This Is How Mickey Rooney Really Felt About Judy Garland

As a beloved silver-screen duo, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland have charmed generations over the decades. But while the legendary actors made movie magic together, were their smiles just plastered on for the cameras? Not everyone gets along with their co-workers, after all. Well, wonder no more. We know just what Rooney thought about Garland – and whether their on-screen chemistry translated into a real-life friendship.

And Garland could have used a friend in Hollywood – especially one who knew what it was like to have been in the biz from a young age. It’s incredible to think of now, but she was signed to the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie studio at the age of only 13. Garland was already a seasoned pro by that point, mind you. Her first performance in front of a paying audience had come when she had been just two years old.

Want another fact that’ll blow your mind? Garland landed arguably her most iconic role when she was all of 17. As Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, she sang and danced her way to superstardom and landed an Academy Juvenile Award in the process. But behind the scenes, the shoot had been a troubling experience for Garland. And it would have a real effect on her in later life.

At least the icon had Rooney to lean on – for a while, anyway. The pair had first starred together in 1937’s Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry but had already met a few years earlier as wide-eyed showbiz teens. And in 2020 Rooney’s biographer Richard A. Lertzman told Closer magazine, “Judy sang, and Mickey couldn’t believe her voice.” It appeared the admiration was mutual. Lertzman continued, “[Judy] loved his talent and energy.”

And luckily for both Rooney and Garland, child stars were big business in Hollywood at the time. In 1935 Louis B. Mayer had even created a schoolhouse on the MGM studio lot. This was overseen by Mary MacDonald, a teacher who had originally been hired to teach French to a young actress named Jean Parker. As it happens, all the youthful talent hired by the studio would go through MacDonald’s training.

So, when Rooney and Garland were signed by MGM, they too began learning their trade with MacDonald. And from the jump, it was clear that the two had a lot in common. Both had been performing in vaudeville family acts from the moment they could talk. Both their fathers had also left their respective families.

This meant that, from an extremely young age, Rooney and Garland were breadwinners for their single mothers. And this may have made the pair depend on Hollywood more than their peers did. For most of the adult stars signed to MGM, the studio was where they worked. For Rooney and Garland, though? MGM became their home, and Mayer was almost a surrogate dad.

Mayer may have been pleased, too, when Rooney sprang to fame in 1937’s A Family Affair – the first film in which he played Andy Hardy. And the teenage judge’s son ultimately became so beloved that MGM made 14 Hardy movies over the next decade. You may remember, too, that Rooney’s co-star in three of the films was none other than his old classmate Garland.

In the series, Garland plays Betsy Booth – the girl next door who pines for Rooney’s character. She was never the one Hardy wanted, though, and she would inevitably end being a shoulder to cry on as he pined over other women. Interestingly, life would imitate art when Garland developed a love for Rooney that went unreciprocated.

Rooney and Garland did make ten movies together, so perhaps that close working relationship gave birth to Garland’s crush. Or maybe it was because Rooney helped his co-star find her way as an actress? On the set of the first Hardy movie, the performer reportedly gave Garland an important piece of advice right before they shot a scene together.

“Honey, you gotta believe this now,” Rooney said while holding Garland’s hands. “Make like you’re singing it.” This apparently unlocked something in Garland’s mind, helping her understand how to carry the emotion in her singing into her spoken film dialogue. It was a sage piece of wisdom from Rooney – a teenager who had already amassed a huge amount of showbusiness experience.

Rooney and Garland’s time at MGM wasn’t always fun, though – especially with Mayer trying to control their lives. When Rooney, who was a known Hollywood womanizer, told his boss he was going to marry Ava Gardner, the studio head stepped in. He reportedly put his foot down, saying, “I simply forbid it.”

Rooney allegedly countered, “You’ve got no right to do that. This is my life.” Mayer then asserted his authority by stating, “It’s not your life. Not as long as you’re working for me. MGM has made your life.” Ouch. And even though Rooney wound up being permitted to marry Gardner, it didn’t last. The whole episode also left the actor under no illusion about Mayer’s manipulation.

