The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  For a while my money worries kept me from thinking about my troubles at home. If I couldn’t pick up where I left off before the war I wouldn’t be able to afford a home in the Valley. Sure, I was making five thousand dollars a week during the sixty-seven days we took to shoot “Summer Holiday,” but I didn’t see much of that. Sam Stiefel took his 50 percent off the top. Then he paid the overhead and gave me what was left, generally close to nothing. Things weren’t turning out the way I’d dreamed they would when I was bouncing around the war in Europe. The thought depressed me. I was even sadder when I realized that, up to this point in my life, I had never even had my own bank account, never written a check, never had my own financial integrity.12

  Although Mickey was paying Rooney Inc. overhead, for personnel expenses, most of Mickey’s errands were not carried out by his “staff” or secretary. Les Peterson was still Mickey’s shadow, his minder, making sure his needs were satisfied..

  Peterson also knew Mickey’s peccadillos, as did Ava. He was a serial cheater, and both were aware of his predilection for young girls. Rooney family friend since 1994, Pam McClenathan, who would become B.J.’s caregiver, told us a story recounted to her by Betty Jane:

  Betty Jane told me she went to visit Mickey at the studio in Culver City around June in 1946. She had Mickey Jr., in tow, and she was pregnant with Timmy. She was directed to Mickey’s dressing room, while he was filming an Andy Hardy film [Love Laughs at Andy Hardy]. When she opened the door to the dressing room, Elizabeth Taylor was on her knees giving Mickey a blow job. Now, Betty Jane was just standing there with her baby and was shocked. I mean Elizabeth Taylor was just a kid herself. [She was fourteen.] After that, all hell broke loose. Betty got an attorney and met with Mr. Mayer and his team. That was the end for Betty and Mickey. She knew he was cheating, plus this was with a young girl. She got a top attorney and a big settlement, but Betty really was not happy after that. She wanted a faithful husband.

  Sexually precocious and physically mature for her age, teenage starlet Elizabeth Taylor set her sights on older actors, according to authors Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince in their biography, Elizabeth Taylor: There Is Nothing Like a Dame.13 Porter and Prince reveal that at age fifteen, Taylor went to thirty-six-year-old Ronald Reagan’s apartment lobby for a film role. According to the book, the future California governor and U.S. president, who was married to actress Jane Wyman at the time, gave the five-foot-two Taylor a drink and treated her like an adult. “ ‘I could tell he wanted to get it on but he seemed reluctant to make the first move,’ Taylor later told friends. ‘I became the aggressor. I wished they’d been casting Lolita around that time; I could have won an Oscar playing the nymphet. After a heavy make-out session on the sofa, we went into the bedroom,”14 where, Taylor insinuated, she had sex with the Great Communicator-to-be.

  Porter and Prince also claim that Taylor had a sexual encounter with future president John F. Kennedy, whom she first met as a seven-year-old in London. When she was reunited with the then-senator, who was fifteen years her senior, Kennedy persuaded her to go skinny-dipping in actor Robert Stack’s pool. According to the book, Taylor told friends she ended up in a threesome with JFK and Stack. As a teenager whose sexual dalliances could have landed both future presidents in criminal proceedings for statutory rape, Liz Taylor was certainly not one of the “untouchables,” but at least she was bipartisan in bestowing the pleasures of her amicability on both sides of the aisle. JFK’s aberrant sexual proclivities (including his many affairs and his liaisons with prostitutes, his use of LSD obtained directly from Timothy Leary, and his long-term addiction to methamphetamine) are well known, but Reagan’s are not.15

  Mickey’s dalliance with Taylor was par for the course. However, Betty Jane, having caught her husband in flagrante delicto with a teenager, was incensed enough to know that her marriage was over and shrewd enough to hire an attorney who would make him pay dearly for his sins: former Los Angeles municipal court judge (1927–30) Leonard Wilson, who was later convicted of accepting bribes in exchange for granting state liquor licenses. (In return for leniency, he named names, which included former state attorney general Fred Howser. His law career was over, and he committed suicide on December 7, 1954.) Wilson was a Los Angeles insider and, according to columnist Hedda Hopper in a January 14, 1947, column, “a real barracuda.”

