CHAPTER NINE
AS FAR back as the 1930s Lucy had tried to liberate her comic style. As we have seen, her attempts met with sporadic success, but they had never elevated her to the status she hankered for. Yet in the half-hour format Lucille Ball abruptly metamorphosed into the dominant comedienne of her time, a performer whose virtuosity and timing were compared to those of the giants of silent movies.
How was it possible for a performer entering middle age to alter her character and approach so drastically? Some believed that she was a stage actress rather than a film personality: Lucy’s true metier was performing before a live audience rather than a group of jaded technicians. Others said she had never felt free enough to be zany until she could control everything from the scripts to the lighting. No doubt these factors were important in her astonishing turnaround, but one component overshadowed all the others: Desi. The man who made Lucy uneasy as a wife also gave her assurance as a performer. Cousin Cleo believed that, in films, Lucy “didn’t trust, really let go, put herself in someone’s hands and do what they told her to do. But she had total trust in Desi. She thought he was just brilliant.”
And so he was. He was also mercurial, devious, and self-destructive. Lucy had to balance her husband’s assets and liabilities like a CPA, and this did little to settle her nerves. On the plus side, Desi, acting as a sure-handed catcher to his wife’s lunatic leaps, allowed her to be fearless. “His talents as an actor never received the public recognition they deserved,” observed Vivian Vance. “The contribution that Desi made! The secret lay in his Cuban point of view, which he brought to three clods, who didn’t know what to make of it. That was the crux of so much of the laughter.” Desi’s supposed bewilderment, his comic stubbornness, his accent always gave the trio something to work against. Gradually his bewildered “You got some ’splainin’ to do,” his cry of “Looooosey!” and his cascade of dropped g’s and mispronunciations became almost as vital to the comedy as Lucy’s physical shtick. The Hollywood Reporter belatedly recognized these contributions when the paper called Desi “the most underrated performer on network television.”
In fact, as time went on performance became the least of Desi’s qualifications. “He had great enthusiasm,” Bob Carroll was pleased to note. As producer, “he never said no. He never said anything was too expensive. He would do anything, pay for anything.” Madelyn Pugh agreed: “For some reason, people play down his part, like he was some lucky Cuban. I mean, he was a lucky Cuban, but he deserved it. He loved writers and he loved working with us. We never had arguments. We never had harsh words.” Lucy remembered the morning her husband pored over the network’s budget for the new season and found a glaring error. The following day he charged over to CBS and presented his findings: their accountants had made a million-dollar mistake. “That’s impossible,” he was informed in a patronizing tone. “Look, Desi, stick to your acting. We’ll take care of the business details.” Desi spread the papers and pointed out the inaccuracies: there actually was an extra million to be used by Desilu for production expenses. “From then on,” Lucy wrote, “when he talked, they listened.”
As an executive Desi moved from strength to strength, just as he had done in the old days when he caromed from conga lines to Broadway to Hollywood. “He’s intuitive,” Lucy observed. “He lives from minute to minute. But I call him Nostradamus—he seems to know what’ll happen next. And he learned every job in our setup before he hired anybody else to do it.”
Among Desi’s most important hires were the people he had seen on the other side of the desk. He began by offering the executive vice presidency of Desilu to Martin Leeds, a hard-nosed network administrator. According to Desi, “That son of a bitch had given me so much trouble arguing about the CBS money we were spending on I Love Lucy. I figured it would be better to have him fighting on my side.” Leeds knew a growth opportunity when he saw it, and he persuaded some of his network colleagues to join him at Desilu. Bernard Weitzman became vice president of business affairs and Edwin E. Holly eventually came over to control the company’s purse strings.
Desilu then moved into high gear, producing Eve Arden’s hit show about a wisecracking schoolteacher, Our Miss Brooks, for CBS. High as Desi rose, however, he was never too big to stoop down and pick up the small change. The network had given him expensive overhead lights for the I Love Lucy show. Now that he was filming Our Miss Brooks, he felt free to charge the network for the use of those lights—and CBS paid up.
Later he found a new opportunity to increase revenue, and this one became a trove. As historians Coyne Steven Sanders and Tom Gilbert report in Desilu, Desi had always disliked the jarring interval between the show and the commercials. Onscreen he and Lucy usually faded to black, followed by the harsh peddling of Philip Morris cigarettes. “Different music, different lighting, different everything,” Holly stated. “Desi thought this was wrong. He thought the commercial should be done as part of the show.” That meant new music and careful illumination to provide a bridge from I Love Lucy to the ads. Under ideal conditions there would be no more jarring sales talks; ads would be tailored to the show’s look and tempo. “Desi insisted that as part of the Lucy deal with Philip Morris and CBS that we take their commercials and integrate them—for an additional fee, of course.” The integration was so successful that other producers eventually demanded the same smooth transitions for their programs. Desilu was happy to offer its services—for an additional fee, of course.
Desilu grew exponentially throughout the 1952–1953 season. As I Love Lucy continued to hold first place in the ratings, Jack Benny arranged to have the studio produce five episodes of his program. Danny Thomas, then beginning to rise as TV producer, chose Desilu to make the pilot for his own show, Make Room for Daddy. Remembering the audition for ABC, he described himself as “fortunate to have Desi as a boss for the pilot. He laughed so hard on the soundtrack that we sold the pilot in forty-eight hours.” In addition, programs starring Ray Bolger and Loretta Young were filmed on the premises.
Some of Desilu’s aborted projects were as intriguing as the ones that were produced. Nothing came of the full-length feature Lucy Has a Baby, composed of episodes strung together and edited by Lucy’s old counselor Ed Sedgwick. Frank Sinatra planned to star in Blue in the Night, a dramatic series about a musician. It was called off when he won the career-saving role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity. Still, business was so good that Desilu relocated to a seven-acre lot on Cahuenga Boulevard. By the time construction was finished, there were nine sound stages and scores of offices for new and veteran employees. Desi calculated that by the end of 1953 Desilu would gross a minimum of $6 million. That year, he predicted, would bring the Arnazes “nothing but blessings, success, honors, and wealth.” (Mindful of costs, Lucy and Desi kept their own salaries at $35,000 each, a liberal sum but nowhere near what they might have drawn.)
During 1953 the couple agreed to star in The Long, Long Trailer, a slapstick comedy about newlyweds living out of a trailer as they ply the roads of Southern California. The film would be produced by Lucy’s long-extinguished old flame Pandro S. Berman, and directed by Vincente Minnelli. Lucy was promised Lana Turner’s old dressing room; Desi would have Clark Gable’s.
