The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  On the night he was to appear with Paar, Rooney had a few drinks before the show with his then wife Barbara Ann Thomason (stage name Carolyn Mitchell). He wasn’t drunk, though: Mickey’s having a few drinks was like most folks’ having a couple of glasses of water. Although Paar had wanted to have lunch with Mickey, Mickey said he preferred meeting Paar on the show. Rooney even refused to schmooze with Paar in the green room, protocol for celebrity guests and their hosts, an opportunity for them to touch antennae before a show begins. When Rooney came out onstage, therefore, many believed that Paar, who’d been snubbed by his guest before the show, was especially aggressive, as if he were hunting bear. Cavett told us that Paar was looking for a fight. The writer explained that when facing off against Paar, it was futile to get into a quip contest with him. Paar was too fast on his feet and experienced in verbal fencing. Mickey was not. Immediately, the conversation became hostile and combative. When Paar asked Mickey what kind of woman Ava Gardner was, with Barbara sitting right there in the audience, Mickey was miffed. He felt stung, and took Paar’s bait. “Ava’s more of a woman than you’ll ever know,” he replied. And the war was on. Mickey went on to tell Paar that he liked a local talk show host, Tom Duggan, more than Paar. He and Paar became locked into an antagonistic confrontation. The audience felt the tension. Paar seemed to like it. Finally, he asked Rooney, “Are you enjoying my show tonight?” Bristling with hostility, Mickey replied, “Not necessarily.” Then Paar remarked, “Then would you care to leave?” The audience began to applaud for Paar. Mickey stood up, shook hands with Paar, and left, while the audience cheered.

  Paar remarked to the audience, “That’s the only time I got a hangover just from listening . . . It’s a shame. He was such a great talent.”

  The next day, Mickey took a beating in the press. There were claims that he was drunk during the appearance. Paar feasted on the media circus, and remarked, “I’m sorry he was drunk.” Meanwhile, manager and press agent Red Doff went into spin control. He also sent a wire to the president of NBC seeking an apology from Paar and the network for alleged slanderous remarks, including Paar’s sarcastic “He was such a great talent.” Although Rooney later met with Paar, he never appeared on his program again. When Paar was asked if he had exploited the situation, he replied, “I really think Mickey should understand that I didn’t need the publicity. I am rather successful.”58

  The fifties was a tough decade for Mickey despite making movies that still resonate today. But tough as it was, he worked and he had survived, clawing his way through more marriages and another decade in the business. His film output was still steady, though they were mostly low-budget programmers. He subsisted, paid his child support and alimony with revenues from his stage appearances. His fourth marriage was crumbling, major scandals were on the horizon, and bankruptcy would soon follow. While it was a bumpy ride for most of the fifties, the turbulence would be far rougher in the dawning decade, and danger would, yet again, rear its ugly head.

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  Bigamy and Barbara Ann

  Mickey, Barbara Ann, Kerry (left), Kelly (right), and Michael in Barbara’s arms.

  PHOTO COURTESY OF KELLY ROONEY.

  By officially resigning from Rooney’s management, Maurice Duke, as he later told his daughter, had “escaped the lunacy of Mick”—and after the murder of his friend Gus Greenbaum by mob associates of casino operator Moe Dalitz, the Duke believed he had also escaped with his life. He was quickly replaced by the competent Red Doff as Mickey’s manager and press agent. But all was not rosy for Mickey, who, yet again, stepped into the spotlight of the gossip columns with his pending divorce from Elaine, his newest marriage to Barbara Ann Thomason, and his erratic behavior on Tonight. Mickey was certainly not fading away as many had predicted; though he did seem to be decomposing before a national audience.

  One of the most important and well-known Hollywood screenwriters, Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Oh, God!, and Tootsie), told us, “Sadly, the talent was always there. It was his real life that distracted him and made him the butt of many punch lines. I worked with him on a tour of A Funny Thing [Mickey played Pseudolus]. He had such great timing and knew the natural rhythms of his character.”1

  As Mickey was severing his business relationship from Duke, his marriage to Elaine was imploding. After he discovered her betrayal with her ex-husband—Elaine spent much of her time at their house in Lake Arrowhead with her male “friends”—Mickey set out on the prowl looking for his next conquest. His friend, car salesman Bill Gardner introduced him to his friend Barbara Ann Thomason, another tall and lanky beauty in the mold of Ava Gardner, only this time a blonde. Born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1937, Barbara came from a military family. Her father was an officer in the air force, and the family moved around for the early part of her life, including a stint in England.

