The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  Mickey and Stiefel were upset that Mickey was off salary for more weeks than he could afford—in late 1947, early 1948, Rooney Inc. was still spending, but not earning. After the failure of Shorty Bell, CBS made a suggestion for an Andy Hardy radio series. This precipitated the disastrous events that would follow: Stiefel proposed that they approach Metro to get approval of a radio version of the Hardy family, with the film actors recreating their roles. He arranged a meeting with Mayer with himself, Mickey, and Mort Briskin. Before they went off to the meeting, client George Jessel joked about Mayer’s office, “There is so much white in that office, you could go snow blind.”5

  When Mayer saw that Briskin was with Rooney and Stiefel, his shields went up, and he was immediately on the offensive. Stiefel detailed to Mayer the proposal for an Andy Hardy radio show that would fully credit the studio and pay an agreed-upon royalty. Shooting Stiefel a hostile glance, Mayer turned to Mickey with his paternalistic manner and a touch of anger. “You know, Mickey,” he said. “You’ve been one of my favorite people. I look upon you as I would my own son. And you’re a great actor, and I’d like to help you out. But you have to understand, an Andy Hardy radio show would detract from the value of the pictures.”

  “But you already announced to the trades you’re not going to make any more Hardy flicks,” Stiefel reminded him.

  “Suppose I change my mind?” Mayer tossed back.

  “In that case,” Mickey said, “You can get Butch Jenkins to play Andy Hardy.”6

  At that point the meeting became very contentious. Mayer was livid with Rooney, who he felt was treating him with disrespect. He threatened to throw Rooney and friends out of his office. Mickey jumped up and started screaming at Mayer. Mayer held back his anger, remarking, “You know what I’ve done for you, my son.” Mickey replied, “No, but I know what I’ve done for you, I’ve made you, millions.” And at that point Rooney, Stiefel, and Briskin left Mayer’s office.

  Mayer struck back immediately, ordering Mannix to place Mickey on immediate suspension. This was not like the incident with Ava in 1941. He was no longer the number one box office star. He no longer had the clout or the star power to confront Mayer as he had seven years earlier. Probably sensing this, Mickey’s first inclination, and probably his best, was to return to the studio and apologize to Mayer. It would probably have smoothed over L.B.’s ruffled feathers. However, Stiefel used the incident to move forward with his own plan: he wanted Mickey to break his MGM agreement and forge ahead in producing independent films.

  “Mickey this is our opening. We could be earning $100 to $150,000 thousand per film on our own,” Mickey said Stiefel told him.7

  But Mickey became emotional. He felt hurt at what he saw as Mayer’s disrespect toward him. While Stiefel and Briskin were advising Mickey to let them break it off with MGM, he was torn. Sinatra’s business manager and buddy, Nick Sevano, who had a gut feeling about the downside of Steifel’s proposed deal, told him he would be “insane” to leave Metro. Even his stepfather, Fred Pankey, who worked for Rooney Inc. urged him to make peace with Mayer.8

  Sevano told us, “I called Sam and chewed him out. I said, ‘Sam, you know what you’re making this kid do? He’d be giving up the five grand a week and the pension.’ But Stiefel had his own agenda. He had two pictures lined up at United Artists [Quicksand and The Big Wheel] that would bring the back $150 thousand per film . . . and he had a couple of other independent movies for Mickey . . . [H]e said Mickey could be looking at a half million in future films. . . . I told Mick not to listen to Sam. Mickey told me, ‘Nick, Sam’s got a good deal. I couldn’t make that in 10 years at Metro.’ So he told Sam to go ahead and break his contract with the studio.”9

  When Briskin went to MGM to get Mickey’s release, the studio flatly refused. He was contractually tied to MGM for five more years, and it would hold him to that. MGM brass told Briskin that they would create a new image for Mickey, and parts that were age appropriate. They said he still attracted audiences to films, and they had an investment in him. They told Briskin that if Rooney wanted to break the agreement, he would have to buy his way out.

