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 successful song-and-dance team. Audiences delighted in seeing the "playful interactions between the two stars showcase a wonderful chemistry". Along with three of the "Andy Hardy" films, where she portrayed a girl attracted to Andy, they appeared together in a string of successful musicals, including "Babes in Arms" (1939). During an interview in the 1992 documentary film "MGM: When the Lion Roars", Rooney describes their friendship: Judy and I were so close we could've come from the same womb. We weren't like brothers or sisters but there was no love affair there; there was more than a love affair. It's very,