After Andy Hardy
I. E.: The Autobiography of Mickey Rooney.
by Mickey Rooney.
Putnam. 256 pp. $4.95.
For a great many Americans now in their thirties and early forties, the notion of what being a teenager was all about derived from the Andy Hardy movies. From the vantage point of those plush chairs in those nutty old baroque movie houses, they shared vicariously in the adventures of young Andy, as played by Mickey Rooney, and to a large extent they accepted his middle-class version of the reality of growing up in middle-class America. It was a time before hangups were fashionable; people in those days may indeed have suffered nervous breakdowns, developed ulcers from money worries, and had heart attacks, but one would never have guessed it from the Andy Hardy movies. Nor did the series betray any hint of the fact that kids might have had pimples, hated their parents, or were itching to get their hands under the sweater of that blonde cheerleader—played by Lana Turner.
As for Andy Hardy himself, he experienced no conflicts, troubles, or even problems; instead, he was beset by little difficulties. A typical sexual difficulty, for example, might consist of how to get the convertible top of his car to stay down while he was trying to park it on lover’s lane; a social difficulty, of how to get the Judge’s (his father’s) tux altered in time for the Spring prom. Andy was forever getting into these fixes. In one episode, he bought a jalopy on the installment plan from a used-car dealer. When he discovered he couldn’t meet the payments—which totaled all of seven dollars a month—he had no recourse but to go to his father for help. After a gentle reprimand and a man-to-man talk about economics, the Judge agreed to lend him the money, though he made it clear, needless to say, that Andy would have to repay the loan by doing extra little jobs around the house.
The Andy Hardy movies, then, were fantasies portraying life as simple and people as fundamentally good; if a problem did crop up—well, one could always turn to the Judge. It was all very unreal, of course, but in those days one could at least hope that it might be real, or, at any rate, it was easier to suspend one’s disbelief about it. Cancer, in those days, was not yet a word guaranteed to still conversation in any room; psychoanalysis was still something to joke about; and our theologians talked about sin instead of “the precarious balance of nuclear terror.” It is a sign of the great changes in American life since then that the very thought of reviving the Andy Hardy series at this time is almost inconceivable. Today, alas, the films would have to have titles like Andy Hardy, Junkie; or Andy Hardy, Unwed Father.
By way of documentation of the unreality of the American middle-class fantasy that was incorporated into the Andy Hardy movies, we now have Mickey Rooney’s Autobiography. Andy Hardy was played by Mickey, but in real life (if you’ll pardon the expression) Mickey never played Andy Hardy; most decidedly, Mickey did not take the Judge’s advice to heart. Mr. Rooney’s life does almost too much violence to the fantasy of Andy Hardy. It is painful to think of Andy Hardy, that nice young man from across the street, having to face a life of multiple divorces, trouble with the Internal Revenue, bankruptcy, professional failure, and excessive loneliness.
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Andy Hardy was a boy of another time; Mickey Rooney comes closer to being a man of our own. As chronicled in the pages of this likable autobiography, his fall is exceptional not so much because Mr. Rooney is so exceptional a man, but because he fell from so far up. Until this point in his life, his ruin seems not so much monumental as pretty nearly complete—which is just about the condition of the fantasy of the Andy Hardy movies.
Mr. Rooney’s life has been lived within a show-business context; he has known no other. Sired by a burlesque-show “top banana” out of a chorus-line “end pony,” he was christened Joe Yule, Jr., after his father. The earliest years of his life were spent in that sleazy milieu that has since come to be sentimentalized into the good old days of show biz: the long, dull train rides, the bad food cooked over sterno cans, and the other niceties of rooming-house living. After his parents separated, his mother, a self-starter if ever there was one, took the boy out to Hollywood with her. She hired an agent for her son, who now became, in Hollywood parlance, “a property.” It wasn’t long before the young “property” latched on to his first “vehicle,” the role of Mickey McGuire in the Mickey McGuire series; he played a kid in short pants who went around in a derby, with a cigar stub stuck in his face. Shortly thereafter, his name was changed to Mickey McGuire for the profound reason that it enabled the hustlers who produced the series to keep from paying royalties to the cartoonist who created the comic-strip character of the same name. To accommodate new roles, his name was changed again, this time legally, to Mickey Rooney. “My very name,” he comments, “is the product of publicity.”
