On the night of Barbara’s death, Milos parked his blue VW Beetle outside the house. After Barbara’s friend left, but while the three eldest children were in their rooms, Milos, behind the locked door of the master bedroom, made one final and desperate attempt to convince Barbara to save him from deportation by divorcing Mickey, according to the plan they’d hatched, and marrying him. He might have pleaded with her, claiming that it would be his doom if he were forced back to Yugoslavia. Maybe if she brought Mickey in on the plot, Mickey would agree. Milos possibly said he had it all worked out. But his pleading was to no avail. Barbara was adamant. She wanted to stay in the marriage, and Milos would have to leave. Perhaps Milos began to threaten her, maybe even tried to assault her, but Barbara had the loaded .38 that Mickey had bought her for protection. She got it out of a bedroom drawer and pointed it at Milos. Her finger might already have been on the trigger of the cocked revolver. It could have gone off with a simple squeeze. Milos grabbed the barrel as they struggled over the gun, twisting her wrist as he forced the barrel away from his head and tried to wrest the weapon from her tight grip. Suddenly, the gun went off, firing a single round through Barbara’s jaw and into her brain. She collapsed in Milos’s arms, dead. Now Milos is truly in the throes of panic. He has killed Mickey Rooney’s wife. He would most certainly be prosecuted for it and face the gas chamber. He carried her into the bathroom and laid her in the tub. He locked the bathroom door. There was no escape now, only death. In a state of fear and hopelessness, he climbed on top of Barbara’s body, possibly in a final embrace, and put Mickey’s .38 to his temple. He fired the fatal shot.
If this scenario is correct, at Milosevic’s autopsy, Los Angeles medical examiner Dr. Thomas Noguchi would have discovered powder burns on Barbara’s and Milos’s hands, and on Barbara’s face, and blood spatter on both their hands. He would have noted that both the bedroom and bathroom doors were locked from the inside, seemingly precluding the theory that this was a mob hit. And an examination of the weapon would have revealed both Barbara’s and Milos’s fingerprints on the handle and trigger, left there by their struggle. Was this Mickey’s curse on both their lives? Was it the curse of the Incubus that had struck? If so, would it strike again?
According to Barbara’s friend Marge Lane (Mickey’s sixth wife, whom he married shortly after Barbara’s death and who heard the news of Barbara’s death over the radio), Milos had a couple of other reasons for not wanting to live. Marge told Arthur Marx, “There was a warrant out for Milos in Florida for a gun carrying charge. The FBI were after him and so were a couple of members of the Mafia. So he must have figured what was the point of waiting around for them to get him? Now that he couldn’t have Barbara, he’d save everybody the trouble.”10
Rev. Douglas Smith, the minister who had married her and Mickey in 1959 presided at Barbara’s funeral. Her services and interment were held at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale. Fewer than one hundred mourners attended, including Red Doff and his wife, Bill Gardner, Jonathan Winters, Red Barry, Bobby Van, and Joey Forman. In Dr. Smith’s eulogy, he said, “This beautiful girl was like a spray of roses, now only the fragrance remains.”11 Milos’s body was shipped back to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where his mother told the press there that Mickey “plotted to have my son killed.” The story, which was carried throughout the United States, forced Red Doff into more spin control; he responded with vehement denials, and later told Arthur Marx that Mickey was in a state of utter shock during the rest of 1966 and hardly knew what he was doing or even where he was living.
A few years after the murder, Barbara’s parents legally adopted the four children, Kelly, Kerry, Michael Kyle, and Kimmy. At that time, they took their grandparents’ name, Thomason. The judge ruled that the children’s best interests were served by “the regularity, reliability and stability of living with the grandparents at Mr. and Mrs. Don Thomason of Rolling Hills Estates.”
In his autobiography, Life Is Too Short, Mickey said of Barbara’s killing, “I died when she did. I am furious at what happened to her.”12 Of Kelly, he said, “She had blue eyes just like her Mom, and she was beautiful. Who was I to get such a gift? In my heart of hearts, I knew Kelly Ann came from God.”
20
* * *
* * *
Career Swings
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini with (front row, left to right) Dwayne Hickman, Annette Funicello, Beverly Adams, and Mickey Rooney.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WILLIAM ASHER.
