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 Duke had flatly predicted that the show would outperform Gleason's because Rooney had greater appeal to younger viewers. Rooney, who ended his business connection with Duke after the series folded, said, "I don't want to knock off anybody. All I want to do is put on a nice, funny show that people will like." NBC put great faith in the series because Rooney was not only its star but its executive producer who "writes the music, discusses gags with the director, and shakes hands with visitors on the set." According to Brown, the failure of "The Mickey Rooney Show" was