The Mickey Rooney Fan Club

Printed by Screen Life Magazine

1941

Mickey Rooney was born in Brookyln on September 23, 1920, and eleven days later made his first appearance on the stage in Albany, New York.  His parents, Joe yule and Nell Carter, were playing in vaudeville, and his mother proudly carried him on in front of the footlights when she returned to the act.  Perhaps Mickey just didn't have any ambition or perhaps the difficulties placed in his way were insurmountable, but the ugly fact remains that he idled away the next fifteen months of his life, making no attempt at self support.  He was walking when he was seven months old, and could talk and sing when he was fifteen months old.  He also was displaying some artistic talent.  His mother made a habit of taking him to the theater with her and leaving him in her dressing room while she was on the stage.  Mickey did not care to be shut away from the music and the lights and his friends, but he consoled himself with making bold free-hand drawings with nice soft eyebrow pencils until he got his first break.  One momentous day, his mother left the dressing-room door slightly ajar.  Mickey saw his chance and took it.

  The headline act, Sid Gold and Babe La Tour, were on stage and in the middle of a serious duet when they heard an unexplainable roar of laughter from the audience.  They were embarrassed and surreptitiously checked to make sure that a petticoat wasn't slipping, that a collar wasn't coming undone.  Everything was in order, but the laughter continued and the duet stopped when Gold discovered the cause.  Behind him was a minute piece of inverted humanity.  Mickey, carried away by the glamour of the spotlight was standing on his head, waving his legs rhymthmically in time to the music.

  The rest of the story is hard to believe, but everybody swore that when Gold said, "Hello, Sonny, I suppose you can do my act for me?"  Mickey replied distinctly and with only a trace of baby talk, "Sure, and I can sing your song, too."

  The audience applauded wildly.  Gold took up the dare.  "I'll bet you a dollar you can't!" he challenged.  The infant Mickey was not in the habit of carrying large sums of cash on his person, and that gave him a resourcefulness, he toddled over to the orchestra pit.  "Gimmee a dollar," he said to his pal, the leader, and he sang "Pal Of My Cradle Days" without missing a word.

  The audience went wild, and so great was the demand for Mickey's appearance that he was given a regular routine in the Gold-LaTour act.  This engagement continued until Mickey's second birthday when he felt that he was getting in a rut, and launched out on an act of his own in which he sang, danced and told jokes.

  When he was five years old, his mother decided that he should have the advantages of formal education, so they severed connections with vaudeville and went to Hollwood.  Mickey matriculated in kindergarten, and his mother found a job as manager of a bungalow court until such time as the screen recognized the talents of her son.  The bungalow court was a small one, and evidently Mickey felt keenly that it was an unworthy background because one day his mother overheard him telling a visitor, "We don't really live here.  We have a beautiful home out in Beverly Hills in the middle of the bridle path."  This was not snobbery on the part of Mickey, but ambition . . . an ambition which he realized not many years later.  True, the beautiful home is not in the middle of the bridle path, but it has a swimming pool, orchards, stables, and many servants including a valet named Sylvester to take care of the young master's clothes.

  For the first few month in Hollywood, Mickey was at liberty except for his daily booking at the kindergarten.  Then he won a part in a revue which Will Morrissey staged at the Orange Grove theater.  Up until this time, Mickey had appeared under his own name, Joe Yule, Jr., and he might be called that today had not his mother read of a nation-wide contest which Producter Larry Damour was conducting in an attempt to find the right boy to play leads in a series of comedies.  The comedies were based on the adventures of one Mickey McGuire, black-haired hero of a comic strip drawn by Fountaine Fox.  Time was short and hair dyes are expensive, so Mrs. Yule solved the problem of her son's yellow hair by borrowing a box of burnt cork from a black-face comedian in the revue, and making-up the boy's hair.  He arrived at the studio, slightly smudged but looking so exactly right for the part otherwise that he won a quick contract.

Darmout suggested that his new star drop his own name and become Mickey McGuire in private life as well as on the screen, so, for six years and through the seventy-eight pictures, our hero was known as McGuire.

  Mickey began to grow rather fast when he was eleven, and by the time he was twelve, he was quite to big too continue as the hero of the Mickey McGuire comedies.   When his contract ended, there was a shock.  He didn't have legal rights to his new name!  It was the property of the producer of the comedies! Also he was out of a job.  So he went for a ten weeks' tour in vaudeville under the new name, Mickey Rooney.

  On his return to Hollywood, he won much praise for feature parts in pictures, but he astounded all of Hollywood when he played the exacting role of Puck in Max Reinhardt's a "Midsummer Nights Dream" in the Hollywood Bowl.  He was loaned to Warner Brothers for the film version of the play, and then returned to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer where he has been under contract without loan-out ever since.  Pictures with Wallace Beery and Freddie Bartholomew brought him to the front tanks as a star, but he became a walking gold-mine for his studio with his first appearance as the callow Andy, and a series of Andy Hardy films has been running ever since.

  Most of Mickey's education has been in the school house on the lot.  He is enthusiastic about sports, was captain of his own football team, was Southern California tennis and ping-pong champion in the junior division.  He is an ardent composer, has had several popular songs published and now is working on a symphony.  He has his own swing band, collects stamps, old coins and match books, and wants to be a director when he finishes acting.

Birth Name:  Joseph Ninean Yule Jr.