Mickey Rooney

The Full Biography

Mickey Rooney. Actor. The Brooklyn vaudeville child who became Andy Hardy, outlived the studio that made him, and kept taking work until the work was a Senate hearing.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a short dynamo in an MGM musical, hat tipped, talking a room into putting on a show, or Andy Hardy in a small-town kitchen getting a talking-to from Lewis Stone. The year is 1939, or 1940, or any Saturday the studio still owned the country’s afternoon. What the still cannot show is Joseph Yule Jr. of Brooklyn, onstage before he could talk, a partner the factory paired with Judy Garland until the pairing had used her up, and a man who was still taking parts in his nineties and then flew to Washington to say, under oath, that he had been owned again.

He was born on September 23, 1920, in Brooklyn, to vaudevillians. His father, Joe Yule, was a Scottish-born comic. His mother, Nellie Carter, had come out of Kansas City as a chorus girl. The marriage was a circuit, not a house. The child was in the act at seventeen months — a prop in a tuxedo, then a performer. When the parents split, Nellie took him west. Hollywood in the middle 1920s needed children who could already hit a mark. He became Mickey McGuire in a long run of shorts borrowed from a comic strip, and then, when the strip’s owners objected, Mickey Rooney. The name was a billing that ate the birth name. The first pressure is a child who learns that love and a laugh from the dark are the same sound.

The door was not a single premiere. It was a decade of shorts, then Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream on film in 1935, Rooney as Puck at fourteen, a sprite the camera could not quite contain. MGM knew what it had. In 1937 he played Andy Hardy in A Family Affair. The picture was a B that became a civic habit. Sixteen Hardy films followed. Judge Hardy. The small town. The heart-to-heart in the study. America decided this boy was its boy. From 1939 through 1941 he was the top box-office star in the world, a sentence that still surprises people who only know the late talk-show guest. The factory had a face. It used it.

The musicals with Judy Garland are the other climate. Babes in Arms (1939) — his first Oscar nomination. Strike Up the Band. Babes on Broadway. Girl Crazy. The plot was always a barn and a show and a girl who could sing the country’s heart out while the boy sold the tickets. The studio used them as a pair until the hours, the pills, and the next call time had done to her what they do. He kept working. That sentence is not an accusation dressed as a biography. It is the difference in two metabolisms the same shop employed. She became a wound the culture still argues about. He became a man who did not know how to stop. Both are in the file. The factory is the author of the worst of it.

He could also do the room without a song. Boys Town (1938), opposite Spencer Tracy, brought a special Juvenile Academy Award. Young Tom Edison (1940) was Metro’s idea of American virtue with a boy’s face on it. The Human Comedy (1943). National Velvet (1944), with a twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor and a horse, is the picture a certain kind of viewer still loves without irony: Rooney as Mi Taylor, the once-jockey who knows what a race costs. He was drafted that year. He served, entertained troops, and came home to a town that had begun to want a different boy. The Hardy series could not be a life. The musicals thinned. Killer McCoy (1947) tried to make him a fighter. Quicksand (1950) and Drive a Crooked Road (1954) put him in cheap crime, a short man in trouble, which is closer to the adult life than the Hardy kitchen. The 1950s were pictures and television and a living, not a coronation. The Bold and the Brave (1956) brought another Oscar nomination. Blake Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) gave him Mr. Yunioshi, a yellowface landlord the culture now correctly files as a wound. The part is in the career. It is not the career. He took it. The town that hired him for it has spent sixty years pretending the hire was only his idea. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) packed him into a farce. Disney hired him as Lampie in Pete’s Dragon (1977), a lighthouse keeper with a drunk’s wobble and a father’s fear. He voiced roles, took television movies, and did not pretend any of it was Andy Hardy. The point was the next call time. The point had always been the next call time.

The second life arrived in 1979, in two rooms at once. Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion cast him as Henry Dailey, a horse trainer who teaches a boy and a wild animal how to be a race. The Academy nominated him for Supporting Actor. The same season he opened on Broadway in Sugar Babies with Ann Miller, a burlesque revue that ran for years and made him a New York star at an age when child stars are supposed to be a problem. In 1981 the television film Bill, about a man with an intellectual disability trying to live on his own, brought an Emmy and a Golden Globe. In 1983 the Academy gave him an Honorary Award. The boy from the shorts had outlasted the studio system by a generation and was still, somehow, employed.

He also barnstormed the work the columns treated as filler. British pantomime put him in Aladdin and other Christmas halls, a vaudeville child back in a live room. Television movies through the 1980s and 1990s — holiday pictures, family films, a guest shot whenever a producer needed a name that still meant “show” — paid what the studio pension did not. He did The Fox and the Hound as a voice. He did talk shows as a sport. He could still tap. He could still sell a line. The metabolism that made Andy Hardy did not become a costume at eighty. It became a way of not knowing how to sit still in a house with no audience.

