This Day in Film History (Mickey Rooney, Energetic, Enduring Entertainer, Born)

Sept. 23, 1920—Mickey Rooney, who, with an infectious smile and boundless energy, entertained millions of Americans—not to mention eight wives— in nine decades, was born Joseph Yule Jr. in Brooklyn, NY, to vaudevillian parents.

Rooney first came to the attention of film fans in a series of two-reel silent shorts playing “Mickey McGuire.” At age 14, at his mother’s suggestion, he changed it to Mickey Rooney—at just the moment when his career was about to skyrocket.

He may have been short (some contested even his listed height of five feet three inches), but Rooney made sure you never overlooked him. He could sing, dance, joke, and, audiences would discover, act in serious drama.

A strong hint of his magnetism could be seen in Warner Brother’s 1935 adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where, amid an impressive cast (James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, Dick Powell, Joe E. Brown, Frank McHugh), the 15-year-old stole the show as the impish sprite Puck.

But he really made his mark at MGM, where, from 1939 through 1941, he was the nation’s number-one box-office draw—even replacing the studio’s “King,” Clark Gable, in that slot. His most prominent role, the prototypical all-American boy, Andy Hardy, earned him a special Juvenile Oscar in 1939, and kept him firmly in the public eye in 15 films from 1937 to 1946.

In a blog post from 2009, I related how Rooney appeared with Judy Garland in eight films, and how, in a special promotional blitz for The Wizard of Oz, she simply couldn’t keep up with him. Amazingly, there was still a superabundance of all that energy left over for offscreen pursuits.

In his later years, Rooney joked about his penchant for going to divorce court (six times, to go with eight marriages). But most often, his rampant infidelity caused these trips.

The template for what would follow was his marriage to Ava Gardner. In the late 1980s, a few years before she died, she told would-be ghostwriter Peter Evans, in an interview later collected in Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations (2013), about her initial impressions of him:

“He wasn’t what I’d call a handsome may-an, and his shortness surprised me, but there was definitely something appealing about him. He had thick, red-blond wavy hair, crinkly Irish green eyes, and a grin that was … well, it definitely wasn’t innocent, honey, I can tell you that!” 

Despite her strong suspicions that he had bedded numerous MGM starlets (including her good friend, Lana Turner), the 19-year-old beauty succumbed to his irresistible charm.

Within a month of their honeymoon and Gardner’s hospitalization for a misplaced appendix, she came home to find “evidence that Mick had been screwing somebody in our bed.” The relationship soon entered a cycle—accusations, denials, reconciliation attempts, then open arguments.  

“Mickey was never going to change his ways,” Gardner explained. “I knew that if I had sued Mick for adultery, and named some of the girls he’d been f-----g, it would have blown his whole Andy Hardy image right out of the water. It could have destroyed his career stone dead. I knew that citing ‘incompatibility’ was the cleanest and fastest route of the marriage.”

The marriage only lasted a year and a half. By this time, Rooney was less concerned with marital conflict than an international one: World War II. He ended up serving 22 months (five of them with Gen. George Patton's famous Third Army), entertaining two million troops on stage and radio, becoming a sergeant and earning a Bronze Star. 

He returned to find his place diminished in postwar Hollywood: with savings depleted by a manager, aging out of his teenage roles.

At a career crossroads, Rooney cast about for other, more adult roles. He made only a couple of films in this new set of circumstances when he was informed his contract was being terminated. 

With his education having been confined to studio tutors, he was ill-prepared for what now greeted him. He gambled, drank, popped pills, and fooled around; his impatience and (according to biographer Richard A. Lertzman) bipolar disorder made him difficult to live with; and his ego prevented him from landing better roles (as I discussed in this post about how he blew the chance to play Archie Bunker in All in the Family).

Still, he kept working, even if it was usually not in a leading role, or even in vehicles not worthy of his talents (How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, appearances on game shows like Hollywood Squares). Occasionally, he could rise to the occasion with a vivid reminder of the greatness still ready to be tapped, as with his blistering portrayal of a beloved TV star who tyrannizes staff and even his own brother in a classic episode of the anthology series Playhouse 90, in the Rod Serling teleplay “The Comedian.”

By 1979, he enjoyed a comeback with his fourth Oscar nomination, for Black Stallion (reminding older moviegoers of a similar role in National Velvet, with Elizabeth Taylor) and a Tony nomination for the burlesque revue Sugar Babies.   

