Yet Mickey’s holiday from marriage did not last long, and his first step in that direction began with a move to Florida. After the job in the quasi-porn flick Hollywood Blue, he claimed he felt humiliated and embarrassed. “I was so ashamed of my little part that I got the hell out of town, for good. I moved to Florida, determined that I would have nothing more to do with Hollywood.”1
Packing up and leaving LA was not without its problems, though, particularly for his seven children, four of whom were under twelve. He also had obligations to two ex-wives and owed considerable money to attorneys, advisers, former managers, and others. His earning power was at its lowest in decades. For many years, even in what he had considered times of drought, he was earning between $200,000 and $300,000 per year. By 1970, however, many of the lucrative Las Vegas gigs (for which he was making around $20,000 per week) had dried up. He was relying on dinner theater, for which he got between $2,500 and $5,000 per week, which would have kept him barely abovewater, but there was a lot of downtime when the money pipe ran dry.
While he was in Miami in 1969 and playing a couple of nightclub dates, he was invited to a celebrity golf tournament at the famous Doral Country Club, where his friend Jackie Gleason often held court. (Gleason had relocated to Miami and was producing his weekly television variety show from Miami Beach.) While Mickey was there, a Miami Herald sportswriter introduced him to a pretty, young customer relations representative from the Herald named Carolyn Hockett. Twenty-five, divorced, with a three-year-old son named Jimmy, she bore an eerie resemblance to Barbara Ann. Born Carolyn Zack on August 19, 1943, in Columbus, Ohio, she was the eldest of six children. After an unsuccessful marriage to Jerry Hockett that produced a son in 1966, Carolyn moved to Miami. She was a strict Catholic and very outgoing. Mickey, twenty-three years her senior, was smitten and flew her and Jimmy to Los Angeles to meet his kids.
On May 27, 1969, after another short courtship, Mickey, following his by-now-established custom, chartered a plane to Las Vegas and got married. Red Doff had booked him into the Fremont Hotel to do a week of shows with Bobby Van. Mickey and Carolyn’s daughter, Jonelle, was born seven months later, on January 11, 1970.
The press jumped on the news of Mickey’s seventh marriage, and he was ready with the witticisms. He’d tell them: “I’m going to march in the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena some New Year’s with Mickey Rooney and His All-Wife Marching Band”; or “When I said to the minister at the wedding chapel, ‘I do, I do,’ he said, ‘I know, I know’ ”; or “I keep a wedding license with me at all times. It’s made out to ‘To Whom it May Concern.’ ”
THE HARSH REALITY WAS that his pockets were empty. He was flat broke. The dinner theater income paid the child support and alimony, keeping him out of jail, but he was drowning in debt. Carolyn talked him into moving to her adopted hometown in south Florida, where, through a friend, they found a small house on Forty-Fifth Street in Fort Lauderdale, near the Coral Ridge Country Club. The move worked out well when Mickey’s old friend actor Eddie Bracken, with whom he had appeared in the 1953 film A Slight Case of Larceny, became part owner of Miami’s Coconut Grove Playhouse about an hour’s drive away. Thus, Mickey could live in Fort Lauderdale and find work at a local theater.
Bracken hired Mickey to appear in a new play called Three Goats and a Blanket, about a television producer with alimony troubles, a part to which Mickey could easily relate, especially as he played off Bracken, who costarred. Audiences loved the play, and they toured in this vehicle for nearly ten years. Variety wrote, “Putting Mickey Rooney into a farce about a man with alimony troubles must have seemed a likely gimmick. The acting is worthy of the vehicle. Rooney enters all over the place.” Three Goats and a Blanket (Stop Thief Stop or Alimony), written by Woody Kling, would become a staple of dinner theater, a phenomenon over the next decade, and a high-grossing play.
While Mickey was back onstage, feeling alive again, his four children with Barbara were now living comfortably with their grandparents, the Thomasons, in a beautiful gated community in Rolling Hills, near Palos Verdes, California. The grandparents provided a stable life for Kelly, Kimmy, Kerry, and Michael Kyle, supported financially by Mickey, who paid a thousand dollars a month, whenever he could, in child support. On vacations and some holidays, he flew them in for a visit to Fort Lauderdale. In 1972, Mickey decided that having full custody of the kids would be cheaper than the thousand per month in child support and air fare, and he hired Beverly Hills attorney Robert Neeb to file a motion in Los Angeles County for sole custody.