  While attending Emerson Elementary School in Phoenix, she became known as the prettiest girl in town. Her family then moved to Inglewood, California, in 1951, where, while a student at Inglewood’s Morningside High School, she began entering beauty pageants. By October 1953 her dreams of success started to come true when she won several local contests. In 1954 she was crowned Queen of the Championships of Southern California. Later that year, she won the Miss Muscle Beach and Miss Surf Festival titles. After graduating from high school, she became a dance instructor for Arthur Murray and then, as Tara Thomas, she became a model, appearing in Modern Man magazine in December 1957.

  She was seventeen years younger than Rooney when they were introduced, but for Mickey, that made no difference. A beautiful girl was a beautiful girl regardless of height or age. An aspiring actress, Barbara lived with a roommate, nightclub singer Pat Landers, in a small apartment at 1436 Laurel Avenue, off the Sunset Strip. Using the stage name of Carolyn Mitchell, she did bit parts on television shows such as Crossroads. When she met Mickey, she had just finished her largest role, in Roger Corman’s Drag Strip Riot, as Betty and was working on his film The Cry Baby Killer, as Carole Fields, which starred Jack Nicholson in one of his first leading roles.

  “My mother was a real Southern California beach beauty,” recalled Mickey and Barbara Ann’s eldest daughter, Kelly. “She just fell head over heels in love with my father. Although her career was just taking off, she was more interested in a family life and children. I don’t think she was starstruck with my dad, as she was already appearing in films.”2

  Mickey, who had returned to his typical pattern of wooing beautiful young women, was focused on Barbara immediately. In fact, right after they began to date, he bought her a $4,500 fur coat, a gift that was reported in Harrison Carroll’s column on February 12. Elaine naturally noticed the story and exploded.

  She told Arthur Marx, “I told Mickey that I had a boyfriend and I wanted to leave Mickey. But Mickey begged me not to. Mickey was still under the care of a psychiatrist. I felt sorry for him again, so I said okay, I would stay but I would not give up my young man. Mickey knew that right up front, and he didn’t care. After he bought her a fur coat for $4,500, he felt so guilty, he even bought me one, a more expensive one at that. I figured what was the difference? If it was the end of a marriage, it was the end of a marriage.”3

  As Mickey began his relationship with Barbara Ann, he was blind to her emotional instability. He was head over heels in love with her. Barbara, too, was smitten, but when Mickey told her that he would not go through a divorce from Elaine to marry right her then and there, it led Barbara to three suicide attempts, one of which made national headlines and every show-biz gossip column.

  Mickey had rented a new house, which belonged to longtime (and very controversial) Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty, the perennial butt of many Johnny Carson jokes, at 12979 Blairwood Road in Sherman Oaks, where Barbara Ann took up residence shortly after Mickey moved in. The new house was always filled with Barbara’s friends and acquaintances, including her former roommate Pat Landers
and longtime friend actress Kim Chance from Albert Zugsmith’s High School Confidential. Guests at the house also included famous baseball player Milwaukee Braves first baseman Frank Torre, former Yankee manager Joe Torre’s brother; along with Braves pitcher Lew Burdette, Red Schoendienst, and Gene Conley. Reportedly, Barbara Ann passed out by Mickey’s pool. When she was discovered, by Landers and Chance, to revive her they tossed her into the pool. When she didn’t wake up, Landers fished her out and called for an ambulance to resuscitate her and transport her to North Hollywood Hospital, where she was admitted for one night. The girls blamed the incident on Mickey, who they said had tossed Barbara in the pool. But Barbara Ann, perhaps disconsolate over Mickey’s refusal to marry her—he was still married to Elaine—had written and posted suicide notes with tape throughout the house. The papers the next day, August 13, carried sordid tales of the suicide attempt, Barbara Ann’s nude body floating in the pool, and the currently married Mickey’s involvement.