And Rooney caused even more trouble for the studio with his behavior. So, to make sure that nothing bad ever reached the media, Mayer hired a publicist named Les Peterson to work with the young star. On top of arranging interviews and replying to fan mail, Peterson acted as Rooney’s personal assistant, babysitter and fixer.

Rooney was a gambler, and it was Peterson who would facilitate his bets at the track. The pint-sized lothario also enjoyed partying with the young women of Hollywood, and it was Peterson’s job to keep events at these parties on the down-low. He did just this after one particular shindig at Errol Flynn’s home, as apparently there were several prostitutes on the guestlist.

To Rooney’s credit, he was well aware of Peterson’s function in his life. He would call the other man “the vice president in charge of Mickey Rooney” and laugh about it. Garland, on the other hand, didn’t have the same grasp of the situation as Rooney, as she considered her minder Betty Asher a close friend.

Asher did the same job as Peterson, effectively operating as a paid studio spy. But although her and Garland’s bond became so strong that rumors claimed they were lovers, this was never truly the case. Asher was actually sleeping with MGM executive Eddie Mannix and relating to him every intimate snippet of information about Garland’s private life. Garland claimed that she wept for days on end when she discovered the truth.

As for the Rooney-Garland screen partnership? That would eventually run its course with 1943’s Girl Crazy and 1948’s Words and Music. Those two movies were separated by Rooney’s work entertaining U.S. troops during WWII. Even before then, the writing had been on the wall, as the production of Girl Crazy had been troubled.

By that point, Garland had begun drinking heavily. This was on top of the pill addiction brought on by the drugs the studio had given her to keep her pepped up while working. All this led to a difficult shooting process, with many delays and a lot of tension between Garland and MGM.

It didn’t help that Rooney got his draft notice in the middle of this on-set turmoil. Though Mayer tried to prevent his star player from leaving, his requests to get the A-lister exempted from military service were picked up by the press. In order to avoid any controversy, then, MGM backed down. But when Rooney returned in ’46 and shot another Andy Hardy movie, it simply wasn’t the same. The culture had moved on from the series’ cookie-cutter view of America.

Words and Music, the last film in which Rooney and Garland appeared together, also wasn’t quite the same as their previous efforts. Garland simply made a guest appearance in the movie as herself, while Rooney played the real-life songwriter Lorenz Hart. At a crossroads in his career, Rooney then renegotiated his deal with MGM – and took a large pay cut.

Now, Rooney had become too old to play teenagers. At only 5’2” tall, he didn’t have the physical attributes to play leading man roles, either. That meant he was forced to reinvent himself as a character actor, and to his credit this new direction had some success. In 1957 Rooney was nominated for an Academy Award for The Bold and the Brave.

By contrast, Garland was riding high while the war raged. She starred in two pictures considered to be among her best: Meet Me in St. Louis and The Clock. Both movies were directed by Vincente Minnelli, who would go on to marry Garland. The couple had a daughter, too, in Liza.

But while shooting 1947’s The Pirate, addiction caught up to Garland. Tragically, she had a nervous breakdown. And although she was eventually able to finish the film and even shoot box-office hit Easter Parade, the damage had been done. In 1950 MGM severed its ties with the star it had created and almost destroyed.

How did MGM destroy her? Well, Garland would open up to her biographer Paul Donnelly. She claimed that the studio had started her on the path to substance abuse by giving her and Rooney pep pills to keep them singing and dancing for as long as possible. The star added, “Then they’d take us to the studio hospital and knock us out with sleeping pills – Mickey sprawled out on one bed and me on another.”

Garland continued, “Then after four hours, they’d wake us up and give us the pep pills again so we could work 72 hours in a row. Half of the time we were hanging from the ceiling, but it was a way of life for us.” Addiction would plague Garland for the rest of her life until she passed away in 1969 from an accidental overdose. She was only 47 years old.