Mickey’s fifth marriage had ended in an explosion of gunfire, and manager and press agent Red Doff immediately began the spin on it, putting Mickey in the right and blaming Barbara for her dalliance with the dark and conniving Serbian. Mickey was the victim, confined as he was to a hospital bed suffering from the ill effects of his exposure to some foreign virus he had picked up on location in the Phillippines. Even the scandal-mongering gossip columnists in the Hollywood press corps couldn’t blame Mickey for this one. He would trudge on, Doff assured the press, despite his ill fortune.
Mickey was nothing if not dogged. Even in the midst of failed marriages and divorces he couldn’t afford, threats from mobsters whose bullets buzzed past his friends and associates, tax liens and lawsuits, bankruptcy, womanizing, drinking and drug addiction, and a murder-suicide that, but for a locked door and a lucky turn of fate, spared the lives of his children, Mickey kept on ticking. He continued his professional roller coaster ride across the media. Amazingly, despite the terrible negative publicity and tragic events that surrounded him during this period, his talent continued to shine through. He was comfortable in any venue, blending in like a Zelig wherever he performed. By his own admission, he was only the character he played and nothing more. Where many of today’s performers tend to be one-dimensional, Mickey’s hard-knock life, stage education, lack of a core personality, and general cork-like resilience allowed him to wow audiences whether he was onstage in Vegas, playing the role of the wily Plautine character Pseudolus in the road company of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, doing on a television variety show, or appearing in a motion picture. When film or television stars are dependent on their physical features to appeal to audiences, they faced limited outlets as they age. Mickey experienced this when he tried to recreate Andy Hardy as he grew older, but then he morphed, becoming a chameleon who could adapt to whatever role he was offered. He gave producers, bookers, and casting agents a vast array of talents to utilize.
Mickey never stopped working. In the 1960s he appeared in sixteen motion pictures, had his own television program, did twenty-nine guest appearances on various television shows, did four extended tours with stage shows, “coauthored” an autobiography, and recorded an album. In short, it was another typical decade for Mickey Rooney.
“I learned early on, if you’re knocked down, you’ve got to keep getting up. However, as you get older, you get up a hell of a lot slower and you keep thinking that you don’t have the strength to get up again,” Mickey told the authors in 2008, his voice barely rising above the screaming fans at Santa Anita.
Mickey’s motion pictures in the 1960s included both showcases for his talent and utter schlock. From his now-reviled role as Mr. Yunioshi in the Blake Edwards production of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, to his acclaimed turns in the cult favorite It’s a Mad Mad Mad World to Rod Serling’s poignant Requiem for a Heavyweight to the comedic but awkwardly condescending attempt to embrace the post-Mouseketeer beach bum generation with How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, Mickey was both brilliant and unabashedly shameless.
The great actor George Raft once told us, “I learned the hard way. You need to keep working. Get your face in front of the audiences, whether you’re starring or in a small part. Once they forget who you are, it’s over.”1 Mickey certainly followed this advice.
The decade started painfully slow with two Albert Zugsmith low-budget films, Platinum High School followed by The Private Lives of Adam and Eve. Red Doff was a producer on both films, and as Micke
y’s manager, he set the actor up with profit-sharing participation.
Platinum High School allowed Rooney to return to his old stomping grounds at MGM, where the film was being shot. While Mickey was top billed, the focus was on the younger actors. This film was a remake of the Spencer Tracy film Bad Day at Black Rock. The May 14, 1960, New York Times review by Eugene Archer was fairly positive, stating, “Mickey Rooney, twenty-four years after his peak period as Andy Hardy, MGM’s conception of the all-American boy, is still laboring for the studio with indefatigable professionalism. Unfortunately, he has done more for the studio than MGM has done for him. For Mr. Rooney’s vigorous playing is the only merit in this shoddy and obviously inexpensive exploitation melodrama.”