  Red Doff, now in a difficult position as Mickey’s manager and publicist, carefully responded by telling the Los Angeles Daily Times, a month later on September 13, 1958:

  Barbara was unconscious when Landers and Chance arrived, so they decided to wake her up by undressing her and putting her in the swimming pool. Just for good measure, Landers took off her clothes so she could get into the pool and dunk Barbara in the water. When that didn’t work, Landers called her doctor, who told her to contact the police. The Fire Department also responded and took Barbara to North Hollywood Hospital, which released her the next day. When Mickey got home, he found notes all over the house and visited the hospital to check on Barbara and went home after he found out she was fine.4

  The newspaper story continued:

  Barbara, who claimed she merely took the wrong pills by mistake, said of Rooney, “I’m madly in love with him and he with me.” But Doff insisted to The Times that there was no romance. He said, “Mr. Rooney had left for an engagement at Harrah’s Club in Lake Tahoe. It’s all a publicity stunt cooked up by these three girls,” Doff told The Times. “Sure Mickey knows Barbara and has taken her out a few times. But Mickey likes all girls. After all, he’s not even divorced yet and here someone is trying to get him married already. I’m Mickey’s closest friend and you can quote me as saying that he enjoyed Miss Thomason’s company just as he did the many other girls he has been out with since separating from his wife. But that’s as far as it went!”5

  Elaine, who was not to be trifled with, knew early on that Mickey was always on the lookout for a pretty woman, and though she herself was cheating on him, she refused to put up with it. Once she caught him trying to get his office phone number to a beautiful girl serving hors d’ouevres at a party they were throwing, and she got so mad she walloped Mickey hard across his mouth, drawing blood. Although she claimed that Mickey had begged her several times to reconcile, she was fed up and embarrassed.

  Now that a divorce was in the offing, she was determined to get the highest possible settlement. She hired divorce attorney Max Gilford, who was also an actor and producer and the husband of actress Anne Gwynne, to get her piece of the pie. Gilford played hardball and threatened to expose Mickey’s lifestyle to the media. While Mickey and Elaine had officially separated in early 1958, the settlement negotiations dragged on for months. Elaine had requested a temporary alimony of $2,350 per month until a settlement was reached. Mickey was unhappy and did not feel she deserved that much. He hired divorce attorney Dermot Long and tried to play his own game of hardball.

  Even after she had agreed on terms and the interlocutory degree was granted, on May 18, 1959, neither would be able to marry until June 7, 1960. But by the time of the interlocutory decree, Barbara was already five months pregnant with Kelly Ann, who would be born on September 13, 1959. According to Pam McClenathan, Elaine tried to extort Mickey for extra money in return for not reporting the pregnancy and overlooking the fact that Mickey had actually married Barbara, on December 1, 1958, in Mexico, while he was still legally married to Elaine.6 Hence, already a pedophile because of Liz Taylor and Lana Turner, he was now also a bigamist, and was about to have an illegitimate child. Mickey refused to pay Elaine any hush money, and she promptly sought to sell the story to the gossip magazines. However, it was the Los Angeles Times, on June 3, 1959, before the final divorce decree that reported that Barbara was “four months pregnant.”

  “Mickey fucking dragged me and all the records into his divorce. I thought I was finished with him . . . apparently not,” recalled Maurice Duke.7

  Mickey’s divorce from Elaine—public, ugly, tainted with the smudge of bigamy, and wrapped around her love for her first husband, who intruded himself into Mickey’s life and then wound up getting killed by the very mobsters to whom Mickey was heavily in debt and for whom he even occasionally made collections—would probably have psychologically crippled most people. But not Mickey, who persevered into his next marriage and into another murder.

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  The Mickey Jinx and the Murder In Brentwood

  The scene of Barbara Ann’s murder, outside the Brentwood home.

  PHOTO COURTESY OF MELODY DOFF.

