The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  By 1958, Mickey’s sons Mickey Jr. and Timmy, from wife number two, Betty Jane, were now in their teens. In 1955 they were appearing with Paul Petersen, Annette Funicello, and other child performers on The Mickey Mouse Club. Their stepfather, Betty Jane’s second husband, Buddy Baker, was the musical director at Disney, and had a close friendship with Walt.

  Mickey Jr. bore little resemblance to his father, unlike younger brother Timmy. As a child, he wasn’t button cute like Tim; he was taller and more somber. Like his father and mother, he was gifted in music. According to the website the Original Mickey Mouse Club Show:

  It’s hard to gauge Mickey [Jr.]’s qualities as a young performer, because he appeared in so few skits. He was in the roll call for the Mouseketeers’ debut at Disneyland. The only sequence with him readily available today is “Circus Day,” where he and fellow short-timer Paul Petersen take part in acrobatics. This sort of action rough-and-tumble seemed to suit both Paul and Mickey better than musical variety. If there had been more of it to keep them involved, they might have lasted longer on the show. As it was, Paul was dismissed sometime after July 17, 1955, to be replaced by Tim Rooney. Timmy was the second-youngest Mouseketeer. Mickey Jr. and brother Tim were themselves dismissed a few weeks later, after they went into the paint department and mixed a lot of different colors together. This, combined with the fact that neither boy was proficient at dancing and that Mickey was a serious lad who did not readily smile, may have contributed to their dismissal. The brothers were replaced in early August 1955 by Ronnie Steiner, a professional tap dancer, and Dickie Dodd.44

  Paul Petersen told the authors, “Both Mickey and Timmy were talented musicians. Their father was never around, and he hardly saw them. He was certainly an absentee father.”45

  After leaving The Mickey Mouse Club, Tim was set to move on to other jobs, but at ten years old, in 1957, he was stricken with polio. He was paralyzed for two years, and spent some time in rehabilitative therapy afterward, so it was 1961 before he was able to resume his acting career. He bore an amazing resemblance to his father in his teenage years, less so in later life.

  When MGM fell on hard times in the late 1950s, it decided to try to recapture its glory days by reissuing new versions of its classic films of the 1930s and ’40s. However, the times had changed. Lewis Stone, who had played Judge Hardy, had passed away in 1953, and his absence would make the cast seem incomplete. Mickey tried to persuade Ann Rutherford to return as Polly Benedict, but she refused.

  Ann Rutherford told Arthur Marx, “I said, ‘Mickey, in the first place, very few people grow up to marry their childhood sweethearts. So that gets rid of me right away. And in the second place, you should not come back as Judge Hardy [as the proposed script called for]. You should come back as Andy Hardy. Andy would not grow up to be a judge. Andy would grow up to be Bob Hope or Red Skelton or a great radio performer.’ ”46

  When MGM came to producer Aaron “Red” Doff about attempting to resurrect the Hardy series, Mickey jumped at the chance. Benny Thau, one of Mayer’s former cardinals, had taken over the studio from Dore Schary. He wanted his girlfriend, actress Patricia Breslin, to play Andy Hardy’s wife, Jane. Breslin, who had starred in The People’s Choice TV series, with Rooney’s old pal Jackie Cooper, and opposite William Shatner in the classic Twilight Zone episode “Nick of Time,” later became the wife of Cleveland Browns owner, Art Modell. Breslin told the authors, “Mickey was always in control of everything. He was hoping that we could start a new Hardy family series, but it was old hat by then. It was a real rush job, but Mickey was in great spirits to visit with his old friends from the past. His old pal Sig Frohlich was always at his side.”47

  Director Howard Koch told Arthur Marx, “On the sound stage next door, Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor were shooting Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and here’s Mickey, who’d been one of the world’s biggest stars, and the fellow responsible for keeping Metro in the black all those years, when he was a kid, and no one even knew he was alive. Nobody came on the stage to wish us any luck. Nobody sent flowers. Nothing.”48

  Teddy Rooney recalled, “My dad desperately wanted to direct the movie, but they didn’t trust him. Eventually, they got Howard Koch to direct.”49 Teddy costarred with his father in this Andy Hardy sequel and called getting to appear on-screen with his father one of the high points of his life.