Rooney outlived Garland, of course, although he, too, would experience plenty of ups and downs in the decades that followed. He landed another Academy Award nomination for The Black Stallion as well as a Golden Globe for 1981’s Bill. He also starred on Broadway in Sugar Babies – a loving tribute to the vaudeville years of old. And in more modern times, he appeared in the TV hospital drama series ER and the Night at the Museum movie franchise.

Rooney’s love life was just as eventful, as altogether he had eight wives. That led him to once joke, “Always get married in the morning. That way, if it doesn’t work out, you haven’t wasted the whole day.” Good advice! But he also struggled with money at certain points. Despite his decades-long career, he declared bankruptcy in 1996, having blown vast fortunes in his lifetime. Rooney died in 2014 at the age of 93.

Rooney’s passing marked the end of an era. Now, both he and Garland were gone. But at least we can remember the pair through their close off-screen relationship. Yes, Rooney and Garland were good buds in real life. That’s what the actor said, anyway, when he was interviewed for the 1992 documentary series MGM: When the Lion Roars. Rooney explained, “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.”

Rooney continued, “It’s very, very difficult to explain the depths of our love for each other. It was so special. It was a forever love. Judy, as we speak, has not passed away. She’s always with me in every heartbeat of my body.” It seemed that he had always held their bond close to his heart.

Then, in 1997, Rooney sat down with Turner Classic Movies’ Robert Osborne for an episode of the interview show Private Screenings. And when the topic of Garland came up, Rooney said with great emotion, “She was my sister from the beginning, the sister I never had. I’m an only child, Robert, but she was the love I had searched for.”

Regarding Garland’s talent as an actress and singer, Rooney was gushing with his praise. He said, “She was born to be one of the greatest performers in the world. There are so many things I could tell you. It would take us four programs for me to tell you about Judy Garland. I think she’s one of the greatest actresses in the world.”

And if there was still any doubt, Rooney cleared it up during a 2001 tribute to Garland on Larry King Live. There, he spoke glowingly of his former co-star, saying, “I think without a doubt there will never be a voice like Judy Garland.” To him, she was a genius and a natural talent. He added, “You can’t go to a voice teacher for a voice like that.”

Rooney also peeled the curtain back on a time when he had tried to help Garland. When her mental and physical deterioration had left her hospitalized, Rooney had apparently asked a friend to convince Garland to let him be there for her. He said, “I tried – I sent a football player to New York.”

“[Judy] was in the hospital,” Rooney continued, “and I wanted to get her out of there and take care of her.” When King inquired about the identity of the footballer, Rooney answered, “Ray Pearson, played for UCLA. He’s a friend of mine.” And when Rooney called Garland to tell her about his plan, she reportedly responded, “Do you think I can make it?”

Unfortunately, Rooney didn’t reveal whether Garland went with Pearson, and the story trailed off. But the anecdote made it obvious that he still cared about her long into old age. Poignantly, the actor also maintained that Garland was a consummate professional – even when she became ill toward the end of her life.

“No matter how she felt, she went on and she knocked them dead,” an emotional Rooney said of Garland. He also claimed that she had been the best friend he ever could have wanted. And as the tribute show wrapped up, Rooney gave King one final thought, saying, “There will never be another Judy Garland.”

Did Rooney ever change his mind about Garland? It appears not. In 2005 Rooney was the subject of a Vanity Fair magazine profile written by Nancy Jo Sales. And while the article wound up never seeing publication, Sales would later write about what she and the then-85-year-old actor had spoken about at the time. One of the topics of conversation was, unsurprisingly, Garland.

“[Judy] was like my sister,” Rooney told Sales. “She was my friend. It hurts too terribly to talk about it.” It was unclear whether Rooney meant it hurt to talk about her death or how she had succumbed to drug and alcohol issues. But he did admit that it had torn him apart to see how addiction had ravaged Garland.

