Mickey Rooney

 Mickey Rooney would remember Louis B. Mayer as a visionary who wanted to use his studio to produce movies that would change if not the world then at least America by presenting an idealized image of how things could be. And there was no better example of this than "A Family Affair," the 1937 film in which Rooney first played Andy Hardy, the teenage son of a judge in bucolic small town America. "A Family Affair" was a modest success nationwide, but theater owners in real small towns reported their patrons were clamoring for more stories about the Hardy clan. So MGM obliged, making 14 more Andy Hardy movies over the next decade.

Judy Garland was not the love that Mickey’s Andy Hardy would find. In "Love Finds Andy Hardy" (1938), as in most of the films they’d make together over the next five years, Judy would play Mickey’s pal, the smart, level-headed friend who might take him down a peg when he needed it but would also serve as a sounding board to help him figure out his problems with girls he was actually attracted to. In this film, Judy’s Betsy pines for Mickey’s Andy, who can’t even see her. She actually tries to bribe him into not taking out Lana Turner, playing a teen so sophisticated she wears a skirt suit to the soda shop.

Garland would throughout her life fall for men who brought talent out of her, who spotted it and helped her figure out how to be the best that she could be, and this, maybe more than any of the things they had in common, might explain why Garland developed a desperate crush on Rooney. On their first Andy Hardy film together, Mickey gave Judy the most important acting advice she’d ever receive. Before their first scene together, he pulled her aside and took her hands, and said, “Honey, you gotta believe this, now. Make like you’re singing it.” And with that, Judy immediately got how to transfer her natural talent for animating the emotion of a song into animating dialogue—even the stupid dialogue that pervaded many of her and Rooney’s movies together.

But also, it wasn’t a stretch for her to feel these feelings: the troubles Judy’s characters had to deal with in these movies plagued the actress off screen as well. Her love for Rooney was unrequited: Just like Andy Hardy, he saw Judy as his soul mate but couldn’t see her as a romantic or sexual prospect.

And to add insult to injury, Rooney saw pretty much every other woman in town as a sexual prospect, including Norma Shearer, who was 20 years older than Rooney, and Judy’s co-star in "Love Finds Andy Hardy," Lana Turner. To hear Mickey tell it, it was a simple question of him providing the supply to meet the demand: “I began to meet my obligations to a good many of the gals in town who were dying to meet me. Who wouldn’t want to go out with me? I had my own car. I had some nickels in my pocket. And I was somebody.”

By 1939, the Andy Hardy movies were responsible for nearly half of MGM’s yearly profits. That year, Judy appeared with Rooney in the massive hit "Babes in Arms," as well as starring in a little movie called "The Wizard of Oz." "The Wizard of Oz" was a hit in 1939, but it wasn’t what it would become—it didn’t change the world, and it didn’t give Garland any power. With one of the greatest Hollywood films of all time on her résumé, Judy still had to show up at the studio every day, usually to play a scrappy kid in movies about putting on shows in barns. There was no time to enjoy the spoils of increased fame. She and Rooney were sent on promotional tours that would have them doing 34 live shows a week, with no days off, as the opening act to screenings of "The Wizard of Oz." For her efforts, Judy received a special honorary juvenile Oscar that year—and Mickey was the one who presented it.