Mickey and Judy in one of the backyard musicals.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBERT EASTON.
Mickey and Judy in one of the backyard musicals.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBERT EASTON.
Judy turned to drugs because she was in pain and because drugs made her feel good. As one of the MGM kids, she’d been treated for most of her life to magical, instant, solutions to everything . . . She could never accept herself so she was always on the run.
MICKEY ROONEY
Sometimes movie history is made when the chemistry of two stars acting, singing, and dancing together explodes across the screen, and the totality of their joint performance exceeds what either one has done individually. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers both performed in solo roles, Ginger winning an Oscar for Best Actress for the 1940 Kitty Foyle, and creating a lasting character in Roxie Hart, but together in movies such as Top Hat, Flying Down to Rio, and The Gay Divorcee, Ginger and Fred were beyond magic. Studios look for such combinations. The protosexual friction between Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn generated a flashing electricity as they played off each other for over thirty years, and the on-screen romantic interplay between Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in Joe Versus the Volcano, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail was an expression of pure happiness as the two conveyed to audiences the belief that love will always find a way. But one of the most exciting song-and-dance combinations in motion picture history was that of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, friends since they were students together at Ma Lawlor’s Professional School in 1930 and continuing their friendship when both became contract players at Metro.
Mickey entered the MGM system a year earlier than Judy, and was almost immediately propelled to the edge of stardom by A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His career quickly accelerated, while Judy was used only marginally. They both attended the studio school together, and remained schoolmates and friends. Mickey was two years older than Judy, which at that age was a wide chasm, and they were more like childhood siblings than a romantic couple.
Thanks to a deal Mayer struck with Judy’s agent, a former bootlegger and pimp named Frank Orsatti, Garland was earning three hundred dollars a week. Mickey, at that time, was paid five hundred a week plus some minor bonuses. But the money they would soon earn for the studio when they began performing together would eclipse that of many of the other romantic pairings at the studio, because both entertainers possessed the ability to play off one another psychically, going beyond what the screenplay and the director called for.
The ten movies that Mickey and Judy appeared in together, which were all at MGM, under their studio agreements, were: Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (1937), Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938), Babes in Arms (1939), Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940), Strike up the Band (1940), Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941), Babes on Broadway (1941), Thousands Cheer (1943), Girl Crazy (1943), and Words and Music (1948).
Rooney’s and Garland’s chemistry was obvious to Louis Mayer from their very first performance in the 1937 Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, which generated such a positive audience reaction that Mayer and his ad hoc board of advisers (referred to as the College of Cardinals) were convinced that they were looking at sheer magic, something that went beyond acting. The two were playful and innocent, a pair of friends joyfully cavorting together captured on-screen and framed so beautifully that it became abundantly clear to Mayer and his top execs that this combination should go on for as long as audiences wanted. Although Louis Mayer, when presented with a pitch for a new film, liked to pull out box office figures from similar features and look at the numbers to predict a bottom line, he sometimes allowed himself to be engulfed by the magic of a really good film. And that’s what happened with Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.
In the film, for the first time in her career, Judy Garland (whose previous film was Broadway Melody of 1938, in which she sings “You Made Me Love You” to a Clark Gable photo) received top billing. Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry was the first MGM film for Ronald Sinclair. A Motion Picture Herald news item on July 31, 1937, noted that, in the picture, Douglas Scott was to replace Freddie Bartholomew, Mickey’s frequent costar and the leading male juvenile lead at MGM, who at the time was involved in a contract dispute and lawsuit with Metro. Also, much to Mickey’s delight, parts of Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry were shot on location at Santa Anita racetrack, Mickey’s home away from home. Even though the film did not have a huge box office return, Mayer, to his credit, quickly recognized the magic and electricity created by Garland and Rooney in their scenes together. The Hollywood Reporter, on March 17, 1938, wrote that a sequel to this film was to be made entitled Thoroughbreds Together, which never occurred.
Louis Mayer knew what he was watching was pure gold, and upon his directive, Judy was rushed into the Andy Hardy film Love Finds Andy Hardy, to exploit her chemistry with Mickey. Judy was an instant romantic fit, playing Andy’s platonic friend Betsy Booth, who desperately wants more than friendship with Andy. Then came Judy’s monster hit The Wizard of Oz, after the filming of which she was rushed into Babes in Arms, along with her Oz costar Margaret Hamilton. Based on the 1937 Broadway play by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Babes in Arms was adapted and tailored to both Rooney and Garland, with added songs by Oz composers Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, and by MGM composers Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown.
