Mickey Rooney was often teased both about his diminutive size and his multiple marriages. ("His favorite exercise," Phyllis Diller once declared, "is climbing tall people.") Among the headlines inspired by one wedding? "Half Pint Takes a Fifth!"

[Rooney once described his honeymoon with Ava Gardner as "sex and golf and sex and golf." She later left him, explaining that "I'm goddamn tired of living with a midget." "Yeah," Rooney once told Carolyn Jones, "I put shoes on them, and they walk away from me."]