By this time, Rooney was doing his best to settle down, becoming a devout Christian and determined that his eighth marriage would last. But there remained signs of trouble, including a declaration of bankruptcy in 1996.

In 2011, Rooney shocked fans, in a Congressional hearing on elder abuse, when he testified that a stepson had misused his money. Three years later—remarkably, still working, on a movie of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—he died, at age 94.  

Another year and a half would pass before The Hollywood Reporter published allegations of beatings at the hands of his wife Jan (who had often used him to grasp at her own elusive dreams of stardom) and misuse of his earnings by his stepson Chris. (Rooney’s widow sued the publication in 2017.) 

While the exact circumstances of these relationships remain disputed, it is not that the actor died, after a lifetime of nonstop working and the unqualified praise of admirers like Laurence Olivier, Cary Grant, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal, leaving an estate of only $18,000.

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, on Acting Shakespearean Comedy)

“An actor, in order to get Shakespeare's comedy across, has got to roll his eyes, rub his stomach, kick his father in the seat, make his voice crack, and place his finger against the side of his nose. There is a great deal of talk about the vulgarity and slap-stick humor of the movies. If the movies ever tried to put anything over as horsy and crass as the scene in which young Gobbo kids his blind father, or Falstaff hides in the laundry hamper, there would be sermons preached on it in pulpits all over the country. It is impossible for a good actor, as we know good actors today, to handle a Shakespearean low comedy part, for it demands mugging and tricks which no good actor would permit himself to do. If Shakespeare were alive today and writing comedy for the movies, he would be the head-liner in the Mack Sennett studios. What he couldn't do with a cross-eyed man!”—American humorist and actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945), “Looking Shakespeare Over,” in Pluck and Luck (1925)

(The image accompanying this post is of 14-year-old Mickey Rooney as Puck in the all-star 1935 Warner Brothers adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The young sprite—Rooney, that is—made the most of his opportunity to ham it up, much like Benchley envisioned.)

Quote of the Day (Norman Lear, on Almost Casting Mickey Rooney for ‘All in the Family’)

“Before I came out here and met Carroll [O’Connor], I thought about Mickey Rooney playing the role [of Archie Bunker]…. I called his manager, and he said, ‘Oh, Mickey happens to be in the office. Why don’t you talk to him!’ And I said, ‘No, no, this is a character I would rather talk to him about and then have him read,’ and he said, ‘No, no, no.’ Anyway, before I know it, Mickey [was on the phone] talking about himself in the third person. ‘You got the Mick!’ ‘Mickey is gonna be out there, can I see you out there? I’ll be out there Tuesday.’ ‘You got something for the Mick, just tell him!’ I said, ‘Well, he’s a bigot, he’ll say spics and spades and hebes” — and he said, ‘Norm, they’re gonna kill you. They’re gonna shoot you dead in the streets.’ I can never forget this speech. ‘You wanna do something with the Mick? Listen to this: Vietnam vet. Private eye. Short. Blind. Large dog.’”—Norman Lear, creator and producer of All in the Family, interviewed by Kenya Barris in “Two Titans Dish: Norman Lear and Kenya Barris,” Entertainment Weekly, April 7-14, 2017

I normally pick a joke or something else obviously funny for a quote to start the work week. Yet I trust that you reacted in much the same way that I did when I read this recollection by Norman Lear about how he seriously considered casting Mickey Rooney as Archie Bunker in All in the Family: a guffaw at the actor’s self-aggrandizing use of the third person; his cluelessness about the success of the show; and the sheer improbability of MGM’s Andy Hardy playing the first regularly appearing bigot in American sitcom history.

But on further reflection, I think I was unfair to Rooney, and that realization led me to some alternative history about what might have happened if he rather than Carroll O’Connor had been chosen for this role that broke very markedly with the notion of “Father Knows Best.”

First, Rooney was far from alone in questioning the prospects for this path-breaking comedy. Sure, there were people such as director John Rich who saw possibilities in making TV history by working on this show. But ABC network brass rejected the pilot of the show (originally known as Those Were the Days), and even after CBS gave it the green light, that episode repeated the below-average performance on audience tests that ABC had received for it. 

Second, Lear was not simply picking a big name to draw attention to his show by conceiving of Rooney as his star. Despite the actor’s stereotyping from 20 years, off and on, as Hardy, America’s lovable boy next door, he had, when given a chance, shown that he could not only appear to advantage in gritty, downbeat material (e.g., as a trainer in Requiem for a Heavyweight), or even in unsympathetic roles (e.g., in film noir such as Baby Face Nelson).

