Mickey Rooney and the Invention of the Teen Idol

This essay is excerpted from Hollywood High: a Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies, by Bruce Handy, out May 20 from Avid Reader Press. 

Leap Day, 1940. The city: Los Angeles. The place: the Ambassador Hotel’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub, where Hollywood’s biggest names were gathered for the 12th annual Academy Awards ceremony. Among the stars smiling for the cameras: Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Bette Davis, Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Stewart, Greer Garson, Hedy Lamar, and emcee Bob Hope. 

Professional jealousy was not the evening’s theme, not officially. So surely no one resented the fact that by one important measure — the measure — the answer to the question: Who is the biggest star in the room? was . . . .

None of the above. 

Just a month earlier, the nation’s theater owners had conducted their annual poll and named not Gable, not Davis, not Stewart, but the young, callow, and diminutive Mickey Rooney as the nation’s top box office attraction. Better or worse yet, it was his second straight year winning the crown. Variety had hailed him as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s “most valuable piece of talent” and “king of its star list.” The New York Times dubbed him “the mighty mite of the screen world.” His future first wife, Ava Gardner, then an MGM starlet, deemed him “the biggest wolf on the lot,” adding, “He went through the ladies like a hot knife through fudge.” 

He was nineteen (and a quarter). 

That night, he was a Best Actor nominee, too, for his role opposite Judy Garland in the “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” musical Babes in Arms. (He, along with fellow nominees Gable, Olivier, and Stewart, lost out to Robert Donat from Goodbye, Mr. Chips.) Rooney had been under contract to MGM since 1934, when he was thirteen, with big parts in prestige films like Captains Courageous, Boys Town, and the soon-to-be-released Young Tom Edison. But the main reason for his clout with moviegoers, and for the Time magazine cover he would grace a few weeks after the Oscars, was Andy Hardy, the car-crazy, girl-crazy, swing-crazy high school kid he played in a series of cheerful, not entirely bland family comedies that had been coming off MGM’s assembly line since 1937, at a clip of two or three a year —Love Finds Andy Hardy, Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever, and so on, until the series came to an end after fifteen pictures, in 1946, with Love Laughs at Andy Hardy.

A postpubescent boy star! Hollywood had exploited the talents of many notable child actors, including Jackie Coogan, who had held his own at the age of five, opposite Charlie Chaplin in The Kid, and Shirley Temple, a top draw at five — she had preceded Rooney as Hollywood’s top ticket seller for four years straight. But child stars’ careers tended to peter out once they hit puberty, as would be the case with Temple, who, after a series of flops, was dropped by Fox in 1940, a budding has-been at twelve. Rooney (and teenage peers like Garland, Jackie Cooper, and Deanna Durbin) represented something new because teenagers, as a species, were themselves new in 1940, so new that almost nobody even called them that. (The word teenager would first appear in a national publication, Popular Mechanics, in 1941, and wouldn’t see widespread use until the 1950s.) 

It would be an exaggeration to say that without Rooney there would have been no James Dean and Natalie Wood, Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, Molly Ringwald and Matthew Broderick, Lindsay Lohan and Zac Efron, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson; but Rooney set the template for teen stardom both on- and off-camera. There would be growing pains for all concerned.

***

It was only in the earlier decades of the twentieth century that the interregnum between thirteen and nineteen had begun to be seen as the distinct, passionate, volatile, sometimes baffling phase of life we deem it today. As it happened, 1940 witnessed a tipping point in this evolution: that spring, for the first time in American history, a majority of the nation’s seventeen- year-olds graduated from high school. This was a radical shift in American childhoods. Contrast 1940 with 1900, when only six percent of seventeen-year-olds, most of them well-off, had graduated from high school. The rest, in an era of lax to nonexistent child labor laws, had long since been tossed into the workforce to sink or swim or lose a hand in a factory mishap. 

It was thanks to high school that adolescents, now segregated from their elders and youngers, began developing their own discrete subcultures with their own sometimes-puzzling-to-adults tastes in music, fashion, and slang—one of twentieth-century history’s less well-known cases of an unintended consequence. What they were doing was forming their own tribe. Adults did not yet envy, resent, or emulate them; there would be no such thing as a cool mom or dad for decades; the notion of posing as a youthful rebel well into one’s seventh, eighth, and ninth decades (cf. Mick Jagger and Madonna) would have been laughable in 1940, but the ground was shifting, and Rooney was both a beneficiary and a spark,  

The press of his day heralded his alter ego, Andy, as a national treasure arrived just in time to help parents and kids alike make sense of the new American adolescent. As one movie magazine proclaimed, conflating star and screen presence: “Mickey Rooney is as important to America as strawberry shortcake… and the night before Christmas . . . Millions of parents send their children to see Mickey, and see him themselves, for a richer understanding of each other.” 

