Liz Taylor had sex with Mickey Rooney at just 14, new book claims
‘His wife found them - all hell broke loose’
ELIZABETH Taylor had a passionate affair with long-time friend and co-star Mickey Rooney when she was just 14 and he was a married man in his 20s, according to an explosive new book.
London-born Taylor was only 12 when she and Rooney – then 24 and married to his second wife, Betty Jane – starred together in National Velvet, the 1944 film which made her a star.
Two years later, the young starlet was caught by Rooney’s pregnant wife engaging in a sex act with her co-star.
The claims are made in The Life And Times Of Mickey Rooney by authors Richard A. Lertzman and William J. Birnes, who interviewed the Hollywood actor shortly before his death last year.
At the time, both were under contract to MGM and working on separate films at the studio. Betty Jane, a back-up singer for Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, immediately filed for divorce.
Pam McClenathan, a friend of Betty Jane, said: ‘She went to visit her husband at the studio one day. When Betty Jane reached his dressing room and opened the door, she found Elizabeth and Mickey together.
‘After that, all hell broke loose. Betty Jane was pregnant with their second son. She got a top attorney and a big settlement, but she was not happy. She wanted a faithful husband.’
A diminutive 5ft 2in, Rooney – who married eight times – was one of Hollywood’s most notorious, yet unlikely, womanisers. It is the first time he has been romantically linked with Taylor, who was also a lifelong friend.
In his memoirs Life Is Too Short, he called his sex appeal ‘a combination of early Neanderthal and late Freud’ and said he ‘charmed’ women into bed with his sense of humour. He bragged about his sexual conquests including Lana Turner and Judy Garland, saying of co-star Turner: ‘Her body said it all. When I asked her to go out with me she said yes and I soon found out she was as oversexed as I was – warm, passionate and soft. You may wonder what she saw in me. I don’t know. I do know that on a dancefloor I could make her breathless.’
Rooney – who is most famous for his 16 Andy Hardy films about a small-town hero and for blockbusters including National Velvet, Babes In Arms and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, was Hollywood’s most successful and highest-paid actor in the early 1940s.
He married starlet Ava Gardner in 1942, but their union lasted less than a year. She would later marry Frank Sinatra.
Taylor, who won Oscars for Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? and BUtterfield 8, and was made a Dame in 2000, died in 2011, aged 79. She was also married eight times, twice to Richard Burton, whom she called ‘the greatest love of my life’.
Rooney died last year, aged 93. Vanity Fair magazine described him as ‘the original Hollywood train wreck’ who struggled with alcohol and pill addictions as well as being a compulsive philanderer. He had nine children and filed for bankruptcy twice.
The new book will be published by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, on October 20.
When asked about the Taylor affair, a representative for the Rooney estate said: ‘I have no knowledge of [the] incident.’