CHAPTER TWELVE
SHE HASN’T even got her name on the door,” wrote the admiring New York Times reporter Gilbert Milstein after a tour of Desilu. Essentially, Milstein found, the new president, Lucille Ball, planned to get along and go along with the company’s top executives—every one of them installed by Desi. Ed Holly remained in charge of finance and administration; W. Argyle Nelson, of production; Jerry Thorpe of programming. As in the past, the Times man continued, Lucille Ball “will turn up at the irregular meetings of her executives, listening a lot, saying little, signing papers, and making it known if she has definite ideas on anything.”
Stockholders heard that Lucy was just hanging back, waiting for the right moment to turn into a hard-driving administrator. She put that rumor to rest in an interview: “I’m mad about this idea that I’m a workaholic. I spent some time researching words like ‘workaholic’ and ‘perfectionist.’ Workaholic is not what people think.” She invited the press and the public to examine her history. “For God’s sake, I always took long vacations, eight weeks at a time in Europe, with the kids, and I always had three-day weekends.” The fact is, though, that those holidays were not for relaxation. As she inadvertently admitted, they were for delusion: “I thought that time away could save the marriage to Desi.”
“My mother was uncomfortable with it all,” Lucie Arnaz remembered. “Basically she was a performer, not a businesswoman. The trappings of power meant very little to her. She was happy to delegate authority.” Privately Lucy hoped that everything and everyone would go on as before, leaving her with no decisions to make. But irrevocable changes had already occurred, and more were on the way. This was the season of divorce, for example. After the splits of the Arnazes and Vivian Vance and Philip Ober, cousin Cleo and her husband Ken Morgan separated, as did Madelyn Pugh and Quinn Martin. Lucy sometimes wondered, unhappily, if these breakups occurred because she and Desi had led the way.
Other seismic shifts served to make her days long and uneasy. Two Desilu shows were brought on with an avalanche of publicity. Be Careful,My Love, a comic mystery series starring Glynis Johns and Keith Andes, was produced by Jess Oppenheimer and looked to be a winner. And the long-awaited television adaptation of The Greatest Show on Earth seemed ideal for family viewing. Neither made it out of the 1963–1964 season. Moreover, The Untouchables was coming to the end of its historic run, and none of the spin-offs was working out. Critic’s Choice, the movie Lucy made with Bob Hope upon her return from New York, was supposed to announce her triumphant reentry into cinema. Instead, the picture was a perfunctory and shallow version of the stage play, of more interest to curious Broadway fans than to filmgoers. It was met with yawns from the critics and indifference from a nationwide audience, even though Lucy outshone the script and the costar. Reluctantly she came to the conclusion that her professional life had been a restatement of children’s tales from Aesop to The Wizard of Oz. In the end, all the wandering through various media had taught her that there was no place like home, and for Lucille Ball that home was the sound stage of a television studio.
Whatever Desi’s personal shortcomings, he had always been a shrewd judge of scripts and a sage career counselor. His advice would have been welcome. But he was out of the picture now, emotionally and geographically distant, with little apparent interest in the business he had foresworn. In the tradition of playing up birthdays, he celebrated his forty-sixth in Las Vegas by taking a new wife, Edie Hirsch, a striking redhead who reminded many of Lucy. The best man was Dr. Marcus Rabwin, the physician who had rescued Desi from many incidents of ill health; Jimmy Durante’s wife, Marge, served as matron of honor. To show the world there were no hard feelings, Lucy sent the couple a huge bunch of roses in the shape of a horseshoe. The card read, “You both picked a winner.” That message contained more irony than Lucy knew.
Edie was the ex-wife of Clement Hirsch, who had made his fortune manufacturing and selling Kal Kan dog food. Suspicious that his wife was carrying on with Desi, Hirsch had hired detectives to follow the pair. Desi heard about the move and employed detectives of his own to follow the men who were shadowing him. The farce ended when Desi persuaded Edie to leave her husband and join him in a new and luxurious life. It was new all right, but far from luxurious. On their wedding night Desi spent more time at the roulette table than with his new wife. That was only the beginning; he was soon to squander thousands at casinos and racetracks. “He was a real addicted gambler,” lamented Dr. Rabwin’s wife, Marcella. “It was impossible to stop him.”
Desi’s reputation as a troublemaker stayed with him in the post-Lucy days. One day he received notice that he was being sued for thousands of dollars. The plaintiff was an old man who said Desi had punched him at the Thunderbird Country Club during an argument. Melvin Belli had been hired to represent the plaintiff, and Desi appeared to be in deep trouble. Then he discovered that there was an eyewitness to the argument. That person was willing to swear Desi had not thrown a single punch. Now confident, Desi refused to settle out of court and retained a local lawyer, Donald Brown, to defend him. “I knew he was explosive,” said Brown, “and I knew he was an actor. And I told him that if I were Melvin Belli, I’d put him on the stand and try to get him to lose his temper in front of the jury. He said to me, ‘Don’t worry. When I get on the stand, I’m Ricky Ricardo.’ ” True to form, Belli did try to provoke Desi: he asked if he had cursed out the old man’s wife, and used an expletive for illustration. “I am a Cuban gentleman,” Desi responded. “I would never call a woman that. You I would call that.” The answer brought down the house. Brown then summoned the star witness. “State your name,” the bailiff directed. “James Francis Durante,” came the hoarse reply. That, too, brought down the house—everyone recognized comedian Jimmy Durante. Just in from Las Vegas, he completed his exculpatory testimony and exited. The jury deliberated for seventeen minutes. The old man and his wife went away without a cent.
