The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  Mickey was on the road to recovery, and Webb let it be known throughout the community. He went back on the dinner theater circuit and started receiving excellent notices. Late in October 1974, the Los Angeles Times reviewed Three Goats and a Blanket, which was playing at Sebastian’s West Dinner Playhouse in San Clemente, writing, “[T]he hair around Rooney’s bald pate is white and he’s developed a pretty good-sized pot. Otherwise, age is an entirely negligible condition. The wind-up doll moves are as abrupt as ever and the delivery is still crackling. He effectively uses every trick in the book to get laughs. He’s the old-time boffo comic, faintly salacious (he claps his hands over his mistress’s cheeks and declares, ‘The Andy Hardy days are over’), with a positively ruthless desire to please.” Mickey, now purportedly clean and sober, was on his way back.

  Mickey continued to live in Ruth Webb’s house of oddballs, where, from time to time, she’d have parties that threw together an eclectic mix of celebrities, musicians, poets, writers, and other assorted offbeat characters—a real-life Holly Golightly bash right out of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Mickey enjoyed meeting her guests, and Ruth even held a cocktail party to honor him. One of her guests was Mickey’s oldest son, musician Mickey Jr., whom Ruth had gotten to know during his father’s frightening Houston hospitalization. The now-twenty-eight-year-old Mick had befriended a thirty-five-year-old divorcee and country-western singer named Jan Chamberlin, with whom he had put together an act they performed in small clubs.

  ACCORDING TO JAN ROONEY, she met Mickey Jr. on the music club scene in Los Angeles. She claims she didn’t date him, had no romantic interest in him, and was just his stage partner. Jan said:

  Mickey Jr. is a very talented musician. We had known each other and had appeared in clubs, doing a variety of music. Mickey Jr. told me that his dad was back in town and they were throwing a party. I had heard from [him] of his dad’s problems in Houston. Mickey Jr. said I should meet his dad and that I would get a kick out of him. So I went with [him] to . . . Ruth Webb’s home and this party. The house was like nothing I’ve ever seen . . . It was there I met Mickey and we started talking. Mickey was so talented, I remember him playing the piano that night. I sat down next to him as he was playing and I sang “I Can’t Last a Day without You.” I felt like Judy Garland next to him. Mickey was wonderful, very sensitive and very energetic. And with Mickey, you never know who you’re going to get whether it’s Whitey Marsh [the juvenile punk from Boys Town] or Andrew Hardy.8

  For forty years a rumor has persisted that Jan was romantically involved with Mickey Jr., but that his father wooed her away. Jan, we believe, was honest when she said she and Mickey Jr. were only stage partners, not romantic partners, and that she met Mickey Sr. at his son’s suggestion. However, in interviews with close family members we heard over and over, and emphatically, that Jan was engaged to Mickey Jr. and dumped him for his father, that her goal was to attach herself to Mickey Sr. and, in a Machiavellian move, she used Junior to achieve that goal. Even Mickey Sr. addressed the rumor, stating for the record in Life Is Too Short, “Jan had not been dating Mickey Rooney, Jr. (as some believe). My son just liked her singing, and he wanted me to meet her.”9

  Several of Mickey’s children, including Mickey Jr. himself, speaking through family friend Pam McClenathan, tell a different story. McClenathan, relaying a statement from Mickey Jr., told us, “I’m sorry, but the truth was that Mickey Jr. was engaged to Jan and she did leave him for his father.”

  The combined support of Ruth Webb and Jan was the magic elixir needed to get Mickey back on the road to recovery. He and Jan had started dating, and Mickey soon found that Jan was the rock he had been looking for. Jan, for her part, gave up her career as a singer to travel and live with Mickey. Ruth Webb worked the phones, championed Mickey to every producer and casting director, and booked him into endless dinner theater dates. She painted a picture of a healthy Rooney who was packing in audiences in theaters nationwide.

  Slowly, producers began to trust Rooney again. After his short but memorable appearance in That’s Entertainment in 1974, he appeared in a series of low-budget films that offered him some interesting character roles. In the Spanish-Italian production of As de Corazon (Ace of Hearts) he appeared, albeit in a cameo, alongside Chris Robinson, who later became a soap opera actor (Rick Weber on General Hospital) and a close friend of Mickey’s. The next film, directed by Robinson, Convict Women (aka Thunder County), costarred Mickey with Robinson and included Ted Cassidy (later Lurch on The Addams Family). Mickey then lent his voice as the Scarecrow in the animated Journey Back to Oz, which also featured Liza Minnelli as Dorothy (her mother’s role) and Margaret Hamilton, the Witch of the West in the original motion picture, this time as Aunt Em.

