The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  Executive producer/writer Bernie Orenstein said, “He has such great talent, he gives the writers such versatility that you can go in several directions. Mickey was still working nights doing Sugar Babies. It took great energy to undertake both projects.”7

  Costar Nathan Lane enjoyed working with Mickey, too. “Mickey is one of the greatest legends we have,” he said at a ninetieth birthday celebration for Rooney. “I was honored to work with him and to have him as a friend.8

  However, Dana Carvey disliked working with Mickey, and has since parodied him mercilessly, including in a 2002 appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, where he told Letterman that he did “some of the worst TV you’ve ever seen.” When he mentioned One of the Boys, Letterman asked, “Could it really have been that bad?” Carvey replied, “It sucked!” He then went on to describe Mickey Rooney as “eccentric,” and carefully added, “I don’t want to meet his lawyers.” Letterman offered the description “high-strung” as an alternative, and Carvey went on to imitate Rooney, saying, “I was the number one star in the world.” Carvey also said, “He was one of those guys who would talk till he ran out of breath [imitating Mickey], ‘I’m going to create Mickey Rooney Macaroni . . .’ ”

  Turteltaub told us, “Mickey’s and Dana’s acting styles clashed.” He explained that this might have been the reason Mickey—just as he did with Dwayne Hickman in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini—sought to be Carvey’s de facto director. At this stage in his career, Mickey was seeing himself as a mentor, even to those who didn’t want his mentoring.

  Television audiences shunned One of the Boys, and the show barely lasted a season in early 1982. In 2002, TV Guide ranked the series number twenty-four on its list of “The 50 Worst Shows of All Time.” Mickey was not worried. He was still basking in the glow of Sugar Babies and his Academy Award nomination.

  That glow helped him land his next TV role, and it was a role that would transform him personally as well as professionally. The made-for-television movie Bill was about the real-life Bill Sackter, a developmentally challenged person who had to find his way outside the institution where he had lived for most of his life. The way Mickey rose to embrace the role of Bill showed that, as with his work in Sugar Babies and The Black Stallion, he had made his mark in the industry that rose above even his days at MGM.

  “I GAVE ONE OF the best performances of my life,” Mickey wrote about Bill, the television movie that forced him to think and perform in an entirely new light.9

  The story was born around an unlikely friendship between a mentally challenged man, Bill Sackter, and a young screenwriter. The developmentally challenged Bill had been institutionalized by his parents since he was seven. When he was released at sixty years old, he had to find a life for himself, make his way in a world he did not know. Screenwriter Barry Morrow met Bill at a staff Christmas party at the Minikahda Club in Minneapolis, where Bill had been employed as a dishwasher since his release. A friendship grew, and Barry began shooting videotape and Super 8 film footage of Bill, finding him to be a great subject for a documentary. After being offered a job in Iowa City, Barry moved away and had to leave Bill on his own. Shortly thereafter, Bill was hospitalized, and it was Barry’s job to tell him that he needed to have his leg amputated and be sent back to the institution. In an unprecedented move, Barry instead petitioned the court to grant him legal guardianship over Bill, whom he then brought with him to Iowa City.

  With Barry’s help, Bill made a full recovery, and with the support of Barry and others in the community, Bill soon became a local celebrity. Morrow originally intended to memorialize Bill’s entrance into society in a documentary, but CBS approached him about dramatizing the story of Bill’s life as a scripted movie made for television. Further, the network, having taken notice of Mickey Rooney’s resurgence in the entertainment industry, cast him as Bill and Dennis Quaid as Barry Morrow.

