Mickey directs actress Helen Walker in My True Story in 1951, his directorial debut.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBERT EASTON.
Mickey directs actress Helen Walker in My True Story in 1951, his directorial debut.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBERT EASTON.
As Mickey’s divorce from Marge Lane moved from an interlocutory judgment to a final decree, Mickey was back on the chase, at least while he was legally barred from getting married again. In the late 1960s he entered a skein of relationships. One was with the ex-wife of comedian Shecky Greene, who told us that Mickey and Jeri, a former cocktail waitress, lived together for a while. Greene told us, “Mickey Rooney’s another Elizabeth Taylor, only without the tits.” (Clearly Shecky did not know what had happened between Mickey and Liz.) Harrison Carroll wrote in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner on April 17, 1968, “Mickey was getting serious” with Jeri Greene. When he asked Mickey if he was making another trip to the altar, Mickey replied with his usual self-deprecating humor: “No, we’re still very much in love . . . Marge Lane hasn’t picked up her divorce decree yet. So I haven’t married today. But give me time. It’s only eleven o’clock in the morning.”
Yet Mickey’s holiday from marriage did not last long, and his first step in that direction began with a move to Florida. After the job in the quasi-porn flick Hollywood Blue, he claimed he felt humiliated and embarrassed. “I was so ashamed of my little part that I got the hell out of town, for good. I moved to Florida, determined that I would have nothing more to do with Hollywood.”1
Packing up and leaving LA was not without its problems, though, particularly for his seven children, four of whom were under twelve. He also had obligations to two ex-wives and owed considerable money to attorneys, advisers, former managers, and others. His earning power was at its lowest in decades. For many years, even in what he had considered times of drought, he was earning between $200,000 and $300,000 per year. By 1970, however, many of the lucrative Las Vegas gigs (for which he was making around $20,000 per week) had dried up. He was relying on dinner theater, for which he got between $2,500 and $5,000 per week, which would have kept him barely abovewater, but there was a lot of downtime when the money pipe ran dry.
While he was in Miami in 1969 and playing a couple of nightclub dates, he was invited to a celebrity golf tournament at the famous Doral Country Club, where his friend Jackie Gleason often held court. (Gleason had relocated to Miami and was producing his weekly television variety show from Miami Beach.) While Mickey was there, a Miami Herald sportswriter introduced him to a pretty, young customer relations representative from the Herald named Carolyn Hockett. Twenty-five, divorced, with a three-year-old son named Jimmy, she bore an eerie resemblance to Barbara Ann. Born Carolyn Zack on August 19, 1943, in Columbus, Ohio, she was the eldest of six children. After an unsuccessful marriage to Jerry Hockett that produced a son in 1966, Carolyn moved to Miami. She was a strict Catholic and very outgoing. Mickey, twenty-three years her senior, was smitten and flew her and Jimmy to Los Angeles to meet his kids.
On May 27, 1969, after another short courtship, Mickey, following his by-now-established custom, chartered a plane to Las Vegas and got married. Red Doff had booked him into the Fremont Hotel to do a week of shows with Bobby Van. Mickey and Carolyn’s daughter, Jonelle, was born seven months later, on January 11, 1970.
The press jumped on the news of Mickey’s seventh marriage, and he was ready with the witticisms. He’d tell them: “I’m going to march in the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena some New Year’s with Mickey Rooney and His All-Wife Marching Band”; or “When I said to the minister at the wedding chapel, ‘I do, I do,’ he said, ‘I know, I know’ ”; or “I keep a wedding license with me at all times. It’s made out to ‘To Whom it May Concern.’ ”
THE HARSH REALITY WAS that his pockets were empty. He was flat broke. The dinner theater income paid the child support and alimony, keeping him out of jail, but he was drowning in debt. Carolyn talked him into moving to her adopted hometown in south Florida, where, through a friend, they found a small house on Forty-Fifth Street in Fort Lauderdale, near the Coral Ridge Country Club. The move worked out well when Mickey’s old friend actor Eddie Bracken, with whom he had appeared in the 1953 film A Slight Case of Larceny, became part owner of Miami’s Coconut Grove Playhouse about an hour’s drive away. Thus, Mickey could live in Fort Lauderdale and find work at a local theater.
