by Lee Server
Rooney was strong evidence of the gulf that existed between MGM’s wholesome public image and the often rough reality of the place. To moviegoers he was the grinning Everyboy of the Hardy movies, puckish yet decent, earnest, innocent. But Mickey Rooney in real life was no Andy Hardy, no naive small-town boy whose interest in the opposite sex could be sated by a kiss and an ice-cream soda with two straws. Mickey Rooney in life was a wised-up Hollywood playboy. “I was about three years younger than Mickey,” said Gene Reynolds. “But I was like thirty years younger. Are you kidding? Mickey at fifteen, sixteen, he would get off work and pop open a beer and then go off and get laid. There would be some party with all the young ladies from the studio, and Mickey would be saying ‘You see that one over there, the redhead? I’ve had her.…see that blond over there? I’ve balled her.’ He would meet them and charm them and so forth, and the next thing you knew they were in bed. He could even get laid on the Great Plains of Omaha, Nebraska, when we were out there tor Boys Town.”
Rooney, said an article in the Saturday Evening Posty “had studio watchdogs assigned to bail him out of scrapes. He was a belligerent kid with no inhibitions…a confirmed wolf, junior grade. When he wasn’t smoking cigars or driving cars too fast the big boss had him on the carpet constantly for lectures, and Rooney displayed his best acting at such sessions. He wept, beat his breast and swore to reform, then promptly cased the horizon for personable females.”
After the ravishing young contract player’s cool dismissal of him in the studio commissary, Mickey Rooney’s interest in Ava had only increased. Get me that Southern babe’s phone number, he told one of his flunkies, and that evening he called her at home.
“Miss Gardner, won’t you reconsider? I would love to take you out to dinner.”
“No, I’m sorry. I can’t.”
He called her again the next night.
“Miss Gardner…Ava.”
“No, thanks all the same.”
The next night the same thing, and the next.
“No, I’m awful tired.”
“No, I…G’bye.”
It drove him a little crazy. Once he really set his sights on a girl, it was not normal for him to get the brush-off like that. It was a blow to the ego, not a pleasant sensation at all. It caused one to question oneself, equally unpleasant. He was single, twenty years old, with a very large paycheck forty-eight weeks a year. He was used to having girls fall into his lap, wait in hiding, beg him for a date, even if it was only a run up to the top of Mulholland Drive and a few minutes in the backseat of his car. “Ava didn’t give a damn who I was or what I was or what I could do for her,” he would recall. Her face and body were unsettling enough, but her intransigence went under his skin, touched a raw nerve of vulnerability that lay beneath his often unbearably brash surface. He was the most popular movie star in the world, wasn’t he? What was wrong with him? Was it because he was short?
At the studio he sent another minion to find her and plead his case, tell her all she was missing. Dick Paxton, Mickey’s stand-in, found her in the “shooting gallery” getting some pictures taken. Mickey’s a great guy, Ava, he told her. Mickey can do a lot for your career. Go out to dinner with him, willya? What have you got to lose?
Bappie said the same thing, back in their little room at the Hollywood Wilcox. Every night they ate hamburgers across the street, played rummy, listened to the radio, and went to bed at nine. She was bored stiff with her baby sister the movie queen. Bappie said, “Why don’t you let him take you to dinner, sugar? I bet he goes to some real nice joints. A helluva lot better than that hamburger stand.”
Ava said she didn’t want to get people talking about her the way they did some of the other new females at the studio. And Mickey had a reputation. He’d been with a million girls. Who knew what a movie star expected you to do on a date? And Ava told her again how small he was the time she saw him at the lunchroom and he wasn’t wearing his Carmen Miranda platform heels. He had barely come up to her breasts.
“Well, give me the phone next time,” said Bappie. “I’ll go out with him.”
In the end Ava gave in. And Bappie did come. Ava said she couldn’t leave her sister behind, and Mickey, not about to lose his opening, said, “I’ll pick you both up at seven!”