Child custody cases are bitter and ugly, as anyone who has litigated one will sadly attest. So it was with Rooney v. Thomason, a particularly messy court case that came to trial on August 24, 1972, in Los Angeles Superior Court. The Thomasons displayed their serious intention to retain custody by appearing with their high-priced attorney, the celebrated Marvin Mitchelson (later known for winning the landmark Lee Marvin v. Michelle Triola case, in which Mitchelson argued the legal precedent for “palimony,” still applicable law today in California). Mickey’s former mother-in-law, Helen Thomason, testified that she did not dislike Mickey, only his actions. She testified that he traveled often and would leave without even acknowledging the children. She also said he had missed countless meetings, appointments, and arrangements with the kids. His former secretary, Bill Gardner, testified that the children were better off with their grandparents. In summary, the defendants argued, Mickey was an irresponsible, self-absorbed, unfit parent.
Arguing on behalf of Mickey, his pastor testified that Mickey had found God and had married a good Christian woman, who would help with the children. Then of course, on the stand, playing for the moment, Rooney gave a brilliant performance, stating how he had found God and needed his children to live with him to make his life complete. The court disagreed. Despite the Rooney performance, the pastor’s testimony, and compelling testimony from Carolyn on her maternal skills, the judge held for the Thomasons, though it was unusual in California for a biological father, who had a wife to assist with child rearing, to lose custodial rights. However, the judge cited the stability the children had had with the Thomasons since 1966, and the lower court’s initial action of placing the children with their grandparents after their daughter died and while their son-in-law was committed to work on movie locations out of the state. In a fifteen-page decision, Judge Mario Clinco stated that the children’s life with the Thomasons had been one of “regularity, stability, love, strong emotional ties and dependence and companionship. To award Mr. Rooney sole custody would be detrimental to the children.” He also said that in a meeting with them in his chambers, the children had expressed a preference for remaining with their grandparents.2 Under the court’s custody ruling, Mickey remained a co-guardian, with full visitation rights, and of course was ordered to make continued child support payments.
ENTER RUTH WEBB. WEBB is now known for her representation of supermarket checkout line tabloid headline makers such as the penile-challenged John Wayne Bobbitt; America’s most famous guesthouse resident nonwitness Kato Kalin; and a celebrated auto mechanic whose tryst with the teenage “Long Island Lolita” propelled him into the national consciousness, and into jail, and thence into reality television. But for Mickey Rooney, who’d outlived many of his managers and agents and was desperate to find someone who would plug away to get him parts wherever they appeared, she was one of the few old-time talent agents still standing.
While kicking around the dinner theater circuit, Mickey was being represented by Milton Deutsch. When Deutsch suddenly passed away in 1970, the actor was left with no agent for the first time since Harry Weber took him on in 1926. Good fortune rained on Mickey, though, when pal Eddie Bracken recommended him to small-time Hollywood agent Ruth Webb. Mickey, who was accustomed to strong-minded male managers and agents such as Sam Stiefel, Johnny Hyde, Bullets Durgom, and Maurice Duke, liked the spunk of this former actress whose most notable client at the time was television actor Gene Barry (War of the W
orlds, Bat Masterson, Burke’s Law). She had previously represented major stars from the 1940s studio glory days.
Ruth didn’t have an office. Instead, she operated out of her home, actually, as the New York Times described it in her obituary (December 17, 2006), her “unusually appointed bedroom.” A postmodern interpretation of The Addams Family meets Castle Dracula, the room featured a clutch of stuffed and live raccoons, whom she lovingly fed by hand, and lace cobwebs that hung so deep from the stachybotrys-covered beams that they looked like curtains; you had to part them just to walk through. Her office-bedroom was hidden in the back of a house nestled hard against the collapsing walls of Nichols Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, where it was darker than the land of Mordor. Visiting clients would be forced to move the raccoon installations in order to sit near her bed, which, by the way, looked like it was covered in a thin layer of soil from the country of her birth. But it was the raccoons, the raccoons! Those eyes, red in the soft light, were unwavering; they would stare at you as she fed them. You would never forget them.
