My Mother Dated Mickey Rooney?

The day after my mother's memorial service in June of 2016, I hosted a picnic and invited my family and a few extended folks. There were several reasons for the picnic: to honor my mother one more time, to celebrate my brother's birthday and to give the family an opportunity to go through some of the things my mother had kept in storage.

Image by Teece Aronin

There were photos and dishes and tissue-thin letters, a portrait of me in a little smocked dress and one of each brother taken at the same time as mine, both of them wearing blazers, dress shirts and ties. 

One of us sitting among the piles of pictures held up a framed photo of my father and asked, "Do you mind if I slip the photo out and see if there's anything behind it? You know how people used to do that - slip one picture in on top of another?"

She slid my father's picture out and lo and behold, reposing beneath was a publicity shot of a youngish Mickey Rooney. The room erupted in surprised laughter and those of us of a certain age recalled how, in the golden age of Hollywood, picture frames and wallets were sold holding pictures of popular film stars instead of the fake, paper flower versions of loved ones we see on store shelves today.

Silently I mused how wild it would be if the photo was stashed back there because my mother dated Mickey Rooney before she met my father. How close might I have come to being even shorter than I am? What if my mother, as faithful a mate as any swan, had married Mickey and through no fault of her own found herself Ex-Mrs. Rooney Number Umpty-ump?

What else didn't I know about my mother? Maybe she'd been a studio starlet and met Mickey that way. Maybe she was a cigarette girl at the Biltmore Bowl in Hollywood and caught his eye one night as he wined and dined Ava Gardner. 

I know my mother's past didn't really include Mickey Rooney or even a stint as a cigarette girl at the Biltmore Bowl. She was a kind-hearted, pretty Clarkston girl who met my father before her twenty-first birthday and they were married soon after. And besides, she was allergic to cigarette smoke.   

But for a few minutes, imagining my mother's secret life with Mickey Rooney, I almost forgot how much I miss her.