Mickey in Sugar Babies.
UNPUBLISHED PHOTO.
Mickey in Sugar Babies.
UNPUBLISHED PHOTO.
The item in the morning paper one day in 1974 caught Norman Abbott’s eye. It was buried deep in the Los Angeles Times, a notice Norm found while thumbing through the pages and drinking his coffee. It was a story that sparked a very old memory. They were tearing down the old Burbank Theatre on Sixth and Main Streets, in downtown LA, one of the city’s oldest burlesque houses. What memories still lingered there! Abbott thought.
The Burbank Burlesque, as it was known, opened as a legitimate theater in 1893, and for many years it was Morosco’s Burbank Theatre, before becoming a burlesque house—and the base, for many years, for its top banana, Joe Yule Sr., Mickey Rooney’s father. The Burbank Burlesque in its later years had also become the West Coast home for noted strippers such as Gypsy Rose Lee and Tempest Storm, one of gangster Mickey Cohen’s girls (whom Mickey Rooney dated and then ditched after he was slapped around by a couple of Cohen’s musculeros).
When Norm Abbott read that the theater was to be razed, it touched a deep memory. Burlesque and the sights and sounds of performers on the Burbank stage were embedded in his blood. Norm and his wife, Ann, were aficionados of burlesque and collectors of its memorabilia. When Abbott read that someone was selling off (or giving away) memorabilia from the old house’s glory days before knocking the place down, he knew he had to go. This opportunity was a collector’s dream, especially for someone whose heart and soul was burlesque, whose very ancestry was spawned in the footlights.
Norm’s family was burlesque. He had grown up around it, the son of burlesque/vaudeville performer Olive Abbott, the sister of Bud Abbot, Lou Costello’s straight man. Abbott and Costello’s act evolved from burlesque, through film, and into television. Bud Abbott, the greatest straight man who ever lived, was a piece of American history, and so was Norm. As a youth, he worked at the renowned Gaiety delicatessen in New York City, which abutted the legendary Minsky’s Burlesque.
“The Gaiety was the first deli to serve overstuffed sandwiches,” Norm told us. “And you could even order a half sandwich if you were short of cash. If things were really rough, you’d eat salami—‘a nickel a shtikle’—or a hot dog, the real kind, rolled on a grill, but if you were flush, you’d have pastrami or corned beef. The Gaiety backed onto a burlesque theater on Forty-Fourth Street, and you’d always be elbow to elbow with actors. If they were really broke, that one overstuffed sandwich would be their only meal of the day.”1 Abbott recalled meeting the great burlesque legends, such as Gypsy Rose Lee, Rags Ragland, Phil Silvers, Harry Steppe, and Sid Fields. Burlesque flowed through Norman Abbott’s blood like a river, deep and full of life.
Norman Abbott eventually became a prolific motion picture and television director. He started out working for his uncle Bud on Abbott and Costello films such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Hit the Ice, and Africa Screams. He eventually directed hundreds of episodes of television classics, including Leave It to Beaver; The Munsters; The Jack Benny Program; Welcome Back, Kotter; Sanford and Son; McHale’s Navy; and perhaps one of the best examples of vaudeville fly-gab, fast-talking back-and-forth patter (that is, after Burns and Kaye), Burns and Allen.
At the Burbank Theatre closing sale, Norm rummaged through suitcases of old promotional material, placards, scripts, posters, postcards, and photos, discovering a treasure trove of star memorabilia from some of the marquee burlesque performers. And then he came to Joe Yule. Looking at the original jokes, gags, and stage business, Norm told us, it was if he were hit by a thunderbolt. He’d discovered the mother lode of burlesque memorabilia, and it gave him an idea. “I suddenly had an inspiration, I told to my wife, Ann. I thought it would be wonderful to do an old-fashioned burlesque show on Broadway. Do all the old routines, music, and create the world of burlesque for both the new and older generations. We kicked around names, and the most obvious choice would be Mickey Rooney.” He said that while the older performers were gone, Mickey was still rather young, and knew every nuance and rhythm of burlesque.2
Abbott heard that Broadway producer Harry Rigby was in Los Angeles trying to recruit Debbie Reynolds to star in a revival of Hello, Dolly! and happened to be staying at the house of Norm’s friend. Norman called Rigby and told him about what he had found at the Burbank. When he later showed him his collection of memorabilia, Rigby was interested. But Abbott had one caveat: he wanted to direct the show. Rigby said, “You’ve got a deal.” Abbott also told Rigby that it was imperative that they have Mickey Rooney as the top banana. “Mickey knows all the bits, and there is an innocence in his face that will keep the show from getting dirty,” Abbott recalled saying to Rigby.