  Wilson arranged a meeting with Eddie Mannix to discuss Betty Jane’s claims, in which he spelled out in minute detail what Betty Jane said she’d seen going on between Mickey and Taylor. He didn’t have to explain that it meant a serious sex offense with a minor: the facts hung over them like the stench of sweat in a boiler room. Without doubt, it would have been the end of Mickey’s career. Not only that, the studio would be involved as well as the corporation Rooney Inc. It would have been a blood bath all around, played out in the Hollywood gossip columns. However, this was California, it was the industry, and both Mannix and Wilson knew this could be solved with money. Lots and lots of money.

  Mannix, whom Mickey had often referred to in interviews as “Mayer’s whip,” then met with Mickey’s partners, Stiefel and Briskin. Neither was shocked at Mickey’s behavior but both certainly worried about their fortunes. Stiefel approached his meeting with Mannix determined to protect Mickey, his breadwinner, at all costs. Since Mickey’s option was picked up shortly after he had returned from the war in March, he would remain under salary. He would film one more film, Summer Holiday, a big-budget musical remake of Ah, Wilderness!, and then would embark on a long stage tour. Stiefel was pleased because Mickey would draw big dollars on a tour, dollars that would go directly to Stiefel to repay Rooney Inc.’s advances to Nell and Fred, to Mickey, and toward covering company overhead. Also, the agreement would give them time to negotiate a settlement with Wilson, who was well aware that under California law—especially if Mickey were prosecuted for a sexual offense with a minor—Betty Jane would get her hands on whatever assets came out of the partnership.

  MGM was obviously very concerned about this brewing scandal because of the revenue Mickey’s movies were still bringing in and the publicity nightmare the studio would have to endure. As a result, it decided to play defense in advance of a settlement. Mickey had shot two numbers in April 1944 with Judy Garland that were to be included in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1946. Initially, the film was to be released in 1945, but the studio tinkered with the cut and released it for a roadshow in April 1946. A final version was ultimately released in June 1946 from which the studio had curiously cut both of the Rooney/Garland numbers they had filmed two years earlier, “Will You Love Me in Technicolor as You Do in Black and White?” and “As Long as I Have My Art.” Both of those scenes and Mickey’s entire part were excised, never to be seen again, according to film historian Alvin H. Marill. Was this the studio’s way of preemptively playing defense in case Mickey wound up being prosecuted?

  On June 17, around the time the Taylor affair was breaking, Mickey started work on Summer Holiday, marking his return to the musical films that had become an MGM staple. For the movie, Metro hired director Rouben Mamoulian, who had previously directed the original stage productions of Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Porgy and Bess. The studio gave Mamoulian complete control over the film, which was unusual for MGM. In the original film version Ah, Wilderness!, Mickey plays the younger brother, Tommy, who is setting off firecrackers on the Fourth of July. In this movie, he is the older brother, the philosophical Richard, who is coming of age, faces parental-inspired rejection from the girl of his dreams, and sneaks out on a night of drunken carousing with his friend.

  Summer Holiday was budgeted at an astounding $2.3 million and was the type of nostalgic, schmaltzy film Mayer’s vision had espoused after the death of Irving Thalberg left him in creative control of the studio. Mayer was clearly trying to repeat the surprise success of the original Eugene O’Neill property by turning it into a big-budget musical.

  This is one of the most interesting aspects of the Mayer/Rooney relationship. Be
neath their business relationship, the standard stuff of studio contracts in the old studio-owned player days, was something both men shared: Neither Mayer nor Rooney had enjoyed the type of all-American childhood depicted in the Hardy movies or Summer Holiday or Ah, Wilderness!, which were as foreign to them as if glimpsed through a telescope from The Twilight Zone. Mayer’s family was the victim of lethal persecution from the Russian czar’s Cossacks, and had had to flee for their lives to Canada. And Rooney never had a childhood in the first place. Did Mayer see in the Rooney character an American childhood that he’d never had? Did Rooney see in Mayer a father figure he’d never had, stability he’d never experienced? Whatever their dynamic, the films Mickey starred in at Metro defined the image of the American family and the joy of coming of age, a joy that neither Rooney nor Mayer had ever experienced. Maybe that’s why these films were more than just business for the two men.

  Although the shooting on Summer Holiday continued until October 14, Mickey completed his scenes by September 3, in order to embark on the tour that Stiefel had scheduled to get him out of town. This would earn Stiefel money, and allow him and Morty Briskin the time to negotiate with B.J.’s attorney, Leonard Wilson. The brief shooting time was just as well. Mamoulian was an absolute terror on the set, acting more like a theatrical stage director than a motion picture director. He fired the original cinematographer, Charles Rosher, replacing him with Charles Edgar Schoenbaum, even though Rosher had won two Academy Awards for his work and was adept at filming musicals.