Rooney himself had never attended high school. Born to a pair of vaudevillians, he’d been acting since he could walk. Off screen, his life was nothing like Andy’s: he enjoyed all the perks of being a top box office draw: the big house, the cars, the girls, the best tables at nightclubs. His studio, MGM, even set up a direct line to his book in his dressing room. But he too recognized the import of his signature role. As he would write in his 1991 autobiography, Life Is Too Short: “Through the years I keep meeting people who tell me, ‘Andy Hardy? Hey, he taught me how to be a teenager.’” 

If you’ve seen any of the Hardy movies, you may be troubled by the notion that anyone’s real-life behavior was influenced by Andy’s predictable misadventures—Signing an $8 promissory note to buy a broken-down jalopy? Not a good idea!—not to mention his pop-eyed enthusiasm for the opposite sex. By one estimate, taken as a whole, the Hardy films earned roughly ten times what they cost to produce, given their skimpy budgets, grossing a total of $80 million through 1946, or $1.3 billion in 2024 dollars. 

Louis B. Mayer, the co-founder and head of production at MGM, liked that return on investment, but he took the Hardy films deeply seriously, too, believing that for all their easy laughs and silly plot contrivances they served a higher, patriotic purpose. “The best pictures [I] ever made — the only pictures I really ever took an active hand in—were the Andy Hardy series,” he once said. “They were good and wholesome. They had heart. You can’t imagine how much good they did for America . . . all over the world.” 

Being good for America meant that, among other things, the Hardys’ world was almost entirely white, with allowances made for porters and butlers; queerness remained a subterranean menace, surfacing only rarely in the form of epithets like “pantywaist.” In a very real sense, when twenty-first century conservatives conjure the bucolic small-town “real America” of the past and narrowing present, they are in part tapping into a myth crafted by Mayer, Rooney, and the rest of their collaborators, from Andy’s hometown of Carvel — population 25,000; not too big, not too small, just right — down to the literal white picket fence in front of the Hardy home. Andy, goofy and libidinal, but not too goofy and libidinal also just right — helped sell the myth. Which meant Rooney did, too. As Mayer once told him, in all seriousness (during an argument over the actor’s busy off-camera love life), “You’re Andy Hardy. You’re the United States. You’re the Stars and Stripes.” 

The New York Times profiled the star on a 1939 publicity tour of New York, on an afternoon when “the typical American boy wasn’t feeling so typical.” The paper described a weary, jaded Rooney struggling to stay awake on his hotel suite’s couch where he lay prone “like a heroic warrior being borne from the battle on his shield,” depleted by deep drafts of Gotham nightlife: 

It must give him a tremendous feeling of responsibility to young America — that is, being Andy Hardy and all, the reporter cautiously observed. Mickey, lying flat upon his back with his hands behind his head and that tousled nob cradled wearily between his elbows, said it does. 

“I try,” he solemnly recited, his eyes half closed with fatigue, “to live up to what they expect of Andy Hardy. I try to be as close to Andy as possible. I really do.” 

Imagine being saddled with that as a teenager. 

***

Andy began life in a forgotten play, Skidding, by a forgotten writer with the almost impossibly mellifluous name Aurania Rouverol. The work, which ran for a year on Broadway in the late 1920s, was a comedy-drama about a large middle-class family buffeted by the fast pace and shifting mores of modern life. You almost surely haven’t seen Skidding, but if you’ve seen Ron Howard’s 1989 film Parenthood, or the subsequent television series, you’ve seen a more recent equivalent. Family bonds fray but are rewoven more tightly than ever by final curtain. 

A producer at MGM, decided that Skidding might make “a nice little picture” for the studio’s B-movie unit. Retitled A Family Affair, the 1937 adaptation starred Lionel Barrymore and Spring Byington as Andy’s parents, Judge and Mrs. Hardy. Another young actor under contract at MGM had been considered for Andy, but a growth spurt rendered him unsuitably gangly. According to Ann Rutherford, who would play Polly Benedict, Andy’s on-and-off girlfriend, through most of the series, “They thought that having a short Andy Hardy would be a little more amusing and touching.” Sixteen-year-old Mickey Rooney, whose full adult height would be reported as anywhere between five feet two inches and five feet three inches (and five feet one inch during his World War II army physical), fit the bill.

