Legendary television producer Robert Finkel said to us, “Although he was loaded with talent, I was always reluctant to use him . . . I was producing the Academy Awards in 1972 and we thought of using Mickey as a presenter. Sammy Davis Jr. was the cohost and said that Mickey was not reliable . . . and I thought they were friends. Sammy said that Mickey was always angry and could be a problem.”
UNDETERRED BY HIS TYPECASTING, Mickey forged ahead working in films to the point where, amazingly, his output in the 1990s and 2000s was similar to that of the past seven decades. He appeared in twenty-one films between 1990 and the end of the millennium, and another twenty-one in the first decade of the new century. He was on his way to the same number of films in the 2010s, appearing in ten films from 2010 to 2015, including Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb. If we include the seventy-eight shorts he appeared in as Mickey McGuire, Mickey Rooney had appeared in more than four hundred movies in eighty-nine years. By any measure, this is an astounding feat.
Woody Allen once quipped, “Show business is not so much dog eats dog as dog doesn’t return other dog’s phone calls.” Mickey followed Woody’s other piece of sage advice: success also means just showing up. Mickey kept showing up.
Motivational speaker Michael Simkins wrote, “Acting isn’t all about feeling the character and being in the moment. If you can’t get a job, it’s not about much at all. Acting is only possible if somebody’s prepared to sit and watch you do it. To survive emotionally and professionally, you’ve got to both earn a living and nourish your beleaguered self-esteem.”16
An old joke goes: Picture a circus parade moving through town. At the back is an old guy whose job is to shovel the manure from all the circus animals into a big bag slung over his shoulder. A passerby asks him how long he’s been doing the job and how much he gets paid, to which he replies fifty years and fifty dollars a week.
“Well, why on earth don’t you stop doing it and find a better job instead?” asks the passerby.
The old guy says, “What, and give up show business?”
So it was with Mickey Rooney, who had gone from the head of the parade to following the elephants.
26
* * *
* * *
Time May Lie Heavy Between
The Atomic Kid (1954).
PHOTO COURTESY OF ROCKY KALISH.
We were both at a party, a little tipsy and . . . well, it happened.” So begins the story of a former actress we call Mrs. Smith, to conceal her real identity—her long-term spouse is still unaware of her unconventional sixty-five-year love affair with Mickey Rooney, which lasted from the 1940s until his death. She was also his confidante, pen pal, friend, and possibly the only person to whom Mickey unlocked his deepest secrets, desires, and fears.
Throughout Mickey’s different marriages (from his second wife, B.J., through Jan), Mickey had one constant thread, his relationship with Mrs. Smith, who is still alive today and, until we spoke to her, had lived under a self-imposed vow of silence concerning her decades-long affair with Mickey. In return for our promise of anonymity, she has provided us the intimate details of her unconventional love affair.
Mrs. Smith told us:
I had known Mickey during the 1940s, even prior to my marriage. He was not my physical type. However, he was terrific fun to be with. I became sexually involved with Mickey between his divorce of B.J. and his marriage to Mart. Mickey is a very caring and passionate lover. While we never considered a relationship beyond clandestine meetings and correspondence, it also was a friendship like no other. We were able to tell each other our deepest secrets and confidences, which we have done for over sixty years. We never had a scheduled time or meeting setup; it just happened . . . well, when it happened. Whenever we could sneak away. While the sexual aspect eventually was not the focus, we remained almost soul mates. I heard about the travails with his flavor of the year, and I was able to unload my problems. We both listened and commented. It was actually better than being in psychoanalysis. Mickey was not his usual manic self, he listened and cared. We sometimes talked on the phone, and many times we corresponded. We never sent any letters to our homes; we were very careful. We were in contact until shortly before his death, when his daughter-in-law, [whom] he was living with, cut us off.1 (That would have been Charlene Aber, who might have believed she was protecting Mickey.)
