The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

  Mickey Rooney told the New Haven Register on March 2, 1987, “Playwright Larry Gelbart hasn’t been happy with the liberties I have taken with his script, [but] we’ve thrown caution to the winds, without degrading anything.”

  Where Sugar Babies had the flexibility for asides and ad libs, simply because Mickey was playing himself as his father in burlesque, Forum was not created for burlesque bits, and it was necessary that Mickey read his character’s lines, not improvise. Forum was a nuanced piece that had been carefully constructed, and Gelbart was right in his judgment that the dialogue needed to be strictly adhered to.When Mickey followed the dialogue and played the character as the play demanded, he was a riot.

  In 1988, Mickey finally produced the type of live show he had been proposing since the mid-1970s when he tried to borrow clips from Jack Haley Jr. and MGM. Called Mickey Rooney in Mickey Rooney, the show started with thirty minutes of clips from Mickey’s classic films, including Bill, then some song and dance, followed by audience questions. The show played throughout the United States in stops such as San Francisco, Chicago, and Cleveland. They repeated the tour in 1994 in Australia and New Zealand.

  “We were like conquering heroes in Australia,” Chris Aber told us. “They just rolled out a red carpet for us. Mickey was like a national hero, and [he] just loved it. However, he ran right back to his hotel room after the show. He did not want to face the autograph seekers as soon as the show ended.” According to Aber, Mickey had grown increasingly bitter at having to smile for the fans when he wasn’t onstage or in front of a camera. With growing anger, Mickey was pulling a curtain around himself even as he kept on performing.

  By this time, something was not right with Rooney. It turned out that the pills he was taking were catching up with him. He could no longer move with his old grace. He was hesitating in delivering his lines. And he seemed tentative and not full of the confidence that marked his former days. The San Francisco Chronicle, in its review of the live show on May 14, 1979, was vastly underwhelmed. While the paper heaped praise on him for Sugar Babies, it went to town on him in a story titled, “Mickey Takes His Ego for a Stroll”: “After being trapped in the Theatre on the Square for two-and-one-half hours without intermission, I think we need a law against yelling ‘Mickey Rooney’ in a crowded theater. At the very start of this most peculiar, almost endless, one-man show, modestly called ‘Mickey Rooney in Mickey Rooney,’ the star says he hopes he fits the part. In fact, he’s been badly miscast, playing the role of a windy, old showbiz bore, the one thing Mickey Rooney has never been.”

  Mickey was crashing and burning in front of audiences. He was having a public breakdown. The stop in Cleveland proved disastrous, according to Chris, who said, “Mickey was taking lithium and diazepam [Valium]. He was taking the lithium as he was diagnosed as being bipolar. He stopped taking the lithium as he thought it sapped his energy on the stage. What happened was that Mickey suffered a complete breakdown, a nervous breakdown. It was very frightening. I was there with him in Cleveland. He was put in the hospital. The play producers were panicking. The insurance claim was that Mickey was suffering from a bleeding ulcer. But it might have resulted from his medications. Mickey is his own worst enemy.”4 (Mickey’s breakdown was confirmed to us by his manager Robert Malcolm and by Cleveland Plain Dealer television critic Mark Dawidziak.) Mickey spent nearly one month in Cleveland detoxing and rehabilitating from his addiction to painkillers and Valium, and adjusting his dosage of lithium.

  Medical issues notwithstanding, Mickey needed to continue as the breadwinner for the Rooney family, a job that had not stopped since 1926, when he was the main breadwinner, at six years old, for his mother, Nell. At seventy years old, when many senior citizens are starting to enjoy their retirement, Mickey had to go back to work. He enjoyed performing—it was his life, his only life, though he had no choice. There was no nest egg, no great savings, even though he had earned tens of millions of dollars over the past seven decades and had ostensibly built up his guild pension.

  Mickey’s next show had him teaming with his old friend Donald O’Connor. He had met O’Connor in 1933 at a Talent Night at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. O’Connor, who, like Mickey, came from a family of vaudeville performers, told us, “Mickey was a dream to work with. We had similar sensibilities. We had worked together in the past, on The Sunshine Boys onstage. Mickey was always Mickey.”5

  Mickey seemed to have recovered from his breakdown as the two debuted a musical revue called Two for the Show, which played in venues throughout the country in 1989 and 1990. One of their appearances was at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, on August 23, 1989, about which Variety wrote, “The 90-minute razzle-dazzle of the two showbiz vets heralds a new nitery team sorely needed in these times in Las Vegas. The matching of talent was exemplary, exhibiting both entertainers in song, dance, comedy, and plenty of theatrics.”

