Spencer Tracy and Mickey in Boys Town (1938).
PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBERT EASTON.
Spencer Tracy and Mickey in Boys Town (1938).
PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBERT EASTON.
After Mickey signed his agreement in August 1934, MGM wasted no time putting him right to work with a slate of motion pictures ready to shoot. Even though his roles were relatively minor at first, he soon started to shine, and garner recognition from critics and fans. His loan-out value had already been established with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Mickey soon accumulated important experience working with A-list actors such as Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Maureen O’Sullivan, Robert Montgomery, William Powell, Jean Harlow, Lionel Barrymore. Spencer Tracy, and the beloved Will Rogers. He also followed the direction of such MGM veterans as Clarence Brown, Woody Van Dyke, Edward Sedgwick, and Victor Fleming.
Mickey hit the ground running with Hide-Out. Though in a sixth-billed part as Willie Miller, he received praise from Variety, which wrote, “Rooney well-nigh steals the picture.” Next up was Chained, directed by Mayer favorite Clarence Brown and starring the hot reteaming of Clark Gable and Joan Crawford. In it, Mickey was billed twenty-second, in a relatively small part, but the movie gave him the chance to appear with two of the top box office stars of the day.
Next for Mickey was a loan-out to the Poverty Row studio Columbia for a quickie called Blind Date. It starred a young Ann Sothern, later the star of the comedy Panama Hattie, and on the 1950s television sitcom Private Secretary; and former silent film star Neil Hamilton, later Commissioner Gordon in the TV series Batman. Mickey was fourth-billed as Freddy Taylor, Sothern’s younger brother. Then he quickly returned to Culver City to film Death on the Diamond, directed by the prolific Eddie Sedgwick. The film starred Robert Young and Madge Evans. Mickey enjoyed doing the baseball-themed film in which he play Mickey, the batboy of the St. Louis Cardinals, a small part once again. “Anytime I got to do a film with sports,” he recalled, “it was a big thrill. They had Ty Cobb on the set as a technical adviser, which was exciting.”1
His next picture, completed in five months during 1934, was the loan-out to Fox The County Chairman, starring the immortal Will Rogers. Mickey is fifth-billed as Freckles, a part that received some good reviews. This would be one of the last films of Rogers’s career before he was killed in an airplane crash with Wiley Post a few months later, in August 1935. Almost sixty years later, Mickey would play Rogers’s father in the Broadway musical The Will Rogers Follies. Mickey recalled that Rogers was very complimentary to him on the first day of shooting, saying, “You handle yourself very well, son . . . You know your lines. You don’t interfere with mine. You know how to have fun with your script. Your performance makes mine better.”2
After A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mickey went directly back to work in Reckless, directed by the macho Victor Fleming (best known for Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz). Reckless, a musical with a score by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, reunited Mickey (in the role of Eddie) with his benefactor, producer David Selznick. The film starred William Powell and Powell’s real-life fiancée, Jean Harlow. It also had Ted Healy, with whom Mickey had appeared in vaudeville. Mickey was then sent on a loan-out to the ultra-low-rent studio Monogram, to take the third lead in The Healer, which starred Ralph Bellamy, one of the popular stars of the 1930s, but perhaps best known to modern audiences for his role in the Eddie Murphy film Trading Places and as Dr. Sapirstein, the Satan-worshipping obstetrician in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby.
