The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  Early in his period in the service, Mickey spent his spare time writing long love letters to Ava. She at first answered his letters and promised to wait for him until the end of the war. By the close of the summer, however, she no longer replied to his letters. Mickey then tried calling her. When he finally connected, she told him very bluntly that they were over as a couple and to please stop contacting her. As Mickey began sobbing to her that he still loved her, he asked her through tears if there was another person in her life. Click, she hung up the phone. Mickey was devastated. When one of his army buddies showed him a newspaper column carrying a story that Ava was now the steady girlfriend of millionaire movie producer and aviation pioneer Howard Hughes, he went ballistic. He went on a drinking binge and then went AWOL from Fort Riley.1

  Not so, according to Mickey. He claimed in Life Is Too Short, in response to the accusation that he was AWOL, that he was in fact on a ten-day furlough to Los Angeles to take care of his mother after she received a death threat in the mail from an anonymous “kook.” (He also claimed he got into a fistfight with Hughes in front of Ava’s apartment, which she broke up. Hughes was nearly six foot three, insanely aggressive, and certainly no pushover. At the end of the fight, Mickey claims, they all calmed down and drank Dom Perignon in the apartment. Mickey wrote that when he was leaving, he said, “I gotta go fight a war.”

  “Good luck,” said Hughes, “and Mickey—don’t get your ass shot off.”2 (Ava never mentioned this in The Secret Conversations.)

  Yet authors Arthur Marx, Roland Flamini, and Jane Ellen Wayne put forth the AWOL claim.3 Flamini writes, “MPs were waiting at Los Angeles Airport to take him back to Kansas, and Metro had to pull strings to prevent serious trouble. Strickling also succeeded in keeping it out of the papers.”4 In our research, we found several newspaper accounts of Mickey’s being in Los Angeles. When rumors apparently began to spread, a story in a column by Louella Parsons in the Los Angeles Express, on August 5, 1944, said, “Reports that Mickey Rooney is out of the Army at this writing at least are apparently untrue. He is at Fort Riley and leaves soon to be in an Army show in Kansas City.” However, on August, 23, 1944, Sidney Skolsky in the Hollywood Citizen-News wrote, “Mickey Rooney is in town on a furlough. Sidney Miller said, ‘It’s darned decent of Mickey to come back and entertain us civilians.’ Rooney will go to Camp Siebert, and O.C.S. [Officer Candidate School].”5 In talking with the authors, Sid Miller did not mention Mickey going AWOL. However, he did recall that both Eddie Mannix and Louie Mayer pulled strings and had Mickey shipped to Camp Siebert, Alabama, where he would be “out of harm’s way, and would be assigned to Special Services to entertain the troops. Listen, Mick was the most talented, all-around performer, so why not put his skills to work to put a show on for our troops and lift their morale?” Sid also recalled, “Mickey was hitting the sauce pretty hard. He was out of his mind with Ava dating Howard Hughes and [his] being stuck in the army.”6

  It was at Camp Siebert that Mickey first met the person who would become his longtime friend legendary tenor sax player Jimmy Cook, who said to Arthur Marx, “I was in the day-room at the camp. Mickey was at the piano, playing the blues, probably for Ava, so I got out my horn and started playing with him. We sounded good together. I never suspected what a hell of a good musician Mickey is. I thought it was just publicity that he could play all those instruments, but he really can. Anyway, we had a lot in common, and we’ve been friends ever since.”7

  When he arrived at Camp Siebert, Mickey was drinking heavily and on the rebound from Ava, a dangerous combination. “Surprisingly, Mickey had a high threshold for alcohol. He could really pound ’em down. He was sort of a happy drunk. He told us the story of how drunk he was when he met B.J.,” recalled Sid Miller, referring to Mickey’s second wife, Betty Jane Rase.8

  B.J., as she was known, was born on May 6, 1927, in Birmingham, Alabama, and was a trained musician, a pianist, by the time she was sixteen. Going by the professional name of Betty Jane Phillips, she was the 1944 Miss Alabama, and in September 1944 she was the fourth runner-up in the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, where she played the piano for the talent portion of the contest. Even at seventeen, B.J. was a very ambitious and driven woman, one seeking to get into show business. As a finalist in the pageant, she had attracted lots of attention, and in a whirlwind of activity after the pageant, she attended several parties and events in Alabama, meeting a lot of different people.