  While Mickey Rooney faced countless hurdles during his life, along with a multitude of bizarre and twisted experiences, none was more devastating, or threatening to him and his children, than the murder of his wife Barbara Ann, a tragedy that impacted his life until the day he died, and the lives of four of his children right up to today. Although the facts in the death of Barbara Ann and the suicide of her alleged lover and killer, Serbian actor Milos Milosevic, on January 30, 1966, appear to be clear cut in that the LAPD closed the case, forty years later many questions linger. Was it a murder-suicide, as claimed almost immediately by Los Angeles County deputy coroner Thomas Noguchi, or were Milosevic’s underworld connections, stretching all the way back to Yugoslavia, contributory factors in the double murder? Several people, including the children of Mickey and Barbara, claim this was not simply a murder-suicide perpetrated by a jealous lover.

  Conspiracy theories abound on the Internet, including some that conjecture that the official inquiry was a cover-up and that the two were actually both murdered in revenge for their affair. Two Serbian books were written about the tragedy, Zagrljaj Pariza (The Embrace of Paris), by Dusan Savkovic,1 and Ubij Bliznjeg Svog, by Marko Lopusina; about the “real” story behind the murders; and one website deifies Milosevic as a victim of a gangland murder, possibly related to an international sex ring.

  Barbara Ann and Mickey’s friend Milos Milosevic was born on July 1, 1941, in the kingdom of Yugoslavia, three months after the Nazi invasion and partition in April of that year. As a teen after the war, he worked alongside his childhood friend Stevan Markovic for gangster Nikola Milinkovich. Milos had ambitions as an actor and sought out French actor Alain Delon when he was filming a movie in Belgrade. Delon liked the audacity of Milos and his friend Stevan, good-looking young men whose skills in procuring women for an evening’s entertainment impressed the French actor. Delon took the two wannabe actors into his entourage, hiring them to be his “bodyguards,” in which capacity they traveled with him everywhere.

  In April 1964, while visiting the film set in Yugoslavia for Roger Corman’s low-budget (six hundred thousand dollars) picture The Secret Invasion, an early version of The Dirty Dozen, Delon met Mickey and Barbara Ann, who was on set with her husband, and introduced them to his two burly bodyguards. The couple was already having problems, and in an attempt to reconcile with Barbara Ann, Mickey had brought her, now pregnant with Kimmy, on location in Yugoslavia for the six-week shoot. In the film, Mickey plays a pivotal role as an underground fighter for the Irish Republican Army. (Barbara Ann and Corman knew each other from her earlier acting work on his 1958 picture The Cry Baby Killer.)

  Mickey and Barbara went through a turbulent period after that trip to Yugoslavia. He had been having an affair with a stripper while rehearsing the road version
of Larry Gelbart’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in Atlantic City. In late August, his new girlfriend created a row when Barbara Ann accompanied Mickey to the set for the filming of his television series Mickey. After the incident, Barbara had a massive fight with Mickey that resulted, in September 1964, in both parties contacting their respective divorce attorneys. However, they didn’t divorce, but instead sold their Beverly Hills home and moved into a Brentwood house they’d bought relatively cheap, at only sixty-five thousand dollars, a property in which both the previous two occupants had died in freak accidents. The house turned out to be equally unlucky for Barbara.

  Meanwhile, Delon came to Hollywood to try his hand at American films, and he brought Milosevic and Markovic with him. At a party at the house Delon had rented, Milos sought out Rooney, asking for his help in learning how to become an actor. Mickey called some friends and found the young man work as a stunt double. Milos auditioned and was eventually cast in the ambitious Esperanto-language horror film being directed by Leslie Stevens of the television series The Outer Limits, called Incubus (1966), starring Star Trek’s William Shatner. Milos played the title monster, Incubus.

  In conspiracy-bound Hollywood, theorists still talk about Incubus, and how it seemed to be cursed, as many of those who worked on the film met unfortunate fates, including Milosevic. Actress Ann Atmar committed suicide weeks after the film wrapped. The daughter of actress Eloise Hardt (Amael in the film) was kidnapped and murdered, a case that remains unsolved. Director Leslie Stevens and actress Allyson Ames divorced, and Stevens’s production company, Daystar, went bankrupt. William Shatner suffered personal tragedy in the death of his wife. And most chilling of all, Milos killed Barbara Ann Rooney and himself in a murder-suicide in 1966.