Webb, to her credit, was the major influence in the resurrection of Mickey’s career in the 1970s. It was her strong belief in Mickey’s talent that brought him back from obscurity to his great triumph on Broadway in Sugar Babies. A desperate Mickey more than appreciated her perseverance on his behalf, writing, “Agents should all take a lesson from Ruth Webb. She always gave more than I ever expected. Ruth Webb was a real striver. She was something of a dynamo, an energy source that pumped away day and night on my behalf . . . She made it impossible for people to forget me.”3 Comedienne Phyllis Diller, one of Webb’s clients, told us, “Ruth was eccentric and quirky, but she was very loyal. She really was the ‘unsinkable’ Ruth Webb,” Diller said, referring to the New York Times obituary for Webb. “She was a mix of Zsa Zsa Gabor and Auntie Mame.” The Times also mentioned that Webb also represented screen stars such as Kathryn Grayson, Rhonda Fleming, Dorothy Lamour, Donald O’Connor, Gloria Swanson, Gig Young, Ann Sothern, Chuck Connors, Tiny Tim, Bert Parks, and Rose Marie. The Times also said that Webb was “a successful Hollywood agent who was a master of the art of professional rehabilitation, reviving dormant careers and representing clients few other agencies would touch.” Indeed.
And Mickey stiffed her out of her final commission.
As Webb took over Mickey’s career, she started finding him work in dinner theaters, small film roles, and some television. She worked hard, cared deeply for her client, helped him through his personal difficulties, and found him bookings anywhere someone would pay him.
As Mickey slogged through city after city in the tour of Three Goats and a Blanket, new wife Carolyn was spending his earnings freely. Timmy Rooney told Pam McClenathan, who later repeated it to us, that Carolyn’s spending was the source of many arguments between the Rooneys. Their constant fighting over who could spend the money Mickey was bringing in created a rift between them, and the marriage started cracking within the first couple of years. “The constant touring, being away from home, the money troubles, and Mickey’s wandering eye never helped,” Sidney Miller told us.
Ever the optimist, and despite his complete lack of financial acumen, Mickey also tried his hand at business—and fell for countless schemes, lured by people he would meet on the road or at the racetrack, in which he would invest with blind confidence that he would strike it rich. There were innumerable (potential and realized) businesses and products, including:
• Mickey Rooney’s Two-Ball Golf-a-Chair, for indoor golf facilities.
• Lovely Lady Cosmetics, with a woman’s cologne called Me, and others called Trapeze, Taming the Shrew, and Twelfth Night. (It was even more surprising that he didn’t develop a men’s cologne called Kiss Me Kate.)
• Complete, an aerosol spray that painted on hair for men (a product that, surprisingly, actually exists, although it is not the one Mickey sought to develop).
• A pharmaceutical company called Elim, with products such as an analgesic, Elim-Ache; a laxative, Elim-n-Ate; a diet aid, Elim-a-Weight; and a foot powder, Elim-a-Itch. “Elim,” get it? Nobody else did.
• Rip-Offs, disposable shorts for men and women in a hurry, either in the bathroom or in the bedroom. No need to fuss with those pesky buttons or zippers. Just put your hands together and pull.
• Tip Offs. Yes, it was a disposable bra. Why? Nobody knows, but Fruit of the Loom rejected the idea faster than you could dispose of the bra.
• Puppy Pop, to give your dog a bubbly personality. This idea for a dog drink Ralston Purina turned down flat—flatter than yesterday’s half-empty glass of Pepsi.
• Coins with movie star images, which the Franklin Mint turned down. Too bad Mickey didn’t approach the U.S. Post Office, which, years later, issued stamps featuring movie star images.
• Mickey Rooney’s Weenie World, a fast-food chain with a round hot dog on a hamburger bun, to be called the Weenie Whirl. Also to be included were the Mickey Yankee Doodle (mac-n-cheese), a relish called Micklish, Eric Von Weenie sauerkraut, and Mickey’s Pancho Weenie.
