The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  The long and unpredictably successful career of Wallace Beery (a perfect last name for his characters) sums up the rules the star machine followed in exploiting the creation of bonuses it stumbled across. First, whatever narrow niche an odd personality first appealed to audiences in, keep it. Make that the star’s defined type. Second, broaden it as much as possible to make more money from it by using it in any genre. Can it work in musicals? Westerns? Melodramas if it’s comedic, and comedies if it’s tragic? What else can you get out of it at the box office? And third, repeat all the elements from the successful film that defined the “bonus” popularity with the masses as often as you can in any setting that you can. Last, and this was related to the efficiency of the business and its maintained roster of players, offset any weakness that might appear as the years passed by surrounding the oddity with opposites. In Beery’s case, that meant maybe putting in a young couple to provide the youth and beauty he lacked. It maybe meant broadening his appeal to women, who might otherwise reject him, by having him play opposite a child star. It certainly meant having the nerve to trust the audience who had picked him out in the first place. MGM compensated for Beery’s lack of good looks by putting him front and center, often in close-ups, in almost every scene in his movies. The studio fully understood that it was his ugly mug the paying customers wanted to see.

  Bad Bascomb (1946) demonstrates all these points. The story is perfect for the aging Beery. He plays a “bad” man who undergoes a humanizing process, a kind of de-uglifying of Wallace Beery. The system builds its vehicle around him, both using him and shoring him up. Beery can carry the load, but he’s also working with a safety net. Marshall Thompson and Frances Rafferty provide a youthful romance. Marjorie Main expands the comedy. The story is a favorite genre of its time, a western, with a comforting wagon-train plot that provides plenty of action and drama to go with the humor. And child star Margaret O’Brien sits in Beery’s lap and tells him she loves him and is going to marry him when she grows up. O’Brien’s love for Beery’s character softens him and sentimentalizes him. It’s all schmaltz, tried and true. In the end, however, the movie validates Beery. After killing a man (to help his friends, of course), he has to be taken away by the federal marshal. In a teary finale, Beery promises little O’Brien that he will “catch up later.” She knows better. “I’ll never see you again,” she wails, “I just know it.” And, in fact, in that astonishingly cruel way of Hollywood’s that people so easily forget, she never does see him again. He’s taken away to be hanged. The End. No happy ending with Beery, all grins and golly-gee, riding up to the old wagon train and giving little Maggie a big hug. Not having a sudden about-face plot device gave real credibility to Wallace Beery’s playing of Bascomb—and to the definition of his stardom, and MGM knew the star business. Oddities had to remain oddities to the very end of the picture. The business respected the audience’s oddball choice.

  MICKEY ROONEY

  Mickey Rooney

  Mickey Rooney was in many ways a younger version of Wallace Beery. Rooney had talent to burn, and he burned it. His was a seemingly endless supply of natural resources that would never dry up but were ruined by excessive use and abuse, by his own arrogance and sense of power. He could sing, dance, play the drums and the piano, do comic imitations of the greats of the day like Gable and Lionel Barrymore, fall down in punishing slapstick routines, dress up like Carmen Miranda and boom-chick around, and, finally, act in a serious role. Whatever was needed, he could do. Rooney starred in vaudeville, radio, legitimate theatre, nightclubs, state fairs, ad campaigns, movies, and television. He has done everything there is to do in show business, all with equal success, and, it might be said, equal failure.

  Clarence Brown, a major director in the 1930s and 1940s, who directed Rooney in an Academy Award–nominated performance in The Human Comedy (1943), said, “Mickey Rooney is the closest thing to a genius that I ever worked with. There was Chaplin, then there was Rooney. The little bastard could do no wrong in my book…All you had to do with him was rehearse it once.” It might be said that Mickey Rooney is one movie star who really defines the term, yet he’s an oddity: a guy too short, too goofy, too youthful looking, and too unromantic ever to make it, much less last the way he did. He was born to be a sidekick but became a star. The bottom line of Hollywood oddball stardom has to be Mickey Rooney, a real bonus payoff in the system.