  In 1975, Mickey shot two international films: the first was a French James Bond spoof called Bon Baisers de Hong Kong (or “Good Kisses from Hong Kong,” but translated as From Hong Kong with Love); and the second, Rachel’s Man, an Israeli biblical epic.

  Jan traveled with Mickey to different locations and sets, and took on an active, almost managerial interest in helping Mickey get his career back on track. He would go on location and shoot the films and then immediately return to the States, where he kept himself constantly busy with dinner theater dates. He was working furiously and enjoying it.

  The next film he shot was an interesting Canadian comedy called Find the Lady (1976), which teamed John Candy with another Canadian actor, Lawrence Dane, in Abbott-and-Costello-type roles. Mickey played a gun-happy hood named Trigger.

  With the support team of Ruth Webb and Jan, Mickey’s career started to regain traction. He was in the Hollywood trades again as a working actor. “Slowly but surely, we were getting Mickey back on track,” Jan recalled. “Ruth was tireless in her promoting Mickey. She was invaluable in getting him back on the map. It was a slow climb back, but she kept Mickey working steady.”

  Mickey and Jan found an apartment together in Hollywood, then a home in Sherman Oaks. They were constantly on the road—Jan’s sister Ronna took care of her sons, Chris and Mark Aber, while they traveled—on film locations or working the dinner theater circuit, which was now at its peak. This was mainly because of Mickey’s growing the market. He had brought the glory of Hollywood’s golden age to local venues.

  He and Jan eventually found a beautiful home in the planned community of Westlake Village, in a development on an island called Red Sail. “I had lived most of my life in the Valley,” Jan recalled. “I grew up in Van Nuys. I felt most comfortable there, as did Mickey, who had lived there much of his life. We fell in love with Westlake Village.”

  Mickey was much more cautious about his relationship with Jan. Possibly he had finally learned from his past mistakes. Their romance was not highly publicized, remaining mostly under the radar. “Our families knew about our relationship,” said Jan. “I was not eager to just jump into another marriage. We took it very slowly. We did not officially get married until five years after we met.” When informed that this was the longest hiatus between marriages for Mickey, she remarked, “[T]hat may possibly be a reason that we had a long and successful marriage. We were together over forty years. Maybe it is due to the fact that we had time to get to know each other. It was not the same impulsive act he carried out with his previous seven wives.”10

  Although Mickey once joked to a reporter that he had married Jan while on location in Hong Kong, the fact was they took out a marriage license in July 1978 in Thousand Oaks. Mickey’s eighth marriage took place on July 28, 1978, at the Conejo Valley Church of Religious Science. Mickey was fifty-seven, and Jan was thirty-nine. Sig Frohlich was Mickey’s best man, and Chris Aber, Jan’s oldest son, gave the bride away. This broke the pattern of Mickey’s last five marriages, conducted in a Las Vegas wedding chapel. This time was different. This time, Mickey would tell Jan, it would work. “Mickey was determined to make our marriage work—as was I,” Jan said.

  23

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/>   Sugar Babies

  Mickey in Sugar Babies.

  UNPUBLISHED PHOTO.

  The item in the morning paper one day in 1974 caught Norman Abbott’s eye. It was buried deep in the Los Angeles Times, a notice Norm found while thumbing through the pages and drinking his coffee. It was a story that sparked a very old memory. They were tearing down the old Burbank Theatre on Sixth and Main Streets, in downtown LA, one of the city’s oldest burlesque houses. What memories still lingered there! Abbott thought.

  The Burbank Burlesque, as it was known, opened as a legitimate theater in 1893, and for many years it was Morosco’s Burbank Theatre, before becoming a burlesque house—and the base, for many years, for its top banana, Joe Yule Sr., Mickey Rooney’s father. The Burbank Burlesque in its later years had also become the West Coast home for noted strippers such as Gypsy Rose Lee and Tempest Storm, one of gangster Mickey Cohen’s girls (whom Mickey Rooney dated and then ditched after he was slapped around by a couple of Cohen’s musculeros).