There were individual achievements as well. Lucy won an Emmy as Best Comedienne. Desi cut a 78 rpm disc, I Love Lucy (with his own composition “There’s a Brand New Baby at Our House” on the flip side); overnight it rose to the top of the charts. To ice the cake, he made the list of Ten Best-Dressed Men in the United States, alongside Rex Harrison, Danny Kaye, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Looking at the Arnazes’ period of prosperity, as well as the nation’s, the New York Times remarked: “With Lucille Ball’s baby and Ike in as scheduled, the American situation can now be said to be well in hand.” Walter Winchell added his own quip: “The nation got a man and Lucy got a boy.”
Rather than cheer Lucy, these triumphal moments seemed to make her more neurotic and apprehensive. “I developed a feeling I couldn’t shake,” she was to write. “All our good fortune was suddenly going to vanish. When I tore myself away from my babies in the morning, I had this terrible fear that they’d be gone when I returned at night.” Yet the more she thought about them the more these terrors seemed irrational. Filming of The Long, Long Trailer went smoothly; the pace was so undemanding that Lucy commented, “I never realized how much tension I was under making TV shows.” She made a great effort to relax that summer, settling into a rented beach house in Del Mar. The four Arnazes were accompanied by Desi’s mother, a nurse, and a continual stream of drop-ins. Lucy laughed a lot, swam, played word games, walked on the beach, and finally let down her guard. It was then that the letter arrived from the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Nothing to worry about, said an aide to Representative Donald L. Jackson, the HUAC chairman. “We simply want to go over the statements made at your previous appearance before our committee last year.” Lucy knew better: the long climb from Jamestown, the career, the house, the show, Desilu itself would all go. Let the shrinks and the friends scoff at her little formless fears. Every time she had reached a peak, disaster beckoned. It was beckoning now.
Since her last interview, the blacklisting of “radicals, fellow-travelers, dupes” and those who had been “prematurely antifascist” had become ruthless in Hollywood and New York. The committeemen of HUAC were obviously after big names, and at this point Lucille Ball was one of the biggest. She returned to their turf and resubmitted her testimony, emphasizing that she and her brother had simply placated their crusty old grandfather by registering as Communists. How many times had Lucy chosen unwisely just to please men? She had lost count long ago. The best thing she could do at present was to please more men, answering all their questions without hesitation.
Lucy’s memory was usually remarkable; she could recall places she had visited and conversations with friends years afterward. But before the congressmen she stumbled, like an auditioning actress who has lost her script. Lucy could not, for example, recall whether she had signed a petition supporting the Committee for the First Amendment, a group protesting the HUAC investigation of Hollywood back in 1947. Perhaps she did; she couldn’t swear she didn’t. The whole business was so long ago, and besides, everybody signed things in those days— Humphrey Bogart, Danny Kaye, Frank Sinatra.
Her listeners were sympathetic. After two hours Lucy was allowed to submit an official statement: “I am not a Communist now. I never have been. I never wanted to be. Nothing in the world could ever change my mind. At no time in my life have I ever been in sympathy with anything that even faintly resembled it.” She had worked out a rationale and submitted it for the record: the family had posed as radicals to soothe Fred Hunt’s psyche, that’s all. Politics had nothing to do with their actions. “It sounds a little weak and silly and corny now, but at the time it was very important because we knew we weren’t going to have Daddy with us very long. But I was always conscious of the fact I could go just so far to make him happy. I tried not to go any farther. In those days that was not a big terrible thing to do. It was almost as terrible to be a Republican in those days.”
She was dismissed with the comforting words of investigator William Wheeler: “I have no further questions. Thank you for your cooperation.” She shook hands with him and made her exit, assured that she was in the clear and that her testimony would remain sealed this time as in the past.
That weekend she and the children returned to Chatsworth. Desi remained at Del Mar, where he had scheduled a poker game at the home of producer Irving Briskin. Lucy put Desi IV and Lucie to bed and turned on the radio. It was time for Walter Winchell. Shortly before the newsman signed off, he offered a blind item: “The top television comedienne has been confronted with her membership in the Communist Party.” No name was mentioned, but it was clear that Winchell did not mean Imogene Coca, costar of Your Show of Shows, the only other TV comedienne of comparable stature. Despite guarantees, someone had leaked the news that Lucille Ball had been before HUAC.
In Del Mar, Desi received a call from Cleo’s husband, Ken Morgan, recently elevated to the position of Desilu’s public relations chief. Had Desi heard Winchell tonight? No, he had been too busy at cards. What was up? Desi was filled in. Acting on instinct rather than cogitation, the boss ordered Morgan to meet him in Chatsworth. It would be a good idea, Desi added, to bring MGM’s head of publicity, Howard Strickling, along for the ride.
“I was driving the 130 miles or so from Del Mar to the ranch,” Desi later wrote, “when it hit me that history was repeating itself in an ironic sort of way.” Twenty years before, in Cuba, “I had been playing poker when I got a phone call from my uncle, telling me that a bunch of Communists (Bolsheviks in those days) were on their way to ransack our house and asking me to get my mother the hell out of there.”
He arrived at the ranch at 2 a.m. to find Strickling and Morgan advising their confused and terrified client. Lucy was willing to do whatever they counseled. Strickling felt that the best policy was no policy: keep quiet and let the mini-scandal blow over. Morgan also saw no reason to call attention to the problem. Desi agreed. For several days the Arnazes walked on eggshells but saw no mention of Lucy’s past in the newspapers or on television. I Love Lucy continued to rehearse on schedule and everyone breathed a little easier.
Then came Black Friday. The Arnazes woke to find a reporter and a photographer camped in their front yard. At noon the Herald Express hit the stands with an extra. Some investigative reporter had done his job; the paper carried a four-inch banner: LUCILLE BALL A RED. Under it was a photostat of the 1936 card indicating Lucille Ball’s intention to vote the Communist Party ticket. Lucy began to cry and remained in tears for the most of the day. The feeding frenzy had begun.
On several occasions Desi had met J. Edgar Hoover at the Del Mar racetrack. Now Desi imposed on their acquaintanceship with a phone call. He explained the situation as best he could and asked if there were any other nasty surprises in Lucy’s FBI file. Hoover had already checked it. “Absolutely nothing!” he declared. “She’s one hundred percent clear as far as we are concerned.” With that assurance Desi felt free to call Frank Stanton, head of CBS in New York, warning that a scandal was about to break and that there was not a shred of truth in it. “I am so goddam mad, I’m going to fight this like I’ve never fought before,” Desi told him. “We are not going to get scared. What happened to Larry Parks is not going to happen to her.”