This was important to Abbott. Early burlesque was risqué but not outright pornographic. There was a flash of this, a hint of that, lots of brassy music, songs with a ragtime beat, lots of pratfalls, and skits and jokes (many that have stood the test of time)—and it was only Mickey Rooney, the last living and healthy performer from a bygone era of live onstage, raucous slapstick comedy who knew all the routines, patter, and timing to pull this off. Rigby agreed. Only Mickey. But how to sell Rooney on the idea? Norm said he would pitch to Mickey that this was the innocent kind of burlesque, the one that existed in the 1920s, before the strippers came along and changed it from “family” entertainment to salacious porn.
From that meeting in 1975, Rigby kept kicking around Abbott’s idea. Then, in 1977, he attended the Conference of American Pop Arts at Lincoln Center, where several respected professors of the arts from several universities were giving lectures on different incarnations of popular American entertainment, including burlesque, minstrel shows, and carnivals. Rigby attended a presentation by Professor Ralph Gilmore Allen from the University of Tennessee, whose historical research on burlesque comedy had made him an aficionado of the art form. Rigby went to his seminar and, as he later told Arthur Marx, listened to Allen give a lecture on burlesque that had “the audience rolling in the aisles. I thought if he could get that type of reaction from that audience, then a burlesque show could do well.”3
When Abbott initially called Mickey to talk about the concept, he said, Rooney “was very rude. I talked to his wife and she was very nice. When Mickey came to the phone and I told Mickey my idea, he said, ‘Fucking Burlesque is dead.’ And then he hung up. I had known Mickey for years. I directed him on several television shows and even directed him in a pilot [Tempo, 1963], so it wasn’t as if I didn’t know him. We later talked again about the idea, and he still wasn’t very interested. When Rigby called him later, he told him that ‘the idea is bullshit.’ But Rooney also said that he would keep an open mind. He was still touring in dinner theaters and thought it might afford him to take a break from Three Goats and a Blanket.”
Eventually, in 1977, Rigby signed Professor Allen to write the book for the proposed project, and create a musical book after the play book was complete. Taking a look at the tapes and interviews that Allen had compiled and Norm Abbott’s memorabilia from the Burlesque, they selected the material that they believed would best engage modern audiences. After the first draft of the book was completed, Rigby sent it to Rooney. Then, when Mickey was in Louisville performing, Professor Allen went backstage to introduce himself—where, he claimed, he talked the actor into doing the show.
On October 14, 1978, Variety announced, “Ruth Webb pacted Mickey Rooney with Harry Rigby for B’Way-bound Sugar Baby [sic], a look at burlesque from 1898–1935. Rooney would play a Joe Yule, Sr.–like performer, Rehearsals are skedded to start in March.”
“Rigby called me and was thrilled that he signed Rooney, as was I,” Abbott told us. “He then told me we would sign an agreement to direct the project as we had agreed. However, no agreement was ever signed. I trusted Rigby’s word that we had a deal.”
Rigby then set out to find a composer. He wanted music you could hum leaving the theater. He first tried to use some Irving Berlin songs, but Berlin turned him down; he didn’t want his music associated with burlesque. Sheldon Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof) also passed. But it was Mickey’s costar who would help them find their music.