  Andy Hardy Comes Home had a budget of $313,000, which was low even by late 1950s standards for a major studio release. It also had only an eleven-day shooting schedule. While Mickey had high hopes for it, when it was released the film ended up being the lower half of a double bill. In it, Mickey Rooney returns in the starring role of Andy Hardy, while Fay Holden, Cecilia Parker, and Sara Haden reprise their original roles as mother Emily Hardy, sister Marian Hardy, and Aunt Milly. A portrait of actor Lewis Stone (1879–1953) as Judge Hardy is featured prominently in the film. Andy Hardy Comes Home also contains brief clips from some of the original Hardy family films. In MGM publicity materials, Andy Hardy Comes Home, which was released eleven years after the last Hardy family film, was described as “a continuation” rather than another in the series. However, in the closing credits, a title card reads: “To Be Continued.” The Variety review states that MGM intended to re-embark on the Hardy series. According to MGM records, the movie earned $400,000 U.S. and Canadian box office and $210,000 elsewhere, delivering a loss to the studio of $5,000.

  As the 1950s wound down, change was once again in the air for Rooney. By 1957, Maurice Duke, despite Rooney’s self-destructive behavior in television and onstage, had continued to find Mickey well-paying gigs. But now he was tired of Mickey’s antics. Unlike Sam Stiefel, Duke turned out to be of great help to Mickey throughout this rough period, keeping him afloat. Although most of the projects he found for him were second rate, Duke also scored Rooney particularly lucrative appearances in Las Vegas. In 1955, he teamed Mickey with his Hey, Mulligan sidekick, comic Joey Forman, to create a perfect vehicle to showcase Mickey’s talents. Yet things did not turn out as Duke hoped:

  I booked Mickey into the Riviera when it first opened. I negotiated a pretty good fucking salary for him, around twenty grand per week [actually $17,500]. They were desperate, as they had used Hildegarde and actor Jeff Chandler, and they bombed. I hired comic Ben Lessy, who wrote great material for him and mounted a first-rate show. Mickey was a smash. I mean they had fucking lines to get into his show. They held him there for four weeks and wanted more. My old pal, Gus Greenbaum, ran the hotel and loved Mickey. Gus was one of Bugsy Siegel’s childhood friends. So Gus calls me up and he is fuming. He is screaming and told me to get down to Vegas. Mickey had blown over fifty grand at the craps table and was going berserk. It seems Mickey during his show is fucking stoned and announced he was retiring. He makes a speech onstage and says, “I’m going to retire to a farm and just take care of the cows and chickens and the horses. And all of you can go fuck yourselves.” Now every newspaper picks this up and the headlines were “Mickey Rooney Retires.” Now, he has this lucrative gig and he is really pissing off the wrong guys. I mean he’s lucky he’s not in a body cast or buried in the desert. I come down and make a deal with the bosses to get some of the money back for Mick. But Mickey is nowhere to be found. He flew back to Los Angeles. So these wiseguys are fucking pissed. They had wanted him back, as they were moving him to Moe Dalitz’s Dunes to replace Wally Cox, who had bombed. Now he’s being paid twenty Gs per week. He tells me, “I’m fucking fed up.” I said, “How can you be fed up for twenty grand?” I had to beg Mickey to return to do the shows with Elaine [Rooney]’s help. I told him that I just manage you, but I have a big house in Beverly Hills, money in the bank, and you are flat busted—and you’re retiring? I reminded him that he was making more for one week in Vegas than he did on some of those ferkakta films.50

  As a postscript, one year later, during Thanksgiving 1958, the Riviera’s boss, Gus Greenbaum, the man Mickey spurned and the one who took the blame for Mickey’s actions, went t
o Scottsdale with his wife to get away from his hotel/casino for a few days. On December 3, 1958, the Greenbaums’ housekeeper, Pearl, showed up for work at their house and found what was left of Gus and his wife, Bess. Both their heads had been hacked off and left neatly in plastic bags right next to their bodies. As he skirted on the edge, Mickey was leaving bodies, as well as wives and children, in his wake—a fact not lost on Duke.

