The Greatest Love in Micky’s Life!!!… His Very Groovy Grandmother
Micky is so super-masculine, so groovy and cool it’s hard to imagine him as a baby. Like did you know he was on the plump side as a child—or that one of his pastimes was knitting?
Today of course he’s got hundred of friends and millions of admirers, but the people who are really dear to him, so close they know what he’s thinking without his saying it, can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. And the person who figures right on top of that list is… his Grandmother!
Micky calls her Mamoo. Seems he got all mixed up when he was just learning to talk with the words Mama, Mother and Grandmother… so now everybody calls her Mamoo—we even did.
All Micky did was rave about her, so we took ourselves up to Los Gatos, where she lives very close to the Dolenz home, to see just who this swinging lady is. The minute we met her we found out one of the big reasons Micky is as great as he is! She may be a grandmother but she thinks as young as any teenager. She’s so full of life you end up panting just trying to keep up. And of course the big loves in her life are Coco and Micky, and she can’t stop talking about them.
Sitting with her a whole afternoon we got the real low-down on Micky. Here’s a little of the groovy talk we had that afternoon.
“When Micky was a little boy he was rather on the chubby side, never fat but just round and cuddly. He was an easy child to feed, liked most foods, and was very active so he soon lost his chubby look.”
From the beginning Micky was inseparable from Mamoo. “I appointed myself as Micky’s sole babysitter. I couldn’t imagine anyone else handling my first grandson. He was well on his way before I agreed that anyone else could sit with him.
“As he grew older he was really a challenge. He picked up poems and songs we would sing or say to him. When he was three years old he could say poems the length of ‘The Night Before Christmas’ with no trouble at all. Songs were easy to teach him. By the time he was six and on until the present he loved writing songs and poetry, and when he thought he had perfected them he would come in and announce he had finished. No one dared not to stop whatever they happened to be doing to listen to the new song. He was always encouraged to do this. He would take picture books and read his own story. It was amazing how he could weave his own story around a picture.
Great determination Permalink
“Micky never could understand why anything he wanted to do could not be done, and it wasn’t easy to explain why. He showed great determination in exerting every effort to accomplish a seemingly impossible task—such as counting the grains of sand in his sandbox. He tried and tried and finally gave it up with ‘I still say it can be done.’ There were no boring hours for Micky, or anyone around him. He could create things to do faster than we could think.
“As the years went by Micky and I became closer. He was with me a great deal of the time, and wanted to help me do whatever I was doing—even knitting. I taught him to knit when he was very little. Of course it was simple, knit and purl, and he tired of that very quickly.
“He wanted to be outside. He was so energetic. Something new every minute. If there was anything new or exciting he always asked if Mamoo had one. No matter whether it was a famous painting, a new coffee urn or whatever. If it was a picture, then he would say, ‘I’ll paint her one.’
Coco arrives Permalink
“Micky was truly the king of all he surveyed around our homes until Coco came into the picture. Micky’s reaction to this happy event was that she belonged to him. She was his baby. He was very happy about the whole thing. Of course things got a little out of hand when he insisted on giving her the bottle. He’d say, ‘She’s my baby, so I have to feed her.’ But he soon turned from the nursery to his yard.
“Micky was never punished by me. Only if he insisted on playing with a mirror and a hammer together, then I’d put him in a chair and make him sit there until I told him he could get down. Or I would refuse to go outside and play with him. This was his worst punishment for I always played games with him.
“When he became ‘Circus Boy’ I was busy taking care of Coco. He was excited about the show. Micky has never lost interest in doing a good job, like he’d never seem to tire of signing autographs. Of course he felt proud that no matter where he went he was reminded by people that he was ‘Corky’, but he always found time to play with his neighborhood friends.
Good in school Permalink
“Micky always did well in school and was very conscientious about his homework. I remember one night he was writing a theme paper and sat up until three in the morning typing it. I read it and thought it was super. His teacher thought it was too, but crushed Micky with the statement, ‘I don’t believe you wrote it.’
“He always made excellent grades—until he got his first car. For a while then his grades fell off, but he soon got back into the studying bit. He loved literature, history and science.
“As they grew up, Micky and Coco were more or less pals. They had their battles of course, but most of the time since ‘Circus Boy’ they have been very close… writing, singing, recording songs. They had their own tape recorder and loved doing songs together.
“Then both began to like this girl or that boy. They were growing up. Micky always took a girl seriously. A break would completely floor him, for awhile. But the world is full of girls and he would be all hung up on another love almost immediately.
“Sundays were always big days in the life of Micky. Usually he attended church with the family, but he romped, visited friends, or had friends over or had time to work on whatever project he was doing at the time. He worked wonders with erector sets and each set was bigger and bigger. His projects in building things were accomplishments that were worth seeing… architecture was a natural with him!”
Today Mamoo is absolutely delighted with her Grandson, the Monkee, and is the show’s biggest booster. But then she always had a secret idea that the little boy who played games with her in the back yard would one day grow up to be a very important person.
