The show was budgeted for $1.3 million, higher than some others of that time, but Rigby wanted to take the musical on a five-week pre-Broadway tour, which upped the cost of the production. He partnered with Terry Allen Kramer, whose husband, Irving Kramer, was a board member of Columbia Pictures. Along with Kramer’s participation, Columbia also invested five hundred thousand dollars.
Rigby scheduled six weeks of rehearsals at the Michael Bennett studios in downtown Manhattan. (Jan and Mickey decided to stay in Fort Lee, New Jersey, instead of New York City because it was closer to golf courses Mickey wanted to play.) The first couple of weeks were devoted to the dance numbers choreographed by Ernest Flatt. Norman Abbott oversaw the dialogue. Problems started to creep up right away, though, when Mickey felt uncomfortable with the straight men (comedians in the mold of George Burns and Jack Benny) they had hired. A straight man’s job is to set up the punch line for his partner. It’s called “laying pipe.” George Burns demonstrated it in the first episode of the The Burns and Allen Show when he described how a straight man asks the question, for example (to Gracie), “How’s your brother, Freddie?” Then he pauses, looking casually around at the audience, his gaze maybe lingering on a prop. This pause is called a “beat.” Gracie answers, “Oh, he just came back from Philadelphia.” George stares at his cigar. He repeats Gracie’s last line as a question—this is very important to lay the pipe for the next line: “Your brother Freddie just came back from Philadelphia?” “Yes,” Gracie answers, and says nothing else. The straight man looks perplexed, scans the audience again, purses his lips, and finally takes the bait, asking, “Why was he in Philadelphia?” Gracie answers, “They were sitting at breakfast and his wife said, ‘I’d love some Philadelphia Cream Cheese.’ ” Now take this same type of interchange and replace it with “Who’s on first?” Now imagine Jerry Seinfeld talking to Kramer, and you get the picture. That’s what a straight man does.
By the end of the second week, at Mickey’s insistence, they had fired three different actors. Mickey was complaining about the material, the delivery, and the show’s structure and timing. If he seemed obsessive, it was because he realized what this play could mean to his career. He was stuck in dinner theater and in low-level movies playing minor character roles. He was no longer a top-grossing motion picture leading man. Far from it. But this was Broadway. This was the burlesque in which he’d grown up and learned all his stagecraft. This was his home. If he failed at this, his last chance at a major Broadway show, it was back to $2,500 a week at the dinner theaters in small cities where blue-haired ladies and their retired husbands looked up from gumming their string beans and poached salmon to watch the Andy Hardy of their youth try to recapture what he was fifty years earlier. Sugar Babies had to work. The weight of the production was on his shoulders.
When no acceptable straight man was found by the third week, director Norman Abbott read the lines to Mickey. After all, wasn’t Abbott the nephew of arguably one of the greatest burlesque straight men who ever lived? There was George Burns, there was Jack Benny, and there was Bud Abbott. Nobody else was even close. But Abbott was a director not a seasoned performer, and thus he kept throwing Rooney’s timing off.
Fortunately, Mickey then remembered his friend and well-known character actor Peter Leeds, with whom he’d done shows, and they hired him. Leeds worked in seamlessly with Mickey, and the straight man/gag man patter started to click.
Mickey was also unhappy with Abbott as a theater director, even though it was Abbott who’d created the play and pushed to get Mickey back on a Broadway stage.
