Vaudevillian Julia Rooney; Dubbed ‘Princess of Hoofers’

Julia Rooney Clinton, the vaudeville singer and dancer once dubbed the “princess of hoofers,” has died of complications of old age. She was 102.

Miss Rooney died last Saturday at St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank.

“You only had 12 minutes, and when you got out there, if you didn’t grab your audience right now, you didn’t get them,” she reminisced about vaudeville in a 1983 Times interview.

“We got them,” she said, “because the minute we hit the stage, we were fun, we were fun.”

The last of her show-business family, Miss Rooney was the daughter of singer and dancer Pat Rooney Sr. and his ballerina wife. Julia’s three older siblings, Mattie, Pat Jr. and Josie, also became singers and dancers, performing from the age of five.

Miss Rooney made her formal debut in an 1895 stock production of “Rip Van Winkle,” and played her first vaudeville date in 1902 at Keith’s Union Square in New York.

By 1904 she was on the road in Ziegfeld’s production of “Mam’selle Napoleon,” which played at Los Angeles’ Mason Opera House.

A year later, she and her sister Josie portrayed Hansel and Gretel at Hammerstein’s Victoria in New York, the top vaudeville house. Will Rogers was also on the bill.

After standing in as a rider of the horse Rogers roped, Miss Rooney was invited to see him perform in Newark and took partial credit for prompting Rogers, who became known for his folksy monologues, to speak onstage. With her seated in the box nearest the stage, Rogers flubbed one of his rope tricks, and commented, “Shucks, I can’t do a durn thing when my girl’s in the box.” The audience laughed, and Miss Rooney encouraged him to talk to all his audiences.

To get Josie away from a divorced admirer named Al Jolson, the girls’ parents sent them on a European tour in 1908.

The sisters also toured the United States on the Orpheum circuit, dancing and singing from Sioux City to Spokane and Los Angeles to New Orleans.

Courted by counts on other European tours, Miss Rooney married Walter Clinton, a singer, at Butterfield’s Majestic Theater in Flint, Mich., on Christmas Day, 1915. Backed by a 10-piece band, the young couple performed together for several years as Clinton and Rooney.

“Vaudeville didn’t die,” Miss Rooney said. “They took our theaters away from us.”

The Clintons moved to Hollywood in 1930 and both worked in movies. Miss Rooney, who operated a dancing school on Hollywood Boulevard, returned to the stage in 1942 in “Ken Murray’s Blackouts,” which ran for eight years.

Clinton died in 1966, shortly after the couple’s 50th wedding anniversary. Miss Rooney had no survivors.