  Sevano recommended that Mickey hire Greg Bautzer and his office to deal with Mayer. Bautzer was a high-powered lawyer with clients such as Joan Crawford, Ingrid Bergman, Ginger Rogers, Howard Hughes, Billy Wilkerson, and Edward G. Robinson. A noted bachelor, he had been engaged to Lana Turner, Dorothy Lamour, and Barbara Payton. He was later married to actress Dana Wynter (of Invasion of the Body Snatchers fame). Bautzer’s law partner, Murray Lertzman, recalled the Rooney negotiations. “Greg simply did not have the juice to extricate Rooney. Mayer had a hard-on for Mickey and wanted his pound of flesh. Rooney would have been far better off to have stayed at Metro. Greg told him that. However, he and his partner were adamant. The studio controlled him lock, stock, and barrel, and it was an inequitable situation. We were at their [MGM’s] mercy.”10

  After negotiating the entire summer, on July 30, 1948, MGM attorney Floyd Hendrickson sent a memo to Benny Thau, the main points being:

  • Mickey had to forgo his $5,000-per-week salary for forty weeks and had to work for $2,500 for twenty weeks.

  • Mickey would have to give Metro a note for $500,000, “which indebtedness would be reduced by $100,000 for each picture he completed under the new picture agreement,” which would call for six-month options rather than the yearly options they now held.

  • Mickey would receive $125,000 for each picture he made under the new agreement, but $100,000 of that would go to pay off the $500,000 bond he’d posted. In other words, he would be paid just $25,000 per film.

  • In the event that Mickey defaulted under the new agreement, Metro would have the right to keep him from appearing in any other film with anyone else during his failure to perform services at Metro.

  • Moreover, if Metro exercised its right to terminate the five-picture agreement by reason of Mickey’s failure or refusal to work, the unpaid balance of the $500,000 was to be paid in cash to the studio upon demand. Also, Mickey still had to pay Stiefel 50 percent of the $25,000 per film and 10 percent to William Morris. If Mickey made all five films in one year, he would be returned $50,000, before taxes.

  It was an absurd, insane deal that Stiefel pressured Mickey into signing.

  On August 3, 1948, Mickey signed the agreement. One week later, unbeknownst to him, Herman C. Biegel, the administrator of the Loews pension plan, sent a memo to Eugene Leake, the treasurer of the fund, that stated, “After going over Rooney’s new contract, it is my opinion that he is no longer a full-time employee of Loews. Therefore his membership in the plan has been terminated as of June 25, 1948.”11 The $49,000-per-year-for-life pension plan was now gone as well, and along with it the lifeline that would have saved Mickey as he got older.

  Mayer was still angry. He scheduled no films, under the agreement, for Mickey to work in. MGM was in no hurry to put Mickey back to work. He would now have to rely solely on Stiefel. According to Mort Briskin, it was just an illusion that Stiefel would invest his own millions to finance the independent films as he had boasted. “Stiefel didn’t want to take any risks with his own money. So I had to go out and get independent financing for our projects. For example, I was the one who found Harry Popkin. He put up most of the money for ‘The Big Wheel.’ Once we had the money, United Artists agreed to release it. So, in reality, Stiefel was in on a free ride. He got other people to put up the money, and he took forty percent of the profits”12—and this was in addition to getting the company overhead paid back. This was an early example of securing independent deficit financing for pictures outside the studio system so that a studio could act as a distribution company. Independent deficit financing is one of the mechanisms financing independent films today. An investor pool puts up money to develop a script that, if sold, might generate another round of financing. The distribution studio buys the film, paying back the investors, some of whom will leave their initial investment in the fund for another picture. />
  It later surfaced that the main reason Mayer so abruptly turned down Stiefel’s proposal for a Hardy series on CBS Radio was that Loews and MGM had grander plans for its properties. They had been quietly purchasing radio properties, including WHN in New York in 1946. (In September 1948, they changed the call letters to WMGM.) The plan was to create their own radio network, using actors already under contract and film properties in their possession. They initially planned to syndicate the M-G-M Theatre of the Air with “At Home with Lionel Barrymore,” “Hollywood, U.S.A.,” “The Story of Dr. Kildare,” “Good News from Hollywood,” “Crime Does Not Pay,” “Maisie,” and their centerpiece, “The Hardy Family,” which would reunite Rooney with Lewis Stone and Fay Holden. The series appeared on Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m. and ran from November 11, 1949, to May 8, 1951. It was syndicated to two hundred stations on the Mutual Radio Network. There were seventy-eight episodes created—twenty-six episodes to run per year that repeated once with the rest in the can. William Morris created this deal for Mickey by going around Stiefel to have MGM work directly with Rooney as a contracted-for-radio performer. The MGM network ended with the popularity of television, which dealt a deathblow to live entertainment programming on the radio and, by the 1950s, helped transform the medium into an arm of the recording industry. Top 40 stations arrived with the advent of rock ’n’ roll, and then became talk radio and open-mike call-in radio, which itself is morphing into Internet on-demand radio as opposed to “appointment” radio.