Bracken hired Mickey to appear in a new play called Three Goats and a Blanket, about a television producer with alimony troubles, a part to which Mickey could easily relate, especially as he played off Bracken, who costarred. Audiences loved the play, and they toured in this vehicle for nearly ten years. Variety wrote, “Putting Mickey Rooney into a farce about a man with alimony troubles must have seemed a likely gimmick. The acting is worthy of the vehicle. Rooney enters all over the place.” Three Goats and a Blanket (Stop Thief Stop or Alimony), written by Woody Kling, would become a staple of dinner theater, a phenomenon over the next decade, and a high-grossing play.
While Mickey was back onstage, feeling alive again, his four children with Barbara were now living comfortably with their grandparents, the Thomasons, in a beautiful gated community in Rolling Hills, near Palos Verdes, California. The grandparents provided a stable life for Kelly, Kimmy, Kerry, and Michael Kyle, supported financially by Mickey, who paid a thousand dollars a month, whenever he could, in child support. On vacations and some holidays, he flew them in for a visit to Fort Lauderdale. In 1972, Mickey decided that having full custody of the kids would be cheaper than the thousand per month in child support and air fare, and he hired Beverly Hills attorney Robert Neeb to file a motion in Los Angeles County for sole custody.
Child custody cases are bitter and ugly, as anyone who has litigated one will sadly attest. So it was with Rooney v. Thomason, a particularly messy court case that came to trial on August 24, 1972, in Los Angeles Superior Court. The Thomasons displayed their serious intention to retain custody by appearing with their high-priced attorney, the celebrated Marvin Mitchelson (later known for winning the landmark Lee Marvin v. Michelle Triola case, in which Mitchelson argued the legal precedent for “palimony,” still applicable law today in California). Mickey’s former mother-in-law, Helen Thomason, testified that she did not dislike Mickey, only his actions. She testified that he traveled often and would leave without even acknowledging the children. She also said he had missed countless meetings, appointments, and arrangements with the kids. His former secretary, Bill Gardner, testified that the children were better off with their grandparents. In summary, the defendants argued, Mickey was an irresponsible, self-absorbed, unfit parent.
Arguing on behalf of Mickey, his pastor testified that Mickey had found God and had married a good Christian woman, who would help with the children. Then of course, on the stand, playing for the moment, Rooney gave a brilliant performance, stating how he had found God and needed his children to live with him to make his life complete. The court disagreed. Despite the Rooney performance, the pastor’s testimony, and compelling testimony from Carolyn on her maternal skills, the judge held for the Thomasons, though it was unusual in California for a biological father, who had a wife to assist with child rearing, to lose custodial rights. However, the judge cited the stability the children had had with the Thomasons since 1966, and the lower court’s initial action of placing the children with their grandparents after their daughter died and while their son-in-law was committed to work on movie locations out of the state. In a fifteen-page decision, Judge Mario Clinco stated that the children’s life with the Thomasons had been one of “regularity, stability, love, strong emotional ties and dependence and companionship. To award Mr. Rooney sole custody would be detrimental to the children.” He also said that in a meeting with them in his chambers, the children had expressed a preference for remaining with their grandparents.2 Under the court’s custody ruling, Mickey remained a co-guardian, with full visitation rights, and of course was ordered to make continued child support payments.
ENTER RUTH WEBB. WEBB is now known for her representation of supermarket checkout line tabloid headline makers such as the penile-challenged John Wayne Bobbitt; America’s most famous guesthouse resident nonwitness Kato Kalin; and a celebrated auto mechanic whose tryst with the teenage “Long Island Lolita” propelled him into the national consciousness, and into jail, and thence into reality television. But for Mickey Rooney, who’d outlived many of his managers and agents and was desperate to find someone who would plug away to get him parts wherever they appeared, she was one of the few old-time talent agents still standing.
While kicking around the dinner theater circuit, Mickey was being represented by Milton Deutsch. When Deutsch suddenly passed away in 1970, the actor was left with no agent for the first time since Harry Weber took him on in 1926. Good fortune rained on Mickey, though, when pal Eddie Bracken recommended him to small-time Hollywood agent Ruth Webb. Mickey, who was accustomed to strong-minded male managers and agents such as Sam Stiefel, Johnny Hyde, Bullets Durgom, and Maurice Duke, liked the spunk of this former actress whose most notable client at the time was television actor Gene Barry (War of the Worlds, Bat Masterson, Burke’s Law). She had previously represented major stars from the 1940s studio glory days.