Like Mickey, Ann Miller was an MGM veteran. She was born in 1923, and by the time she joined Metro in 1947, she was a sound stage veteran, having done twelve musicals while under contract at Columbia. At MGM she appeared in such classics as Easter Parade (1948, replacing Cyd Charrise, who had broken her leg), with Judy Garland; On the Town (1949); and Kiss Me Kate (1953). After she left MGM in 1957, she appeared in nightclubs, on the dinner theater circuit, and on Broadway in Mame (1969), succeeding Angela Lansbury in the title role. In her book Miller’s High Life Miller writes that she had romances with Louis Mayer, Conrad Hilton, and Howard Hughes, and in Tapping into the Force (1990) she claims she is the direct reincarnation of an Egyptian queen, Hathshepsut.4 Theater producer Terry Allen Kramer said, “Annie was tough as nails. Mickey was overpowering and could get his way with most everybody. With Annie, he watched his step. He was more frightened of her.”5
When signed to costar in the play, Miller suggested the music of the late Jimmy McHugh, whom she used to date. When Rigby bought McHugh songs such as “I’m in the Mood for Love,” “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby,” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” he discovered that McHugh had left a trunk of seventy tunes that had never been published and had no lyrics. Upon a recommendation from the choreographer he hired for the play, Ernest Flatt (The Carol Burnett Show), he hired Arthur Malvin to write the lyrics for those lost songs.
The show was originally titled The New Majestic Follies and Lyceum Gardens Review—really too long for a marquee. They needed something shorter, punchier, more to the point; something that communicated what drew audiences to burlesque in the first place. They then alighted upon the nickname Stage Door Johnnies, which describes the wannabe “sugar daddies,” guys who waited outside the side entrances to theaters for the chorus girls they were picking up after the show, the “sugar babies.” The title Sugar Babies might have also been inspired by Arthur Malvin’s song “Let Me Be Your Sugar Baby.” And then there was the name for the Sugar Babies candy developed in the 1930s.
The show was budgeted for $1.3 million, higher than some others of that time, but Rigby wanted to take the musical on a five-week pre-Broadway tour, which upped the cost of the production. He partnered with Terry Allen Kramer, whose husband, Irving Kramer, was a board member of Columbia Pictures. Along with Kramer’s participation, Columbia also invested five hundred thousand dollars.
Rigby scheduled six weeks of rehearsals at the Michael Bennett studios in downtown Manhattan. (Jan and Mickey decided to stay in Fort Lee, New Jersey, instead of New York City because it was closer to golf courses Mickey wanted to play.) The first couple of weeks were devoted to the dance numbers choreographed by Ernest Flatt. Norman Abbott oversaw the dialogue. Problems started to creep up right away, though, when Mickey felt uncomfortable with the straight men (comedians in the mold of George Burns and Jack Benny) they had hired. A straight man’s job is to set up the punch line for his partner. It’s called “laying pipe.” George Burns demonstrated it in the first episode of the The Burns and Allen Show when he described how a straight man asks the question, for example (to Gracie), “How’s your brother, Freddie?” Then he pauses, looking casually around at the audience, his gaze maybe lingering on a prop. This pause is called a “beat.” Gracie answers, “Oh, he just came back from Philadelphia.” George stares at his cigar. He repeats Gracie’s last line as a question—this is very important to lay the pipe for the next line: “Your brother Freddie just came back from Philadelphia?” “Yes,” Gracie answers, and says nothing else. The straight man looks perplexed, scans the audience again, purses his lips, and finally takes the bait, asking, “Why was he in Philadelphia?” Gracie answers, “They were sitting at breakfast and his wife said, ‘I’d love some Philadelphia Cream Cheese.’ ” Now take this same type of interchange and replace it with “Who’s on first?” Now imagine Jerry Seinfeld talking to Kramer, and you get the picture. That’s what a straight man does.
By the end of the second week, at Mickey’s insistence, they had fired three different actors. Mickey was complaining about the material, the delivery, and the show’s structure and timing. If he seemed obsessive, it was because he realized what this play could mean to his career. He was stuck in dinner theater and in low-level movies playing minor character roles. He was no longer a top-grossing motion picture leading man. Far from it. But this was Broadway. This was the burlesque in which he’d grown up and learned all his stagecraft. This was his home. If he failed at this, his last chance at a major Broadway show, it was back to $2,500 a week at the dinner theaters in small cities where blue-haired ladies and their retired husbands looked up from gumming their string beans and poached salmon to watch the Andy Hardy of their youth try to recapture what he was fifty years earlier. Sugar Babies had to work. The weight of the production was on his shoulders.