Lucy heard about this from afar, relieved for Desi’s sake, and glad for herself—she was beyond the reach of a man who seemed to draw trouble the way he used to attract women. Logically, she should have installed her new husband at Desilu, as a welcome Desi Arnaz substitute. She astonished the employees, to say nothing of the town, by refusing to do so. Gary Morton went on doing what he did best, appearing at nightclubs, until Lucy realized that in one respect the second marriage was repeating the first—the man would be on the road too much of the time. During the first months of their marriage, Lucy had been only too happy to edit Gary’s routines, encouraging him to emphasize a word to elicit a bigger laugh, fine-tuning his timing and approach. Now she demanded that he put a stop to his road shows, and he complied. His performances would be confined to audience warm-ups before the Lucy shows were filmed, and occasional appearances on the show.
A scratch golfer, Gary began to develop a course in the San Fernando Valley. The rest of the time he spent as a substitute father, attempting with some success to befriend Lucy’s children, staying discreetly out of the way, and making sure that Lucy was treated with great deference. His first anniversary present to her was a tiny gold watch and matching gold pocketbook.
A tougher, less malleable Lucy went public in August of 1963 when, as Desilu’s new president, she ran the stockholders’ meeting. More than one of those present must have recalled Bob Hope’s quip, “Who would have ever thought I’d kiss a company president—on the lips?” Lucy’s informal outfit—purple-and-white-flowered dress and open-toed sandals—clashed with her cool demeanor and prepared statements. The company had experienced some hard times, she stated: it had lost money the previous year. Now, however, things were looking up. For the first quarter of 1963 Desilu enjoyed a gross income of $4.8 million, up $1.5 million for the same period in 1962. And there were big plans for the upcoming season, with a heavy emphasis on situation comedy, the genre Desilu knew best. At the end, a few attendees asked pro forma questions; one wanted to know whether she could handle her executive duties and still star in her own program. Assuming the authoritative tone of a woman capable of having it all, she assured everyone that she could do several tasks at the same time and succeed in all of them.
Only afterward, when the listeners and the press had gone, did Lucy drop her guard. Those who knew her best could see evidence of the humiliated child as she went around collecting pencils distributed to the stockholders when the meeting began. Gathering up writing instruments was an old habit; she did the same thing after board meetings. “I could never find out what she did with all those pencils,” recalled Ed Holly.
Sitting atop her empire, Lucy remained just as threatened now as she was in the days of the HUAC hearings. The only difference was that back then she was bothered by the past; today she was threatened by the future. Who knew if any of these gaudy plans would really work? You could assure your investors and wow the networks, but in his own ungrammatical way Sam Goldwyn had it right: if people don’t want to watch you, you can’t stop them.
Whenever Goodman Ace was asked about Lucille Ball, his eyes rolled. The veteran writer had been hired by Desilu Productions to create a special for TV comedians, sponsored by General Foods. The 1963 experience was so unpleasant that he made detailed notes about it, and later published a vengeful piece in the Saturday Review. The program, he noted, ran in September, just before the second season of The Lucy Show. But it aired only after many revisions demanded by Lucy.
Ace had come up with the premise that General Foods was going to drop one of its five stars—Jack Benny, Danny Thomas, Garry Moore, Andy Griffith, and Lucille Ball. Onscreen, the comedians’ nerves would be on edge, competition would ensue, and jokes would abound. Or so it was expected when the sponsor approved the script. Then, Ace wrote, “in the purified vernacular of television, all heck broke loose. Miss Ball found it highly incompatible with her public image to pretend that she would worry about losing her job . . . because everybody knows she is president of Desilu Productions. She wanted a slight change—the script to state explicitly that she is president of Desilu and she wasn’t worried.” The changes were of course made, much to the detriment of the show. Grumbled Ace, “If I play my cards right, I may never have to write for her again.”
He was not the only writer to make Lucy an object of derision in 1963. At the end of the year, Nobody Loves an Albatross opened at the Lyceum Theatre in New York. The Broadway comedy was written by Ron Alexander, who had extensive experience in television. Essentially, his was a revenge play about demanding producers and the employees they overpaid and then humiliated. Robert Preston starred, with strong support from veteran actress Constance Ford in the telling role of Hildy Jones. The script describes Miss Jones: “She is one of those incredible women who, despite her 47 or 48 years, looks better than anybody else who is 30. Add to this the fact that Hildy has the talent of a clown and the steel trap mind of a tycoon, and you have a general picture.”
In a typical exchange, a writer pleads for his job:
NAT
Hildy, darling, I created and wrote the private eye show for you.
HILDY
That’s all you’ve come up with in a year and a half, it’s not enough for all the money I’m paying you, Baby. (Smiles) The difference between you and me is you’re a man of five-minute loyalties and I’m a woman of no loyalty at all. I’m staking your reputation on this show, Nat, and if it doesn’t work, you won’t either.
NAT
You’re very kind.
To New York critics and audiences, Hildy was just an amusing character—she could have been any female executive. Hollywood insiders had a specific boss-lady in mind.
