CHAPTER TEN
MORE THAN one industrialist has acquired a movie studio in the hopes of diversifying his holdings and maybe meeting a few starlets along the way. Almost all have unloaded the investment within a few years, victimized by circumstance, bad timing, and the Hollywood operators who always manage to fleece “civilians”—their pejorative term for those outside of show business.
Howard Hughes was just such a civilian, entering major motion picture production with the purchase of RKO in 1948. At first he enjoyed the glamour; columnists coupled his name with actresses including Linda Darnell, Yvonne De Carlo, Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, and Terry Moore (who later claimed to have been secretly married to him). His reputation for eccentricity took another leap when he paid particular attention to Jane Russell’s poitrine during filming of The Outlaw. Noticing that the leading lady’s lavish bust rose and sagged unpredictably, he asked for a drawing board and a pencil. “This is really just a very simple engineering problem,” he told a designer. He sketched a brassiere that would stabilize the focal points of the picture and saw to it that it was manufactured and worn. Extensively hyped, the Western made Russell a star, and established the name of Hughes in Hollywood. Unfortunately for him, the rest of RKO’s movies could not be treated as engineering problems; what followed The Outlaw was a string of undistinguished failures.
By 1955 Hughes wanted out. He sold the studio to the General Tire & Rubber Company; that company had no more luck than he did, and two years later it put RKO on the block. General Tire’s intention was to take a loss, offsetting capital gains for the past fiscal year. For $6.5 million a buyer would get all assets of properties in Los Angeles and Culver City, including sets and office equipment. “Everything,” said the company representative when he waved the offer before Desi, “except unproduced scripts and stories and unfinished films.”
The sum was more than Desilu had, and perhaps more than it could borrow. Before Desi dismissed the idea out of hand, however, he called the Great Eccentric himself and told him about the prospective sale of his old studio’s properties.
“What do they want for them?” barked Howard Hughes.
Desi gave him the details.
“Grab it! Even if you tear them down and make them into parking lots, you’ve gotta make money.”
Hughes’s argument not only convinced Desi, it persuaded a lender; the Bank of America advanced $2 million after he negotiated the selling price down to $6.15 million. One key individual had been deliberately shut out of the bargaining—Lucy. Leery of her reaction, Desi asked his chief financial officer, Edwin E. Holly, to break the news. According to Holly, Desi “wasn’t going to go out and tell Lucy she was going to have to mortgage the house, the kids, and everything else. This was, in effect, putting everything they and the company had on the line.” Holly approached the I Love Lucy set with trepidation, keeping out of the star’s way while she filmed a scene with Vivian Vance. When the two women took a break he hustled Lucy into her dressing room, briskly went through highlights of the RKO acquisition, and waited for the explosion. “Is this your recommendation?” was her sole question. Holly nodded. “Then go do it,” Lucy told him. He responded with a mix of awe and dismay. Lucy “walked out of the dressing room right onstage with Vivian—she had just made the biggest decision she’d ever make in her lifetime from a business standpoint, and went right back into the routine they had been doing.”
To a degree, she was protecting herself. It was true that I Love Lucy was an autocracy. Desi liked to tell the writers that whenever there was a disagreement about stories or gags, there would be a simple vote: “We’ll do it democratically. Lucy wins.” To underline her value, when she tripped and fell over a cable, he ran over, ostentatiously helped her up, and said to the room, “Amigos, anything happens to her, we’re all in the shrimp business.”
Yet much of this deference was for display, and Lucy knew it. As Desilu’s vice president she had become little more than an ornament. Desi and his executives bought and developed the television programs going out under the company name; they were the ones who met the payroll and ran the day-to-day operations. It was an arrangement Lucy could live with; as an administrator Desi still had her full faith and credit. It was only as a husband that he had crucially diminished his wife’s trust.
For the 1956–1957 season, Lucy rubber-stamped a decision to relocate the Ricardos and the Mertzes. The quartet moved from New York City to suburban Connecticut in order to refresh the series and give the writers new plot lines, and Ricky moved up in his professional world—he was now the owner of his own nightclub, the Babalu.
The changes could be effective; a classic episode, “Lucy Does the Tango,” was produced during this period. The two couples decide to earn money by raising chickens in their backyards. When the hens fail to produce, Ricky threatens to sell the house and move back to the city. But now Lucy and Ethel have fallen in love with country life; retreat is unthinkable. To foil Desi they buy dozens of eggs, conceal them in their clothing, and proceed to the chicken house, where they plan to stuff the nests. Before they can get to their destination, however, Desi interrupts them. He needs Lucy right now, to go over a tango for an upcoming PTA fund-raiser. Lucy and Vivian deliberately rehearsed without eggs, and their reactions at show time were authentic and explosively funny. Indeed, the dodging and writhing, and the final crunching of eggs in her costume, brought Lucy a sustained sixty-fivesecond laugh—the longest of her career. “No matter what we wrote for the scene with the eggs,” recalled Robert Schiller, “Lucille did it better than we could have imagined it.” His partner Robert Weiskopf added: “And that bit where Frawley opens the door and hits Viv in the ass, cracking the eggs, was the topper.”
As usual, Desi struggled to maintain his composure when scenes like that were under way. Several weeks later—and for very different reasons—his façade broke down when he was one of the hosts at the Ninth Annual Emmy Awards. “Usually Arnaz, despite personal problems, was completely professional,” recalls Geoffrey Mark Fidelman in The Lucy Book. This evening, however, Desi’s manner was “forced and overdone.” It was the only time in Desi’s career when his drinking was detectable onscreen. Formally attired, sweating profusely, he kept telling bad jokes to an unresponsive audience, and weaving in and out of focus, flummoxing the cameramen.
During this period, no one knew which Arnaz would appear on the set or in the office, the high Desi and or the low one, the gregarious glad-hander or the irresponsible alcoholic, the great straight man or the distracted executive, the affectionate family man or the driven womanizer. Yet throughout it all, he remained one of the best talent scouts and developers in the business. One evening, as he and Lucy idly watched bandleader Horace Heidt on his NBC show, a five-year-old percussionist debuted. Billed as “the World’s Tiniest Drummer,” Keith Thibodeaux possessed stage presence, musical ability, and that great desideratum, a fleeting resemblance to Desi IV. Within days Desi Sr. signed the child and hired Keith’s father as a Desilu publicist, thereby assuring his loyalty. Under the name Richard Keith, the little musician appeared on I Love Lucy in the part of Little Ricky. The cast welcomed him aboard—with the exception of Frawley, who did his customary curmudgeon act. As the boy amused himself by drawing on a scratch pad during breaks, someone asked, “Richard, what are you doing?” From the sidelines, Frawley grumbled, “He’s writing me out.” To the Cuban community, as to many other Latinos, Thibodeaux actually served to widen the cultural separation between father and son. In Life on the Hyphen, a study of Hispanic-Americana, Gustavo Pérez Firmat observes: “[Little Ricky’s] appearances in the show make clear that, his father’s bedtime stories notwithstanding, the cultural identity is papi’s alone. Little Ricky couldn’t speak accented English even if he tried. There is a healthy continuity between father and son, but there is also a healthy distance. When Ricky gets old enough to play an instrument, he follows in his father’s steps by choosing drums. But instead of the Afro-Cuban tumbadora, little Ricky plays the American trap drums.”
