Mickey Jr. was a member also of the surfing music group the Sunrays, which had a hit with “I Live for the Sun.” Junior also played bass in Willie Nelson’s band, and has recorded an album called The Song Album. Like his height, his musical talent was inherited from his mother, a gifted vocalist. His maternal grandmother taught him how to play the ukulele by showing him the chords, which he then taught himself to play on an acoustic guitar. In addition to bass and guitar, Mickey Jr. played drums, harmonica, and keyboards, and wrote music.
According to Dan Kessel in our interview:
My stepbrothers, Mickey Rooney Jr. and Tim Rooney and Ted Rooney, had already been independently active on the music scene. Mickey recorded for Liberty Records, toured on the road, performed musically on TV shows like Shindig and in films like Hot Rods to Hell, with Dana Andrews and Jeanne Crain. Tim, who had been under contract to Warner Bros. as a young actor, did lots of dramatic stage work and was in the regular cast of the family sitcom Room for One More, as well as guest shots in episodic TV like Hawaiian Eye, Dragnet, and Bewitched. He also appeared in the teen films Village of the Giants and Riot on Sunset Strip. In fact, we were all there outside Pandora’s Box the night of the real riot, when the cops started arresting everyone.
In 1966, Columbia Records signed the Rooney Brothers and took them to producer Jerry Fuller, who, Kessel said, “was charting with hit records like ‘Young Girl,’ by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, and ‘Little Green Apples,’ by O. C. Smith.” The name Rooney was important of course, and even by the mid-1960s it could open any door in the industry. But the Rooney Brothers were talented in their own right, playing and singing well, and composing their own music. Mickey Jr., the eldest, was the singer and songwriter, and led his younger stepbrothers into making some excellent records that reminded listeners of harmonies they’d heard from the Beatles and the Byrds.
“The guys sounded great and looked great, and did their fair share of TV performances,” said Kessel, who accompanied them to studios for some of their TV appearances, such as on The Woody Woodbury Show and Mike Douglas. Although they gave strong performances, Kessel remembers, “Columbia just didn’t promote the records, and thus they didn’t chart.” As a result, the group soon disbanded. However, Tim was selected to take the place of Davy Jones on The Monkees when the Colpix/Screen Gems division of Columbia feared that Jones, then classified 1A, would be drafted and shipped off to Vietnam.
Dan described what he called the “Sunset Strip lifestyle” in Mickey Jr.’s apartment in Los Angeles, where Tim and Ted would stay over. (Although he was younger, Kessel tried to spend whatever time he could with them.) These guys, he said, belonged to the in crowd, and “ran with people like Candice Bergen, Don Johnson, Scott Walker, Liza Minnelli, Terry Melcher, [singer-songwriter] Bobby Jameson, Sharon Tate, Johnny Crawford, [character actor] Paul Petersen, and Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys.” Yes, these were the sixties, and yes, it was that Terry Melcher, Doris Day’s son, who spurned Charles Manson’s attempts to produce his music or take his music to his mother.
Timmy Rooney had his own circle of friends, including promising actress Farrah Fawcett, who had just arrived from Texas and whom Tim hooked up with songwriter Jimmy George; and actor Tommy Rettig, Jeff on Lassie, who also appeared in River of No Return, with Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum. Tim met, fell in love with, and became engaged to Art Linkletter’s daughter Diane, who lived across the street, but the engagement was cut short when she fell to her death from her sixth-floor apartment. Her father claimed the death was an LSD suicide, but Tim and his brothers, and Diane’s friends, disagreed—and were supported in this by the county’s toxicology report, which found no traces of LSD (or any drug) in her system. Tim was devastated by the loss, and believed, as did Diane’s friends, that she was murdered by a man named Ed Durston, a drug dealer who lived in her building and was believed to be associated with Charles Manson and Sharon Tate, and might have been involved in other murders. Dan Kessel remembers Durston as a menacing figure.
