The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  Mickey recalled, “Red fucked every broad that wore a skirt. He had banged Susan Hayward, Linda Darnell, and Joan Crawford. Crawford got hot when she was fucked in public and could get caught. She once fucked Barry in a limo while the chauffeur watched. That turned her on.”18

  Red Barry was the worst possible influence for Mickey at this point in his life. Barry, who had gained fame as “Red Ryder” in a series of B Westerns featuring Robert Blake, had a history of drinking and fighting on movie sets.

  Sid Miller told us, “This guy was a real piece of work. He had a chip on his shoulder and was quick tempered. He was short and built much like Mickey. He was down on his luck and sponged off Mick. He was nothing but fucking trouble.”

  In October 1951, Mickey shot a quickie Western, My Outlaw Brother, at Poverty Row’s Eagle-Lion Films. It was the last production for Eagle-Lion, whose president, Arthur Krim, left to take over United Artists; the studio was sold to Ziv Television. The film costarred Robert Stack and Robert Preston. Mickey found a minor part for Barry.

  In the 1950s Mickey was still working in roles that couldn’t provide enough income to pay all his obligations, even as he sought to reignite his career. After a rather dismal showing for The Strip, MGM decided to pursue only one more film with Mickey, even though he owed them two more (one of which was canceled), and the studio cut ties with him on January 8, 1952, at which time Mickey would be released from any future obligations. But he still had two films owed to Columbia. Sound Off had fared decently enough to induce Harry Cohn to order another picture in that vein. He had producer Jonie Taps reassemble the same team, with Dick Quine as director and Blake Edwards as writer, for All Ashore, a naval farce that would be shot on Catalina Island, with singer Dick Haymes as the costar.

  While Cohn sent Taps to ensure that Rooney stayed out of trouble, Mickey remembered in an interview with Arthur Marx, “I went to Catalina with them and the first guy to get drunk was, of all people, Jonie Taps.” Taps said, “Mickey Rooney had to put me to bed. And when he did, he said, ‘[T]his is the last time you’re going to get drunk ahead of me, Jonie.’ ”19

  Rooney followed this film with another naval comedy at Paramount, Off Limits, which starred Bob Hope, with Mickey second-billed as brash boxer Herbert Tuttle. The film also costarred Hope’s mistress, Marilyn Maxwell. “Hope would disappear with Maxwell during afternoon shoots. He’d be behind the flats with that broad [Maxwell] blowing him,” Rooney recalled.20

  No angel himself, Mickey, like his father, had always been attracted to strippers. In mid-1952 he started dating legendary statuesque stripper Tempest Storm, born Anne Banks, who was known as the “Fabulous 4D Girl.” Mickey claimed to Arthur Marx that he bought her a ten-thousand-dollar full-length mink to win her over. Storm was also an off-again, on-again girlfriend of mobster Mickey Cohen, not someone upon whose girl you wanted to put the moves—not if you didn’t want to end up like mob boss Benny Siegel, whom Cohen had his gunsels riddle with bullets as he sat in his living room. But Mickey recalled, “I fucked Storm for nine straight hours when we met. Such great tits.”21

  Marx told us, “Mickey was dating Storm when two thugs came to his apartment and pushed him around. They were Mickey Cohen’s boys. Mick was scared shitless. They made it clear for him to stay away from Cohen’s ‘goil.’ I don’t think Storm ever heard a peep from Mickey ever again.”22

  Despite Nick Sevano’s having secured him his three-picture deal at Columbia, Mickey was growing unhappy with the lack of work. He felt Sevano was paying too much attention to his childhood friend Frank Sinatra. He also was angered by Sinatra’s romance and marriage to Ava Gardner. Sevano recalled, “He was out of control. He was frantic and demanded I get him a job as a director. He would have made a lousy director because he had no discipline. So we parted.”23 Mickey released Sevano as his manager in October 1952.

  In December of that year, he began shooting his final film for Metro, A Slight Case of Larceny. This cheap B comedy teamed him with Eddie Bracken and was directed by television director Don Weis and written by Jerry Davis, who later became a prolific television writer/producer for shows such as Bewitched and The Odd Couple. Davis had married Hope’s girlfriend, Marilyn Maxwell, after Hope dumped her.

  Hearing that Mickey was now without a manager, the manager, producer, and theatrical impresario Maurice Duke decided to pursue Mickey as a client. Native New Yorker Duke, who had changed his name from Maurice Duschinsky, had knocked around the business in vaudeville as a harmonica player before becoming an agent/manager, writer, and a film executive for Sam Katzman at Monogram Studios. Duke was a Hollywood original, a member of the tribe from the old country (Brooklyn), a Damon Runyon type of character who held court at the Beverly Hills Friars Club. Until the mid-1990s he was also, with a group of friends, a daily fixture at the deli Nate ’n Al, on Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills. Duke, who had an outsize personality, was the self-proclaimed “King of the B Pictures,” and was fond of telling everyone, “I produced one hundred and four pictures, all bad.”24 He would proudly proclaim that he had produced the worst film ever made, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, in 1952, a real cult stinker set in the jungle of a Pacific island. In it, Lugosi, playing the the evil evolutionist/biologist Dr. Zabor, turns a visitor to the island who is making lascivious eyes at his daughter into an oversize monkey. (How bad was the movie? It was so bad that not only could Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Cambot not find the words to describe it, but the film made Ed Wood’s Plan Nine from Outer Space look like Gone with the Wind.) Shot for twelve thousand dollars in six days, it was directed, after a fashion, by the infamous William “One-Shot” Beaudine, who had helmed many of the Bowery Boys comedies at Monogram and had directed the Jiggs and Maggie series that starred Joe Yule Sr.

  On an early morning in March 1953, the Duke, as he was called, went to Rooney’s Woodland Hills house, having decided to cold-call Mickey. Duke, a five-foot tall, cigar-chomping, fast-talking, gravel-voiced hondler, was stricken with polio as a baby—well before, he always said, “it was popular.” His leprechaun personality was a compensation for his disability. Part of Duke’s charm was his zest for life, despite the Forest Gump leg braces he wore and the two canes that kept him ambulatory—and which once caused comedian Joe E. Lewis to describe him from the stage as “the only man who walks around with his own Erector set.”25

  In Life Is Too Short, Mickey recalled, “Maurice Duke, a lean, keen guy who knocked on my door one day, then limped into my living room . . . wanted to help me. I dared him to try. For five years, he did a helluva job for me.”26

  The Duke was a Hollywood legend, boasting connections with the likes of Frank Sinatra. His story was recently told in a nostalgic documentary made by his daughter, Fredrica Duke, appropriately titled, Fuck ’Em. Fredde Duke told us, “My dad always loved Mickey, but he was also realistic about him. He always said, ‘Mickey is a real prick, but a talented prick.’ My dad would always believe in Rooney and called him one of the five great actors of all time.”27

  Duke also represented the film comedian Huntz Hall, one of the original Dead End Kids before he became forever known as Sach in the Bowery Boys films at Monogram. Hall was a longtime drinking buddy with Mickey. An example of the Duke’s escapades, and why Mickey liked him, comes out of a great story the Duke told in Fuck ’Em about how he tried to get Milton Berle to hire Hall to guest-star on his television show, The Texaco Star Theater. “Miltie didn’t want to hire Hall because he reputedly had a bigger cock, and he was jealous,” the Duke tells his interviewer in the documentary Fuck ’Em.

  You see, Milt was proud of having the biggest schlong in the business. He blamed not hiring Hall since he couldn’t remember his lines, which wasn’t true. He did many films, but bottom line, he was jealous of him. When I saw Milt having dinner with Sinatra at Danny’s Hideaway in New York, I told the story to Frank and told him that Berle wouldn’t put Huntz on the show because he’s jealous . . . Sinatra said, “Why would Miltie be jealous of Hal
l?” And I explained it to him . . . Frank then put it to Milton, “If Hall’s cock is bigger, will you put him on the show?” and he agreed. Frank was in stitches. So Sinatra set up a black-tie affair at his apartment at the Essex House and invited all of the hoi polloi in New York City. At the party, Frank had Milton and Huntz drop their shorts, and I measured their dicks with my cane with a marker. Milt was fuming when I declared that Huntz won the cock face-off. He screamed that I measured wrong and cheated by measuring Hall from his asshole and him from his balls. However, in the end, Milt honored the bet and hired Hall for his show.”

  Duke’s daughter, Fredde, spoke extensively about her father’s relationship to Rooney. “My father and Mickey chased broads together. They fucked the most gorgeous girls in Hollywood despite their both being extremely short and my father walked with two canes from polio. Mickey truly lived like a rock star. Mickey tried to even come on to my mother, even though my father was his manager. He just did not care.”28

  Duke and Mickey’s longtime friend June Wilkinson remembered a practical joke Duke played on Mickey:

  Mickey and Duke were in New York to promote Hey Mulligan [also known as The Mickey Rooney Show], and Rooney was driving Duke crazy. So he told Mickey that Ava was also in New York and was desperate to meet him. I think she had just had one of her breakups with Frank [Sinatra]. Duke found out where she was staying and told Mickey he should go see her and that she wanted him badly, which was not true. When Mickey knocked on Ava’s hotel room and she opened the door and saw it was him, she freaked out. She went berserk. He ran for his life and was rather embarrassed.29

  The third and final film for Columbia, Drive a Crooked Road, again reunited the Rooney team of director Dick Quine, writer Blake Edwards, and Jonie Taps as producer. Mickey received the same $75,000 he was paid for his first two Columbia efforts. Unlike Sound Off and All Ashore, however, Drive a Crooked Road was an action film about auto racing.

  Writer Austin “Rocky” Kalish told us, “Mickey never failed to impress me and he was always a thinking actor. I did a scene with him and he’s crying in the scene, which the script called for. And I was sitting there behind the camera crying along with him because he was so convincing. In the scene he was working with a girl named Diane Foster. And he was doing the crying bit. Mickey took Diane by the arm and gently moved her to a slightly different spot on the set. The tears continued to flow, however. And there was never a stop in the dialogue. I thought to myself, “Gee, he hasn’t done that before—why did he move her?” And then I realized what had happened. She had gotten out of her “key” light, and he was putting her back in it. The facility of the guy is staggering.”30

  Blake Edwards, who went on to become a legendary director of such film classics as the Pink Panther movies, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Days of Wine and Roses, 10, directed the second unit for the first time in this film that turned out to be a modest success and again showcased Mickey’s talents as a dramatic actor.

  With a strong personal manager in place, Mickey felt recharged and ready for a return to the limelight. Duke was an early master at packaging projects. (Others, such as Lee Rich, Aaron Spelling, Joel Silver, and today’s Scott Rudin followed the blueprint Duke created.) His plan was to get Mickey back in the limelight, and what better vehicle than the burgeoning television industry? It had worked for fading film stars such as Lucille Ball, Fred MacMurray, Robert Young, and Donna Reed. Duke felt that Mickey was a natural for a situation comedy. Nick Sevano had earlier structured a deal with CBS for Mickey, creating two pilots that never sold. The first was based on the life of Daniel Boone, with Mickey playing the legendary frontiersman, which is hard to fathom when you think of flintlock-toting tall-in-the-saddle Fess Parker in the role. The second failed pilot was based on the files of the Tokyo police, called Dateline Tokyo, with Mickey as a police detective. CBS put up thirty thousand dollars to produce each pilot, but was unable to find a sponsor.

  This time, however, rather than turn Mickey into something he was not, Duke smartly decided to tailor a vehicle that utilized Mickey’s comedic talents. He called his Columbia team of Richard Quine and Blake Edwards, and along with Mickey they tossed around ideas for a series concept in the same realm as I Love Lucy. They cast Mickey as a show business wannabe who works as a page at the fictional TV network “IBC” while waiting for his big break. Originally titled For the Love of Mike—the show was retitled Hey, Mulligan when it was discovered that announcer Mike Wallace had already registered that title—the story had the thirty-four-year-old Rooney playing Mickey Mulligan, a twenty-three-year-old. Duke worked with William Morris to put the package together and seek out a sponsor, which they found through the Leo Burnett ad agency, which signed on Pillsbury Flour and Jolly Green Giant. NBC quickly bought the project, and it debuted on September 4, 1954. However, it received a terrible slot, on Saturday nights at 8:00 p.m., opposite the popular The Jackie Gleason Show featuring “The Honeymooners,” “Joe the Bartender,” “The Poor Soul,” and “Reginald Van Gleason III,” sketches that were some of the most popular pieces of comedy in the 1950s. NBC and the Leo Burnett agency were hopeful that Mickey’s strong name might put a dent in the Gleason juggernaut’s ratings and give it a chance to survive.

  The terms were good for Mickey and Duke. Mickey would be guaranteed thirty-three weeks at $3,500 per week, with options and ownership of the show. The exposure would be wonderful for his career, and Mickey was very optimistic because he had strong writers such as Edwards and Quine, veteran Leslie Martinson as the director, a powerful character and story foundation, and a seasoned supporting cast that included old character actors Regis Toomey and Alan Mowbray, comic Joey Forman, and even a young Angie Dickinson.

  The show was critically acclaimed. The reviewers loved the writing, Mickey, and the plot’s premise. Mickey was in his milieu, physical comedy, and Edwards and Quine knew his rhythms and could write dialogue directly to them. But while the ratings started strong from viewers wanting to see Mickey in a television role, in the face of the Great One’s domination, they rapidly started to sink. Duke recalled, “By the tenth episode, Gleason was getting a forty-nine share, we were getting a seven. I think only Mickey’s mother was the only one watching.”31

  Arthur Marx told us, Gleason himself was a fan of the show. After he watched it, he would phone Mickey, whom he called Spider, and say, “I want you to know, Spider, that one loyal American watched your show,” and then he’d laugh and hang up. Despite guest stars such as Milton Berle, Hey, Mulligan remained in the ratings basement. Yet it’s also the case that Mickey put very little interest in the program, concentrating on his horse racing. He left its direction up to Duke, Quine, and Edwards. He’d show up, read his lines, and then skip out. He once snubbed Leo Burnett and the Pillsbury executives when they visited the set. Yet they still loved him.

  Here’s why the show failed in spite of its support from the sponsors: An element of success in television, especially in the 1950s and ’60s, when the sponsors controlled programming, was to appease the ad agencies and their clients. Desi Arnaz was brilliant at this, in creating Desilu and working with, acquiring, and keeping sponsors for the production company’s programs. He was a master at schmoozing sponsors and at giving legendary parties. Danny Thomas’s business partner, Sheldon Leonard, was a world-class salesman, too, once saving the The Dick Van Dyke Show from extinction by charming Procter and Gamble. Television was an advertising business, as network television is today, and stroking the egos of the sponsors was an integral part of the game. As depicted in the AMC series Mad Men, it was the ad agencies and sponsors who decided which programs would survive. A program could be very successful, such as The Bob Cummings Show (also known as Love That Bob), produced by George Burns’s McCadden Productions, yet still be axed if the sponsor disliked the star (or, in the case of Cummings, the star’s wife).

  This was where Maurice Duke could shine. He had the ability to schmooze and sell. In his daughter’s documentary, Duke
says that above all, he loved making deals. Deals made him feel alive. However, Mickey had zero tact, lacked the ability to schmooze, and refused to stroke others’ ego because his own overinflated ego got in the way. Thus, he was poison when it came to dealing with sponsors or studio heads or producers or the power brokers themselves.

  Perhaps one of the best examples of Mickey’s complete lack of interpersonal skills and social sensitivity comes from his good friend and off-and-on business adviser Donald Trump, who invested in Mickey’s musical The Will Rogers Follies. Donald Trump told us about his being on a very exclusive golf course with Mickey and two very wealthy friends, both of whom had the ability to back Mickey in a Broadway play. When the two wealthy friends began whispering to each other, Mickey became irate and read them the riot act for disrespecting the legendary golf club. Both wanted to leave, until Trump convinced them that it was just Mickey being Mickey. Rooney lacked any filter, and spent a lifetime burning important bridges with his lack of tact. “I greatly respect Mickey’s great talent. However, his anger issues sometime got the better of him,” recalled Trump in our interview.

  While the ratings for Hey, Mulligan were sagging because the Great One ruled Saturday nights, the sponsors liked the show and were willing to relocate it for the next season to a more favorable slot on NBC. Peter Jurow, the president of Pillsbury, key sponsor of the program, was a huge Rooney fan. Yet Mickey’s inability to play the television sponsor game ultimately led to the show’s demise.

  In April 1955, Pillsbury told the Burnett ad agency and NBC that it wanted to renew Hey, Mulligan for another season. To discuss the renewal, Pillsbury invited Mickey and Duke to attend the anniversary celebration of the company at its headquarters in Le Seur, Minnesota. They would also participate in a celebrity golf tournament in the area. The tournament would include the foursome of Peter Jurow; Leo Burnett, who’d created the Pillsbury Dough Boy and the Jolly Green Giant; Gen. Lucius Clay, commander of the U.S. forces in Europe; and Mickey. (Duke would tag along in the golf cart, but could not play because of his physical handicap.) The event turned into an epic disaster.