Offscreen, young Thibodeaux played another kind of role as he quickly became absorbed into the Arnaz family. “It was as if we had three children instead of two,” Desi wrote proudly. The truth was not quite so benign. Although Keith was two years older than Desi IV, the boys did become fast friends, and under Desi’s tutelage they learned how to swim, fish, and ride horses. From the outside, it seemed an idyll—a little boy turned into a TV star, and enjoying the benefits of two happy families. In reality, Keith’s father and mother later divorced, and the elder Thibodeaux married a Desilu secretary. Chez Arnaz, Keith remembered, “Desi was a really great guy when he wasn’t drinking.” Unhappily, those occasions grew more infrequent as the seasons went by: “As kids, we’d definitely stay away from him when he was drunk.” One evening when Keith was sleeping over, the boys were awakened by a ruckus outside the bedroom. Desi had heard that his son’s tutor had called Desi IV “spoiled” and later, Keith recalled, “caught the guy talking to a girl in the living room and just beat him badly. Desi IV and I hid in the maid’s quarters.”
Marcella Rabwin, wife of Dr. Marcus Rabwin, Desi’s physician, recollected the Low Desi. When he imbibed heavily, “there wasn’t a personality change, but an intensification of all the worst things about him—the swearing got much worse. His language was always offensive. He used the worst language I’ve ever heard. It would get even worse when he got drunk. But it took a lot of liquor to make him drunk—he drank all evening long.”
At the same time, the High Desi operated his business with an amalgam of luck, instinct, and acuity. It was he who saw dollar signs upon reading The Untouchables by retired G-man Eliot Ness, leader of the group that nailed Al Capone. Warner Brothers had taken an option on the book, but never got around to developing it. Desi ordered his legal department to stay on the qui vive: the day Warner dropped its option they were to grab the project for Desilu. Warner let the contract lapse, and Desilu acquired The Untouchables. Desi assigned a writer, Paul Monash, bounced the first draft, got the cops-and-robbers scenario he wanted, and made plans for a two-part series bankrolled at a half-million dollars. His top executives were against this extravagance, but the matter was settled with a Lucy-style vote: the opposition made their case and Desi overruled them.
There were more obstacles. Desi’s childhood friend, Sonny Capone, called when he learned of the undertaking. “Why you? Why did you have to do it?” he demanded. Desi gave his standard rationale: “If I don’t do it somebody else is going to do it, and maybe it’s better that I’m going to do it.” Sonny replied with a million-dollar nuisance lawsuit claiming defamation of character.
And that was the least of the worries. Desi entertained a brief fantasy about playing Eliot Ness himself, but his first serious choice of leading man was Van Heflin. When that actor turned it down, Desi went to another Van, Johnson, who readily agreed to do the pilot film for $10,000. Desilu proceeded with arrangements, ordering sets to be built, contracting for cameras, crews, and the requisite technicians. Less than forty-eight hours before the shooting was to begin, Evie Johnson phoned. Speaking in the dual role of Van’s wife and his manager, she demanded a 100 percent salary increase. After all, Evie reminded Desi, The Untouchables program was going to be in two parts. Upon reflection she’d decided the right price would be $10,000 per episode.
“It was Saturday night,” Desi rancorously noted. On Monday morning the first scene to be filmed “was the one in which Eliot Ness took a truck, busted into a brewery with his men, and proceeded to tear it apart. We had about 150 union people—and you can’t cancel a call on a weekend.
“Evie knew this, so she was putting a gun in my back. ‘Either give him $20,000,’ she said, ‘or he won’t be there Monday morning.’ ”
Desi slammed down the phone and called his chief of production. The advice: pay the $20,000. “It’s going to cost you $150,000 if you don’t shoot on Monday.”
“Maybe it will,” replied the boss, “but I am not going to kiss this lady’s ass.” So saying, Desi began to comb through the Academy Directory. He settled on the name and image of Robert Stack. The former juvenile lead was best known for having given Deanna Durbin her first kiss more than ten years before; nevertheless, at that moment Desi professed to see in him an “Alan Ladd kind of quality and the same even-toned performance.” Operating on adrenaline and coffee, he tracked the actor down at Chasen’s on Saturday night, made an offer via phone: $10,000 for the two-part Untouchables, with a guarantee of $7,500 per episode plus 15 percent of the profits if the show became a weekly series. By the time Stack got home, a script was waiting for him. He read it and before dawn agreed to the conditions without a written contract—Desi’s word was good enough.
With the cast in place, Desi went to William Paley and announced Desilu’s series for the fall: The Texan, with Rory Calhoun, The Ann Sothern Show, starring Lucy’s old friend, and The Untouchables. The CBS chief agreed to run the first two, but passed on the third. In the first place, Paley grumbled, “What the hell are you going to do after you do Capone?”
Desi replied: “Don’t you know how many crooks you had in this country? We can go on forever telling the stories about all the gangsters.”
“Well, Chico, there is another problem. Paramount is doing a pilot for us about gangsters.”
Insisting emptily that his was better, Desi went hunting for a new home for The Untouchables. He found it at ABC. There was yet another hurdle. Desi sensed that an authoritative voice-over, someone from the Capone era, was needed to make the program work. Walter Winchell seemed ideal for the role—except that he was involved in a lawsuit with the network. Moreover, Lucy had never forgiven Winchell his cheap scoop, nearly wrecking her career with news about the Communist Party registration. Yes, she acknowledged, the columnist had backtracked and apologized. But that was only after the public and the President had come to her rescue. Operating under the classic Hollywood motto “I’ll never speak to you again—until I need you,” Desi pointed out, “Look, honey, this is business, so let bygones be bygones.” She allowed herself to be persuaded. ABC grumbled about Winchell, but had no voice in casting.
In the end, everything went Desi’s way. The two-part Untouchables performed so well in the ratings that ABC agreed to do it as a series, underwriting thirty-two hour-long episodes, each one bloodier and more violent than the one before. In another extension of the Desilu family, the show would be produced by Quinn Martin, the husband of Madelyn Pugh.