A Family Affair was made on a B-movie budget ($178,000, or $3.7 million in 2024 dollars) and with a B-movie running time (sixty-nine minutes), destined to fill out the bottom half of double features as a “programmer.” Expectations were low. But as Rooney later wrote, “A funny thing happened to this little programmer: released in spring 1937, it ended up grossing more than half a million dollars nationwide”—not a blockbuster number, but a nice return on a shrug of an investment. 

Reviews ran from unkind to tepid. The Chicago Tribune labeled the film “a boob trap,” and Billboard, which then covered movies, dismissed it as “a harmless concoction, neither very bad nor very good, but just about hitting the level considered excellent by the Legion of Decency.” But an unexpected success demanded a follow-up, and a partially recast sequel, You’re Only Young Once, reached theaters in December of 1937, just nine months after the first picture’s March release, the movie business being less sclerotic in that era. With Barrymore reluctant to get trapped in a B-movie series (though a year later he would be cast in a recurring role in MGM’s Dr. Kildare series), Judge Hardy was now played by Lewis Stone.

While the parents were the central characters of the initial films, Andy increasingly dominated the series — a breakout character before anyone had heard of Fonzie or Urkel. As well, a sitcom plot template was set: Andy gets in over his head one way or another, sometimes with a girl, sometimes with money, often with both, and then, after a curative “man-to-man” talk with Judge Hardy, figures a way out of his “fix”— until he makes a similar mistake in the next picture. 

There would be three Hardy pictures in 1938, including Love Finds Andy Hardy, the series’ most popular installment. All told, Rooney appeared in eight movies that year, a heavy workload for a seventeen-year-old, surely eased by MGM’s practice of dispensing “pep pills” to young performers. It was the first of his three consecutive years as box office champ. 

An AP story from the same year, headlined “Hollywood at Last Learning How to Rear Its Children,” observed, “Years ago, child stars were not expected to last more than a year or two. When they reached the ‘awkward’ age they were dropped like a Hank Greenberg drive from a third baseman’s glove.” What had changed? No one seemed to know, though an MGM soundman credited Rooney’s staying power to the miraculous stability of his larynx: “From twelve to sixteen it is normal for a boy’s voice to change but Mickey’s has remained virtually at the same level with a minimum of fluctuation.” 

Reading Rooney’s press clips from the 1930s and early 1940s, you get an almost real-time sense of writers and editors struggling with how seriously to take him and his peers. As ingenues, Deanna Durbin and Judy Garland didn’t fare too badly, but Rooney was treated like a novelty act, written about with equal parts amusement and condescension. He was variously Hollywood’s “colossal kid” and “the mighty mite of the screen world,” more than once posing for photographers while attempting to shave—an inherently comic conceit, like a picture of a dog seeming to drive or read a book. 

Rooney himself was in a hurry to move past adolescence, at least off screen. “People don’t seem to realize I’m grown up. They’re still pulling that ‘kid star’ stuff on me,” he told a reporter, who described the actor emphasizing his point by “heatedly rising to his full five feet two and a half inches.” At the time, in the fall of 1938, he had just turned eighteen. “The way some people talk, you’d think I still played with toys,” he complained “bitterly” to another interviewer. When it was pointed out that in fact Rooney had a large alcove off his bedroom with an elaborate electric train set up, he bristled: “For gosh sakes, a lot of men have electric trains for a hobby.” 

A line from his 1939 studio biography: “He boasts of the fact that he has always worn long trousers.” 

Gossip columnists liked to tweak Rooney anytime he was perceived as putting on adult airs. A movie magazine teased him for having a man crush, as we’d now call it, on Clark Gable: 

He has mastered the Gable swagger and always he carries the Gable prop, a pipe — sometimes clenched between his teeth, sometimes flourishing it in his hand. Like Gable, too, he calls all waitresses “Honey” or “Toots.” Once someone tried to admonish Mickey on this point: “Don’t you think it’s out of keeping for a youngster to address grown women like that?” “Who’s a youngster?” Mickey wanted to know belligerently. 

His romantic life was well scrutinized — a burden shared by most celebrities, but one that, because he was underage, was particularly fraught for the star and his handlers. “Is Mickey Rooney in Love?” one movie magazine headline wondered, adding: “At seventeen, the Rooney kid is old enough to think about girls—and he does!” Scandal sheets ran headlines such as: “Million Dollar Problem Child” . . . “Mickey the Menace” . . . “The Youngest Wolf in Hollywood?” Rooney, or MGM’s publicity department, countered with a fan magazine article under his byline titled “I’m Not Girl Crazy.” Elsewhere, he was quoted uttering bromides like “Dames are the bunk as far as I’m concerned” and “Necking’s all right, but it ain’t necessary.” 

