Mickey Rooney's Death Makes Me Think of Ava Gardner

When I heard this morning that Mickey Rooney had died, my first thought was back to THIS  2013 article in Vanity Fair, excerpting a newly published book about Ava Gardner, to whom Rooney was once married (one of his eight wives). She had collaborated extensively on the book in life, back in the 1980s. It was intended to be her memoirs.  But it was never published, until now.

Here's just some of what she said about Mickey Rooney. (I'm not copying the most vulgar, prurient and profane parts. But you can read those in the article itself, if you want.)

She was a 19 year-old starlet when she met him. "I still didn’t know that he was the biggest wolf on the lot. He was catnip to the ladies. He knew it, too. The little sod was not above admiring himself in the mirror. All five foot two of him! He probably banged most of the starlets who appeared in his Andy Hardy films—Lana Turner among them. She called him Andy Hard-on. Can we say that—Andy Hard-on?”

 “A week or so after we got back from our honeymoon, I woke up in the middle of the night with the most god-awful pain in my stomach. Mickey drove me to the Presbyterian Hospital. Like everybody in my family, I had a misplaced appendix. In those days you stayed in hospital for three weeks after even a minor operation. So I came home, and the first night I found evidence that Mick had been screwing somebody in our bed.”