Desi was referring to the young actor who had mimed Al Jolson’s numbers in the 1946 blockbuster The Jolson Story, did it again three years later in Jolson Sings Again, rose to celebrity—and was then exposed as a former member of the Communist Party. Humiliation followed. Pressed by HUAC to give the names of the comrades in his cell, Parks resisted. “I am no longer fighting for myself, because I tell you frankly that I am probably the most completely ruined man that you have ever seen. I am fighting for a principle . . . I don’t think that this is fair play. . . . These are not people that are a danger to this country.” The committee was having no truck with the actor’s plea. “If you will just answer the question, please. . . . Who were the members of the Communist Party cell to which you belonged?”
Parks capitulated: “Well, Morris Carnovsky, Joe Bromberg, Sam Rossen, Anne Revere, Lee Cobb, Gale Sondergaard . . .”
The committee chairman, discomfited by this pocket theater of cruelty, let up on the witness now that he had abased himself. “You could get some comfort out of the fact that the people whose names have been mentioned have been subpoenaed, so that if they ever do appear here it won’t be as a result of anything that you have testified to.” True enough, but the testimony was enough to finish Parks in Hollywood, on the right because he had once been a Communist Party member, and on the left because he had given HUAC what it wanted. Desi vowed not allow such a catastrophe to happen to Lucy. He called the Philip Morris panjandrum Alfred Lyons and told him that he had talked to Hoover and Stanton, and that if his company wanted to back out, Desilu would sponsor the program itself. Desi treasured the harrumphing reply: “ ‘No, young man, I ain’t pulling out,’ said the nice old bastard. ‘Let’s go get some good headlines!’ ”
The phone rang nonstop that afternoon, and Desi was selective about whose calls he would take. Later he confided to Lucy that he had spoken to columnist Hedda Hopper. “I told her the only thing red about you is your hair, and even that is not legitimate.” “You ‘dint’!” said Lucy, and as soon as she made fun of his accent Desi knew she had regained enough humor and equilibrium for his next move.
Just before filming of the first show for the new season, Desi stepped before the audience and said: “Ladies and gentlemen, I know that you have read a lot of bad headlines about my wife. I came from Cuba, but during my years in the United States Army I became an American citizen, and one of the things I admire about this country is that you are considered innocent until you are proven guilty.” He told them that the full story would come out the next day, introduced Fred and Ethel, proclaimed Lucy as “American as J. Edgar Hoover and President Eisenhower,” and once again used the line about her hair being the only thing red about the star. The star of the show came on to a standing ovation and the continued shout “We love you, Lucy.”
By the time the crowd settled down, almost everyone in the place was snuffling, including many of the reporters seated in the front rows. The troupe went on with the episode, “Ricky’s Life Story,” with Lucy flawlessly executing a dance number and playing with Little Ricky (impersonated by twin child actors, Joseph and Michael Mayer), and earning, once again, resounding applause and cheers. The following day, newspapers ran Lucille Ball’s exculpatory testimony before the committee and quoted HUAC chairman Jackson, “We love Lucy, too.”
To emphasize Lucy’s rehabilitation, Desi arranged a press conference on Sunday around the Arnaz swimming pool. Amid the beer and the ham-and-cheese sandwiches, Luci and Desi chatted up a group of invited journalists. In case anyone was unkind enough to mention Lucy’s ancient interest in the Committee for the First Amendment, four press agents stood by to parry: Morgan and Strickling had been joined by PR men from CBS and Philip Morris.
During the conference, the doorbell rang. Desi excused himself, went inside, and attended to the latecomer. It was Larry Parks, holding a bunch of flowers. Desi thanked him profusely, and, he confessed later, “told him to get lost.” Desi wrote: “I explained it wouldn’t do him or Lucy any good to have a story about Larry Parks bringing Lucy red roses at that particular ‘period of time.’ Some sonofabitch would accuse them of belonging to the same cell. Larry, who had suffered enough from some of this same bad publicity and who had always been a perfect gentleman, understood. I really felt like a shit but I didn’t care to take the chance.” Returning to his guests, Desi used the illegitimate red hair gag yet again and got laughs with it. The atmosphere of strained levity could not hide the fact that the conference was a miniature version of the committee, with witnesses called upon to debase themselves. It remained for the host to encapsulate the moment. The late Fred Hunt, Desi said, was “a wonderful guy, a loveable guy—the kind of guy who wanted everybody in the world to be happy and have more money. In 1936 it was a kind of a joke, a kind of a light thing. If Grandpa was alive today, we might have to lock him in a back room.”
That sufficed for the Hollywood press, a group who genuinely liked Lucy and found Desi an amusing and generous chap. They dispersed, and then wrote flattering items about the Arnazes and dismissed the notion that Lucille Ball was anything but a patriot.
Not so the reactionary press. The charge was led by Westbrook Pegler, a Hearst columnist notorious for his invective, for his loathing of the Roosevelts, Franklin and Eleanor, and for his withering appraisal of anything to his left. Lucille Ball, he wrote, had not “come clean” at all. She had to be “tracked down and exposed” before confessing her past politics. “The proposition that she was only 24 years old and that her grandfather was a family tyrant, a Socialist who made her do this, has no value at all with me. This Ball woman knew what she was doing when she registered with the Communists. . . . Socialist grandfather! That is a new variant on the whine of the crooked White Sox player who did it for the wife and kiddies.” Pegler was gratified to find a warm response from devotees. His fellow Hearst columnist Lee Mortimer messaged: “Re Lucille Ball, as usual you’re on the beam. It was wonderful. If she’s OK they should clear all of the Hollywood commies and let [Alger] Hiss out of jail.” One reader sent in a limerick:
How touching to hear Lucille bawl “Grandpa was the cause of it all,” When she was caught In the Communist plot Designed for Uncle Sam’s downfall.
Others wrote more conventional letters: “If Lucille Ball at 24 years of age didn’t know what Communism was she was not sufficiently educated to vote.” “Will you please keep after this case and do your very best to keep that hard, cold-blooded communist off the TV.” “Congratulations on today’s article re Lucille Ball. I was a former fan of hers but when things like these are proven I no longer patronize these individuals.”