All this time Desi was rolling sevens as a high-stakes gambler and genially telling the press he was a “verry locky Cuban.” He believed that his dark side was out of view. Only occasionally would an article hint that things were less than ideal at Desilu. In one issue Life commented, “Sometimes the old worry over playing second-fiddle to Lucy’s fame shows beneath his brashness.” For instance, the story continued, when he bought a champion racehorse the papers paid more attention to Lucy. With derisive attention to Desi’s accent, the magazine offered a quote: “Geez, how do you like that? I pay 31,000 bucks for dees horse, and who gets her peecture on zee front page—my wife.” This was accompanied by a wide smile, as if to indicate that it was all in fun. It was not.
As the anger and resentment mounted, so did the need to go on long alcoholic binges. Desi got too many calories from liquor, and began putting on pounds that he could not diet away. His face was frequently flushed, and instead of making him appear youthful, the hair dye only seemed to accentuate his onrushing middle age. Important documents were brought to Desi in the morning when he was clearheaded. The drinking could begin as early as 10 a.m., and after lunch it was useless to talk to him seriously about contractual matters. That meant involving Lucy in the process, if only to rubber-stamp decisions that had already been made. Not that it mattered; for the most part she was content to leave the big Desilu matters to others. Only on trivial items did she exert her authority, ruling on the commissary menus, and choosing the sites for company picnics. It was another manifestation of her deference to men, something that she could not shake even now. And besides, whenever matters got too complicated, whenever the alcohol and abuse became too much to bear, she could always retreat to the character she had invented: television’s own Lucille Ball.
At the conclusion of the 1956–1957 season, Lucy, Desi, and CBS agreed that they ought to go out on top. There had been a few tight moments: Charles Van Doren’s last two weeks on Twenty-One (rigged, as it turned out) had topped Lucy in the ratings. And there were other moments when Desi regretted selling all the past I Love Lucy shows to CBS for $4.5 million, a sum that was beginning to look like a bargain for the network. But overall Lucy and Desi had exceeded their most exaggerated hopes. Almost every aspect of popular culture had been influenced by the show. Licensing fees brought them dividends from a syndicated “I Love Lucy” comic strip running in 132 newspapers, and from the sale of a million Little Ricky dolls. Between the Arnazes and the cast there had been more than two hundred awards, including five Emmys and twenty-three Emmy nominations. Only so many changes could be wrung out of the same half-hour format, with the same conniving couples. I Love Lucy had even run out of ideas for amusing guest shots, like the visit from Orson Welles, playing Orson Welles, egomaniest magician and Shakespearean ham, or the appearance of George Reeves, TV’s Superman, at Little Ricky’s birthday party. Yet because the public still loved Lucy, Desi devised a scheme to take advantage of this profitable affection: the Ricardos would carry on in semimonthly hour-long episodes. The notion of giving the Mertzes their own spinoff comedy was quickly chloroformed by Vance. She refused to make a half-hour pilot because it would extend her on-camera relationship with Frawley. “Whenever I received a new I Love Lucy script,” she declared, “I raced through it, praying that there wouldn’t be a scene where we had to be in bed together.” Desi offered a $50,000 bonus if she would change her mind, but Vance was adamant.
Undeterred, he proposed a dozen new hour-long Lucy shows to CBS. The network allowed him to produce five. Each would be sponsored by the Ford Motor Company, which insisted on—and ultimately received—top billing. The first Ford Lucille Ball–Desi Arnaz Show, subtitled “Lucy Takes a Cruise to Havana,” was partially filmed in Cuba only a week before the Castro revolution. Built around a flashback, the program begins with columnist Hedda Hopper grilling the Ricardos and the Mertzes in Connecticut. How did it all begin? asks the news hen. In a dissolve to the past, Lucy McGillicuddy and her friend Suzy McNamara (Ann Sothern) are seen on a vacation cruise to Havana. Onboard they meet singer Rudy Vallee, and in Cuba Lucy is introduced to the man who will be the love of her life, musician Ricky Ricardo. At a café Lucy tries to persuade Vallee to hire Ricky for his band, thereby bringing him to New York. Lucy’s sales talk is lubricated with booze, and before the evening is finished she and Suzy are arrested for being drunk and disorderly. They just barely get up the gangplank before their boat departs for the States.
Seasoned though they were, the four writers had script trouble. The weekly continuity of the half-hour Lucys had build up an audience of devotees over the years. It needed no “back story” to explain the characters. The one-hour format had to start from square one. Over thirty minutes, observed Bob Schiller, many episodes could be built on one large comedy scene. Not true of the long form, where shows had to have two or three to sustain the humor. In his view, “these were never as successful as the shorter ones, despite larger budgets and longer rehearsal time.”
That was not how Desi saw it, however. To him, the cruise show was a triumph from start to finish: “It was beautifully written and it played great.” The comment was more than hyperbole. He approved the story line and the gags, played straight man with his usual cunning and enthusiasm, oversaw the editing, and pronounced the finished product too impressive to be further reduced. When William Paley called to find out how the show had turned out, Desi assured the CBS chief that it was the best work he and Lucy had ever done. “There’s only one little problem,” he added. “We got an hour and fifteen minutes.” Not to worry, Paley assured him. Simply cut the seventy-five minutes to the appropriate length. No, Desi protested, that wouldn’t do. Paley was willing to meet him halfway: “Well make your opening show an hour and a half and the rest will be an hour.”
“I tried that, too, but it also louses it up. It slows it down here and there. What we’ve got is a great hour and fifteen minutes.”
“Now, Chico, let me explain something to you. Television has fifteen-minute shows, half-hour shows, hour shows, sometimes even hour-and-a-half or two-hour shows, but it does not have any such thing as an hour-and-fifteen-minute show.”
“Well, that’s what we’ve got. Why can’t we get fifteen more minutes from whoever follows us?”
“Right after your hour special comes The United States Steel Hour.”
“So tell them to give us fifteen minutes of their time.”
There followed a sulfurous exchange, after which Paley concluded, “You want me to call United States Steel, tell them they’ve got such a lousy show it wouldn’t hurt them any if they give you fifteen minutes of their time.”
“Would you mind if I called them?”
“No, do whatever you want, just make sure you keep me out of it.”