First, Abbott was a television director. He didn’t understand, as his uncle and Mickey did, the cadences of burlesque before a live stage audience, where you have to leave it to your performers to play off one another and off the audience. A good stage comic can actually hear the audience breathe. He can feel the response of the audience to a line, knows when to pause, knows how to lay the pipe for the next joke, knows where and how to look—and, as straight man, knows how to bring the audience into the joke so as to get them to laugh at his consternation. Look at how Bud Abbott plays the flummoxed interviewer, gasping in frustration, opposite Lou Costello in “Who’s on First?,” or Jack Benny playing off Mel Blanc in the railroad station skit, or off Eddie “Rochester” Anderson when he’s asked to spend a dime. And picture Carl Reiner and Sid Caesar or Mel Brooks as Reiner on the old Your Show of Shows lays out the setup and pauses before the next joke to the Two Thousand Year Old Man or the man who fell out of the plane, television staples in the 1950s. This timing, this sense of what his audience was thinking and expecting, was what Mickey learned from the time he was one year old standing in the wings as his father performed, and by watching the greatest burlesque comics cavort on stage. This became his language as his neurological pathways developed, as the syntax and rhythm of language became hard-wired within the language center of his brain. Just as a child learns the language spoken to him by those who nurture him, so Mickey learned the patter and rhythm of stage comedy. In his opinion, Norm Abbott did not know it.
Second, Mickey felt that Norm was not authoritative enough with the actors. Also, he believed, probably correctly, that Abbott was unable to get the skits on their feet. While Abbott knew burlesque from his family background, Mickey had performed these routines since he was two years old. He was still doing the skits in his Vegas act.
Finally, Mickey approached Abbott and said to him, “I love you, baby, but this isn’t going to work out. You can’t control the actors.” Then he turned to Rigby and demanded that he fire Abbott, which Rigby reluctantly did. But the whole project had been based on Abbott’s conception. Abbott trusted Rigby and had not signed a contract, which left him vulnerable. He deserved at least a partial share in a project based on his ideas.
Abbott packed up and returned to Los Angeles to direct episodic television, which was his forte and expertise. Several months later, after the initial shock of being fired from a project that he had worked on for five years, he filed a lawsuit for breach of contract for nine hundred thousand dollars in Los Angeles Superior Court. Though he had no signed paper, he had enough extrinsic evidence to assert “promissory estoppel” if Rigby were to claim there was no contract. Abbott had performed his job as if he had signed a contract hence he could stop the producer from claiming there was no contract. Besides, no defense attorney in his or her right mind wants an LA County judge compelling the production of box office receipts to establish the value of a claim. Abbott and Rigby settled the suit about a year later, Norm told us, for an amount in the high six figures.
Meanwhile, Mickey suggested that Rigby call the colorful impresario John Kenley, who had employed Mickey for nearly twenty years for his theaters in Ohio. Kenley had been a huge help to Rooney when he couldn’t find work, hiring him for starring roles in several productions and gaining him notice. In fact, Rigby knew Rooney’s stage work because of John Kenley. Also, Kenley knew the art form in question, having assembled shows such as This Was Burlesque with Ann Corio. Mickey trusted his judgment. Merv Griffin wrote about Kenley in his book Merv: An Autobiography, revealing what had been gossiped about by many and known as fact by few that Kenley (who has since died) spent many a theatrical off-season traipsing around South Florida as a woman named Joan, wearing getups that would make Liberace look like Don Draper.6 Kenley once said, “People have often wondered if I am gay. Sometimes I wished I was. Life would have been simpler. Androgyny is overrated.”7
Kenley recommended his friend Rudy Tronto as director. Tronto had directed The Best of Burlesque, with Ann Corio, for Kennely, and Mickey had worked with him in W.C., and trusted him. He was the perfect fit.
When Tronto arrived, Rooney grabbed him and said, complaining about some of the skits, stage business, and other material, “Rudy, we’ve got to get rid of all this shit. The stuff is terrible,” recalled Tronto about some of the skits in the show, to Arthur Marx and thence to us.8
The show toured for six month
s. “Harry Rigby wanted this long pre-Broadway tour, which I thought, and still think, was far too long. It kept our costs higher,” said producer and financial backer Terry Allen Kramer. The first stop was San Francisco, at the Curran Theatre. Mickey, for maybe one of the only times in his career, was walking a tightrope of nerves before opening curtain. He didn’t have to worry. He brought down the house. The audience delighted in his every movement, joke, pratfall, and dance step. He didn’t just keep in step with Ann Miller; he floated across the stage with her, and harmonized with her in songs that made the audience hum. Many experts of the theater believe that the first preview is a good indicator of the show’s future. If that is the rule, then the eight curtain calls for Mickey were an excellent barometer. While the first preview was not sold out, by the next morning the word of mouth was so strong that there was a line around the block for tickets. Sugar Babies was sold out for the rest of the four-week run. The reviewers raved about Rooney and Miller.
