The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  Rumors of a curse, and Milosevic’s gangland connections, throw a strange light on the story of Milos’s suicidal rampage. A handsome twenty-four-year-old who had no trouble ingratiating himself with the Hollywood set, Milos was gaining recognition as an actor. A gigolo in Europe who never lacked for female companionship, he was divorced and was leading the life he had always dreamed of in Hollywood. According to people who remember him, it made no obvious sense for him to kill himself over a woman with four children.

  The murder-suicide of Barbara Rooney and Milos Milocevic spurred international headlines and was truly shocking for its time. It was the OJ Simpson case of the 1960s, a murder in Brentwood. Associated Press entertainment reporter Bob Thomas wrote a straightforward account of the events of January 30, 1966, explaining that the planned reconciliation between Mickey and Barbara Ann might have been the catalyst for her murder at the hands of the Yugoslav actor Milos, whom Mickey accused of being his wife’s lover. Police found the bodies of Barbara Thomason Rooney and Milos in the bathroom of Mickey’s Brentwood home. Thomas cited the police theory that this was likely a murder-suicide in which Milos, who had begun a relationship with Barbara while Mickey was filming in the Philippines, shot Barbara Ann and then turned the gun on himself. He wrote that police theorized that Milos committed the crime because Barbara and Mickey had decided to resume their marriage: in a meeting at Mickey’s hospital, which private detective Herm Schlieske had taped, Mickey and Barbara reconciled, and Barbara returned to Brentwood where she and Shlieske and her attorney Harold Abeles broke the news to Milos who had appeared to accept her decision. But later that evening, the two retired to her bedroom. When they did not respond to the maid the next morning or to her friend Wilma Catania’s knocking on the door, Wilma and the maid broke into the bedroom, found the bathroom door locked. When they opened it, they found the bodies of Milos and Barbara in the bathtub with Mickey’s .38 revolver beside them. The Rooney children were in the house at the time of the murder-suicide. Mickey remained in the hospital under sedation after learning of the news of his wife’s murder.

  Mickey’s eldest daughter by Barbara Ann, Kelly, was present in the house at the time of the murder. She recalled:

  My mother was wrongly presented in a terrible light and almost as a whore. Red Doff had planted stories that blamed her for seducing this Milos, which angered him and may have precipitated the murder of my mother. I am not certain of what happened, but we have always been upset at how my mother has been presented. Also, strange and violent events happened to everyone who was involved. Red Doff’s four-year-old daughter, Carol, who was an excellent swimmer, drowned only three months later [May 3, 1966] in Hal March’s pool; Cynthia Bouron, Milos’s wife, was years later found bludgeoned to death and stuffed in a trunk [October 30, 1973]; his business partner, Stevan Markovic, was found murdered [1967]; the private detective my mother had hired [Herm Schlieske] was mysteriously murdered [he was only thirty-seven] the next year; and my grandmother Nell died on March 3, 1966, only a month after my mother’s death—officially from a heart attack, but we still question that as well. And there were other strange incidents. I feel that my mother’s murder was never properly investigated and she never received the respect she deserved.2

  In his autobiography, Life Is Too Short, Rooney gives his version of events, stating that he preferred working on the stage:

  [B]ut [agent] Bullets Durgom kept getting me work in pictures. So the next job was “Ambush Bay,” to be shot in the Philippines, the one trip in my life I wish I’d never taken. Barbara herself wanted to drive me to the airport the day I left LA for Manila. Milos was at the house. He came up to wish me luck. I shook his hand and said, “Take good care of my wife while I’m gone.” He smiled and assured me he would. Well, Milos did take care of Barbara. He spent most of his nights with Barbara, and, by the time I returned at the end of November, they were in the middle of a very torrid love affair. I had hated my time in the Philippines. The plot of ‘Ambush Bay’ had us hacking our way through the worst kind of jungles on the island, fighting mosquitoes and drinking the local water. [Mickey said he returned quite ill.]3

