Mickey had to work hard to find a minister who would marry both a divorcee and the twice-divorced Rooney. He was turned down by several churches. However, the Christ Memorial Unity Church in North Hollywood agreed. The Rev. Herbert J. Schneider married Martha and Mickey on June 3, 1949, at 5:00 p.m. Mickey had just picked up his final divorce papers at 11:00 a.m. that same day.
His close friend Sidney Miller was not invited to the wedding but was present at Betty Jane’s marriage to Buddy Baker, which took place five days after Mickey’s wedding to Martha. Miller recalled, “I never got along with Martha, and she tried to cut me out of their circle of friends. Mickey and I still hung out at the track.”19
Mickey, now with his third wife, was twenty-nine. He said at the wedding, “I’ve got me a wonderful girl this time. If I don’t make this one last, there’s something wrong with me.”20 He partied until late with friends, family, and Sam Stiefel. This was unusual, since Mickey had begun a very public dispute with Stiefel three months prior to the wedding.
“Why not?” Mort Briskin said with an amused grin when asked why he and Sam were at the wedding reception while Mickey was having a dispute with Sam over money. “Sam and I paid for the wedding.”21
Mickey’s feud with his partner Sam Stiefel began when Johnny Hyde, vice president at William Morris Agency West Coast and Mickey’s former agent, was courting Mickey to return to the agency. Hyde was a legendary agent in Hollywood, known for being the Svengali and lover to Marilyn Monroe until his death in 1950. Hyde reminded Mickey that his career was going nowhere.
“Hyde was a real character,” recalled Nick Sevano. “He was a little short Russian Jew. I think Budd Schulberg based Sammy Glick on him,” Sevano said, referring to the take-no-prisoners ladder-climbing character in Schulberg’s famous Hollywood novel What Makes Sammy Run? “He did everything to try to get Mickey to come back to Morris.”22
In a story (undoubtedly planted by Hyde) headlined “Rooney Cuts away from Sam Stiefel,” the Daily Variety on February 1, 1949, wrote, “Rooney was dissatisfied with the financial returns he had been getting out of the Rooney-Stiefel Corp. The actor was set in a deal Stiefel made with United Artists for release of Quicksand. However, he is now negotiating with King Brothers to make a picture with Lou Rantz repping the Kings to put together a package and also negotiating with RKO for a releasing deal with King and Rooney. . . . Since William Morris is now repping him, naturally Rooney will try to by-pass the Stiefel Quicksand deal.”
Months later, other rumors surfaced in the papers about the split between Rooney and Stiefel, the first of which appeared in the Hollywood Reporter on April 9, 1949, which spoke of a project Hyde had set up at Twentieth Century–Fox for him: “Mickey Rooney attempted to withdraw from this production in order to star in ‘A Ticket to Tomahawk,’ but producer Samuel H. Stiefel, Rooney’s partner in the independent production company, held the actor to his contract. Fritz Lang was considered for director and Ava Gardner and Jean Wallace are being considered for the film.”
As William Morris attempted to negotiate the breakup of their partnership, Mickey learned that Stiefel was not to be trifled with. According to Stiefel, Mickey had accumulated a huge debt to the corporation, and to Stiefel personally. All the loans Mickey had taken for his debts and gambling, the money lent to Nell and Fred, the money fronted for Mickey’s divorce from Ava and Betty Jane, the homes, the offices, the staff—Stiefel basically owned Mickey. Eventually, a deal was ironed out to extricate Mickey from this mess. Essentially, Stiefel kept all the proceeds from Mickey’s earnings from Metro, from his personal appearances and radio show (Shorty Bell), and from Rooney’s appearing in the three properties Stiefel and Briskin had sold to investors. Only two of those films were produced; these became the films noir Quicksand and The Big Wheel.