  The MGM top screenwriting team, husband and wife Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, wrote the original Ah, Wilderness! screenplay, but Irving Brecher wrote the adaptation for this musical remake. In an interview, Brecher, who went on to create the radio and television series The Life of Riley and the screenplay for the musical Bye Bye Birdie, recalled his experience on this film:

  I wrote the adaptation with Jean Holloway. I was under contract to Metro and Mamoulian sought me out to enhance the comic element. When he went to hire Jean, he asked her if she thought she could write as well as O’Neill, and she told him that if she could she certainly wouldn’t be working for MGM. He was a very odd man and quite a taskmaster. Throughout the filming, I was there to punch up lines, if necessary. I had known Rooney at the studio and through Groucho. Mickey was rather subdued throughout the entire shoot. He didn’t have his typical energy.16

  What Brecher didn’t know, because the lawyers kept mum and the studio wasn’t about to release any information to the public, was that throughout the nearly three-month shooting of the film, Rooney’s life was in turmoil. After the explosion in July with the Elizabeth Taylor incident, Rooney had returned to El Ranchita from his brand-new home with Betty Jane, now single and anchorless again. It had been less than one hundred days in which he had been discharged from the army and reunited with his wife and child, and already he had perpetrated a sexual act with a fourteen-year-old girl and been tossed out on the street.

  Mickey breezes over the incident in his autobiography, offering an explanation of his incompatibility with Betty Jane and his boredom with the marriage; he never delves into any details from this period. Obviously, given the gravity of the criminal charges he might have faced, and the embarrassment and humiliation he did face when caught in flagrante delicto by his wife and child, he never talked about the incident openly for the rest of his life, not even to his best friends or to us. And of course the newspapers remained silent most of that summer regarding Betty and Mickey, except for a denial by Mickey that B.J. was pregnant.

  Harrison Carroll wrote on July 16, 1946, in the Evening Herald Express, “Mickey Rooney, who ought to know, has been vigorously denying the stork but two of his friends insist he told them that the long-legged bird is due at his house in about five months.” This story, which was accurate, was a rare personal mention of Mickey during this period. Except for a Sidney Skolsky column on July 24, 1946, about the filming of Summer Holiday, there was a virtual news blackout on anything Mickey. Not so much as a Stiefel press release appeared until the fall. A man who had been the center of press attention since his ascent in 1937 had virtually disappeared from public view.

  This was an obvious move by Strickling, to put a lid on the volatile situation. Except for the Frank Borzage golf tournament in early July 1946, Mickey sightings were rare. But the Mickey craze in the media of the early 1940s had already run its course. His absence for nearly two years during the war had also cooled the jets of the entertainment columnists. Times and tastes were changing. Mickey was no longer the flavor of the youth market. After the war ended, an avalanche of new young talent came pouring out. The new breed of performer who attracted the youth audience in 1946 included Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and Dinah Shore—all of whom were band singers. Fading, though still performing, were the big band leaders Harry James, Artie Shaw, and the Dorsey brothers, while film actors Van Johnson, Lana Turner (The Postman Always Rings Twice), and Rita Hayworth (Gilda) got lots of press. Ava Gardner (The Killers) was getting lots of press as well with her films and romances, and she was a box office draw. At twenty-six years old, Mickey was yesterday’s news.

  With no films released by the summer of 1946, Mickey was not on any box office list of stars. His proposed radio show hadn’t yet happened, which was surprising: He was a natural for a variety show with his ability as an onstage performer. Before the war, Mickey had appeared more than 220 times on radio as a guest star, with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Jack Benny, and others. However, his original MGM agreement had precluded his having his own weekly series, which would have been very lucrative. When Stiefel renegotiated the MGM agreement in 1944 and 1945, he had that provision waived. Still, Mickey’s first appearance on radio after his return was not until January 8, 1947, on Philco Radio Time with Bing Crosby, and then on January 12 on the Lux Radio Theatre, with none other than Elizabeth Taylor revisiting National Velvet. Mickey finally got his weekly radio program, called Shorty Bell and costarring his father, Joe Yule Sr., in March 1948, two years after his return.