Without offering an apology for Lucy’s behavior during this period, her daughter thought she knew the reasons for it. “The worst thing you can do is suppress pain,” observed Lucie, “and she made a career out of suppressing all her pain.” Lately the miseries of childhood had been supplanted by the very public divorce and the assumption of responsibility Lucy had never wanted. To be famous, yes, she had always desired that, and to be respected. But to be responsible? That was something else, something unplanned and intimidating. But if that was the hand she had been dealt, so be it. She would intimidate back. Small wonder that director John Frankenheimer seriously considered Lucy for the part of Laurence Harvey’s lethal, oedipal mother in the thriller The Manchurian Candidate, before awarding it to Angela Lansbury.
On the set, a different person began to show up. Through the I Love Lucy years, the star had been difficult and querulous, particularly at first readings, seeking the right tempo and takes. But the persona she displayed at the filming of The Lucy Show was quite unlike what had gone before.
Vivian Vance, whom Lucy regarded as a reliable script doctor as well as a friend, was not immune to harsh critiques from the boss. For “Lucy and Viv Play Softball,” the two actresses were to choose up sides with a bat. Lucy kept throwing the bat in a way that made it impossible for her partner to catch it cleanly. “I could catch it right if you threw it right,” was the very reasonable complaint. Lucy walked off the set and Vivian started to cry. When Lucy returned she simply said, “Now, where were we?” refusing to recognize that anything untoward had taken place.
Others came under fire and were not let off so easily. Lucy made a point of challenging authority figures who were working for her. Candy Moore thought it was “unprofessional for her to yell at people in front of others—particularly the director Jack Donohue. It undermined his authority.” But that was Lucy’s aim. After the first day on any episode, everyone knew who was in charge.
The only actor immune from Lucy’s barbs was Gale Gordon, her old companion from radio days, when he had played innumerable haughty, pompous bosses. Gordon was written into The Lucy Show during its second season, in order to supply Lucy with the foil she lacked in the first thirty-three episodes. For the next five seasons he played Theodore J. Mooney, manager of the local bank and trustee of Lucy’s money. In a better part, or with different direction, Gordon might have given the show some depth and satiric bite. The skilled farceur had learned his trade from the cradle onward, watching his father, an American vaudeville quick-change artist, and his mother, a British actress. Born with a cleft palate, Gordon had worked on his diction until it was perfect for radio, and on his appearance until it was ideal for television. Lucy’s affection and regard for him were absolute, so much so that she failed to see the shortcomings of the Mooney character—or of the character actor who portrayed him.
In the first place, Gordon was never encouraged to vary his interpretation. “When you are at full tilt right from the beginning,” noted Maury Thompson, “you have nowhere to build to—nowhere to go.” When Gordon consulted Thompson about his acting, the camera coordinator leveled with him. “He said, ‘You know, other people have told me that. But I can’t seem to help myself. I’ll try to temper it.’ But he couldn’t.” In the second place, through no fault of his own Gordon was incapable of filling the vacuum left when Desi departed. “A husband is a funny authority figure,” Bob Schiller pointed out. “A banker, although certainly an authority figure, doesn’t have any of the warmth, humor, or sex of a husband.”
Very occasionally that season, Lucy relaxed, allowing comedy to imitate life. In the Lucille Ball Comedy Hour special “Mr. and Mrs.,” she and Bob Hope played two actors hired for a job because the producer believes they’re married. When Lucy falls in love with another man, and Bob with another woman, they contrive to get a bogus divorce. There was enough similarity between the fiction and the Lucy-Desi story to make Lucy play the part convincingly. Decked out in Edith Head costumes, she looked elegant and surprisingly young. The years fell away—at least temporarily—thanks to makeup expert Hal King, who used surgical tape and elastic foundations to provide the effects of a face-lift without the anguish of surgery. In “Lucy Conducts the Symphony,” Jack Donohue relinquished his usual assignment as director in order to play a hapless orchestra conductor. When his percussionist comes down with stage fright, Lucy stands in, hilariously overriding the man on the podium. She was absolutely convincing in the role, and why not? Offscreen, she had been doing much the same thing to Donohue whenever he directed her.
The nadir of the season came in April 1964, with “Lucy Enters a Baking Contest.” The episode was written by her longtime favorites, Bob Carroll Jr. and Madelyn Pugh Martin. Desilu had made them affluent, and both wished to retire while they were on top. Lucy had coaxed them back, only to savage their work on the final show of the season. “What are you trying to do,” she demanded, “ruin my career?” In a gesture she would come to regret, Lucy threw the script to the floor. The writers gathered up the papers and exited, speechless. To Lucy, this was outright insubordination; she assumed that they were walking out on the job, and more significantly, on her. Nobody walked out on Lucille Ball. The next morning, Bob and Madelyn found their possessions neatly boxed outside their office door. In another era Desi would have stepped in and broken the tension with a joke and a compliment and they all would have pretended nothing had happened. But there was no one capable of making peace, and the best writers Lucy would ever have took their leave of Desilu. It was as if she was trying, both consciously and unconsciously, to erase Desi’s fingerprints from every door and desk no matter what the personal cost.
The cost, it developed, would be prohibitive. Not long after the writers left, there came other crucial exits. Among those to leave were producer Cy Howard, who had created the long-running comedy My Friend Irma; executive producer Elliott Lewis; and programming vice president Jerry Thorpe. Replacements were found—for example, network veteran Oscar Katz was hired away from CBS to replace Thorpe. But Desilu would never be the same, and other signs indicated that personal trouble lay ahead.