  The next year, Rooney and O’Connor returned in a fourteen-week tour of The Sunshine Boys. It was warmly received and garnered strong, positive reviews. However, the Rooney and O’Connor team was derailed by Donald’s heart attack in 1990, followed by quadruple bypass surgery later that year.

  In 1993, Mickey joined the touring group of Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor for nearly nine months. As he had as a youth, he toured the Midwest circuit of Chicago and other Rust Belt cities. After his triumph in Sugar Babies, audiences greeted the return of Mickey warmly. Richard Christiansen, chief critic of the Chicago Tribune wrote on May 13, 1993:

  “Lend Me A Tenor” Gets Rooney as Bonus. Mickey Rooney saves his best bits for his second entrance in “Lend Me a Tenor.” The latest star to be imported here for the amazingly long Chicago run of Ken Ludwig’s farce at the Apollo Theater, Rooney can’t help but bring some of his inimitable personality to the show. He breaks character to shake hands with the customers, hurl mock insults at the audience and laugh at his own jokes. Inevitably, he works in funny lines about his size (short) and his wives (many). But he has to be a team player, too, if the slam-bang gags and the timing complexities of the farce are to work, and Rooney, while not neglecting his slapstick, speaks his lines and makes his moves more or less in synchronization with the rest of the cast. They’re in fine form screaming, slamming doors and stripping off their clothes. And whenever the action threatens to sag, there’s always Mickey Rooney, spitting out wax fruit or snoozing off during a long stretch of plot explanation. He’s one of the last, and the greatest, of the big-time buffoons.

  Mickey followed this in his return to Broadway in The Will Rogers Follies, which starred Larry Gatlin. Mickey joined the play during its 1993 run as Roger’s father Clem, replacing Dick Latessa in the role at the Palace Theatre. Mickey took a minor role and expanded it in what many began to call The Mickey Rooney Follies. The producers were happy because it revitalized a dying show.

  Donald Trump, whose then-wife, Marla Maples, was in the show, recalled to us, “Mickey was just amazing . . . [H]e just ad-libbed his way through the part. The audiences just loved him.”6

  Clive Barnes in the New York Post wrote, “This happily shuffling performance by one of the last, indeed perhaps the last, of the glorious old vaudevillians, is restrained, touching, rhythmic, and brilliant. Quite marvelous!”

  Mickey then returned for one last hurrah in Sugar Babies, with Ann Miller, in London at the Savoy Theatre. In this West End version of the show, Mickey was still receiving forty thousand per week, plus three thousand weekly in expenses. At the end of the run, he made an important change in management. Ruth Webb, who had nurtured him through his drug breakdown in Houston and put his career back on track, including negotiating his deal for Sugar Babies, was unceremoniously fired, something she complained bitterly about for the ensuing decade. In fact, she eventually had to sue Mickey to recover her 10 percent agency commission for this last run in Sugar Babies. Webb was replaced by Robert Malcolm, who remained Mickey’s manager and agent through 2014.

  Meanwhile, Mickey went to work on the only successfu
l television program of his career, The Adventures of the Black Stallion, in which he reprised his Oscar-nominated role as horse trainer Henry Dailey. The series, which lasted three seasons from 1990 to 1993, was shown on what is now the ABC Family Network, and was a huge hit; it is still in reruns worldwide. Rooney was nominated for a Gemini Award, Canada’s version of the Emmys, in the category “Best Performance by an Actor in a Continuing Leading Dramatic Role.” Mickey also promoted the show to press and potential sponsors. Cleveland television critic Mark Dawidziak attended a press conference in Los Angeles at which Mickey was ostensibly promoting the show and recalled:

