The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  With Barbara’s death, Mickey now had the responsibility of being a father to their four children all under nine years old, even though they had been put in the custody of Barbara’s parents. (Mickey Jr. and Timmy were living with Betty Jane, and Teddy with Martha Vickers.) His housekeeper, Mrs. Hogan, he discovered, had a drinking problem, so he relied on the aid of Barbara’s close friend and his soon-to-be next wife, Margaret “Marge” Lane. Marge, who worked as a Realtor, helped keep the Rooney house running smoothly. Marge was not the type of woman Rooney often chased: She was older (forty-five, born in 1921), educated in accounting (rather than an aspiring entertainer), a member of the Church of Religious Science (and very religious), and more matronly and mature than Rooney’s usual female companions. Other than having been Barbara’s best friend, she had no connection to show business.

  In 1966, Nell died of a heart attack, but Mickey was so overcome with the murder of Barbara Ann that he was numb to the death of his mother. He was a mess, taking countless drugs, prescription and otherwise, and drinking heavily. His in-laws were suing him for permanent custody of the kids. Also, Nell’s passing did not come as a huge shock because she had long suffered from cardiac ailments. She had continued to drink heavily with her husband. Kelly Rooney remembered “Nanny Nell’s” drinking, as did Sidney Miller, who said she was an alcoholic like her husbands, Joe Sr. and Fred Pankey. Miller said she was a heavy smoker as well.

  Marge Lane told Arthur Marx, “About a month after Barbara’s death, I started going over to Mickey’s house to see if I could help with the children, particularly the babies. It was a lot for the housekeeper to take care of, and Mickey was most receptive. I’d sometimes do the grocery shopping, I’d take the children to church or pick them up at their grandparent’s house in Inglewood and take them back to Mickey’s when it was his turn to have them, and take them back again.”6

  When Mickey left for a three-month shooting of The Devil in Love on location in Malta, his assistant, Bill Gardner, was unable to take care of the kids, and the drunk housekeeper asked Barbara’s parents to take them. When Mickey returned from Malta and saw how well his in-laws had taken care of the kids, he reluctantly made an arrangement of co-guardianship with them. He paid them one thousand dollars a month for their support and retained visitation rights. He arranged for the kids to sleep over on weekends, when it was convenient. He also moved to a smaller home in Benedict Canyon.

  While Mickey could hardly afford another marriage, he liked the stability that Marge Lane brought to his life. She was almost like Andy Hardy’s movie mother, Emily. Mickey was an utter disaster both emotionally and physically, and he began to count on her, and she made herself available to him. When he got down on one knee and proposed marriage, she readily accepted.

  On September 10, 1966—only seven months after Barbara’s murder—as was his pattern, he chartered a plane to Las Vegas and they were married with sons Mickey Jr. and Timmy as witnesses. Marge Lane became Mickey’s sixth wife. He was now tied with Henry VIII—and paying for it.

  “It was a strange marriage. Mickey was in such a state he would have married an orangutang,” said Bob Finkel, who had hired Mickey for several variety shows he’d produced. “With the tall Marge and the diminutive Mickey it was an odd sight. The homunculus and the gazelle.”7

  Immediately after the wedding, Mickey embarked on a lucrative performance tour of Australia with Marge and his stage partner Bobby Van. Red Doff felt that Marge was disappointed that touring wasn’t more glamorous. Mickey avoided autograph hunters, rarely ventured outside his hotel room after each show, and knocked himself out with sleeping pills. When they returned to the United States, a curious press took notice of the “new” Mickey and how he had seemingly settled down with a churchgoing woman only one year younger than he, who was known to his kids as Aunt Margie.