  When Norm Abbott read that the theater was to be razed, it touched a deep memory. Burlesque and the sights and sounds of performers on the Burbank stage were embedded in his blood. Norm and his wife, Ann, were aficionados of burlesque and collectors of its memorabilia. When Abbott read that someone was selling off (or giving away) memorabilia from the old house’s glory days before knocking the place down, he knew he had to go. This opportunity was a collector’s dream, especially for someone whose heart and soul was burlesque, whose very ancestry was spawned in the footlights.

  Norm’s family was burlesque. He had grown up around it, the son of burlesque/vaudeville performer Olive Abbott, the sister of Bud Abbot, Lou Costello’s straight man. Abbott and Costello’s act evolved from burlesque, through film, and into television. Bud Abbott, the greatest straight man who ever lived, was a piece of American history, and so was Norm. As a youth, he worked at the renowned Gaiety delicatessen in New York City, which abutted the legendary Minsky’s Burlesque.

  “The Gaiety was the first deli to serve overstuffed sandwiches,” Norm told us. “And you could even order a half sandwich if you were short of cash. If things were really rough, you’d eat salami—‘a nickel a shtikle’—or a hot dog, the real kind, rolled on a grill, but if you were flush, you’d have pastrami or corned beef. The Gaiety backed onto a burlesque theater on Forty-Fourth Street, and you’d always be elbow to elbow with actors. If they were really broke, that one overstuffed sandwich would be their only meal of the day.”1 Abbott recalled meeting the great burlesque legends, such as Gypsy Rose Lee, Rags Ragland, Phil Silvers, Harry Steppe, and Sid Fields. Burlesque flowed through Norman Abbott’s blood like a river, deep and full of life.

  Norman Abbott eventually became a prolific motion picture and television director. He started out working for his uncle Bud on Abbott and Costello films such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Hit the Ice, and Africa Screams. He eventually directed hundreds of episodes of television classics, including Leave It to Beaver; The Munsters; The Jack Benny Program; Welcome Back, Kotter; Sanford and Son; McHale’s Navy; and perhaps one of the best examples of vaudeville fly-gab, fast-talking back-and-forth patter (that is, after Burns and Kaye), Burns and Allen.

  At the Burbank Theatre closing sale, Norm rummaged through suitcases of old promotional material, placards, scripts, posters, postcards, and photos, discovering a treasure trove of star memorabilia from some of the marquee burlesque performers. And then he came to Joe Yule. Looking at the original jokes, gags, and stage business, Norm told us, it was if he were hit by a thunderbolt. He’d discovered the mother lode of burlesque memorabilia, and it gave him an idea. “I suddenly had an inspiration, I told to my wife, Ann. I thought it would be wonderful to do an old-fashioned burlesque show on Broadway. Do all the old routines, music, and create the world of burlesque for both the new and older generations. We kicked around names, and the most obvious choice would be Mickey Rooney.” He said that while the older performers were gone, Mickey was still rather young, and knew every nuance and rhythm of burlesque.2

  Abbott heard that Broadway producer Harry Rigby was in Los Angeles trying to recruit Debbie Reynolds to star in a revival of Hello, Dolly! and happened to be staying at the house of Norm’s friend. Norman called Rigby and told him about what he had found at the Burbank. When he later showed him his collection of memorabilia, Rigby was interested. But Abbott had one caveat: he wanted to direct the show. Rigby said, “You’ve got a deal.” Abbott also told Rigby that it was imperative that they have Mickey Rooney as the top banana. “Mickey knows all the bits, and there is an innocence in his face that will keep the show from getting dirty,” Abbott recalled saying to Rigby.

  This was important to Abbott. Early burlesque was risqué but not outright pornographic. There was a flash of this, a hint of that, lots of brassy music, songs with a ragtime beat, lots of pratfalls, and skits and jokes (many that have stood the test of time)—and it was only Mickey Rooney, the last living and healthy performer from a bygone era of live onstage, raucous slapstick comedy who knew all the routines, patter, and timing to pull this off. Rigby agreed. Only Mickey. But how to sell Rooney on the idea? Norm said he would pitch to Mickey that this was the innocent kind of burlesque, the one that existed in the 1920s, before the strippers came along and changed it from “family” entertainment to salacious porn.