  To honor Mickey’s presence in Birmingham, a benefit showing of his film with Judy Garland Girl Crazy, at the Alabama Theater, was arranged on September 23, 1944, where officers from the camp were in attendance along with local media. Mickey was there with his army pal Jimmy Cook. The Birmingham News’s Lily Mae Caldwell, who’d worked as the arts and entertainment editor for forty-seven years, was a major force in the development of the Miss Alabama Pageant, and acted as its director for forty-six years until her death in 1980. (The pageant was sponsored by her employer, the Birmingham News.) That evening, Caldwell brought along Betty Jane Rase to the Girl Crazy party; she had become very close to B.J. and was very protective of her seventeen-year-old beauty queen prodigy.

  In a Birmingham News story in 1975, Caldwell described the first meeting between Rooney and B.J., writing, “She was a very talented young woman. When I saw Mickey, I introduced myself as the News entertainment editor and his eyes went directly to B.J. I said, ‘Mickey, I want you to meet my very good friend Betty Jane Rase. She’s Miss Alabama.’ He said, ‘Well hello there Miss Alabama.’ And she responded, in her very best elegant Southern greeting, ‘Oh, Mr. Rooney! How Y’all?’ I think it was love at first sight.”

  B.J. had several qualities that reminded Mickey of Ava. They both had a wonderful southern belle drawl and were long legged with a beautiful smile. The only difference was that B.J. was a blonde. Mickey told us, “I was so fucking drunk, I would have married my drill sergeant. I got stuck with a giant, goddamn hick from the sticks.”9

  Jimmy Cook recalled, “Mickey’s eyes bugged out at the sight of Betty Jane’s figure. She had more going on than a naïve little teenager who was impressed to be in the same room as a movie star. She had more on the ball than that. She was a very good musician. She played excellent piano and sang very well.”10

  In a recent interview with the authors, B.J.’s friend Pam McClenathan remembered, “She had a great sense of humor and was just an incredible musician.” (Pam became B.J.’s friend when she was taking care of her and her son Tim Rooney, who was suffering from dermatomyositis, a fatal neuromuscular disease. Both have since died.) McClenathan remembered B.J. as “an accomplished singer and highly sought after as a back-up singer for Elvis, Bobby Darrin, Frank Sinatra, and countless others.” She also sang in films, such as The Flower Drum Song, in which she laid down the vocal tracks for actress Pat Suzuki.

  It had been a month since the blowup in front of Ava’s apartment, and the divorced couple was no longer in contact. Mickey was lonely and isolated at the Alabama army base, way out of his comfort zone, and missing the life he had led for over ten years as a star at Metro. Wearing the uniform, he was looking at being shipped to Europe to join Allied troops still fighting pitched battles against the Wehrmacht, and as a consequence, he felt extremely vulnerable.

  “I’m a little hazy about the courtship. In fact, I was a little hazy during the courtship. I’d been drinking,” admitted Mickey.11 “Hazy” was an understatement. “Obliterated” was probably more accurate. But there he was, staggering drunk and dazzled by B.J.’s beauty, and just as likely by her similarity to Ava. He wanted to nail her on the spot. Thus, almost three hours after meeting Betty Jane on that very same night, he proposed to her. Betty Jane immediately accepted. That night, Betty Jane took Mickey to meet her working-class parents, Edward and Lena Rase, who lived in a small house in Birmingham, to get their approval—which they gave immediately upon hearing the news. (It was indeed good news for Edward Rase, who was out of work at the time.)

  Tim
e was fleeting. Mickey was told that he would be shipped to the European Theater within ten days. Mickey no longer had Les Peterson to take care of every detail, so he arranged the wedding with his commanding officer, who invited the couple to hold the wedding at his home. And on September 30, 1944, Mickey Rooney and Betty Jane Rase were married. Jimmy Cook was Mickey’s best man, and reporter Lily Mae Caldwell was Betty’s maid of honor. Edward Rase gave the bride away. In a story that covered the event for the Birmingham News, Lily Mae wrote, “The Rases were as proud as if General Robert E. Lee had won the Battle of Appomattox.”

  Mickey, with a two-day pass, spent his wedding night at a hotel and returned on Monday morning for reveille. Two days later, his unit received its overseas orders for Europe, and Mickey was headed to the front as part of an entertainment unit. He received one more pass from his CO and spent the final weekend in Alabama with his bride of one week (and drank heavily). Then, on Monday, October 6, he found himself on a troop train bound for New York City. Two days later, Mickey was marching up the gangplank of the Queen Mary on his way to England, part of another generation of young men off to another war, many of whom would return to their families only in body bags, if they returned at all.