Hedda Hopper, who had been one of Lucy’s staunch defenders, was unprepared for the small firestorm of protest from her own readers. A Gold Star Mother reminded the columnist, “My son didn’t vote red to please his grandpa—but he did die in Korea for his Uncle Sam.” This angry sentiment was echoed by like-minded readers. “So the only thing RED about Miss Ball is her hair, eh?” one demanded. “Hedda, how can you be so taken in—or are you TOO all part of this publicity stunt? Certainly convenient to have a dead grandpa, isn’t it?” In Indianapolis, a group of World War II veterans signed a petition stating that they would stop smoking Philip Morris cigarettes until Lucy was taken off the air. “We intend to use our memberships in veterans’ organizations,” they warned, “to combat the appearance, on TV, stage or screen, of anyone supporting or belonging to any party supervised by the Soviets.”
Lucy and Desi made no more public statements, going about their business as if nothing had happened, resentful of fair-weather friends and acquaintances who made themselves scarce, and grateful to the handful who went out of their way to express their support. First to pay a call was comedian Lou Costello. Lucy thought of him as an acquaintance more than a pal; she had only been on his radio show a few times. But there he was sitting in the garden, and when Lucy asked him why he was in evidence Costello replied: “You just go about your business. I’m just hanging out here for the day. I just thought you might need a friend about now.” Jack Oakie, Lucy’s costar in the old days, also showed up; so did Lionel Barrymore, crippled by arthritis, who visited in a wheelchair.
During the next week thousands of letters came in. Almost all of them spoke of their love for, and their belief in, Lucy. Syndicated columnist Royce Brier took on Pegler: “Surely every middle-aged citizen of this country (Miss Ball is 42) is not under moral obligation to arise publicly and confess his or her manifestations of immaturity or ignorance at 25.” Ed Sullivan, the New York Daily News columnist who loathed Winchell, added his own message: “It’s a singularly fortunate thing for Lucille Ball that she’s been a weekly visitor to millions of American living rooms. In those Monday night visits, people have come to know her well. TV cameras being as revealing as they are, the Jury of Public Opinion is an informed jury as it renders its verdict on a silly thing she did 17 years ago.” Pegler’s own home paper, the New York Journal–American, conceded in an editorial, “We wish Miss Ball had not done those foolish things long ago, but we don’t wish it one millionth as much as Miss Ball. Folly is regrettable, but none of us is immune to it, and let’s distinguish between folly and real treacherous conspiracy.” In the New York Times, Jack Gould added: “For once the accusation and the rebuttal became known simultaneously and the public had an opportunity to judge and act for itself.” Walter Winchell was forced to go into reverse, changing his tune to Yankee-Doodle: “Donald Jackson of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and all its members, cleared Lucy 100%, and so did J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, plus every newspaper in America and, tonight, Mr. Lincoln is drying his tears for making her go through this.” Unmentioned was the fact that “this” had been ignited by Winchell himself.
There was one more hurdle to clear: the ratings. It was all very well for journalists to withdraw from the attack, and for more than two thousand fan letters to arrive in support of Lucy—as opposed to two dozen negative ones. It was quite another to expect the country at large to stay tuned to the show. The Neilsen and Trendex polls would reveal more about the political climate than any columnist or mailbag. And so on a Monday night an apprehensive Desi and Lucy awaited “overnights”—the fast reading of what viewers had watched between 9:00 and 9:30 EST. Four men were just as tense: William S. Paley, chairman of CBS; Alfred Lyons of Philip Morris; adman Milton Biow; and Louis B. Mayer of MGM, producer of The Long, Long Trailer. Shortly after midnight the results came in. I Love Lucy remained number one, a fact noted in a Los Angeles Times headline the next day: EVERYBODY STILL LOVES LUCY. The heartening results spilled over into other arenas. B’nai B’rith, acutely sensitive to the vagaries of American politics, gave its Woman of the Year award to Lucy because of her willingness to appear at charity benefits. Of greater consequence was the fact that the Arnazes, along with William Frawley and Vivian Vance, were summoned to the White House by special invitation. The troupe performed to more than polite applause, and then President Eisenhower summoned Desi and Lucy to his table. “So you’re the young man that knocked me off the front pages,” said Ike. Flustered, Desi could only babble, “They said a foreigner with an accent wouldn’t be believable playing an average American husband.” The chief executive put him at his ease: “Out in Kansas they said I’d never be president. You know what we are? A couple of walking miracles!”
Lucy could not be included in that category. Her escape from history was not a matter of miracle but an accident of timing. “I was one of the lucky ones,” she was to realize later on. “For a long time, people in Hollywood couldn’t get a job because of unfounded and vicious smear rumors. If news of my registration had been revealed during the worst witch-hunting days—between 1945 and 1950—my career would probably have been finished.” As it was, she could and did go on. Lucy and Desi never mentioned HUAC again in public. No less than the president of the United States had given her a clean bill of political health, yet Lucy would remain scarred and insecure. She could never quite relax after her experience with the congressmen and the fallout that came from their investigation. A signature on an old piece of paper had been enough to justify her most pathological fears: one’s livelihood and social position could indeed vanish overnight, and in the end neither money nor love nor public relations would be powerful enough to keep the jackals away.
G ranted a second chance, could Lucille Ball make it big on the big screen? As MGM (and the Arnazes) saw it, the only way was to have her play Lucy Ricardo in disguise—hence the characters and plot of The Long, Long Trailer. The scenario by the experienced farceurs Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich sedulously copied the devices of television. A few critics went overboard: the Newsweek reviewer thought the comedy made “Mack Sennett look, in retrospect, like a reticent disciple of Ibsen.” But most agreed with the New York Times reviewer, who thought the misfortunes of a honeymooning couple in car and trailer little more than an extended episode of I Love Lucy. Tacy, the wife, the reviewer wrote, “is a nitwit with a benign and vacant stare, and Nicky, the spouse, is a good sport with more patience than passion—or brains.” Trailer, the review continued, “is a comedy of situation—straight situation—from beginning to end, and Vincente Minnelli has directed for nothing but quick, responsive yaks.” These he got in overplus. The film had enough box office magic to open at Manhattan’s most important movie house, Radio City Music Hall, where Lucy made a personal appearance, gushing to the audience about going to the Music Hall in the 1930s. Never, “in my wildest dreams,” she told her fans, “did I imagine that I would one day be on this stage myself.” The Long, Long Trailer racked up impressive grosses in New York, then opened nationwide to large crowds. By the end of the year it had earned some $4.5 million and a place among the top twenty moneymaking films of 1954.
