The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney by Richard A. Lertzman & William J. Birnes

Author:Richard A. Lertzman & William J. Birnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

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The Mick, the Duke, and the Deuce in the Coconut

Mickey and his mother Nell dancing at the housewarming party for El Ranchita, their new home in Encino, California, in 1939.

PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBERT EASTON.

By 1949, Mickey had become a vastly different person than the Andy Hardy of the 1930s. No longer a teenager, and now a war veteran and twice divorced, having severed contracts with Metro and Sam Stiefel, he found himself marching in place at the crossroads of his career and his life. He still owed Metro three pictures and had an obligation to complete three independent films with Stiefel, which would satisfy his agreement with the now-defunct Rooney Inc. (He ended up doing only one film for MGM, The Strip.) Also he would receive only a pittance of a salary as part of his negotiated departures. On top of that, as the new decade stared back at him, his new marriage was also quickly foundering on the rocks. As his marital adventures fed the daily tip sheets of the gossip columnists, he was repeating the same script: married but bored and looking around. And while the Rooney name still offered some box office attraction, it was driven mostly by audiences’ ghoulish desire to watch in slo-mo the train wreck that he had become, inhabiting character roles that were no longer the leads he had played fifteen years earlier.

Mickey was a walking time bomb. He was drinking heavily, addicted to Benzedrine to keep up his energy, gambling at accelerated levels, over his head in debt, and according to his personal manager, Nick Sevano, “still fucking anything with a skirt.”1 And he was only twenty-nine years old.

Mickey’s emotional decompensation, one must realize, went far beyond that of today’s young performers acting badly. None of today’s scandal-ridden entertainers command the box office power or garner the public attention that followed Mickey from the late 1940s through 1950. He was the original enfant terrible of the entertainment world. Through the end of his agreement with MGM in 1949, his every want or desire was indulged. Everyone, from Les Peterson to Sam Stiefel to Mort Briskin to his personal entourage of Sid Miller, Sig Frohlich, and Dick Paxton, was there to scratch his every itch. His bad behavior was whitewashed by Howard Strickling and his PR team at Metro. He was horribly irresponsible to his wives and children. He now had two ex-wives and a third divorce inexorably heading toward him like a mudslide along the canyon walls of the Hollywood Hills. He had two sons from his previous marriage whom he would barely acknowledge, but who were desperate for their father’s attention.

While Mickey failed on almost every personal front, there is no disputing his talent as a performer. Even as he began his free fall into minor low-budget films throughout the 1950s, his performances were still right on target. As an evolving character actor, he lent each role the immediately identifiable Rooney energy and credibility that had become his trademark even as his star faded.

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