  I was sitting next to the Dallas critic Ed Bark, and I think it took us days to recover. It was summer 1990 at the Century Plaza Hotel, and it was for the cable channel then called the Family Channel. The press conference was for a series based on The Black Stallion. Rooney stunned the channel executives and the critics by not talking about The Adventures of the Black Stallion, but launching into a nonstop pitch session for a bunch of series ideas he had. In one, he would play Thomas Edison. In another, he would play the evangelist Billy Sunday. He pitched an animated show called Lucky the Leprechaun. He talked about an interracial comedy. We were on the other side of the Looking Glass, to be sure. Then he hit the topper of all time. He pitched a comedy about a man married to a woman wrestler, who would periodically get mad and throw him out the window. We were fairly helpless at this point, but then he told us the proposed title for his series: Wait Till the Swelling Goes Down.7

  The funny thing is that all these politically incorrect series not only made sense, but also were imaginative and would have taken advantage of Mickey’s comedic talent. You could theoretically come across versions of these series on cable today or on Amazon, Netflix, or iTunes. (Before you dismiss this notion amid apoplectic peals of laughter, just remember the little-person-tossing scene in Scorsese’s Wall Street. Not so far-fetched now, is it?) Yet, at the time, over twenty-five years ago, and pitched by a seventy-year-old looking for a starring gig, any gig, they sounded way “out there.”

  Despite the sometime frivolity in Mickey’s appearances, his bipolar symptoms were getting out of hand, and he sometimes erupted into explosive rage during public appearances, even though his wife, Jan, tried to control his mood swings. Doug McDuff, a longtime radio host in the Chicagoland market and now at WBEL AM, recalled an interesting experience with Mickey when he appeared on McDuff’s program in 2008. “We had Mickey as a guest with his wife, who were promoting their Let’s Put on a Show! in Rockford [Illinois]. While on the air, Mickey was absolutely fascinating, recalling his heyday in Hollywood. He was just wonderful. Then, at the break, he was like another person. His poor wife. He was screaming at her: He was hungry, why didn’t she have food for him? He was like a horrid spoiled child. Then, when he went back on the air, he was back to being wonderful.”8

  Geoffrey Mark Fidelman, author of The Lucy Book, was a guest at the May 2001 Lucy Festival in Ball’s hometown of Jamestown, New York. Mickey was paid to attend the festival and talk about his work and his friendship with Lucy.9 Mark recalled:

  I was there with my Lucy book. At the occasion was a young girl who was attending thanks to the “Make-A-Wish” foundation. She wanted to meet me because of the book and to talk with Mickey. Mickey’s speech was about twenty seconds about Lucy and twenty minutes about Mickey. After the speech, he headed straight to the bar and was mixing his own drinks. Part of Mickey’s “job” was to meet this dying young girl. I went up to Mickey to introduce this young girl and he just told me not to bother him. I said that she was from “Make A Wish,” and again he told me to basically “Fuck off.” I told him he had two choices: one, I would break his leg or, two, he would meet the girl. Reluctantly he talked to the girl, actually harshly, for a few seconds. As a recovering alcoholic, I knew the signs. Mickey was his own worst enemy, and he certainly had an addiction problem.10

  This anecdote seemed to be representative of how Mickey was with his fans, at least in his later years. While many fans were eager to meet him, he was not always eager to meet them. The majority of recollections, by fans and even friends, of meeting Mickey almost always reflect his rudeness and antagonistic attitude. Get Mickey in the right mood and he was ebullient with ideas and bubbling with enthusiasm, as attested to by Karen Kramer, who described Mickey’s demeanor at a Mad, Mad World retrospective. He was just like the Andy Hardy she fell in love with on the big screen, she said. Yet catch him in a down mood or when he was off his meds, and Mickey would be hostile to the point of ugliness.

  Said stepson Chris Aber, “Mickey wants always to appear to be a tough guy. He wants everyone to think that of him. I couldn’t even count the confrontations and problems that Mickey had with his fans, friends, and everyone over the nearly thirty-five years I was with him.”11 Aber became Mickey’s personal assistant after road manager Jack Krieg left in early 1983. He was replaced in 2012 by Kevin Pawley, who stayed with Mickey until the end, in 2014.

  “When we were doing the first Night at the Museum films,” Aber said, “the director was Shawn Levy, who is one of the top directors. When Shawn’s mother, an elderly lady, came toward Mickey to talk with him, he pushed her away. When we found out it was Shawn’s mother, then he was apologetic. Once, the owner of the New York Giants, Wellington Mara, came up to talk to Mickey and he told him, ‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself.’ This story was constantly repeated.”