Always get married in the morning. That way if it doesn't work out, you haven't wasted the whole day.Mickey Rooney

He used that joke for decades. He had the marriages to prove he meant the timing. Eight of them. The first, in 1942, was Ava Gardner, nineteen to his twenty-one, a union the columns treated as a prize and the two of them treated as a year. Then Betty Jane Rase, Martha Vickers, Elaine Devry, Barbara Ann Thomason — who was murdered in 1966 by a lover who then killed himself — then Marge Lane, Carolyn Hockett, and Jan Chamberlin, whom he married in 1978 and separated from in 2012. The joke is a defense. The list is the file. Children came from the marriages and had to share a father who was also a billing.

That is the turn, and it is easy to miss because the public remembers Andy Hardy. The turn is not a single comeback. It is the refusal to treat the end of MGM as the end of the occupation. Other child stars became a caution or a silence. He became a man who took the next job: a horse picture, a burlesque, a television film, a cameo, a voice, Night at the Museum in 2006 beside Dick Van Dyke, a bit in The Muppets in 2011. Nearly nine decades. More than three hundred credits. The energy that made Andy Hardy was not a costume. It was a metabolism that did not know another trade.

The children — among them Mickey Jr., Tim, and Teddy — have had to share a father the public still addresses as a teenager. Friends from the MGM years describe a professional who could do a take, a song, and a somersault before lunch, and who did not always know what to do with an evening that had no audience. Jan Chamberlin was the last wife and, in the final years, part of the legal weather that sent him to Washington. On March 2, 2011, before the Senate Special Committee on Aging, he said he had been stripped of the ability to make even basic decisions, and that the daily fact of it was unbearable. He did not name names on the record that day. Court papers did. A conservator took the finances. He kept working until the body stopped offering the next call time.

The later years

The last quarter-century was the habit made visible. He toured Sugar Babies after Broadway, took the burlesque to rooms that still wanted a live comic, and kept a tuxedo in working order. Television movies and holiday pictures paid the bills the studio pension never quite covered. In 2006 Shawn Levy’s Night at the Museum cast him as Gus, a night guard beside Dick Van Dyke and Bill Cobbs. He came back for Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014), shot when he was ninety-three. A cameo in The Muppets (2011) was a wave from the old shop. He did not treat any of it as a farewell. He treated it as Thursday.

Home, in those years, was a modest house in the San Fernando Valley weather, not a compound. Jan Chamberlin was still the legal wife until the separation in 2012. Stepson Christopher Aber became the weather of the household in a different sense. On March 2, 2011, Rooney sat before the Senate Special Committee on Aging and said he had been stripped of the ability to make even basic decisions — where he went, what he ate, whether he had a dollar. He did not name names on that record. Court papers did. A conservator took the finances that same year and called him competent. The last public work was not a cameo. It was a hearing. He had come out of a vaudeville trunk and an MGM contract. He told the Senate he had been owned again.

He kept taking parts until the body stopped offering the next mark. Friends from the old lot describe a man who could still hit a laugh on the first take and who did not know what to do with an evening that had no audience. The children — Mickey Jr., Tim, Teddy, and the rest of a long list — had to share a father the public still addressed as a teenager. The estate, when the accountants finished, was small. Fame had been the income. The income had not stayed.

He died on April 6, 2014, at his son Mark’s house in North Hollywood. He was ninety-three. The cause was ordinary: age, a body that had been working since 1922. Hollywood Forever took the remains. The country ran the Hardy clips, the Garland numbers, a few seconds of the horse trainer by the sea, and, if a producer was honest, a few seconds of a small old man at a Senate table. The transcript is a poorer clip. It is the truer last act.

After he was gone

Andy Hardy still plays on a certain kind of Sunday. The Garland musicals still teach what a studio could do with two children and a barn. The Black Stallion still looks like a man who knew horses and silence. The Yunioshi footage is a wound the picture has not been allowed to heal by cutting him out of the rest of the life. Nine decades of work is the pile. The hearing is the correction. The factory is the climate.

He came out of a vaudeville trunk, took a comic-strip name, became America’s boy, sang with Judy, raced a horse with Elizabeth Taylor, lost the studio, married eight times, came back on Broadway, taught a boy to ride in a 1979 picture, and told the Senate he had been helpless in his own house. If you only remember Andy Hardy, you have the still. If you remember Puck, the 1979 season, and the hearing, you have him.

Portrait: Studio publicity still · Public domain (PD US not renewed) · via Wikimedia Commons

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