In May, Lucy, Gary, and the two children, Lucie and Desi IV—or, as he was now billed, Desi Jr.—performed together for the first time on the game show Password. It should have been a minor triumph. Lucy and Gary were predictably fluent and funny on the show. Desi Jr. was easy—a little too easy—before the cameras, saying, “This is one of my favorite experiences of all time.” Lucie, on the other hand, was hyper and self-conscious. “I can’t even watch the tapes of that show,” she was to tell Geoffrey Mark Fidelman, historian of the Lucy shows. “It makes me sick. I was trying to copy-cat comics. It’s sad. I was trying too hard. I want to go to that little girl to say, ‘You don’t have to do this!’ I wanted to be like Mom and Gary—snap my fingers to the music and have snappy patter.”
In the meantime, Vivian Vance let it be known that shuttling from Connecticut to Hollywood was getting to be more of a strain each time out. This was not a ploy; she planned to ask for half a million dollars to sign for another season. It was an unrealizable demand, and she knew it.
At the 1964 stockholders’ meeting Lucy was a little too ebullient when she discussed all the new series planned for Desilu—twenty-two in all. There would be programs for Ethel Merman, a hit when she appeared as herself on one of the Lucy episodes; for comedienne Dorothy Loudon; for Dan Rowan and his partner Dick Martin, who for a handful of episodes had played Lucy’s romantic interest; and for comedians-dancers Dan Dailey and Donald O’Connor. None of these would sell. Lucy could not know that another genre, drama, would be the company’s salvation, when MGM veteran Gene Roddenberry was signed to create and produce a military program, The Lieutenant, and a science fiction series he called Star Trek.
While the company made its way into the 1960s, one exploitable commodity carried it through bad times and good: Lucy. Her various series, including the current highly rated one, were syndicated in forty-four countries and more than a dozen languages, and her name was as famous as the President’s. The public relations department saw to that, arranging a special “Lucy Day” to take place at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City. Accompanying her to the fair were the expected Gary and DeDe, and the unexpected Hedda Hopper, all flown out at the expense of General Foods, sponsor of the most recent Lucy shows. The columnist had been a protector and fan for decades, and in New York, while thousands of fans looked on, she knelt side by side with Lucy as they put their handprints in cement at the fair’s Hollywood Pavilion. With the most powerful gossip columnist in her corner, Lucy seemed ready for renewed popularity and a resurgent home life. Things did not work out in quite the way she intended.
Returned to home ground, Lucy agreed to take a step backward in her career. She would make regular broadcasts on the old medium of radio, starring in Let’s Talk to Lucy. Produced by Gary Morton, the ten-minute show would showcase guest performers and give Lucy a chance to get paid just for talking. According to authors Coyne Steven Sanders and Tom Gilbert, who kept the closest track of Desilu, Lucy told friends she took the job in order to give her husband “something to do.” Evidently he did not know how to do that something: Let’s Talk sputtered from the beginning, failed to attract sponsors, and was not renewed at the end of the season. Not that the misfire bothered Morton; it would give him more time on the golf course.
When Gary was at the links Lucy sat at home playing countless games of solitaire, a portrait of the poor little rich girl, except that she was neither little nor a girl. She was only rich. And money was not enough to keep the fashion police at bay. Earl Blackwell Jr., notorious for his bitchy evaluations of movie stars’ outfits, continually placed Lucy on his Worst Dressed list. One year he put her down in three sentences: “If you can’t wear it, carry it. Lucy buys her clothes without any planning, then lugs around most everything else she owns. Her appearance is absolute confusion.” Another time Blackwell wrote: “Despite her great comedy flair, offstage she is a clown caricaturing an actress who borrowed her wardrobe from the studio costume department.” Recently he had called her a “Halloween trick without the treat. Lucy, dear, shoulder pads went out with the black bottom.” It was not a good season for Lucy to be left alone, brooding about her image, or about life in general.
All the while, Lucie and Desi Jr. had been nourishing a fantasy. Both had seen The Parent Trap, a Disney feature about children successfully reuniting their separated parents. It had become their favorite movie, and they insisted that Lucy see it. She saw it. Four times. The year before, Desi Jr. had even inquired, “Can’t you say you’re sorry and go back?” As gently as possible Lucy tried to convince them that the divorce was final, that Gary Morton was here to stay. “People change,” she kept repeating. It was an uphill struggle. Morton did what he could to win over Lucie and Desi Jr. Affable and low-key, he made a special effort to be friendly with their real father. Perhaps in addition, as Lucie Arnaz suggests, he wanted to learn about the television business from Desi. But that was not going to happen. Desi acted as a subversive influence; within the children’s hearing he kept referring to his replacement as “Barry Norton,” as if he couldn’t quite recall Morton’s name, and he shared nothing with him but an occasional handshake and small talk.