When no acceptable straight man was found by the third week, director Norman Abbott read the lines to Mickey. After all, wasn’t Abbott the nephew of arguably one of the greatest burlesque straight men who ever lived? There was George Burns, there was Jack Benny, and there was Bud Abbott. Nobody else was even close. But Abbott was a director not a seasoned performer, and thus he kept throwing Rooney’s timing off.
Fortunately, Mickey then remembered his friend and well-known character actor Peter Leeds, with whom he’d done shows, and they hired him. Leeds worked in seamlessly with Mickey, and the straight man/gag man patter started to click.
Mickey was also unhappy with Abbott as a theater director, even though it was Abbott who’d created the play and pushed to get Mickey back on a Broadway stage.
First, Abbott was a television director. He didn’t understand, as his uncle and Mickey did, the cadences of burlesque before a live stage audience, where you have to leave it to your performers to play off one another and off the audience. A good stage comic can actually hear the audience breathe. He can feel the response of the audience to a line, knows when to pause, knows how to lay the pipe for the next joke, knows where and how to look—and, as straight man, knows how to bring the audience into the joke so as to get them to laugh at his consternation. Look at how Bud Abbott plays the flummoxed interviewer, gasping in frustration, opposite Lou Costello in “Who’s on First?,” or Jack Benny playing off Mel Blanc in the railroad station skit, or off Eddie “Rochester” Anderson when he’s asked to spend a dime. And picture Carl Reiner and Sid Caesar or Mel Brooks as Reiner on the old Your Show of Shows lays out the setup and pauses before the next joke to the Two Thousand Year Old Man or the man who fell out of the plane, television staples in the 1950s. This timing, this sense of what his audience was thinking and expecting, was what Mickey learned from the time he was one year old standing in the wings as his father performed, and by watching the greatest burlesque comics cavort on stage. This became his language as his neurological pathways developed, as the syntax and rhythm of language became hard-wired within the language center of his brain. Just as a child learns the language spoken to him by those who nurture him, so Mickey learned the patter and rhythm of stage comedy. In his opinion, Norm Abbott did not know it.
Second, Mickey felt that Norm was not authoritative enough with the actors. Also, he believed, probably correctly, that Abbott was unable to get the skits on their feet. While Abbott knew burlesque from his family background, Mickey had performed these routines since he was two years old. He was still doing the skits in his Vegas act.
Finally, Mickey approached Abbott and said to him, “I love you, baby, but this isn’t going to work out. You can’t control the actors.” Then he turned to Rigby and demanded that he fire Abbott, which Rigby reluctantly did. But the whole project had been based on Abbott’s conception. Abbott trusted Rigby and had not signed a contract, which left him vulnerable. He deserved at least a partial share in a project based on his ideas.
Abbott packed up and returned to Los Angeles to direct episodic television, which was his forte and expertise. Several months later, after the initial shock of being fired from a project that he had worked on for five years, he filed a lawsuit for breach of contract for nine hundred thousand dollars in Los Angeles Superior Court. Though he had no signed paper, he had enough extrinsic evidence to assert “promissory estoppel” if Rigby were to claim there was no contract. Abbott had performed his job as if he had signed a contract hence he could stop the producer from claiming there was no contract. Besides, no defense attorney in his or her right mind wants an LA County judge compelling the production of box office receipts to establish the value of a claim. Abbott and Rigby settled the suit about a year later, Norm told us, for an amount in the high six figures.
Meanwhile, Mickey suggested that Rigby call the colorful impresario John Kenley, who had employed Mickey for nearly twenty years for his theaters in Ohio. Kenley had been a huge help to Rooney when he couldn’t find work, hiring him for starring roles in several productions and gaining him notice. In fact, Rigby knew Rooney’s stage work because of John Kenley. Also, Kenley knew the art form in question, having assembled shows such as This Was Burlesque with Ann Corio. Mickey trusted his judgment. Merv Griffin wrote about Kenley in his book Merv: An Autobiography, revealing what had been gossiped about by many and known as fact by few that Kenley (who has since died) spent many a theatrical off-season traipsing around South Florida as a woman named Joan, wearing getups that would make Liberace look like Don Draper.6 Kenley once said, “People have often wondered if I am gay. Sometimes I wished I was. Life would have been simpler. Androgyny is overrated.”7
Kenley recommended his friend Rudy Tronto as director. Tronto had directed The Best of Burlesque, with Ann Corio, for Kennely, and Mickey had worked with him in W.C., and trusted him. He was the perfect fit.