  Mickey had made what would turn out to be the fatal mistake of asking his new friend Milosevic to look after his his wife. With the cat away, the mice did play. Barbara reportedly took Milosevic as a lover to get back at Mickey for his philandering. While Mickey was away, she accompanied Milosevic to Northern California, to the location shoot of The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, in which he had a bit part. According to the official standard story, they were still having an affair when Mickey returned and moved out of the Brentwood house after finding out they were lovers. The couple filed for an official separation in December 1965, and it was reported that Milosevic moved into the Brentwood house to live with Barbara and her four children by Mickey, a story Kelly Rooney disputes: “This is absolutely not true. I lived in the house, and I would know this. While he did visit the house, he never moved in, lived there, or even stayed overnight. This was an absolute lie.”4

  When Mickey learned that Barbara was planning to file a lawsuit for separate maintenance, seeking a judgment that would grant her payments from Mickey until the divorce settlement was approved by the court, Mickey struck first and filed for divorce on January 19, 1966, citing mental cruelty. In his suit, he asked the court for a restraining order to keep Milosevic out of the Brentwood house. Barbara began to panic when she learned she might lose her children in a custody battle due to her adultery, which Mickey would charge in his court pleadings. For his part, the story goes, Milosevic became jealous when he realized Barbara Ann was considering returning to Mickey. He was even more incensed when he heard a tape recording of a conversation between Barbara and Mickey discussing the divorce suit. The tape was made by LA private eye Herm Schlieske, who had wired Barbara for the purposes of getting Mickey to talk about his philandering.

  On the tape, recorded inside Mickey’s hospital room, Mickey pleads for reconciliation. If Milos Milosevic thought Mickey would argue for a divorce, he was trumped, because in response to Mickey’s proffer of loyalty and his love for the children, Barbara agrees to keep the marriage alive. She tells Mickey that she will not see Milosevic again, even as a friend. Afterward, Red Doff concocted a story that Mickey had checked into the hospital for treatment of an exotic blood illness he had picked up on location. The hospitalization actually occurred due to an overdose of pills by Mickey during this period of turmoil (most likely an aborted suicide attempt).

  On the night of her death, Barbara went out with Milosevic and her friend Margie Lane for dinner at the Daisy on Rodeo Drive. They returned to Brentwood and bid her friend a good night at 8:30 p.m. Three of the children were at home, while Kimmy Sue was visiting her maternal grandparents in Inglewood. The following day, Barbara’s friend Wilma Catania, worried that the children were alone and Barbara was still locked in her bedroom, got the maid to bang on the door. When that didn’t get a response, Wilma asked for the key, which the maid retrieved from the kitchen. They opened the door, but found the bed still made and the bathroom door locked. Wilma and the maid found a screwdriver and hammer, which they used to pop the bathroom door off its hinges. They were shocked at what they found inside.

  In the bathtub were the bodies of Barbara and Milosevic. She was lying on her back, shot with a single round through the jaw. Milosevic, lying on top of her, facedown, had a bullet hole in his temple. According to the medical examiner and the LAPD, Milosevic had shot Barbara with Mickey’s chrome-plated .38-caliber revolver and then turned the weapon on himself. Odd, though, that none of the three children who were in the house heard the shots. Officially, the police ruled it a murder-suicide perpetrated by a jealous lover. When Mickey learned about the crime, he went into shock and was forced to stay another day in the hospital.

  In Emma Brockes’s (London) Guardian interview on October 17, 2005, with Mickey’s son with Barbara Ann (conducted backstage at the Albery Theatre, where the young
Rooney was choreographing a new musical, Ducktastic!), the then-forty-three-year-old Michael Rooney recalled the murder-suicide, saying that he didn’t remember anything that happened that night but that he knew his parents were going through a divorce. “My mum was kind of seeing somebody on the side,” he said. “But then my father and my mother decided to get back together, and the guy my mum was dating wasn’t having it. So he took the very gun that my father gave my mother for protection and killed her in our house. Then [he] killed himself. It was a murder suicide.”5

  Michael said that although he and his sisters were in the house when the murder-suicide took place, they were “scurried out” of the house and told they were going to see the movie Mary Poppins. They were never told at the time that their mother was dead. They were subsequently adopted by their maternal grandparents because, according to Michael, “My father was going through a tough time in the 1960s.”

