“We left Chasen’s and went to the Cocoanut Grove, at the Ambassador Hotel, where Freddy Martin’s band played, and then on to Ciro’s. They became our favorite hangouts,” she said.
That was the start of something.
12
Mickey Rooney made no secret of his obsession with Ava. He took her out every night: dinner at Romanoff’s, dancing at the Grove one night; dinner at Chasen’s, dancing at Ciro’s or the Trocadero the next. He took her to the races at Santa Anita and to watch him play golf at the Lakeside Golf Club. “He acted, he sang, he danced. He told jokes, did impersonations—Cary Grant, Jimmy Cagney, Lionel Barrymore, he did them all. He’d have even turned somersaults if I’d asked him to,” Ava recalled.
Some idea of her apparent coolness to Rooney’s approach can be judged from the Pinteresque conversation on their first date at Chasen’s, remembered by Rooney himself:
“Would you like to hear me impersonate Cary Grant?” I said.
“Would you like to impersonate Cary Grant?” Ava said.
“Sure,” I said. “I do it great.”
“Well, go ahead, if you want to,” Ava said.
“It wasn’t that I was immune to his charms. I was just so fucking overwhelmed by his energy. I couldn’t think straight. I was so shy I could barely open my mouth, honey. Mick was manic, he was a complete hambone. He was always on—he was always on heat, too. At first, I didn’t know whether he was trying to woo me or entertain me,” Ava said. “It was flattering being with him, knowing that people were wondering who the hell I was. But it was goddamn exhausting, too. Mick was so famous. You have no idea how famous he was. Everybody loved him. Everybody wanted to be his friend. He’d introduce me—‘This is my girlfriend. Isn’t she pretty? She’s gonna be a big star!’ he’d say. Most times he’d forget to mention my name! ‘And this must be the Girl with No Name,’ said Frank Morgan [a popular MGM character actor; the Wizard himself in The Wizard of Oz] when Mick introduced me to him for about the third time one evening at Schwab’s. He meant well though.”
Under the name of Mickey McGuire, the Brooklyn-born son of vaudevillian comic Joe Yule Sr. and chorine Nell Carter, Rooney had appeared in dozens of two-reel comedies for a B picture unit before changing his name to Mickey Rooney. Rooney was soon cast as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in 1934 MGM gave him a contract. His performance was acclaimed by the critics and fans alike. “Rooney’s Puck is truly inhuman,” critic David Thomson later wrote in the New Biographical Dictionary of Film, “one of cinema’s most arresting pieces of magic.”
But Rooney really hit the jackpot in 1937 with A Family Affair, the first of his Andy Hardy family series. By the time Ava arrived at MGM in the summer of 1941, he was the hottest property the studio had, turning out several Andy Hardy movies a year plus the equally cheap and profitable “Hey, let’s do the show right here” musicals with Judy Garland. And movies with Spencer Tracy—Captains Courageous and Boys Town (1937, 1938)—further enhanced his popularity.
On screen, in the Andy Hardy series, he had endeared himself to audiences, especially American ones, with his sassy, boy-next-door persona and embodiment of family values, which earned him a special Academy Award for “bringing to the screen the spirit of youth.” Mayer watched over his protégé’s screen image like a hawk. When he noticed at a preview that Rooney had failed to remove his hat when he entered a room, he made the director shoot the scene again. In one classic Andy Hardy scene, written by Mayer himself—and reflecting the mogul’s own sentimental affection for the American family—Rooney falls to his knees and, clasping his hands together, prays for his sick mother: “Dear God, please don’t let my mom die, because she’s the best mom in the world. Thank you, God.” (“Let me see you beat that for a prayer,” Mayer said triumphantly when Rooney finished the scene.)
Off screen, Rooney remained more than a handful for those who were assigned to take care of his needs. He wanted a direct telephone line to his bookmakers on the set. He got it. He expected a copy of the Racing Form delivered with his first cup of coffee on the set each morning. It was there.
“Poor baby, Mick was hooked on the horses,” Ava said. “That’s one vice I’ve never had. Installing that phone on the set for him was fatal. I was surprised the studio would do it, but I guess they’d do anything for him as long as he was making money for them. His pictures were cheap and made millions for the studio. Those Andy Hardy pictures paid for MGM’s great movies, Ninotchka, Camille, Two-Faced Woman, all those other Garbo movies that were a bust at the box office. Mickey’s movies kept the studio running.”
They also more than satisfied Mayer’s greed, and the old showman was always willing to overlook his star’s extravagant whims. When his minders warned Mayer that on weekends Rooney often drank insatiably, Mayer ignored them. “He would say I was a good little fella and pat me on the head—he made about ten million dollars a pat at the box office,” Rooney said, when all the money was gone and his liver was shot.
Whatever Rooney did off screen, it was important that his Andy Hardy image remained unsullied. “If you let Andy get too crazy about girls you’ll lose your audience,” was Mayer’s view. It was all right for Andy to be smitten by some passing beauty—played by a series of MGM starlets, including Lana Turner, Donna Reed, Kathryn Grayson, and Esther Williams—so long as in the final reel he’d wind up with plain Ann Rutherford, his reliably chaste, faithful, and patient girlfriend.
His pursuit of Ava had a familiar ring to it. “He was like an eager puppy dog. He followed me everywhere. When he realized I didn’t have a car and had to travel to the studio on public transport, he insisted on picking me up every morning at Wilcox Avenue and bringing me back every evening—in time for me to powder my nose ready for the evening round of dinner and dancing. He was a pretty good dancer, by the way.”
“Wasn’t it tiring for you, Ava?” I asked.
“I must have enjoyed it. I always accepted,” she said.
The only thing she didn’t accept were his proposals of marriage, which he made at the end of every evening.
“Please marry me, Ava,” he would say.
“No,” she would answer.
“Please, please marry me, Ava.”
“You’re too young,” she would tell him.
“I’m twenty-one, fahcrissake!”
“Well, I’m eighteen and I’m definitely too young to marry anyone,” she said. He really put the works on her, but she always played it straight with him, she said.
“He vowed he’d keep asking me until I said yes. Now that was tiring. He even went to work on Bappie. That was a smart move because Bappie was all for it. She loved the idea of being Mickey Rooney’s sister-in-law. She thought I was crazy to keep turning him down. The truth is, I suppose, I was having too much fun being wooed by him. I didn’t want it to stop.”
The news that they were an item soon spread around the studio. Starlets who had previously enjoyed Rooney’s attention—many of whom had grown to count on it—took his neglect to heart. Eventually, Les Peterson, Rooney’s personal publicist and minder, as well as his friend, decided that it was time to warn L. B. Mayer of the seriousness of his star’s interest in Ava. Mayer—who had to have Ava pointed out to him, some five weeks after she joined MGM—asked how serious.