  Marge told Arthur Marx, “Our whole marriage was planned by Mickey and his managers in order to change his public image. He needed work and had to show the world he was dependable and respectable again, not running after young girls, and not on pills. I didn’t know anything about the pills, at the time. I was pretty innocent and just played right in their hands. I thought the world of Mickey, I really did, up until I discovered what was going on.”8

  “Aunt Margie” discovered a very different Mickey from the man she believed she knew. She recalled, “He had pills hidden in different places in the house, like Ray Milland and his liquor bottles in ‘The Lost Weekend.’ If he took them, he couldn’t go to work in the morning. So I had to stay awake all night to try to keep him off them. I finally wound up with nervous exhaustion from keeping an eye on him . . .” And he was cheating on her. “Even on my birthday, one month after we were married, he was up in Tahoe with someone else,” Marge said. He was also suggesting they engage in sexual activity that the religious Marge could not tolerate. She revealed, “Barbara told me of some of the sexual things she had to put up with. When he suggested, well you know, the imaginative things he wanted to do . . . well, I believe he has an aversion to women, quite a complex about proving his manliness. I think he got this from his early years backstage at the burlesque house. Anyway, I finally told him, ‘Look Mickey, I’d have to lose my soul to do what you want to do. You can have another girlfriend if you want, but I can’t do these things.’ ”9

  In early December 1966, Marge caught the flu and went to her girlfriend’s home to recover, to avoid infecting Mickey or the kids. During her recovery, Red Doff called her girlfriend and told her to tell Marge not to return to their house and that Mickey was filing for divorce. They had been married for only about one hundred days. Marge was hurt but relieved. On December 23, 1966, Marge, herself, filed for divorce. Thus, in less than a year, Mickey lost a wife to murder and another through divorce. Marge left the house and never spoke to Mickey again. It took about a year for their attorneys to negotiate a settlement. On December 14, 1967, the divorce was granted. Compared to the other divorces, this one came cheap. The alimony was $350 per month for one year and payment of community debts of $5,348, and Marge was allowed to keep her car. Despite the minimal alimony, Mickey lacked the funds to pay even that, and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest in September 1968 for nonpayment. He eventually paid up. In our interview with Rooney, when mentioning his marriage to Lane, he said—jokingly, because at that point his eight marriages had become the stuff of satire—“I think that was her name, anyway.”

  The 1970s started out extremely slowly for Mickey but picked up by mid-decade, and he wound up making a steady stream of movies. After a prolific mid-1960s on television, he was completely absent from the set from mid-1967 to October 1970. However, he did four films in three years: The Extraordinary Seaman, Skidoo, The Comic, and 80 Steps to Jonah. His only theater appearance was a summer tour of George M! in 1969 and a few stints at the Flamingo in Vegas and the Cal-Neva Lodge in Tahoe, in 1968 and 1969 with Bobby Van, which paid some of the bills. To an objective observer, it did seem that Mickey was being forgotten.

  In the aftermath of his failed series, he was a complete pariah on television, an untouchable to sponsors. No matter how hard Doff worked to get Mickey a part, he was always vetoed by the network. The actor was effectively blacklisted, not for his political affiliations (like writer Dalton Trumbo and others called before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the late 1940s and early 1950s), but, like movie and television star Bob Cummings, who a decade earlier became addicted to Dr. Feelgood’s methamphetamine shots,10 for his prescription drug problem. His drug use had become widely known, which frightened the film producers, who in addition to having to put up with Mickey on set fighting with directors, refusing to read the lines he was given, or insulting his sponsors and their ad agencies, had to prove to insurance companies that the actor was still insurable despite his drug problem. So, to pay the bills, Mickey set out on the dinner theater circuit, appearing in Luv, See How They Run, Show Boat, and Good Night Ladies. He returned to a similar circuit of his y
outh, performing at the Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City, Busch Palace in St. Louis, and the Packard Music Hall in Warren, Ohio. He was back onstage in the venue where he was raised and where he’d been understood. He had the moves, the rhythm, and the patter all down, which allowed him great freedom to expand and even ad-lib the parts he played.

  In another strange business venture, Rooney also lent his name, and an investment, to a moderately priced resort in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, called Mickey Rooney’s Tabas Hotel. Mickey was given a part interest, along with Red Doff, and starred in their advertising campaign and as nightclub host. He continued to appear in the hotel’s “Mickey Rooney Room” for nearly the next thirty years, along with performers such as Frankie Valli, Frank Sinatra Jr., and Bobby Rydell. The hotel closed in 1998, but many readers of New York and Philadelphia newspapers might remember the Sunday edition ads featuring Mickey’s invitation to join him in Downingtown.

