When did the world stop loving Andy Hardy? The character, introduced by playwright Aurania Rouverol in the 1928 play Skidding and played by Mickey Rooney in a series of 16 widely popular films, was once the personification of the American adolescent male: high-spirited and altogether wholesome.
Maybe the world moved on from Hardy at about the same time that it stopped respecting Rooney himself. The actor, who would have turned 100 last September, died in 2014, but long before then, he had become an object of befuddled amusement among the cognoscenti — the punch line to jokes he didn’t get. Much of the humor sprang from contemporary audiences’ incredulity that this short, thickset, hair-challenged old man could have ever been a movie star. In the 1980s, Saturday Night Live’s Dana Carvey adopted Rooney’s husky, breathless tone as he impersonated the actor insisting, improbably to our modern ears, “I was the No. 1 star in the world!”
Even the Academy Awards, which honored Rooney with an Academy Juvenile Award in 1938 and nominated him for four competitive Oscars, did not provide a safe haven for the aging thespian. During the 2003 ceremony, host Steve Martin gently lampooned Rooney’s age, saying, “At one point, Mickey Rooney was the biggest star in all the 38 states.” Hardy, har, har — 38 states.
But the record demonstrates that Rooney’s stardom was legitimate. Decades before anyone knew who Martin was, an earlier incarnation of Rooney, still diminutive and always rather stocky, but then in possession of a winning on-screen disposition and a full head of hair, was beloved coast to coast in each of our then-48 states.
Rooney, born Ninnian Joseph Yule Jr. in Brooklyn in 1920, earned his show-business stripes early on. His vaudevillian parents tapped him for their act before he had turned 2, and he was still in short pants when he was shipped off to Hollywood. There, Rooney parlayed his earliest comic appearances, under the name Mickey McGuire, into roles in prestige productions, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). By then, his last name was Rooney, and before long, he would answer to Andy Hardy.
During a glorious nine-year stretch from 1937 to 1946, Rooney appeared in the core entrants of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Hardy series, the best of which are perhaps Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938) and Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever (1939). Those 15 films — a 16th, a kind of grown-up epilogue called Andy Hardy Returns Home, was released in 1958 — were embraced in their day for presenting the commonplace middle-class family as a marvel on the order of the lightbulb or the steam engine, one of those rare human inventions that is ingenious in its design and functionality.
Leo Tolstoy’s observation at the start of Anna Karenina that “all happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is most often used to illustrate the wide range of unhappy families, but the first part of the formulation is arguably more accurate: Happy families are indeed uniform because, regardless of their unique parts, they depend on certain consistent elements: a strong but forgiving father, a loving but firm-handed mother, and, ideally, multiple siblings whose differing ages and personalities complement one another. Even the films’ titles suggest the imperishability of the nuclear family: Judge Hardy’s Children (1938), Judge Hardy and Son (1939), and so on.
Of course, the upstanding but unpretentious Hardys were more uniform than most. Residing in material comfort in the small town of Carvel and plagued by few troubles that could not be resolved by a good father-son talk, the core family consisted of Judge and Mrs. Hardy (played, in every film in the main part of the series but the first, by Lewis Stone and Fay Golden) and their two children, Marian (Cecilia Parker) and Andy (Rooney), whose journey from affable adolescent to eager collegian was depicted in not quite real time by the perennially fresh-faced Rooney.
Up to a point, America was happy to see Rooney play their favorite teenager even as the actor was starting to show signs of having advanced well into adulthood. Perhaps that is because the wartime world into which the Hardy films were released was in turmoil: That Carvel and its inhabitants remained largely unchanged amid great upheaval is a sign not of the series’ obsolescence but of the constancy of American values during that era. The films themselves are marvels of solidness and stability, with MGM’s quaint yet sturdy backlot and the cast’s remarkably subtle performances anchoring these mild, unpretentious entertainments about mild, unpretentious people.
It may sound strange to speak of eternal verities in the context of movies that many would consider formulaic, but we feel their presence during certain privileged moments in the series: when Mrs. Hardy admits that she cannot fathom the passage of time from Andy’s infancy to his young adulthood in Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941) or when the firm but fair Judge Hardy graciously suspends a young man’s fine after getting a whiff of a lilac bush in Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever. These are movies in which the whole world is boiled down to living rooms, courtrooms, and the odd soda fountain or swimming pool.
Despite being born in what was then the Russian Empire and raised in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, studio boss Louis B. Mayer considered the Hardy films to be something akin to a spiritual autobiography. “Mayer was recapturing the small-town, provincial world he remembered from Saint John, with [father] Jacob Mayer transformed into a more kindly Lewis Stone, and his sainted mother transformed into warm Fay Holden,” wrote Scott Eyman in his Mayer biography. For his part, Mayer described the movies as cinematic goodwill ambassadors. “They were good and wholesome,” Mayer said. “You can’t imagine how much good they did for America. I saw them in Turkey and Egypt, all over the world.”
But just as the industry could not resist poking fun at Rooney (whose personal life, with eight marriages, was admittedly troubled), some have been unable to resist jabbing the Hardy films themselves, perversely using them to undermine the very values they promote. In 1998, an avant-garde filmmaker produced the execrable Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, in which segments from the films are edited to render them unintelligible or ridiculous.
To be fair, when seen today, few of the 16 films can withstand viewings from start to finish — it is too difficult to get wrapped up in a story meant to be experienced as part of a series — but each contains enough laughs, sentiment, and virtue to remind us that, yes, Mickey Rooney was once the No. 1 star in the world.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
