and he later told the authors, “Judy, like Mickey, became a slave to MGM. They had them on a brutal work schedule. Babes [on Broadway] was completed in thirty-one days, along with publicity and personal appearance schedules that they undertook to maximize their value to the studio. Mayer, to keep Judy going and to keep her weight down, was given the drug Benzedrine, commonly known as speed, and to give her energy.”

  Judy was quoted by Paul Donnelley in his biography of her: “They had us [Mickey and Judy] working days and nights on end. They’d give us pills to keep us on our feet long after we were exhausted. Then they’d take us to the studio hospital and knock us out with sleeping pills—Mickey (Rooney) sprawled out on one bed and me on another. Then after four hours they’d wake us up and give us the pep pills again so we could work 72 hours in a row. Half of the time we were hanging from the ceiling but it was a way of life for us.”4 In an interview with the Daily Mail Online republished on September 3, 2014, by Caroline Howe, Judy said of the pills, “That’s the way we got mixed up. And that’s the way we lost contact.” In this way, both Mickey and Judy were being stretched to the limits by the studio, and revealed it publicly only years afterward.

  Just as the studio would later assign Les Peterson to watch over Mickey, and Eddie Mannix to supervise Peterson, Mannix assigned Betty Asher to watch over Judy. It was the studio’s way to keep their teenage stars managed and, most important, working through their rigorous filming schedules as if they were on an assembly line. As William Asher, Betty Asher’s brother, told us in March 2007, “Betty worked in publicity and was a handler for Garland. She loved Judy. Betty was like a sister to Judy. They may have been even closer, really closer, than that.” According to William Asher, Mayer was aware that Betty was a lesbian and that she had seduced Judy when she was fifteen years old. Asher, whom we interviewed in connection with Dr. Feelgood, had a long history in Hollywood and was a noted director/producer of shows such as I Love Lucy and Bewitched. “Betty and Judy lived together for a while, but when Judy married Vincente Minnelli, the relationship ended. Betty was the maid of honor at Judy’s wedding to Minnelli.”

  Mickey Rooney expressed his opinions about Judy’s sexuality in Life Is Too Short, saying, “She always idolized her own charming father—only to learn, after she’d grown up, that he was a homosexual. She couldn’t accept that in him. And then, she had an even harder time accepting a trace in herself. She had an affair with a female singer and, caught up in guilt, couldn’t accept herself.”5

  Mickey and Judy’s relationship remained strong throughout the years, until Judy’s suicide in 1969. They were confidantes, intimates, and lifelong friends. Although there is no direct evidence of a physical relationship, Mickey’s six-decades-long mistress, Ms. Smith (not her real name and whom we shall meet later), suggested that she was at parties in the early 1950s where Mickey and Judy escaped to the bedroom together and then returned to the party casually disheveled. Mickey’s friend Sidney Miller, whom we interviewed extensively, also suggested a possible sexual relationship, stating, “Mickey and Judy were always close. I think, at times, they may have been closer than people think.”6

  The way Judy and Mickey were drugged at MGM turned out to be a tragedy. Judy came to rely on drugs because she was in pain and because drugs made her feel good. Actress and Andy Hardy costar Ann Rutherford said in an interview with us, “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.”

  During an interview for the 1992 documentary film MGM: When the Lion Roars, Rooney described his friendship with Garland: “Judy and I were so close we could’ve come from the same womb. We weren’t like brothers or sisters but there was no love affair there. There was more than a love affair. It’s very, very difficult to explain the depths of our love for each other. It was so special. It was a forever love. Judy, as we speak, has not passed away. She’s always with me in every heartbeat of my body.”

  Mickey sometimes contradicted his take on Judy, saying variously, in a decades-old TV interview: “We were so close . . . [I]t transcended any love affair . . . She was my sister from the beginning—the sister I never had . . . She was the love I’d searched for.”

