The Mickey Rooney Show three stormy marriages by the early 1950s to actresses Ava Gardner, Martha Vickers, and Betty Jane Rase had marred his wholesome "Andy Hardy" image. (His fourth wife at the time, Elaine, was not an actress.) Although Rooney was thirty-four years old in 1954, his character Mickey Mulligan was only twenty-three. The series aired from August 28, 1954, to June 4, 1955 on Saturday evenings opposite the first half-hour of both CBS's "The Jackie Gleason Show" and ABC's "The Dotty Mack Show", a low-budget novelty program in which Dotty Mack lip-synced many of the works of other singers. Rooney's then-manager Maurice
The Mickey Rooney Show coach. "The Mickey Rooney Show" was created by Blake Edwards and Richard Quine, also a former child actor and a long-time Rooney friend. The pair had previously co-written and directed Rooney's three feature films for Columbia Pictures, "Sound Off", "All Ashore" and "Drive a Crooked Road". The title first proposed for the series, "For the Love of Mike", was dropped because it had already been registered. Rooney's career had begun to decline when he left full-time employment at MGM in 1948. The situation comedy emerged at a needed time in his career. Some people, including Rooney himself, speculated that his