|
|
|
A Great American Actor
 Thirty years ago, Laurence Olivier said a
startling thing. He’d just seen the musical Sugar
Babies, starring Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller, and he pronounced
Rooney “my favorite actor.”
 I
thought Olivier was joking, or maybe sarcastically putting down his rivals in the
classical theater. I took Rooney for a minor Hollywood has-been, more
notable for his eight marriages than for any achievement. (N.B.: Rooney is
now late in his ninth decade, and as far as I know his eighth marriage is still
going strong.)
But Lord Larry was
serious, and he was right. He knew what it takes to go out on a stage and lift
an audience’s hearts. When he saw Rooney, he recognized a greatness
that deserved honor.
Mickey
Rooney, born in 1920, was a child prodigy of entertainment — singing,
dancing, acting. By 1934 he was a movie veteran who had done Shakespeare
— starring as Puck in Max Reinhardt’s excellent film of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream. A couple of years later, still in his
mid teens, he was featured in what became the immensely popular Andy
Hardy series, often co-starring with another amazingly versatile young
talent: Judy Garland.
Rooney and
Garland were synonyms, and close pals. Today she is the legend; he is all but
forgotten. He was Hollywood’s top box-office draw for five straight
years, against competitors like Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. He was
world-famous and an Academy Award winner by age 20, long before Olivier,
13 years his senior. He could hold his own in straight drama with Spencer
Tracy, his Oscar-winning co-star (as Father Flanagan) in Boys
Town; the five-foot-three Rooney played the defiant juvenile
delinquent.
Right after
adolescence he commenced his eventful connubial life. His second wife was
the big, voluptuous Ava Gardner. Many years and several wives later, he
remembered her fondly. He showed up drunk on the old Tonight
Show. It was broadcast live in those days, and any host but the
flamboyant Jack Paar would have had the tact to whisk him off during a
commercial break. Remember, this was the dull, repressed 1950s.
![[Breaker quote for A Great American Actor: Honoring Rooney]](2007breakers/070501.gif) Instead,
Paar took advantage of the moment
to ask the question on everyone’s mind: “Tell us, Mickey, what
is Ava Gardner really like?” Rooney did not disappoint.
“Jack,” he slurred, “Ava Gardner is more woman than you
will ever know.” The audience went berserk.
Rooney was
no longer a superstar by then, but people still remembered when he had been.
Now he was taking any role he could get. He was too old to play Huck Finn, too
small for Coriolanus. But he could play Baby Face Nelson. Or whatever. And
whatever he did, he did it well — drama, comedy, musical, dancing.
Audiences remembered him and were glad to see him. He’d never
stopped being a lovable, gutsy performer. Give him an audience and he was
magic.
Critics
didn’t adore him the way they adored Chaplin or, in France, Jerry
Lewis. It might have jump-started his fading career if he’d become at
least a victim of McCarthyism. No such luck. He just seemed to fade away in
plain sight, for no better reason than that a whole style of cheerful
entertainment had gone out of fashion. It was the era of Brando, except that
Brando could make a comeback after a long slump and he’d still be
hailed as a genius.
Not Rooney.
He’d still show up for the Academy Awards ceremony every year, like
an inexplicably jolly ghost from another epoch, bald and chubby. Now and then
he even got a break, as in The Black Stallion in 1979, where he
was still brilliant and moving; and in Sugar Babies he showed
on the stage that he was also still much more than a fine character actor on
film. If the greatest actor in the world was in the audience, after all those
years Mickey Rooney could put a lump in his throat and make him grateful to
be there.
Olivier said he
never really learned to act until he realized he had to love both his character
and his audience. Is there any really great performer of whom that
isn’t true? You can see it even in brief film clips of little Mickey
Rooney tap-dancing. That tiny boy had already learned the secret so many
never learn. Love is the secret it does no good to keep.
Joseph Sobran |
||
| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
|
||
|
||
|
Archive Table of Contents
Current Column Return to the SOBRAN’S home page. |
||
|
|
| FGF E-Package columns by Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and others are available in a special e-mail subscription provided by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. Click here for more information. |