The third, unfortunately for Rooney, was never produced. It was a property Rooney Inc. had owned called Francis, the Talking Mule, based on a novel by David Stern called Francis that Mort Briskin had optioned. Briskin recalled, “Stiefel didn’t have any faith in it and refused to put up his own money. Eventually, I dropped the option and Universal bought it immediately.”23 It became one of the most profitable film series, made Donald O’Connor a star, and kept Universal afloat for most of the 1950s. Ultimately, the story turned up on television as a series about a talking horse, Mr. Ed, starring Alan Young. “The money that Mickey could have made from owning those movies would have cushioned him for life,” recalled Billy Barty.24
Quicksand, an attempt to change the Rooney image, was the type of film noir that had become popular with audiences in the late 1940s and early ’50s. It put Rooney alongside his old friend James Cagney’s sister Jeanne and Rooney Inc. client Peter Lorre. Harrison Carroll wrote on March 15, 1949, “From now on, Mickey Rooney says he’ll play only Jimmy Cagney type of roles on the screen. He started in that direction with the start of filming Quicksand.”
For the second film under the Stiefel agreement, The Big Wheel, Stiefel and Briskin had secured some of the financing from former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey. The movie marked the final appearance in films for Hattie McDaniel, the first African American actress to win an Academy Award. According to Nick Sevano, Mickey was asked a favor by his off-and-on William Morris agent, Johnny Hyde, to create a small role his girlfriend, Norma Jean Baker, who appears as an extra in the film, one of her earliest performances before she became Marilyn Monroe.
Norma Jean was a stunner. She would go on to have a spectacular career and become friends with Sinatra and the Rat Pack and with President John F. Kennedy. Mickey was fascinated with Norma Jean and told us that he invented the name Marilyn Monroe, a story that doesn’t have any credence, but a fun anecdote nonetheless.
He said, “I met her. She was Norma Jean Baker and she was at singer Vaughn Monroe’s house. She needed a ride home and I drove her to her apartment. She blew me and then I suggested that Norma Jean was not a good name for movies. She said, ‘Mickey, what do you think?’ So I thought, Marilyn, from Marilyn Miller, who was a vaudeville star, and then give her Vaughn’s last name, Monroe. She loved it.”25 The true story, however, is that Twentieth Century–Fox executive Ben Lyons helped her combine her mother’s maiden name, Monroe, with the first name of his late fiancée, Ziegfeld Follies star Marilyn Miller.
Meanwhile, the stories about the Rooney-Stiefel breakup continued to appear in the press. Harrison Carroll wrote on March 8, 1949, “I hear Mickey Rooney and Sam Stiefel were rowing for hours yesterday at the General Service studio.”
Another signal that Mickey’s finances were running low came when he was forced to sell the beloved El Ranchita, which he’d given to his mother. Harrison Carroll wrote on March 8, 1949:
When the lawyers come out of the huddles, Mickey will probably be free of his long-term contract to the corporation under which he and his partner, Sam Stiefel, have been operating, but of course there will be concessions . . . [A]s I get it Mickey will do the picture, Quicksand . . . and will make two other films at a special bargain rate on salary for these productions. Otherwise he’ll be free of his seven year deal. Mickey is now living in the three-bedroom home of his mother and step-father, the Fred Pankeys. The five-acre ranch that Mickey gave to his mother was sold to director Roy Del Ruth. The smaller house was taken in trade.
The Sam Stiefel story is almost emblematic of how show business personalities with no business sense can easily be manipulated by managers and agents. By the time of the dissolution of Rooney Inc., Sam Stiefel had achieved his goal. The corporation had returned a hefty profit for him, and he became an independent film producer. After his years in Hollywood, Stiefel returned triumphantly to Philadelphia, now a legitimate successful film producer.
While Stiefel and Mort Briskin had achieved their objectives—they set up a company marketing the services of Rooney, used revenue generated by Rooney to cover the company expenses, advanced Mickey money then charged it back to Mickey out of his percentage, and topped it off by wrenchi
ng Mickey away from the one contract he had that promised a future—Mickey was left high and dry. Under the influence of Stiefel, he went from the world’s number one box office star, with the security of a long-term agreement of the premiere movie studio, to an underemployed actor merely scraping by.
The Stiefels, the Annenbergs, and the Kennedys all rose to become patriarchs of empires and great philanthropists by adhering to the “three gets” of American society: Get rich any way you can; once you’re rich, get legitimate as quickly as you can; and once you’re legitimate, get philanthropic so nobody can touch you. And poor Mickey Rooney wound up involved with all three of these figures: financed by Joe Kennedy into Larry Darmour’s Poverty Row studio, addicted to horse racing via Moe Annenberg’s Daily Racing Form, and bled dry by Sam Stiefel.