  From that meeting in 1975, Rigby kept kicking around Abbott’s idea. Then, in 1977, he attended the Conference of American Pop Arts at Lincoln Center, where several respected professors of the arts from several universities were giving lectures on different incarnations of popular American entertainment, including burlesque, minstrel shows, and carnivals. Rigby attended a presentation by Professor Ralph Gilmore Allen from the University of Tennessee, whose historical research on burlesque comedy had made him an aficionado of the art form. Rigby went to his seminar and, as he later told Arthur Marx, listened to Allen give a lecture on burlesque that had “the audience rolling in the aisles. I thought if he could get that type of reaction from that audience, then a burlesque show could do well.”3

  When Abbott initially called Mickey to talk about the concept, he said, Rooney “was very rude. I talked to his wife and she was very nice. When Mickey came to the phone and I told Mickey my idea, he said, ‘Fucking Burlesque is dead.’ And then he hung up. I had known Mickey for years. I directed him on several television shows and even directed him in a pilot [Tempo, 1963], so it wasn’t as if I didn’t know him. We later talked again about the idea, and he still wasn’t very interested. When Rigby called him later, he told him that ‘the idea is bullshit.’ But Rooney also said that he would keep an open mind. He was still touring in dinner theaters and thought it might afford him to take a break from Three Goats and a Blanket.”

  Eventually, in 1977, Rigby signed Professor Allen to write the book for the proposed project, and create a musical book after the play book was complete. Taking a look at the tapes and interviews that Allen had compiled and Norm Abbott’s memorabilia from the Burlesque, they selected the material that they believed would best engage modern audiences. After the first draft of the book was completed, Rigby sent it to Rooney. Then, when Mickey was in Louisville performing, Professor Allen went backstage to introduce himself—where, he claimed, he talked the actor into doing the show.

  On October 14, 1978, Variety announced, “Ruth Webb pacted Mickey Rooney with Harry Rigby for B’Way-bound Sugar Baby [sic], a look at burlesque from 1898–1935. Rooney would play a Joe Yule, Sr.–like performer, Rehearsals are skedded to start in March.”

  “Rigby called me and was thrilled that he signed Rooney, as was I,” Abbott told us. “He then told me we would sign an agreement to direct the project as we had agreed. However, no agreement was ever signed. I trusted Rigby’s word that we had a deal.”

  Rigby then set out to find a composer. He wanted music you could hum leaving the theater. He first tried to use some Irving Berlin songs, but Berlin turned him down; he didn’t want his m
usic associated with burlesque. Sheldon Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof) also passed. But it was Mickey’s costar who would help them find their music.

  Like Mickey, Ann Miller was an MGM veteran. She was born in 1923, and by the time she joined Metro in 1947, she was a sound stage veteran, having done twelve musicals while under contract at Columbia. At MGM she appeared in such classics as Easter Parade (1948, replacing Cyd Charrise, who had broken her leg), with Judy Garland; On the Town (1949); and Kiss Me Kate (1953). After she left MGM in 1957, she appeared in nightclubs, on the dinner theater circuit, and on Broadway in Mame (1969), succeeding Angela Lansbury in the title role. In her book Miller’s High Life Miller writes that she had romances with Louis Mayer, Conrad Hilton, and Howard Hughes, and in Tapping into the Force (1990) she claims she is the direct reincarnation of an Egyptian queen, Hathshepsut.4 Theater producer Terry Allen Kramer said, “Annie was tough as nails. Mickey was overpowering and could get his way with most everybody. With Annie, he watched his step. He was more frightened of her.”5

  When signed to costar in the play, Miller suggested the music of the late Jimmy McHugh, whom she used to date. When Rigby bought McHugh songs such as “I’m in the Mood for Love,” “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby,” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” he discovered that McHugh had left a trunk of seventy tunes that had never been published and had no lyrics. Upon a recommendation from the choreographer he hired for the play, Ernest Flatt (The Carol Burnett Show), he hired Arthur Malvin to write the lyrics for those lost songs.

  The show was originally titled The New Majestic Follies and Lyceum Gardens Review—really too long for a marquee. They needed something shorter, punchier, more to the point; something that communicated what drew audiences to burlesque in the first place. They then alighted upon the nickname Stage Door Johnnies, which describes the wannabe “sugar daddies,” guys who waited outside the side entrances to theaters for the chorus girls they were picking up after the show, the “sugar babies.” The title Sugar Babies might have also been inspired by Arthur Malvin’s song “Let Me Be Your Sugar Baby.” And then there was the name for the Sugar Babies candy developed in the 1930s.