Stage veteran Ann Miller kept Mickey in line right from the start. “Annie knew Mickey, and she kept him in place,” recalled Terry Allen Kramer to us. “If he got too broad, she could tone him down. They made a great balance, and she would not take any of Mickey’s stuff. She could definitely stand up to him.”
As they assessed each road performance, Kramer, Rigby, Tronto, Flatt, and Malvin revised, tightened, and fine-tuned the show throughout the tryouts. They next played the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, a historic venue and Mickey’s old stomping ground. Again, the show sold out. Except for one negative review from Sylvia Drake of the Los Angeles Times, in which she said the show was “for the Magic Mountain crowd,” every other outlet praised Mickey and the show.
The show continued its gypsy existence for long runs in Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, where it met with the similar accolades. “I’ve never had so much fun,” said Kramer. “And I learned every step of the way. In today’s theater world, I can’t be so hands-on. It just can’t be done today.” She explained that in today’s Broadway musical theater, she couldn’t have had the level of intimate, day-to-day involvement that she had with Sugar Babies; nor could the play have toured for that long.
On Friday, October 9, 1979, at the Nederlander Organization’s Mark Hellinger Theater, Sugar Babies finally made its Broadway debut. The word of mouth from the six-month tour was so strong that there was already over a million dollars in advance tickets sales.
“It was such a triumph for Mickey . . . all the anger for being forgotten and relegated to the bin, melted away,” Jan Rooney told us. “Everyone recognized his tremendous talent.”
On November 16, 1979, Mickey told the New York Times, “To sum it up, living with Mickey Rooney hasn’t been easy. There have been crevices, fissures, pits and I’ve fallen into a lot of them. But the crux of it is, you can’t quit on life, you’ve got to keep going.” He also claimed that he had found God though the Church of Religious Science.
The triumph of the opening night of Sugar Babies would have made a great film arc in itself: from Mickey’s rise to the top of stardom in films, through his long fall and successive tragedies, to his rise again to become the favorite son of Broadway. Here he was on opening night playing to an audience live onstage in the town where he was born, performing the very material he had grown up with, and playing a role his own father had played—and all of it to cheering audiences and rave notices. It doesn’t get any better than that.
New York reviews, which could be brutal and rarely were sentimental, especially for this kind of play, one with so much shtick, created tributes to Mickey Rooney. Newspapers, television, radio, and every magazine sang his praises. Mickey’s face appeared everywhere. He was on the cover of the March 1980 issue of Life magazine. He was featured in covers stories in Time, Newsweek, and even the National Enquirer. Time on October 29 featured a piece on him that read, “These days the sun is shining almost constantly at the Mark Hellinger Theater. At 59, Mickey once again has the approval he needs and demands. ‘The audience and I are friends,’ he says. ‘We’re family. They grew up with me. They allowed me to grow up with them. I’ve let them down several times. They’ve let me down several times. But we’re all family, and it’s time for a reunion. What warmth comes over you when they laugh! It’s as if they’re saying It’s all been worth it, thank you.’ ” And that’s what a stage performer not only understands, but absorbs.
