Before I was a child of Hollywood, the place, I was a child of Hollywood, the dream factory and its ancillary cultural machinery.  That meant the movies first and foremost, whether experienced on the big screen at Radio City Music Hall or theatres and movie houses elsewhere in New York and New Jersey, or on the black-and-white screen of a towering television set in a suburban living room.  One of my earliest memories is a movie memory (Little Caesar (Warner Bros., 1931) – strong stuff for a three year-old).  Somewhat later (though not much), I had my first experience of Shakespearean theatre on the big screen – again shrunk down to the frame of a large cathode ray tube – this time courtesy of M-G-M (and CBS, I’m guessing).  I’m not sure how much of it I understood on the first go; but I knew it was a fairy story, I knew it involved magic spells, enchantments, a romance or two or three, and that it was uncommonly pretty in every respect.  It also featured some very young actors who looked to be not much older than I was.  From the gutters of Hell’s Kitchen, I might be reborn in an Athenian enchanted forest.  In another time, I might have been the ‘changeling’ child myself; but after being dazzled by Titania (Anita Louise) and Hermia (Olivia de Havilland) (and maybe a little frightened by Victor Jory’s Oberon), I only had eyes for that other ‘wanderer of the night’, Puck – filling out an urchin silhouette that would soon become familiar in other movie guises – with a memory for the ‘music of the spheres’ and ready to ‘put a girdle around the earth’ in a matter of minutes.  The movie had us coming back to him again and again, and we couldn’t take our eyes off of him. 

I don’t think my brother or I immediately made the connection between this magical sprite and the teen-teen-age Andy Hardy we had fleeting contact with before losing ourselves in the horsey romance of National Velvet or the boundless optimism and Tin Pan Alley tenacity of the “Babes” movies; but by the time we actually had our first big screen encounter with Mickey Rooney – in the unlikely role of Mr Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s – we were ready for it.  Although the casting was decried from the beginning, and Blake Edwards himself expressed regret over it, we accepted it as we might have accepted him in any number of cameos.  And cameos were exactly where we were most likely to see him.  With the exception of a rare choice television or film part, this performer who oozed talent from every pore, once one of the world’s top film stars, was struggling to stay in the game. 

Like everyone else in love with the movies, I have a few theories about this.  And then there are the extra-theoretical considerations.  (Including, among other things, a penchant for glamourous partners and betting on the ponies.)  By the 1970s, film, television – the entire entertainment world – had moved on.  As Rooney’s legendary peers were disappearing or just dying off, a whole new set of players had moved onto the scene.  It made the Hollywood studio landscape of the early 1960s look almost quaint.  But at his lowest ebb, he never stopped working entirely.  Against all odds, by the end of that decade, the one-time ‘Babe’ would be back on Broadway and headlining alongside fellow M-G-M stalwart, Ann Miller.  To the gambler that Rooney was, this probably made perfect sense.  Double or quits – except that there could be no quitting for a performer like Rooney, for whom conventional career as well as casting considerations might be set aside. 

Looking back at this career puts a number of things in perspective.  There’s a funny What’s My Line “mystery guest” segment (Rooney signs in as “Joe Yule, Jr.” – his legal/birth name) that you can find on the web in which Dorothy Kilgallen tries to pick apart the matrix of his celebrity – not a “leading man type,” but somehow a kind of “leading man.”  She manages to hopscotch from her hunches to the right answer, but the awkwardness of the identification zig-zags almost embarrassingly from the panel to the host and back to Rooney.  There was no pinning him down, nor any way to look at him as a conventional leading man.  Yet for nearly a decade, between Andy Hardy and Judy Garland’s entrepreneurial show-biz foil, he was a box office sensation.  But in between he was also playing everything from the vaudeville urchin that was a second skin to actual icons like Huckleberry Finn, to messengers, to the guy who gets to hold Elizabeth Taylor’s riding tack.  As screen icons go, Rooney was an anomaly. 

And then came television – which might have challenged such rigid categorization, but for the longest time only reinforced it.  Love would not find Andy Hardy between the post-war transition and the advent of television, but somewhere between Playhouse 90 and the early 1960s, Rooney found his footing again as the great character actor he had always been.  But there was something missing in the new medium – a certain quality of light and space.  It must sound like I have Irwin or Turrell or other light and space artists on my mind.  But images have an entirely different quality on the big screen – especially when enhanced by great lighting and Technicolor.  They radiate a certain glow and the magnetism of their screen presence really comes across. 

Rooney’s career underscores a couple of enduring truths about Hollywood.  First – it’s still true that nobody knows anything and probably always will be.  Second, marketing is no substitute for talent; nor can talent ever be served by the willful marketing of substandard product.  (There are those who will disagree with the second part of that, I know.  Check back with me in thirty years.)  The medium matters – you need the right medium to maximize impact.  Finally, the moment matters more.  It’s the moment as much as the frame, or even the ‘icon’ – which can be extremely personal.  No – everything is not illuminated.  Just certain genius moments charged by a quality of the performer and the performance, by a certain energy and momentum, and (perhaps as Puck would have put it) a certain music – or the right tune, anyway.  Richard Strauss might have called it transfiguration – and he would have known.  I don’t know if you could apply that word to any of Mickey Rooney’s performances; but the moments he illuminated endure for me.