In The Healer, Mickey chews up the scenery as Jimmy, a boy who has polio and has lost the use of his legs. This was a convenient part for Mickey because he was still on crutches from his sledding accident. Ralph Bellamy plays the doctor who is committed to helping Jimmy walk again. Jimmy Starr, in the Los Angeles Evening Herald-Express on May 23, 1935, wrote, “When you see Mickey on crutches in “The Healer,” it’s the real thing . . . [L]uckily enough, the producer timed the finish of the film so that Mickey could walk for the final fade-out.” Mickey received strong notices for the role in Film Daily, which on May 28, 1935, wrote, “Rooney plays a prominent role that grabs your heart.” Mickey recalled that “Directors never had to pull any tricks to get me to cry; nobody had to tell me my dog had just died; I’d been crying on cue all my life.”3
Throughout 1935, Mickey continued to move from movie set to movie set at Metro, churning out pictures as if he were an assembly line worker, as the Howard Strickling publicity machine worked overtime to expose him in the media. Along with stories about Mickey’s continued recovery from his broken leg—“No More Sledding for Mickey” (Jimmy Starr, Los Angeles Evening-Herald, February 7, 1935)—Rooney made appearances at several charity events. On April 26 of that year, Louella Parsons reported in the Los Angeles Examiner that “Mickey Rooney and other All-Stars will perform in special skits to benefit the Public School Protective League”; and Harrison Carroll in the Los Angeles Evening Herald-Examiner of May 24 wrote, “Groucho Marx’s thirteen year old son, Arthur, is teamed with Mickey Rooney in a tennis tournament at Midwick Country Club.” Arthur Marx recalled, “Mickey was actually quite a good athlete. He was rather untrained in tennis, but he was a real competitor.”4 Harrison Carroll also reported, on June 20, 1935, that “Clarence Brown will sponsor Mickey Rooney’s football team, which will play at halftime at the professional games here.”
Director Clarence Brown, in addition to sponsoring Mickey’s football team, sought him out specifically for the role of Tommy Miller in his film adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!; Brown had managed to secure Wallace Beery and Lionel Barrymore for roles, too. The play depicts a young man’s coming of age against the tapestry of his family dealing with issues that started well before the play begins, but that come to a head on a July 4 holiday in 1906. The film version was a success. This success, and the relationship between Mickey and Barrymore as his father and Spring Byington as his mother, would spur the development of the 1937 A Family Affair, which would be the first Andy Hardy movie. Ah, Wilderness! was the type of film that pleased Louis B. Mayer, who sought to produce his version of Americana, perhaps as a way for him, as a Jewish immigrant who fled persecution in Russia, to amalgamate himself deep into the American social fabric. As Mickey writes, “Creating this New England utopia was all part of L. B. Mayer’s master plan to reinvent America.”5
Mickey’s final film of 1935 was Riffraff, his first film with Spencer Tracy, in which he plays Jean Harlow’s kid brother. “Harlow was a hoot. She was really down to earth,” Rooney recalled. “I don’t think Spence cared for her that much. She was too blunt.”6
Nineteen thirty-five turned out to be an eventful year for Rooney, with six films under his belt, including his memorable role as Puck in A Midsummers Night’s Dream. Although he was still stuck in mainly secondary parts, he was starting to garner attention. He was also starting to feel comfortable working with some of the greatest actors and directors of the period. Directors such as Clarence Brown and Victor Fleming recognized his skilled professionalism, and sought him out for their upcoming films.
In 1936, David O. Selznick once again requested Rooney for a loan-out—by this time, Selznick had left his father-in-law’s company to set up his own production company, Selznick International Pictures, which was distributed by United Artists. His adaptation of Little Lord Fauntleroy would be his first film. The star of the film was the twelve-year-old English actor Freddie Bartholomew. “He was making five times what I made [about a thousand dollars per week], and I was a bit intimidated,” said Mickey in Life Is Too Short. Rooney played a bootblack named Dick who was a friend of Bartholomew and character actor Guy Kibbee. “I wasn’t jealous, though. He was not stuck up at all. In fact, he was just a regular kid. I got to like Freddie very much. He was a bit younger, but he was always interested in everything I did.” The film was an early success for the budding production company. “The film cost less than a half million to make and cleared Selznick International a profit of two million dollars,” Rooney recalled.
With the success of this film, MGM rushed Rooney into another film in which he again appeared with Bartholomew: The Devil Is a Sissy, directed by Woody Van Dyke. The film costarred another famed child star, Jackie Cooper, already a friend of Mickey’s. Mickey was third-billed, but again garnered strong notices for his work. The New York Times in its September 19, 1936, review of the film, noted, “His is, without question, one of the finest performances of the year.”