Now it was Desi’s turn to go into overdrive. He took charge of pilots for new Desilu shows, reordered schedules, oversaw scripts. As a result he became tired and cranky in the office and on the set, and not everyone indulged him. Jerry Hausner, featured in the pilot for I Love Lucy as Ricky’s agent, had been with the show for two seasons. During one episode he was required to speak to Desi on a pay phone. The prop was at one end of the stage; Desi’s phone was at the other. The instruments were supposed to be connected so that the actors could talk in normal voices and actually hear each other on their receivers. At show time the phones were still unconnected. Instead of ranting at the engineers, Desi cursed out Hausner before the cast, crew, and audience. “I couldn’t believe it,” said Hausner. “In all my professional career I had never been treated so badly. I was so upset that I walked over to Jess Oppenheimer and told him I would never again do the show. He understood. It was terrible when Desi and I had to do another scene together in the last act. I found it very difficult looking him in the face.”
Desi paid for his hyperactivity with eye tics, headaches, and bad digestion. Worse things were in store, though a seemingly offhand remark by Frawley helped to delay them temporarily. “Remember when you led a band?” the actor asked between takes. “You just waved a stick and the boys took it from there. Why don’t you develop faith in others?” For an unsubtle man, Frawley showed extraordinary discernment. By using the image of the band, he persuaded the boss to start thinking about delegating authority. Desi began to allow others to take over some of his duties. Morale improved and productivity rose. Among the shows under way at the Desilu studio were December Bride, starring the aging character actress Spring Byington; Those Whiting Girls, with singer Margaret Whiting and her sister Barbara; Willy, starring June Havoc; The Jimmy Durante Show; and The Lineup, a police drama. Some never made it to the screen, others had a half-life of one season. December Bride made up for them all, placing among prime time’s Top Ten for five years. Desilu would do 229 half-hour shows in 1954. According to Desi’s calculations, this would be the equivalent of some eighty feature films.
The pressure of the schedule showed on everyone. Desi and Lucy maintained a façade of mutual satisfaction. Their employees went along with it, but privately they noticed that Desi’s face bore unusually deep lines for a man under forty, and that his hair was dyed jet-black to cover the premature gray. The marriage was correspondingly strained; asked about it, Lucy cheerfully told reporters that the couple’s domestic arguments were used as material for the show, and that running Desilu was their substitute for counseling. And besides, she added, with a long-running program, plus two children to raise, she had no time to waste fretting.
Those children were shadow figures to most of the Desilu personnel—and in a sense to Lucy and Desi. After yearning so hard and so long for children, neither seemed willing to assume the duties of parenthood. In later years Lucie was to remark that her mother and father were “never as happy as when they were working. They weren’t home. I was raised by my nanny, Willie Mae Barker, and my mother’s mother, DeDe.” Barker saw Lucie and Desi IV off to school, reminded them to brush their teeth and clean their rooms, and drove them to pediatricians’ appointments. DeDe took them shopping for clothes. As for Desi: “He didn’t come to my fifth-grade father-daughter dance—my uncle did. Do you think I’ve ever forgotten that?” Weekends were another matter; then Desi and Lucy were very much in evidence, but more as lawgivers than as hands-on parents. Lucie concluded: “I think they would have loved to have been the Ricardos. But they weren’t.”
In fact, during its fourth season more attention was spent on the show than on the kids. It needed intensive care. I Love Lucy was running out of ideas, as the critics were the first to notice. In the New York Herald Tribune, John Crosby complained: “Miss Ball is always trying to bust out of the house; Arnaz is trying to keep her in apron strings. The variations on the theme are infinite, but it’s the same theme and I’m a mite tired of it.” Across town, Jack Gould, his counterpart on the New York Times, regretfully noted a surfeit of “the most pedestrian and sophomoric slapstick.” Perhaps, he ventured, “ Lucy has run its course and has no choice but to press too hard.”
The public disagreed, and ratings remained high. Even so, the president and vice president of Desilu knew that there was a great deal of truth in the newspaper laments. So did their producer and writers. A pair of seasoned writers, Robert Schiller and Robert Weiskopf, were brought in to assist Pugh and Carroll. The new men did the first draft, then the veterans rewrote it. A difficult period of adjustment ensued until Desi made a fortunate error. Examining a script, he barked at Jess Oppenheimer, “Jesus, I don’t know if you chose the right ones, these two guys.” Recalled Weiskopf: “But Bob and Madelyn had written it. That really saved our necks.” To give I Love Lucy a fresh look, it was decided to “open up” the show and take it on the road. The Ricardos became a little more affluent—as did a preponderance of their listeners in the mid-1950s—and many episodes took them out of Manhattan. A series of famous guests made cameo appearances, boosting the ratings and giving the program a glamorous undertone.
Driving to California, for example, the Ricardos and the Mertzes are caught in a speed trap and forced to stay in Bent Fork, Tennessee. There they run into the popular folk singer “Tennessee Ernie” Ford. (In some of the crowd scenes was a bit player named Aaron Spelling, who carefully observed the way Desi ran things. Much would be heard of him in the ensuing decades.) When the couples reach their destination, Los Angeles, Lucy manages to meet, among other film stars, Cornel Wilde, Rock Hudson, Van Johnson, Harpo Marx, and William Holden.
The Holden episode, “L.A. at Last,” was to become a favorite with devotees. At the Brown Derby restaurant, Lucy argues rudely with the star, who is dining alone at an adjoining booth. Later, Ricky brings a new friend to the Ricardos’ hotel suite—William Holden. In the next room, Lucy, embarrassed to be revealed as the offender, hastily disguises herself with kerchief, glasses, and a false nose. She enters. The script called for Holden to light her cigarette, and for the nose to burn up. It took Oppenheimer a full week to convince Lucy that the whole prop would not burst into flames, that only the tip was flammable. The makeup man, he remembered, “used a putty nose that wouldn’t burn and placed a candlewick in it, just to ensure her safety. Still, Lucy was extremely nervous about it all through the rehearsal and during the final shooting, and we all held our breath. When her putty nose caught fire, the script called for her to remove it and dunk it in her cup of coffee. Lucy ad-libbed and picked up the cup with both hands, dunking the end of her putty nose while it was still attached. It was an inspired moment, entirely hers.”