Produced by Arthur Freed, Babes in Arms was written by Jack McGowan, Kay Van Riper of the Hardy writing team, and Annalee Whitmore, and was directed by Busby Berkeley in his first film at Metro after gaining fame for his work at Warner Bros. Curiously, most of the Broadway songs written by Rodgers and Hart were cut, except for the title tune, “The Lady Is a Tramp” (later made famous by Frank Sinatra), which was used as background music during a dinner scene; and Garland’s heart-stopping rendition of “Where or When.” Freed and Brown wrote a new song for the film, “Good Morning,” that later gained more notoriety in Singin’ in the Rain as performed by Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds. Babes in Arms, which also featured one of the best tap dance numbers of Mickey Rooney’s entire career, became a huge hit, one of the ten biggest of the year, earning almost four million dollars in the domestic gross and nearly two million in pure profits. At nineteen years old, Mickey was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor.
The film version of Babes in Arms showed audiences something vibrantly new and bursting with excitement. Just watch Mickey at the head of the throng of teenagers in Babes, leading an army of youth, marching in optimism and joy even during the throes of the Great Depression. While their parents might have scrounged for pennies to buy the next bottle of milk, here was an entire generation rising to the music. Sure, they did not know what lay before them: war, bodies piled on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, the incineration of entire cities, death camps. These were our parents who fought that war for us, and now they’re gone. But on that screen, with that music, with that joy, captured on celluloid in majestic chiaroscuro, they are forever young.
Mayer’s instincts about pairing Mickey and Judy had been correct. The film proved to be a triumph, and Mayer saw dollar signs for a Garland and Rooney team. He now had Judy with the Oz film, and Rooney with the Hardy films and a slew of other features, all returning large revenues for the studio as audiences showed no letup in their desire for more Rooney and more Garland. Accordingly, Mayer rushed into production Strike up the Band, with the same creative team, now supervised by Arthur Freed, whom Mayer believed was a genius. MGM empowered its recent steal from Warner Bros., flamboyant director/choreographer Busby Berkeley, to realize his vision by staging elaborate routines featuring Mickey and Judy and the band they sought to have perform on a national stage. The next two films, Babes on Broadway (1941) and Girl Crazy (1943), employed the same team. Babes in Arms (1939), those two, and Strike up the Band are often referred to as the “backyard musicals.”
Berkeley and Garland had several blowout arguments during filming of the backyard musicals, after which the studio removed him as director. However, Rooney was amused by Busby. Mickey wrote, “He was hard on all of us . . . he could be quite charming with his flashing eyes and a smile that warmed everyone around him . . . [H]e had an alcoholic’s perfection . . . [B]oth vaudeville kids, Judy and I were troupers enough not to complain. This is after all, what we lived for. If we weren’t working, we’d have complained. But we did work.”1
Film historian Lou Sabini remarked to us that “Those films, which have been called the ‘backyard musicals,’ were considered to be low-budget musicals for MGM, while it certainly would have been a major production for most other studios. These films were about teens putting on a show that spotlighted not just the leads but various other young performers who were part of the MGM studio system. The concept, which started strong, started to wear thin.”2
Producer Arthur Freed clearly wanted to duplicate the first film, Babes in Arms, in its two sequels. Fred Finklehoffe, who had created the second outing, Strike up the Band, wrote a carbon copy for the final film of the backyard quartet, Babes on Broadway. Burton Lane wrote the music for the songs, with Arthur Freed’s brother Ralph and E. Y. “Yip” Harburg as the lyricists for various numbers. Freed would write the score’s biggest hit, “How About You,” but Harburg would have the more lasting relationship with Lane, with whom he would later write the Broadway hit musical Finian’s Rainbow. In order to introduce a wider variety of musical styles into the score, Freed assigned Roger Edens, Garland’s longtime mentor at MGM, to arrange the score.
