Hey, Gang, Let’s Put On a Show! : LIFE IS TOO SHORT <i> By Mickey Rooney (Villard Books: $22.50; 384 pp.)</i>

When he pops on screen or bounces on stage, and it’s hard to imagine him anywhere else, you can almost hear an announcer’s voice: “And here he is, the one, the only, MICKEY ROONEY!” He first appeared in vaudeville at age 17 months, and now, in his early 70s, he says, “When I open a refrigerator door and the light goes on, I want to perform.”

The highs of his life are a part of our culture: the Andy Hardy movies, “Boys Town” and the back-yard musicals with Judy Garland. The lows have been pretty awful: hitting the bottle and the skids, a murdered wife, and a period of penury when he rented himself out to suburban cocktail parties for $500 a shot.

He was born Joe Yule Jr. in 1920 in Brooklyn. His parents were a vaudeville comic and a showgirl. Joe Sr. didn’t stay around long, and Mickey and his mother headed West, staying for a while in Kansas City, making their way to California. They had a car, but no money for lodging. If you have any doubt that Mickey Rooney started out in a country that had a different set of rules, think about a young mother and son traveling West, spending their nights on the grass by the side of the road.

In a few years, he was in pictures, specializing in midgets--at least once with a cigar, making a pass at Colleen Moore. “Gee, baby,” ran Mickey’s title card, “you’d look great in an ermine coat.” He was 6. The faux-midget work led to the Mickey McGuire shorts, silents, then talkies, in which he played a tough little rascal getting in and out of tight spots.

At 15, already a veteran of 28 features, he played Puck in Max Reinhardt’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Warner Bros. “I’d never read Shakespeare before or since,” Mickey tells us, but that didn’t stop his work from being well received.

From the “quick bright things” of “Dream,” it was on to MGM and the fictional town of Carvel, home to Judge Hardy and his son Andrew, who seemed always to be bumbling through a financial or romantic jam. By today’s standards, Andy Hardy was an appallingly enthusiastic young man who wore his id on his sleeve. Andy seemed so relentlessly positive that if he had fallen in manure, I think he would have turned to Ann Rutherford and said, “Look Polly. We’re in horse country!”

Andy Hardy’s teen-age years were one kind of fantasy on screen, that of small-town America with its (supposed) values of loyalty and decency. Mickey Rooney’s own adolescence was something else again. As a teen-ager he had a love affair (one of many, many) with Norma Shearer, then the widow Thalberg and the 40-ish queen of Metro. Her dressing room was decorated in the style of Marie Antoinette, her most famous role. According to Mickey, he would turn up there every afternoon, so the lady might make love to him in the French manner.

Is it true? Is any of it true? Mickey’s not always great on details, and his talent is to amuse, not to inspire confidence in his scholarship, so it’s difficult to know. Ms. Shearer is of course dead. But Gavin Lambert, her biographer, documents the affair and confirms that it was Louis B. Mayer who broke it up. It’s hard not to picture the whole business as Andy Hardy meets Marie Antoinette in an absurdist comedy called, perhaps, “When Archetypes Collide.”

In 1939, the year generally regarded as Hollywood’s greatest, Mickey, age 19, made five pictures at MGM, the grandest of the studios: “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and four Andy Hardys. He was Metro’s leading money earner. It is an astonishing commercial achievement, and there is nothing else quite like it in the annals of Hollywood.

What was his charm? He was prodigiously talented--a singing, dancing, drumming little fool full of brash humor and pugnacious wit. No less than James Agee called him “magical.” He was the apotheosis of likability, which in studio-think, then and now (today the term is “sympathetic”), meant that he could sell tickets even if the pictures weren’t great. Likability uber alles, runs the conventional wisdom, and little Joe Yule Jr. a.k.a. Mickey McGuire a.k.a. Mickey Rooney was the king of it.

Mickey married eight times, first and most famously to Ava Gardner. They were young and glamorous, and it didn’t last. A relationship with more staying power than his marriages began at MGM when, in “Love Finds Andy Hardy,” an insecure young girl arrived in Carvel. She was a little plump, a little plain, but could she sing! Judy Garland appeared in three of the Hardy pictures, and then she and Mickey made the famous Busby Berkeley backyard musicals: “Babes in Arms,” “Strike Up the Band” and “Babes on Broadway,” the pictures in which Mickey and Judy were always putting on a show.

The two of them toured the country together promoting the movies. They were often mobbed, always adored. Those musicals had such a fabulous sense of optimism that they read as a reflection of what the country wanted itself to be. The Depression was ending, the war still in the future. Who better than Mickey and Judy to march us all into a giddy sense of American possibility.

Mickey was in the Special Services during the war, performing on the back of a Jeep, entertaining the troops. And when Mickey and his Jeep come upon a Nazi tank, you fully expect him to jump up and sing and dance until the enemy cries Onkel. After the war, for the next 30 years, Mickey’s life was a long slide of bad women, bad advice and bad karma. He spent too much time and money at the track, and wife No. 5, Barbara Ann Thomason, was killed in a murder-suicide with her lover. But nothing keeps Mickey down for long. Something always seems to turn up.

In the mid-’60s, while he was in a casino coffee shop in Lake Tahoe, where he was performing, a busboy with golden ringlets whispered in his ear, “Mr. Rooney, Jesus Christ loves you very much.” When no such busboy could be located, Mickey declared it a visitation from an angel. It was the occasion of Mickey Rooney’s conversion. Although his faith has been misplaced occasionally since that day, it has always returned, and he feels it has given him a solidity that had been absent.

In recent years, after soldiering on the dinner-theater circuit in a comedy called “Three Goats and a Blanket,” he once again found popular success, on Broadway and in the touring company of the vaudeville review “Sugar Babies.”

It would be nice to report that Mickey tells his story with grace and insight. But he doesn’t. The book is full of gossip about those who are beyond the arm of argument or legal retribution--the dead. There are enough numbers in these pages to please an accountant. Mickey loves to tell us how little he earned, and how much profit the studio made. If his life reads like a musical, or one of his old melodramas, the story itself is compelling and Mickey good-natured enough to keep one reading despite the doubtful and often self-serving anecdotes.

His performances these days are usually pretty good, notably “The Black Stallion” and the TV drama, “Bill,” although you do keep expecting him to burst into one of his gosh-and-golly routines. When he was at the top, the highs were so high that I guess he just had to tumble a bit. In fact, he fell very far.

He’s struggled hard to accept himself and to embrace what happiness has come his way. In his occasional moments of introspection, he realizes that Judy Garland seems to have had a greater influence on him than did any of his wives. He says they were never lovers. He’s hard to credit in many areas, but in this situation I’m inclined to take him at his word. Judy Garland is certainly the most vivid presence in his memory.

Maybe he should have just skipped the others, married Judy and grown up to be Liza’s dad.