Then, in 1966, after blowing a good portion of his savings, Desi returned to the only arena that had given him satisfaction and recognition: television. What better place to work than Desilu, the company that still bore his name? Said an executive, “He was older, heavier, his hair had gone pretty gray, and if you looked at him in the wrong light he looked a hell of a lot older than a man in his fiftieth year.” There were intimations of mortality—Bill Frawley was the first of the great quartet to go, dead of a heart attack. “I’ve lost one of my dearest friends,” said Lucy when she heard the news. Desi did her one better, He took out an ad in the Hollywood Reporter, complete with a picture of the deceased and the exit line, “Buenas noches, amigo! ”
Even so, as old as Desi appeared when he was caught off-guard, another executive conceded, “when he checked into the studio at Culver he lost about a decade. His smile was wider and his gait was younger. He forgot about his troubles. He was home.” From that home he began to develop properties for Carol Channing, an extravagant Broadway entertainer who was hard to contain on the small screen, and for Western star Rory Calhoun, Eve Arden, and Kaye Ballard. The last two were the title characters of The Mothers-in-Law, a bright situation comedy written by the exiled Bob and Madelyn. Wary at first, Lucy came to regard her ex-husband as an office asset. The passions and resentments had diminished, if not dispersed, and the two were able to work together without arguing, Lucy turning thumbs up or down when certain performers were mentioned for shows, Desi advising her on scripts and creative people.
She would need all the help she could get. As Vivian Vance expected, her salary terms would not be met and she would be replaced for the upcoming season. After some soul-searching, Lucy placed a call to Connecticut: the program wouldn’t be the same without her old sidekick, she said. It might not even survive. “Lucille,” Vance said, “with your talent you mustn’t feel that way about anybody.” Yet, Vance wrote in a memoir, “I was sure she felt I was deserting her. She had a tremendous fear of rejection, and unless she thought it through, it could seem that I was rejecting her, giving her up after fourteen years of closeness and clowning, for a husband and a home I wanted to share with him. She and I would go on chatting together, seeing each other, staying friends, but the relationship inevitably changed.” What changed most was the two actresses’ attitude toward show business itself. Vance had seen too much of Lucy’s insecurity and took a jaundiced view of fame and its concomitants. She even tried to talk the mother of her onscreen son, Ralph Hart, into taking the boy out of show business altogether.
For Lucy, entertainment was the only way to go. It was all she knew and all she wanted to know. Marriage, motherhood, leisure—all were subordinated to the main concern of putting on a good show and turning a profit for the Desilu stockholders. Though she determined to get along without her feminine foil, Vivian’s departure did made an enormous difference, not only in the scripts but in Lucy’s outlook. In her view, she had been dropped twice, by her husband and by her closest professional friend. The moat around her grew wider and contained more alligators.
“On the set she could be a holy terror,” said one of the technicians who watched Lucy in action. She summarily fired a New York Method actor who mumbled his lines; intimidated directors and cameramen; and sought confrontations, even when the star was as big as she was. When she gave Danny Kaye instructions on how to do humor, he snapped, “Just who the hell do you think you are?” Lucy shot back, “You’re full of shit, that’s who I am.” She was not smiling. Joan Blondell, who had known Lucy since their starlet days in the 1930s, had become a first-class film and stage comedienne in middle age. Lucy booked her on the show, then expressed dissatisfaction with the way Blondell read her lines. After one take, her friend Herb Kenwith reported, the director yelled “Cut” and “Lucille pulled an imaginary chain . . . as if flushing an old-fashioned toilet.” Blondell turned away but caught the tailend of the gesture. “ ‘What does that mean,’ she demanded. Lucille said, ‘It means that stunk!’ Joan looked her right in the eye and said, ‘Fuck you, Lucille Ball!’ and left. The studio audience was stunned. You didn’t hear words like that in those days.” Kaye and Lucy were to make up their differences in later years. Blondell never came back.
Lucy’s mood was not improved by events at the 1966 stockholders’ meeting, held at Desilu’s Workshop Theater. As president of Desilu, she had to inform investors that after a long period of stability, Desilu’s net income had plummeted 42 percent from the previous year. There were compensating factors, she argued: her company was cutting back on expenses; it held valuable rental spaces, and other studios were using them as never before. This time the Ball glamour could not mask the distressing statistics. If Desilu was tightening its belt, asked one shareholder, then why did its president draw such a high fee for her work? (Lucy was getting $100,000 in executive salary and $130,172 in acting fees.) Another stockholder pointed out that Lucy’s income was just a little less than the company’s annual loss. Gary Morton intervened on his wife’s behalf, and board members attempted to defend the president: she was “about two hundred percent underpaid.”
Lucy, flustered, could only stammer that she was a fiscal conservative who made “honest reports,” and would stay in the job “as long as I can afford it.” She lit cigarette after cigarette as the meeting degenerated into accusations from the floor and posturing on the part of the executives. Lucy tried to leaven the proceedings with a little humor, offering free Bufferin and water to everyone, on the house. But by now the audience smelled blood, and an angry member spoke out. Why did Desilu’s top advisers get such big money and produce such meager dividends? Why weren’t they dollar-a-year men like the counselors in Washington? That way their salaries could be plowed back into the company coffers and stockholders could get a decent return for their money. Lucy’s exasperated response: “How long could I keep these valued advisers at a dollar a year? This isn’t war—it’s the TV business.” As the tumultuous meeting ended, one of the questioners shouted: “This has been a real show. Too bad it wasn’t shown on television. It might have increased our revenues.”