In the episode built around Harpo Marx, conditions were reversed. Lucy had adored the comedian since they first met in 1937 on the set of Room Service. She was delighted to welcome him to her own show, where the two of them would reenact the famous mirror sequence done by Harpo and Groucho in Duck Soup. Lucy had forgotten that Harpo never repeated his motions. Each time, he added some new business. “That was deadly for this episode,” recalled Maury Thompson, “because she had to be his mirror image. This is one occasion where we had to reshoot a scene over and over again after the audience left.” When the routine was finally completed, Lucy threw a party; Harpo played his instrument and Vivian Vance sang pop tunes. Harpo was to look back on the occasion with nostalgia and rue: “I hadn’t worked for a while before this show, because I’d had a heart attack.” His physicians advised against the appearance, but Harpo wanted to get back onstage. “Lucille loved to rehearse, but I had done this stuff for thirty-five years. I had a great time. Right after the show, I had another heart attack.”
For all their comic qualities, these Hollywood episodes displayed an unattractive schizoid character. So strong was Lucy’s television persona that to most viewers she had become a member of the family. For them, nothing could violate the image of Mrs. Ricardo as an insular and naive housewife, forever attempting to worm her way into small-time show business. On the new programs Lucy continued to be presented as the ultimate celebrity freak, dumbstruck by the superstars she met. At the same time, the audience knew very well that Lucille Ball was herself a superstar, very much on a par with the likes of “Tennesse Ernie” or Van Heflin. This collision of fancy and fact tended to unbalance the show, and for the first time I Love Lucy took on a forced, artificial quality.
Still, the fans continued to tune in every Monday night, and as a result of their loyalty the ratings stayed astronomical. No one was willing to kill the golden goose quite yet. But it was time to start looking elsewhere for income and fame.
The Arnazes signed with MGM to do another picture, Forever Darling, with Desi in the dual role of actor and producer, under the banner of Zanra—“Arnaz” spelled backward. The script had been lying around for twelve years. Scenarist Helen Deutsch, whose credits included I’ll Cry Tomorrow and King Solomon’s Mines, had shaped her work for the talents of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Carroll and Pugh (uncredited onscreen) did what they could to retool the plot and comedy for their employers, but Forever Darling remained an inappropriate vehicle and the principals seemed uncomfortable in their roles as research chemist Lorenzo Xavier Vega and his bitchy wife Susan. The cast was not materially aided by Al Hall, Lucy’s friend from the old studio days. According to Desilu executive Bernie Weitzman, Hall “was an old-time director who couldn’t get a job with anybody else. Lucy made him the director because she liked him and he was nice to her when she was a nobody.” The good deed did not go unpunished.
Desi’s great concern was bringing in the picture under budget, and that goal, at least, was accomplished—the film was completed several days ahead of schedule at a cost of less than the agreed-upon $1.4 million. That ended the virtues of Forever Darling. Radio City Music Hall management judged it to be inadequate in style and substance. The next best option was the déclassé Loew’s State Theatre, where the film opened early in 1956.
This time out, critics treated Lucy and Desi with open disdain. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times was among the kindest when he only poked holes in the “thin, overdrawn, weak caper” of a couple “whose once-rosy marriage has deteriorated into bickering and boredom and then is saved through the intervention of the lady’s ‘guardian angel.’ ” He found James Mason, as the angel, a good deal more convincing than the earthly characters. Crowther concluded: “ ‘We had something that slipped away from us,’ one of the disconsolate principals says early in the proceedings. A truer phrase was never coined.” In later years Lucy acknowledged that the film was an unqualified dog, but she was also quick to say that the effort was worthwhile. “As corny as it sounds,” she was to allow, “that movie was more than just a dumb fantasy. I kept hoping that something would come along and save my marriage.”
No feature could have worked that miracle, but at least Forever Darlingbrought Lucy back to Jamestown, where she could introduce Desi to her girlhood friends for the first and last time. Some 25,000 fans turned out to greet the Arnazes, standing in a cold rainstorm for the privilege. Desi turned on the charm and kept it going for three days. During a party arranged by press agents, Lucy went around the room trying to recognize classmates she had not seen in more than a generation. There was some trouble identifying the guests by name, but in most cases she could recall something specific: “Your mother kept a red bowl on the sideboard.” “You had a green bicycle.” The last person in line, she wrote in her autobiography, was “a short, bald, sweet-faced man. He looked up shyly while my old friend Pauline Lopus smiled impishly by my side. I kept looking at this stranger, totally mystified. At last Pauline burst out, ‘That’s Vinnie.’
“Vinnie Myers! My eighth-grade beau! . . . I whooped, then hugged and kissed him; Desi . . . shook his hand and slapped him on the back. ‘So you’re the one I’ve been jealous of all these years!’ It was quite the highlight of the trip.”
During all this career chaos, Lucy and Desi decided to give up their ranch and move closer to town. A number of incidents precipitated their decision. First were the long hours at Desilu that strained their marriage almost to the breaking point. Then there was the sudden change of sponsorship that threatened the business. Without warning, Philip Morris announced that it would not renew its sponsorship of I Love Lucy. The tobacco company had long been criticized for sponsoring a family program, and this was its response. Never before had a sponsor walked away from a top-rated show. In time General Foods was persuaded to fill the gap—after all, I Love Lucy was still number one, with an audience of millions. But the mini-crisis precipitated by Philip Morris demonstrated that nothing in television could be taken for granted, especially the promises of businessmen. And then there was a rumor that someone was out to kidnap their children. Police came up with nothing. The gossip may have been started by a crank or a prankster, but the Arnazes were unwilling to take a chance. Indeed, the threat underlined feelings they had left unexpressed for too long. Over the past several years developers had built hundreds upon hundreds of new houses in the San Fernando Valley, bringing in strangers, changing the character of the neighborhood, and making longtime residents feel crowded and vulnerable in ways they had never anticipated. Finally, there were the stories in the likes of Whisper magazine and Hollywood Confidential.
In another time Desi’s infidelities would have been labeled “bimbo eruptions” and dealt with by adroit publicists. Here they were called an outrage, detailed in scandal sheets, and denied by no one. One article stated that Desi had “sprinkled his affections all over Los Angeles for a number of years.” It went on to say that “quite a bit” of money had been bestowed on “vice dollies who were paid handsomely for loving Desi briefly but, presumably, as effectively as Lucy.” According to the publication, Arnaz had spent time with a prostitute at the Beverly Hills Hotel and shared her with an unnamed male relative because a man, married or single, “should have as many girls as he has hair on the head.” Desi’s tomcat proclivities had never been a secret to Lucy. (“I was always giving Desi a second chance, third chance, fourth chance, hundredth chance,” she was to recall.) This time, however, the secret was out in the open for all to read, and his denial—“a lot of baloney”— was as implausible as it was loud. The Arnazes had fights, some of them physical ones in which Desi was hit with a hammer and bopped with a bottle, and all of them bitter. A split was considered and rejected; there was too much at stake at Desilu and there were too many employees to put at risk.