In particular, Rooney’s turn as a megalomaniac TV star in the Rod Serling/Ernest Lehman-scripted 1957 Playhouse 90 episode The Comedian demonstrated that he was unafraid to risk displeasing a mass audience. 

How well that would have translated to Archie Bunker is another matter. The series’ more than 200 episodes, filled with countless varieties of racial, ethnic and religious slurs, represented shocking stuff nearly 50 years ago. Not everyone appreciated the point of this satire (including a nun in my parochial elementary school, who asked how I could like a show featuring such an awful man).

The dynamics of the show would be quite different had Rooney been cast—most notably, in how Archie was physically envisioned. The same 5-ft., 2-in. frame that had limited Rooney’s possibilities as a movie leading man would also have made TV audiences see, quite literally, Archie’s contention that he was “the little guy.”

Furthermore, the nose-to-nose confrontations between Archie and son-in-law Mike Stivic (played to perfection by O’Connor and Rob Reiner) would have been impossible with Rooney; the advantage enjoyed by “Meathead” would have been a matter of height as well as logic, and would have looked an awful lot like bullying. The temptation would have been enormous for Lear and his writing team to create more jokes playing off Archie’s (now diminutive) size than off his malapropisms.

How physicality can affect perception of a role can be seen in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The original script called for title character Willy Loman to say “I’m short,” a line changed after the casting of burly Lee J. Cobb to “I’m fat.” When Dustin Hoffman played the role 35 years later, Miller went back to his original line. 

O’Connor was so right as Archie Bunker—indeed, Lear says he knew it from the first line reading—that it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone else playing the part. But Mickey Rooney might have brought so much to the role, in terms of audience expectations and physicality, that reactions to the character might have ended up markedly different from what they turned out to be.  

How might Rooney have fared if he had been cast? O’Connor, at the height of the show’s success, stayed off the set for three episodes in a salary dispute with Lear. But there is good reason to think that Rooney would have been far more difficult to handle.

At the show’s premiere, Rooney would have been better known not only than O’Connor—a middle-aged character actor who had made little impression on the public—but also Jean Stapleton, Sally Struthers and even Rob Reiner (still striving to emerge from his father’s shadow). 

Before long, Rooney might have felt entitled to demand a salary commensurate with his status as the show’s biggest draw. His lifestyle might have pushed him even more powerfully in this direction. He was fond of cracking jokes about his multiple divorces (eight, by the time of his death), but the alimony did not help his finances.

Worse still, if that was possible, was his betting on the ponies. In a preface to The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney, Roger Kahn recalled how he couldn’t find him for weeks when they were supposed to be collaborating on the star’s memoir, because the actor was spending his non-working hours at the racetrack. Rooney, given to racking up high debts, might have felt compelled to push for a higher salary on All in the Family to help deal with this issue.

The rest of the cast would also surely have rebelled against his longtime tendency toward scene-stealing—a propensity so strong that Boys Town co-star Spencer Tracy warned the “little snot” that if he tried it in one of their scenes, “I’ll send you to Purgatory.”

Even his initial response to Lear’s crusty protagonist (“Vietnam vet. Private eye. Short. Blind. Large dog”) suggests that Rooney would have pushed for any means to soften, even sentimentalize, this bigot well before these tendencies were well-established for the audience. The point of the satire, then, might have been irretrievably lost.

For all his many gifts as a performer, then, Rooney would have been ill-suited to play Archie Bunker. It is fortunate indeed that Lear found his ideal Archie in O’Connor .

Quote of the Day (Mickey Rooney, on When to Get Married)

"Always get married early in the morning. That way, if it doesn't work out, you haven't wasted a whole day."—Eight-times married Mickey Rooney, from his official Web site

This Day in Film History (Judy & Mickey Put on a Show at “Wizard of Oz” NYC Premiere)

August 17, 1939—For a day, Hollywood’s moviemaking factory turned into a movie promotional factory. With its musical extravaganza of the season, The Wizard of Oz, having already exceeded its $2 million budget by 50%, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—the studio that trumpeted in its motto that it had “more stars than there are in Heaven”—decided to use two of its younger ones to pump up sales.

The Wizard of Oz already had its “unofficial premiere” at the Strand Theatre in Oconomowoc, Wisc., on August 12, and its “world” premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood three days later. Now, MGM had flown Mickey Rooney, the star of its popular “Andy Hardy” series, and Judy Garland, the 17-year-old ingénue with the amazing voice, playing Dorothy on film, to plug The Wizard of Oz in the Big Apple.