When Tronto arrived, Rooney grabbed him and said, complaining about some of the skits, stage business, and other material, “Rudy, we’ve got to get rid of all this shit. The stuff is terrible,” recalled Tronto about some of the skits in the show, to Arthur Marx and thence to us.8
The show toured for six months. “Harry Rigby wanted this long pre-Broadway tour, which I thought, and still think, was far too long. It kept our costs higher,” said producer and financial backer Terry Allen Kramer. The first stop was San Francisco, at the Curran Theatre. Mickey, for maybe one of the only times in his career, was walking a tightrope of nerves before opening curtain. He didn’t have to worry. He brought down the house. The audience delighted in his every movement, joke, pratfall, and dance step. He didn’t just keep in step with Ann Miller; he floated across the stage with her, and harmonized with her in songs that made the audience hum. Many experts of the theater believe that the first preview is a good indicator of the show’s future. If that is the rule, then the eight curtain calls for Mickey were an excellent barometer. While the first preview was not sold out, by the next morning the word of mouth was so strong that there was a line around the block for tickets. Sugar Babies was sold out for the rest of the four-week run. The reviewers raved about Rooney and Miller.
Stage veteran Ann Miller kept Mickey in line right from the start. “Annie knew Mickey, and she kept him in place,” recalled Terry Allen Kramer to us. “If he got too broad, she could tone him down. They made a great balance, and she would not take any of Mickey’s stuff. She could definitely stand up to him.”
As they assessed each road performance, Kramer, Rigby, Tronto, Flatt, and Malvin revised, tightened, and fine-tuned the show throughout the tryouts. They next played the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, a historic venue and Mickey’s old stomping ground. Again, the show sold out. Except for one negative review from Sylvia Drake of the Los Angeles Times, in which she said the show was “for the Magic Mountain crowd,” every other outlet praised Mickey and the show.
The show continued its gypsy existence for long runs in Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, where it met with the similar accolades. “I’ve never had so much fun,” said Kramer. “And I learned every step of the way. In today’s theater world, I can’t be so hands-on. It just can’t be done today.” She explained that in today’s Broadway musical theater, she couldn’t have had the level of intimate, day-to-day involvement that she had with Sugar Babies; nor could the play have toured for that long.
On Friday, October 9, 1979, at the Nederlander Organization’s Mark Hellinger Theater, Sugar Babies finally made its Broadway debut. The word of mouth from the six-month tour was so strong that there was already over a million dollars in advance tickets sales.
“It was such a triumph for Mickey . . . all the anger for being forgotten and relegated to the bin, melted away,” Jan Rooney told us. “Everyone recognized his tremendous talent.”
On November 16, 1979, Mickey told the New York Times, “To sum it up, living with Mickey Rooney hasn’t been easy. There have been crevices, fissures, pits and I’ve fallen into a lot of them. But the crux of it is, you can’t quit on life, you’ve got to keep going.” He also claimed that he had found God though the Church of Religious Science.
The triumph of the opening night of Sugar Babies would have made a great film arc in itself: from Mickey’s rise to the top of stardom in films, through his long fall and successive tragedies, to his rise again to become the favorite son of Broadway. Here he was on opening night playing to an audience live onstage in the town where he was born, performing the very material he had grown up with, and playing a role his own father had played—and all of it to cheering audiences and rave notices. It doesn’t get any better than that.
New York reviews, which could be brutal and rarely were sentimental, especially for this kind of play, one with so much shtick, created tributes to Mickey Rooney. Newspapers, television, radio, and every magazine sang his praises. Mickey’s face appeared everywhere. He was on the cover of the March 1980 issue of Life magazine. He was featured in covers stories in Time, Newsweek, and even the National Enquirer. Time on October 29 featured a piece on him that read, “These days the sun is shining almost constantly at the Mark Hellinger Theater. At 59, Mickey once again has the approval he needs and demands. ‘The audience and I are friends,’ he says. ‘We’re family. They grew up with me. They allowed me to grow up with them. I’ve let them down several times. They’ve let me down several times. But we’re all family, and it’s time for a reunion. What warmth comes over you when they laugh! It’s as if they’re saying It’s all been worth it, thank you.’ ” And that’s what a stage performer not only understands, but absorbs.