• Mickey Melon, a melon-flavored soft drink marketed by Canfield Beverage, but not the one Mickey proposed.
• Thirs-T, a carbonated iced tea, a product which is available today not from Mickey, but from whole earth soft drink companies. Clearly, Mickey’s idea was ahead of its time.
Every one of Mickey’s get-rich-quick schemes met with failure, and ended up costing him money. His friend actor/director/producer Jackie Cooper explained to us that “Mickey had zero business sense. Even if they succeeded he had no organizational skills, never understood money management and surrounded himself with the cast of Guys and Dolls as advisers. He was in a no-win situation. It was a lose-lose proposition.”
Donald Trump agreed: “He once asked me about an investment in a hotel near Philadelphia. I advised him against it, but he didn’t listen and went ahead with the investment, which failed.”4
One of Mickey’s ideas, however, was reasonable. In 1972 he called Liza Minnelli’s then-husband, Jack Haley Jr., whose father had been a star at MGM with Mickey (not to mention the Tin Man opposite Liza’s mother, Judy, in The Wizard of Oz). Haley Jr. was then the head of MGM and in a position to discuss Mickey’s idea, this time for a business Rooney understood: motion pictures. Mickey asked Haley for footage from his films to use in a documentary Mickey wanted to produce about his career. He told Haley he intended to intersperse clips with “wrap-around” on-screen introductions from Rooney. Haley said no, but the idea had traction. Four months later, he called Mickey back with a similar idea, a project called That’s Entertainment, a retrospective of MGM musicals, which would include Mickey, Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Peter Lawford, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Bing Crosby, James Stewart, Elizabeth Taylor, and Liza Minnelli (representing her mother, Judy Garland) doing the wrap-arounds. Haley promised that if Mickey participated, “we’ll pay you well. And I’ll give you some of your films, too. You can do whatever you want with the films.” Mickey was paid scale ($385) in toto and was never allowed to use any clips. The film grossed nearly $40 million for MGM. The studio had essentially managed to trick Mickey one last time.
The traveling, the womanizing, the crazy investments, and the financial insecurity eventually got to Carolyn. As Ruth Webb recalled, “We started with the dinner theaters, and we were doing very well with them, until one day, Mickey went home to Florida. There wasn’t any home, there weren’t any children, there wasn’t any marriage, there wasn’t anything.”5 This was totally out of the blue. When he returned to Florida, Mickey discovered that Carolyn had filed under Florida’s “no-fault” divorce law. She had to state only that the marriage was “irretrievably broken.”
To say that Mickey was in shock would be an understatement. He was now essentially homeless, a wandering minstrel going from dinner theater to dinner theater. He was lost, dejected, and addicted to an array of tranquilizers, staggering through life, when the emotional damage caught up with him onst
age in Houston in October 1974. Appearing for the umpteenth time in Three Goats and a Blanket, at the Windmill Dinner Theater in Houston, he collapsed onstage during the performance.
“Mickey was pretty much down to his last dollar,” said Webb. “. . . I was told he collapsed on stage. I stayed with [him] for ten days. I took care of him. I read the Bible to him. Then I had to go back to my office on the coast. So I said, ‘Mickey, anytime you can come to California, my home is yours.’ ”6
In Life Is Too Short, Mickey explained, “Rather than run toward life, I ran away. I tried to escape, again, into drugs. This time it was Quaaludes, fashionable new little pills that could put you on a mountain peak then drop you as quickly to the desert floor.”7
Mickey Jr. and Timmy flew to Houston during Mickey’s hospitalization and drug rehabilitation and lent him support. Ruth stayed in a bed next to his while he suffered from the DTs and struggled to get clean.
When Mickey was released, two weeks later, he was essentially homeless. With nowhere else to turn, he took Webb up on her offer and showed up on her doorstep, telling her, “I’m here, I’m cured.”
Ruth’s house was already crowded, and not just with the raccoons. There was Jamie, her live-in lover; her son, Mike; her ninety-six-year-old mother, who painted; an actor named Dean Dittman; and the raccoons, a cat, a dog, and a macaw named Sidney, who answered the phone.
The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney Page 42