Lucy had been protected from the rough-and-tumble of finance for too many years. She had no way to handle this kind of criticism. It made her feel vulnerable and strangely isolated: a loyal husband, a phalanx of executives, a carapace of celebrity could not insulate her from attack. The past was of very little use in Hollywood—particularly in the severe world of television. It was the old case of “What have you done for me lately?” and clearly Desilu hadn’t done enough for its stockholders.
Wearing one of several hats, Lucy the performer dickered with CBS, as she usually did at the end of a season, claiming that she was tired of acting on television and ready to retire for good. TV Guide, a watcher of Lucille Ball since her earliest television days, called this “the Lucy Game.” It consisted, said the magazine, “of Lucy casually announcing she was tired of doing The Lucy Show and just might skip the whole thing in favor of ‘more time with Gary and the kids.’ When she did this, the whole CBS Television network shook. It could not afford to lose a show with the popularity of Madame President.” The result never varied. She was always “wooed back” with a large raise—in this case a $12 million package with a budget of $90,000 per half hour, two one-hour specials financed by the network, and a deal for future work. Once the Game was concluded, Mickey Rudin, the architect of Lucy’s contract, made an official, if disingenuous, statement: “I do not deny that Lucy’s contractual right to say yea or nay at any time has had certain business advantages. But I don’t think it’s what motivates Lucy. It is important to her to be reminded every year how much she is loved and wanted.”
When her CEO hat was on, however, Lucy showed quite a different negotiating technique. Actors who demanded top dollar from Desilu found her cold and unyielding. “They priced themselves out of the business,” she would explain to the press. “I was the first to say ‘I’m not worth it’ when my agents told me what they were asking for me.” And yet Lucy was ultimately the performers’ benefactress, backing shows that provided them with new opportunities. She not only encouraged films that emulated the Disney formula for its live-action movies— clean, sentimental stories aimed at a family audience—she also green-lighted two series quite unlike anything Desilu had ever underwritten, Mission: Impossible and Star Trek.
During its development, the bracing half-hour adventure show called “Briggs Squad” had its name changed to “IMF” (for “Impossible Mission Force”) and finally pared down to Mission: Impossible. CBS was unimpressed by the initial pitch, and Desilu’s production chiefs appealed to Lucy: they needed funds to create a pilot to demonstrate what a dry presentation could not. The company had $600,000 in its development fund, but it was not earmarked. Lucy could easily have diverted the money elsewhere; it was hers to begin with. Instead, she read the script, agreed that Mission: Impossible needed to be seen, and allowed the money to be allocated for a pilot. It starred Steven Hill, one of the charter members of the Actors Studio, and Martin Landau, then beginning his career. “When I first became an actor,” Landau was to recall, “there were two young actors in New York: Marlon Brando and Steven Hill. A lot of people said that Steven would have been the one, not Marlon. He was legendary. Nuts, volatile, mad, and his work was exciting.” As repulsive as Lucy found the Method, she admired Hill’s work, and with good reason. The second time around, CBS bought the show.
Mission was to become one of the most successful programs in the Desilu stable—and one with more than its share of woes. Due to technical problems, the production schedule started to run late. Expenses quickly mounted. Recalled supporting actor Peter Lupus: “Those checks were amazing, thousands of dollars for going over. And we always went over.” As if this were not enough, Hill caused some new, and eventually insurmountable, difficulties. He had become an Orthodox Jew, and his contract specified that he would not work Friday nights or Saturdays. There was no doubt of his sincerity; Hill spent a good deal of time organizing prayer meetings for the Jews working at Desilu. But refusal to work on the Sabbath, coupled with spectacular outbursts of temperament, were more than the show could bear. In the second season, Steven Hill was unceremoniously replaced by Peter Graves. (For the next ten years, Hill abandoned acting and settled in an Orthodox community in Rockland County, New York. He was not to become a performer of note until his much-lauded appearance as a district attorney on Law & Order in 1990.)
It took a season for Mission: Impossible to catch on; not until its second year did the show develop a fanatical following. Star Trek was different in every respect. Its creator, Gene Roddenberry, had a philosophical turn of mind, as well as a skill for writing episodes of TV Westerns. He conceived of Star Trek as an intergalactic Wagon Train leading its cast to various exotic locales in space. Desilu executives found the idea intriguing but unaffordable; Ed Holly and W. Argyle Nelson recommended against development. Lucy overruled them, and Holly later allowed: “If it were not for Lucy there would be no Star Trek today.” In essence that would mean no first and second series, no animated version, no film versions—in other words, none of the billions of dollars generated in America and across the globe on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
In exerting her authority, Lucy made some enemies, and executives in and out of the company referred to her as “the lady who became a man.” Not so, Lucy said when she learned of the sobriquet. “If I was going to turn into a man, I would have done it a long time ago,” she told journalist Rex Reed. “I’ve been in awe of men most of my life. It never occurred to me how an executive should be. . . . The rules were here before I took over. I never wanted to be an executive, but when my marriage to Desi broke up after nineteen years I just couldn’t walk away from my obligations and say forget it. We were an institution. So I took on all the responsibilities.”
