by Peter Tonguette
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When did the world stop loving Andy Hardy? The character, introduced by playwright Aurania Rouverol in the 1928 play
Skidding and played by Mickey Rooney in a series of 16 widely popular films, was once the personification of the American adolescent male: high-spirited and altogether wholesome.
Maybe the world moved on from Hardy at about the same time that it stopped respecting Rooney himself. The actor, who would have turned 100 last September, died in 2014, but long before then, he had become an object of befuddled amusement among the cognoscenti — the punch line to jokes he didn’t get. Much of the humor sprang from contemporary audiences’ incredulity that this short, thickset, hair-challenged old man could have ever been a movie star. In the 1980s,