Mickey Rooney

Ava Gardener, The Killers, 1946, the film that made her a star. — Ava Gardner, The Killers, 1946, the film that made her a star.

MGM’s roster of female stars constituted the greatest collection of beautiful and talented women the world has ever known.

One of the greatest was Ava Gardner.

As an emerging starlet in the early 1940’s, before she made a single movie the breathtaking Southern beauty was the talk of the town.

Mickey Rooney was MGM’s golden boy, a versatile star equally adept at musicals, comedy and drama. His signature role as the small-town youngster Andy Hardy made him something of a cash cow for the studio. The Hardy movies were cheap to produce and earned enormous profits.

In his compulsively readable autobiography, Life is Too Short, Rooney claims that his mother worked as a prostitute in order to put food on the table during the depths of the Depression. Thus, it’s not surprising that Rooney pursued women with an obsessive compulsion, seeking affection and love in all the wrong places: call girls, ambitious actresses and mature women–including Irving Thalberg’s widow Norma Shearer–were smitten by Rooney’s brash boyish charm.

Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Love Finds Andy Hardy, 1938. — Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in *Love Finds Andy Hardy*, 1938.

At five feet, two inches, he was the biggest star in the world.

Mickey Rooney (born Joseph Yule, Jr.) was probably the most talented star Hollywood ever produced. His astonishing career started in the silent era as a child actor. Rooney made the transition to sound with ease, and his career saw work in radio, television and Broadway. Rooney popularity reached a fever pitch in the late 1930s and 1940s. Rooney did it all. As Puck in Max Reinhardt’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) the fifteen year-old Rooney dazzled with unrestrained energy. Of course, Rooney and Judy Garland added to the American lexicon of optimism and generosity when they exclaimed, “Hey kids, lets put on a show!”

In Boys Town (1938) Rooney is a strutting, hard-shelled delinquent who ultimately reveals his vulnerabilities with choking sobs that are the template for the eternally mixed-up adolescent. Without Mickey Rooney there would have been no James Dean.

As Andy Hardy, Rooney, the small-town kid with a big heart would, at a strategic point in Act III, turn to his father, Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone)—a judge who was proud to judge others—and say: “Pop, can I talk to you, man-to-man?”

Mickey Rooney

Hidden Hollywood: Ava Gardner and Mickey Rooney’s Wedding Night

In Memoriam: Mickey Rooney, 1920-2014