Now all Desi had to do was convince U.S. Steel and Ford to accede to his wishes. Operating with maximum chutzpah, he located the vice president in charge of TV for U.S. Steel. Aware that The United States Steel Hour had languished in the ratings, Desi proposed: “You give me fifteen minutes from the front of your show. Instead of you going on at ten o’clock, you go on at ten-fifteen. At the end of our show, at ten-fourteen exactly, I will come on, in person, as Desi Arnaz, not as Ricky, and thank The United States Steel Hour for allowing Lucy and me to cut into your time period, tell the audience we have seen your show and it is one of the best dramatic shows we have ever seen, and to make sure to stay tuned for it.”
“Who pays for those fifteen minutes we are going to give up?”
Improvising fluently, Desi declared: “Our sponsor, the Ford Motor Company.”
“You got yourself a deal.”
That he did. And on November 6, 1957, U.S. Steel doubled its rating in the bargain.
The second show, broadcast a month later, did not enjoy the same smooth transition. Originally, Bette Davis was scheduled to be the guest on the program subtitled “The Celebrity Next Door.” She was still lording it over her former classmate from the John Murray Anderson school thirty years before. The movies’ grand dame demanded a $20,000 fee, return airfare to her home in Maine, and, in case anyone doubted her enduring star power, equal billing with the Arnazes. She got them all—and then suffered a horseback riding accident, which aggravated a back injury, broke her arm, and put her out of commission.
Second choice was Tallulah Bankhead. The casting seemed appropriate: Bankhead’s hooting, extravagant style was widely considered the source of Davis’s performance in the 1950 film All About Eve. Asked about that movie, Bankhead claimed to bear no ill feelings. “Bette and I are very good friends,” she purred in her distinctive whiskey drawl. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t say to her face—both of them.” This malice, coupled with her dependence on alcohol, made rehearsals a running psychodrama. The actress would arrive at the set promptly at 9:30 a.m. But, complained Desi, “she wouldn’t really wake up until eleven. Between eleven and twelve she was fine. But one p.m., right after lunch, we’d lose her again.”
Lucy was not used to having her orders questioned on the set. Only a few times had she backed down when challenged, and then only when a director asserted himself. Performers never dared to disobey her.
The condition was about to change. Lucy had a way of snapping her fingers and giving line readings to cast members; when she tried that on her guest, Tallulah grabbed her hand and responded before the cast in a distinctive throaty bellow, “Don’t ever do that to me!” Shocked at such a mutinous reply, Lucy could only mumble, “Well, I want you to read the lines right.” “I have been acting for a long time,” Bankhead reminded her. “I know how to read my lines. Don’t give me readings.” With that she walked off the set. The move was just another stagy tantrum; later in the day Bankhead came back and rehearsed as if nothing had happened. But tensions rebuilt over the next week as Tallulah showed up late, blew her lines, and bumped into the furniture.
The night before the actual filming, Desi invited principals, writers, and selected personnel into his office for a drink. There, he felt, last-minute notes could be given in an atmosphere of conviviality, and past difficulties could be smiled away. As the group sat in a circle chatting amiably, Lucy made a special effort to charm. She indicated the crocheted garment Bankhead wore around her shoulders: “I love that sweater.”
“My dahling, take it!” Tallulah practically threw the thing in Lucy’s face, despite her protests. There was a moment of icy silence, broken by Vivan Vance’s cheery remark: “Well, for me, the slacks. I love the slacks.” Tallulah promptly stood up and peeled off her slacks. Anything to oblige. She was not wearing any panties.
Madelyn covered her eyes. Bob Weiskopf jumped from the couch and headed out the door. “Desi, get her a robe!” Lucy yelled. “Get her a robe!”
“Tallulah was all set to sit there with her legs crossed on the floor for the rest of the evening,” recalled Maury Thompson. “Here came Desi with a dressing gown and put it on her and she condescended.” It was no wonder that Lucy chain-smoked up to the time she went on camera for the real performance, and that Desi planned to go on a bender as soon as they wrapped—after the inevitable retakes, of course. What possessed them to hire this aging egomaniac lush in the first place? he wondered.
Tallulah surprised them all. When it counted, she knew every line cold, hit every mark, elicited every laugh. She was so professional that it was Lucy who flubbed words so badly a scene had to be reshot. Later Tallulah told the press, “I’ve got not even one picayune derogatory thing to say about those wonderful people.” That sentence alone should have warned the Arnazes to duck. “Of course,” she went on, “I did have pneumonia at the time. And someone nearly blinded me one day at rehearsals with hairspray. But Lucy? She’s divine to work with! And Desi? He’s brilliant. He has a temper, however. But that’s because he’s fat. It worries him.”
The Ford Lucille Ball–Desi Arnaz Show outrated all other programs the week the episode was broadcast, and Variety, like many another paper, found the leading ladies “an irresistible combination.” Nevertheless “The Celebrity Next Door” was a program that Lucy found hard to watch in later years: “It reminds me how I allowed Bankhead to mop up the floor with us.” There would be no more mopping-up from the guests. From here on, misery would be an inside job.
The odd thing was,” said a veteran of the one-hour shows, “that while Desi was going downhill personally, he remained at the absolute top of his game professionally.” Bert Granet, who produced those programs, agreed: “Desi was a very, very bright man. And a wonderful boss.” However, he added, that wonderful boss “would sometimes go away for two or three weeks at a time. He loved to play. Desi was really a silent-picture star at heart.”
His flamboyance, coupled with a gambler’s instinct and a seducer’s charm, had brought Desi every material object he could have desired. And he was not parsimonious with his fortune. When one of the hour-long programs was in trouble, Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf came up with a saving idea. Recollecting that comedian George Jessel had made a long-running routine out of phone calls to his mother, the writers created “tag scenes” in which Lucy telephoned Desi and made funny comments about the show she (and the audience) had just seen. It extended her airtime without involving her in any of costume changes or story lines, and, incidentally, saved the show. Lucy showered the men with praise, but Desi had a more dramatic way of showing his gratitude: he gave each of them a Jaguar sports car.
Generous though his gesture was, there were not enough Jaguars in London or, for that matter, writers in Hollywood to keep the Lucy-Desi program from going stale. Under new sponsorship for the 1958–1959 season, it was given a new and ungainly listing: The Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse Presents the Lucille Ball–Desi Arnaz Show. Looking back, Granet regretfully acknowledged: “Every comedy show reaches a point where it has outwritten itself. So you do the best you can to keep the thing afloat. Of these hour-long shows, five or six of them are really memorable. The rest are probably better left forgotten.” One of the most memorable featured Lucy’s great admirer, Red Skelton. The comedian had performed his Chaplinesque pantomime, “Freddy the Freeloader,” for decades. It was never quite the same from performance to performance, delighting his fans, who found something new every time they watched the sketch. But that very mutability was what drove Lucy to distraction. She wanted every take to be exactly like the one before—except a little bit better—and ultimately she showed Skelton how to do his own material. Professional to his fingertips, Red followed her instructions. But they were never to work together again.