  Rooney’s golden era brought him money, fame, and many accolades. In 1938 he was awarded an honorary Oscar “for bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth” and “for setting a high standard of ability and achievement.” He was nominated for Best Actor in both 1939 (for Babes in Arms) and 1943 (for The Human Comedy). In 1940, at the age of twenty, he had it all and then some, but before the decade was over, he was a show business throwaway. He himself said, “I starred in eight pictures in 1938. In 1948 and 1949 together, I starred in only three.” Despite being nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor in 1956 for The Bold and the Brave, he kept his career alive in the 1950s only by the seat of his pants. He appeared in nightclubs and on television, and formed his own independent production company, but not one of the movies that were made, all starring him, was really successful. By 1962, he was bankrupt. (Rooney said, “I was a has-been.”) Because he married and divorced seven times and had developed a drinking problem, he became a joke and was on his way to both oblivion and tragedy.* He was a little boy who could do anything who became an adult who did too much of the wrong things.

  Rooney was born in a trunk in 1920 as Joe Yule Jr. By 1926, he was out there trouping, playing a midget with a cigar in a two-reeler called Not to Be Trusted. As of this writing in 2006, at the age of eighty-six, he’s still trouping, and will no doubt troupe onward after death. If there’s a way to play the ghost in Hamlet when you are a ghost, Rooney’ll be there. When he appeared on Broadway in Sugar Babies in the early 1980s, I attended just to say I had actually seen him in person. His biography in the Playbill was brief. All it said was, “Mickey Rooney…formerly Andy Hardy…formerly Mickey McGuire…formerly Joe Yule Jr.” In between the names lay a lifetime of show business. The Rooney story is the complete history of twentieth-century performance. He started as a showbiz kid, the “junior” to a successful vaudevillian, then broke into the movies about the time most children were starting school. He found success in a popular series based on the Toonerville Trolley comic strip by playing a character named Mickey McGuire. He legally changed his name to cash in, and became “Mickey McGuire as himself” in more than sixty shorts between 1927 and 1934. After continuing to work for three more years, he changed his name to Mickey Rooney because the Toonerville Trolley comic strip people threatened to sue. In 1937, he made his thirty-seventh feature, an MGM movie called A Family Affair, playing a character named Andy Hardy, and by 1938 he ranked in the top ten box office stars of the year, a rating he maintained through 1944. Everything about him is summed up by the four names—Yule, McGuire, Hardy, and Rooney—including loss of identity and the need to become someone else to succeed.

  Mickey Rooney found lasting fame when he undertook the role of a typical American teenage boy, Andy Hardy, in a series of movies about venerable Judge James Hardy (Lewis Stone) and his family. TOP: Andy and Dad have one of their famous heart-to-heart talks in the judge’s den, with suitable subjects being money, cars, girls, and Mom (Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever.

  Rooney’s frequent co-star was Judy Garland, who was first teamed with him in the Hardy series playing Betsy Booth (Andy Hardy Meets Debutante).

  There was every reason in the world that such a progression should not happen for Rooney. He had become famous as a child star, and few can make the transition to adulthood on-screen successfully. Furthermore, he was burned out as Mickey McGuire and so closely associated with the role that shaking it off seemed impossible. His big leap to stardom as Andy Hardy, a typical teenager, should have mired him in that role exclusively, or at least left him there when he aged. His talent k
ept it from happening. Not only is Rooney a movie oddity as a star, his whole career trajectory is an oddity.

