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 the comedies, running from 1927 to 1936, starting with "Mickey's Circus" (1927), his first starring role. During this period, he also briefly voiced Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. He made other films in his adolescence, including several more of the McGuire films. At age 15 he played the role of Puck in the Warner Brothers all-star adaptation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in 1935. Rooney then moved to MGM, where he befriended Judy Garland, with whom he began making a series of musicals that propelled both of them to stardom. In 1937, Rooney was selected to portray Andy Hardy in "A