  Richard Crenna, a prolific actor on radio known for playing high school student Walter Denton on Our Miss Brooks—he portrayed Walter in the television series, and later appeared in The Real McCoys, television movies of the week, and the first Rambo film with Sylvester Stallone—played Andy Hardy’s best friend, Beasley. Crenna recalled of the series, “Mickey was a hoot to work with. Great energy. It was a dream cast and it was a joy to work with Lewis Stone.” Crenna was among a handful of actors, including Jack Benny, George Burns, and Dick Van Patten, who successfully made the transition from radio to early television to popular personality. Mickey, along with Robert Blake and Jackie Cooper, made the transition from silent movies to modern series television.

  Amid the turmoil in his career, Mickey’s home life was always active. He was dividing his time between El Ranchita and a house he rented in Laurel Canyon with Jimmy Cook. The divorce settlement from Betty Jane was approved by the court in June of 1948, with Judge Wilson extracting maximum dollars from Mickey, and would become final in June 1949. Mickey visited his boys on an irregular basis. “Betty Jane was a wonderful mother. Mickey was a father whenever he felt the whim,” remarked her friend Pam McClenathan. Despite his troubles at the studio and in his career, he was back partying every night at clubs such as Ciro’s, the Cocoanut Grove, and Slapsie Maxie’s. Columnists spotted Mickey all over the town with a variety of starlets, including sultry Joi Lansing, Barbara Lawrence, Resa Alcott, Melisa McClure, Mavis Russell, Donna Reynolds, and Julie Wilson.

  In January 1949, at Ciro’s, Nick Sevano introduced him to a twenty-four-year-old actress named Martha Vickers. Vickers was a noted actress who’d played the second lead in The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. She had dated James Stewart after he returned from the war, and was now in the middle of a divorce from Paramount executive, Andrew C. (“A.C.”) Lyles Jr. Their marriage had lasted only a few months (March–July 1948), before Martha filed for a divorce. A.C. recalled Vickers fondly when he spoke of her to us, saying, “She was an absolutely beautiful girl. She was discovered by David Selznick.”13

  “Mickey went crazy when I first introduced him to Martha,” Savano told us. “He wanted to marry her right away.” Mickey believed Martha was everything that Betty Jane was not. She was sophisticated, not the “hick” that he considered B.J. to be. She was only five foot three, and therefore didn’t tower over him. She stroked his ego and was a good listener, in particular to Mickey’s stories of sorrow about his career. She told him that he was a great star and would soon be back on top. He was smitten. Martha took him the very next night to have dinner with her parents, the MacVicars, in the home she shared with them in the Valley. Two days later, Mickey invited Martha and her parents to his small house in Laurel Canyon for a duck dinner prepared by his flat mate, Jimmy Cook. The next night, Martha had dinner with Mickey and his indomitable mother, Nell.

  Columnists and newspapers were all carrying stories about Mickey and Martha. Louella Parsons wrote for the Los Angeles Evening Herald Express and Hearst on January 1, 1949, “Mickey’s new heartbeat is Martha Vickers. They have an every night date, and on Thursday were at a table for two at The Kings.”