The most forgettable episode featured the acting couple Ida Lupino and Howard Duff. Lucy warned her director, Jerry Thorpe, that Lupino had no gift for comedy, and the result bore her out. The scene is a summer cabin in Vermont. A travel agent has booked the Ricardos in for the week, forgetting that he has already leased the place to the Duffs. The two pairs ultimately agree to share the place, and so begins the familiar, and no longer very risible, boys-against-the-girls routine, with a worn-looking Desi and an acerbic Lucy throwing lines in a game with no catchers. Offscreen, matters were every bit as grim. Desi made some verbal passes at Lupino in the presence of his wife and her husband; Lucy reacted coldly. This was followed by a greater drop in temperature when Lupino learned of Lucy’s misgivings about her acting skills. The gelid relations between the couples was enough to wreck the timing and ruin the program. Variety remarked that “Lucy’s Summer Vacation” was the only episode that “falls flat most of the way,” and Bob Weiskopf later admitted, “This was not our finest hour.”
As the 1950s wound down, both William Frawley and Vivian Vance took advantage of their national celebrity. Frawley recorded an album on the Dot label. Bill Frawley Sings the Old Ones presented the actor in a serious mode, crooning with surprising control and a mellifluous voice. The numbers included several that he had helped to popularize in his vaudeville days, including “Melancholy Baby,” “Carolina in the Morning,” “For Me and My Gal,” and “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now.” Vance filmed the pilot for a half-hour situation comedy based on the Patrick Dennis novel Guestward Ho! The show was not, strictly speaking, a spin-off of I Love Lucy, but Vance would play a very similar character. This time out, however, she would be the lead. On the first take, the star seemed to freeze in her tracks. A second and third take found her equally immobile. The director asked her what was wrong. Vance explained: “This is the first time in eight years I’ve been in my own light.” She had been dominated by Lucy for so long she scarcely knew how to move on her own. (The show did not find a buyer until 1960, when Joanne Dru took the part. The latter-day Guestward Ho! ran for thirty-eight episodes.)
Meanwhile, Lucy made herself as busy as possible, if only to keep from obsessing about the continuing failure of her marriage. Much of her thought and energy went into the establishment of the Desilu Workshop, an homage to the school Lela Rogers had set up for young hopefuls in the RKO days. Abetted by Maury Thompson, Lucy auditioned some 1,700 applicants and chose 22 to take lessons and, eventually, to perform in the company’s two-hundred-seat theater. Lucy took great pains to explain that her classes were strictly nonprofit. In fact, she said, Desilu lost money on the deal: “We pay them sixty dollars a week—the Actors Equity minimum—and they’re free to work wherever they want. They’re not tied to us at all.” She bemoaned the catch-22 of show business: “You can’t get a job unless you’ve acted, and you can’t act unless you’ve had a job. We’re just trying to give them exposure.”
As a teacher and adviser, Lucy had no rivals. She was an unquestioned authority, the biggest name in television comedy. The students cared little about the imperfect hourly shows, and had no notion of their teacher’s collapsing personal life. They regarded her as a goddess, and their adoration helped to salve a severely damaged ego. But it was not enough. Lucy had always flirted with superstition and numerology—she had been convinced, for example, that the letters A and R, as in “Arnaz” and “Ricardo,” brought good luck. Now she turned to astrology, accompanying Arlene Dahl, another unhappily married redhead, to the lectures of Carroll Righter.
The man who called himself “the Gregarious Aquarius” had risen to the status of Astrologer to the Stars. Among his clients were Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Susan Hayward, and Charlie Chaplin. Dahl was especially impressed; she attended many of Righter’s “zodiac parties,” given for his favorites. The fete he gave for her had a Leo theme, complete with lion. The big cat was so drugged he fell into the swimming pool and had to be hauled out, but no one saw this as an embarrassment. Righter was much too important to be mocked. It was common knowledge that he had told Hayward the best time to sign a film contract was at exactly 2:47 a.m. She set her alarm for 2:45 so that she could obey his instructions. Like the others, she agreed with the astrologer’s self-appraisal: “They need me here. Just like they need a doctor.”
The stargazer traced the roots of the Arnazes’ difficulties to the constellations. Lucy was a Leo and her husband a Pisces. Soon other astrologists summed up the fate of the union. One report read: “Desi is emotional, tender, sentimental, easily swayed by moods and appeals to sympathy. Lucille is as committed and loyal as Desi is, but Lucille is uncomfortable feeling or expressing softness, neediness, vulnerability, and emotion in general. She can easily dominate or trample over Desi’s feelings, and this can be a source of considerable unhappiness.”
When the unhappiness persisted, Lucy turned away from the heavens and sought earthly help. She turned to the apostle of self-esteem, the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale. In his heyday from the late 1940s to the early 1980s, the pastor of Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate Church was the most popular minister in America. His book The Power of Positive Thinking sold in the millions (he wrote forty-six books in all), and his sermons were mailed to 750,000 adherents every month. A believer in “positive imaging,” a mixture of religious philosophy and motivational psychology, Peale had special appeal for middle- and high-level executives. In a typical speech to Merrill Lynch real estate associates, he declared: “If you see yourself as inferior in any way, and you hold that image in your conscious mind, it will presently, by the process of intellectual osmosis, sink into the unconscious and you will be what you visualize. If, on the contrary, you see yourself as organized, controlled, studious, a thinker, a worker, believing in your talent and ability and yourself, over a period of time that is what you will become.”
Here was a philosophy Lucy could apprehend. She had been reading Peale’s words for some time, and when he visited California on a speaking tour, she sought him out and invited him to her Palm Springs home. Actress and singer Sheila MacRae, then suffering from her own marital tribulations, remembered: “We kneeled in front of her new fireplace and prayed with him for about an hour, and we both cried and hugged each other.” More could be gleaned from this inspiring figure, Lucy decided, and invited Dr. and Mrs. Peale to dinner sans Desi. Peale asked if he might bring his brother along. She was only too glad to oblige. The brother, as it happened, was an obvious alcoholic, and when Lucy tried to steer the conversation around to her current difficulties, Dr. Peale thrummed, “If only you knew what a role model you two are—a marriage with love.”