Mrs. Smith and Mickey led their own separate lives, burying their relationship deep beneath the social conventions as their paths crossed in the comings and goings of the movie industry. “I was around Mickey in many social occasions as well,” Mrs. Smith said. “I was at a party at Judy Garland’s home, where we were all drinking. Mickey and Judy headed off to the bedroom and returned very disheveled. We knew they had slept together. Mickey was incredible at parties—he was everything, playing the piano, singing. He always left with a girl, sometimes even if he was with his current flavor.”
Mrs. Smith was friends with Martha Vickers, and told us, “She was a notorious drinker and would humiliate him. He was on the downward spiral, and she simply looked at him like a loser. He knew that, and it hurt him.”
Regarding his wife Elaine, who took money from him to help her first husband pay off his gambling debts, Smith said, “She loved her first husband. Mickey could provide for her, and that is what she was after. They never had kids as she was into herself. She squeezed him dry.”
Barbara Ann Thomason was different, Mrs. Smith believed. Mickey tried to commit himself to her, had children with her, and was traumatized at her murder. “He truly loved her,” Mrs. Smith said. “I thought they had a happy family for a while. For a while, he seemed content. I never met her killer, but I know he betrayed Mickey. [Mickey] was a literal mess when she was killed. It was a bad period for him.”
Of Marge, Barbara’s best friend, whom Mickey married shortly after the double murder, Smith told us, “Mickey was like a lost boy,” a widower as well as a divorced man with children and a career he was hanging onto in desperation because it defined him. Marge was Mickey’s nearest port in a storm, Smith said, possibly because “she looked like his mother. I think he wanted a mother then.” At the very least, Mickey was seeking a mother for his four children with Barbara.
Carolyn was different, said Smith. She was not Hollywood, not in the business, and his marriage to her, short as it was, had become almost like a respite—until he was bored and his old demons resurfaced. “He met her in Florida. She wanted him to live there. He was just trying to run away from Hollywood and wanted to hide. I never met her, and he just hated to be alone.”
By the time he met Jan at Ruth Webb’s, Rooney was looking at the promise of stability. Of Jan, Mrs. Smith said, “I have met her and found her to be very possessive. However, you have got to hand it to her. He certainly settled down with her. We had dinner with her several times. They were like any couple and had their disagreements, but that’s natural.”
Mickey was very open in his letters to Smith, who read us some passages from his correspondence with her. Not love letters per se, they were filled with recollections and sometimes anger, but always Mickey in his own, heretofore unpublished words:
March 1950: “[S]he [Martha Vickers] could hardly stand up when I came home. After I’m at the studio all day, and the kid is there, I don’t need to be a nanny.”
June 1958, referring to Barbara Ann and specifically to her attempted suicide by an overdose of pills: “[T]hanks for your concern. She is all right. I just don’t want to get trapped again. They use my house as if it’s their house to party.”
February 1966: “I appreciate both of your calls and help. I appreciate ‘Mr. Smith’s’ kind assistance. . . . [T]his has been the biggest nightmare and it never seems to end. . . . I’d like to meet sometime soon. . . . [P]lease call me . . . I miss being close to you—I can still smell your scent.”
“I think I saw a side of Mickey that he revealed to no one else,” Smith said. “He was very romantic, kind; he had a very nostalgic sense; an
d I was able to experiment sexually with him that I couldn’t with my husband. He was very athletic. Very. He was quite inventive . . . and yes, he was very well endowed. I don’t know if it was proportionate, but he could choke you with that . . .”
She continued: “Also, we lent him money over the years, and much of it was never repaid. We just chalked it up to Mickey. He did give Mr. Smith his start.”
The years wore on, but Mickey continued to regard Mrs. Smith as his close confidante, revealing to her his disappointment that the life he had enjoyed when they first met in the 1940s was gone and that age had caught up with him. They stopped seeing each other when he was in his nineties, even though they were still writing. She told us that she attempted to contact Mickey just before his death.