Ruth didn’t have an office. Instead, she operated out of her home, actually, as the New York Times described it in her obituary (December 17, 2006), her “unusually appointed bedroom.” A postmodern interpretation of The Addams Family meets Castle Dracula, the room featured a clutch of stuffed and live raccoons, whom she lovingly fed by hand, and lace cobwebs that hung so deep from the stachybotrys-covered beams that they looked like curtains; you had to part them just to walk through. Her office-bedroom was hidden in the back of a house nestled hard against the collapsing walls of Nichols Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, where it was darker than the land of Mordor. Visiting clients would be forced to move the raccoon installations in order to sit near her bed, which, by the way, looked like it was covered in a thin layer of soil from the country of her birth. But it was the raccoons, the raccoons! Those eyes, red in the soft light, were unwavering; they would stare at you as she fed them. You would never forget them.
Webb, to her credit, was the major influence in the resurrection of Mickey’s career in the 1970s. It was her strong belief in Mickey’s talent that brought him back from obscurity to his great triumph on Broadway in Sugar Babies. A desperate Mickey more than appreciated her perseverance on his behalf, writing, “Agents should all take a lesson from Ruth Webb. She always gave more than I ever expected. Ruth Webb was a real striver. She was something of a dynamo, an energy source that pumped away day and night on my behalf . . . She made it impossible for people to forget me.”3 Comedienne Phyllis Diller, one of Webb’s clients, told us, “Ruth was eccentric and quirky, but she was very loyal. She really was the ‘unsinkable’ Ruth Webb,” Diller said, referring to the New York Times obituary for Webb. “She was a mix of Zsa Zsa Gabor and Auntie Mame.” The Times also mentioned that Webb also represented screen stars such as Kathryn Grayson, Rhonda Fleming, Dorothy Lamour, Donald O’Connor, Gloria Swanson, Gig Young, Ann Sothern, Chuck Connors, Tiny Tim, Bert Parks, and Rose Marie. The Times also said that Webb was “a successful Hollywood agent who was a master of the art of professional rehabilitation, reviving dormant careers and representing clients few other agencies would touch.” Indeed.
And Mickey stiffed her out of her final commission.
As Webb took over Mickey’s career, she started finding him work in dinner theaters, small film roles, and some television. She worked hard, cared deeply for her client, helped him through his personal difficulties, and found him bookings anywhere someone would pay him.
As Mickey slogged through city after city in the tour of Three Goats and a Blanket, new wife Carolyn was spending his earnings freely. Timmy Rooney told Pam McClenathan, who later repeated it to us, that Carolyn’s spending was the source of many arguments between the Rooneys. Their constant fighting over who could spend the money Mickey was bringing in created a rift between them, and the marriage started cracking within the first couple of years. “The constant touring, being away from home, the money troubles, and Mickey’s wandering eye never helped,” Sidney Miller told us.
Ever the optimist, and despite his complete lack of financial acumen, Mickey also tried his hand at business—and fell for countless schemes, lured by people he would meet on the road or at the racetrack, in which he would invest with blind confidence that he would strike it rich. There were innumerable (potential and realized) businesses and products, including:
• Mickey Rooney’s Two-Ball Golf-a-Chair, for indoor golf facilities.
• Lovely Lady Cosmetics, with a woman’s cologne called Me, and others called Trapeze, Taming the Shrew, and Twelfth Night. (It was even more surprising that he didn’t develop a men’s cologne called Kiss Me Kate.)
• Complete, an aerosol spray that painted on hair for men (a product that, surprisingly, actually exists, although it is not the one Mickey sought to develop).
• A pharmaceutical company called Elim, with products such as an analgesic, Elim-Ache; a laxative, Elim-n-Ate; a diet aid, Elim-a-Weight; and a foot powder, Elim-a-Itch. “Elim,” get it? Nobody else did.
