EVEN BY Beltway standards the entire weekend had been bizarre. The six winners of the 1986 Kennedy Center Awards were treated to brunch at the Jockey Club, where their aggressively genial host was John Coleman, owner of the Ritz-Carlton. That hotel was about to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. At a more formal occasion the six honorees were saluted by a beaming secretary of state. George Schultz made no mention of the just-unearthed Washington scandal—U.S. arms for Iran had been illegally diverted to the contras in Nicaragua. In November, in response to journalistic and popular outcry, President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, Admiral John M. Poindexter, had resigned, and Poindexter’s aide, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, had been fired. Now, in the second week of December, aftershocks still reverberated along the Potomac.
Nevertheless, the President and his staff welcomed the half-dozen honorees to the White House, blithely pointing out the seasonal tinsel and poinsettias as they attempted to chat up their visitors. The atmosphere remained as frosty inside the White House as it was outdoors; small talk was slow and laughter strained. Conditions were not markedly improved by the President’s wife Nancy, who wore a fixed, unconvincing smile as she clutched a handkerchief behind her back for the next hour.
Then, about a third of the way through the presentation ceremony, a noticeable thaw occurred. In the presence of fellow performers Reagan began to relax for the first time in days, and when he did his attitude seemed to put everyone but Nancy at ease. When the President congratulated violinist Yehudi Menuhin for a lifetime of rave reviews—“I know from experience that good notices don’t come too easily”—the relief was palpable. Five others also basked in the Chief’s increasingly warm praise: singer Ray Charles, the veteran Broadway couple Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, English choreographer Antony Tudor, and actress–comedienne–producer–studio executive Lucille Ball. Each was treated with esteem, but somehow Lucy seemed first among equals. Partly this was because, as the centerpiece of the celebrated situation comedy I Love Lucy, she was the most recognizable. Even the formidable Ray Charles, whose records had gone platinum so many times he had lost count, was not so familiar a face.
Partly it was because everyone in the White House audience knew that Lucy’s ex-husband and longtime partner, Desi Arnaz, had died only five days before.
And partly it was because her entrance had topped all the others:
I’m your Vita-veeda-vigee-vat girl. Are you tired, run down, listless? Do you pop out at parties—are you unpoopular? Well, are you? The answer to ALLLLL your problems is in this li’l ole bottle. Vita-meata-vegemin. (She looks pleased with herself for getting it right) Contains vitamins, meat, metagable, and vinerals. With—(She looks at the bottle) Vitameatavegemin you can spoon your way to health. All you do is take one of these full (She holds up the spoon) Vita-meedy-mega-meenie-moe-a-mis . . . after every meal. (She has a lot of difficulty getting the spoon under the neck of the bottle, keeps pouring so that it doesn’t hit the spoon but goes on the table. Finally, she puts the spoon down on the table, takes the bottle with both hands and pours it into the spoon. She puts the bottle down, looks at the spoon to see that it’s full, beams back at the audience, turns back to the table, picks up the bottle, and drinks out of it. As she puts the bottle down, she notices the spoon again, picks it up, and puts it in her mouth. She forgets to take it out. With spoon in her mouth) It tastes like candy. (She takes the spoon out of her mouth. By now, she is leaning, practically sitting on the table) So why don’t you join the thousands of happy, peppy people and get a great big bottle. (She opens her mouth but realizes that she’d better not try it again. Holds up the bottle) This stuff . . .
From the moment the seventy-five-year-old Lucy stepped into the room, she became the embodiment of Jenny Joseph’s poem “Warning,” “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple / With a red hat which doesn’t go.” Dressed in deep purple chiffon and matching shoes, her hair dyed a carrot hue, she stirred her colleagues and dazzled the onlookers.
Lucy’s merry expression lasted until the President spoke. “Others in life have seen to our material needs,” he intoned, “built our roads, constructed our cities, given us our daily bread. But these six are artists, and as such they have performed a different and singular task—to see to the needs of the heart.” By the time he addressed Lucy directly, her mascaraed eyes were wet. “It’s no secret that Nancy and I are friends of Lucy,” he said, “and I think this redheaded bundle may be the finest comedienne ever.”
The words were from the heart. Ronald Reagan and Lucille Ball shared many things, including a birth year, 1911. They had struggled in Hollywood at about the same time, grinding through the B movies that were supposed to lead them picture by picture to the upper level—yet, for one reason or another, never did.
I was queen of the B-pluses. I went from one-liners to these sort of mediocre B-plus pictures. I would do anything, though. I was in the only Tracy-Hepburn flop ever made, and I got good reviews. What you were encouraged to do at the studios was to become a flapper girl, a glamour girl or some type. You were that type of girl belonging to that type of picture. It was very limiting, and I was really stuck. . . .