He picked them up in a new red convertible that glistened like wet rubber. They roared up Sunset Boulevard. At every red light people stared, waved, shouted: “Hiya, Mickey!” “That’s Mickey Rooney!” And Rooney glowed with an infectious comic ecstasy. It was like sitting next to the boy-king of the universe. They went to Chasen’s, an expensive industry hangout. He plied them with cocktails, champagne, filet mignon, crepes suzettes for dessert. The room was spinning, from booze and from Mickey Rooney—he dazzled them, an exploding pinwheel. The sisters were gasping for breath, no letup.
He urged Ava out of their booth at one point and glided her over to one table and then another, all of them filled with friends and boosters, some of them recognizable faces from the screen and from fan magazines, but she was too dizzy to remember who was who.
“Fellas, this is Ava Gardner and she’s new in Hollywood. Isn’t she gorgeous?!”
Later they went dancing. And Mickey was a great dancer. Everyone in the club watched them and grinned and applauded. His spirit lifted the whole place higher, like a round bought for the house. It was nearly two in the morning when they pulled up at the Wilcox. Bappie stumbled along ahead and let her baby sister say their good nights. They went up and Mickey clung to her, escorting her down the hallway of the tatty hotel. She looked down at him and he beamed up at her, held her arm tighter.
“Ava,” he said. “Will you marry me?”
She pulled her arm away, took one more startled look back, and ran into her room.
And so it began. He called her in the morning to tell her how much he had enjoyed the evening. He tracked her down at lunchtime, took her out that night. Ava told Bappie, “He’s not my type at all!” And Bappie said, “Baby, just go out and have fun and don’t worry about it. Mickey’s a great guy.”
They went out that night, just the two of them. The next night too.
They had zombies at the Beachcomber, caviar at Romanoff’s. Went dancing at the Trocadero. He introduced her to movie stars they met along the way: Uncle Spence, Uncle Wally. They looked older and drunker than they did in pictures. He showed her everything he had—fame, charm, money—and then he showed her again.
He knew she didn’t want him. Her disinterest only increased his desire. He would later reflect that if she had only felt about him what he felt for her, the romance would have ended like all those before it had—”on the spot…or on some other spot a few weeks later,” lust gratified and replaced with “instant boredom.”
He began picking her up in the mornings and driving her to the studio. He would keep the car top down even on cold mornings so everyone could see what he had in the passenger seat. Sidney Miller, a young actor and part of Rooney’s retinue, would recall to Rooney’s biographer Arthur Marx how Mickey would drive slowly along the studio streets shouting to passersby, “Hey, this is my new girl. She’s going to be a big star!” and Miller would remember Ava sitting there, embarrassed as hell.
He took her around to meet people at the studio, producers, directors, casually but with intent, partly to help her along, partly perhaps to let them know to keep their hands off. Sid Luft, a friend of Rooney’s then working for Metro star Eleanor Powell (and later to marry Rooney’s favorite costar, Judy Garland) remembered being introduced to Ava in those early days of the relationship: “Mickey was completely gone for her, like I’d never seen him act before. I met her and we talked a little. She was a very beautiful girl but very, very naive. She seemed like she had just walked in out of the woods.”
Other than her two screen tests, Ava had yet to work in front of a camera. One day Mickey went up to the office that produced Metro’s short subjects, the one- and two-reelers that ran between feature films.
“I was running the shorts department at that time; I was executive producer,” remembered Richard Goldstone. “And Mickey Rooney just came in to see us, very friendly, and said he had a favor to ask. He said that he had found this lovely girl and asked us did we think we could find her a spot in one of the shorts. She was new, he said, and he just wanted to get her a start. And I think…I mean, obviously he wanted to impress her. This wasn’t something he had ever done before to my knowledge, and he was a big star at Metro, and he was a very nice guy so we obliged him. I okayed it. We were making about seventy shorts a year back then, and we had one we were shooting, and we put her in it. I believe it was the first thing she ever did.”
It was titled Strange Testament, part of the Passing Parade series of one-reelers dramatizing odd but true historical anecdotes, with narration written and delivered by journalist John Nesbit. The short was filmed silent, with an ex-vaudeville dancer named Sammy Lee directing. “It was a restaurant set,” said Goldstone. “Ava played a waitress. I think she walked over to the table and poured a cup of coffee. She looked beautiful. And that was it.”
