CONFESSIONS OF A SUPERBRAT
Mickey Rooney has made more than 200 films, married eight times, fathered 10 children, gone bankrupt and lived to excess. Yet he remains one of the few Golden Oldies still working.

He talks about his strange career to William Cash

   WALKING into the lobby of the Hyatt Hotel in the outer LA Valley suburb of Westlake, I can find no sign of Mickey Rooney. All I can see is a newspaper, being invisibly ruffled by something behind it. When the diminutive 75-year-old Hollywood legend emerges from behind the pages, he looks like Captain Pugwash with a livid case of sunburn. He is soon ordering decaff coffee in the Hyatt's empty mock-Western "Red Rock Ranch" saloon restaurant. Tempus fugit.  It is more than half a century since the night he brazenly proposed to Ava Gardner after subjecting her to his "well rehearsed routine" over a champagne and caviar dinner at Chasen's in Beverly Hills. He was then a 21-year-old sex-crazed Hollywood superbrat. It was their first date; Ava became the first of Rooney's eight wives. Chasen's closed last year. Gardner died in London in 1990. His other Hollywood friends, such as Judy Garland, his partner in such smash musicals as Girl Crazy, are "all gone", as he puts it mournfully. The studio system that enabled mogul Louis Mayer to place 14-year-old Rooney under contract at MGM - launching his career with the Andy Hardy series - has long been replaced by a multi-billion dollar business, where moguls compete to pay a comic such as Jim Carrey $20 million a movie. "I didn't make any money when I was number one star in the world," he says. "I was only making $ 1,250 a week. Today, you've only 15 or 10 actors who are allowed to make movies. Nobody else works."

Yet after more than 200 films, 10 children, an honorary Oscar, bankruptcy, and liquor, drug and alimony excesses, followed by an Eighties Broadway comeback, Rooney remains one of the few Golden Oldies still working. He is flying to Britain this week to lead a workshop for the Scottish Actors Studios on the dream sequence from A Midsummer Night's Dream, and give a performance of his one-man show, Mickey Rooney in Mickey Rooney, at the King's Theatre, Glasgow. The moment we sit down in the restaurant, he leans over and mutters into my tape microphone: "This is your old buddy Mickey Rooney to say that a lot of people don't realise that I'm part of the British Isles. My father was born in Scotland, my mother is American, so I'm a sort of short Winston Churchill. . ." Rooney laughter. A few moments later, he is off again. "The fact is, I'm not really 75. I'm three 25-year-old men." More Rooney laughter. An earnest Anglophile, Rooney is a keen watcher of John Major during Prime Minister's questions on cable television. In 1989, he was invited to a lunch at 10 Downing Street by Mrs Thatcher. "I brought home a bottle of Parliament wine," he says. "We bought it at the souvenir gift shop. When I told Mrs Thatcher I was a member of the British Isles, she said: 'I'm so happy that you're one of us. . .'."

Despite his keen patriotism - "I'm proud to be a Scot and an infinitesimal part of the British empire" - his reception here has not always been so rapturous. When he performed his one-man show at the London Palladium in 1949, he was savaged by the critics, and Danny Kaye was brought in to take over. "That was years ago," he says. "You know there's always going to be somebody who likes you, and there's always somebody who doesn't. So you only try and please as many people as you can. To the rest, you say: God bless you, and a happy life." Forty years after this flop, at 67, he returned to the West End with his nostalgic hit Broadway musical, Sugar Babies. After running for eight years in America, it lasted just a few months in London, with Rooney reportedly homesick for California and only too relieved to be leaving our blessed plot. Sugar Babies saved Rooney's slumping career in the early Eighties, when he was reduced to appearing at cocktail parties for $500, pretending to be an old friend of the host. "I was doing that because I was broke. There's no sin in being broke. The only thing you have to do in life sometimes is get off the canvas and keep going. "I've had my ups and downs. All hasn't been beautiful. And I think that's good, because it does build character."

What of those eight marriages; have they brought him any great insights into women? "I don't think
anybody knows anything about women," he says. "I think all women are different. Nobody knows about women. Why is the girl you go with never the girl you marry?" But he does concede that marriage is something he does know plenty about. "Don't marry anybody you love; that's the secret of a happy marriage. Marry somebody you like," he tells me. "Love is sex, love is drunkenness, but it never lasts. But when you marry your best friend, love grows." Unfortunately, he was never much good at taking his own advice. "I didn't say I followed the policy. These were things I learnt through trial and error. I've been married to my present wife (country singer Jan Chamberlin) for 22 years, so at least I've found out the reason why you make it last. And I've got news for you: people that follow what I tell them end up happily married." He is still unsure about what went wrong with his previous marriages. In his memoir, Life is Too Short, he said that his marriage record amounted to a form of human failure. He now says: "It was my failure at being sensitive. I think everybody is selfish in marriage. And all divorces are like a five-car smash; everybody gets hurt."