Kramer, the producer alongside Rigby and also the main investor along with Columbia, was involved in every aspect of the production. This was the first time she was an active producer for a Broadway show. After Sugar Babies, she went on to become one of the most prolific modern Broadway producers ever. Her most recent plays include The Elephant Man with Bradley Cooper, Cyndi Lauper’s Kinky Boots, and the musical version of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky. Speaking to us from her New York office, she said:
Oh, I just adored Mickey. However, he was so extraordinarily difficult . . . Right from the beginning, when we were on the road. We had a tremendous Rollerblading number that cashed in on that craze and was wonderful. It was a showcase piece, and Mickey was just great in it. In San Francisco, he said, “Terry, I don’t want to do this number any longer.” I told him that it was a showstopper. He said, “No, my leg hurts, and I can’t do it any longer.” And he just lay down on the stage, flat on his back, and wouldn’t move. Needless to say, we removed that segment. . . . While we were still on the pre-Broadway tryouts, I was paying Mickey fifty thousand dollars a week. He came to me and demanded seventy thousand per week. I told him we were barely breaking even on the road, and I couldn’t do that. He then went on a tirade: how he can replace Ann Miller and take her part and her salary. He then did her dance steps in part to prove to me how he could do her part as well.9
According to Kramer, Mickey also received 10 percent of the gross box office. The play grossed more than $300,000 per week for three years, for 1,208 performances. Mickey also toured in the play for two more years and more than 600 performances. His return, by the finish of the last road show in 1985—according to Mickey’s manager of nearly thirty years, Robert Malcolm, CEO of the Artists Group, who would later become his agent as well—was just south of $40 million. He was outearning his yearly return from MGM in three weeks of work. At sixty years old, after all the years of scuffling since being booted from MGM, Mickey had hit a grand slam, emerging from earning $2,500 a week in dinner theater to a weekly salary of $70,000 per week.10
From $70,000 a week for a total of $40 million, to filing for bankruptcy, to an estate worth less than $20,000 at his death—what happened? This question plagues family, friends, acquaintances, and observers of Mickey Rooney, as well as the court that oversaw his conservatorship. How did he go from the astounding income from Sugar Babies, performed in his sixties, and remain a constant earner in movies thereafter, to near poverty at the time of his death in 2014? We asked his agents, managers, business managers, publicists, family, friends, and acquaintances this simple question: How could he have plowed through tens of millions of dollars in just those years alone?
The stock answer was: gambling. His manager Robert Malcolm told us that Mickey was always at the track or on the phone to his bookie. Malcolm said, “Even when he was doing the ‘panto’ plays in London, I’d call there and his assistant would always tell me he was at the track. He went through much of his money in gambling and horse racing.” Mickey’s gambling addiction, notorious during his days at MGM and thereafter, continued throughout the rest of his life unabated until all his money was gone and he ended up in a conservatorship.
Terry Allen Kramer, who confirmed that Mickey earned millions from Sugar Babies, seconded this: “Besides his crazy ideas and products, he was a gambler, pure and simple. He’d always be at the track in the afternoons or on the phone with his bookies. He gambled his money away along with his families’ hands that were always in his pockets,” she recalled, reminding us that Mickey had fathered many children over the years through his eight marriages.11
His stepson Chris Aber, his assistant for over thirty years, confirmed this as well, telling us, “Mickey lived at the track. He blew countless dollars there. He also owned horses and always lost money on that. Until he just stopped, about ten years ago, he lived and breathed horse racing.”
His sister-in-law of forty years, Ronna Riley, Jan’s younger sister, said, “Mickey was a degenerate gambler. He would beg me to go with him to the races, as Jan refused to go. Once, while at Santa Anita, we saw the very elegant and dapper Cary Grant. Cary loves Mickey and once said that he considered Mickey to be the greatest living actor. Grant had this beautiful white Rolls-Royce he was getting into, and said to Mickey—who was rather sloppy, and [was] busy with his forms—‘Mickey, Mickey . . . do you ever change your clothes?’ ”12
His longtime friend Sidney Miller recalled that Mickey could not get ahead of his losses at the track, even when he won early. Mickey’s oft-quoted remark, “I lost two dollars at Santa Anita and I’ve spent three million trying to get it back,” is not far off. In a visit to Santa Anita with the author, he lost quite a few dollars. (In fact, he still owes this author fifty dollars.)
Even with his well-documented gambling problem, it is still astounding that he could go through over forty million dollars. But it was more than gambling, we discovered. It was also his terrible business sense. When it came to business, he was the supreme ultracrepidarian, pitching ideas so far beyond his area of expertise that people who worked with him were astounded. “Mickey had absolutely zero business sense,” Kramer explained to us in our interview.
The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney Page 44