Later on (much later, in Reagan’s case), they both received a celebrity beyond anything either could possibly have envisioned. The speaker burbled on. President or not, he insisted, he was no different from the common fan: “Like millions of Americans and people around the world, I still love Lucy.” Following the appreciative murmur, he added, “I know Miss Ball would want us to pay tribute to the man who produced I Love Lucy and starred in it with her, the late Desi Arnaz.”
I kept Desi driving up and down the coastline visiting spots I had seen in my seven years in California, from San Francisco to Tijuana, below the Mexican border. I wanted to share every experience with him, the past included. I even took him to Big Bear Mountain, where we had filmed Having Wonderful Time. I was in slacks, shirt and bandanna; Desi was in an open-necked shirt, tanned the color of mahogany. We looked like a couple of tourists. Desi ordered a ham-and-cheese sandwich at Barney’s, the local bar-café, and then disappeared to wash his hands. The waitress looked at me and then at Desi’s retreating back. “Hey,” she said disapprovingly, glancing from my red curls to Desi’s blue-black hair, “is he Indian? Because we’re not allowed to serve liquor to Indians.”
Nobody could picture us as a couple, even a tourist-hardened waitress. . . .
Lucy took a couple of deep breaths. They were not sufficient to keep her emotions in check. Robert Stack, who had starred in The Untouchables, a Desilu production, read a letter from Arnaz, written in his last hours. The signoff elicited little broken cries from the audience: “P.S. ‘I Love Lucy’ was never just a title.” Lucille Ball nodded in private agreement; the tears were flowing more copiously now. She had been married to her second husband, comedian Gary Morton, for six years longer than she had been married to her first. The numbers hardly mattered. Desi had been not only the father of Lucy’s two children, but her business partner, her costar, the cocreator of her image, the cofounder of her wealth and reputation, and, au fond, the object of her obsessive affection. Hardly a day went by when Lucy failed to acknowledge that without Desi she would have been one more actress who never realized her potential, the star that never was.
The day I filed for the divorce, on the grounds of “extreme mental cruelty,” we were filming an hour show with Ernie Kovacs and his wife, Edie Adams. In this episode, Lucy tries to get Ricky on Ernie’s TV show. To disguise myself, I wore a chauffeur’s uniform with cap and mustache. In the final scene, Desi was supposed to pull me into an embrace, mustache and all, and kiss me.
When the scene arrived and the cameras closed in for that final embrace, we just looked at each other, and then Desi kissed me, and we both cried. It marked the end of so many things. . . .
The years after Desi amounted to epilogue—the solace of an attentive second husband, the consolations of money, the exercise of power as the head of a major studio, but also, inescapably, the sense of having stayed onstage too long, followed by professional disappointments and the downhill process of aging.
After Lucy ended, I thought, “I’ll live a few more years, and then I’ll die.” I didn’t plan to live this long. I didn’t want to. I don’t know why. I didn’t want people waiting around for me to die just because I’ve got a few bucks. . . .
During the Desi period came the sense of mutual struggle, then small victories, and then vindication when I Love Lucy altered the history of television and turned their lives around. The Hollywood Reporter was the first to catch the dream. The review was pasted in the scrapbook and permanently entered in Lucy’s memory:
Every once in a great while a new TV show comes along that fulfills, in its own particular niche, every promise of the often harassed new medium. Such a show, it is a genuine pleasure to report, is I Love Lucy, starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in a filmed domestic comedy series for Philip Morris, which should bounce to the top of the rating heap in no time at all. If it doesn’t, the entire structure of the American entertainment business should be overhauled from top to bottom.
The outstanding pertinent fact about I Love Lucy is the emergence, long suspected, of Lucille Ball as America’s No. 1 comedienne in her own right. She combines the facial mobility of Red Skelton, the innate pixie quality of Harpo Marx, and the daffily jointless abandon of the Patchwork Girl of Oz, all rolled into one. She is a consummate artist, born for television.
Half a step behind her comes her husband, Desi Arnaz, the perfect foil for her screwball antics and possessing comic abilities of his own more than sufficient to make this a genuine comedy team rather than the one-woman tour de force it almost becomes. . . .
And before Desi? Before him was a climb so desperate and odd that Lucille Ball often had trouble confronting the past. President Reagan had been much too kind, she realized; people always exaggerated at these award things. It was not true that everybody loved Lucy, not when she dominated American entertainment, not when she was a striver in New York and Hollywood, not when she was a child.
You have to understand. I am from a suburb of Jamestown, New York. Not Jamestown itself, but a suburb, yet. You think Cleveland or Cincinnati is bad, Jamestown is only a place to be from. To be from only. . . .
Lucy had read enough of the gossip books, the speculative magazine bios, to know that the world was not composed of Lucille Ball fan clubs. The gossip had come back to her for years, so much of it false or twisted out of shape: she had ties with the Mafia, she had shot a little boy back in upstate New York and the family had paid to shut it up, she had slept her way to film roles, she was an ungrateful bitch, a shrew on the set, hell to work for.
I am not funny. My writers were funny. My direction was funny. The situations were funny. But I am not funny. I am not funny. What I am is brave....