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
Mickey Rooney later replaced by Jo Anne Worley. Rooney wrote a memoir titled "Life is Too Short", published by Villard Books in 1991. A "Library Journal" review said that "From title to the last line, 'I'll have a short bier', Rooney's self-deprecating humor powers this book." He wrote a novel about a child star, published in 1994, "The Search For Sunny Skies". Despite the millions of dollars that he earned over the years, such as his $65,000 a week earnings from "Sugar Babies", Rooney was plagued by financial problems late in life. His longtime gambling habit caused him to "gamble away his