  London Sunday Express writer Clive Hirschhorn interviewed Judy in 1969, the last interview she gave before she died of a drug overdose on June 22, 1969. Hirschhorn wrote, “I met her backstage after the show, and she was in a good mood. She joked that my socks were too short. She talked about how MGM had hooked her and Mickey Rooney on drugs to keep them awake during filming, and she told me that Louis B. Mayer never let her forget that she didn’t have movie-star looks. He called her ‘my little hunchback.’ But she didn’t moan about it. There was no malice or sense of exploitation. She told me, ‘. . . If you want fame you have to pay for it—and brother, I have!’ ”

  The families remained close. Liza Minnelli, Judy’s daughter, released a public statement after Mickey’s death, saying, “Mickey was somebody that everybody loved, but to me he was part of the family. He was one of a kind, and will be admired and respected always.”

  Mickey’s oldest daughter, the talented Kelly Rooney, told us, “I clearly remember going to Judy’s beach house with my dad and my sisters and brother on Sundays. While the kids were all out playing, you could hear him roaring with laughter at the stories that Judy was telling about the old days. They both were having a good ol’ time enjoying drinks and old times. It was just magical watching them together laughing, singing, and reminiscing. I will never forget that image.”7

  The documentary MGM: When the Lion Roars was filmed after Judy had been gone for twenty-three years. It some instances, Mickey’s recollections seem like the cloudy memories of an old man in winter mourning a long-lost colleague. However, it is almost a case of déjà-vu; Mickey used similar words when he was a guest on The Judy Garland Show thirty years earlier: “We’ve had a wonderful seven days together here,” Mickey says at the close of the show, his arm around Judy’s waist as she caresses the lapel of his tuxedo. “This is not only ‘tradition,’ this [woman] is the love of my life. My wife knows this—my wives know this. [She] always has been, because there never will be, there aren’t adjectives enough to express, in the world, how the one and only Judy—is Judy.” There is an awkward sweetness to his obviously ad-libbed words spoken with unfeigned sincerity.

  Judy and Mickey struggled with many of the same issues after they were forced out of MGM. They had parallel challenges with pills, liquor, and bankruptcy; a roller-coaster ride in their careers; and several failed marriages. While Mickey survived the battle for ninety-three years, Judy made it only into her late forties before overdosing herself.

  As Mickey eerily remarked to us in 2008, “Sometimes I wonder if Judy had the right idea . . . to exit all this bullshit.”

  10

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  Mickey Goes Wild

  Andy Hardy’s true love, Polly Benedict (played by Ann Rutherford).

  POSTER CARD COURTESY OF ROBERT E
ASTON.

  When I met him, I still didn’t know he was the biggest wolf on the lot,” Ava Gardner once recalled about Mickey. “He was catnip to the ladies. He knew it too. The little sod was not above admiring himself in the mirror. All five-foot-two of him! The complete Hollywood playboy, he went through ladies like a hot knife through fudge. He was incorrigible. He’d screw anything that moved. He had a lot of energy. He probably banged most of the starlets who appeared in his Andy Hardy films—Lana Turner among them. She called him Andy Hard-on.”1

  Frank Sinatra once said, as Mickey’s good friend and sometime business adviser Nick Sevano told us, “Mickey was the best lay in Hollywood. He was also the greatest talent in Hollywood.”2

  By early 1938, the Andy Hardy screen phenomenon had begun, and Mickey was the driving force behind it. MGM knew it had a gold mine in young Mickey Rooney. However, it was also aware that there was a great division between the real-life Mickey and his on-screen alter ego. Mickey was far more streetwise than the typical Depression-era teenager. He’d already seen too much. Raised in burlesque houses and with a father who still worked in strip-tease joints, growing up backstage and in dressing rooms with nearly naked women strutting their stuff, and with a mother turning tricks in their living room, he was no stranger to the seamier side of life. On the few occasions Joe Yule Sr. did visit his son after he split with Nell, he would invite Mickey to watch him perform at the Follies Burlesque in Los Angeles, and let his friends come along. Mickey’s friend Sidney Miller told us and Arthur Marx, “It was a real treat for horny teenagers like us to see all the bare tits and ass at the burlesque. We were able to even go back and watch the girls get undressed. Mickey would even get a lap dance with some of the girls.”3 Even as he portrayed a naïve, innocent teen on celluloid, Mickey’s hormones were roaring in real life.