Those pronouncements were, let us say, insincere. Ava Gardner, his first wife (of eight), met him in 1941 when she was a cloistered eighteen-year-old starlet fresh from North Carolina, just signed to MGM. As she later wrote, “He was incorrigible. He’d screw anything that moved. He had a lot of energy. He probably banged most of the starlets who appeared in his Andy Hardy movies — Lana Turner among them. She called him Andy Hard-on.” 

According to Rooney, he got Turner pregnant, her abortion serving as one more MGM perk, alongside the amphetamines; she denied the tale. At any rate, this was a heady time and place to be America’s most famous teenager — except when Rooney’s skirt-chasing threatened the Hardy family honor, and with it MGM’s bottom line. 

***

If something as machine-tooled as the Hardy family movies could be said to have an auteur, it would have been Louis B. Mayer — certainly in his own estimation. “I was the daddy of the Andy Hardy films,” he declared in 1957, not long before his death. “Daddy” was a telling choice of words, given both the crude, emotional paternalism with which he ran MGM and the more genteel sort that suffused the Hardy films. 

With most movies, Mayer was content to trust his producers and directors once filming got underway, waiting until he saw rough cuts to weigh in; with the Hardy pictures, he insisted on watching the rushes. He would sit next to Carey Wilson, who produced the films, and tug on Wilson’s arm or even punch it whenever something displeased him — Andy forgetting to take off his hat indoors, say, or not being appreciative enough of his mother’s cooking — and demand reshoots. 

Andy’s libido was, of course, vigorously policed. In a Hardy movie equivalent to the ritualized moment in a James Bond picture where 007 asks for his vodka martini “shaken not stirred,” Andy typically responds to being kissed by shouting “WHOO WHOO!” and crossing his eyes or lifting his legs or both. But in one take, according to Scott Eyman, a Mayer biographer, the studio chief felt the hubba-hubba had gone too far even by the normally elastic standard allowed for Rooney’s mugging. Mayer hauled director George Seitz into his office and lectured him: “George, if you want to get a sex laugh, I can tell you a better one. Let Andy kiss her, then turn around and unzip his fly and take out his prick. That’ll get you a wow!” Seitz dutifully reshot the scene, showed it to Mayer, and said dryly, “I hope you’ll notice Mickey didn’t even reach for his fly.” 

But Mayer’s biggest headache with the series wasn’t the occasional lapse of taste; it was the fact that the movies starred a teenager who was much less easy to wrangle than his fictional counterpart. “Was Mr. Mayer happy? He was delirious,” Rooney writes of the Hardy films’ box office. “The only trouble was, Mr. Mayer wanted me to be Andy Hardy off the screen, too.”

Rooney remembered an incident in 1938 when Mayer called him into his office, only the second time Rooney had been granted an audience. Mayer perhaps intended this to be his version of a man-to-man talk. He complimented Rooney on the success of his films and his reviews, as the actor later wrote: 

“The critics,” he said. “They love you. And I must agree with them. I love you, too.” 

Well, I said, “Thank you very much, Mr. Mayer.” 

“But—”

I said to myself, “Uh-oh.”

“I’ve been hearing stories around town.” 

I nodded very seriously, just as I nodded at my father on screen, Judge Hardy . . . “Stories, Mr. Mayer?” 

He was taken aback by my tone, so polite, so deferential. “Well,” he said. “Yes. I hear–” 

He laughed with embarrassment over the silliness of what he was about to say, but he said it anyway. “I hear you’ve never met a pretty girl that you didn’t kiss.” 

“Kinda like the song, huh? ‘When I’m not near the girl I love, I love every girl I’m near’?” I grinned. 

He frowned . . . “Look,” he said, “I’m not talking about kissing. I’m talking about fucking.” 

The confrontation escalated into a shouting match, with Rooney insisting he owed MGM nothing when he was off the clock and Mayer (who was himself only five feet six inches) bellowing that the star was an “ungrateful runt.” Rooney stalked out of the office, and Mayer chased after him, his tone now returning to something more paternal. He took hold of the actor’s lapels and told him, calmly but not without menace, “I don’t care what you do off camera. Just don’t do it in public . . . You’re the Stars and Stripes. Behave yourself. You’re a symbol.” 

Rooney relented, promising to be “good,” and the two men hugged. “We stood close for a moment more, he looking into my eyes, I into his. We had an understanding. He’d be Uncle Sam. And I’d be the Stars and Stripes.”

Alas, this was one Pax Americana not destined to last.

From Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.