Kramer, the producer alongside Rigby and also the main investor along with Columbia, was involved in every aspect of the production. This was the first time she was an active producer for a Broadway show. After Sugar Babies, she went on to become one of the most prolific modern Broadway producers ever. Her most recent plays include The Elephant Man with Bradley Cooper, Cyndi Lauper’s Kinky Boots, and the musical version of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky. Speaking to us from her New York office, she said:
Oh, I just adored Mickey. However, he was so extraordinarily difficult . . . Right from the beginning, when we were on the road. We had a tremendous Rollerblading number that cashed in on that craze and was wonderful. It was a showcase piece, and Mickey was just great in it. In San Francisco, he said, “Terry, I don’t want to do this number any longer.” I told him that it was a showstopper. He said, “No, my leg hurts, and I can’t do it any longer.” And he just lay down on the stage, flat on his back, and wouldn’t move. Needless to say, we removed that segment. . . . While we were still on the pre-Broadway tryouts, I was paying Mickey fifty thousand dollars a week. He came to me and demanded seventy thousand per week. I told him we were barely breaking even on the road, and I couldn’t do that. He then went on a tirade: how he can replace Ann Miller and take her part and her salary. He then did her dance steps in part to prove to me how he could do her part as well.9
According to Kramer, Mickey also received 10 percent of the gross box office. The play grossed more than $300,000 per week for three years, for 1,208 performances. Mickey also toured in the play for two more years and more than 600 performances. His return, by the finish of the last road show in 1985—according to Mickey’s manager of nearly thirty years, Robert Malcolm, CEO of the Artists Group, who would later become his agent as well—was just south of $40 million. He was outearning his yearly return from MGM in three weeks of work. At sixty years old, after all the years of scuffling since being booted from MGM, Mickey had hit a grand slam, emerging from earning $2,500 a week in dinner theater to a weekly salary of $70,000 per week.10
From $70,000 a week for a total of $40 million, to filing for bankruptcy, to an estate worth less than $20,000 at his death—what happened? This question plagues family, friends, acquaintances, and observers of Mickey Rooney, as well as the court that oversaw his conservatorship. How did he go from the astounding income from Sugar Babies, performed in his sixties, and remain a constant earner in movies thereafter, to near poverty at the time of his death in 2014? We asked his agents, managers, business managers, publicists, family, friends, and acquaintances this simple question: How could he have plowed through tens of millions of dollars in just those years alone?
The stock answer was: gambling. His manager Robert Malcolm told us that Mickey was always at the track or on the phone to his bookie. Malcolm said, “Even when he was doing the ‘panto’ plays in London, I’d call there and his assistant would always tell me he was at the track. He went through much of his money in gambling and horse racing.” Mickey’s gambling addiction, notorious during his days at MGM and thereafter, continued throughout the rest of his life unabated until all his money was gone and he ended up in a conservatorship.
Terry Allen Kramer, who confirmed that Mickey earned millions from Sugar Babies, seconded this: “Besides his crazy ideas and products, he was a gambler, pure and simple. He’d always be at the track in the afternoons or on the phone with his bookies. He gambled his money away along with his families’ hands that were always in his pockets,” she recalled, reminding us that Mickey had fathered many children over the years through his eight marriages.11
His stepson Chris Aber, his assistant for over thirty years, confirmed this as well, telling us, “Mickey lived at the track. He blew countless dollars there. He also owned horses and always lost money on that. Until he just stopped, about ten years ago, he lived and breathed horse racing.”
His sister-in-law of forty years, Ronna Riley, Jan’s younger sister, said, “Mickey was a degenerate gambler. He would beg me to go with him to the races, as Jan refused to go. Once, while at Santa Anita, we saw the very elegant and dapper Cary Grant. Cary loves Mickey and once said that he considered Mickey to be the greatest living actor. Grant had this beautiful white Rolls-Royce he was getting into, and said to Mickey—who was rather sloppy, and [was] busy with his forms—‘Mickey, Mickey . . . do you ever change your clothes?’ ”12
His longtime friend Sidney Miller recalled that Mickey could not get ahead of his losses at the track, even when he won early. Mickey’s oft-quoted remark, “I lost two dollars at Santa Anita and I’ve spent three million trying to get it back,” is not far off. In a visit to Santa Anita with the author, he lost quite a few dollars. (In fact, he still owes this author fifty dollars.)