“While we were in some communication, I was virtually locked out of his life after all the problems,” she said. “It was as if the family crying for him had put a wall up between Mickey and the outside world. I tried several times but was thwarted each time. Just before his death, I attempted to send a car for him to bring him back to our house. I believe it was his daughter-in-law that said that he was not interested. I cannot believe that for one minute. At no time had Mick ever told me about abuse or anything like that. I learned about that on the news. He always told me how content he was.”
In one letter to Smith, Mickey wrote, “As always, I miss you my dear. As we get older, I begin to forget this or that. But don’t think for a minute that I ever forget about us. Sometimes I look around, as I think I become aware of your scent.”
“As with everyone else,” she told us, “I heard about his death on the news. I was crestfallen. My heart broke. I remember all of our good times, our closeness, our being intimate for over sixty years. I felt I lost a piece of myself with his death.”
27
* * *
* * *
The Last Years
Timmy and Mickey at the Academy Awards, where Mickey received his Honorary Award for lifetime achievement.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE DAN KESSEL ARCHIVE, © DAN KESSEL PRODUCTIONS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Shortly after Mickey turned eighty, his cardiologist discovered two artery blockages. They were revealed with a new CAT scan device called InsideTrac, which allows early-stage disease detection. The machine scans the body, much as an X-ray would, then produces a three-dimensional computerized view of the internal organs to determine if there are artery blockages or cancers. (Rooney later became the national spokesman for InsideTrac, promoting the device as a potential life saver.) Further hospital tests confirmed his ailment, and he was operated on December 20, 2000.1
Rooney underwent the three-and-a-half-hour double bypass surgery at Los Robles Hospital and Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, California. Recovering over Christmas, he spent his time revising his cabaret act with Jan. When a reporter asked him if he thought he might retire, he responded, “My motto is ‘Never retire but inspire.’ ”2
During his last three decades, Mickey could rely upon stable support group, a team that included Kevin Pawley, his manager for his last twenty-five years. (Mr. Pawley, who is suffering from a very serious illness, was too ill to be interviewed for this book.) Also on the team were Jan’s son Christopher Aber and Mickey’s manager and agent for the last three decades, Robert Malcolm.
Attorney Michael Augustine, who handled Mickey’s estate and conservatorship, provided us in our interview with an intriguing perspective on the latter third of Mickey’s career, telling us that a web of conflicting family members actually worked to Mickey’s detriment, even though they were, ostensibly, working for him. Augustine said that, over the years he worked for Mickey, he found that his client’s life was “populated with some of the most colorful and persistent prevaricators I’ve ever seen in my life.” Bolstering his claims of chicanery in Mickey’s management circle, he told us, are “court documents, agreements, documentary evidence.” He also said that the conflict between Chris and Mark Aber, Jan’s sons, whom Augustine referred to as “like Cain and Abel” because of their hostility toward each other, also worked to Mickey’s disadvantage. Jan Rooney also told us that the conflict between Chris and Mark went back years, forcing her to take sides even when it broke her heart. She said she was unclear over what started the conflict, but it metastasized over the years and got worse when Mickey’s conservator moved him out of her house, they agreed to a separation, and Mickey took up residence with her son Mark.
Augustine told us that with the management of Mickey basically divided between Chris and Mark, he held a meeting with Jan, asking her to choose between Mickey and her son Chris. He told her, “There are two ways this dance can go.” Jan should go to the Mickey camp and stand by his side. Instead, he said, she sided with Chris, over Mark and Mickey. Mickey accused Chris and Jan of pilfering money from him and abusing him in the process. That came to an end, Augustine said, when the court granted custody of Mickey to Mark Aber and his wife. “As soon as he moved in with Charlene and Mark, all that stopped,” Augustine said, referring to what he believed was the physical, psychological, and financial abuse of Rooney.
Mickey sorely needed the advice of a top-notch business manager. While his wealthy friends Donald Trump and Terry Allen Kramer made attempts to advise him on investments, he needed someone solely looking out for the interests of him and his estate, rather than making risky investments to maximize profit.