The film was yet another success at the box office, and it made a triple return for MGM—it had cost less than four hundred thousand to produce and returned nearly $1.2 million. With all this success, Mickey was starting to feel a bit resentful of the way the studio was working him. “While I was turning big bucks for MGM and they were working me day and night, they were fucking paying me four hundred lousy dollars a week. Sixteen grand a year. Okay, I know gas cost ten cents a gallon then, but they really fucked me. They were squeezing me dry while they were raking in the dollars. I think they made about ten million dollars on the films I did that year, and they never even offered me a bonus or any taste,”7 he recalled. However, Mickey was indeed getting noticed at the studio—and considered more and more important, his parts becoming more central to each succeeding film. A good example of this was his stature at the studio vis-à-vis that of Metro’s Freddie Bartholomew.
Mickey and Freddie made four films together. In the first film, Mickey was in a minor supporting role and Bartholomew was at his peak. By the time they made their last film together, A Yank at Eaton, in 1942, their positions had drastically changed. Mickey was the number one box office attraction in the world, while Bartholomew was badly forgotten. Film historian Alvin Marill noted in his book Mickey Rooney, “Freddie’s career suffered at the hands of Rooney. Perhaps the audiences found the English Bartholomew, initially, as described by Efraim Katz in The Film Encyclopedia, ‘a curly-haired, dimpled, angelic boy star of Hollywood films,’ rather sissified as opposed to rough-and-tumble, swaggering Rooney, but they were great friends as well as rivals on the MGM lot.” Bartholomew later told Alvin Marill, “Mickey and I used to compete for roles. I was under the wing of David Selznick. L.B. apparently wasn’t as enamored with David because of his bent for somewhat more highbrow pictures—taken from classics of British literature, Kipling, Dickens and such—rather than the family fare which Mayer aimed at middle America. I usually ended up playing the dandy, who was the lead, and eventually I kind of grew out of a movie career in my teens.”8 In actuality, the legal problems with his parents, demands for a higher salary by his agents, and his size—he grew to over six feet tall by the time he was sixteen—also played a strong part in Bartholomew’s fall from stardom. By the mid-1940s, he was working at Poverty Row studios such as PRC while Rooney was still a top box office draw.
Mickey’s next film was a low-budget B movie at Warner Bros., Down the Stretch, with Patricia Ellis, in which Mickey was second-billed as jockey Snapper Sinclair. He was then placed in a film that he remembered as one of his favorites, the classic Captains Courageous, which reunited him with director Victor Fleming and costarred Freddie Bartholomew, Spencer Tracy, and Lionel Barrymore. Although his part as Bartholomew’s friend, Dan Troop, was sixth-billed, it was a pivotal role. Mickey recalled, “I learned a lot about playing to the cameras by watching all the great actors around me. I also learned that Spencer Tracy wasn’t like the God-like figure I imagined him to be. He grumbled about having his hair permed every day and put into a hair-net so he would look more like a Portuguese fisherman, and off camera he drank quite a bit.”9 It was a hard shoot, with much of it done in Southern California’s Catalina Channel, off Redondo Beach. “Fleming believed in action; he thought that’s what movies were for. I overheard him telling someone, ‘Hey Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” is great literature but I couldn’t film it to save my life,’ ” Rooney recalled.10 When Captains Courageous came out, Mickey received strong reviews once again, the film was nominated for Best Picture, and Tracy won the Oscar for Best Actor.
Mickey was hitting his stride as he finished Captains Courageous. He was being sought after by the best directors, his films were proving to be big moneymakers for MGM, and he was being recognized as one of the leading juvenile male actors in Hollywood. The next film he was scheduled to shoot, was a “programmer” for director George Seitz. A programmer is another name for a B movie, a low-budget film that is used as part of a double feature to fulfill a studio’s distribution requirements to theater owners. B movies began when theater owners, who would book performers alongside films, asked studios for cheaper films to replace the more expensive live acts, the last vestiges of vaudeville.
This B film, the first in the Andy Hardy series, would reunite Mickey with his Ah, Wilderness! costars Lionel Barrymore and Spring Byington in a family “dramedy” based on the Broadway play Skidding, and renamed A Family Affair. In it, he would play a character who would forever change his life.