But externally at least, conditions had to change. Lucy began to house-hunt in Beverly Hills, close to the action. As a real estate agent showed her around, Lucy’s eye was caught by a large white Williamsburg-style house at 1000 North Roxbury Drive, next door to Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone. The agent looked up the property. It was not on the market. No matter, Lucy decided. She rang the front doorbell and was instantly recognized by the owner, a Mrs. Bang. Lucy complimented the older woman on the place and made an offer then and there: $75,000. It happened that the Bangs had recently lost their son, and the once-happy home had turned into a storehouse of melancholy souvenirs. They were willing to sell—at a price $10,000 higher than Lucy’s initial offer. Fine with me, said the buyer, mentally eliminating the agent’s fee. Mrs. Bang and Mrs. Arnaz made a handshake deal on the spot; then Lucy drove home and presented Desi with the details. He accepted the deal without question. The couple peddled their house in the Valley to the aging former child star Jane Withers, and headed for the Hills.
In doing so they tried to find their bearings in an industry—and a society—that was redefining itself by the day. Nineteen fifty-six was one of those pivotal years that can only be understood in retrospect. Two hundred thousand Soviet troops and tanks crushed a Hungarian rebellion, and Premier Nikita Khruschev of the U.S.S.R. told Western ambassadors, “History is on our side. We will bury you!” newly alarming the Pentagon. As if to answer Khruschev, that year the Dow Jones Industrial Average marked a new high of 500 points, the Gross National Product reached a new high of $434 billion, and unemployment dipped to 4.2 percent. No one could be sure whether the Cold War would heat up again. The Korean War had ended in a truce in 1953. But what if fighting broke out in Western Europe? Would U.S. soldiers go forth in another battle? Was this to be a century of total war? Schoolchildren underwent air-raid drills, and their parents tossed in their beds at night, wondering about the country, about their jobs, and most of all about the Bomb. Many of them spent what they earned—what was the point of saving for tomorrows they might not be alive to see?
Lucy and Desi were no different from their countrymen, only richer and more unhappy with each other than most husbands and wives. They spent what they had, too.
Desi acquired additional acres in Palm Springs, facing the green swaths of the Thunderbird Country Club. No one had bothered to tell him that in addition to being one of the most beautiful clubs in the state, the Thunderbird was also one of the most biased. It did not admit Jews, Negroes, or Latinos. Desi may have been a celebrity of means, but he was barred from membership. In response he began construction on a luxury motel nearby. “We won’t discriminate against Gentiles, Jews, or Cubans,” he proudly informed reporters. (By the time all the additions were made he would spend close to $1 million on his forty-two-room hostelry—a price that worked out to $24,000 per rental unit.)
Lucy was no less manic and extravagant: “I ordered new contemporary living room and bedroom suites from—where else—Jamestown, New York. The order was flown to Los Angeles in a special chartered plane.” For the front hallway of her new home she chose a Japanese silk print that went for $90 a roll. Only after the wall covering was up did she notice the flaw: shadowy birds were a subtle part of its design. Lucy’s neurotic dread of feathered things, present since the death of her father four decades before, reasserted itself. There was a brief, unpleasant scene and the silk print came down. And then, for the sake of appearances, and for her own stability, life resumed, as if nothing untoward had happened.
When everything was finally installed to their liking, Lucy and Desi moved out of the Beverly Hills Hotel and prepared to take up residence at 1000 North Roxbury. Lucie, Desi IV, and DeDe, Lucy’s devoted mother, stood by beaming as Desi ceremoniously carried his wife across the threshold. Then there was a collective gasp. During the night, some water pipes in the eighteen-year-old house had burst. The thick white wall-to-wall carpet, Lucy recalled, was a stained, sodden mess and the newly plastered walls were disintegrating. “Desi really flipped. As the children huddled against me in terror, he ranted, raged, stormed, kicked the walls, and then began tearing them down with his bare hands.” DeDe gathered the children and took them outside: “Come, dears, your father is rehearsing.”
The leakage was stopped, the carpet replaced, the stains removed. Insurance covered a lot of the damage and the Arnazes made up the rest. It was only money, after all, and money was not the cause of Desi’s flare-up. Nor were the scandal sheets; he had too hard a carapace to be distracted by gossip. What pushed him to the edge was worry about the future—if indeed there was to be a future—and overwork at the office. In addition to I Love Lucy, Desilu owned and supervised half a dozen television shows. The Western series Wyatt Earp and the hillbilly comedy The Real McCoys were filmed on the studio lots; so were December Bride and the Danny Thomas, Eve Arden, and Red Skelton shows. Not so long before, Desilu had had a total of seven employees. Now it was a preeminent symbol of the American dream, with more than a thousand people on the payroll. Desi tried to keep on playing the part of patrón, a father figure who knew the name and needs of every man and woman at Desilu, but these days it was impossible. Success had taken away his favorite role. And then there was his self-image, something he rarely spoke about. As a producer, as the husband (and straight man) of a great television personality, Desi had been accepted rather than embraced by the Hollywood establishment. He sensed the difference: in the end they were Anglos and he was a Latino. There was no getting around it; his accent was a permanent reminder of his outsider status, a status, ironically, that made him a demigod in the barrios with which he had long ago lost touch.
In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos’s luminous novel of expatriate Cuban life, Desi and Lucy drop into a New York nightclub. The narrator speaks of a fictive evening when, chatting with the expatriate Cuban musicians, Desi seemed all business, with the fatigue of responsibility showing on his face. Or perhaps he had an air of weariness and exhaustion about him that reminded Cesar and Nestor of their father, Don Pedro, down in Cuba. Perhaps he had sadly yawned and said, “Me siento cansado y tengo hambra”—“I am tired and hungry.” Whatever happened, he and his wife accompanied the brothers uptown to the house on La Salle Street.