His background, as the son of a chorus girl and a travelling entertainer called Joe Yule, is intriguing. When Rooney was just three, his mother caught his father in flagrante with a chorus girl. The Yules separated soon afterwards, and Rooney's mother was reduced to part-time prostitution to pay the rent. When I ask whether the chorus girl business affected him as a child, Rooney flatly denies it. "You're talking about something that wasn't true," he says. "Do you believe everything you read in magazines?" Well, no. . . but I do remember what he wrote on page 10 of his own book: "Mom caught Dad backstage in a compromising position. . . I was with her when she saw him and the other girl together." I then make the mistake of wondering aloud whether his height - 5 ft 1 in - has contributed to his insecurities and drive to prove himself. Rooney is clearly sensitive on this subject. "Let me straighten you out on this, pal. It isn't how tall you are in life; it's what you do with it. I know people who are heads of some of the biggest companies in the world who are shorter than I am. I have no ego. God made me the way he wanted to make me". All the more remarkable, then, that somebody so "secure" insists on stamping almost every page of his braggart memoirs with his macho persona. He is clearly proud of his sexual prowess, although his wedding night with the virginal 19-year-old Ava Gardner was unconsummated because he had drunk too much champagne.  Oh, he "more than" made up to her the following night, he says. "I was, by turns, alternatively tender and tremendous, and that helped." No ego?  Here is Rooney on giving acting tips to 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor on the set of National Velvet. After telling her: "Really listen, then react to me," he noted that the director, Clarence Brown, "smiled and walked away. I think he approved of what I was telling her". He saw the film at a premiere, and basked in the noisy approval of the audience when they discovered he was there. "I loved the attention. I needed it the way a drunk who's been on the wagon for a week needs a shot of booze," he recalls.

As with Taylor, currently divorcing her eighth husband, Larry Fortensky, Rooney's long-term survival on the tightrope of the celebrity circus is probably due to his serial divorces as much as to his film career. He admits the bulk of his movies were best forgotten. Each time he remarried, it was almost as if he were having another shot at casting himself in his own comeback movie. Rooney usually remarried in haste. Only a few weeks after being dumped by Ava Gardner, he proposed to beauty queen Betty Jane Rase, after drinking more than a dozen bourbons at the National Velvet premiere party. She accepted. They had never met before. "I just didn't want to be defeated by marriage, so I found a girl and married her," he says. "Somebody I cared for. She wasn't necessarily my friend." He kept in touch with Ava Gardner, but finally blew the friendship the year before she died by first standing her up for dinner, and then going on Wogan to disclose her age and failing health. In his autobiography, he writes that, after being invited round: "I just couldn't go - I was afraid to. I had had fantasies - that I might fall in love with her again, and she with me." Predictably, he tells me another version. "I lost her phone number. I stood her up because I didn't know where to go." When he got back to Los Angeles, he found it again and called her. "She said: 'You son of a bitch, you're just like you always were. I can't count on you'. I said: 'Ava, honey, you hung up before giving me your address'. She said: 'Everybody knows my address'." When I ask Rooney why he didn't just date his wives for a while to see if they were compatible, he replies: "I thought it was much better to be Mickey Rooney and marry somebody and be able to have sex." His self-confidence cannot have been boosted by the fact that he was usually ditched by them. Ava Gardner was "kind" and asked for just $ 25,000, a car, furs and jewellery. After he had divorced wife number four, Elaine Mahnken, the headline in the LA Times ran: "Wife Dumps Rooney for $81,750". "I was never humiliated," he says. "I was saddened; I mismanaged my finances; I have nobody to blame but myself."

In the past, he has grandly declared that he lived his life according to the W. H. Auden line: "Thou shalt not live within thy means". Today, thanks to Sugar Babies, he is out of the red and living "a quiet life" as a born-again Christian in an LA suburb, playing golf, running a "health food company and an advertising business" - when not performing. He gave up hard drink years ago. Does he still get recognised in Westlake? "Of course. I'm recognised around the world, thank God. Because if they don't recognise you, you had better think of another job." After Britain, Rooney is off to Vienna to collect an award. "What for?" I ask. "I have no idea until I get there."