That was it: She was in the movies now. Mickey beamed at her: “I’m telling you, kid, you’re gonna be big!”
Suddenly—it felt like overnight, with the tornado that Mickey kicked up, never a moment to stop and think what was happening—suddenly they were a couple. She had looked away, and when she looked back she was “Mickey Rooney’s girl,” and strangers in public places were popping flashbulbs in their eyes. She was on his arm at the hottest nightspots, at the prizefights, at a movie premiere at the Chinese with a red carpet laid out before them. The press took note. Louella Parsons, the queen of the Hollywood columnists, wrote: “Mickey Rooney’s latest is Ava Gardner, brunette stock actress at MGM.” Jimmie Fidler announced that she looked like Hedy Lamarr, only better, and Sidney Skolsky reported to his readers that Rooney’s new interest was “a North Carolina beauty…who is much taller.”
On October 3 the Smithfield Herald ran an entire feature on the hometown girl: PRETTY AVA GARDNER IN LIMELIGHT AS MICKEY ROONEY’S “LATEST” GIRL FRIEND. It read, “Ava Gardner, recently of Johnston County…doing all right at the movie capital…a glimmer of stardust in Ava’s hair…box-office smasher Mickey Rooney chasing after her.…It shouldn’t be long before the folks back home can be seeing Ava at their local theater.”
Pictures appeared of the two of them dancing at the Mocambo. In her spike-heeled shoes she stood ten inches taller; in the pictures it looked as if she were in a different latitude. Towering over him and wearing her MGM makeup and hairstyle and the chic clothes Mickey bought for her, she looked more sophisticated and in control than she was. Rooney was the driving force in everything they did and Ava the mostly passive object of desire, but some people saw the pictures of the towering gorgeous woman and the short, boyish, excited Mickey and figured her for a gold digger, figured that she had hit town and craftily latched on to Mickey Rooney as a career move. Ava was too unsure of herself and too indifferent and surprised by each day’s events to hatch as calculated a scheme as that. The farthest she could think ahead was to the evening’s necking session in the convertible and how she was going to keep Mickey from going too far.
He was feverish to possess her. She would squirm on the front seat and tell him, “I can’t do…that…before I’m a married woman!”
And then he would propose marriage.
He later calculated that he asked her twenty-five times.
“Ava and I and Dorothy Morris, another actress, would go eat lunch at a drugstore on the corner,” recalled Berdie Abrams. “We would go there because it was more peaceful than the studio cafeteria. And we’d sit in the little booths and talk. And she wanted our opinion about Mickey. And we’d say, Oh, he’s adorable. Everybody loves Mickey.’ And we did. He used to call me ‘Legs’ because I won a contest for best legs at the studio. And she would ask some more about him, and we’d say he was cute and nice. And one day she said, ‘Mickey asked me to marry him. What do you think?’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s a big question. You shouldn’t ask anybody else. You have to know that for yourself.’ But she wasn’t sure what she felt about him. And he was just wild about her.”
People at the studio—spies from the studio, like Mickey’s assigned caretaker, Les Petersen—began to sniff around, ask what was going on with the brunette dame, why he was tying himself down like this instead of playing the field. Which had the effect of making Rooney—who hated the studio’s dictates and its attempts to run his life—more determined than ever. Ava’s turning him down was a challenge and a rebuke. He could sell more movie tickets than Clark Gable; surely he could win over one virgin from North Carolina. He employed what he called an “allcourt press,” not letting her do anything without him, overwhelming her with sheer Mickey Rooneyness. He worked on Bappie as well, charming her onto his side. “He’s awful sweet, Ava, don’t you think?” she would say to her sister. “Isn’t he funny? Did he do his Lionel Barrymore imitation for you? And when are you two gonna get hitched?”