Lucy followed that unsatisfactory meeting with another. She wrote to Peale “in heartbreaking terms, and so he invited her to come to New York.” Psychiatrist Smiley Blanton “was Dr. Peale’s right-hand man. Norman wanted it known that she could talk to Smiley—whose wife just ‘happened’ to have a script for her to read.” (Lucy did read the script of Mrs. Margaret Gray Blanton’s best-seller, Bernadette of Lourdes, and persuaded Desi to have a look. He signed the author to adapt the book for television.) Deliberately ignoring evidence that she was being courted for her fame, Lucy devoured Peale’s and Blanton’s books. Surely these wise men would show her the way to tranquillity.
While she was researching, she obtained more immediate help from her cousin Cleo, who flew into town and listened to Lucy’s litany of sorrows. “Why can’t I be happy?” Lucy cried. Cleo replied with another question: “What is it you want more than anything in the world?” For a woman supposedly wracked by domestic woes, Lucy gave an answer that was astonishing to both of them: “My career.”
Later in the week she bought a ticket to the Broadway comedy The Marriage-Go-Round starring Claudette Colbert, an old acquaintance from the war bond days. Backstage, she ran into another Hollywood veteran, Greer Garson, appearing down the street in Auntie Mame. Instead of being mobbed, the three actresses were alone and unsought. They wound up in Colbert’s apartment for a late-night meal. “So here we were,” Lucy wistfully remembered, “three old broads making scrambled eggs at two o’clock in the morning and bored to tears with each other!”
By now nothing seemed to work. Lucy remembered the words of Humphrey Bogart when he was slowly dying of cancer. He and his wife Lauren Bacall had no financial problems. In fact, he lamented, “Money is about all we do have.” That had become the Arnazes’ story. Desilu was booming. In addition to the Lucy programs, the studio owned a group of top-rated hits including The Ann Sothern Show, The Walter Winchell File, The Texan, and, of course, The Untouchables. In addition, Desilu provided the facilities and talent for such successful TV series as The Betty Hutton Show, The Danny Thomas Show, DecemberBride, The Millionaire, and Wyatt Earp. These were all manufactured in a place that had become, in terms of real estate and number of projects, the largest television studio in the world. Desilu boasted twenty-six sound stages and forty-three acres of back lot, far in excess of what such old giants as Warner Brothers, MGM, and Twentieth Century–Fox had.
Lucy and Desi were always mentioned as a pair, but their sole link these days was a monetary one. The affection had drained away. They were sleeping in separate rooms and barely communicating with each other, appearing together in public principally to maintain the corporate image of Desilu. Cosmopolitan sent Frederick Christian, one of its writers, to interview them; he came away with a very different image from the one he expected to see. In his view, Desi had the aspect of “a Latin American dictator, relaxing in sports clothes.” Christian continued: “He behaves rather like a dictator, too—not a relaxing one, but a hardworking, demanding one.” The only constant in his onscreen persona and the real thing was “the strong Cuban accent, which many believe is affected for the TV role but which is authentic. In life, the accent is liberally embellished with American profanities, but they constitute a kind of working language and are used mainly for emphasis and for release.
“Desi’s accent is so strong that there are times when even Lucy cannot quite understand him.
“ ‘What do I say here?’ she asked one day during a rehearsal.
“ ‘You say, ‘I “can’t.” ’
“ ‘Can?’
“ ‘Can’t.’
“ ‘Are you saying “can” or “can’t”?’
“ ‘I’m saying “can’t,” dammit! Can’t!’ ”
Christian knew the separation rumors and asked about them. At first Lucy denied everything: “Desi and I have been in this whole thing long enough to be accustomed to them. We’ve got through that kind of thing before and, we’ll get through it again. Maybe it’s good for some couples to be separated for a time—maybe it can renew and refresh a relationship.”
“Or wreck it completely,” the journalist suggested.
“Yes, there’s always that chance,” Lucy conceded. Her face was grave—so grave that Christian concluded, “Driving back to my hotel, I kept seeing their faces: Desi’s lined and intense. Lucy’s drawn, tired, and worried.” He considered I Love Lucy and “thought of Bing Crosby’s comment: ‘This show’s got a lot of heart.’ It does. And some of it may be broken.”
Members of the Friars Club took a lighter approach to the Arnazes’ dissolution. When Lucy and Desi were being honored by twelve hundred club members, Milton Berle warned Desi not to get a divorce because “she’ll get the kids and you’ll get Olivera Street”—an unsubtle reference to the L.A. barrio. He went on to refer to the honored couple as “the Cuban Leopold and Loeb.” Lucy and Desi dutifully broke up on cue, as they did at the gags of Harry Einstein, a.k.a. the Greek radio comedian “Parkyakarkus.” Einstein reminded the audience that when the guest of honor started out he had been introduced as “Dizzy” and “D. C.,” before citing “Danny” the Cuban as one of his best friends. Milton Berle described the next moments: “Harry had been sick and a lot of people said, ‘Don’t do it,’ but he was really the smash hit of the evening. He got a standing ovation. As he sat down I looked at him and his face was turning colors. I’m sitting to his right. He took a breath and went boom and hit my shoulder, dead. I heard a lot of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ from the audience. They guessed what happened. I never saw so many pillboxes thrown. I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, take it easy; just a little accident here.’ Backstage about eight top physicians were in a tumult, working on him. They used scissors, knives, forks, I don’t know, and they tried to revive him and they couldn’t. Desi was crying. He was so beside himself, and so was Lucy. He said, ‘We’re grateful for this wonderful tribute, but we can’t go on.’ ” Comedians in attendance, among them Eddie Cantor, George Burns, Sammy Davis Jr., and Berle himself, tried to restore some lightness to the evening.
A reporter from Variety was there, and in the next issue summed up the occasion: “A great and funny dinner had become veiled with the pall of a mortuary.” For Lucy and Desi, things were not to improve. In the late 1950s, honors and dividends came at a price that neither of them had calculated.
In December 1958, Desilu became a publicly held company. Desi claimed that new money was necessary to help expand the business, and to some extent that was true. But he had more pressing financial obligations just then: seven-figure gambling debts. Shares went for $10 per at the initial public offering, and since Lucy and Desi were major stockholders, they each stood to make some $2.5 million, after taxes. Lucy kept every cent and invested it in blue-chip companies. Desi paid his creditors and wound up with less than $100,000. Only his ability to find and develop hit shows kept him solvent; he was hitting the bottle harder than ever, spiking his tomato soup with liquor, and attending meetings with a cup of 7-Up laced with vodka. Alcohol may well have been what prompted him to sell the old films of I Love Lucy to CBS for the bargain price of $4.5 million. “Even forsaking Lucy’s potential as a syndication entry,” observed Variety, “CBS estimates a $6,000,000 annual bonanza in sales of quarter-hour network segments across-the-board.” Certainly alcohol acted as the main solvent of the Arnazes’ marriage.