Rooney also hinted that he believed Garland had carried a torch for him at one point, although he had never reciprocated her feelings. This, he confessed, was one of his big regrets. Rooney even admitted that he had often wondered how he and Garland’s lives would have turned out if he had been more open to letting romance blossom. Well, although we’ll never know this, at least we can rest assured that the pair loved each other in a different way.

Behind the scenes, though, trouble was brewing for another of Garland’s co-stars. It’s another busy day on the MGM lot, as Vincente Minnelli directs Garland and young actress Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis. But as O’Brien moves towards her mark, she’s unaware that she’s facing almost certain death. Far above her, an assassin is moving, planning to end her young career.

O’Brien plays Garland’s little sister Tootie, and she’s loving making the movie. Many years after the 1944 musical came out, in 2019, she would tell the Los Angeles Times, “Judy was so much fun to be with on the set that she was making me laugh before the scene.” This became a problem when O’Brien was asked to cry in one scene.

There’s an old rumor around Hollywood that Minnelli had a cruel scheme to provoke tears from the young actress. He is supposed to have told her that her beloved pup was ill. But O’Brien denied this was true. She said that her mom would simply not have tolerated such cruel behavior.

Ultimately, O’Brien did manage to cry — because she didn’t want to be defeated in a kids’ game. “I’ll tell you how they got me to cry.” She said to the Los Angeles Times. “I was in a contest with June Allyson [on the MGM lot] of who was the best crier, because June cried in a lot of her movies. I wanted to win the contest.”

O’Brien was desperate to let Allyson win, so when her mom told her, “but June is such a great, great actress. She always cries on cue,” you can bet that she was fired up. Brushing aside the suggestion of fake tears, O’Brien said that her response was, “I thought, I’m not letting her win the contest. I started crying.”

O’Brien was already accomplished in the crying game. When she was six she reputedly asked a director, “When I cry, do you want the tears to run all the way or shall I stop halfway down?” Little did she know, though, that a man lurked in the shadows who wanted her to cry for real — and perhaps worse.

But O’Brien was unaware of the danger that she would face as she enjoyed working with Minnelli. In 2014 she told Vanity Fair how the experience had been. She said, “He was very gentle. He was very sweet, very nice. Knew exactly what he wanted, because, as I said, he made sure the set was decorated just right.”

O’Brien was particularly impressed by the way Minnelli treated her. “[H]e directed me like a grown-up actress and that’s what I loved about doing the movie,” she said. “I was very fortunate. Most of my directors did treat me like an adult actress. They actually did.” And it wasn’t just the director who made the shoot enjoyable. Garland also helped.

Reminiscing about working with Garland, in March 2015 O’Brien told U.K. newspaper the Sunday Express, “I adored working with Judy. She was 22 at the time and she seemed like a big sister to me. She was very sweet and always very kind to children. I’m still friends with her lovely children today. She was a lot of fun to be around even though people think of her as a serious, tragic figure. She really loved to tell jokes, and she’d play jump rope with me on the set.”

Meet Me in St. Louis was released in the fall of 1944 and was a smash hit. It was fifth on the U.S. box-office charts for that year and the second-highest-grossing film MGM had ever released at that time. Only 1939’s Gone with the Wind had made the studio more money.

It was only fitting that O’Brien should be in such a successful movie. She was MGM’s top child performer, having already appeared in nine movies since her career began at three years old. And that career would continue through the decades, evolving from child star to adult actress, from movies to TV.

In one of the slightly unusual quirks of that day, O’Brien had actually borrowed her first name from the character she’d played in her first credited appearance — in the 1942 film Journey for Margaret. Her real Christian name was Angela, and the Californian had actually made her screen debut in an uncredited, brief role a year earlier.

The youngster was very busy throughout the 1940s, appearing in a wide range of films. Before the Minnelli musical, O’Brien appeared in Jane Eyre (1943) and The Canterville Ghost (1944), and she’d go on to star in movies such as Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945) and Little Women (1949). And the Luisa May Alcott adaptation certainly had a lasting impact on O’Brien.