  “It was a miserable voyage,” Jimmy Cook said to Arthur Marx. “Four thousand GIs jam-packed aboard a ship built to accommodate a thousand. Not only that, we were billeted way down in the bowels of the ship. During the trip, the latrines above us broke and all that shit was coming down on our bunks and over everything. Then when we got to England some officers, who’d never been anything as civilians, suddenly decided to take it out on Mickey and the rest of us because he was a celebrity and we were an entertainment unit and not a fighting force. So they put us on twenty-one days straight of KP . . . Mickey, of course, hated it, as we all did, but he took it like a good sport, stuck it out, until we were eventually shipped over to Le Havre and then Paris,”12 which had been liberated from German occupation six weeks earlier, at the end of August.

  Once Mickey arrived in Paris, he was transported to the encampment in the outskirts of the city where Special Services had set up shop. There he met fellow entertainers such as comic Red Buttons, former child star Bobby Breen, and his pal Jimmy Cook. Broadway producer Josh Logan, who was in charge of the unit, told them they would have to improvise and create their own stages to entertain the troops. Mickey suggested they entertain off the flat bed of the jeeps they were set to travel in to reach the troops. Thus the “Jeep show” idea was born. Logan set up teams comprising a musician, a singer, and an emcee, who told the jokes.

  Mickey embarked on his circuit with singer Bob Priester and accordion player Mario Pieroni, where he performed his old numbers from vaudeville along with his imitations. Priester sang to Pieroni’s accordion accompaniment. The small troupe traveled to troops in Belgium, France, and parts of Allied-occupied Germany, all in all, according to Mickey, covering about a hundred and fifty thousand miles that first year. They roughed it, living mostly on C rations, individually canned, precooked wet rations that were issued when fresh food or packaged unprepared food from mess halls or field kitchens was impractical or unavailable. They worked in the rain, sleet, and snow, performing before audiences of GIs as bullets flew past them and bombs exploded nearby. They were truly in the thick of it. Mickey visited the troops in the field hospitals and visited the concentration camp at Dachau at the time U.S. forces liberated it. One can only wonder at the shock he must have experienced, if not the trauma (which many American GIs experienced) upon witnessing firsthand the absolute barbarity that could be inflicted upon human beings by other human beings.

  Jimmy Cook recalled, “These shows were so mobile, we could drive anywhere with them. We’d go right up into the front lines, park, and do shows for guys who were in foxholes being shot at. Sometimes we were so close to the front that the Germans stopped their firing to listen to the music. Mickey did the emceeing, in addition to a lot of comedy bits and musical spots. We followed the troops all through the winter of 1944 and into the spring of 1945, as we slogged our way to Berlin through France and Belgium. Sometimes we slept on the ground, or if we were lucky, we were billeted with cooperative German families as we got closer to Berlin.”13 The travel was nonstop.

  Despite being surrounded by people, Mickey was deeply lonely, as he wrote to Betty Jane on Christmas Eve 1944. Dated January 8, 1945, but referring to it being Christmas Eve, Mickey writes that he’d just returned from putting on a show for the troops. He’d had coffee and now was sitting down to be with his wife Betty Jane, if only in a letter. Though they are apart, he writes, just being apart means that he is closer to her “spiritually,” and like the other troops thinking of their families back home on Christmas, Mickey is thinking of her. A soldier just walked into Mickey’s billet and offered him candy and a “Merry Christmas,” and, he says, he feels lucky having her as the girl he loves and cherishes. He feels the warmth of his family, his “sweet mother,” and his life together with Betty Jane. These things are his, even in time of war. He may sound “a little blue,” he writes, but he’s not, and closes by saying that she is his “darling wife,” he loves her, honestly he does, as her “loving husband.”14

  While Mickey was in France, he received a letter from Betty Jane informing him that she had given birth, on July 3, 1945, to a healthy baby boy. They had agreed he would be named Joseph Yule III, however, he was always known as Mickey Rooney Jr. (He lives a hermit-like existence in Hemet, California.) Mickey arranged for Betty Jane and the baby to live with Nell and Fred at El Ranchita. He flew them there by chartered plane with the help of Sam Stiefel, who was advancing him money (with accruing interest compounded almost every minute) to cover his expenses.