A few last efforts were made to save their union. Lucy persuaded Desi to accompany her when she visited a psychiatrist; perhaps a specialist could get to the roots of their trouble. It was a futile venture. “Desi and I would scream and yell in front of the doctor,” she told a friend, “because we weren’t screaming and yelling in front of the children. I felt sorry for the poor guy, he’d ask a question and the two of us would jump down his throat.” After a few sessions Desi stopped coming, and a short time later Lucy gave up as well.
A trip to Hawaii produced similar results. The couple argued for much of the time, and once, to cool off, Desi took a dip in the Pacific. He body-surfed for a while and emerged minus a glittering gold chain that held a St. Christopher medal and his wedding ring. Lucy was to categorize this as “Kind of symbolic. Our marriage was gone—so why shouldn’t his ring be, too?”
But the marriage was not quite gone—not yet. A few more painful moments had to be endured, a few more nerves rubbed raw. In early May 1959, Lucy consented to perform at a Kiwanis Club youth rally against juvenile delinquency in Oklahoma City. Lucy arrived at Taft Stadium expecting the twelve-thousand-seat arena to be overflowing with ticket-holders. At most, two thousand people showed up. It was a hot day and she decided that if this was the best Oklahoma could do, the program could jolly well go on without her. A widely syndicated Associated Press account stated that Lucille Ball “refused to leave her air-conditioned Cadillac for a scheduled comedy routine and a talk on juvenile delinquency.” Lucy’s explanation failed to convince her disappointed audience. It wasn’t just the size of the crowd, she maintained. “I’ve played to thirteen people in a dugout. It doesn’t matter to me how many there are. But when they don’t care enough to publicize the affair, it’s high time they stopped getting people to go thousands of miles to perform.”
She had a few thousand more miles to travel in the next fortnight. In a last, desperate attempt at reconciliation, the Arnazes agreed to exchange the stresses of California for the vistas of Europe. As a holiday à deux, the trip might have worked a temporary miracle. But the inclusion of the children, Lucy’s cousin Cleo, and Cleo’s husband just about guaranteed failure. On May 13, 1959, the Arnaz party boarded the Liberté in New York City and settled into six staterooms. A week later Lucy sent Hedda Hopper a letter from France. “I don’t know if Paris is ready,” she wrote, “but we sure are. . . . Forty bags, two trunks and look out, here we come—Capri, Rome, Paris, London. Everyone loves our kids—that makes us happy.”
“Happy” was, in fact, the antonym for their situation. Cleo remembered that “Desi was falling-down drunk everywhere.” In her memoir Lucy summoned up the image of a man who, “when he wasn’t drinking, spent most of his time on the phone with the studio checking the Del Mar racetrack.” She continued: “I was completely disenchanted, bitter, and unforgiving, and the kids saw and heard way too much.”
Lucy’s spirits were not aided by a London press conference. She was unfamiliar with the London gossip reporter, a species lower down the evolutionary scale than its Hollywood or New York counterpart. The questions were relentless and impolite: “How much money do you have?” “How old are you? . . . Well, if you admit to that, you must be five years older.” One paparazza took hold of little Lucie and maneuvered her behind a potted palm. “What’s it like to be rich?” she grilled the eight-year-old. “Is it true your father and mother fight all the time?” Nor was Desi bolstered by a package that came to their hotel addressed to “Mr. Ball.” He hit the bottle harder, and by the time the family visited Maurice Chevalier he was flushed and incoherent much of the time. The elderly Frenchman, living in retirement outside Paris, had done a guest shot for one of the hour-long shows in 1958; he could see what was going on between the husband and wife. Chevalier took Lucy aside and advised, “the end of a love affair is more painful than anything else on earth except for staying in a love affair that has no love left.” She assigned him the temporary role of Daddy: “He was like a father telling me it was all right to go. We cut the trip short and came back on the Île de France.”
There could have been no more appropriate vessel; this was its final voyage as an ocean liner—and the last trip the Arnazes would take as a couple. As soon as she unpacked, Lucy began to reckon how soon she could initiate divorce proceedings.
Lawyers and friends told her to proceed slowly, not only for the sake of the children but for the future of Desilu. “You and Desi signed the Westinghouse contract as partners,” a counselor reminded her. “If you walk out now, they could cancel and sue you.” In addition, Desilu was now a corporation, responsible to its many investors. To scotch rumors of an impending divorce, and to bolster an image of financial stability, Lucy and Desi sat together at the first annual stockholders’ meeting, in July 1959. Assembled at a Desilu sound stage, investors were given the official word. “We now estimate that our gross income during the current television season will be not less than $23.5 million,” company president Desi Arnaz declared, reminding them that this was “an increase of 15 percent over the last fiscal year.” In fact, as he was later to write, the company had realized a net profit of only $250,000 for the year. “We could have done better,” he admitted, “if we had put our money in a savings account.” Later in the week he and Lucy discussed a sale of the corporation. If the right bidder could be found they could probably sell at $14 or $15 per share. Everyone, he argued, would wind up richer—especially Desi and Lucy. She refused to countenance a sale.
The days of denial were growing short, and they ended when Desi took off for Europe that fall. On October 28, 1959, United Press International scooped its competitors with the story: “Desi Arnaz left for Europe today aboard the liner Queen Mary without a bon voyage from his wife, Lucille Ball, amid reports that their marriage was breaking up.” Desi denied the rumors; he was going to Rome and North Africa to scout locations and oversee some productions. Lucy had to stay stateside to edit a script. “We’re working too hard, that’s the only trouble. Probably someone heard we had an argument, but we have lots of arguments.” He added a line that had grown stale through the years: “When a redhead and a Cuban get together we argue pretty good.” Reporters who turned to Lucy got some more of the company line. Scuttlebutt about an impending breakup was, in her words, “cruel and absolutely false,” as were stories that Desilu was up for sale.
Lucy was always an orderly person, but in this period she became a demon of organization. Lucy told friends she looked upon her life as a chest of drawers: she opened one drawer, tended to whatever needed attention, closed it, and moved to the next drawer—comedy, children, Desilu, shopping, friends, each in its own time. She plastered memos to herself on the dashboard, peeling them off as soon as the assignment was done.