  Mickey had a long history of interaction with the underworld. His degenerate gambling habits initially put him in direct contact with figures such as Mickey Cohen and Benny Siegel. As early as the start of the 1940s, he owed debts that had resulted from his gaming losses to various bookies and loan sharks. MGM knew about this, and one of the duties of his MGM shadow and handler Les Peterson was paying off his markers with advances, actually loans, from MGM. Friends such as Sidney Miller and Billy Barty recounted tales of his legendary gambling and his owing money to racketeers. His friends Marcy and Wally Cassell recalled his skipping out on losses at the Las Vegas gaming tables, leaving legendary hoods such as Moe Dalitz and Gus Greenbaum angered, and considering consequences for Mick. Greenbaum, who ran the Flamingo for Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, was particularly on the hook for Mickey’s debts. These were not street corner candy store bookies Rooney was trifling with.

  Mickey’s managers and partners throughout the years constantly tried to keep him out of harm’s way. First, Sam Stiefel, who through his theatrical business, had worked with mobsters such as Al Capone, paid off Rooney’s debts for almost ten years—which Mickey repaid with interest, leaving him nearly broke. Then Maurice Duke, who booked him in Vegas and elsewhere in lucrative gigs, received death threats from Gus Greenbaum and Moe Dalitz when Mickey skipped out on dates and money owed them. Duke eventually left Mickey, after Greenbaum’s murder, believing that Mick’s antics threatened his family’s safety. Red Doff, likewise, was put in a compromising position, and questioned whether the drowning death of his young daughter in a swimming pool was accidental or otherwise. His other daughter, Melody Doff, confirmed to us that her father had had extra duties as Mickey’s second with the mob.

  By the 1960s, Mickey and his friend actor Dick Wesson, who was also a degenerate gambler, were forced to be both bagmen (debt collectors) for men such as Mickey Cohen in order to reduce the markers they owed. Wesson’s daughter, actress Eileen Wesson, recalled tagging along with Rooney and her father on their excursions as debt collectors or to the track. Dan Kessel’s memory of Rooney’s trip to Vegas to see Howard Hughes suggested that Mick was in fear that the trip was a result of his gaming debt to the mob.

  While it was inevitable that an entertainer such as Rooney would be exposed to mobsters, since he worked their clubs in Las Vegas and elsewhere, he exacerbated his involvement with them by being a compulsive gambler. Without a doubt, Mickey for many years was at their mercy. He needed the money from his appearances to support his addiction. Although Mickey was never associated in the public’s mind with these racketeers—unlike many entertainers such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, George Raft, and Louis Prima, who were all rumored to have mob connections—his involvement with the Cosa Nostra was a central part of his life for several decades, one that had a strong influence on both his personal and professional life.

  And this came to a head onstage in Vegas. For Duke, Mickey’s public announcement of retirement was the last straw. Mickey had insulted not only his audience, but also Duke’s friend and Moe Dalitz associate Gus Greenbaum. Duke now feared for his own life and the lives of his family. Even though he remained friends with Rooney until his death, he formally removed himself from Mickey’s management so he would no longer be blamed for the actor’s escapades, especially those involving the mob, to whom Mickey was skating too close, too fast, and on very thin ice. Shortly after that announcement, and the subsequent death of Greenbaum and his wife, the Duke “retired” as Mickey’s manager. He told Arthur Marx:

  I just walked up to him one day and I told him I quit . . . There was no particular incident. I just got fed up with him because he does stupid things. He’s the greatest actor in the world—or one of the ten best, anyway—but he won’t listen to you and he thinks everybody steals from him and blames all of his problems on them. Mickey steals from himself. Mickey’s his own worst enemy. He has a fantasy about making two hundred million a month. He’s always going into these crazy enterprises, and losing his money, like “Mickey Rooney Macaroni” and “Soda Pop for Dogs.” He goes into anything a promoter gives him a pitch on, but they all flop, and he winds up getting mad at his manager who advised him to stay out of them in the first place.51

  Stepson Chris Aber recalled, “Mickey listened to every con artist who was going to get him rich quick. Lots of bullshit. I can’t tell you how many crazy schemes he put money in. The Mickey Rooney acting schools, restaurants—every crazy idea. And he put his own money in it. I tried to talk him away from these leeches, but sometimes he didn’t give a shit what you said. He always did what he wanted. He was a horrible businessperson.”52

  With Duke remaining a friend until his passing in 1996, Mickey now turned to his longtime publicist, Aaron “Red” Doff, to act as his new manager. He had met Doff in the army, where he was a captain and had received both the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. Doff had become a close friend of Mickey, and became his press agent in 1952. Doff, like Mickey, was a former child actor and radio performer.