December came. And on the seventh the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the United States was at war. Clouds of uncertainty, fear, and panic hung over Los Angeles. There were rumors of imminent invasions. At enlistment offices young men lined up around the block, eager for battle, revenge. There was tension and drama in everything now. No one knew where it was all going to lead, only that there would be more blood and horror in the times ahead. On the evening of the ninth they had been out to dinner. Later that night the two of them had gotten into his car to head back to the Wilcox. Mickey didn’t start the car right away, and for a time they sat there in silence in the dark.
“Ava,” he said then. “Will you marry me?”
Maybe it had something to do with being far from home during such a terrible week; maybe she had been feeling somber and vulnerable as so many people did in those first days of the country at war; or maybe he had just won her over at last. Fifty million moviegoers couldn’t be wrong.
She said, “All right, Mickey.”
She imagined a big wedding. Not because she was marrying the biggest star in Hollywood, but because a big wedding was supposed to be the dream of every girl who was getting married. She called long distance to tell her mother about it, and Molly was so happy for her and yet a little unbelieving. It was all such a strange thing, her child in Hollywood, now to be the bride of a famous young man. Ava wanted to make arrangements for her mother to come out to California. They would pick out a nice wedding dress and all the rest. Molly was so happy for her, and Ava said yes, she was happy, too. Mickey was a great guy. They were going to be very happy. He was so talented and so crazy about her.
Mickey had said they had better keep their intentions a secret for the moment, but then he had been ready to burst with it and broke the news himself. He called the Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper and gave her the scoop on his engagement. But then Hedda called up MGM for confirmation, and they told her the story wasn’t true, and of course she believed MGM. She wondered what had gotten into the boy, making up a thing like that.
Soon came a message from Culver City, from the third floor. Mr. Mayer would like to see Mickey and his…friend. Right away.
They arrived arm in arm, Ava parroting her fiance’s subdued demeanor as they neared the mogul’s lair. White-haired Ida Koverman, Mayer’s stern, devoted executive secretary, looked at them with open reproof as she would at anyone or anything that caused her employer distress. They entered the colossal private office, the size of a tobacco warehouse but considerably more plush (regal-modernist design courtesy of Academy Award—winning Metro staffer Cedric Gibbons). And now Ava looked upon the fifty-six-year-old former junk dealer from Minsk who was the highest-paid executive in the world and one of the handful of men who had invented the motion picture industry. Short and unhandsome, with a heavy, bespectacled head set upon a thick, powerful torso, he looked like an owl made of pig iron. He gave her no greeting at all but launched into Ro
oney with a righteous fury.
“How dare you do this to me! Who has been like a father to you! To this studio that has been your family who has raised you to great success!”
Mayer fumed behind his colossal desk. Behind and to his side were Bennie Thau and Howard Strickling, silently hovering, ominously observing, like two henchmen backing up the big boss in a gangster movie. Mayer went on with his rage. He was known for his temper tantrums when those under contract disappointed him, but for Rooney he always reserved a particularly savage exasperation. To Mayer the Hardy series was not only an incredible moneymaker but a profound cinematic expression of the studio’s Main Street values—Mayer’s much-vaunted personal values—a veneration of family, home, innocence. And Rooney, to Mayer, was forever doing something to threaten that pristine image. Mickey’s own mother had once come to the office to complain that her son was throwing all his money away on hookers. And there was the time a year or two ago—it had nearly given Louis B. cardiac arrest—when he received the news that the teenage Rooney was having an affair with Norma Shearer, the Queen of the Lot—shtupņing the thirty-eight-year-old widow of Irving Thalberg the length and breadth of her Marie Antoinette trailer! (“She was hotter than a half-fucked fox in a forest fire,” Mickey would recall appreciatively in his memoir.) And now this—Mayer treated Rooney’s “engagement” as just another transgression, no more honorable than the others. Where did he get the temerity to go off and get engaged? Engaged to be married? Did he know what the public would think when they heard that America’s favorite high-school-boy virgin was planning to marry some hotsy showgirl? Had he even considered how such an action might damage the box-office potential of the next Hardy picture or the next one with Judy? Were people going to believe he was still a sixteen-year-old dating the girl next door when there were pictures of him with a sexpot wife?
