Alan Wasser was a young company manager in New York when he got an assignment: Go to San Francisco and manage some new show at the Curran Theater that was headed to Broadway. He was told it was about some old burlesque routines, and it featured a couple of old MGM stars whose fortunes had so declined, they were dangling from the Hollywood Hills by the reels of their old films.
“I thought it would open and close at the Curran,” Wasser says now. “I’d booked a summer house because I never thought the show would come in.”
Wasser had to return the deposit on the summer house, because the show did come in, triumphantly. It was called “Sugar Babies,” and it starred those old MGM stars: Ann Miller and Mickey Rooney.
Miller died in 2004; Rooney this week, at age 93.
For Rooney, it was a comeback. Married eight times, the money squandered on divorces and the racetrack, he was singing old songs from MGM movies at a broken-down club in Chicago when a producer from New York named Harry Rigby came to see him. In 1979, Rigby cast him in “Sugar Babies,” and Rooney and the show became a sensation. It ran three years on Broadway, and another four on the road.
“When he went on vacation, we couldn’t sell a ticket,” recalls producer Terry Allen Kramer. “Everybody wanted to see him.”
His audience had, of course, grown up with him. Those “Andy Hardy” movies with Judy Garland helped make him a Hollywood legend. But then Hollywood shifted. There was no room for an old song-and-dance man in the era of “The Godfather,” “The Conversation” and “Taxi Driver.”
“Sugar Babies” was such a big hit, Rooney demanded more and more money. At its height in 1981, he was making $70,000 a week, a princely sum. Kramer asked her investment banker father, Charles Allen, to open an account for him. Charles told Mickey: “You will live on the interest, but not on the principal.”
A few days later, Rooney called and said, “I want the principal.” He got it and bet it on the track. It was gone by the end of the day.
“My father closed his account,” Kramer says.
But she did have fun producing “Sugar Babies,” starring Mickey Rooney.