• Rip-Offs, disposable shorts for men and women in a hurry, either in the bathroom or in the bedroom. No need to fuss with those pesky buttons or zippers. Just put your hands together and pull.
• Tip Offs. Yes, it was a disposable bra. Why? Nobody knows, but Fruit of the Loom rejected the idea faster than you could dispose of the bra.
• Puppy Pop, to give your dog a bubbly personality. This idea for a dog drink Ralston Purina turned down flat—flatter than yesterday’s half-empty glass of Pepsi.
• Coins with movie star images, which the Franklin Mint turned down. Too bad Mickey didn’t approach the U.S. Post Office, which, years later, issued stamps featuring movie star images.
• Mickey Rooney’s Weenie World, a fast-food chain with a round hot dog on a hamburger bun, to be called the Weenie Whirl. Also to be included were the Mickey Yankee Doodle (mac-n-cheese), a relish called Micklish, Eric Von Weenie sauerkraut, and Mickey’s Pancho Weenie.
• Mickey Melon, a melon-flavored soft drink marketed by Canfield Beverage, but not the one Mickey proposed.
• Thirs-T, a carbonated iced tea, a product which is available today not from Mickey, but from whole earth soft drink companies. Clearly, Mickey’s idea was ahead of its time.
Every one of Mickey’s get-rich-quick schemes met with failure, and ended up costing him money. His friend actor/director/producer Jackie Cooper explained to us that “Mickey had zero business sense. Even if they succeeded he had no organizational skills, never understood money management and surrounded himself with the cast of Guys and Dolls as advisers. He was in a no-win situation. It was a lose-lose proposition.”
Donald Trump agreed: “He once asked me about an investment in a hotel near Philadelphia. I advised him against it, but he didn’t listen and went ahead with the investment, which failed.”4
One of Mickey’s ideas, however, was reasonable. In 1972 he called Liza Minnelli’s then-husband, Jack Haley Jr., whose father had been a star at MGM with Mickey (not to mention the Tin Man opposite Liza’s mother, Judy, in The Wizard of Oz). Haley Jr. was then the head of MGM and in a position to discuss Mickey’s idea, this time for a business Rooney understood: motion pictures. Mickey asked Haley for footage from his films to use in a documentary Mickey wanted to produce about his career. He told Haley he intended to intersperse clips with “wrap-around” on-screen introductions from Rooney. Haley said no, but the idea had traction. Four months later, he called Mickey back with a similar idea, a project called That’s Entertainment, a retrospective of MGM musicals, which would include Mickey, Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Peter Lawford, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Bing Crosby, James Stewart, Elizabeth Taylor, and Liza Minnelli (representing her mother, Judy Garland) doing the wrap-arounds. Haley promised that if Mickey participated, “we’ll pay you well. And I’ll give you some of your films, too. You can do whatever you want with the films.” Mickey was paid scale ($385) in toto and was never allowed to use any clips. The film grossed nearly $40 million for MGM. The studio had essentially managed to trick Mickey one last time.
The traveling, the womanizing, the crazy investments, and the financial insecurity eventually got to Carolyn. As Ruth Webb recalled, “We started with the dinner theaters, and we were doing very well with them, until one day, Mickey went home to Florida. There wasn’t any home, there weren’t any children, there wasn’t any marriage, there wasn’t anything.”5 This was totally out of the blue. When he returned to Florida, Mickey discovered that Carolyn had filed under Florida’s “no-fault” divorce law. She had to state only that the marriage was “irretrievably broken.”
To say that Mickey was in shock would be an understatement. He was now essentially homeless, a wandering minstrel going from dinner theater to dinner theater. He was lost, dejected, and addicted to an array of tranquilizers, staggering through life, when the emotional damage caught up with him onstage in Houston in October 1974. Appearing for the umpteenth time in Three Goats and a Blanket, at the Windmill Dinner Theater in Houston, he collapsed onstage during the performance.