The Rooneys and Dan were habitués of the LA club scene, where some of the hottest bands of the sixties performed, especially along the Strip and in Venice Beach, the center of LA’s drug culture. Dan said:
One night, we took their dad, Mickey, to one of the clubs to see Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker perform. They were blues artists, who along with Muddy Waters and a couple of others inspired the early Rolling Stones. Mickey [Jr.] and Tim and I had their records and knew all their lyrics by heart. We kept telling Mickey [Sr.] how great they were and how much he would love them. Of course, that night, when Jimmy Reed hit the stage with his band, he was bombed out of his head and spent the first twenty minutes trying to tune his guitar, which never did get in tune, and the band kind of all fell apart when they started playing. We followed after Mickey when he finally stormed out of the club screaming, ‘I refuse to be a witness to this form of musical embarrassment.’ It was a bad night for Jimmy, and we felt bad for him. But we also felt bad that we put Mickey through that when he’d been such a good sport to go there with us. After that, when we invited Mickey to go with us to the Monterey Pop Festival or other musical happenings, he always declined. He was totally burned out from the Jimmy Reed gig.
Kessel remembers another, more troubling story about the elder Mickey: “One evening in 1968, when Tim and I were visiting Mickey at his home in Beverly Hills, there was a knock on the door, which Tim answered. A serious-looking man, who seemed like an attorney, asked if Mickey was home. . . . The man said, ‘Tell Mickey this is Mr. Maheu, and Howard wants to see him.’ ” Was this payback for the fistfight Ava Gardner said Mickey and Hughes got into when Mickey found Howard Hughes in her apartment? Or was it worse? Had Hughes bought up Mickey’s debts to casino owner Moe Dalitz and the Vegas mob, and was he now trying to collect? Mickey would soon find out.
When Tim told Mickey who was at the door, Kessel remembers:
Mickey turned off the shower and started yelling, “Why didn’t you say so, son? Go let him in and bring me my suit off the hanger. Hurry, son. Let Mr. Maheu inside. Tell him I’ll be right there in just a minute.” Mickey splashed on some 40 Love cologne, jumped into a suit, tied his tie, and combed his hair with lightning speed.” When the man told Mickey he was taking him to Vegas, Kessel recalls, Mickey said to his sons and Dan, “ ‘How’d you like to go roll some dice in Vegas with your little daddy?’ Tim and I looked at each other. Mickey [Sr.] looked at me. Then he answered himself, loudly proclaiming, “Sure you would!” Then, looking back and forth at both of us, he screamed, “Of course you would! You’d like it just fine! Come on, boys. We’re gonna go see Howie.” Tim and I . . . liked the idea of Vegas, but when Tim began to ask his dad who the hell was Howie, Mickey cocked his head to one side, looking him directly in the eye, and slowly whispered, “He’s a man who needs to see your daddy, son. Come on, boys. You’re going with me. They’re going with me, Bob,” he said [to the man], walking out the front door.
In the car on the way to Vegas, Mickey explained that Howie was in fact Howard Hughes . . . and made several unsuccessful attempts to find out from Mr. Maheu why it was that Hughes wanted to see him. Mr. Maheu’s only reply was for Mickey to relax and to be patient until they arrived there, which of course was like asking lava to stop flowing down a volcano.
During the next four hours, the whole way there, Mickey was his usual nonstop self, running the gamut from lengthy and extremely animated episodes to moments of contemplative, existential meanderings, all of which encompassed general observations regarding the state of the world, vivid reenactments of recollections from decades gone by, assorted homespun bromides, and outlandish, creative business ideas. Tim and I actively conversed with him. Mr. Maheu was polite, but was disengaged and mostly silent.
When we got to the Vegas Strip, we pulled into the Desert Inn and drove into a special parking area. Three men in black suits suddenly appeared from the shadows . . . [and] stayed with us as we followed Mr. Maheu into a
special utility elevator, not for public use. We all went up together, nonstop, to the top floor. We then exited the elevator, proceeding down a dimly lit hallway [and] around a corner to an unmarked door.
“Wh-where are we? Where’s Howie?” Mickey wanted to know.
There was no answer given. It was disconcerting when Mr. Mahue abruptly bid us a curt farewell and disappeared around a corner, as the men in the black suits opened the door and instructed us to enter the room. Then one of them walked through another door on the far side of the room. Two men stayed with us.
Mickey told us, “I bet Howard is going to offer to sign me to a million-dollar contract!” Then, a minute later: “Maybe he wants to invest in Mickey Rooney Macaroni. It’s a great idea, you know.”