  Jan told us, “When he woke up in the morning, you never knew which Mickey you’d get, the angelic Andrew Hardy or Boys Town’s Whitey Marsh.”

  Jan’s sister Ronna Riley told us, “Mickey was absolutely brutal to many fans. It was frightening. Thank God he was nice to the Queen of England and Prince Phillip when he met them.”

  Donald Trump echoed Ronna’s statement, saying that Mickey didn’t care whom he was talking to. He simply spoke his mind whenever he felt like it.

  One of the many psychological issues Mickey was facing at this point in his life was a perception (which was true) that he had lost relevance, not only in his career, but also in his life. His frustration over that loss of relevance might have been what was driving the dark side of his personality off-camera.

  Hollywood Reporter journalist Scott Feinberg, who conducted one of the last interviews with Mickey (with Jan and Chris there), which he videotaped, recalled that Mickey displayed bizarre fits of explosive anger during their interview. “At times he was almost totally out of control. He would have an actual tantrum and crying fits if he didn’t get what he wanted.”12

  When Fredde Duke, Maurice Duke’s daughter, asked Mickey to participate in Fuck ’Em, the documentary she was making about her father, “he said, ‘If you’re not going to pay me,’ to go fuck myself. He was horrible.” Maurice Duke, Mickey’s longtime manager, had rescued him from near oblivion and remained personal friends with him even after Mickey’s antics had put the Duke and his family in jeopardy. But not even a project on Duke could elicit warm behavior from Rooney.13

  Ray Courts, the founder of the Hollywood Show, a celebrity autograph convention, echoed stories about how Mickey dealt with fans:

  I did nearly twenty years of autograph shows with Mickey. I can tell so many countless stories of Mickey mistreating his fans, it would take hours. Once, an elderly lady, who had paid for his autograph and was clearly devoted to him, asked if he could personalize an autograph, and he replied, ‘Listen, lady, I’m not writing a fucking book here.’ He called people leeches. Sometimes it took both Jan and Chris to calm him down. He was always angry. Believe me, I felt for Jan. Anybody who could put up with Mickey’s crap should go to heaven. Mickey traveled with us to autograph shows all over the country, like Chicago and Houston. He once skipped out on a hotel bill in Chicago, where he was staying for the show. I once was with him at a hotel gift shop, where Mickey just grabbed a bottle of aftershave, opened it, and poured a fistful in his hands, then put it back. He just did not care. . . . Mickey made a ton of cash at the autogr
aph shows. Once, when he needed money for a plane ticket to Mexico to shoot a movie, he just showed up, unannounced, to the autograph show in Hollywood to make some cash. He literally begged [me] to set up a table, [to] which I acquiesced. Then he was mean and nasty to the fans. He just hated fans trying to come behind his table to take pictures with him. The great publicist Marvin Paige once told me . . . sadly, “You know, even if Mickey is rude, he shouldn’t have to do this at his age. He should be able to enjoy the fruits of his labor, by this age.”14

  Comedian Rip Taylor, who filled in for Rooney in Sugar Babies, told us, “I kind of knew him, but his personality changed every half hour. You know I ‘replaced’ him in Sugar Babies. He gave me a lot of help and helped with my career. A real pro. Crazy and funny, but who isn’t?”15

  Author and television historian Steve Cox recalled joining Billy Barty and Mickey at Barty’s tournament to sponsor the Billy Barty Foundation, which covered medical bills for complications resulting from dwarfism. When the crowd tried to surround Mickey for autographs, he spurned the attention so they could focus on Barty, and said, “This is Billy’s day.” Despite his heavy mood swings, Mickey still had a sense of loyalty, especially to Barty, who had been his on-screen sidekick for decades.

  Publicist Roger Neal, who hosted Mickey at his annual Oscar party in Beverly Hills, told us that “Mickey was very cordial to everyone and was accommodating to those who sought to meet him.” In other words, when he was on, he was on, but when he wasn’t, when he was on the downside in his bipolar depression, he became bitter to the point of cruelty.

  Leatrice Gilbert, the daughter of screen legend John Gilbert and silent film star Leatrice Joy, told us in our interview with her, “When he was younger, Mickey was very cordial to his fans. He loved being the center of attention. When I was with Ava and Mickey, they loved being the focus of what was going on. When I met him years later he had changed. He was far more bitter and gruff.”