ANDY HARDY GOES TO
                                      WASHINGTON?

                                                  by Matthew Flamm

                                      "I'm tired of a house divided," Mickey Rooney
                                      is saying. "I'm tired of 'Are you a Democrat or
                                      are you a Republican?' Ask me that right now,"
                                      he commands, sitting in the New York hotel
                                      suite where the quixotic star is supposed to be
                                      promoting his first novel, The Search for Sonny
                                      Skies (Carol Publishing/Birch Lane Press,
                                      $19.95). Okay, are you a Democrat or a
                                      Republican? "I'm an American," Rooney
                                      answers proudly, like the 1996 Presidential
                                      candidate he is. That's right. Mickey Rooney,
                                      child star-and the author of a new mystery
                                      novel-will run for President on the "All
                                      American" ticket, with either "Ross Perot or
                                      Rush Limbaugh as my running mate," he says.
                                      (What about soul mate Newt Gingrich, who's
                                      been touting Rooney's 1938 Boys Town?)
                                      Rooney might make a good candidate. He's
                                      certainly adept at dodging questions-like, is
                                      the character Sonny Skies, who was a child
                                      star, in any way autobiographical? "Sonny
                                      Skies has nothing to do with Mickey Rooney,"
                                      Rooney, 74, insists. And the chapter in which
                                      Skies and a Howard Hughes-like tycoon duke
                                      it out over a beautiful actress-that had nothing
                                      to do with the real-life star's brawl with Hughes
                                      over Ava Gardner? "That happens in
                                      everybody's life," Rooney says of the fight,
                                      which he described in his 1991 autobiography,
                                      Life Is Too Short. Rooney claims that he wrote
                                      Sonny Skies all by himself. (Carol Publishing
                                      chief Steven Schragis draws a slightly different
                                      picture: "There was help," he says, "but not an
                                      excessive amount.") Rooney says his literary
                                      career has just begun: He's at work on at least
                                      half a dozen other novels. Not to mention
                                      running for President. "(President) Clinton was
                                      a Rhodes scholar," the actor says. "Do you
                                      know who tutors Rhodes scholars?" No, who?
                                      "Marxists!"