  It was also in 1938 that Mickey portrayed a character with a bad-boy image, in Boys Town, opposite Spencer Tracy. The cast included Mickey’s lifelong friend Sidney Miller. Boys Town was a monster hit for MGM, held over in its run at theaters throughout the United States and Canada. The film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director, and won Oscars for Spencer Tracy for Best Actor and for Eleanore Griffin and Dore Schary for Best Original Story. This film cemented Schary’s position at MGM, and he would eventually succeed Mayer as studio head. Mickey won a special award at that year’s Academy Awards: a five-inch-high Oscar for “significant contribution in bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth.” (As a side note, that statuette was given to Jeri Greene, comic Shecky Greene’s first wife, who was Mickey’s girlfriend in the late 1960s. As Shecky told the authors, the statuette was handed down to his daughter.)

  MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer called Boys Town his favorite film created during his tenure at MGM. The film grossed $4,133,000 in 1938 dollars. It’s still generating profits on DVD sales and rentals for Turner Films, which bought the MGM film library in 1986. The film also signaled to the MGM marketing team and to Mayer the power of the youth market. In fact, it was so popular with young audiences that it forced the modification of a Canadian law that prohibited the admittance of children under sixteen to movie theaters. It also sparked a sequel, Men of Boys Town, released in 1941, though it was not as successful as the original.

  At age eighteen, and upon his success in Boys Town, Mickey had become a worldwide motion picture star and was riding high. “Everything came at him nonstop,” remembered his friend, director Dick Quine. “We just watched in awe. Here he was purchasing a palatial home in Encino, buying this knockout baby-blue Ford convertible and he was spending his nights chasing broads. He was knocking down south of one hundred thousand dollars a year. It was just fucking incredible.”4

  It was a situation similar to what occurs with young stars today when all of a sudden they become nationally recognized, when they are suddenly multimillionaires from whom every hanger-on looks to carve a piece. Such stars are faced with multiple challenges, which can cause a significant, almost traumatic, change in both their personal and professional lives, and they are usually not equipped to make the proper decisions. Mickey had had no guidance from his father, whose own life was never an example to follow. For her part, Mickey’s mother, had been too overwhelmed and destitute after Joe abandoned her, all alone and struggling to support their child. Thus, Mickey had had to confront a reality that no six-year-old should have had to confront. No wonder he regarded Louis B. Mayer as a kind of patriarchal figure, and studio fixer Eddie Mannix as a surrogate father, even as Mannix led him down paths that were contrary to his own best interests.

  For MGM, where the bottom line was the most important thing, they needed to protect their asset, who was making millions for the company, keeping Nick Schenck and Louis Mayer very happy with the return on their investment. Accordingly, the public image of Mickey Rooney/Andy Hardy needed to be closely guarded.

  At first, Louis Mayer was willing to overlook Mickey’s teenage indiscretions. Peter Evans writes, “[The Hardy films] also more than satisfied Mayer’s greed, and the old showman was always willing to overlook Mickey’s extravagant whims. When his minders warned Mayer that on weekends Mickey drank insatiably, Mayer ignored them. ‘He would say I was a good little fella and pat me on the head—he made about ten million dollars a pat at the box office,’ Rooney said.”5

  Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling so meticulously guarded MGM publicity that they controlled not only every aspect of their stars’ lives but the Hollywood media as well. In fact, Louella Parsons didn’t type a line about a Metro star unless she’d cleared it first with either Mannix or Strickling. No reporter would dare go rogue on a Metro personality if he or she wanted to be kept in Strickling’s loop. The best example of the way Strickling controlled the media with an iron hand to protect his stars involved Lana Turner, her lover, and her daughter. When mobster Johnny Stompanato was murdered at Lana Turner’s house in Beverly Hills, Turner called her mother. Did her mother call the police? Did she call an ambulance? No, she called two people. One was attorney Jerry “Get Me” Giesler, the Hollywood lawyer once dubbed “defender of the damned.” The second was Howard Strickling. Even though Turner was no longer under contract to MGM, she sought out Strickling for his help. After all, it was Stricking who had covered up her abortions and a suicide attempt in the past. She had relied on him for over twenty years. He had shielded her from the journalists and the columnists just as he had shielded her affair with Mickey Rooney. She knew with his help that she was destined to be OK. Her image had been so carefully controlled no one dared print the real story. And once again, Strickling carefully orchestrated the media that went into damage control and in the end prevented any damage to her career.6

  Katharine Brush, a popular author at the time, remarked on MGM’s desire to project a wholesome image for Rooney in a story (essentially an insider’s gossip column) she wrote titled Andy Hardy’s Private Secretary for Reader’s Digest. She recalled the incident in which Mayer, watching the rushes, objects to Andy telling his mother that the dinner she has cooked is no good: “Infinite pains are taken to keep the family precisely average,” Brush wrote, “lest the parents protest that Andy is setting a bad example.” The subsequent rewrite was ordered by Mayer himself, in the interest of family values.7

  (The Hardy family values were not enjoyed by everyone. When MGM once offered Broadway playwright George Oppenheimer a job writing Hardy films at a substantial salary, he remarked, “Sure I’d love to write one, provided you let me have every member of the fucking family killed in a railroad accident in the last reel.”8)

  MGM was very careful to preserve Rooney as if he were a specimen on a microscope slide fixed in the image created by Aurania Rouverol, Kay Van Riper, and Louis B. Mayer—even though the real-life Mickey was changing before their very eyes, morphing from the all-American teenager he played into a reckless young adult. Andy Hardy had become his exoskeleton, while the real Mickey metastasized within. For example, when in 1938 the studio
opened Judge Hardy’s Children, the third film in the series, Mickey was forced to drive up to the premiere in the Model-A Ford with the torn roof from the films rather than in his new convertible. His date was gray-haired Nell, forever the stage mother and caregiver.

  The studio’s efforts notwithstanding, the flesh-and-blood Mickey had simply become vulgar. He would brag to anyone within earshot about his masculine prowess and the girls with whom he’d had sexual relations. He was on a tear, and the people he boasted to were shocked at the crude way he spoke. His close friends, however, were amused by Mickey’s frankness and brand of braggadocio, too soon a man in the body of a child, now boozing, chasing women with fervor, and cursing like a stagehand in burlesque, as his hormones and lack of impulse control took over.

  Sidney Miller recalled a get-together during the summer of 1938:

  We were once hanging out at Phil Silvers’s apartment, shooting the breeze. Silvers was trying to get in film and was already a top banana in burlesque. We looked up to Phil, as he was older than we were and had been around the block. Silvers was telling us about the girls he had fucked in the burlesque show he was in, and we were very intrigued by his spiel. Mickey could[n’t] care the less about his stories. He just wanted to find a girl to schtupp. Silvers said he knew this gorgeous hooker he could call. Mickey was drooling. He told Silvers to bring her to the apartment and we all agreed to split her cost. Phil called her and cut a deal. He got a group rate. Mickey started bragging that he could fuck her for the longest and made a bet that whoever lasted the longest with the girl gets paid the whole cost. I think it was like twenty or so bucks each.

  I went first, then Jackie Cooper, then Silver, and Mickey took the last shot. None of us lasted long, probably three or four minutes. When Mickey went in, I mean he was in there for a good twenty, thirty minutes. We heard noises, squeals and loud noises. We were on the floor laughing. Then Mickey came out saying, “Did I tell you guys . . .” and he kept bragging. Then he thanked us for his free treat and left. When Silvers started paying the girl, he asked her, “Was he really that good? Did he really last thirty minutes?” She laughed and said, “Are you kidding? It was four minutes of fucking and twenty-six minutes of imitations.”9