As influential as Star Trek and Mission: Impossible were to be, Desilu still revolved around the Lucy shows, and here the strategy went awry. With the great writing teams gone, Lucy hired Milt Josefsberg, Jack Benny’s head writer for many years. At the time, Josefsberg was the most experienced and competent sketch writer in the television business. The trouble was that Lucy was not a sketch performer. She needed credibility and a recognizably feminine persona to go along with her comedy. Josefsberg hired male writers who gave her gags— good gags, but not organic ones that rose out of her personality. As her assistant Thomas Watson noted, “these guys did not understand how to get a housewife into physical stunts, so, essentially, she stopped being a housewife.” Where Lucy Ricardo was a blithe and endearing schemer, the character on the Lucy shows of the late 1960s was unpleasant and argumentative, out to embarrass and humiliate Gale Gordon. The comment of former I Love Lucy writer Bob Weiskopf is germane: “I don’t want to sound mean, but where was Lucy in all this? Why didn’t she demand better writing for herself? She certainly was in charge. If Desi or Jess had been there, this would have been handled much more smoothly and with greater humor.”
To add to this unstable mix, the fifty-something Lucille Ball was taking visible losses in her battle against age and worry. A face-lift remained out of the question; her skin remained too sensitive to bear knifework. She did have her eyes tucked, and even that relatively minor operation took more than a year to heal. During the long period of recuperation, Hal King had to conceal the redness around her eyes with heavy pancake makeup. She edged toward the glamorous but unreal—a star, rather than the endearing zany that viewers had adored for the last fifteen years.
I Love Lucy had been syndicated in Europe for more than a decade. Lucy decided to try her luck overseas. Lucy in London, broadcast in the fall of 1966, did not receive the hoped-for response. “What had promised to be one of the season’s major specials,” said Variety, “turned out to be a major disappointment.”
While these distresses gathered, Lucy reached out for a confidant. Gary Morton was appointed to the role. He tried to be modest about it at first, quietly sitting in on meetings and deliberately playing down his significance. “Lucy can’t run a company by herself,” he said. “Maybe with me around, when she walks on the set, her mind is at peace. I pop in from time to time, on conferences, rehearsals. I can tell from her if things are going well, if the laughter is there.” As the months went on he insinuated himself into the corporate workings of Desilu. Agreeable as always, he tried to ingratiate himself with the higher-ups, who rarely responded in kind. Desilu program executive Herbert Solow regarded Lucy’s husband with a mixture of wariness and disdain. His view was, “Don’t take from your spouse and use that as your importance. Gary did that. Constantly.” Cousin Cleo felt that Morton gave in to his wife too easily, and that the deference reinforced her worst instincts. Desi, who put on a public show of friendship, resented his replacement and was especially irritated by Morton’s collection of expensive cars, obviously underwritten by Lucy. Others at Desilu felt that Morton was an embarrassment. “He tried to be Mr. Nice Guy,” said one staffer, “and in a way he was—always smiling, always trying to grasp what was going on. But he was resented and, to be perfectly frank, he wasn’t capable of taking over the company, which is clearly what he was aiming to do.” Bernard Weitzman, one of the top Desilu executives, agreed, saying that Gary “tried to be what Desi was, without having Desi’s authority.” Or, for that matter, his skills.
There were times when Morton’s inadequacies were apparent to Lucy, and those occasions could be unpleasant for him and for onlookers. Geoffrey Mark Fidelman notes that during the filming of one episode Morton indicated some steps leading to a doorway. “Lucy doesn’t like them and she wants them out,” he instructed the director. Maury Thompson was surprised at the order; the steps had been there for several previous shows. “I tried to stall Gary,” he remembered, “telling him how much manpower and money it would take to redo the set.” As he was speaking Lucy entered and looked at the tableau. “What’s going on here?” she wondered. “Why is everybody standing around?” Thompson repeated what Morton had told him. “She looked at me,” he recalled, “then turned to Gary and said, ‘Gary, go buy a car, but get outta here.’ Gary just hung his head and left. She never asked any more questions; she knew what Gary had tried to do. Lucille wanted him to be another Desi, but he just couldn’t cut it.” (Thompson would go on to receive an Emmy nomination for his work on the Lucy shows—the only director so honored—but perhaps because he had seen too much, he was fired at the end of the season.)
In later years, Desi Jr. was fond of quoting fans who “thought I was Little Ricky.” But, he said, “I knew Fred and Ethel didn’t live next door—Jack Benny did.” That sentence encapsulates his childhood and adolescence. In an environment where most of the neighbors were famous and all of them were wealthy, a normal childhood would have been extremely difficult; for Desi Jr. and Lucie it was impossible. Not only were their parents celebrated, rich, and divorced, their father was an alcoholic and their mother a deeply conflicted figure whose treatment of the children alternated between discipline and indulgence. “You’re not special because you’re famous” was one of Lucy’s ongoing instructions to her son and daughter. Both had to make their beds and pick up their clothes; neither ever received an allowance that exceeded five dollars a week. Yet on one of Desi Jr.’s birthdays, a carnival was set up in the backyard, complete with Ferris wheel, clowns, and a live elephant. With mixed messages like these, confusion was bound to result, and it was exacerbated by their mother’s long workday and the resultant guilt for time spent away from them.
Their father was not much of a role model during this time. There was, for instance, the summer night in 1966 when fifteen-year-old Lucie and a friend were visiting Desi at his beach house in Del Mar. Late at night some youths began making noise and cursing within earshot. It happened that Desi owned a .38 revolver—and this one was not a cigarette lighter. He fired two shots into the sand. They only added to the noise. The next thing he knew, the Del Mar police had arrived, arrested him for assault, and hauled him off to the station. He claimed that he had only fired blanks, but when the cops dug in the sand they found no evidence of such shells. They released Desi after he posted $1,100 bail, and he went home to sleep off his drunkenness.
