The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  Maurice Duke recalled how Mickey treated one of his sponsors, a huge fan:

  Before the tournament, the president of Pillsbury, Peter Jurow, wanted to meet with Mickey and I [sic]. He had this elegant office that had a map of the country with colored pins on it. He told us the colors showed where Pillsbury’s sales were strong and the others were areas where sales needed to be picked up. He said—and I swear this to be the fucking truth—“You can stay with us forever, Mick, if you can pick up the places where we’re weaker.” Mickey got real agitated when he said this and said, “I’m not supposed to sell your product, Jurow. You hired me to be an actor!” I swear, the color drained from Jurow’s face. I knew that we had blown the show right at that minute. I hit Mickey with my cane under the table. I tried everything to play it as Mickey just joking around. But he really pissed off this guy and there was no going back. I was hoping that we could save ourselves at the golf tournament. There was a huge crowd cheering Mickey. Mickey again seemed annoyed. He was unhappy with the slow play and he was cursing up a storm. He was pissed at his poor play, as well. Now he’s playing with this powerful group and he is treating these guys like they were sacks of shit. On the fourth hole, he takes me aside and says, “Let’s get out of here, Duke. This is boring. I can’t stand these guys.” So I make an excuse that Mickey is having problems with an ulcer and he just threw his clubs down and left.32

  So that night there is a huge celebration that was held at the Pillsbury mansion, where Mickey is the honored guest. I mean there was a huge orchestra, great food; the booze is flowing. Everyone is there, all their executives, the press, the Pillsbury family—everyone. Mrs. Pillsbury, this elegant older broad—I mean she had the jewels, the dress; she looked the part—like Margaret Dumont. She just loves Mickey. She tells him how much she loved Andy Hardy, his Judy Garland movies, and he just looks annoyed. She still likes him. I pulled him aside and told him to be nice to everyone and save the show. Mickey just was agitated and drinking a bit . . . so Walter Pillsbury, the son who ran the company, is talking to Mickey and calling him Charlie . . . sort of a slang. Now Mickey is really pissed off and tells me loudly, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” I tell him that we need to charm them and we could save the show . . . But Mickey is ready to blow . . . So after dinner, Walter Pillsbury grabs Mickey by his lapel and pulls him toward the piano. He tells Mickey, “It’s time to do your act, Charlie.” Mickey gives him a look, and Pillsbury says, “We want you to sing and dance for us.” Mickey looks at him and said, “Sorry, I don’t feel up to it.” Pillsbury looks at Mickey and says, “What do you mean you don’t feel up to it? You’re talking to Walter Pillsbury. We own you, Charlie.” That was the last straw, and Mickey just exploded. The place got very quiet; all eyes were on us. Mickey screamed and said, “No one owns me. Let’s go Duke. I can’t stand these bunch of crows another minute.” We left and, of course, the show was canceled the next week.33

  The show finished its run on June 7, 1955.

  But the Duke had work lined up for Mickey: he set him up with his friend Herbert Yates and Yates’s studio, Republic, for a feature, The Twinkle in God’s Eye, with Mickey in a change-of-pace role as a reverend bringing religion to the west. Mickey was toned down and far more low-key opposite Hugh O’Brian and his pal Red Barry. Along with a small salary, Duke negotiated some profit-sharing points. In fact, from the start of his tenure with Rooney, he’d been hard at work to further Mickey’s career. In 1946, he formed Mickey Rooney Productions Inc., to create properties for Mickey to star in and produce. They quickly made a deal with Yates to film Jaguar (1956), which starred Sabu, the Elephant Boy, for which they received both a producing fee and a profit-sharing deal. Duke had also previously set up a ten-week deal for Mickey to headline at the Flamingo hotel for the summer of 1953. It was a successful gig. Mickey was paid ten thousand dollars weekly, and the show was held over for an extra two weeks. Propitiously, he and his entourage ended up on the same plane with writer James Michener, the novelist who wrote Tales of the South Pacific, Hawaii, and Centennial, who had just sold the theatrical rights to his book The Bridges at Toko-Ri for a feature film.

  “Michener took a liking to Mickey and said he would see to it that a part was written into the script for him,” recalled Duke. “It was a small part, and Mickey had to take short money for it, but he wanted to be in a major movie again.”

  The Bridges at Toko-Ri, in the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front, exposes the futility of war. Both William Holden and Fredric March give outstanding performances; Grace Kelly, underplaying her role as Holden’s wife and then widow, is as beautiful as she ever was; and Mickey Rooney is strong as cocky Mike Forney, a Korean War helicopter jockey whose talent is rescuing downed navy pilots. Mickey received the strongest reviews in years. Bosley Crowther, on January 2, 1955, in the New York Times, called him a “pint-sized tornado.” The film placed Mickey in a new light: as the character actor in a part written especially for him, a tragic hero who sacrifices his life to save the downed navy pilot played by Holden, himself sacrificed by bureaucratic war planners on a futile bombing mission. After the skein of low-budget films noir that Mickey had performed in, James Michener’s The Bridges at Toko-Ri showcased just how Mickey could underplay a role to great effect. Bridges was a standout film during a time when Mickey was struggling to find the roles that would allow him to stretch his talents, to depict serious dramatic characters instead of middle-aged guys bumbling through life.

  In the 1950s, Mickey was also on the lookout for his next mate. By now, he had moved on from Martha, Tempest Storm, and others, but remained on the lookout for wife number four—and he found her on a golf course. One of Mickey’s passions in the 1950s had become golf. He could often be seen at the nearby driving range in Woodland Hills with a bucket of balls, mindlessly stroking them into the net. When he met his next spouse, he had just returned from a twenty-one-day USO tour of Korea and was looking for action. That was when he spied, in the next stall at Woodland Hills, a tall, striking redhead who closely resembled Ava, practicing her swing.

  The beautiful redhead was twenty-three-year-old Elaine Mahnken, born Thelma Elaine Mahnken on January 10, 1930, a Southern California native who had been homecoming queen at Compton Community College. She had just returned from Montana, where she’d moved with her now-ex-husband, her high school sweetheart, Dan Ducich, a former college basketball player at Compton and Utah State. After Ducich was sent to prison for armed robbery, Elaine divorced him and returned to live with her mother in Woodland Hills, right near Mickey’s home, where she hoped to create a new life for herself.

  She had started modeling when she was fifteen, including posing nude for some calendars for Theda and Emerson Hall, a husband-and-wife team of photographers known for crisp, vibrant color photographs at a time when the technique was difficult and rare; the Halls were used by almost all the film studios in Hollywood for many years.

  Watching the redhead in the next stall take her swing, Mickey was immediately entranced by her, and later wrote, “I flipped for her—her body, her backswing, even her little dog, a Maltese terrier named Pepy.”34 Elaine had grown up watching the Andy Hardy films and, when she and Mickey met, she realized that despite his small stature and now-paunchy appearance, he was still the same Mickey Rooney she’d admired as a child.

  “When he was doing the Andy Hardy series—I was just a kid then—my whole family adored Mickey,” Elaine told Arthur Marx. “I felt I already knew Mickey when I met him. Also I was quite in awe of his musical talent. While we were dating he used to sit down and play the piano at his house and he’d make up lyrics, and they were beautiful. And I thought, ‘This man must have a beautiful soul.’ I fell in love with that talent. I felt [that] together we could be good, though I was not in love with him. But that didn’t seem to bother him and he kept saying, ‘You can learn to love me.’ I was never madly in love with him, but I loved him in a particular way.”35

  Since her return home, Elaine, who ha
d been under contract by Warner Bros. for a couple of years as a teen and had trained under acting coach Sylvia Rosenstein, was working nights as a carhop at the Dolores Drive-In, in the Valley, and auditioning during the day. Although Mickey later claimed in his 1965 autobiography that he was unaware of Elaine’s “past”—her former husband had Mafia connections and was heavily in debt to the mob—she denied this to Arthur Marx.

  “Mickey knew more about me than I knew about him . . . I certainly did not know he was in any financial trouble. When we were dating he used to drive me down Ventura Boulevard and say to me as he pointed out the car window, ‘I own this side of the street.’ It sounded like he owned all of the San Fernando Valley, he did act the big shot for my benefit,” said Elaine.36

  For thirty days, Mickey proposed to Elaine every night (reminiscent of his courtship of Ava). For thirty days, Elaine politely told Mickey that she wasn’t in love with him. Eventually he wore her down, and on their thirtieth date, on November 15, 1952, at Don the Beachcomber, Elaine said yes. Mickey chartered a plane and flew that night to Las Vegas, along with his friends Gene and Sylvia Kahan, and married her at the Wee Kirk o’the Heather wedding chapel, which still exists. The wedding license was for Joseph Yule Jr. and Elaine Ducich, because Mickey had still not changed his name legally, even though he’d been using Rooney since his days at Universal. Elaine, who was still using her name from her previous marriage, gave her occupation as “model.” They registered at the El Rancho casino/hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Yule. Mickey was thirty-two and she was twenty-three. It was a little over one year since his divorce from Martha.

  The marriage was revealed on November 20, 1952, when a photograph appeared in the Los Angeles Examiner of Mickey carrying Elaine off the chartered plane at the Burbank airport, and was accompanied by the quip “I think they knew me there. Maybe they recognized the rice marks on my face.”

  The couple moved into Mickey’s Woodland Hills home. “It was a small house—not the kind of place you’d expect to find Mickey living in—but a nice house in a typical Valley neighborhood,” Elaine recalled. “Nice living room, nice master bedroom, a servant’s room, a nice yard with a swimming pool.”37

  She stated that although Mickey loved to live high, buying Jaguars, having an extensive wardrobe, a “man-servant” named Arthur Baker and other extravagances, he owed money to countless creditors. She claimed that she helped straighten out his finances. “I handled the finances for about two and a half years. Finally, the government was paid, all our bills were paid. And I took the envelope that contained all of our unpaid bills. And said, ‘Look Mickey, no more debts.’ And what was the thanks I got? Two weeks later Mickey went up to Vegas to play a nightclub date. He went to the tables and lost fifty grand, just like that. We were back in the hole again. When I heard that I threw up my hands and said, ‘No more. From now on he could take care of his own finances.’ ”38

  Elaine brought her own baggage to the marriage, according to what she revealed to Arthur Marx. Her father, Fred Mahnken, needed a place to live, so she had him move into the guest bedroom and go on payroll doing “errands” for the Rooneys. Also, Mickey found out that Elaine was “meeting” her ex-husband. She claimed he owed money to the mob in Vegas and needed cash to repay them, and he needed it right away because they were putting the heat on him. She pleaded with Mickey to lend him the money, “as one human being to another,” which he refused. Ducich also put the arm on Mickey for a life-saving loan, but Mickey turned him down. Ducich, though trying to stay out of sight until he could scrape up the dough, was eventually visited in Butte, Montana, on June 25, 1954, by a couple of button men working for Mickey Cohen, who put two rounds in the back of his head, charging off the debt family style. It wasn’t the first time the mob had shouldered in on Mickey’s life, and it wouldn’t be the last time fatal gunshots whizzed by him, too close for comfort.

  The pseudonymous Mrs. Smith told us, “She [Elaine] didn’t give a shit about Mick. She saw him as a sugar daddy who might be able to get her in the movies . . . Mickey tried to keep her happy . . . [H]e bought her a vacation home in Lake Arrowhead, a new house in Studio City, and all kind of toys, like a speedboat, clothes, servants. She lived like a queen. But Mickey gets bored easily,” his longtime mistress admitted. “They lived separate lives, and Mickey was on to new girls, gambling and living . . . well, living like Mickey. She was living in Lake Arrowhead and partying . . . I’m also pretty sure she was fucking her ex-husband, who was a hood and ex-con, and [she] was giving him money before he was killed. Mickey was constantly whining to me about her. He just dreaded another divorce.”39

  Elaine told Parade magazine in January 1967, “I gave the marriage everything I had. I tried everything Mickey suggested. After years and years I’d had enough. Living with Mickey is no bed of roses. Six wives can’t all be wrong.” Confronted with Rooney’s version of the settlement, claiming she got a $125,000 mansion, a summer home, all their furniture, a motorboat, a Chrysler, assorted jewelry, and $21,000 a year in alimony for ten years, Elaine says:

  Mickey’s always in hot water, and I’m not going to downgrade him with a recitation of what marriage to him was really like. But I’ll tell you this: After being married to him for eight years, I’m marriage-shy. I’ve had half a dozen proposals in the past few years, but I turn chicken, especially when the proposals come from actors. I’m sure some actors make good husbands, but after Mickey, I’m afraid to take the chance. As for my divorce settlement, Mickey let his imagination run riot on that. I got a $75,000 house in Studio City, with a $45,000 mortgage. The reason I have to work now, doing bits here, feature parts there, is that I still have to pay that mortgage off. I don’t live in that house. I rent it to meet the payments. The summer home at Lake Arrowhead—the same thing. Mickey’s business manager used to give each of us an allowance. I put mine into a piece of mountain property. He put his into horses. The Chrysler I got was eight years old. All the jewelry consisted of my wedding ring, my engagement ring, and a watch. The $21,000 a year for ten years—that’s a joke, too. I got it for one year. Then it was cut back to $500 a month. It’s been more than a year now since I’ve gotten a single payment.

  With four marriages under his belt and still looking around, Mickey became the constant butt of comedians’ monologues. To deflect the damage, he laughed with them, and once quipped to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, “Always get married early in the morning. That way, if it doesn’t work out, you haven’t wasted a whole day.”

  His critically acclaimed role in The Bridges at Toko-Ri unfortunately did not open up new opportunities, even though the New York Times’s Bosley Crowther, writing on January 21, 1955, was very impressed with the power of Mickey’s performance. In his quest to obtain quality film roles in higher-budget movies, the offers for Mickey were few and far between. With the failure of Hey, Mulligan, and because Mickey had burned bridges in television when he snubbed Pillsbury and legendary ad man Leo Burnett, he was considered toxic to sponsors, and the ad agencies wanted none of him.

  “Mickey was essentially blacklisted by Leo Burnett for many years from television,” recalled Norman Brokaw, former chairman of William Morris. “Those guys ran the game, and if they hated you, you became a pariah. It was impossible for us to package anything with Mickey attached to it.”40 Brokaw also noted that Mickey tested poorly in his Q score, the measurement of the familiarity and appeal of a celebrity. The higher the Q score, the more highly regarded the item or person is among the group familiar with him or her. Due to the broken marriages and negative publicity, sponsors were reluctant to attach Rooney to any program. While he made guest appearances on television shows, an ongoing series with him was not considered again for nearly ten years.

  “Mickey just fucked himself with the crap he pulled at the Pillsbury event,” recalled Maurice Duke. “No matter how hard I tried to sell him, it was always a dead end. We picked up decent money in Vegas, but he blew most of it at the tables or the track. There was always a
n audience that wanted to see Mickey live, so we could always line up gigs.”41 Elaine recalled, “There was not one year I could remember [between 1952 and 1958] that Mickey made less than $150,000.”42

  Thus, Mickey relied upon personal appearances and cheap B movies for the remainder of the 1950s. Starting in 1955, with a couple of exceptions, he worked mainly for the Poverty Row studios Republic and Allied Artists (formerly Monogram), for indie producer Albert Zugsmith, and for RKO. The next few years were loaded with films, among them: The Twinkle in God’s Eye (1955), at Republic; Francis in the Haunted House (1956), at Universal; The Bold and the Brave (1956), at RKO; Magnificent Roughnecks (1956), at Allied Artists; Baby Face Nelson (1957), with Albert Zugsmith; A Nice Little Bank That Should Be Robbed (1958), with Rank; The Big Operator (1959), with Zugsmith; The Last Mile (1959), at United Artists; and Platinum High School (1960), with Zugsmith.

  Legendary writer Austin “Rocky” Kalish, who later wrote for All in the Family, My Three Sons, and Family Affair, among other television series, recalled, “Albert Zugsmith was a cheap, quickie producer that made Roger Corman look like David Selznick. He had movies such as The Girl in the Kremlin, Female on the Beach, and High School Confidential. I wrote one movie for him called The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, with Mamie Van Doren and Mickey, who played the devil. Zugsmith told me he decided to make the film when his thirteen-year-old son liked and approved the story. A real schmuck.”43

  The couple of notable exceptions came as a result of a reprieve from Mickey’s old pal Dick Quine: to appear in the Jack Lemmon comedy Operation Mad Ball in 1957 and an attempt to resurrect Andy Hardy for MGM in Andy Hardy Comes Home in 1958. A popular comedy, Operation Mad Ball in particular showcased Mickey’s ability to interact with younger comedians, such as Jack Lemon, who did not come out of burlesque.