  As he did in his first two marriages, Mickey impulsively forged ahead with an instant marriage to Martha, who had told her friend actress Frances Lane that “Mickey was rather modest and not all over the place as he was supposed to be. He is intelligent and quiet, unless his mood is for fun.”14

  Martha’s mother, Frances; and father, James, a sales representative for a Japanese steel manufacturer, were both impressed by Mickey, and the feeling was mutual. Mickey liked the very homey atmosphere of the MacVickar home. Frances was an excellent cook, and James a rugged outdoorsman. It was the type of family life he had always lacked. In a curious way, it might have reminded him of the all-American family he belonged to in the Andy Hardy series. It made him feel good. Accordingly, he decided to pursue Martha and settle down. He sold his bachelor pad home in Laurel Canyon and moved back to El Ranchita with his mother and stepfather.

  Mickey’s close friends at the time were actor Wally Cassell and his wife, RKO star Marcy McGuire. Wally, who was born Oswaldo Castellano, had been renamed Wally Cassell by Mickey, who told him it was a “better name for the films.” Wally had a long career in both feature films and television, which included several pictures with Mickey, including the Sam Stiefel/Mort Briskin–produced Quicksand. Marcy was the star of several films, including 1943’s Higher and Higher, costarring Frank Sinatra. Both Marcy and Wally had known Mickey for over sixty years and were good friends with Martha Vickers.

  Marcy told us:

  Mickey included us in dinners with Martha, and we had them over for dinner. Martha was very sweet. She wanted nothing more but to please Mickey. They both were actually about the same in height, however, Martha wore heels and would tower over him. She felt it would embarrass him, so she started wearing flats. Mickey told her, “Honey, you look great in heels. You don’t have to wear flats for me.” He was pretty confident in himself. Martha was clearly in love with him and told Wally and I [sic], “I just know in my heart that there would never be another boy like him.”

  In around April of 1949, Mickey had really fallen head over heels for her. Just gaga. Wally and I had been married about two years by then. Wally took Mickey to the famous Joseff jewelers and ordered a large emerald-cut diamond engagement ring. He literally called Martha from the store and proposed. She accepted, but cautioned Mickey that they could not marry until her divorce from A. C. Lyles was final, which could be several months. Mickey did not want to wait. Wally arranged for Martha to get a Vegas divorce. In those days, to get a quickie divorce in Vegas, you had to have residency of six weeks. Mickey asked Wally to help them out. So Wally and I drove then to Vegas, and Wally arranged for them to be at an exclusive guest ranch owned by friends of Wally. It was a big spread, about four hundred fifty acres, but there was no gambling there. Martha stayed there, with us, and Mickey was doing a film, so he commuted back and forth. It wasn’t a great place for Mickey to be near the casinos.15

  Wally recalled, “Right when he got to Vegas, Mickey blew about five grand and he couldn’t cover his markers he asked for. Well, these weren’t the type of guys he could screw with. Mickey was flat broke. So I got the markers back for him after I talked to the boys. They knew who he was and it would be bad business for them to go out and put Andy Hardy in a cement block.”16 Still, Mickey would not stop the gambling in Vegas. He loved the atmosphere and
playing craps, and he was addicted to the thrill of tossing the dice across the green felt and off the table cushion.

  Marcy recalled:

  We once were having dinner at the nightclub and casino El Rancho with Mickey and Martha. Wally and I wanted to dance, so we gave our half to Mickey to pay the check. When we came back from dancing and went to leave the club, the maître d’ grabbed Wally’s arm and said to him, “Hey buddy, you’re not planning to leave without paying your check, are you?” Wally explained that we gave Mickey the money to pay the check. He said Mickey skipped off, so we were stuck with the whole bill. When we went to the casino, Mickey was at the craps table playing with our money. Luckily, it only took six weeks to get a divorce. It was dangerous to leave him in Vegas. It was quite an interesting six weeks. Martha liked to have a good time, as well. She could match Mickey drink for drink.17

  Martha’s divorce from A. C. Lyles came through near the end of May, and five days later, Mickey’s divorce from Betty Jane became final.

  “Mickey wanted a simple wedding in Vegas, probably because he couldn’t afford anything fancy. Martha wanted an elegant church wedding in front of her parents. Mickey had no choice but to give in to what Martha wanted,” recalled Marcy.18