The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  Writer Roger Kahn told us, “Mickey claimed that Vickers was frigid. Cold as ice. She also was a big drinker. [But] you just couldn’t believe half the shit Mickey shoveled at you.”4 However, interviews with her friends confirmed that she had become depressed that her once-red-hot film career was sputtering and she realized that it was not helped by her pregnancy. She subsequently started drinking. Her problems were compounded by Mickey’s boozing and gambling, which ultimately spelled disaster for the couple. Martha found out quickly that Mickey was not about to change. By the end of the decade, the two were in constant battles. “It was almost like the fighting Bickersons,” recalled Marcy Cassell. “We would go over their house and they would be in the middle of a huge fight that was usually fueled by both of them drinking.” She also told us, “Martha was drinking very heavily. Beulah, their maid, used to call me all the time and ask for help. She was worried about her drinking at all hours. She would tell me that Martha would just lie in bed and was terribly depressed. Mickey would come home drunk, and started blaming everyone for his problems. He would threaten to quit the business. Martha would counter him by saying, ‘Maybe that’s a good idea, Mick. Why don’t you just quit. You could become a milkman or something.’ ”5

  Meanwhile, Joe Yule Sr. suffered a heart attack on March 30, 1950, and passed away at Santa Monica Hospital. He was buried at Forest Lawn, next to Mickey’s famous costar Wallace Beery. While Mickey had seen his father infrequently over the years, Joe Sr.’s death affected him deeply; he became “really devastated,” according to his friend director Dick Quine, who told us about how his father’s death affected Mick.

  Joe had married a stripper, Leota Hullinger, in 1940 and lived in a small bungalow in the Valley that Mickey had helped finance. Although the agreement that Mickey had set up for Joe with MGM had ended in 1946, he remained active, still in movies, playing the character Jiggs of the Jiggs and Maggie newspaper cartoon strip, and still drinking heavily.

  As the decade progressed, everything was piling up on top of Mickey. His marriage was unraveling, his father had passed away, he had another child on the way, he was out of steady work and he was already behind on the alimony and child support payments for Betty Jane and the boys. His debts were eating him up. Mickey responded, according to Arthur Marx, with “booze, broads, and horses.”

  Under the direction of Martin Gang, Mickey crawled back to MGM to beg their forgiveness. Times had changed, however, at Culver City. By 1950, Mayer had been ordered to hire a new “Thalberg,” and Loews had put Dore Schary in charge of production at Metro. With the backing of Nick Schenck, Schary wielded immense power at the studio, and Mayer was more an honorary than a hands-on executive. Schary did not believe in the “star system.” Slowly, quietly, he was not renewing agreements with many of the legendary contract players such as Garland or for the musical stars from the Arthur Freed unit such as Esther Williams. Mickey certainly did not fit into the future Schary envisioned.

  Nonetheless, Mickey set up a meeting with Schary in January 1950. He told Schary that he had made a big “boo-boo” breaking his agreement and would like to be placed back under contract. Schary and Rooney had known each other for years and had worked together since Boys Town, for which Schary had won his Oscar for Best Screenplay. But Schary was dismissive. According to Mickey, Schary told him, “We’ll see what we can do for you, kid,” and then showed him the door. There was no great reprieve coming. Even though he had a short-lived return to MGM for The Strip, in 1951, and A Slight Case of Larceny, in 1952—features that were part of the agreement that Mort Briskin and Greg Bautzer had negotiated in 1948—it did not last. In the end, Mickey was on his own.6

  Mickey then tried to set up his own independent production team. He hired attorney Martin Gang and Nick Sevano to act as his managers. He’d retained Johnny Hyde at William Morris as his agent; Hyde believed he could get Mickey to open a picture. Mickey’s name still held some value at the box office, albeit in more budget-conscious low-rent productions; he was no longer a leading man. True to his word, Hyde found Mickey work in a low-budget drama at Twentieth Century–Fox about the roller derby, called The Fireball. Trying to recapture some of his Boys Town appeal, in it Mickey plays an orphan boy who becomes a roller derby champ with the aid of the orphanage priest, played by perennial clergyman Pat O’Brien. The movie was filmed from December 1949 through January 1950. Once again, Hyde’s girlfriend, Marilyn Monroe, was given a bit part. The movie returned a small profit and garnered some positive notices for Mickey. James Barstow Jr. wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, “Rooney does a fine job in a part that appears to fit his proportions inside and out . . . his half-pint who hates the world until he finds his niche on a roller rink and then becomes overbearingly egotistical comes through with pungent conviction.” His diminutive size, which in the past was part of his charm, now had become more glaring as he aged.

  Next, Columbia studio head Harry Cohn, who hoped to catch a resurgent interest in an Andy Hardy type of film, signed Mickey to star in He’s a Cockeyed Wonder, which began shooting in early April, shortly after Rooney’s father’s death. Mickey’s face had weathered by now, and he looked paunchy and much older than his twenty-nine years. His costar was Terry Moore, who starred in the 1949 quasi-cult King Kong knockoff Mighty Joe Young, opposite the ape, whose mechanical eyes lasciviously oogled her throughout the film—as did the eyes of her reputed longtime companion Howard Hughes, Mickey’s former antagonist/nemesis with Ava. Just watching the trailer for He’s a Cockeyed Wonder,7 viewers can sense the wear and tear of Mickey’s hard living on his performance. On October 21, 1950, the New York Herald Tribune wrote, “The Hardy series died a natural death several years ago, with the generally accepted epitaph that enough is enough. It is painfully surprising, therefore, to see Mickey Rooney back at the same old stand in ‘He’s a Cockeyed Wonder.’ The name has changed, this time it’s Freddie Frisby, and there’s no Hardy clan. But all of Andy’s mannerisms are on tap including the exuberant mugging and Hardy’s facility for getting in and out of contrived troubles.” Mickey’s innocent young lad act had clearly worn thin.

  Meanwhile, Theodore “Teddy” Michael Rooney was born on April 13, 1950, at Valley Hospital in LA. Mickey, who was not living with Martha after the death of his father, was, like his father at his own birth, nowhere to be found. As Marcy Cassell explained to us, the couple had been fighting, arguments driven by alcohol, and Mickey tried to be away from her as much as he could. “Martha called Mickey the day before . . . and told him that the baby’s birth would be very soon. She was already three weeks late. He told her that he was very busy and had to go to a party. While Teddy was born early in the morning [4:00 a.m.], Mickey sauntered in around 5:00 p.m.”8

  After Teddy’s birth, Martha and Mickey attempted a reconciliation. As Martha told her friend Pam McClenathan, “She didn’t want Teddy to be the victim of a broken home so early in his life.”9 That was Mickey’s life script, and Vickers wanted none of it for her son. But Teddy’s fate, because the chromosomal deck had been stacked against him at the moment of his conception, was sealed. Alcoholism and substance abuse would dog him his entire life.

  THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED Teddy’s birth were turbulent for the Rooneys. There was a series of breakups and reconciliations. The pattern was typical of Mickey, and would be repeated in future marriages and relationships. He simply was not interested in being trapped in domestic life. After a few days of being with his wife and kids, boredom would set in.

  “Mickey was a ball of energy that always needed attention and action,” said Nick Sevano.10 Wally Cassell echoed Nick, telling us, “He had a frenetic existence and it was impossible for a wife to keep up with him. But with his wives he felt he could do anything that he pleased. He felt that he had the right to go anywhere or do anything as long as it pleased him. Mickey lived as many husbands had fantasized about living, which was to support his family but screw around as he pleased.”11 It was a lifestyle, though, that was fated to catch
up with him.

  Mickey’s and Martha’s alcohol-fueled arguments led to many knock-down, drag-out fights that ended with Mickey back at Nell’s or with another woman. Marcy Cassell described them to us as “The Battling Rooneys.”

  Just as 1950 had begun to be an extremely difficult year for Mickey, things went from bad to worse. The year started out with the death of his father and the birth of another child, he continued his rocky relationship with Martha, his drinking and gambling intensified, his career had hit the rocks, and he faced financial disaster when the failure of Rooney Inc. cleaned out all his assets and left him flat broke. Lawsuits inevitably followed the shutdown of the company, for tax liabilities it had incurred. Not just the IRS, but the state of California was pursuing him. And while his prior obligations were siphoning off any dribble of income there was, he was being forgotten by Hollywood. Many industry executives, the folks who could green-light a film on their signatures alone, avoided him like the plague if they saw him at an event or function—assuming he was invited. As if by a gentlemen’s agreement, and with nary a sound, the door to an industry that had embraced him with open arms since 1934 was suddenly shut in his face. When he did get an invitation to an event, gone were the crowds of photographers and fans who had previously mobbed him for an autograph or a photo op. He was becoming the textbook definition of a Hollywood has-been. And for a guy used to the bright lights, the sudden popping of hundreds of flashbulbs going off in his face, the whirr of rolling cameras, the roar of fast cars, and the cooing of willing starlets, the silence was deafening.