Customarily, several years after a divorce an emotional distance opens up between the former husband and wife. Lucy had convinced herself that she could be indifferent about Desi’s life and loves and vagaries, but the fact was that she could never turn her back on him. They had been too close in ways that neither of them fully understood. When she learned of Desi’s arrest, instead of shaking her head and responding with a wry smile, she managed to get hold of some blanks and had a chauffeur drive them over to Desi’s house in case the investigation continued—he could plant them as needed. Happily, the cops never returned. The incident made the papers, however, and the implication was that Lucy’s ex, rather than protecting two teenage girls, had simply been on yet another binge.
Each child had a way of dealing with this kind of stress. Lucie, who inherited her father’s exotic aura and her mother’s long silhouette, led an active social life and performed in school plays. Desi Jr. played rock music with two young friends from the neighborhood: Dean Martin Jr., son of the singer-actor, and Billy Hinsche, son of a prosperous real estate developer.
In the beginning the boys composed songs to amuse themselves. Their amateur status was not to last long. First, Lucy indulgently booked the trio to warm up her audience before the show went on. When they were sufficiently rehearsed and polished, Dean Martin invited to them to perform for one of his close friends. Frank Sinatra was no fan of rock ’n’ roll—he was subsequently to call it “the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.” In those days, though, he found himself amused by the style and rhythms of the group called “Dino, Desi & Billy.” Sinatra and Desi Sr. had long since reconciled, and as a lark he invited the trio to cut a disk for his label, Reprise Records. The mid-1960s was the time of global “youthquake,” when newcomers like the Beatles and the Byrds let their hair grow, radiated insouciance, and performed their own material. The harmonies and attitudes of these groups changed the course of popular music, and the directors of Reprise, anxious to tap into the youth market, arranged for a contract. At the age of twelve, a round-faced Desi, with his thinner thirteen-year-old pals, went on tour and composed two songs that made the Top Forty. The first had a pleasant melody and banal lyrics with a tincture of something less felt than seen:
You treat me just like dirt You have all the fun I stay home and hurt.
Other entries in their first album included an exuberant version of Willie Dixon’s “Seventh Son,” Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” and two songs written by the boys’ producer, Lee Hazelwood, “Not the Lovin’ Kind” and “Rebel Kind”—quite a statement for a group whose combined age was thirty-eight. Hazelwood was later to say that working with Dino, Desi, and Billy was “hell on this earth.” After one year he walked away from his contract because “I didn’t want those little leg biters around me anymore.”
Whatever their behavior in the studio, the trio were catnip to squealing groupies wherever they played. Lucy was heard to complain that she wanted Dino, Desi, and Billy on her show and was waiting for an appropriate script. “By the time it came along,” she later said, “I couldn’t afford them.” (Her budget only allowed $400, whereas Dean Martin paid $1,000 for a single appearance on his show.) During the group’s first flush of success, a journalist asked each member what he liked best about his sudden prominence. “The privilege to wear long hair,” stated Dino. “The travel,” was Billy’s favorite. “The money,” said Desi Jr. And therein lay much of the trouble.
Desi Jr. had never received a generous allowance from his mother. Now thousands of dollars were rolling in every month. On the cusp of adolescence he was not only getting rich, he was becoming famous. The proof was the adoration he received from the crowds wherever he went. He acted with such self-assurance that Lucie claimed her brother “had been thirty-four since we were kids.” In the next few years that assurance would become arrogance, and the appetite for applause would turn into a need for greater stimulation. If there is, as some researchers believe, a substance-abuse gene, he surely inherited it from Desi. The phrase “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” was to apply to his life and times for a longer, sadder period than anyone could possibly have predicted—least of all Desi Jr.
He was to remember experiments with marijuana, mescaline, quaaludes, cocaine, LSD, all the while questioning himself like someone in a song: “Is this all there is?” The query, he said, “terrified me. I told myself all I needed was something else—more money, another girl, a different kind of drug.” At the age of fifteen he was financially independent. Lucy’s criticism of his low grades had little effect, and her attempts to ground him went nowhere. “I felt indestructible,” her son remembered. Mother and son argued, and then, when the wounds were raw, went for days without speaking to each other. Desi sought refuge at his father’s place. Desi Sr. knew what Desi Jr. was doing to himself. He made some acid comments but generally refrained from confrontations. “His own drinking problem,” Desi Jr. observed, “prevented him from coming down too hard on me.”
Desi Jr.’s belongings, his instruments, his main emotional life were with Lucy, and it was to her house that he would return, only to have more fights about his indifference to school—and indeed to anything that didn’t feed his ego. A young actor, Robert Pine, was on the set of a Lucy show when a call came in from Desi Jr. Pine recalled: “He wanted to buy an expensive car. I think he was about to turn sixteen. She didn’t put it off on an aide or a maid. She took the call like any mother and said, ‘Goddamn it, I don’t want you doing this, so don’t do it.’ Then she turned to me and said, ‘Can you believe this kid?’ It was very human.” All too human, it seemed. Desi Jr. was, as he himself put it, “already independently wealthy from my work with Dino, