Scandals and rivalries

Why Ava Gardner and Mickey Rooney Divorced: Gambling, Womanizing & a $25,000 Settlement

Gardner cited mental cruelty in 1943, blamed Rooney's gambling and womanizing only in private, and settled for $25,000 while his Andy Hardy image stayed intact.

Photo: DoctorMacro.com

Why Did Ava Gardner’s Marriage to Mickey Rooney End?

Ava Gardner ended her marriage to Mickey Rooney in 1943. The stated ground was mental cruelty, and her private complaint was his gambling and womanizing. She left his clean-cut Andy Hardy image undamaged, and a Heritage Auctions listing says she covered her own fees and took a $25,000 settlement. They had married on January 10, 1942.

Quick facts

Wedding: January 10, 1942, in Ballard, California
Divorce: 1943
Plaintiff: Ava Gardner
Defendant: Mickey Rooney
Grounds in the papers: “grievous mental suffering” and “extreme mental cruelty”
Private complaint: his gambling and womanizing
Settlement: $25,000, per Heritage Auctions
Studio: MGM, headed by Louis B. Mayer

Courtship at MGM

Gardner left for California in 1941, at 18, with a studio contract. Her mother insisted that her oldest sister go along as chaperone, according to Bryan Mims, writing in Our State magazine in 2014. Mims says Gardner had only bit parts at first, and that the studio’s people coached her and tried to train away her Carolina accent. Rooney was the top box-office attraction from 1939 to 1941.

Time put Rooney on its cover in 1940, and its story called his name a frequent “synonym for brat.” Mims describes a man with a reputation for sexual exploits who asked Gardner out over and over, although he was not her type. She finally agreed, likely from exhaustion in Mims’s reading. A huge diamond ring came next, and then the wedding.

The sources differ on small details. The Heritage listing says Gardner was 19 and Rooney 22 when they married, while Mims calls him a 21-year-old during the courtship. Mims gives his height as 5 feet 2 inches, and his 1942 draft registration recorded 5 feet 1 inch.

The Ballard Wedding

The couple married in the remote town of Ballard, California. The location reflected the worry of Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, that fans would desert the Andy Hardy series if they learned its star had a wife. Rooney had played Andy since 1937, and author Barry Monush says MGM wanted those films to appeal to every member of a family.

Mayer also lectured Rooney about his conduct. Historian Jane Ellen Wayne describes him grabbing the young actor by the lapels and telling him, “Just don’t do it in public.” In her account Mayer finished with “You’re a symbol!” and Rooney answered, “I’ll be good, Mr. Mayer.” The passage gives no date and does not mention Gardner.

Wayne also wrote Ava’s Men, subtitled The Private Life of Ava Gardner. Fifty years on, Rooney decided that such clashes had been needed for him to become a leading star. “Everybody butted heads with him,” he said of Mayer.

Gambling and Womanizing

Gardner’s private explanation came down to those two habits. The accounts name the complaints but describe no single incident from the marriage. Rooney’s wider record does touch on both. Behind the scenes, he is said to have acted like the “hyperactive girl-crazy teenager” he played on screen. His co-star Wallace Beery called him a “brat” as well as a “fine actor.”

His gambling is recorded mostly in later terms. It was a longtime habit that made him gamble away his fortune again and again. Debts and multiple divorces forced him to file for bankruptcy in 1962, although he had earned $12 million by that point. He declared bankruptcy a second time in 1996.

The 1943 Papers

Heritage Auctions sold a three-page set of the divorce papers on April 15, 2007, as lot 22009, from the Ava Gardner Estate. The listing describes the set as unsigned and names Gardner as plaintiff and Rooney as defendant. It gives the grounds as “grievous mental suffering” and “extreme mental cruelty,” and it puts the settlement at $25,000. It grades the documents Very Fine, with mild wear, some tanning and a heavy horizontal fold crease.

The listing says the couple stayed together a little over a year before separating. Mims counts “17 maddening months” from the marriage to the divorce. The listing is also inconsistent about its date. It calls the papers undated, then says they are dated May 21, 1943, and that Gardner’s mother died that same day.

Mims writes that her mother had misgivings when MGM first called Gardner to New York for a screen test. Both spouses had screen work in 1943. Gardner received her first screen billing that year in Ghosts on the Loose, after a walk-on in We Were Dancing (1942) and 15 bit parts. Rooney earned an Oscar nomination for The Human Comedy (1943), whose director, Clarence Brown, called him “the closest thing to a genius” he had worked with.

After the Divorce

Rooney’s screen image as the judge’s clean-cut son survived. The Andy Hardy films ran through 1946, with a final picture in 1958. He was inducted into the Army in June 1944 and served more than 21 months, earning a Bronze Star for entertaining troops in combat zones. His career declined once he returned to civilian life, since he could no longer play a teenager.

Gardner’s second marriage, to bandleader Artie Shaw, lasted from 1945 to 1946. Mims notes that she was wife No. 5 of his 8. She and Lana Turner both later described Shaw as extremely emotionally abusive. In 1946 came The Killers, which Mims calls her breakthrough movie.

Film Daily’s review, reprinted in Canadian Film Weekly on September 25, 1946, called the picture an “ACE DRAMA” and listed Gardner among its “important principals.” Her third marriage, to Frank Sinatra, ran from 1951 to 1957. Mary Edna Grantham, her niece in Smithfield, told Mims about “all this ugly talk and chat” that reached home. “She didn’t learn that around here,” Grantham said.

Later Years and the Record

Gardner moved to London in 1966 and had an elective hysterectomy, worried about the uterine cancer that had killed her mother. She died on January 25, 1990, at 67. Her autobiography, Ava: My Story, appeared eight months later. In her last years she had asked Peter Evans to ghostwrite her memoir, saying she would otherwise have to “sell the jewels.”

Evans left that project, and his notes and draft sections were published after his death. Mims describes the result, Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations, as a collection of her verbatim reminiscences. Two other books address the marriages by their publishers’ accounts. The publisher of Ava: A Life in Movies, by Kendra Bean and Anthony Uzarowski, says it offers new light on them. Greenwood says Karin J. Fowler’s bio-bibliography highlights all three.

Rooney described himself as “broke” in 2005, and his personal property was valued at only $18,000 when he died in 2014. The divorce papers, from Gardner’s estate, had gone to auction in 2007. In 2014, Mims reported that the Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield drew some 12,000 visitors a year. Its 18-minute documentary includes reflections from Rooney himself.

The papers record how the marriage ended. How it started is the subject of Why Ava Gardner married Mickey Rooney, which settles why she went ahead when MGM wanted them apart.

Quick answers

Where did Ava Gardner live in london?

Ava Gardner lived at 34 Ennismore Gardens in Knightsbridge, London, which was her final residence. She moved there from Madrid in 1966. Bryan Mims of Our State says she went to London to escape media gossip and glare.

How did Ava Gardner die?

Ava Gardner died of bronchopneumonia on January 25, 1990, in Westminster, London, at age 67. She had suffered a stroke in 1986. Our State magazine reports emphysema and two strokes that year, and says the strokes left her paralyzed and bedridden.

Where did Mickey Rooney live?

Mickey Rooney lived as a small child in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where he was born in 1920. His parents separated in 1924, and he and his mother moved to Hollywood the following year.