  Mickey himself described what he went through during this period in an interview in the January 1958 issue of McCall’s magazine. He had been invited by his old MGM shadow, Les Peterson, to be an Oscar presenter at the March 23, 1950, Academy Awards ceremony hosted by actor Paul Douglas. Mickey was thrilled to be included in the event, and hoped that this meant he was being accepted again by the industry. As Mickey recounted to McCall’s:

  My pride was hurt during this period. I wanted to be wanted and needed, but I didn’t know how. . . . I had an old tuxedo that didn’t fit so good anymore, but there was nothing I could do about that. On the night of the Oscars, I was finishing dinner with Martha, who was my wife at the time, when I got a call from Johnny Green, the Academy musical conductor. It was twenty minutes before I was due to leave for the theater. Green said he didn’t know how to say this, but the Academy had changed their minds about me taking part in their show, and had elected him to break it to me. It seems that I’d been married so often that I was a bad representative of the picture industry. When I realized what he was telling me, I blew. Boy, how I blew! I told him where the whole Academy could go, and I resigned then and there at the top of my lungs. Then after I hung up, I cried.12

  The quickly unraveling marriage with Martha, his topsy-turvy life headed for another divorce, had become the only story about Mickey the press was covering. Mickey claimed that this marriage to “Mart” ended the very night he was rejected by the Academy, during an argument fueled by booze. He said Vickers viciously attacked him as a has-been. “I think that was the night our marriage died. Martha never felt the same way about me again, and I didn’t feel worthy of her. Soon, we were living apart,” Mickey wrote in Life Is Too Short.13

  Mickey began dating a bevy of starlets, including Diane Garrett, Kay Brown, Erin O’Brien, and Elaine Curtis. Mickey claimed that while on a break from filming The Bridges at Toko-Ri, he was on an aircraft carrier near Japan with his friend, actor Don “Red” Barry, and “they booked sixteen Japanese gals into our hotel room for an Asian style orgy. If there is one thing that Californians can learn from the Asians among us it is their acceptance, without guilt, of the erotic.”14 Mickey also claimed he had an affair with a divorced, rich San Francisco socialite who wanted to marry him and retire to a life of leisure, living off her inheritance—a proposition, he said, he declined.

  Now broke, Mickey was forced to resort, again, to appearing in live stage productions to pay alimony and back child support, come up with cash for Nell, and provide for Martha and Teddy, not to mention himself. Nick Sevano picked up a lucrative gig for Mickey in June 1950 as the emcee of the Hadacol Caravan, in essence, an old-time medicine show that sold Hadacol, a tonic that was 26 percent alcohol and that seemed to be a universal remedy: Drink enough of it, and you forgot you were sick in the first place. It was the “cure-all” for every ailment, but was later banned by the Food and Drug Administration. Manufactured by a Louisiana state senator named Dudley LeBlanc, the alcohol-laced elixir was marketed throughout the South to “down-home folks,” as LeBlanc called them, in commercials using famous country music stars such as Minnie Pearl, Roy Acuff and His Smoky Mountain Boys, and the Chez Paree Girls. The price of admission to Hadacol Caravan was a bottle top of Hadacol. According to the August 30, 1950, review in Variety, Mickey was earning $7,500 a week for fifteen weeks shilling for the drug. More than $110,000 for a summer of work was impressive money for 1950, but even before it came in, it was gone.