In December 2019, O’Brien reminisced with Yahoo Entertainment about the girls she filmed the movie with. They were Janet Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as her crying competitor June Allyson. She said, “Whenever all [four] of us would meet again at different luncheons and dinners, we always called ourselves the ‘Little Women.’”

But O’Brien’s career started to slow down somewhat after Little Women. The star’s selling point had been her cuteness as a kid, and she found the transition to adult actress difficult. Roles were harder to come by, and although she would continue to work, her final starring role in a movie was in 1960’s Heller In Pink Tights.

TV was O’Brien’s salvation. She told The Bristol Daily Courier newspaper in 1957, “The wonderful thing about TV is that it has given me a chance to get out of the awkward age — something the movies couldn’t do for me. No movie producer could really afford to take a chance at handing me an adult role.” She was only 20.

In time, O’Brien’s TV appearances became rarer — she preferred to focus on her husband and daughter. She’d turn up from time to time — including a cameo in the 1981 Disney biopic Amy — and as part of the Los Angeles Christmas Parade. Throughout her life, people loved to hear her speak, and she made many appearances doing just that.

This all seems a long way from the stardom that seemingly beckoned with the release of Meet Me In St. Louis. O’Brien’s performance was widely acclaimed. Entertainment journal The Hollywood Reporter raved, “Hers is a great talent as distinctly outstanding as the greatest stars we have. The O’Brien appeal is based on her naturalness. She’s all America’s child, the type every person in an audience wants to take into his arms.”

And this sentiment was echoed abroad too — the movie proved a huge success in London. There, the Daily Express noted, “Her quiet, compelling acting, worthy of an Academy Award, steals the show.” High praise indeed, and it turned out to be an accurate prophecy as the Oscars did come calling.

Back in the 1930s and ‘40s, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences liked to recognize the top child actor of the year. And it did so with a mini Oscar, just like the adult sort. Ironically, Garland had herself won the award before, along with the likes of Deanna Durbin and Mickey Rooney.

The winner in 1945 was O’Brien, as her turn in Meet Me In St. Louis wowed the Academy as well as audiences. And when she was awarded the Oscar at the ceremony at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, presenter Bob Hope had to hoist her up to the mic so that she could say a few words.

“Will you hurry up and grow up, please?” quipped Hope, struggling with the effort. O’Brien was so excited that she completely forgot the speech her mom had written for her. So when director Mervyn LeRoy gave her the award, she burbled that she didn’t know what to say and left it at “Thank you.”

The Oscar was by no means the only award that O’Brien would win throughout her career. But it was her favorite by some distance. In her family home, her awards had their own room, although they were sometimes taken home by the maid when they needed cleaning. And that’s just what happened in 1958 — only this time with an unexpected outcome.

Three days later and the maid still hadn’t come back, so O’Brien’s mother phoned to sack her — and demand the return of the awards. But shortly after, the elder O’Brien — who did not enjoy good health — became poorly and ultimately died. Margaret O’Brien was so shaken by grief that she didn’t even think about the maid for months. When she finally did phone her, the number was inoperative, and she now had to face up to the loss of the Oscar.

Even though the Academy gave her a substitute, it wasn’t the same. And for years, O’Brien would hunt for her missing award. She visited countless movie collectors’ sales in the hope of finding it. In 1995 she finally saw the Oscar again, in a memorabilia auction catalog. So, after alerting the Academy who quickly reclaimed it, the award was returned to her — 50 years after she was first presented with it.

A delighted O’Brien told the press, “For all those people who have lost or misplaced something that was dear to them, as I have, never give up the dream of searching — never let go of the hope that you’ll find it because after all these many years, at last, my Oscar has been returned to me.” But this was not O’Brien’s only brush with crime.