  Rooney’s fame today lies partly in his musicals co-starring Judy Garland, but mostly in his signature role as Andy Hardy in the series of fourteen films about Judge James Hardy (Lewis Stone) and his Carvel, Ohio, family. The judge’s son, Andy Hardy, defined the American boy of the 1930s, and no consideration of today’s teen movies can forget that all teen movies are grounded in Mickey Rooney as Andy. Rooney defined both the all-American boy look and the all-American boy behavior: brash, confident, pushy, yet no matter how spoiled or rotten, having the right stuff underneath. A Rooney boy’s head could be turned by flatterers, money, or a pretty blonde, but in the end he was going to do the right thing. Andy Hardy was a “Gee, Dad” kind of role, and Rooney gave an all-out “Gee, Dad” kind of performance, frequently falling down stairs and mugging his head off in a maddening manner. Yet every Hardy film had a moment of true credibility—highly unlikely yet credible. “Look, Dad. I’m in an awful jam. Can I talk to you man to man?” Hardy would ask the old judge, who would respond with a gentle smile and a “suppose we start from the beginning” patience. Everyone laughs at these scenes, but even in their own time they were hard to make work, requiring careful writing and impeccable performances. Stone adopts an attitude of amused tolerance, balanced against the eager and sincere enthusiasm Rooney thrusts at him. The two of them are always in the judge’s study with the door closed when they talk it all out. Dad listens carefully and treats Andy’s small problem as an important milestone in his son’s progress toward manhood. The way sober old Dad sees it, it may be about not having enough money to pay for a car today, but it will be bankruptcy tomorrow if he doesn’t dispense wisdom. And dispense he does. Dad is very tough, as befitting the original Depression-era mentality behind these movies. He has the same standards in his home as he does in his law court, which means the Andy Hardy movies are grounded in morality. Rooney plays with simplicity and sincerity in these “Dad” scenes. He drops the mugging. In fact, Stone and Rooney are great together, and there was a reason these low-budget movies were so popular. Today, people complain, “There never was a family like the Hardys.” That was the point. The Hardys were an idealized family, set inside a faux realism. Andy was a moving photograph of a comic strip.

  The first movie that presented Rooney as Andy Hardy was not really an Andy Hardy movie at all. A Family Affair was about two things: the American family as a unit and the American small town as the center of our value system. It’s also about maintaining the status quo—old-fashioned family values, marriage, neighborly friendships, respecting one’s elders, and, of course, Judge Hardy. There is a simple, direct quality to the narrative. It has conviction. Louis B. Mayer understood that middle-class viewers just coming out of a Depression that had rocked their daily lives would want movies that reestablished their sense of “nice, ordinary” small-town American life. The movie introduced fans to the Hardy folks—the wise old judge, his kindly homebody wife, his spinster sister who lived with them, and his three children: Andy, a teenager, and his two older sisters, Joan, who is married, and Marion, away at college. (Thankfully, there’s no dog or happy black maid named Orchid or Sapphire.)

  Lionel Barrymore plays the judge. None of the principal actors was billed above the title. It was “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presents A Family Affair,” and the next title card listed the cast members. Barrymore, the biggest name, was listed first in slightly larger letters than the others, and his name was followed by Cecilia Parker (whom MGM was hoping to make into a star), Eric Linden,* and then Mickey Rooney in fourth place. In fact, Rooney had been added into the cast mix casually, a solid pro to play the small role of the family’s youngest son. The young actor the film was really trying to showcase and develop as a star was Eric Linden, an early version of Lon McCallister. Linden had been previously featured in Ah, Wilderness! (1935) and was MGM’s candidate to become the perfect all-American teenager for their films. It is one of stardom’s ironies that the “bonus” guy who would fulfill that role—Rooney—was right under their noses. Linden was capable but colorless, and not especially good-looking. Although he could hold his own with actors like Barrymore, which is why the star machine was working on him, he was an unrealistically proper young teenager. He was the type studios had under contract to be “typical” before they figured out that “typical” was a homely kid with unruly hair and awkward manners like Andy Hardy. As Marion Hardy’s beau, Linden was the anti-Hardy. He wore suits and ties, and his hair was always perfectly in place. He took being young too seriously. Rooney signaled to teenagers that life was fun, even though their worries might seem real. To look at Linden is to see why Rooney succeeded. Rooney’s hair sticks out in all directions and always needs combing. His clothes are naturalistic—the sweaters and letter jackets real kids wore. He runs into a room, trips over himself, falls downstairs, and talks in slang. (Linden delivers full sentences with correct grammar.) Rooney is messy but always tries to remember to tuck his shirt in and slick down his hair. He’s rumpled and real—a breath of fresh air. Today, no one has heard of Eric Linden. Everybody knows Mickey Rooney.