  Morrow took this film very seriously. He wanted to send a message that would translate into creating advocacy groups for people with disabilities and their families and caretakers. Essentially, in the wake of federal and state policies mainstreaming developmentally challenged and mentally ill people, there was a need for such advocacy, lest the criminal justice system reinstitutionalize those released into society.10

  Of course Morrow was very sensitive about the portrayal of Bill, and was a little surprised at Mickey’s first attempt at the character. He recalled, “When Mickey began the film, his translation of Bill was not at all what I envisioned. He portrayed Bill as if he had a severe palsy or muscular disease. It was quite exaggerated . . . Mickey had adamantly refused to meet Bill or even watch the tapes of him. He had no real basis to understand what Bill Sackter was really like. He just tried to ape mannerisms that were quite exaggerated.”11

  Mickey had decided that he would play what he thought a developmentally challenged person should be, without regard to the real person. The result was a hollow characterization: demeaning, nearly comic, and absolutely devoid of verisimilitude.

  “I was very upset at the initial footage,” Morrow told us. “My contract, thank God, with CBS was ironclad, wherein I had veto power. The director that they assigned, Anthony Page, although he had done fine work in his career, was very weak with Mickey. Anthony let Mickey overrun him. Although Mickey was only five two, he has a very powerful presence and could be rather intimidating. Do not be fooled by his size.” Morrow wasn’t. He had invested more than a script in the story of Bill Sackter and was not about to see Mickey mug and stumble his way through a performance, intimidating his director and making a mockery of the real-life Bill. With his contract in hand and waving his veto power like a flag,

  I went to CBS at Black Rock in New York and met with their top executives, and I vetoed how Bill was being presented. I told them that the character needed to be toned down. There was a delay of several months, and I thought [the movie] might never be made. Luckily, CBS wanted to really make this film. Finally, they actually had their executives sort of sit on Mickey to have him tone down his outrageous, broad portrayal of Bill. They eventually scrapped all initial footage except for one scene where he is fighting with drunks in the dark and goes to jail. Mickey actually found his center and toned down the character. It was an amazing metamorphosis. Mickey found the heart of Bill.12

  What was it that transformed Mickey’s performance, that enabled him to inhabit the character of Bill Sackter? Morrow explained that after the execs from the network showed up to read him the riot act, Mickey had a blazing Saul-on-the-way-to-Damascus moment and realized that his success in Sugar Babies could be completely obliterated by a failure in a television production. He agreed to meet with the person he had been hired to portray, and the result was nothing less than an epiphany.

  Morrow explained that the upshot of Mickey’s meeting with Sackter, and his resulting performance, “was that the film, I believed, became a watershed of Mickey’s later career. The next year, he won an honorary Oscar. I believe that Bill certainly played a big part in making that happen. It brought him new respect by the industry. He also won an Emmy and a Golden [Globe] for this role.”

  Mickey had been able to navigate through roles his entire life, pulling from his actor’s tool kit all the skills necessary to inhabit parts ranging from precocious teenagers to gangsters to prizefighters. But when it came to Bill, the usual tools wouldn’t work. In the empty pit where Mickey’s personality should have been, there was only a hollow echo of narcissism. Bill Sackter, walking through life as a stranger in a strange land, gave Mickey empathy, something that he might not have felt before, despite his desperate situations and tragedies. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Mickey saw the struggle of a real human being overcoming his personal disability, attempting to make two and two equal four so he could live on his own. For Mickey, carried onstage into a brave new world of bright lights, seminaked hoofers, brassy warblers, clowns in baggy pants flopping around the stage like fresh-caught fish on a ship’s deck even before he wa
s one year old, there was no personality to develop, only the skills to inhabit that specific world—and inhabit it he did, filling the emptiness of his being with every form of self-gratification. Then he met Bill Sackter, watched him as he moved, listened as he framed sentences, and realized that real human beings live not just to gratify themselves, but to inhabit the lives they live as human beings, not avatars. And in that moment, Mickey did an amazing thing: He amalgamated what he perceived in Bill Sacker and morphed it into a character. In that process, Mickey experienced true catharsis and was translated from a tired old irritable artifact, an anachronism, into a legend. He didn’t just act the role, he understood it, he lived it, and the result on-screen was pure mimesis.