I hadn’t realized just how huge an event this premiere was till I read Horatia Harrod’s piece in Britain’s Daily Telegraph nearly two weeks ago. I’ve always thought that the line I stood on for Star Wars when it came out was the most interminable I ever encountered, but that pales next to the details that Harrod unearthed about the one at Loew’s Capitol Theatre in New York for The Wizard of Oz:

* Lines were already forming at 5:30 a.m. outside the theater.

* On the sidewalk outside the 5,230-seat theater, 15,000 people were waiting for the box office to open at 8:30 am.

* Sixty cops exercised crowd control outside MGM’s flagship theater throughout the day.

* By the last performance that evening, 37,000 people had witnessed the movie in that one spot.

MGM wasn’t taking any chances with a movie that, during production, looked snake-bitten (Margaret Hamilton had been sidelined for six weeks because of severe burns from an onset accident, and Buddy Ebsen suffered such a severe reaction to his Tin Man makeup that he’d been forced to withdraw from the role). The double-teaming of Garland and Rooney highlighted two of the studio’s most winning (though not to directors) stars.

With Babes in Arms, the third (out of eight) collaboration between Garland and Rooney, set for release in several weeks, you could almost see the wheels spin in studio honcho Louis B. Mayer’s head: Why not, in effect, beat the publicity drum for two flicks?

A great idea—on the surface. Problem was, the studio was about to demonstrate that the title of a prior Garland-Rooney film, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, was mistaken.

Maybe the most famous exchange from Babes in Arms came when Rooney’s singer-musician character had a brainstorm: “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!”

“We can use my Dad’s barn!” Judy says, matching him every step of the way.

On the set was a bit different.

Rooney wasn’t the problem. The man, then as now, was a force of nature.

But Garland needed special handling—precisely what she wasn’t getting. Keeping up with Rooney during the Babes in Arms shooting had severely taxed her physical resources. Only starting the second year of her career, she was already receiving strong hints from the studio brass that she try diet pills to maintain weight consistency throughout production.

Garland did as she was told, as she now did when MGM wanted her and Rooney to introduce each screening—and perform energetic song-and-dance routines—before each one. The Lowe’s audiences ate it up.

Garland’s run was extended for a third week. It proved too much for the star, who at one point collapsed from exhaustion.

Think this taught MGM a lesson? Think again.

If you want graphic visual evidence of how the studio ran its most valuable female musical-comedy star into the ground, then rent the DVD of Annie Get Your Gun, made a decade later. Betty Hutton was handed the role of Annie Oakley when Garland’s diet-pills-and-amphetamines regimen led to a physical collapse and her withdrawal from the Irving Berlin musical.

Special features of the DVD include Garland’s three outtakes (she’d recorded the vocals in their entirety for the soundtrack already). They’re painful to watch. Time and again, the star attempted another take, but she looked utterly wan, spent and bewildered.

By 1950, five studio doctors were plying her with pills. But Garland’s body could no longer take the stress.

Her refusal to film Royal Wedding led the studio to suspend her for unreliability. The next day, she attempted suicide. Within 24 hours, with the exquisite tact it had shown throughout her tenure at the studio, MGM cited her suicide attempt as a violation of the “morals clause” in her contract and severed the relationship permanently.

Garland would complete only three more films before her death, from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, in 1969.

Babes in Arms, on a budget of $600,000, made its money back and then some, grossing $2 million domestically. The Wizard of Oz did so, too—a decade later. As with It’s a Wonderful Life, it took TV to make the film a permanent part of the American cultural experience.

Like other youngsters in the Sixties and Seventies, I sat transfixed in front of my family’s color TV set for the annual showing of The Wizard of Oz. Much of the time, I peeked through my fingers whenever the Wicked Witch of the West terrified poor Dorothy and Toto. (In real life, Margaret Hamilton was a former kindergarten teacher who adored kids and pets.)

I haven’t seen the film all the way through in at least 35 years. I suspect if I were to do so now, my dominant emotion would not be horror at the Wicked Witch but a sweet-sad feeling of nostalgia over Dorothy’s lost Kansas.

From the first, audiences welcomed “Over the Rainbow” rapturously, along with the line that, in effect, echoes it: “There’s no place like home.”

Years after Judy and Mickey put on their show, the original fans of the movie (and their children, such as myself) grew up to learn that “home” is not only a point in space but a point in time, when the people we have loved were not just here but physically and emotionally whole—and, for that reason, the concept exists now only as a gulp in the throat.