From that visit comes an invitation for the musicians to make a guest appearance on I Love Lucy. It is the zenith of their lives—the greatest Cuban of their time bestowing a favor they can never pay back. Desi’s affect and the powerful iconography of his program are so strong that years later the nephew of one musician has a dream of his uncle’s funeral, the deceased’s heart swelling to the size of the satin heart on the I Love Lucy show, and floating free from his chest over the rooftops of La Salle. . . . the organist starts to play, except, out of each key, instead of pipe-organ music, instead of Bach, what sounds is a mambo trumpet, a piano chord, a conga, and suddenly it’s as if there’s a whole mambo band in the choir stall, and so when I look, there is a full-blown mambo orchestra straight out of 1952 playing a languid bolero, and yet I can hear the oceanic scratching, the way you do with old records. Then the place is very sad, as they start carrying out the coffin, and once it’s outside, another satin heart escapes, rising out of the wood, and goes higher and higher, expanding as it reaches toward the sky, floating away, behind the other.
In Hollywood, the place where those symbols had been manufactured, Desi was not so highly regarded. Every day new demands were made on his already jammed schedule, and at the same time his support system began to give way. After the 1956 season two faces would vanish from the Desilu crowd, and they were among the most important of all. First, NBC made Jess Oppenheimer an offer he could hardly wait to accept; after the years of wrangling with Desi he was leaving to develop new shows for the network. At the farewell party, Desi tried to put a good face on the defection: “We’re not losing a producer, we’re gaining a parking space.” But he and everyone else knew what industry watchers were predicting: I Love Lucy could not run without its mainspring. Oppenheimer retained a percentage of the show, so he had mixed feelings about it now that he was going. As Bob Schiller put it, “He was hoping that Lucy would fall on its ass, and yet he stood to make a lot of money if it didn’t.” Karl Freund was also calling it quits; the old pro had worked longer and harder than he had ever expected to, and this seemed the right time to say farewell. More dire predictions were heard around Hollywood.
With the stalwarts gone or going, the average age of the Desilu employees was thirty-two, and Desi had trouble remembering all their names. He continued to do his gung ho act at company picnics and trips to Disneyland, but there was something sad about his bonhomie, something that seemed to suggest another farewell in the offing.
It was time to clear the air with Lucy, to speak about their marriage and their future. “We have two alternatives,” Desi told her. “Now that we have two wonderful children, after waiting all these years, it’d be a shame not to be able to spend more time with them, enjoy watching them grow. Desi will be two and a half and Lucie four this summer. We could teach them to fish, ride a horse, and I could take all of you to Cuba to meet your thousands of relatives. What do you think?”
“You said we had two alternatives. What is the other one?”
To stay as they were, in Desi’s view, was to drown. Therefore, if he and Lucy were not to get out they had to grow. They had won awards, made money, achieved national recognition. Yet he could not let go of the idea that the town still considered him a pushy Cuban, a bonito swimming with the sharks. In A Book, his candid memoir, Desi recalls his feelings, summarized in a warning to Lucy: “Unfortunately there is no such thing as a nice little company surviving anymore. You don’t see many individually owned grocery stores or the little drugstore on the corner. They’re all gone. Big Fish eats them all up.”
Lucy’s rhetorical question said it all: “How do you quit a number-one show?”
There was more to her decision than staying at the top of the heap. To retire meant that she and Desi would be forced to share each other’s company day in and day out, month in and month out. Something of the fantasist lingered in Lucy; on rare occasions she caught herself wishing for an intimate and comfortable middle age with her husband, shuttling casually between Palm Springs and Los Angeles, visiting Europe when the spirit moved them, watching the children grow and learn. But the realist in her knew better than to batten on a dream. “I still preferred to spend my weekends resting, playing cards, and sitting on the floor with the kids,” she was to write. Sad to say, Desi was “too keyed up and restless for such pleasures.” Typically, after the last business was completed on Friday night, chauffeurs drove the Arnazes home in a limousine and station wagon. Once Lucy and the children were settled in, Desi would take off. “It was go, go, go, all the time,” she added resentfully, “to the golf links, to his new motel, the gambling tables, or his yacht.”
Yet she could often be enough of an irritant to drive her husband away. The script man Maury Thompson recounted Lucy’s aggressive behavior off the set: “She loves to hurt a man. She’s kicked Desi in the nuts several times. Just bowled him over. She laughed about it. If he’s stooped over, she’ll kick him in the butt, and she’ll aim low and she’ll hit him right in the balls.” On another occasion, Desi insisted on remaining at the country club to watch the Kentucky Derby. Lucy wanted to go home, and when he refused she got in a golf cart and furiously drove off. Thompson happened to be there that day as well, and she took him home to look after the children. He, Lucie, and Desi IV were in the swimming pool when Lucy joined them. “You’re the only one in the world I would ever show myself to in a swimming suit,” she told the guest. “Well, you look marvelous,” Thompson responded. “And she did. She was tight, thin, no stomach, long legs, just freckles on her legs. She got in the water, and she swam the breaststroke, always keeping her head above water. I treasure that moment. Because she was thoroughly relaxed and enjoying it. Then Desi got home, and she got mad again. There were only those few moments that there was no one to worry about.”
As the year drew on, Desi found it impossible to play the genial Latino around the office. His smile turned into an unconvincing rictus, and casual conversations took on a metallic edge. The higher he rose, the greater became his fear of falling. “Failure is the most terrible thing in our business,” he observed. “When we fail, the whole world knows it. When a Fuller Brush man fails, does the whole world know it? That’s why we break our ass not to.” Assurances from Lucy were not enough to put him at ease anymore. He lost his temper at home, often over trivial matters. “He stopped discussing any of our personal problems,” she was to say. “I had to dig and dig to discover what caused his rages, and generally it had nothing to do with anything I’d done. I wanted to help him, find out where I was at fault. But as soon as I started questioning, he’d stalk angrily out of the room. Or the house.”
Edgy and unwell, Desi consulted his physician. What Dr. Marcus Rabwin learned could hardly have been a surprise. The patient’s colon was full of diverticula, inflamed by continuous mental pressure and tension. Untreated or exacerbated, this was the kind of ailment that could kill. The doctor advised Desi to rent a house on the beach and get away from the studio the minute he finished filming. “Have somebody drive you to the beach and stay there until Monday morning,” he prescribed. “Have Lucy and the children join you there for Saturday and Sunday and don’t even think about the business. During the summer take six or eight weeks off, and even if they offer you the entire CBS network to come back to work during those weeks, tell them to stick it.”
Looking back, Desi agreed that this was “wonderful advice and it helped a lot, at least for a while.” A very short while. Then other panaceas took over: booze, women, and intense labor. You had to work pretty goddamn hard if you were going to be a Big Fish.