“Mickey was pretty much down to his last dollar,” said Webb. “. . . I was told he collapsed on stage. I stayed with [him] for ten days. I took care of him. I read the Bible to him. Then I had to go back to my office on the coast. So I said, ‘Mickey, anytime you can come to California, my home is yours.’ ”6
In Life Is Too Short, Mickey explained, “Rather than run toward life, I ran away. I tried to escape, again, into drugs. This time it was Quaaludes, fashionable new little pills that could put you on a mountain peak then drop you as quickly to the desert floor.”7
Mickey Jr. and Timmy flew to Houston during Mickey’s hospitalization and drug rehabilitation and lent him support. Ruth stayed in a bed next to his while he suffered from the DTs and struggled to get clean.
When Mickey was released, two weeks later, he was essentially homeless. With nowhere else to turn, he took Webb up on her offer and showed up on her doorstep, telling her, “I’m here, I’m cured.”
Ruth’s house was already crowded, and not just with the raccoons. There was Jamie, her live-in lover; her son, Mike; her ninety-six-year-old mother, who painted; an actor named Dean Dittman; and the raccoons, a cat, a dog, and a macaw named Sidney, who answered the phone.
Mickey was on the road to recovery, and Webb let it be known throughout the community. He went back on the dinner theater circuit and started receiving excellent notices. Late in October 1974, the Los Angeles Times reviewed Three Goats and a Blanket, which was playing at Sebastian’s West Dinner Playhouse in San Clemente, writing, “[T]he hair around Rooney’s bald pate is white and he’s developed a pretty good-sized pot. Otherwise, age is an entirely negligible condition. The wind-up doll moves are as abrupt as ever and the delivery is still crackling. He effectively uses every trick in the book to get laughs. He’s the old-time boffo comic, faintly salacious (he claps his hands over his mistress’s cheeks and declares, ‘The Andy Hardy days are over’), with a positively ruthless desire to please.” Mickey, now purportedly clean and sober, was on his way back.
Mickey continued to live in Ruth Webb’s house of oddballs, where, from time to time, she’d have parties that threw together an eclectic mix of celebrities, musicians, poets, writers, and other assorted offbeat characters—a real-life Holly Golightly bash right out of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Mickey enjoyed meeting her guests, and Ruth even held a cocktail party to honor him. One of her guests was Mickey’s oldest son, musician Mickey Jr., whom Ruth had gotten to know during his father’s frightening Houston hospitalization. The now-twenty-eight-year-old Mick had befriended a thirty-five-year-old divorcee and country-western singer named Jan Chamberlin, with whom he had put together an act they performed in small clubs.
ACCORDING TO JAN ROONEY, she met Mickey Jr. on the music club scene in Los Angeles. She claims she didn’t date him, had no romantic interest in him, and was just his stage partner. Jan said:
Mickey Jr. is a very talented musician. We had known each other and had appeared in clubs, doing a variety of music. Mickey Jr. told me that his dad was back in town and they were throwing a party. I had heard from [him] of his dad’s problems in Houston. Mickey Jr. said I should meet his dad and that I would get a kick out of him. So I went with [him] to . . . Ruth Webb’s home and this party. The house was like nothing I’ve ever seen . . . It was there I met Mickey and we started talking. Mickey was so talented, I remember him playing the piano that night. I sat down next to him as he was playing and I sang “I Can’t Last a Day without You.” I felt like Judy Garland next to him. Mickey was wonderful, very sensitive and very energetic. And with Mickey, you never know who you’re going to get whether it’s Whitey Marsh [the juvenile punk from Boys Town] or Andrew Hardy.8
For forty years a rumor has persisted that Jan was romantically involved with Mickey Jr., but that his father wooed her away. Jan, we believe, was honest when she said she and Mickey Jr. were only stage partners, not romantic partners, and that she met Mickey Sr. at his son’s suggestion. However, in interviews with close family members we heard over and over, and emphatically, that Jan was engaged to Mickey Jr. and dumped him for his father, that her goal was to attach herself to Mickey Sr. and, in a Machiavellian move, she used Junior to achieve that goal. Even Mickey Sr. addressed the rumor, stating for the record in Life Is Too Short, “Jan had not been dating Mickey Rooney, Jr. (as some believe). My son just liked her singing, and he wanted me to meet her.”9
Several of Mickey’s children, including Mickey Jr. himself, speaking through family friend Pam McClenathan, tell a different story. McClenathan, relaying a statement from Mickey Jr., told us, “I’m sorry, but the truth was that Mickey Jr. was engaged to Jan and she did leave him for his father.”