The Stiefel-Rooney relationship was skewed from the start, for both men had divergent agendas, even though they seemed to be walking down the same path. Sam saw Rooney as the ripe talent he needed to break into the motion picture industry. Mickey saw Sam as a father figure. The partnership of Rooney Inc. was thus off on the wrong foot from day one.
In the end, Mickey felt no hard feelings toward Stiefel, despite the damage he had done to Rooney’s career. On March 22, 1950, Rooney told Hedda Hopper, “I went down the sewer with Stiefel. Sam Stiefel and I made some lousy pictures. He’s back in Philadelphia now, but there are no hard feelings between us. When trouble arises between the two people, I’ve learned its best to shake hands and go to a neutral corner.”26
Rooney had been very susceptible to Sam Stiefel’s charm. Neuropsychiatrist and author Dr. John Liebert (Wounded Minds, Hearts of Darkness) told us that given Mickey’s lack of parenting as a growing child and his exposure to the theater and performance at such a tender age, he developed a “situational character,” one that allowed him to become the consummate entertainer, but it was more an exoskeleton than a personality.27 He was, therefore, psychologically a “hollow man,” underdeveloped. Thus, for the rest of his life he would search for a core personality, which he would find only very late in life, when he met and empathized with Bill Sackler for his performance in the television movie Bill. But more on that later.
Bob Dylan wrote, “The times they are a-changin’,” which aptly describes Mickey in 1949. Good-bye MGM, Betty Jane, Sam Stiefel, and adios mi casa, El Ranchita. Hello Martha, hello to a new mistress, and hello to a new decade. After his years at Metro and his disastrous partnership with Sam Stiefel, Mickey was peeking over the next hill, hoping for a fresh start. In reality, he was only staring into a red sky at morning.
17
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The Mick, the Duke, and the Deuce in the Coconut
Mickey and his mother Nell dancing at the housewarming party for El Ranchita, their new home in Encino, California, in 1939.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBERT EASTON.
By 1949, Mickey had become a vastly different person than the Andy Hardy of the 1930s. No longer a teenager, and now a war veteran and twice divorced, having severed contracts with Metro and Sam Stiefel, he found himself marching in place at the crossroads of his career and his life. He still owed Metro three pictures and had an obligation to complete three independent films with Stiefel, which would satisfy his agreement with the now-defunct Rooney Inc. (He ended up doing only one film for MGM, The Strip.) Also he would receive only a pittance of a salary as part of his negotiated departures. On top of that, as the new decade stared back at him, his new marriage was also quickly foundering on the rocks. As his marital adventures fed the daily tip sheets of the gossip columnists, he was repeating the same script: married but bored and looking around. And while the Rooney name still offered some box office attraction, it was driven mostly by audiences’ ghoulish desire to watch in slo-mo the train wreck that he had become, inhabiting character roles that were no longer the leads he had played fifteen years earlier.
Mickey was a walking time bomb. He was drinking heavily, addicted to Benzedrine to keep up his energy, gambling at accelerated levels, over his head in debt, and according to his personal manager, Nick Sevano, “still fucking anything with a skirt.”1 And he was only twenty-nine years old.
Mickey’s emotional decompensation, one must realize, went far beyond that of today’s young performers acting badly. None of today’s scandal-ridden entertainers command the box office power or garner the public attention that followed Mickey from the late 1940s through 1950. He was the original enfant terrible of the entertainment world. Through the end of his agreement with MGM in 1949, his every want or desire was indulged. Everyone, from Les Peterson to Sam Stiefel to Mort Briskin to his personal entourage of Sid Miller, Sig Frohlich, and Dick Paxton, was there to scratch his every itch. His bad behavior was whitewashed by Howard Strickling and his PR team at Metro. He was horribly irresponsible to his wives and children. He now had two ex-wives and a third divorce inexorably heading toward him like a mudslide along the canyon walls of the Hollywood Hills. He had two sons from his previous marriage whom he would barely acknowledge, but who were desperate for their father’s attention.