No, O’Brien’s previous experience of criminal intent was rather more serious — almost fatal, in fact. Let’s turn the clock back to 1944 and revisit the set of Meet Me In St. Louis to find out how O’Brien faced danger. It all begins a few years before when the young actress signed a contract with MGM. But as her star grew, studio boss Louis B. Mayer didn’t match her rise in fame with an increase in wages.

“I was making very little money, and I had already become a name,” O’Brien told Yahoo Entertainment. “My mother thought, ‘We don’t know how long this studio contract will go.’ So she marched into Mr. Mayer’s office and said, ‘I want the top salary for my daughter!’” And O’Brien’s mother knew that she had an ace in the hole.

That “ace” was the knowledge that Minnelli wanted O’Brien for the part of Tootie. But Mayer simply didn’t care. He refused to accede to any demands and instead responded in a quite remarkable way. “Of course, he started to cry,” O’Brien said. “He could cry better than anybody when you were asking him for money.”

Well, Mayer was in for a shock when O’Brien’s mom — far from impressed with his waterworks — told him that he could stick it. As the actress recalled, “My mother said, ‘That’s fine. I’m going to New York, and I’m taking my daughter, so bye-bye!’ Mr. Mayer was surprised by that!”

Still, Mayer had a card of his own up his sleeve. He didn’t have to give the child star the role in Meet Me In St. Louis after all. And this was a ploy he’d used many times with other stars — and it had worked. He simply threatened to recast the part.

MGM had a stable of stand-ins for their star actors — so there was a ready replacement for O’Brien. As she told Yahoo Entertainment, “They had a little girl that was my lookalike, but had never let her do a big, big role. Mr. Mayer told this little girl’s family that she was going to be in Meet Me in St. Louis, and even had a wardrobe fitting for her. So they thought for sure that she was going to do the movie.”

Well, the other little girl’s hopes were dashed pretty quickly, as Mayer decided that he did — after all — want O’Brien for the role. Turns out the standby’s dad was pretty upset by fact that his daughter wouldn’t be getting her big break too. And it turns out that he himself was part of the crew on the movie — working as part of the lighting crew.

O’Brien told Yahoo Entertainment that this man was truly broken by the news. “They had to tell this little girl’s family that she wasn’t going to be in the movie, and her father had a nervous breakdown,” she said. “I mean, the whole family was just so distraught. It was a really unfortunate thing that the studio used to do to keep stars in line, and not a nice thing to do to contract players.”

The father was not going to take this lying down, and he blamed O’Brien. He started to think about revenge — and a deadly scheme began to take shape in his mind. If his daughter couldn’t have the role, no one would. He crept up into the lighting rigging, where he could operate unseen, hidden from view.

The lighting engineer was perched high above the unsuspecting O’Brien. And he held a wrench — the ideal tool to loosen a bolt that kept the lights in place. If unfastened, the heavy light would crash down through the rigging and hit the young actress. The collision between illumination and little girl would, he hoped, be fatal.

Luckily for O’Brien, the man was not the only person up in the rigging. Another member of the crew caught him in the act. The murderous technician was dragged from the set never to return. Meanwhile, O’Brien played out her scene, completely oblivious of her close encounter with death.

Turns out, it would actually be years before O’Brien found out about the incident. She told Yahoo Entertainment, “I didn’t know about it until I was older. They didn’t want to tell me about it as a little girl.” Although strangely, in 2011 O’Brien’s memory was rather different, as she told the New York Post, “He dropped a huge light that almost landed on me and my stand-in!”

Whatever the exact truth of the story is, O’Brien survived the incident without coming to any harm. So she was able to enjoy a career that saw her recognized with stars on the Walk of Fame for both her film and TV work. And she avoided much of the excess of Hollywood, with her parents tucking away most of her earnings in a trust fund that she couldn’t touch before she turned 40.

Although O’Brien might still be best known for Meet Me In St. Louis, you can still catch her in a role here or there as she continues to work. Her latest movie, the romance Love Is In Bel Air is scheduled for a December 2021 release. It’s just lucky this Hollywood star survived the murderous rage of a jealous showbiz parent.