  And, as Morrow told us, Mickey didn’t just walk away from Bill after filming. Because he felt empathy, probably for the first time in his life, he committed himself to groups such as the Arc (for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities). His portrayal of Bill was the genesis, in Mickey, of better awareness and compassion for people with disabilities—and his impact will be felt far after his passing. (For his part, Morrow won an Emmy for writing Bill. He later won an Academy Award for writing Rain Man.) Life had now changed: He had peeked over the edge of his private reality and seen the universe.

  ASIDE FROM SHOWING HIS ability to play an aged and impaired person, a role he inhabited so perfectly, Bill was pivotal in Mickey’s career also for launching him into the label of “old guy” that would define him for the next thirty years. Whereas in the 1950s he might have been the middle-aged guy acting out the role of a superannuated teenager; and in the 1960s he was the awkward, behaving-badly artifact miscommunicating with bubbly Gidget wannabes and amply muscled young surfer dudes; by the 1970s, not even that worked. He now inhabited “old” and would venture through the rest of his professional life as the “old guy.”

  In 1983 his vindication from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences came full circle. On Oscar night on April 11, 1983, at the Fifty-Fifth Annual Academy Awards, Mickey was bestowed with a Special Award for Lifelong Career Achievement. In a list of Oscar speeches, Mickey’s acceptance speech is listed as the eighteenth best. The website Oscar, Oscar! wrote that it was a “humbling acceptance speech” and “one of the most profoundly sad and true acceptance speeches in Oscar history. . . . [H]e talked about back when he was a kid in the ’30s, he was the number one star in the world. A few years later, he was broke, and nobody offered him work (nobody wanted me). He relayed the sad truth of Hollywood sometimes, that fame can be so fleeting and so temporary, and he ended on a positive note, thanking the people who helped get him work again.”13

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  Going Ungently into That Good Night

  Mickey played Oscar to Tony Randall’s Felix in a 1968 production of The Odd Couple at Caesar’s Palace and other locations. Rooney was Randall’s first choice to play Oscar when casting the TV version.

  PHOTO COURTESY OF TOM POSTON.

  How does one become the professional old guy? When the bright red expiration light starts flashing in your palm, do you slouch grudgingly but obligingly into the vaporization beam or do you run for your life? Would Mickey continue the wild ways of his youth while inhabiting the body of the old guy, blinded by lechery as he chased after women more than half his age? Or would he gracefully shoulder the burden of a patriarch to his many children and grandchildren while professionally making the role of the old guy nonsuperfluous? Which direction could Mickey take?

  There was indeed a path for Mickey for the ensuing decades, a path that began with an actor who represented, for producers and directors, a lucky charm. With his performance in Bill, Mickey had taken on the mantle not only of the old guy, but of a character hobbled by physical and developmental disability. Remember how Antigone schlepped her father Oedipus around town because his blood-scarred eye sockets represented his supreme act of contrition and a washing away of public sin? Playing Bill was an expiation of the compensatory sins of pride and narcissism that had marked every aspect of Mickey’s life as he sought to justify acts of self-gratification that, like bags of potato chips, leave you hungry no matter how much you eat. In Bill Sackter, Mickey had seen that truth was the beauty of art.

  Mickey would quickly learn, however, that where once he was the target of prejudice against his height (size-ism), he was now discriminated against because he was old. Ageism is rampant in Hollywood, where the folks who can green-light films are so young they’re barely legal to drive. And where do people sixty-five and older fall? Into a pit of rusted Tin Men was the fate of Mickey Rooney as he turned sixty-five in 1985 after Sugar Babies ended its long run and he showed the world what he could do in Bill. After these back-to-back successes, Mickey was quietly relegated to the role of aging eccentric by what seems to have been a sub rosa gentlemen’s agreement among Hollywood producers so young that aging was anathema.