  For his war efforts, Mickey was promoted to technical sergeant third class, and when the war ended on May 7, 1945, he continued to entertain the troops with the Army of Occupation in larger shows throughout Europe, as he waited to accumulate enough points for a discharge. Meanwhile, he performed shows such as Up in Central Park in Mannheim and OK-USA in Frankfurt, and he became a radio announcer on the Armed Forces Radio Network. Mickey once claimed he was offered the rank of lieutenant if he agreed to stay longer to entertain the troops, which he gently declined: “ ‘Sir,’ I said politely, ‘you could offer me brigadier general and I would still say no. I want to go home.’ ”15

  But it would take almost another year in the service before Mickey’s discharge would come through, on March 6, 1946. In the end, he served one year, eight months, and twenty-one days. Then he was free to return to Metro, to his new partner Sam Stiefel, and to his new wife, Betty Jane Rase.

  The war had a positive effect on Mickey. He had matured, and was feeling more confident about his future. His service, and the respite in his career, gave him time to reflect on his life and brought back the energy and optimism that had been flagging since the breakup with Ava. He now had the responsibility of a son and a wife. “When I left, I was older, wiser and still in one piece,” he recalled.16

  15

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  Rooney Inc.

  From left to right: Edsel Ford, Mickey, and Henry Ford. Mickey claimed that this was the only picture of Edsel and Henry Ford smiling together. This was taken at the premiere of Young Tom Edison in Detroit, Michigan, in March of 1940.

  PHOTO COURTESY OF THE MONTE KLAUS COLLECTION.

  While Mickey was away in the army, Sam Stiefel remained hard at work for Rooney Inc. Mickey’s MGM contract came up for renewal on November 4, 1944. While in peacetime MGM would have had to exercise its option for Rooney’s services for another year, during wartime the studios adopted a type of force majeure rule: if an artist’s option came up during his service in the military, rather than beginning immediately the renewed contract would begin only at the end of his military service (with the artist remaining unpaid during that service). Thus, Mickey, whose salary under a renewed option would normally have been increased to a minimum of $2,500 per week f
or forty weeks plus agreed bonuses, would continue receiving only his buck private’s pay of $50 a week. However, Sam Stiefel and Rooney Inc. vice president and corporate counsel Mort Briskin decided to go against the grain and challenge MGM’s force majeure clause. But Stiefel waited to spring this surprise on Mayer.

  Two months before Mickey’s option came up, Mort Briskin informed Metro by certified mail that there would be no automatic option of Mickey’s agreement just because he was in the army. They placed a story on the front page of the Hollywood Reporter on August 28, 1945, which stated, “Morton Briskin, attorney for Rooney Inc., a corporation recently formed to handle Mickey Rooney’s affairs, announced Saturday that his company will file suit in Federal court within the next two weeks, applying for a ‘declaratory relief action,’ and asking the court to uphold its contention that Rooney’s entrance into the Army and not being paid his weekly salary by MGM automatically abrogates the star’s contract with the studio.”

  This precipitated a blistering in-response commentary by the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, the infamous Billy Wilkerson, a notorious gambler who co-owned nightclubs and the Flamingo hotel/casino in Las Vegas with mobsters Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Benjamin Siegel. In his August 28, 1945, “Tradeviews” column, Wilkerson wrote:

  We don’t know what they have been feeding Mickey Rooney or who has been feeding him, but the announcement in a different column of your Reporter today is not the Mickey we have known or the boy you have admired so much. The whole thing looks to us as if the minority of Mickey’s new corporation is about to sink the major owner of that stock—Mickey himself . . . Mickey Rooney asking for a cancellation of his agreement with MGM, and the reasons for asking for such a cancellation, is a pretty weird piece of business. Pretty bad behavior . . . never in our looking over the affairs of this business have we ever seen such a protective hand on the shoulder of anyone as the one L.B. always extended to Mickey. He adored that kid, fought many studio battles to bring him up to where he is; watched his scripts, ordered them rewritten to care better for the advance of Rooney, counseled him at all times, giving him more attention than most fathers would give a son, and because of it Mickey has become one of the industry’s great stars. Mayer . . . did EVERYTHING for the kid and in Mayer doing it, they get slapped in the face with a request for an abrogation his contract.