It’s showtime!

Even when he’s seated, Mickey Rooney looks small, somehow even child-sized. Dressed in a striped cotton jersey and a pair of beige slacks, he was waiting patiently for a visitor scheduled to arrive just an hour before the evening’s performance.
Rooney had arrived early, precisely how early never became clear. At any rate, his wife and performing partner, Jan Chamberlin Rooney, was sitting at her dressing table in the next room, having eye shadow administered by a friendly, relaxed-seeming makeup man.
Jan Rooney doesn’t come on until the second act of “Let’s Put on a Show!”, the venture she and her husband are doing at the Irish Rep, which means the makeup was being applied a full two hours before she’d be under the stage lights, but she wanted things to be right.
If anyone still working in show business has a valid claim to the appellation “living legend,” it’s Mickey Rooney, who’s been facing audiences since he was a year old and he more or less crawled into his family’s vaudeville act.
Give or take a year, that crawl took place some 83 years ago, since the diminutive actor, born on Sept. 23, 1920, the son of the Scotsman, Joe Yule, will turn 84 just 11 days after he and his wife wind up their run at the Irish Rep.
There is, or seems to be, a quality of unselfconscious calm about the Rooneys, a naturalness.
Jan Chamberlin, who was a singer long before she met her husband, is Mickey Rooney’s eighth wife, a detail the couple doesn’t shy away from during their act, a wise choice, since they know only too well that one of things for which the beloved actor is known by the public is his tendency to enter into matrimonial situations.
Indeed, one of the warmest moments in “Let’s Put on a Show!” occurs when Rooney recalls his first wife, the late Ava Gardner, whom he married in 1942, when he was 22 and she just 20 and, technically, underage.
In the course of their show, Rooney and his wife make a point of emphasizing the fact that their relationship has lasted longer than all of the actor’s seven previous alliances put together.
When asked how they’ve managed this feat, in the face of Rooney’s marital track record, Jan said, simply, “I have a high pain threshold,” leaving it up to the questioner to decide whether or not she’s joking. The real answer may lie somewhere in the middle, being half humor and half reality.
Being around the Rooneys, even for half an hour or so, it’s impossible not to come away with the feeling that, despite whatever ups and downs they may have experienced, they genuinely like each other, which is all to the good, considering the fact that, wholly apart from living together, they’ve been working together, year round, since 1998.
Jan, probably somewhere in her late 50s, would have, in another time, been an ideal Lane Bryant customer, being what the old store’s advertising copy termed a “full-figured” woman.
Without giving off any of the signs leading to the impression that she’s a control freak, she clearly has a gift for organization, for keeping facts, dates and statistics comfortably, but very definitely, in order.
It’s a useful quality, since her husband, once in a while, juggles the facts a bit.
For example, when asked when he last played New York, he came up with the answer, “It was ‘Sugar Babies,’ I think.”
He co-starred with the late Ann Miller in that show, marking his Broadway debut, and it provided him with his greatest local success, but the year was 1979.
But the last time Rooney appeared live on a New York stage was in 1997, in a new, rewritten version of “The Wizard of Oz,” one of those cobbled together productions intended to attract families over the Christmas holidays. With the gentle kindness that would appear to be one of her hallmarks, Jan Rooney put her husband’s dates in order, without the slightest sign of annoyance, but with her merest suggestion that adjustments like this are something she does with some regularity.
What the Rooneys mostly do these days is tour. When they finish their gig at the Irish Rep on Sept. 12, they’ll soon be on the road again, accompanied, as always, by their pianist arranger and musical director, Sam Kriger. The bassist and drummer they need to fill out the trio they use are generally acquired along the way.
“Let’s Put on a Show!” has been through a process of evolution over the years, with minor adjustments, such as the substitution of film clips being made as recently as the three preview performances on West 22nd Street.
“We launched his particular version of the show five years ago in Australia, in Sydney,” Jan said.
The engagement at the Irish Rep, five weeks in all, will have been the longest booking the Rooneys have had in a single space, and they’re happy about it, for reasons including the fact that Mickey Rooney was born here.
“I was born in Brooklyn,” he said, “and my father was born in Scotland.” As for the comic’s wife, she was born in Hollywood. “I think I’m one of the few,” she said, “and my mother went to Hollywood High.”
As for Rooney, he could be said to have earned the right to retire and live an easy life, but Rooney isn’t interested.
“I say, ‘Don’t retire,’ ” he said, and his wire chimes in with, “That’s not his nature.”
“We’re in business for the business,” Rooney said. “We love show business.”
“Once in a while,” his wife said, “I’ll be tired, and we’ll take a little down time, but pretty soon, he wants to go, go, go and so we’re off again. When you’ve done years of that, it becomes part of you.”
Like many people, performers and others, there’s the unspoken fear that retirement is the doorway to death. “My dad retired and he was dead in less than two years,” Jan Rooney said.
Some actors can identify a performance, or perhaps a moment, when they think they’ve come closest to attaining their professional goals. Not Rooney. His response has a generalized quality.
“What pleases me most,” he said, “is just being here with my wife, and doing the show. That’s it for me. I love to please the public. That’s what the business is all about, bringing joy to people.”
Rooney estimates that, counting the many shorts he made when he was a child, he’s done something like 350 films. “I think I’ve done more movies than anybody else,” he said. He’s probably right, too.
The Rooneys have been together for 30 years, and married for 28. They met at a party at his agent’s home and what Jan Rooney remembers of her first impression of Mickey comes as a bit of a surprise.
“He was very quiet that day, very introspective,” she said. “But I knew he was a fascinating character, and I’ll never forget the way he played the piano. I was mesmerized.”
Jan reads music, but her husband doesn’t. The meticulousness with which he addresses the keyboard contributed to some of the most memorable moments in “Sugar Babies,” and its evident in “Let’s Put on a Show!” when he plays a bit of jazz with the bassist and the drummer.
Rooney has a kind of despairing attitude about the way movies are made today. “How long do you think it took to make ‘Boys Town?’ ” he asked. “Two weeks. One in Hollywood and one in Omaha. The musicals took four or five weeks.”
When the Rooneys finish at the Irish Rep, they’ll go home, but only briefly, leaving for San Diego for a big AIDS benefit and then to Branson, Mo.”
Branson is a unique place in Southern Missouri, where there is a cluster of theaters and not much else. Most of the theaters feature country and western stars. The Rooneys may seem like something of an anomaly there, but they’re slotted in for six weeks in Branson, after which they’ll be writing a Christmas show.
“Last Christmas we were at the Tropicana in Atlantic City,” Rooney said, “but I don’t know where it’ll be this year. Maybe West Palm Beach, or maybe Atlantic City again.”
It doesn’t seem to matter very much to Jan and Mickey Rooney where in the world they’re booked. The world they inhabit is the world of entertainment, and that’s the way they like it.