  Michael, who had been trained as a dancer, got his first job as an extra on the TV series Fame. He said that he never knew what had happened to his mother (who simply disappeared from his life) until he was thirteen or fourteen. For years, he told his interviewer, he believed that his grandmother was his mother. Then one day “my grandmother sat us down and told us why our mother was no longer around. She started showing us pictures of my mother. The way they did it was really good.”

  Michael explained that he didn’t have much contact with his father, who always seemed as if he were staring into a camera, even when they were alone together. For example, Michael said show business was the only thing the two of them talked about, even when the conversation wandered off into other subjects. But Michael said he realized that show business was the only thing his father knew. That was his only life, and there was nothing else for the two of them to talk about. It does make sense, he explained to his interviewer, because “my father was shooting two to three musicals at the same time when he was a kid. They were cranking ’em out back then. They used to put stuff in the soup to keep ’em going—everybody says it was cocaine—anyway, it was some kind of upper. But he’s a survivor, unlike poor Judy [Garland].”

  Years later, after the Thomason grandparents told the children that their mother had been murdered, Mickey told his son that Barbara Ann had been a good mother, “caring” and wonderful with the children, whom she deeply loved. Of all the women he had known, Mickey said, Barbara Ann, to whom he’d been married for eight years, was the best wife he’d had. Michael said that after all the years had gone by, what Mickey said about his mother was something he had wanted to hear.

  As of this writing, Michael’s sister Kelly told us, the Rooney children have never fully investigated the police and coroner reports of their mother’s death, even though that death is still shrouded in mystery despite the official explanations.

  While the official determination of coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi was that the death of Barbara Rooney and Milos Milosevic resulted from a murder-suicide, facts abound, nearly fifty years after this event, that question the veracity of the findings of the Los Angeles Police. The coroner’s report was unclear. The website Murderpedia has: “The official inquiry provoked rumors and doubts that they were actually both murdered in revenge for having an affair.” A website was even created to dispute the death of Milosevic, stating that his death was a murder: “Milos allegedly committed murder and suicide but this page is created to oppose artificial facts and dismiss public belief and disinformation. Milos was brutally murdered with Barbara Ann Thompson, and the proof for such an extensive claim is now ready to be published, including mortuary photos, death-scene report [sic], letters of threats and other significant evidence of what really happened. Teams of directors and producers are working together to develop a specific film project in creative collaboration.”6 Of course, this is purely speculative.

  The mysterious circumstances and the events following the tragedy could be coincidence or could perhaps lend credibility to questions regarding the deaths of Milos and Barbara and others connected with the motion picture Incubus. In the movie-fantasy life of Mickey Rooney, the horrid event plays out like classic film noir, a curse that follows him through his life, impacting everyone around him.

  Of her mother’s death, Kelly Rooney has said:

  My mother may have used [Milos] as a shoulder to cry on, but I do not believe there was a passionate affair. She was first a wife and mother. I remember Milos just sitting by the pool and bringing his German shepherd with him. He was a friend of both my parents. He had a very sinister aura about him. He always frightened me, as if he was the devil. Also, my mother was not well at the time. She was still recovering from a rough pregnancy and birth with Kimmy, and an invasive C-section. She was not out partying. My father, at that time, was loaded up with barbiturates and sleeping pills. When he went to the hospital, Doff made up a story of why he was in the hospital. He was really there because he was taking too many sleeping pills and other drugs.

