Conan O’Brien recalls Mickey Rooney hanging ‘like a chimpanzee’

You might not remember how crazy Conan O’Brien’s early talk shows were — but O’Brien certainly does.

The former late-night host recalled “Mickey Rooney being on a test show” in the “dysfunctional and insane” early days of Late Night with Conan O’Brien, he shared In a recent conversation with The Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart on his Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast.

“Dear God,” Stewart replied, “did he know he was on a test show?”

O’Brien continued to remember “talking to Mickey Rooney outside that 30 Rock hallway. I’m nobody, and he is hanging from a garment rack, his feet dangling from a garment rack like a chimpanzee, and he’s in his white T-shirt and he’s like, ‘Conan, I used to have a full head of hair, but [Warner Bros. studio founder] Harry Warner made me use this shampoo and I lost it all!’ And I thought, This is an amazing job I have. This is an incredible job. He blamed his hair loss on Harry Warner in 1941, making him use a kind of shampoo.”

Stewart joked that “more impressive is a 91-year-old man with that agility.” O’Brien added, “He was flipping around doing full 360s!”

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Rooney appeared on Late Night at least twice, first in November 1994 alongside baseball legend Pete Rose (who died on Monday) and The Lemonheads’ Evan Dando, and again in June 1996 alongside Vanessa Marcil and the hip-hop group Delinquent Habits.

O’Brien’s official YouTube channel still hosts a clip of Rooney’s interview on the latter episode. Andy Hardy himself appeared as dapper as ever in a brown suit with matching pocket square, and discussed his short-lived sitcom One of the Boys, co-starring Nathan Lane, Meg Ryan, and Dana Carvey. “It lasted I think about four or five minutes,” he joked.

In typically refined-yet-ribald fashion, Rooney also joked about rumors then circulating about the marquee man of the moment, Richard Gere. It isn’t just any entertainer than can render a seasoned host like O’Brien completely speechless, but on two separate occasions, Rooney did just that.

Carvey recalled his own wild Rooney memories on a 2023 episode of his Fly on the Wall podcast. “‘I was the No. 1 star in the world. You hear me? Bang. The world.’ That’s what he said every day, every 45 minutes, down the hallway, ‘No. 1 star,'” he remembered from the One of the Boys set.

Rooney’s Hollywood career lasted over eight decades. He was ushered into show business by his vaudevillian parents at only 18 months old. He starred opposite Judy Garland in 14 Andy Hardy films, found success on stage and the small screen, had eight marriages, and even received an Oscar nomination for 1979’sThe Black Stallion. He died 2014 at the age of 93.