Berkeley kept things hopping in Babes with his elaborate staging of the production numbers. He spent days endlessly rehearsing before shooting, in marathon sessions that upset the front office by going over the projected budgets. At one point, Louis B. Mayer even sent his minions to the set to see why Berkeley was belaboring the shooting schedule. Berkeley got rid of them in his usual way: He climbed on the camera boom and had technicians raise him so high that the executives couldn’t talk to him. After they left, he got the entire number on the first take, releasing the company early for the day and saving the studio thousands of dollars.
Toward the end of the musical series, the critics were beginning to notice that the stars were getting a bit old for this “gee whiz, let’s put on a show” theme. Rooney was now involved with Ava Gardner, and Judy had her own love interest. Thus, by the last of the backyard musicals, Babes on Broadway, it was obvious that the child stars Garland and Rooney had clearly grown up off-screen. In fact, during the third week of filming Babes on Broadway, Garland eloped to Las Vegas with composer David Rose. She asked for a few days off for a honeymoon, but Mayer forced her back on set the next day, disappointed that she had deprived him of the chance to garner publicity with a lavish wedding. Meanwhile, Rooney’s soon-to-be first wife, Ava Gardner, was watching him perform in Carmen Miranda drag, on her first day at the studio. This was Hollywood after all.
Babes on Broadway marked the film debut for Margaret O’Brien, who recalled to the authors, “It’s rather remarkable that my first film was with Mickey and his last film was with me. A stunning coincidence. He was just such a great person and performer, right until the end.”3
By the time Babes on Broadway was released, in late 1941, critics were complaining that both stars needed to take on more adult roles. Audiences loved them regardless, and though the film was a modest hit in comparison to Babes in Arms, it still wound up in the black for the studio. Even though it saw the box office decline for Babes on Broadway, the studio was undaunted in reuniting the Babes team for another go-round, casting Rooney and Garland, and attaching Berkeley as director, for Girl Crazy later that year.
During this period, Mickey and Judy were at the mercy of Louis B. Mayer. E. J. Fleming, in The Fixers, writes that the studio ruthlessly exploited Judy in Babes on Broadway, and he later told the authors, “Judy, like Mickey, became a slave to MGM. They had them on a brutal work schedule. Babes [on Broadway] was completed in thirty-one days, along with publicity and personal appearance schedules that they undertook to maximize their value to the studio. Mayer, to keep Judy going and to keep her weight down, was given the drug Benzedrine, commonly known as speed, and to give her energy.”
Judy was quoted by Paul Donnelley in his biography of her: “They had us [Mickey and Judy] working days and nights on end. They’d give us pills to keep us on our feet long after we were exhausted. Then they’d take us to the studio hospital and knock us out with sleeping pills—Mickey (Rooney) sprawled out on one bed and me on another. Then after four hours they’d wake us up and give us the pep pills again so we could work 72 hours in a row. Half of the time we were hanging from the ceiling but it was a way of life for us.”4 In an interview with the Daily Mail Online republished on September 3, 2014, by Caroline Howe, Judy said of the pills, “That’s the way we got mixed up. And that’s the way we lost contact.” In this way, both Mickey and Judy were being stretched to the limits by the studio, and revealed it publicly only years afterward.
Just as the studio would later assign Les Peterson to watch over Mickey, and Eddie Mannix to supervise Peterson, Mannix assigned Betty Asher to watch over Judy. It was the studio’s way to keep their teenage stars managed and, most important, working through their rigorous filming schedules as if they were on an assembly line. As William Asher, Betty Asher’s brother, told us in March 2007, “Betty worked in publicity and was a handler for Garland. She loved Judy. Betty was like a sister to Judy. They may have been even closer, really closer, than that.” According to William Asher, Mayer was aware that Betty was a lesbian and that she had seduced Judy when she was fifteen years old. Asher, whom we interviewed in connection with Dr. Feelgood, had a long history in Hollywood and was a noted director/producer of shows such as I Love Lucy and Bewitched. “Betty and Judy lived together for a while, but when Judy married Vincente Minnelli, the relationship ended. Betty was the maid of honor at Judy’s wedding to Minnelli.”