  Melody Doff told us about the forty-plus-year relationship between Mickey and her father: “I think my dad filled every role for Mickey. He was his confidant, manager, press agent, nursemaid . . . He was with him through several wives and tragedies. They had their arguments, but [they’d] always end up back together . . . My dad was with him when his wife was murdered, when he went bankrupt. They had a bond.”53

  By the time he became Rooney’s manager, Doff was already a well-known press agent for several singers and musicians, representing Frankie Laine, Liberace, Ray Anthony, Margaret Whiting, Billy Eckstein, the Ames Brothers, Les Paul and Mary Ford, and Doris Day. He was also the personal manager for Bob Hope sidekick Jerry Colonna. Doff followed in the tradition of Duke in packaging projects that would feature Mickey. For Rooney, he would produce the films Andy Hardy Comes Home, Baby Face Nelson, The Big Operator, Platinum High School, The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, and Everything’s Ducky.

  “Doff kept everything balanced when I did The Private Lives of Adam and Eve,” recalled writer Rocky Kalish. “Zugsmith was a prick, and Rooney had his problems. Red kept the peace and kept Rooney under control.”54

  Life was not any easier for Doff than it had been for Duke. Mickey skipped out on shows he’d already been paid for at the Moulin Rouge Theatre in Hollywood. The theater’s owner, Frank Sennes, who later ran several Las Vegas showrooms for the mobsters at the Desert Inn, Stardust, and Frontier, sued Rooney and Doff for breach of contract, a suit that was later settled for six thousand dollars. “Sennes never forgot, and [he] blacklisted Mick in Vegas,” remembered Sid Miller.55

  Things went from bad to worse for Mickey at the end of the 1950s. While he did a few TV appearances in the 1950s after the demise of Hey, Mulligan, he was still focusing on films and nightclubs. His fall at this time was well illustrated by a disastrously embarrassing appearance on the Tonight show that also demonstrated his love-hate relationship with television. In November 1960, Mickey had Doff schedule him for an appearance on Tonight, then hosted by Jack Paar. Paar was far different from the hosts who followed him behind the desk at NBC. Unlike Johnny Carson or Jay Leno or even early Tonight show host Steve Allen, Paar was confrontational with some of his guests. More a storyteller than a comic, Parr loved the conversation even more than he loved the humor, and he sought out conflict and controversy. He held long-running feuds with television icon Ed Sullivan and columnist Walter Winchell. His guests ranged from the brilliant but controversial conservative commentator and writer William F. Buckley to performers Peter Ustinov, Elsa Maxwell, and the caustic pianist Oscar Leva
nt. Paar became an entertainment juggernaut, generating an almost obsessive fascination and curiosity in the press, public, and among critics about his on-screen comments, feuds, and antics, more than anyone who had ever hosted the show. Paar strove for compelling conversation, and his humor was acerbic, almost a precursor to that of Dave Letterman or Bill Maher on Real Time. Under Parr, Tonight’s ratings were off the charts, with Paar holding, at times, an unbelievable 80 percent share. What happened on Paar’s Tonight was the fodder for conversations around breakfast tables and office water coolers for weeks across the country.

  Twice a year, Paar went on location in Los Angeles. When he scheduled appearances in Los Angeles in December 1959, Mickey called and booked himself on the show.

  Paar recalled to Arthur Marx, “I had never met Mickey Rooney . . . He was a legend to me, of course . . . Several times on the ‘Tonight Show’ when we asked a guest who [sic] they considered to be the best motion picture actor who had ever lived, it would usually be Mickey Rooney or James Mason. When James Mason was on the show and asked that question of the best actor ever, he replied, ‘Mickey Rooney.’ ”56

  Dick Cavett (at the time, one of Jack’s writers for the show) explained that in the lead-up to Mickey’s Tonight appearance, Paar was lying in wait for Mickey, as he did with many of his guests. In order to position Mickey for the verbal kill shot, Paar had asked Cavett to script responses, quips, that Paar could fire back once he got into it with Mickey. Paar, Cavett said, was more of a radio interviewer than he was a comedian, and he liked to have scripted material ready that would allow him to set up a guest with a pointed question and then knock the guest off balance or push him out of his comfort zone. If the guest came back with any hostility, Paar was ready with his own comeback—again, lines Cavett had written for him. And that’s exactly the trap Paar set for Mickey.57