Even with his well-documented gambling problem, it is still astounding that he could go through over forty million dollars. But it was more than gambling, we discovered. It was also his terrible business sense. When it came to business, he was the supreme ultracrepidarian, pitching ideas so far beyond his area of expertise that people who worked with him were astounded. “Mickey had absolutely zero business sense,” Kramer explained to us in our interview.
My father [Charles Robert Allen Jr.] was a world-famous venture capitalist [and founder of the investment bank Allen and Company]. . . . He had Mickey set up a trust for investment, where he could collect his dividends but never, ever touch the principal. He was emphatic to Mickey that you can never, ever touch the principal, and he’ll have that forever. Eventually, he goes behind my father[’s back] and tries to take out the principal. My father read him the riot act, but Mickey would not listen. Eventually, my father just threw up his hands and gave up trying to help Mickey.
During the run of the play, Mickey would blow his money on ridiculous investments. Oh, he had all these hangers-on around him. He paid a fortune and bought this restaurant in Fort Lee, where he lived. He asked me for my advice before he bought it. I . . . pointed to the empty parking lot and said, “Mickey, don’t you dare buy this. The shopping center is dead.” Regardless, he bought it and it went bust. Later on, he decided to start a chain, in Los Angeles, called Rooney’s Weenie World of Hot Dogs. I invested ten thousand dollars in it. I remember I went to the opening and it must have been a hundred ten degrees and the air-conditioning wasn’t working. They sold square hot dogs in a bun. Square hot dogs. I think that says it all. Obviously, I lost my investment.
Donald Trump, Mickey’s friend for years, remarked to us, “Over the years I tried to help him, but he did as he pleased. He was a brilliant and talented artist. He just had no sense of business.” Robert Malcolm said, “You could not talk him out of these crazy ideas. He always thought his next idea would be the big winner. That never happened.”
His sister-in-law Ronna Riley said, “Mickey was the Midas touch in reverse.”
Regardless of advice from some of the great financial gurus of our times—Donald Trump; Charles Robert Allen Jr.; Terry Allen Kramer and her husband, financier Irwin Kramer—Mickey was tone-deaf to their advice. He’d rather invest in Rooney’s Weenie World than safe dividend-bearing investments recommended by Charles Robert Allen Jr. or Trump. With his crazy investments, his gambling addiction, and a lifestyle in which he spent without restraint, paying for things he couldn’t afford while going shy on the IRS and the State of California, one can see how the scores of millions he earned could be gone at the end of the day.
Gambling wasn’t the only vice Mickey continued to indulge in during his later years. Though he had now entered into his eighth marriage, and had claimed to have rediscovered God, according to Terry Allen Kramer, his womanizing ways continued. “Mickey constantly had girls up in his dressing room, and it wasn’t just to visit,” she said. “On one occasion, I needed to talk with Mickey and went into his dressing room where he was in the middle of a tryst with this girl. When I walked in, he stopped and in his boxers he held out his hand to me and said, ‘Let us pray.’ He said he had found God. I said to him, ‘Mickey, you’re so little in this world, how did God find you? Did he come through the window?’ Mickey was not the least bit embarrassed to be caught.”13
His stepson Chris told us that a steady stream of ladies made themselves available to Mickey, up until his late eighties. Although it may seem shocking that this went on while Chris’s mother was Mickey’s wife, Chris was not bothered, saying to us, “No, I think she realized that is part of the business. The girls were always available, and Mickey would be available.”