While Mickey failed on almost every personal front, there is no disputing his talent as a performer. Even as he began his free fall into minor low-budget films throughout the 1950s, his performances were still right on target. As an evolving character actor, he lent each role the immediately identifiable Rooney energy and credibility that had become his trademark even as his star faded. Throughout our many interviews with directors, writers, actors, and crew, his colleagues revealed to us many of their memorable negative personal encounters with Rooney. But not one ever disputed Rooney’s innate talent or the performances he could deliver regardless of the demands of the role. From the madcap farce comedies (such as 1957’s Operation Mad Ball, with Jack Lemmon and Ernie Kovacs, in which he plays a wily army sergeant in the days after World War II) to the tragic dramas (such as the 1954 James Michener film The Bridges at Toko-Ri, a very early antiwar movie, in which he plays a navy helicopter rescue pilot shot down over North Korea while trying to retrieve a navy fighter pilot played by William Holden), there is no disputing that Mickey’s performances were flawless. He never missed a beat.
While his output was nearly the same in the 1940s and ’50s, when he made twenty-two films in each decade, the quality of the films themselves was markedly different. He had appeared in mostly A-level films in the 1940s, in which he was usually top-billed. But in the ensuing decade, despite some exceptions such as The Bridges at Toko-Ri, he was reduced to performing in low-budget, mediocre programmers, playing secondary or character roles. Yet he inhabited those roles with a gusto that went beyond professionalism. He also starred in a hardly noticed television comedy series and made personal appearances in any venue that would have him, just to pay the bills, the alimony, child support, and bookies—even as he was struggling against the current to stay financially afloat, yet slowly sinking beneath the waves. He was no longer, in most instances, an independent producer, as Sam Stiefel had envisioned for him, but a job-seeking actor who, in some cases, hat in hand, had to audition for a part. By the mid-1950s he was appearing in the series that his company, Rooney Inc., had optioned and jettisoned, Francis the Talking Mule, which by that time had become creaky and burned out. He performed in the sequel Francis in the Haunted House, replacing his friend Donald O’Connor, who had leapfrogged him in films. While O’Connor had received profit points when he did the series, Mickey was being paid far less, and had had to audition to beat out a then-unknown comic and future television producer, James Komack, for the part.
On the personal front, in 1949 Mickey and Martha Vickers, now Martha Rooney, bought Spencer Tracy’s former home, a small bungalow at 4723 White Oak Avenue in Encino, near his mother. He chose the location so he could go home to Mama Nell when Martha became fed up with his antics and locked him out of the house, which she was wont to do whenever she felt Mickey needed reining in.
Director Dick Quine, who was a lifelong fri
end of Rooney, recalled to Arthur Marx, “How could they not be aware with his track record? The problem was always the same. His frenetic existence. It was impossible for a wife to keep up with him. But as I say, how could they have not known when they married him? I feel he’s taken a bum rap about being a lousy husband. I think a lot of the women used him to get somewhere. After all, he was a tremendous star. He had clout in the business or at least they thought he did . . .”2 Dick Quine himself was no slouch, having been married four times and having had a long engagement, but no marriage, to Kim Novak before his suicide in 1989.
Actress Marcy McGuire Cassell and her husband, Wally, close friends of both Mickey and Martha, told us:
Mickey was just impulsive and spontaneous, and had little regard for his wife. He would toss around outlandish ideas. Once we were having dinner with Mickey and they were talking about financing a movie. Martha was pregnant with Teddy. Mickey had the cockamamie idea that he could get a friend of his in New York City to put up the money. He just called up the airline for reservations for he and Wally [sic] to fly to New York for a week. I knew he had more than financing on his mind. I just told Mickey that Wally and I traveled only together and that he was not about to leave Martha by herself. She was pregnant for Chrissakes. She just sat there quietly, but he was out of control and very inconsiderate.
Regarding Martha, Wally added, “When she was pregnant, Mickey was out the door chasing other broads.” Wally also told us, “Mickey was a free spirit. He had a carefree attitude and did as he pleased. I mean, most of the women he married knew how Mickey lived. They knew he was never going to change.”3 As if to echo this comment, Mickey’s stepson Chris Aber, from his marriage to his last wife, Jan, told us that even in his eighties, girls would throw themselves at Mickey, and he enjoyed every minute of it.
The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney Page 30