The longer we were sitting there, the darker Mickey became.
“Oh God, maybe he’s going to have me thrown out of the window. I do have gambling debts with some of his friends. Maybe Howard’s not really here. I do owe some gambling debts to some of his friends. Maybe they’re gonna throw me out of the window. He’s mad at me. That’s it. I probably said some really bad things about him once, but that was so long ago! I think I’d like to leave. Yes, we’d like to leave now!” he said to the two men in suits. . . . “Just stay put, Mr. Rooney. It won’t be long, now,” one of them replied.
But Mickey was getting more nervous. “Wha-what’s going on here? Why does Howard want to see me now? It’s been so many years. Why am I being kept waiting like this? I’m Mickey Rooney. Why am I being kept in the dark?” he cried out in anguish.
Tim and I recognized that Mickey was having one of the anxiety attacks that had started plaguing him sporadically since the tragic loss of his wife Barbara a couple of years before. [Finally] the first man who had left us what seemed like hours ago but in reality was more like twenty minutes ago . . . came back.
“Follow me, Mr. Rooney,” he said.
Mickey was starting to become borderline hysterical. Tim tried to calm him down . . . “Don’t worry, Dad,” Tim said. “Dan and I will go in there with you.”
Suddenly the door flew open.
“Finally!” Mickey exclaimed, jumping up. Pointing to us and motioning through the open door, he told the man in the suit, “They go with me everywhere I go.” . . . [But] the man shook his head and said, “That’s not possible.” . . .
Later, when we were alone in our room, Mickey explained it to us like this. Hughes was in bed. . . . He told Mickey that he wasn’t in the best of health and didn’t know how much time he had left. Mickey asked what he’d been doing. Hughes said he’d been buying lights. Mickey asked him what he meant by ‘buying lights.’ From his bed, Hughes pointed toward the window, out to the night sky and the twinkling lights. He said he couldn’t buy any more time for himself but that he could buy lots of lights.
‘You’re buying stars? Will the government let you do that?’
‘Lights,’ Hughes said.
He explained to Mickey how he was buying up hotels. But that’s not what he wanted to talk to Mickey about. He wanted to apologize to Mickey because he said he always liked him and he felt guilty about Ava Gardner. Hughes said he had been pursuing Ava while she was still married to Mickey and that he might have been the cause of their divorce and that he felt bad about it for years. Mickey told Hughes it was all water under the bridge and, he told us, that in the end, when they said their good-byes, they both felt better about everything.
That was it in a nutshell. At dinner that night, Tim and I clinked glasses with Mickey as he proposed a toast to Howard Hughes.
And that was the story Dan Kessel told us about Mickey Rooney’s seeing Howard Hughes before his death, hearing Hughes’s final confession about what he believed was his role in Mickey’s divorce from Ava Gardner. But most of all, this was about B.J.’s legacy and the glory days of the Rooney Brothers.31
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The Seventies: Aftermath of Tragedy
Mickey and Dick Cavett.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBERT FINKEL.
After Barbara Ann’s death, Mickey was reeling. It was one thing to endure a publicly embarrassing and financially devastating divorce, but quite another to have violence and death spread through your life like an unstoppable virus.
Red Doff was the next victim.
Doff was both his personal manager and closest confidant. He had been with Mickey, first as a publicist and then as his personal manager, since the early 1950s. Their relationship had endured longer than his marriages and many of his friendships. Mickey trusted Red’s judgment and often relied on his advice. Thus, when Red’s four-year-old daughter, Carol, drowned only two months after Barbara’s death, Mickey was deeply affected.
“Nobody could have been a better friend at a time like that,” Doff recalled. “He stayed by our sides night and day, helping with the funeral arrangements and even paying for the catering after the funeral.”1
“Mickey and my father had a bond,” Melody Doff said in our interview. “I can remember my father giving him advice and really taking great concern of his well being.”
Mickey suffered another startling and painful loss when his “sister,” as he referred to his childhood friend and costar Judy Garland, died at age forty-seven. Garland had faced a roller-coaster ride when she departed MGM. After her divorce from director Vincente Minnelli, she had married the rough-and-tumble Jewish promoter Sid Luft. They had a rocky marriage, and Luft disliked Mickey.