  Doff had started a company to create investments for Mickey called Productions Eleven, Inc., but after a dispute with Rooney, he took leave of Mickey again. Their co-investor, Florida promoter Alexander O. Curtis, took over as Mickey’s manager in 1969. Doff sued Mickey for back fees of $8,800 for bookings into the Fremont Hotel in Las Vegas and some television appearances, a suit they later settled amicably.

  Curtis, who produced shows on the dinner theater circuit, stayed by Mickey’s side for the next three years as the actor became known as the King of the Dinner Theater. Earning between $2,500 and $5,000 per week, Rooney and Curtis traveled through Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina, Louisiana, Florida, appearing at countless venues. He was a regular at Howard Douglass Wolfe’s Barn Dinner Theatre, who, along with his business partner Conley Jones, had a chain of twenty-seven such theaters in New York, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, and Georgia that kept actors such as Rooney, Bob Cummings, Donald O’Connor, Jane Russell, Van Johnson, Lana Turner, and Joey Bishop busy for many years. (In the summer of 1966, Robert De Niro reportedly was canned mid-show during a production at the Barn in Greensboro, North Carolina.) By 1975 there were 147 dinner theaters throughout the United States. The circuit became the source of income for Mickey for the next ten years along with his appearances at Downingtown.

  Surprisingly, Mickey’s output of films remained constant during the 1970s, picking up after a slow start, with twenty films spread across the decade. While most of the films were low-budget releases until later in the decade, he remained before the camera nonetheless.

  The decade began with a fun piece of fluff called Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County, in 1970, from Universal, starring Bonanaza’s Dan Blocker (Hoss Cartwright), with Mickey in a small role as Indian Tom, another politically questionable character. The next film has to be the low point in Mickey’s nearly ninety-year film career: Hollywood Blue (1970), an embarrassing pornographic film, intersperses hard-core porn shots with a clothed Mickey and June Wilkinson, Mickey’s and Maurice Duke’s on-again, off-again shared romantic interest, talking about the Hollywood sex life. Mickey, who prided himself on doing family films, rarely mentioned this movie, which he had agreed to do because he was desperate for money.

  The next year, he made only one, a picture called The Manipulator, or B.J. Lang Presents, which stars Mickey as a film-industry makeup man who goes crazy by kidnapping an actress and holding her hostage on a back lot. The film was R-rated for violence and nudity.

  The next year, 1972, Mickey appeared in what has become a cult comedy classic, Evil Roy Slade. A precursor to Blazing Saddles, it was a made-for-television movie that spoofed Westerns and starred John Astin (The Addams Family). Mickey received top billing as a railroad tycoon.

  He followed this with another offbeat film, one that lampooned President Richard Nixon, called Richard (1972), in which he plays Nixon’s guardian angel. His third film, Pulp (1972), starred Michael Caine. In it, Mickey plays Preston Gilbert, a washed-up 1930s movie star, a role close to home. He earned several great notices for it, including one in Time magazine, on May 22, 1972, that said, “The performance, like the movie itself, deserves to become some crazy kind of minor classic.”

  In 1973, Mickey did one only one picture, a slapstick spoof called The Godmothers, in which he is credited for the screenplay and the music. Mickey plays part of the film in drag, with comic Jerry Lester, à la Some Like It Hot. The story of the “witless wonders of the underworld,” the film was shot in Mickey’s new hometown of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

  He filled in the gaps with some television appearances, including The Name of the Game, with Gene Barry, Robert Culp, Tom Skeritt, and Susan Saint James in 1970. He then did the voice of Santa Claus in what has become a yearly holiday classic, Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, an animated special by Rankin/Bass that featured Fred Astaire as the narrator. (Interestingly, he did the porn film Hollywood Blue the same year.) He appeared in Dan August, with Burt Reynolds, the next year. In 1972, Mickey appeared in Fol-de-Rol, the Sid and Marty Krofft musical special that costarred Rick Nelson, Howard Cosell, Totie Fields, Ann Sothern, and Cyd Charisse. His final project in 1972 was an episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, with Mickey as a vicious crime boss. After his move to Florida, though, there was a two-year lull until his next television appearance, in 1974.