  In December 1950, Mickey, now separated from “Mart,” moved into Nell and Fred’s new house on Dickens Street in Sherman Oaks. Martha was still living with Teddy in the house they’d bought on White Oak. The couple attempted a Christmas reconciliation, according to Hedda Hopper’s column on December 16, 1950, in which she quoted Martha as saying, “We thought it was a shame to spoil the baby’s first Christmas. We are going to see if we can’t be a little more sensible and hang onto our tempers.” However, on January 4, 1951, Martha told Hopper that she would seek a divorce, stating, “Mickey doesn’t like the restrictions of a marriage.” Then, in the Los Angeles Times on March 8, 1951, it was announced that “Mickey Rooney and his estranged wife, Martha Vickers, will leave on a second honeymoon in a few weeks. The Rooneys kissed and made up and decided to put their San Fernando home up for sale, so they can start fresh in new surroundings.” The true reason behind selling their home was that Mickey again was flat broke, couldn’t afford to live there, and simply needed the dough.

  At that time, Mickey was just completing his last film for Metro, The Strip, as part of his negotiated release, for which he earned only $25,000. While on set, he was served with a writ of execution that demanded he pay $3,541.14 to Betty Jane for back alimony and child support or show up in court to face a charge of nonsupport. With the threat of a prison sentence hanging over him, he begged his friends to help him scrape together a payment, and it was Sam Stiefel who came to the rescue, loaning Mickey money to pay off the debt.

  Mickey’s star may have faded, but there was still an instant box office draw for any film with his name attached. Harry Cohn, the chairman of Columbia who had given Mickey a contract for Cockeyed Wonder, recognized this and, with Nick Sevano, negotiated a three-picture deal for seventy-five thousand dollars per film in March 1951. Cohn put producer Jonie Taps in charge of creating projects for Mickey. Mickey suggested hiring his old friend Dick Quine to direct, and a young scribe named Blake Edwards to write a script. Based on Taps’s idea of an Abbott and Costello service-type comedy, they created Sound Off as Mickey’s first Columbia film.

  On June 11, 1951, during the filming of Sound Off, Martha filed for divorce, charging Mickey with “extreme mental cruelty” and asking for custody of fourteen-month-old Teddy. Mickey’s divorce attorney, James Needleman, began negotiating a settlement, and Mickey, once again homeless, and nearly penniless at age thirty-one, was back to living with Nell and Fred.

  Dick Quine recalled to Arthur Marx:

  Mickey was in a state of depression all during the filming of “Sound Off,” because he felt there was something wrong with him that he couldn’t make a marriage work. One day, when I was on the set and waiting to make our first shot, Mickey called in sick and said, “I can’t make it, Dick. I can’t make it, I’m sick.” I said, “Come on, Mick. You can handle it. You were all right last night . . .” Mickey eventually showed up. He was having trouble sleeping. When Blake and I would go out to dinn
er with him after a day’s shooting . . . we’d slip him a couple of phenobarbitals into his drink. That way he’d be sleepy after dinner and go home to bed instead of roaming around the city half the night getting into trouble.15

  The wrap on the two-year-old Vickers-Rooney marriage came on September 25, 1951. Martha claimed Mickey was “extremely abusive and sometimes was drinking.” The court awarded her a monthly alimony of $2,000 for 1951, $1,875 for 1952, $1,750 until July 1955, $950 for the rest of 1955, $750 in 1956, $600 in 1958, $450 in 1959, and $300 after that until she died or remarried. She also received $150 monthly child support for Teddy until he turned eighteen. Mickey would keep the house on White Oak, but not the furniture.

  In October 1951, Mickey’s income was also garnished by the IRS to repay $35,000 in back taxes. According to his friend Sig Frohlich, Mickey was suicidal. “I have to get out of town and you’re coming with me,” he told Frohlich.16 They flew off to Houston. He chose Houston because he wanted to be away from the glare of Hollywood, out of the spotlight. They checked into an upscale hotel, the Shamrock, and hunkered down.

  “Mickey just disappeared from the world for a few weeks,” recalled his mistress of six decades, “Mrs. Smith” (not her real name because she asked us to keep her identity confidential). “He just knocked himself out with sleeping pills and booze. Sig helped him pull out of his depression. He was very suicidal for a bit, but he bounced back quickly. I flew up to see him, and he barely recognized me. I reminded him what he had to live for. He also dreaded the albatross he created with alimony and child support for two wives and child support for three sons, along with Nell. It was touch-and-go for a while.”17

  When Mickey returned to LA, he rented a small apartment with his buddy, cowboy actor Don “Red” Barry, himself a notorious drinker and womanizer. Barry became Mickey’s constant companion as they gambled, partied, and drank until the early hours.