TERRY ALLEN KRAMER BELIEVES that Sugar Babies struck gold largely due to Mickey Rooney. She recalled, “He was impossible to replace. I really have attempted to revisit Sugar Babies on Broadway, but I don’t think it would succeed. First, I don’t think that I could find anyone who could take Mickey’s place today. Name me someone who could do what he did in a burlesque way? Secondly, I think the material is too clean for today’s audiences.”14
To Kramer’s point: during Mickey’s breaks, when he was shooting a film or when the show was on the road, his understudies for Sugar Babies were ineffective because they couldn’t inhabit the role that Mickey had created playing his own father. After all, who could play Joe Yule Sr. better than Joe Yule Jr.? During the three-year run on Broadway, Mickey took three vacations, and his replacements included comic Rip Taylor, Joey Bishop, understudy and choreographer Rudy Tronto, Eddie Bracken, Phil Ford, and Robert Morse from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. None of them could draw the audience that Mickey did. For example, when Joey Bishop substituted for Mickey for four weeks in February 1981, “the grosses dipped to practically nothing. It was a disaster,” Kramer said.
And Bishop was not without his burlesque bona fides: “The funny thing was that when I was just starting out in Philadelphia in the late 1930s,” he said, “I was part of a vaudeville act called the Bishop Boys, which is where I got my name. We were booked into the old Trocadero, which was a burlesque house, and I had a chance to see the world of striptease and baggy-pants comics at close range.”15
When director Harry Rigby attempted an ill-fated road production of Babies during the original Broadway run, which starred Carol Channing and Robert Morse, and ran from August through November 1980, the show folded in Boston—and Kramer and Rigby took a million-dollar bath. “Channing did not fill Ann Miller’s shoes, and Bobby Morse was not Mickey Rooney,” Kramer recalled.
As Mickey and Ann Miller embarked on a national road show of Sugar Babies in 1984, Rooney was still enjoying himself as top banana. He loved coming up with new ad libs, pieces of business, and sometimes a jab from something he saw in the news. In effect, he was updating the dialogue in small ways as he went along. Thus, the show always seemed fresh, even though it was ostensibly the same script every night.
Mickey’s former manager Bullets Durgom recalled that “when Sugar Babies was playing at the Pantages, I went to see him. Knowing I was in the audience, he started calling the people in the show not by their character names, but by the names of people we used to know and deal with when I was managing him: Sam Stiefel, Maurice Duke, Red Doff. That night he kept referring to Ann as Sam Stiefel. ‘Hey, Sam,’ he’d say to her. ‘Come over here, Sam.’ The audience was completely confused. But he was getting a kick out of it for my sake.”16
Even Ava Gardner came to watch the show, and stopped backstage to visit Mickey in his dressing room and congratulate him. She told her coauthor Peter Evans, “He is still the same beautiful clown. I’m very proud of him.” Their crossing paths again was a very poignant moment: Mickey’s career was on an upswing while Ava was on her long, painful slide into alcohol-laced oblivion.17
It was much the same with his longtime childhood friend Richard Quine, who directed Mickey in his films after MGM and in his television show, and later gave him parts when nobody else would. Quine had once been one of Hollywood’s hottest talents, but in 1984 he was living in obscurity. He visited Mickey’s dressing room in Los Angeles, which may have been their last meeting. Quine remarked, “Mickey has the uncanny ability to always bounce back from whatever was thrown at him.”18 Quine, however, couldn’t seem to bounce back, and he sadly took his own life in 1989.
BY 1985, SUGAR BABIES had become a classic, having been on the stage for many years. It played at the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island rather than Broadway, and the Music Fair Theater in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, outside Philladelphia. Ann Miller was replaced by Jane Summerhays; and Mickey Deems, Jay Stuart, Rudy Tronto, and Lucianne Buchanan took the place of Peter Leeds, Ann Jillian, and others. Juliet Prowse replaced Ann Miller, and in road shows, Eddie Bracken and Anita Morris took Mickey’s and Ann’s places. A national tour had Carol Channing and Robert Morse taking Ann’s and Mickey’s places in August to November of 1980, and Eddie Bracken and Jaye P. Morgan stepping in in 1982. Yet, as Terry Allen Kramer told us, none of the replacements was as powerful in his or her role as the original cast, particularly Mickey Rooney. And on July 7, 1985, the New York Times wrote, “Most importantly, ‘Sugar Babies’ has a national treasure in Mickey Rooney, who is truly, as a banner over the stage proclaims at the end, ‘The Ambassador of Good Will.’ ”