  His dinner theater work continued in 1970 with George M! and Hide and Seek, and in 1971, Three Goats and a Blanket, with Mickey playing a part that hit close to home: a man with alimony troubles. He portrayed the great film comedian W. C. Fields in a musical called W.C., that costarred the talented Bernadette Peters. Although the play was well received in the pre-Broadway tour in Baltimore, Detroit, and at the Westbury Music Fair in New York, it folded before hitting Broadway. The reviews were positive, however, with Newsday writing on July 10, 1974, “With Mickey Rooney playing W. C. Fields, the musical has a measure of charm, some bright tunes and solid lyrics by Al Carmines, a fairly interesting book by Milton Sperling and Sam Locke, and an engaging Fields impersonation by Rooney.” Mickey had his heart set on a Broadway debut and continued to work toward it—a goal he would finally achieve with Sugar Babies later that decade.

  After divorce number six from Marge, Mickey took his longest romantic hiatus since he married Ava at twenty-one. He was nearing fifty and after six marriages and seven children; the death of his mother, whom he once called a sponge and whose funeral he declined to attend; the murder of his wife; bankruptcy; his career skidding; and his public humiliation on national television; he had not had time to step back and evaluate his life. Was Mickey truly reflective about the direction his career had taken? Did he contemplate why he had failed in personal relationships with both men and women? He did not maintain any friendships with his ex-wives after their divorces. He never was a particularly hands-on father. He would see his kids as needed, when it suited him. He left the responsibility of child rearing to Betty Jane, Martha, and the Thomasons. His friendships were rooted more in who could assist him in promoting his career and earning him money. He was also always on the lookout for his new flavor of the moment. He changed management at a whim or when managers who tried to work for him found him unmanageable. Now, by the early 1970s, it was Alexander O. Curtis, whose work for Mickey focused on dinner theater productions. Amid the glare of lights from one venue to the next, even as audiences flocked to see him onstage recreating hits from favorite Broadway shows, even moving from one casual flirtation to another, wherever he went, Mickey Rooney was alone.

  Even friends since childhood, such as Sidney Miller, Sig Frohlich, Dick Paxton, Dick Quine, and Jackie Cooper never really got close to Rooney, except when drinking and carousing. He had no extended family beyond his late mother and father. If Buddha is right that there is an island in each of us, and when we go home to ourselves we are on that safe island, then Mickey lived solely on that island. The one constant through the countless interviews we conducted for this book was that although many of the subjects claimed to have known Rooney, none e
ver truly knew him. They knew the persona Mickey had portrayed since he was a child—but that was really all there was to know. When we delved into what made Mickey run, no one could quite answer the question. Whether it was stepson Christopher Aber, who was with him almost daily for more than thirty years; his children Teddy, Kelly, or Kerry; his friends of more than seventy years such as Sidney Miller; or his wife of more than thirty-five years, Jan Chamberlin—no one truly knew what drove Mickey and who the real Mickey Rooney was. Was it possible no real Joseph Yule Jr. ever existed? That the person named Mickey Rooney was only a situational construct? Was the only real Mickey Rooney the guy who was on for the audience, on for the camera, or on for each of his wives and friends—until he was off? Was their no real person inside the created character that was Mickey Rooney? Simply put, was the secret of Mickey Rooney that there was no Mickey Rooney?

  All of Mickey’s remaining resilience would be tested as he approached two mileposts on his last attempt to resurrect his career. And they were coming up fast.

  22

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  Escape from Los Angeles

  Mickey directs actress Helen Walker in My True Story in 1951, his directorial debut.

  PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBERT EASTON.

  As Mickey’s divorce from Marge Lane moved from an interlocutory judgment to a final decree, Mickey was back on the chase, at least while he was legally barred from getting married again. In the late 1960s he entered a skein of relationships. One was with the ex-wife of comedian Shecky Greene, who told us that Mickey and Jeri, a former cocktail waitress, lived together for a while. Greene told us, “Mickey Rooney’s another Elizabeth Taylor, only without the tits.” (Clearly Shecky did not know what had happened between Mickey and Liz.) Harrison Carroll wrote in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner on April 17, 1968, “Mickey was getting serious” with Jeri Greene. When he asked Mickey if he was making another trip to the altar, Mickey replied with his usual self-deprecating humor: “No, we’re still very much in love . . . Marge Lane hasn’t picked up her divorce decree yet. So I haven’t married today. But give me time. It’s only eleven o’clock in the morning.”