  Mickey’s new struggle for professional credibility began because in the world he inhabited, the world of those who cut him the checks he then turned over to his bookies, even the most talented artists of a certain age were looked upon as disposable antiques—even though, according to Karen Kramer, the wife of Mad, Mad World producer and iconic filmmaker Stanley Kramer, they might have reached the peak of their artistic prowess.

  Many of Mickey’s friends told us they were befuddled at the transition in his career after Bill. Where Mickey saw his arc as a respectable avuncular character (a Lionel Barrymore or a Lewis Stone), instead he was relegated to thankless, throwaway roles as cantankerous old men or laughable sidekicks (a Gabby Hayes or a J. Pat O’Malley).

  “It is pure and simple ageism,” remarked Carroll Ballard, the auteur who helmed The Black Stallion. “I was completely in awe of Mickey’s huge talent. I was pained to watch as his talents were underutilized and he was typecast in thankless roles playing old coots, whereas he had so much more finesse, depth, dimension, layers and skills.”1

  The nonagenerian Norman Abbott, who has been recognized over the years as one of the great television comedy directors, echoed these sentiments, not only about Mickey, but about older show business professionals in general, saying, “While your work is repeated and copied, you are considered old hat and stale. Mickey got even stronger as he aged. He had talent that was seasoned by generations of experience.”2

  Another nonagenarian, Rocky Kalish, who co-created Gilligan’s Island and wrote and produced such programs as My Three Sons, Family Affair, and Good Times, said, “I can draw upon classic ideas and learned from brilliant men like Sheldon Leonard to Hal Kanter. Your talent ages like fine wine. Mickey maintained his talent as long as he lived.”3

  MICKEY, THOUGH NOW TYPECAST as elderly, continued to lead a diverse career, with constant appearances in theater, clubs, television, and as a published author. Despite his Emmy and Golden Globe, his film career was still a succession of mostly thankless roles, the only parts offered him. The sequel to Bill in 1983 was an exception. Bill: On His Own, again a television movie scripted by Barry Morrow, featured Dennis Quaid, Helen Hunt, and Teresa Wright. Although Morrow felt the story was weaker, the film was well received, and Mickey was again nominated for an Emmy. He followed this with another television movie, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, a sentimental film costarring Scott Grimes, Lloyd Nolan, and as Mickey’s spouse, his own wife, Jan. In it, Mickey portrays a retired cop who passes away and returns as an angel. He also did the voice-over for the animated Care Bear Movie in 1985, and had a small part in a television flick, The Return of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer in 1986, with Stacy Keach. That same year, he did another television film, for Disney, called Little Spies, with another small, eccentric role as Jimmy the Hermit.

  This trend continued almost unabated for the next nearly thirty years. He never again, in films or television movies, was given the opportunity to stretch out or do anything more than create a very small role playing an eccentric. There would be nearly forty more fil
ms, but he was now a curiosity. For older viewers, he offered a glimpse at a faded superstar who wanted to continue working. For younger ones, he was just a crotchety old character actor.

  There were bits and pieces, in various roles, where viewers saw glimpses of the old Mighty Mite. But he needed money, and the parts he took were mostly simply getting him a paycheck.

  What became the saving grace for Mickey was that he still had the chops for being onstage, where he was allowed to spread his wings. Mickey was always a live audience draw, especially after Sugar Babies. He did the occasional dinner/regional theater for old friends such as John Kenley, for whom he appeared in a revised version of his old standby, Three Goats and a Blanket, now retitled Go Ahead and Laff. He performed it in the summer of 1986 with Jane Kean, who played Trixie on The Honeymooners. The next year, he did a four-month national tour of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, again as Pseudolus.

  For two months in the 1970s, when starring in Forum, playwright Larry Gelbart was unhappy with Mickey’s ad-libbing. He said, “We take great pains creating the dialogue and rhythm of the piece. Mickey took it upon himself to do extra throwaways, which both threw the other performers off and also distracted from the piece. This is not The Carol Burnett Show. I truly detest an actor breaking character.”