The combined support of Ruth Webb and Jan was the magic elixir needed to get Mickey back on the road to recovery. He and Jan had started dating, and Mickey soon found that Jan was the rock he had been looking for. Jan, for her part, gave up her career as a singer to travel and live with Mickey. Ruth Webb worked the phones, championed Mickey to every producer and casting director, and booked him into endless dinner theater dates. She painted a picture of a healthy Rooney who was packing in audiences in theaters nationwide.
Slowly, producers began to trust Rooney again. After his short but memorable appearance in That’s Entertainment in 1974, he appeared in a series of low-budget films that offered him some interesting character roles. In the Spanish-Italian production of As de Corazon (Ace of Hearts) he appeared, albeit in a cameo, alongside Chris Robinson, who later became a soap opera actor (Rick Weber on General Hospital) and a close friend of Mickey’s. The next film, directed by Robinson, Convict Women (aka Thunder County), costarred Mickey with Robinson and included Ted Cassidy (later Lurch on The Addams Family). Mickey then lent his voice as the Scarecrow in the animated Journey Back to Oz, which also featured Liza Minnelli as Dorothy (her mother’s role) and Margaret Hamilton, the Witch of the West in the original motion picture, this time as Aunt Em.
In 1975, Mickey shot two international films: the first was a French James Bond spoof called Bon Baisers de Hong Kong (or “Good Kisses from Hong Kong,” but translated as From Hong Kong with Love); and the second, Rachel’s Man, an Israeli biblical epic.
Jan traveled with Mickey to different locations and sets, and took on an active, almost managerial interest in helping Mickey get his career back on track. He would go on location and shoot the films and then immediately return to the States, where he kept himself constantly busy with dinner theater dates. He was working furiously and enjoying it.
The next film he shot was an interesting Canadian comedy called Find the Lady (1976), which teamed John Candy with another Canadian actor, Lawrence Dane, in Abbott-and-Costello-type roles. Mickey played a gun-happy hood named Trigger.
With the support team of Ruth Webb and Jan, Mickey’s career started to regain traction. He was in the Hollywood trades again as a working actor. “Slowly but surely, we were getting Mickey back on track,” Jan recalled. “Ruth was tireless in her promoting Mickey. She was invaluable in getting him back on the map. It was a slow climb back, but she kept Mickey working steady.”
Mickey and Jan found an apartment together in Hollywood, then a home in Sherman Oaks. They were constantly on the road—Jan’s sister Ronna took care of her sons, Chris and Mark Aber, while they traveled—on film locations or working the dinner theater circuit, which was now at its peak. This was mainly because of Mickey’s growing the market. He had brought the glory of Hollywood’s golden age to local venues.
He and Jan eventually found a beautiful home in the planned community of Westlake Village, in a development on an island called Red Sail. “I had lived most of my life in the Valley,” Jan recalled. “I grew up in Van Nuys. I felt most comfortable there, as did Mickey, who had lived there much of his life. We fell in love with Westlake Village.”
Mickey was much more cautious about his relationship with Jan. Possibly he had finally learned from his past mistakes. Their romance was not highly publicized, remaining mostly under the radar. “Our families knew about our relationship,” said Jan. “I was not eager to just jump into another marriage. We took it very slowly. We did not officially get married until five years after we met.” When informed that this was the longest hiatus between marriages for Mickey, she remarked, “[T]hat may possibly be a reason that we had a long and successful marriage. We were together over forty years. Maybe it is due to the fact that we had time to get to know each other. It was not the same impulsive act he carried out with his previous seven wives.”10
Although Mickey once joked to a reporter that he had married Jan while on location in Hong Kong, the fact was they took out a marriage license in July 1978 in Thousand Oaks. Mickey’s eighth marriage took place on July 28, 1978, at the Conejo Valley Church of Religious Science. Mickey was fifty-seven, and Jan was thirty-nine. Sig Frohlich was Mickey’s best man, and Chris Aber, Jan’s oldest son, gave the bride away. This broke the pattern of Mickey’s last five marriages, conducted in a Las Vegas wedding chapel. This time was different. This time, Mickey would tell Jan, it would work. “Mickey was determined to make our marriage work—as was I,” Jan said.