  The film opens up like a play. Marion is coming home for the first time since she enrolled in college, and the Hardys are about to have their three children together again around the dinner table for the first time in months. Dinner preparations are in the works. Everyone is bustling around. Within the first five minutes, three main story lines are swiftly and economically introduced: Joan has marital problems; Marion has a serious new boyfriend; the judge is in conflict with a city plan to build a new aqueduct. (Andy doesn’t appear until most of this is under way.)

  The full character and plot structure is in place for what will become the Andy Hardy series, but the formula has not yet emerged. For instance, when the judge takes a family member into his well-known study, the center for the dispensation of all parental wisdom, it’s not Andy who needs the talk but his sister Joan (Julie Haydon). Both Judge and Mrs. Hardy participate, presumably because it is a daughter in trouble. Joan confesses to her parents that she has split from her husband, although she had always dreamed of a marriage like the one they have. Weeping, she tells them that, well, she’s gotten bored by her husband. And, well, she went out to the Blue Rabbit, a low-down roadhouse. With another man. (This all spools out very slowly, since Judge and Mrs. Hardy can apparently only absorb one thing at a time.) Finally she comes out with the real problem. There was a private room, kissing, and her husband bursting in, followed by a fistfight. “Oh!” cries out Mrs. Hardy. “I’m going to go right into the kitchen and make you a nice cup of hot cocoa!” This sort of thing often makes people misunderstand the appeal of the Hardy films to their original audiences. Viewers, no matter how small the town, would have known all about Blue Rabbits, boredom, and kisses, not to mention nice cups of hot cocoa. No one was surprised, but everyone was reassured. If Blue Rabbits could happen in Carvel to the most honorable judge in the universe and his noble wife and kids, well, it certainly could happen in their burg to them and their motley crew. (And, of course, it had.)

  A Family Affair was a low-budget feature that ran only sixty-nine minutes. It made a potful of money and received favorable reviews. It also kicked off a storm of fan mail, especially about the young son, Andy, and Rooney’s performance. The public had fallen in love with Andy Hardy and MGM had a bonus star on their hands.*

  Metro surveyed the situation. Why not just make another one of these Hardy films? Cast members besides Barrymore, Rooney, Parker, Haydon, and Linden had included Spring Byington as Mrs. Hardy, Sara Haden as the spinster aunt, and Margaret Marquis as Polly Benedict, who would later become important as Andy’s girlfriend. There was no need to worry about repeating actors, except, of course, for the one audiences had singled out: Mickey Rooney. Any minor players who were available—Cecilia Parker and Sara Haden—were also recast, and everyone else was replaced. Fay Holden became Mrs. Hardy, and Ann Rutherf
ord became Polly. (The public hadn’t taken to the Hardy sisters. Julie Haydon disappeared and Cecilia Parker was soon to follow.)

  MGM quickly cranked out two more Hardy films: You’re Only Young Once (1937) and Judge Hardy’s Children (1938). They amped the running time for You’re Only Young Once up to seventy-eight minutes. By the time it was in theatres and cast and crew were at work on Judge Hardy’s Children, the third film in the series was planned to run at 102 minutes. Most important, the studio knew what it had: Andy Hardy. By the fourth movie, Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938), the series revolved around Mickey Rooney, and after Out West with the Hardys (1938) and The Hardys Ride High (1939), every movie had “Andy Hardy” in the title (although one was called Judge Hardy and Son, 1939). All sixteen Andy Hardy films starred Mickey Rooney. No one else ever played the role. Rooney owned it, and he not only became a big movie star as a result—he became Andy Hardy. Or Andy Hardy became him.

  As MGM moved to create the Hardy films, the story formula was figured out. The small town of Carvel, Ohio, would always be the primary setting. Two parallel plots would be united: one that would test the judge’s character and involve him in saving Carvel from some potential threat to its integrity; one involving Andy’s maturation process, particularly in regard to his love life, which would require the wisdom of his father to solve.