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 for them for five years at $25,000 a movie (his fee until then had been $100,000 but Rooney wanted to enter independent production.) Rooney claimed he was unhappy with the billing MGM gave him for "Words and Music". His first television series, "The Mickey Rooney Show" (also known as "Hey, Mulligan"; created by Blake Edwards with Rooney as his own producer), appeared on NBC television for 32 episodes between August 28, 1954, and June 4, 1955. In 1951, he made his directorial debut with "My True Story," starring Helen Walker. Rooney also starred as a ragingly egomaniacal television comedian, loosely