The Private Lives of Adam and Eve was shot at Universal as a risqué comedy, featuring Mickey in a dual role as a conniving gambler and a puckish Devil in the Garden of Eden via a dream sequence with Martin Milner and Mamie Van Doren. “Mickey was wonderful to work with. He was a real pro. He directed the sequences as well,” recalled Milner (Life with Father, Route 66, Adam-12).2 And our friend screenwriter Austin “Rocky” Kalish (Maude, Good Times, Gilligan’s Island) told us, “Mickey was actually a talented director. I’m not certain why he didn’t pursue that. He had a great vision of placement . . . and was incredible with the actors and crew. I know that Zugsmith was credited as well as the director, but I only remember Mickey in the chair.”3
The New York Daily News review on December 1, 1960, hated the film but mostly enjoyed Mickey: “Aside from Mickey Rooney, who sometimes overplays, there is little evidence of talent.”
HIS NEXT FILM WAS a major blockbuster, one that has been revered for over fifty years. However, Mickey’s small role as Breakfast at Tiffany’s Japanese photographer, Mr. Yunioshi, became emblematic of racism in films and has been credited with perpetuating a broad cultural and ethnic stereotype. While his role as Mr. I. Y. Yunioshi was minor, it has struck a nerve in many observers as demeaning to the Japanese. Upon Mickey’s death, Jeff Yang of the Wall Street Journal (April 8, 2014) wrote a piece called, “The Mickey Rooney Role Nobody Wants to Talk Much About,” that details the controversy that stemmed from Rooney’s portrayal of Yunioshi:
At the age of 93, actor Mickey Rooney has passed away. As his many lengthy eulogies have made abundantly clear, his was a life of stratospheric highs and humiliating lows. He was one of the biggest stars in the world as a teen; he fell into bankruptcy and irrelevancy as an adult. He reinvented himself and rebounded. He crashed and burned. Few lives have had as many epic twists and turns, making his obituaries obsessively engrossing reading.
But there’s one thing the newspapers have generally danced past, and it happens to be the role that has cast the longest shadow out of a career of thousands: His performance as Mr. I. Y. Yunioshi in the classic 1961 film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
In the decades since the film was released, Rooney’s portrayal of Yunioshi—taped eyelids, buckteeth, sibilant accent, and all—has become one of the persistent icons of ethnic stereotype, brought up whenever conversation turns to the topic of Hollywood racism. The depiction has prompted widespread protests whenever the film is screened. Paramount, the studio behind Breakfast, has now acknowledged Yunioshi as such a toxic caricature that its canonical Centennial Collection DVD release of the film includes a companion documentary, Mr. Yunioshi: An Asian Perspective, which features Asian American performers and advocates in conversation about the role’s lasting cultural impact and the broader context of Asian and other racial stereotypes in entertainment.
Six years ago, after four decades of stolidly defending the role, even Rooney himself finally expressed some regrets, stating in an interview that if he’d known so many people would be offended, “I wouldn’t have done it.”
But he also added in a September 2008 interview in the Sacramento Bee, “Blake Edwards . . . wanted me to do it because he was a comedy director. They hired me to do this overboard, and we had fun doing it. Never in all the more than 40 years after we made it—not one complaint. Every place I’ve gone in the world people say, ‘God, you were so funny.’ Asians and Chinese come up to me and say, ‘Mickey, you were out of this world.’ ”4 In later years, Mickey apologized repeatedly for the portrayal, and in Life Is Too Short, he wrote, “I am downright ashamed of my role in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ and I don’t think the director, Blake Edwards was very proud of it either.”5
The specter of Yunioshi continues to haunt Hollywood and Asian Americans today. Rooney’s broadly comic performance, repurposed from his early vaudeville days into the brave new world of cinema, is the godfather of the stereotype that continues to rear its head. A recent flap over a Colbert Report tweet underscores this. In March 2014, @ColbertReport tweeted: “I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.” Although the tweet was not from Colbert himself, a campaign emerged demanding the cancelation of The Colbert Report for the remark. The point made by the activists behind the subsequent #CancelColbert campaign is a valid one: racially stereotypical images are problematic even when presented as progressive satire, because many who see them won’t understand the context and will laugh for the “wrong reasons.”6
In the documentary The Making of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, director Blake Edwards remarked, “Looking back on the casting of Mickey—well, it’s not my favorite part. At the time I cast Mickey, nobody complained and thought it was perfectly okay. Looking back, I wish I had never done that. I would do anything to be able to recast it. But it’s there and onward and upward.” Producer Richard Shepherd said, “I would rather have cast a Japanese actor to play the character. At one point, I wanted to replace Mickey.”