“For many years, when she was married to Luft, we were not in contact much,” Mickey told us in 2008. “He didn’t like me, and it was vice versa. When she separated from him in the early sixties, Judy and I would get together. I saw her at the Palace perform, did her TV show, and we talked.”
Kelly Rooney reminisced to us: “I remember all the kids going with Dad to Judy’s beach house. We saw [her kids] Lorna, Liza, and Joey there, and we all hung out. I can remember Judy cleaning, wearing her ‘cleaning clothes’ and humming ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’ While the kids got together, my dad and Judy would talk and reminisce and kick back a few. Judy was a hoot and so much fun. My dad and her would just have a blast together. It was wonderful to watch.”
Mickey told radio and television host Larry King that he talked to Judy during her serious hospitalization in New York City during the mid-1960s, when she had overdosed and suffered another nervous breakdown. She had been in and out of hospitals over the years, fighting battles with drugs and alcohol. (It was actually in 1959 when Judy was in the hospital for weeks, due to hepatitis C and cirrhosis of the liver.)
King asked, “Did you talk to her, Mickey, during those days?”
Rooney said, “Yes, and I tried—I sent a football player to New York. She was in the hospital, and I wanted to get her out of there and take care of her . . . Ray Pearson, played for UCLA. He’s a friend of mine.
King asked, “What, to pep her up, or to get her out?”
Mickey replied, “No, to help get her out. And so I called her on the phone and I said—I said, ‘Judy,’ I said, ‘I’ve sent Ray Pearson to talk to you, see if you want to come home.’ Anyway, she—she said, ‘Do you think I can make it?’ He said she answered him in that “little voice.”2
A completely different version of Mickey’s conversation with Judy than that recounted on the air with Larry King appears in his autobiography, in which he claims that he continued to try to help Judy throughout her tragic last years. In the autobiography, his version is that Judy was in Boston, not in a hospital, while he was preparing to appear in George M!, and that just before her death, she called him at three in the morning sounding desperate. Rooney writes, “She said, ‘I can’t get arrested.’ I made a snap judgement. If she was calling me at 3 am, she was in real trouble. ‘Judy,’ I said, ‘I want you to stop singing for a couple of years. You need money? I’ll get you money . . . we’ll make it together. I just want you to get off whatever you’re on, Judy. I just want you to be well, my angel. I k
now you can make it.’ She said, ‘Mick, do you-really-think-I can-make it?’ ”3 Like many of the stories Mickey wrote about in both his autobiographies or that he told in countless interviews, the facts and events change or were ad-libbed. Mickey reinvented history for every conversation, every interview, contradicting himself even on basic facts that his readers and listeners already knew. He did this because, for him, truth was only what he needed at the moment. It was the essence of what made him a great performer: there was no reality underlying how he projected himself.
The facts regarding Judy’s downward spiral and death are these: By the mid-1960s, Judy had moved to New York City. She had divorced Luft and married a bisexual con artist named Mark Herron, who physically abused her. She also had a relationship with a songwriter named Johnny Meyer, before her last marriage, to musician/mobster/drug dealer/con artist Mickey Deans, since deceased.
Author Rick Lertzman got to know Deans during the 1990s, and he gave his own version of Garland’s last days: “Judy was on any drug she could get her hands on. She always wanted me to get her ’ludes [Quaaludes]. I remember Rooney was trying to get involved in some fucking acting school, the Mickey and Judy School or some fucking idiotic idea. He was just all lip service. He never helped Judy out. I don’t think he had a pot to piss in. He was doing his own drugs.”
After Garland’s death, Deans cowrote the 1972 biography Weep No More, My Lady: The Story of Judy Garland.4 He was also later suspected in the murder of his boss, Roy Radin, the producer of Francis Ford Coppola’s Cotton Club. Deans passed away in 2003, ending his life as a promoter/mob character in Cleveland, Ohio.
When Mickey was told Judy had died, he claimed he was heartbroken. He wrote that when he heard of her death he was on a golf course, and he “felt a sudden deep chill in my bones. Then I walked over to the green, dropped to my knees and pounded the ground with my fist. ‘Why, Judy? Why?’ I hit the ground as hard as I could, maybe thirty or forty times. My heart was broken.”5
The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney Page 40