  Mickey was always career conscious, and panicked when he was not working. When he finished filming his scenes for Summer Holiday on September 3, he had no future films scheduled. This was a shock to his system: His entire being from the time he was one and a half had been performance oriented. Even his social interactions, especially with women, as Ava Gardner described, were based on his ability to entertain. Mickey had been in constant motion since he started shooting the Mickey McGuire shorts in 1927. Now, nearly twenty years later, he was idle.

  Mickey was fading into a different category of performer. While he would eventually settle into life as a character actor, his days as a first-rank leading man were essentially ending. Mayer knew that both Rooney and Garland were no longer his top attractions. The eventual flops of Summer Holiday and Words and Music would make that quite clear.

  For Stiefel, however, Mickey was still his breadwinner, and like Dracula, he was determined to squeeze every last drop from him until he found a new victim. In September, Mannix and Thau gave Stiefel approval for the twelve weeks they could take Mickey off payroll between October and January. This would be Mickey’s longest period between films in twenty years: he would not shoot another film for almost one year, when he began to shoot the Mort Briskin–produced Killer McCoy in June 1947. Moreover, Mickey was no longer on the Culver lot on a daily basis. With the exception of his time in the army, he had been mostly on the Metro lot since 1934. He began to hang around the offices at Rooney Inc., on Sunset.

  With no radio lined up, it was back to the stage for Mickey. When he signed with Universal in 1932, at the age of twelve, he thought his life in the rough-and-tumble world of vaudeville/burlesque was over. Now, however, Stiefel had lined up almost four straight months of a brutal forty-three-city vaudeville tour throughout the East Coast, starting in Boston.

  Meanwhile, Betty Jane had returned to her parents in Birmingham. Her attorney, Judge Wilson, knew the high visibility that this divor
ce would garner. He started carefully looking at the books of Rooney Inc. and studying the agreements with Stiefel. He held the Elizabeth Taylor chit, which could be used if necessary to put the squeeze on Stiefel. Meanwhile, the newly allied combination of Mort Briskin and Metro legal had Betty, through Wilson, sign a confidentiality agreement to remain mum until the difficult divorce settlement could be worked out.

  Hedda Hopper, in her column in the Los Angeles Times on August 6, 1946, wrote, “Betty Jane Rooney, who is expecting in January, is at present visiting her mother in Birmingham, Alabama, with Mickey Jr. and will return in two weeks.” This was supported in Los Angeles Superior Court the next June (1947), when Betty Jane testified that Mickey “deserted me and sent me back home to Alabama to have my baby.”

  Mickey began his forty-three-city tour at the RKO-Boston on October 24, and by December 9, 1946, he had reached Cleveland and its Palace Theater. Mickey had last been to that theater on a vaudeville tour in August 1932, appearing with Ted Healey and his Stooges, Larry, Moe, and Shemp. In the Cleveland Plain Dealer of December 9, 1946, W. Ward Marsh wrote about the tour and Rooney Inc., revealing:

  Mickey Rooney, MGM’s fair-haired boy and the Palace’s stage star this week has to stand on his tiptoes to even reach five-foot-four, but he stands on top of the world today and reaches almost as far into Big Business as do Crosby, Hope, et al. Maybe he reaches further. I have not examined his books. What I am getting at is Mickey Rooney, Inc. When I talked to him last Thursday after the first show, this business racket did not come out. Mickey was the stage star, sweating out a first performance and talking about his next pictures, “Love Comes to Andy Hardy” and the musical version of “Ah, Wilderness!” . . . While Mickey’s manager, Sam Stiefel, is not in Cleveland this week, Al Holcraft, who travels as road manager for Mickey Rooney, Inc. is here. So too, is Dick Crockett, who has been Mickey’s friend for 14 years and acts as personal representative, friend, guard, buffer, etc. Like the workers at Jack & Heintz [a large airplane parts plant], they are all called associates. Stiefel owns 50 percent of Mickey. But Mickey Rooney, Inc. founded three years ago, has more than Mickey on its staff to support. It pays regularly weekly salaries to such stars as Cleveland’s own Ross Hunter, Peter Lorre, Andy Russell, Connie Haines (the song-bird on Mickey’s show this week at the Palace), Abigail and Buddy, and George Jessel. Rooney is President of Mickey Rooney, Inc. Offices are in the Rooney Building, Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood . . . Mickey Rooney, Inc. has made some picture deals, but they do not know what the films will be. They also plan more radio appearances, but now they are sold on “live audiences” and stage appearances.17