Louis Roney: Friends & Acquaintances

• A Liberal Pal: A guy I’ve known for many years since we met in New

York where he married someone I knew, now lives in a Western watering-hole where land that used to cost a few bucks an acre now probably fetches a million or more. In dusty baronial splendor he manages to preserve a cherished air of arrogance.

He is one of those, to me, inexplicable people: a very rich, very left-wing political animal. He went to a great university and being an only child has probably never had to worry about a penny in his life. He topped off his credentials with a fancy business degree: ergo his sophisticated educational persona is complete.

His wife is a product of the Midwest, worked as an artist in New York, and now is transplanted as a member of the “artsy” not-so-wild West. This couple and I have, along the way, run into each other in New York, Winter Park, Paris, London, Austria, Holland, New Mexico and Massachusetts.

They are dear and worthy people, despite their unfortunate differences from me, and may take it as a personal insult that I don’t think politically as they do.

Frankly, I have never given a damn about any of my friends’ politics, and can’t tell you what most of them espouse. Therefore, I cannot understand how my friend gets his feathers so ruffled by my being a conservative, while he is a liberal and votes for that strange assortment of misfits which that breed frequently engenders.

I knew some guys of his background while at Harvard, and they were all as left-wing as they were rich.

Churchill was always an exceptional hero of mine because he was born in a castle, and yet maintained the common touch while he was saving conservatism and the Western world. Perhaps his American mother, Jenny Jerome, from New York and Jerome, Arizona, never let Winston forget he was half American.

My friends and I, who knew each other well in New York, ended up, after multitudinous travels, with their southwest posh-spot — and I, with my Winter Park digs.

It occurs to me that a busy life includes much moving about and usually many occasional meetings, either planned or coincidental.

Anyway, at the end of the line is the last trip, where we do not know when we shall meet again, or how…

• Rooney & Roney: Mickey Rooney was a perky little guy when I chatted with him, and I noticed right off that he was polite, a bit high-handed, and quite “pushy.” Mickey told me backstage at Orlando’s Bob Carr Auditorium that he was four months older than I am. He sat down at a grand piano at the edge of the stage and said, “So you’re a singer — so sing.” He was very much at home with his hands on the keyboard, and played a bit of a popular song from the ’40s. I sang along and interpolated a high B-flat. “Ya’ got it all right,” he said. A cameraman clicked Mickey and me at the piano and I have that photo on my office wall.

Mickey said that Elizabeth Taylor even as a small child was “as beautiful as they come.” If Elizabeth was 79 as her death notices proclaimed, she was 11 younger than I, and I remember her in the movies as being older than that. Well, no matter — movie stars are “make-believe people,” even in death.

Mickey also recounted his long friendship with Judy Garland, a highly talented young girl whose mature years brought her much unhappiness. In 1942, at 22, Mickey married Ava Gardner in a marriage that fell apart in a few months. He married seven more times, and the last one has endured for more than 30 years. He said to me, “If at first you don’t succeed, marry, marry, marry again!”

About Roney: Harvard’42—Distinguished Prof, Em.—UCF 2004 Fla. Alliance for the Arts award (Assisted by beautiful wife Joy Roney)