Mickey Rooney expressed his opinions about Judy’s sexuality in Life Is Too Short, saying, “She always idolized her own charming father—only to learn, after she’d grown up, that he was a homosexual. She couldn’t accept that in him. And then, she had an even harder time accepting a trace in herself. She had an affair with a female singer and, caught up in guilt, couldn’t accept herself.”5
Mickey and Judy’s relationship remained strong throughout the years, until Judy’s suicide in 1969. They were confidantes, intimates, and lifelong friends. Although there is no direct evidence of a physical relationship, Mickey’s six-decades-long mistress, Ms. Smith (not her real name and whom we shall meet later), suggested that she was at parties in the early 1950s where Mickey and Judy escaped to the bedroom together and then returned to the party casually disheveled. Mickey’s friend Sidney Miller, whom we interviewed extensively, also suggested a possible sexual relationship, stating, “Mickey and Judy were always close. I think, at times, they may have been closer than people think.”6
The way Judy and Mickey were drugged at MGM turned out to be a tragedy. Judy came to rely on drugs because she was in pain and because drugs made her feel good. Actress and Andy Hardy costar Ann Rutherford said in an interview with us, “As one of the MGM kids, she’d been treated for most of her life to magical, instant, solutions to everything . . . She could never accept herself so she was always on the run.”
During an interview for the 1992 documentary film MGM: When the Lion Roars, Rooney described his friendship with Garland: “Judy and I were so close we could’ve come from the same womb. We weren’t like brothers or sisters but there was no love affair there. There was more than a love affair. It’s very, very difficult to explain the depths of our love for each other. It was so special. It was a forever love. Judy, as we speak, has not passed away. She’s always with me in every heartbeat of my body.”
Mickey sometimes contradicted his take on Judy, saying variously, in a decades-old TV interview: “We were so close . . . [I]t transcended any love affair . . . She was my sister from the beginning—the sister I never had . . . She was the love I’d searched for.”
London Sunday Express writer Clive Hirschhorn interviewed Judy in 1969, the last interview she gave before she died of a drug overdose on June 22, 1969. Hirschhorn wrote, “I met her backstage after the show, and she was in a good mood. She joked that my socks were too short. She talked about how MGM had hooked her and Mickey Rooney on drugs to keep them awake during filming, and she told me that Louis B. Mayer never let her forget that she didn’t have movie-star looks. He called her ‘my little hunchback.’ But she didn’t moan about it. There was no malice or sense of exploitation. She told me, ‘. . . If you want fame you have to pay for it—and brother, I have!’ ”
The families remained close. Liza Minnelli, Judy’s daughter, released a public statement after Mickey’s death, saying, “Mickey was somebody that everybody loved, but to me he was part of the family. He was one of a kind, and will be admired and respected always.”
Mickey’s oldest daughter, the talented Kelly Rooney, told us, “I clearly remember going to Judy’s beach house with my dad and my sisters and brother on Sundays. While the kids were all out playing, you could hear him roaring with laughter at the stories that Judy was telling about the old days. They both were having a good ol’ time enjoying drinks and old times. It was just magical watching them together laughing, singing, and reminiscing. I will never forget that image.”7
The documentary MGM: When the Lion Roars was filmed after Judy had been gone for twenty-three years. It some instances, Mickey’s recollections seem like the cloudy memories of an old man in winter mourning a long-lost colleague. However, it is almost a case of déjà-vu; Mickey used similar words when he was a guest on The Judy Garland Show thirty years earlier: “We’ve had a wonderful seven days together here,” Mickey says at the close of the show, his arm around Judy’s waist as she caresses the lapel of his tuxedo. “This is not only ‘tradition,’ this [woman] is the love of my life. My wife knows this—my wives know this. [She] always has been, because there never will be, there aren’t adjectives enough to express, in the world, how the one and only Judy—is Judy.” There is an awkward sweetness to his obviously ad-libbed words spoken with unfeigned sincerity.
Judy and Mickey struggled with many of the same issues after they were forced out of MGM. They had parallel challenges with pills, liquor, and bankruptcy; a roller-coaster ride in their careers; and several failed marriages. While Mickey survived the battle for ninety-three years, Judy made it only into her late forties before overdosing herself.
As Mickey eerily remarked to us in 2008, “Sometimes I wonder if Judy had the right idea . . . to exit all this bullshit.”