Instead, he chased tall, beautiful women, like Ava Gardner, whom he married at 21 (she was 19) it lasted a year. Maybe, he said, both their lives would have been different if he had. Mickey indicated that maybe at some point, he thought, Judy had a thing for him and he said he regretted that he had never responded. Seeing her struggle, “tore me apart,” he said. It hurts too terribly to talk about it.” Both child stars and cash cows for MGM, they both fell into alcohol and drug addiction when they were very young. That was also the era when Mickey was making dazzling hit musicals with his great acting partner, Judy Garland ( Babes in Arms, 1939 Babes on Broadway, 1941). I almost drowned once when the cart fell in a sinkhole. We were cold and we had dogs and donkeys, and firecrackers going off over us. “For lunch they gave us a banana and an apple. “We made a two-reeler a week,” Mickey told me. Soon he became “Mickey McGuire,” a tough-talking street urchin and star of 78 shorts. Nell wanted to be an actress, so they went to Hollywood, but it turned out that her engaging little son-who had been on the stage since the age of 17 months-was better at getting work. He told me about how, as a child of six, he had driven across the country with his mother, Nell Carter, a chorus girl, after she had left his father, Joe Yule, a vaudevillian, “’cause my dad he liked pretty women, you know.” He said they slept in their car and shot rabbits for food. Mickey was some kind of beautiful, talented monster. He composed a symphony, Melodante, which he performed on the piano at Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 Inauguration Gala. He was an expert golfer, a champion ping-pong player. He learned to play the banjo-scarily well-in a day. He could sing, he could act, he could dance. Photographed by Herb Ritts for the April 1996 issue. What had driven Mickey to seek the solace of substances well into his 70s? And what had made him gamble away his fortune again and again? (He was making $65,000 a week starring in Sugar Babies on Broadway with Ann Miller in the late 70s and 80s.) It was in attempting to answer these questions that I began to feel overwhelmed by the hugeness of his life and his talent. (“You need to stop talking, Mother,” Mickey would say, annoyed.) He had beaten his addiction to gambling and sleeping pills only five years before, when he had to be hospitalized on the road in Cleveland for exhaustion. “It was the adrenaline rush,” of the track, that had been his undoing,” said Jan-who, I found, was unhesitant about discussing her husband’s foibles. 1 box-office draw in 1939 and in 1996, he had filed for bankruptcy. He was then 85, and, he told me, all but broke, which seemed impossible, considering he had done more than 300 films, including some of the best ones ever made ( A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1935 Strike Up the Band, 1940). It was Christmastime, and at one point Mickey got on stage wearing a tattered white beard and shabby Santa suit. It was a homespun affair full of dog-eared jokes (“I’ve been married so many times I’ve got rice marks on my face!” he said) and plenty of Jan, but then, you still got to hear Mickey sing Gershwin tunes. He was there doing Let’s Put on a Show, the musical revue he traveled around the country performing with his eighth wife, Jan. I first came upon Mickey in Branson, Missouri, in 2005. He was the great Hollywood story, the original Hollywood train wreck, and the most genius of actors Laurence Olivier called him the best ever. He was my five-foot-two-inch Moby Dick, a soul so outsize he seemed impervious to the tiny harpoons of my words. I tried, and failed, twice to write a story about Mickey Rooney.
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