Desi ran his life in precisely the opposite manner. He returned from his holiday looking puffier and older; his hair, when he failed to dye it, was shot with gray. Lucy, on the other hand, had settled gracefully into her forties. She was quick to play into self-deprecation: on the show Desi’s uncle inquires, “Where did you get your beautiful red hair?” The answer: “I get my red hair every two weeks—(gasp) oops!” But the long bones and bright blue eyes were permanent gifts of nature, and her still-shapely legs and model’s carriage gave her the aura of a woman ten years younger. Nobody who met Lucy for first time believed that she was already forty-eight, whereas newcomers who encountered Desi had trouble accepting the fact that he was only forty-two. The once-boyish husband now seemed older than his wife, rather than six years her junior. The drinking had gone from self-indulgence to sickness, and in early fall he was stopped for “weaving down Vista Street,” a place known to the police as a red-light district. The arresting officers were roundly cursed on their way to the station, and while he was booked Desi threatened to call his friend J. Edgar Hoover. After half an hour in a jail cell he posted bail of $21 and was released. No harm done—except that his habit had been entered in the official record.
In the wake of this arrest, it was all but certain that the Arnazes would separate and that Desilu would be put on the block. One financial reporter noted that National Theaters & Television was interested in buying the company. It seemed a logical step; the conglomerate of movie theater owners and operators had already invested in several profitable Desilu shows, among them Grand Jury and U.S. Marshal. But negotiations never had a chance; as soon as Desi expressed interest Lucy put a stop to the talks by again refusing to sell. Four Star Production, a company headed by Dick Powell, offered to merge with Desilu. Here Desi was responsible for a breakdown in negotiations. The new company, he maintained, needed a single guiding vision. Powell agreed. The problem was that both of them wanted to be president. In the end, neither got the job.
Although those talks went nowhere, the press confirmed that Desilu was in play and concluded, not unreasonably, that Lucy and Desi were about to divorce. A story in the Hollywood Reporter suggested that battle lines had already been drawn: “We hear Lucy may align with Martin Leeds so there would no longer be a solid Arnaz block of stock.”
Lucy and Desi kept nursing separate grievances: she resented his descent into alcoholism and his driven womanizing—why, at this stage of his life, when he was rich and famous, did he have to go slumming to prostitutes? He thought of her as a woman who had suddenly become a prig in middle age. The final confrontation came on an autumn evening in 1959. They agreed to attend a formal party at Dean Martin’s house. As they entered a chauffeur-driven limousine, he threw her a compliment: “Lucy, you look like a doll. I’m going to have the best-looking date at the party.”
Coldly she inquired, “Are we going to be the last ones to leave the party again?”
“For Chrissakes, Lucy, we haven’t even left the fucking driveway yet and you’re worrying about whether we’re going to be the last ones to leave the party. I’ve got to be the last one to leave the party now. There ain’t no way I can miss. You know, in Cuba, when we have a party and it doesn’t wind up with everybody having breakfast the next morning, we consider it a lousy party. And now, if I’m having fun and want to stay a little longer than the other people, you consider me an asshole.”
It was only a question of who would be the first to crack. The answer came in late November. Another argument had occurred at the Desilu offices, and this time Desi followed Lucy down the hall. When she stopped to have a drink at the water cooler he asked her outright for a divorce. They were both miserable—why not end it now?
Lucy later claimed, “I had a lawyer in his office in twenty minutes.” That was not the case. She walked away, enraged. Whether she was angry because he had jumped the gun and asked for a split before she did, or because this was just the latest in an endless line of insults— how dare he confront her at the water cooler instead of in the privacy of their house?—was never made clear. She got home before he did, and when Desi entered she confronted him with her own question: “You meant what you said?”
“Yes, I’m very sorry, but I did. I cannot keep on living this way.”
All the misery poured out. “Why don’t you die then?” Lucy cried. “That would be a better solution, better for the children, better for everybody.”
“I’m sorry, but dying is not on my immediate schedule.”
Her tirade continued. “I’ll tell you something. You bastard, you cheat, you drunken bum, I got enough on you to hang you. By the time I get through with you you’ll be as broke as when you got here.” Now she ran completely off the rails. “You goddam spic, you . . . you wet-back!”
Desi broke away to find a cigarette in his dressing room. Lucy ran after him, and there occurred a scene that could have come straight out of I Love Lucy in its early years. She grabbed an ornamental dueling pistol that lay on his desk, aimed it at his face, and pulled the trigger. She knew very well that it was a cigarette lighter, not a real firearm; she had used the movement and the prop before, usually to conclude whatever argument they were having at the time. But this time was different; behind her gesture were years of resentment and hostility, and behind that was a lethal intent. The end of the barrel ignited and Desi lit his cigarette on the flame. After an aching silence he conceded. Lucy could be the one to sue for divorce; he would not stand in the way of a fair financial settlement. He ended by asking, a little too theatrically, “Please, don’t ever threaten me again.” After that, there was nothing to do but make an exit.
That their parents were not getting along was no secret to Lucie or Desi IV. Their anxiety and depression were reflected in poor school-work and in temperamental outbursts. Yet both continued to deny what everyone else knew was true. To be sure, their father was not around the house much. These days he spent a lot of evenings at the office, and frequently lived away from their L.A. home, usually at their Palm Springs house, but also at the Circle JR Ranch, a Thoroughbred stock farm, where he owned some racehorses. Still, other daddies were just as busy, just as scarce. And if Mommy seemed distressed much of the time, other mommies were similarly unhappy. They remained secure in the knowledge that their parents were married, that their house was not run by stepmothers and stepfathers, as were the houses of so many of their schoolmates.
The denial ended on the afternoon Lucy and Desi took the children to Palm Springs. She broke the news gently: “I have to tell you that Mommy and Daddy are not getting along and I know the unhappiness you see is affecting you. And I want you to know that it has nothing to do with you. We love you very much.”
An embarrassed silence ensued. Lucie broke it. She had an intense air, even at the age of eight, and her question bore in on her parents: “You don’t have to get divorced, do you?”
The six-year-old Desi chimed in: “Can’t you take it all back—and make up?”
No, both parents informed them, they could not. The next moments were almost unbearable. More than thirty years afterward Lucy still heard “the sound of those two kids weeping. That really stays with you. I never thought they would go to pieces like that.” She and Desi tried to assure the children that he would be around as often as they wanted to see him, but their grief was not to be assuaged. As much as Lucie and Desi IV had heard and overheard, it was not enough to make them understand their parents. “I thought they knew what was going on, but they were little kids . . . and so it was like a bomb dropped.”
In retrospect, Lucy reflected, perhaps she should have told her daughter and son their parents were splitting because “he’s a drunk and he lays every broad in Hollywood.” She continued: “It was important for me that they know that I didn’t cause the divorce. That it wasn’t me who failed. I wanted to tell them, ‘It’s all your father’s fault. Blame him!’ ” But she couldn’t make herself say the words. “I knew that if I told them to blame him, they’d only blame me anyway. I had to let them find out for themselves what their father was like. And unfortunately, they did.”