  One theory concerning Mickey’s stay in the hospital was that he was so distraught over the relationship between his wife and Milos that he attempted suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates. Kelly confided to us, “My father always regretted not being there for my mother. He told me in front of Jan, just three years before he passed, that ‘Your mother was the love of my life.’ I think he was being completely sincere.”7

  In an emotional retelling, sobbing over the phone as she dredged up memories of the traumatic event, Kelly said to the authors:

  I was very close to my dad. I was his oldest daughter and I guess a daddy’s girl. My mother was a hands-on mom. Milos was here illegally from Yugoslavia, with a very mysterious background. Milos was not a lover of my mother; that is not true at all. He may have been infatuated with my mom, but they were not involved. He feared he was going to be deported and wanted to use my mom to stay in the U.S. He feared returning to Yugoslavia. The gun used in the killing was a house gun my dad kept for protection. They were shot in my parents’ bathroom . . . the door was locked to the bedroom. My mom usually got us up and ready for school, and that morning she did not. Her best friend came over to the house and was upset to see Milos’s car there. She said, “What’s his car doing there?” I am serious that he never spent the night at our house. Her friend was panicked, and we could not find the keys to the master bedroom. We looked all over the house for the keys and we got in and all started to go into the bedroom. Thank God my mom’s best friend had the presence of mind to notice that the bathroom door was locked and knew something was wrong and moved the kids out of the bedroom, which I’m so grateful to this day that she did. She asked our maid to go into the bathroom, which she did. When the maid went in there, we heard her let out a blood-curdling scream. After that, the police came and we went to my dad’s manager’s [Red Doff’s] house and stayed there for two weeks. We were not told anything. I mean we knew something was wrong. I was there when the police were spraying for fingerprints, and we went into the back of a police car. Red never told us. He waited for my dad to sit us down and tell us. It devastated the family. They made my mom out to be a whore in the newspaper, [but] it was my dad who was doing the cheating—not my mom. My dad was no saint. My grandparents—my mom’s parents—kept us shielded. The media created this whole fabricated story about my mom and rode with it. There was more to the story, and the police just did not follow through. I want the true story to be told. It was and remains suspicious and untold. I mean the death of Red Doff’s daughter Carol—we stayed with him—just a couple months after this; my grandmother Nell died one month later; Milos’s wife was later bludgeoned and stuffed in a trunk; the investigator, Herm Schlieske, who worked with my mom on her last day was killed months later at thirty-seven; Milos’s business partner was murdered the next year. It does not add up.8

  Speculating on what might have happened on the night of the murder and the events leading up to it, we suggest the following scenario of the corpus delicti: Milosevic, possibly because of prior criminal connections
and a belief that he would be imprisoned or killed, was deathly afraid of being deported back to Tito’s Yugoslavia. Staying in America, where had already enjoyed a starring film role and had befriended Barbara Ann, was his only chance at survival. But to stay in America, he needed a spouse. He was a manipulator who saw in Barbara Ann the possibility of a spouse if she divorced Mickey, which she was already in the process of doing. All he needed to do was nudge the process forward, get a good divorce settlement from Mickey, and marry her so as to establish a cause for his permanent residence in the United States. However, when Barbara and Milos conspired to get Mickey on tape, the plan quickly fell apart when Mickey, instead of providing evidence of his philandering and his desire for a divorce, begged Barbara to stay in the marriage. Barbara ultimately relented, shut the tape recorder off, and agreed to reconcile, promising that she would tell Milos to move out. She and her lawyer broke the news to Milos, who, according to witnesses, seemed to take it calmly. But, as Kelly Rooney has attested to, Milos had a dark and sinister side. This was also evidenced by claims made by Milos’s former wife that he had beaten her, which is why she wanted a divorce. Thus, we can assume, for the sake of argument and based on the claims of his former wife and Kelly’s own perceptions, that Milosevic had a violent side, especially when crossed.

  Milos was also a very jealous and possessive man, one who could not brook breaches into his territory. And Barbara Ann, while Mickey was away on location shooting Ambush Bay, had become his territory. By his own admission, to Barbara’s friend Michele Lamour, Milos had grown romantically attached to Barbara and was exhibiting some extremely powerful possessive sentiments. He told Lamour on the Thursday prior to the shooting, “If Barbara even looks at another man, I’ll shoot her and myself. It’ll be like a film. We’ll be found sleeping like two lovers together.”9