At 86, Mickey Rooney is not the sunniest of interviewees, but to see his stage show, which he performs alongside his wife Jan, is to step back in time to Hollywood's 1930s heyday, writes Stephen Dixon
Gunton Hall, on the East Anglia coast just outside Lowestoft, is a resort complex catering mostly for the elderly. During the day the bars, restaurants and leisure facilities are thronged with cheerful old-timers, the men wearing high-waisted slacks with knife-edge creases and the women splendid in bright new holiday clothes. But very few, if any, of the guests are as old as the star of the evening's cabaret, a performer who can muse: "I remember Hollywood when it wasn't Hollywood. It was mainly orange groves. And when I started in silent pictures as a child they rolled the cameras by hand, and the cameraman would shout 'Go to the left' and 'Go to the right'." Mickey Rooney will be 87 this month. Appearing these days as a double-act with his eighth wife, Jan, he still tours constantly - more than 20 shows this month, including Dublin's National Concert Hall. And, following a return to the US for more shows in October and November, he'll back in the UK at Christmas for his first-ever pantomime, Cinderella, with Michelle Heaton and Les Dennis, at the Sunderland Empire.
Why does he still do it? "He's not a man to sit down and be idle," Jan Rooney tells me. "He prefers to do something he likes and enjoys, rather than say 'What'll I do today?' He's routine-ised, if I can use that term, because all these years he's had to be at a certain place at a certain time to perform. You take that away and it's not healthy for him. I learned that early on. He must do it. Because otherwise he sits and watches old movies, and then he wants to watch more and more, and then he starts to relive it, and it's better for him to get out and do it - it gets his circulation going and keeps him young. He runs circles around me half the time!"
DURING OUR TALK Mickey is not in the sunniest of moods. Tiny and seeming almost as wide as he is high, dressed in T-shirt and gigantic baggy shorts, he sits glaring at me balefully, snorting occasionally and generally ignoring most of my questions about his career, which began when he crawled on stage during his parents' vaudeville act 85 years ago. I want to talk about him working with Spencer Tracy in Boys Townin 1938, or with Judy Garland in Babes in Armsthe following year. I want him to share what it was like on the set of a silent movie.
Mickey doesn't really want to talk about any of these things. He wants to talk about how much he loves his wife. She chides him gently, as one would a stubborn child, when he responds to one of my questions about his work with: "When I first met Jan here . . . she's an actress, a singer . . . " "We're not talking about me, honey. Please, Mickey. I'm going to walk away right now if you don't answer the questions. It's so important that you talk about yourself. We're talking about you. You're the only one who's still alive and healthy enough to tell these stories about Hollywood."
Mickey stops staring crossly at me and looks over at his wife, his expression changing to one of great yearning tenderness. "I love Jan with every breath of my life," he says quietly. She takes his hand. "Well thank you, honey," she says. "You know that means so much to me." Their devotion isn't faked for my benefit. Earlier, I sat unobserved at the back of the venue while they rehearsed. Jan would be instructing the on-stage trio, or talking to their manager, and every so often Mickey would totter over to her for hugs and cuddles. They have been together for 35 years (his most celebrated other marriage, to screen goddess Ava Gardner in 1941, lasted just over a year).
In the late 1930s Mickey Rooney was the world's highest-paid and most popular film star, mostly because of the Andy Hardy series of heart-warming family comedies, in which he played the adolescent son of a judge, forever being rescued from innocent scrapes. Awesomely talented as an actor, singer and dancer, he also partnered Garland in several hit musicals.
He enlisted to fight in the second World War, and was awarded the Bronze Star, but when he got back to Hollywood his services were no longer in great demand - a fate shared by other performers since, such as Jerry Lewis and Michael J Fox, who traded on their ability to play much younger than their actual ages and found audiences reluctant to accept them in more mature roles.
But Rooney was born into the business and knew no other way of life. He soldiered on with fine dramatic parts in films and had his own TV show in the 1950s, and soldiers on to this day, always seeking a new audience, constantly adapting to meet new challenges. He guest-starred as himself in an episode of The Simpsonsin the 1990s and recently had a good part in the successful Night at the Museumwith Ben Stiller.
"It was a lot different in the old days," he tells me. "And as the cinema went on and on, times changed. And I had to change with them. When I started working in films it was play-like for me - an extension of child's play. Everything has changed. Attitudes change. But do you know what is lacking today? The musical skills. Songs you can understand. Sure, people are still singing and dancing, but it has evolved in a different way. The training is different."
"But you bring them back in this show, sweetheart," says Jan. "The old songs and the old way of doing things. But you see, if Mickey didn't have the gift, and didn't have the wherewithal to get up and do all this, then I would say: 'Fold up your tent and go home.' But he still has it. And why not keep giving that gift, as long as he wants to do it?"
Mickey starts to get mildly agitated, and keeps looking pointedly at his wristwatch. It's time for his pre-show nap. He gruffly thanks me for coming and says: "Love. Love is the most powerful thing in the world." I watch them leave; the shuffling little gnome and his patient, dignified, elegant (and very tall) wife. Mickey doesn't seem to be in great shape. I entertain misgivings about the quality of the show I am to see in a couple of hours.
IT BEGINS WITH a fanfare and a screen, filled with black-and-white images of the human dynamo that was Mickey Rooney in his heyday: the Mickey McGuire shorts that began his career; Mickey drumming up a storm; Mickey wooing Judy.
The screen lifts and he barrels on in his tuxedo, straight up to the microphone for the show's first song, delivered in a tuneful bellow. When it ends he does a few dance steps, and then you realise that he hasn't danced at all - he's acted dancing in a display of consummate stagecraft, and made the audience believe they were seeing dancing when they weren't. He goes into his patter.
"This is what's left of Mickey Rooney," he rasps. "I'm happy to be here tonight. I'm happy to be anywhere tonight. You know, senility is great for romance. You wake up each morning with a new woman." He sings some standards from the 1930s, then quits the stage while Jan Rooney does her solo spot: powerhouse ballads and a couple of Patsy Clines. He joins her for the final section of the show - crosstalk and duets, including the inevitable Ah Yes, I Remember It Well. Rooney onstage and off seems like two different people: one a very old man with not much to say, the other a Hollywood star with plenty still to give. It was a demonstration of that theatrical cliche about the years and infirmities falling away when a performer hears the first chords of his introductory music. And, whatever time has taken from Mickey Rooney in terms of face, figure and energy, it has left intact his stage charm and star quality, and the great artist's ability to draw you in, to involve you in a temporary bonding process.
Performing is all Mickey Rooney has ever known from infancy. It is what's keeping him alive. As his wife says: "You take that away from him and it's not healthy. He must do it!" If you care at all about Hollywood, or the popular culture of the 20th century, it's worth making a pilgrimage to see him while he's still around, because Rooney is the last of his kind, the last of the great stars still working. He may not have been a very forthcoming interviewee, but that doesn't really matter, because it's all up there on stage: the shadow of the performer he once was, the connections, the legendary names who were his personal friends, the proximity to greatness. During the show Jan Rooney sings Smile. Her husband first heard the tune in 1936, before she was born, when its composer, Charlie Chaplin, sat down at the piano in his home and played it for him.
You can count on the fingers of one hand the stars of the 1930s who are still with us. None perform. Except Mickey Rooney, night watchman at an abandoned dream factory, beckoning us in for a last, poignant glimpse of the way things once were.
Let's Put on A Show, with Mickey and Jan Rooney, is at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Sept 9