Mickey’s second bankruptcy occurred in 1996, when it turned out that he owed about $1.75 million to the IRS and the State of California. Where his accountants were in this mess is unclear. However, Mickey and Jan feared losing their Westlake Village home, were it to be seized by the tax authorities to pay off their obligations. While bankruptcy would not erase the IRS debt—federal taxes are generally exempt from bankruptcy protection—the Rooneys’ declaration was more of a restructuring of their finances. This raises the same perplexing question: Since the debut of Sugar Babies in 1979, Mickey had been earning a huge yearly income from salary and residuals (seventy thousand dollars a week at its height). He had a television series, The Adventures of the Black Stallion, which ran for three years and was an international hit. His stage appearances after Sugar Babies were earning him a hefty salary (around fifty thousand dollars per week). He no longer had alimony; his previous wives were either remarried or deceased. Nor did he have child support; his biological children were now grown. Nor did he have a mother’s lifestyle to maintain; Nell had passed away. It was theoretically just Mickey and Jan. Their lifestyle was not like that of Sinatra, who had a jet and flew all over the world. One would have expected he could live comfortably on his savings and continuing earned income. But Mickey had lived way beyond his means, invested in wild business schemes that always failed, gambled, and spent without regard to his earnings until there was simply nothing left and what was coming in went to pay past obligations.
Despite our efforts, we couldn’t find any records that could definitively show the ways Mickey blew through tens of millions of dollars. No one could show us the money, not even the people who were paying him. Sure, he made some bad investments, particularly in race horses. However, his poor business decisions were never substantial enough to bleed him dry. And several of those decisions involved him lending his name rather than dollars. In fact, he even used other people’s money on some schemes, such as his Weenie World, in which Terry Allen Kramer admitted investing ten thousand dollars, money that evaporated with the business’s failure.
When asked where the money went, many people, such as Donald Trump, Terry Allen Kramer, Robert Malcolm, Ray Courts, Sidney Miller just shrugged their shoulders and look perplexed. Even Night at the Museum director Shawn Levy, who directed Rooney only one month before his death and paid him “in the low six figures,” wondered how the star could have ended up in what his conservator described as poverty. Rooney’s daughter Kelly told us that when she talked to him in 2011, he told her that he had no money for food or clothing and he was even gluing his shoe
s together.
Chris Aber told us, “Mickey could just not be controlled. It was his money, and he eschewed any advice. He made the final decision. The problem was, despite rarely making money, he listened to shady guys, con men and leeches who gave him ideas to make money. He forgot to pay taxes; he would spend without any controls and freely, as fast as he made it.”
However, according to court documents filed by attorney Michael Augustine, Chris had managed Mickey’s financial affairs since 1998, after Mickey’s bankruptcy. In other words, Augustine said, the financial records showed that Mickey’s finances were handled only by Chris Aber.
WHILE MICKEY CONTINUED HIS film work, he also made appearances on a mix of TV shows, such as The Love Boat; Mike Hammer; The Golden Girls; Norm; Full House; The Simpsons; ER; and Murder, She Wrote. He remained a hot commodity, and television networks brainstormed to create a vehicle for him, such as the series ten years earlier called O’Malley, in which Mickey was to be a tough New York private detective.
In 1999, Gail Radley’s novel The First of May—a poignant story of a foster child who finally finds a friend in an elderly woman in a nursing home, and the two of them go off to join the circus—provided the backdrop for a meeting of two icons, Mickey and baseball legend Joe DiMaggio. The novel was adopted for a small low-budget motion picture by director Paul Sirmons, who filmed it in Orlando, Florida, in December of that year, assembling an eclectic cast of older actors, including Julie Harris, television’s Charles Nelson Reilly, and Mickey Rooney as the circus owner who takes in the unlikely couple. This memorable film, now a favorite of Rooney and Julie Harris fans, won several honors, but it is also notable because it features the final appearance of Yankee baseball Hall-of-Famer Joe DiMaggio, as a mysterious stranger who encourages the young foster boy to chase his dreams. The film was completed just a few months before DiMaggio’s death in March 1999 and was released at the time of his passing.
The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney Page 48