It would be easy, and politically correct, to leave this discussion about the 1958 Truman Capote creation of an obviously broad-stroke satirical character right there, exactly where Mickey’s apologia pro vita sua for his portrayal left it. But in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris and the ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks in Garland, Texas—and the resulting counter-tide of unqualified tolerance for satire and comedy, no matter who’s offended—the discussion is incomplete. We have to ask ourselves: What are the limits of racial satire inasmuch as words and images have the power to hurt? What is the moral and political balance along the spectrum of satire, racial stock humor, and unqualified support for free speech no matter what? Mickey Rooney found out where he stood with respect to satire versus racial offensiveness, and found it out the hard way.
IN THE WAKE OF Breakfast, Red Doff continued to pick up projects for Mickey. He did another low-budget film, King of the Roaring ’20s: The Story of Arnold Rothstein, at Allied Artists, the former Monogram Studio. Cashing in on the popular gangster craze created by Desilu’s popular television series The Untouchables, King of the Roaring ’20s starred an old friend of Mickey’s, David Janssen, as racketeer and gambler Arnold “the Brain” Rothstein, who preceded Meyer Lansky as head of New York City’s Jewish mob. Rothstein is best known, among other exploits, for fixing the 1919 World Series and forever tarnishing the reputation of Chicago White Sox outfielder Shoeless Joe “Say it isn’t so, Joe” Jackson. Mickey is third-billed as Rothstein’s childhood friend Johnny Burke. His second son, Tim Rooney, had a small part in the film.
“Timmy just loved working with his father, as it was about the only time he got to spend time with him,” recalled the boy’s later caretaker, Pam McClenathan, who went on to say that, over the years, Timmy sought out any opportunity to be with his father, on-screen and off-, but Mickey simply wasn’t interested.7
Mickey’s next film, Everything’s Ducky (1961), teamed him with his pal Buddy Hackett, the wildman comic with whom Mickey became friends while they were both playing Vegas clubs. “My father just adored Mickey,” recalled Buddy’s son, comedian Sandy Hackett. “They meshed so well together. While this film really was not highly regarded, it set them up as a team when Stanley Kramer
hired them for ‘It’s a Mad Mad Mad World.’ Their rhythms were in synch.”8
The New York Times reviewer, on April 27, 1962, dismissed Everything’s Ducky, writing, “It is an ostensible farce in which Mickey Rooney is required to play straight man to the comic Buddy Hackett and a talking duck. The alarming title is ‘Everything’s Ducky,’ and that should be warning enough for anyone.”
Following an established pattern in his career, Rooney went from a farce (Everything’s Ducky) to a drama: Rod Serling’s remarkable Requiem for a Heavyweight. Based on Serling’s absolutely brilliant Playhouse 90 television production, Mickey portrayed the trainer of a washed-up boxer named Mountain Rivera, masterfully portrayed by Anthony Quinn in the role that Jack Palance played in the television version. Jackie Gleason, playing Quinn’s manager, who exploits his client for the money, demonstrated his dramatic abilities, too, a talent that would shine years later in the poignant Soldier in the Rain and The Hustler. The New York Daily News, on November 17, 1962, was complimentary toward Rooney in its review, writing, “Mickey Rooney is solid as the trainer who, unlike the manager, actually cares what happens to the man who was the source of his income for many years.”
Following Requiem for a Heavyweight, Mickey did the now-classic comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, directed by Stanley Kramer. Shooting took nearly eight months, beginning on April 26, 1962, and wrapping on December 6. The film was jam-packed with nearly every comic actor in the business, including core stars Sid Caesar, Edie Adams, Ethel Merman, Dorothy Provine, Jonathan Winters, Milton Berle, Spencer Tracy, and (paired together) Mickey and Buddy. It was made on a huge budget (for the time) of nearly ten million dollars.
The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney Page 37