He soon became a very valuable “property” indeed. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio for which he did the Andy Hardy movies, was no slum landlord. As long as Mickey Rooney made money for them, he was carefully tended. He was sent to a special school for show business children. A classmate was Judy Garland, the Fabulous Judy, the wreckage of whose life was later to amount to as sad a pile of debris as his own. While still in his teens, Mr. Rooney was earning as much as $300,000 a year. (This at a time when actors did not get contracts that allowed them a cut of the gross, as they do now.) Metro provided a Vice President for him, a sort of superintendent on the premises whose job it was to watch over the increasingly valuable “property.” And the young Mr. Rooney needed watching. He breezed around Los Angeles in a red convertible; he was a sack-artist of no mean pretensions; though still too young to drink legally, he frequented nightclubs and prevailed upon older friends to sneak him shots in the john.
The first phase of Mr. Rooney’s fall was marked by his marriage to Ava Gardner. It was his first failure and the responsibility, he concedes, was his own. What attracted him to Miss Gardner, aside from her magnificent good looks, was her aloofness, her absolute cool in the presence of so renowned a star as himself. She was nineteen, he was twenty-one; she had just arrived in Hollywood, he had been established there for years; she was a country girl from North Carolina, he was a cosmopolitan millionaire. Miss Gardner, evidently, was insufficiently impressed by the contrast. He went after her with all the resources available to a young Hollywood squire. Finally, after months of employing what he calls a “full-court press,” she agreed to marry him. Metro didn’t approve of the match; the thought of Andy Hardy slipping between the sheets nightly with so elegant a lady as Miss Gardner, they felt, would not further endear him to the folks in Keokuk. But over the long haul it didn’t much matter. Soon after, having put up with the most outrageous husbandly behavior, Miss Gardner wanted—and got—out of the marriage. Even now, Mr. Rooney seems not to have completely gotten over her.
Mr. Rooney’s marriage to Miss Gardner was the first of six marriages. “When I proposed to Ava,” he tells us, “I was almost unconscious with passion, when I proposed to Betty Jane [Rase] I was almost unconscious with booze, when I proposed to Martha [Vickers] I was almost unconscious with despair, and when I proposed to Elaine [Mahnken] I was almost unconscious period.” Rooney bears these women little malice; Miss Gardner excepted, he has almost no regrets. One’s sense of the graciousness he displays toward his ex-wives is heightened when one discovers how badly some of these ladies have taken him in divorce settlements. The following, for example, is what his fourth wife, Miss Mahnken, took away from their childless marriage:
“The house in Studio City.
The house in Lake Arrowhead.
All the furniture.
The motorboat.
The Chrysler.
The horses.
Assorted jewelry.
Five thousand dollars cash.
My agreement to pay her $21,000
a year for ten years.”
Why has Mr. Rooney married so often? He claims it is because of his fear of solitude, because he cannot stand being alone. However, it would be more precise to say he could not stand being alone while his career came tumbling down around him. His wives did not constitute the whole of the wrecking crew. There were also the idiot investments, the bad agents, the obsessive gambling. At one point, a Baltimore hustler lent him a lot of money and, when Mr. Rooney entered the Army during World War II, lent his mother even more. When he returned, the hustler announced that the two of them were now in business together. Rooney thereupon left Metro and set up an independent production company with his new partner. It flopped. When he returned to Metro, hat in hand, Dore Schary was presiding, and busy ushering out the end of the star system. Rooney began to get bad parts, and there were few even of these. And this headlong descent was punctuated by costly divorces. One day he looked up and discovered he was bankrupt. He had run through twelve million dollars! A friend was appointed to inform him that, “public-relations-wise,” it would probably be a good idea for him to stay away from Academy Award dinners.
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The last section of Mr. Rooney’s Autobiography recounts his slight comeback of recent years. Television, which he recognizes for the mediocrity it is, saved him. A few years back he played in a Rod Serling TV script entitled The Comedian, and people were reminded of what had been true all along—that he is a capable actor. Since then, his parts and paychecks have been increasing. Through it all, Mr. Rooney has somehow survived. Now forty-six years old and balding, he is a tough little guy, and one would have to be heartless not to wish him well. As for Andy Hardy, I prefer to believe that he died somewhere on the beach at Corregidor after single-handedly wiping out a machine-gun nest and then throwing himself on a hand grenade in order to save his buddies. May he rest in peace.
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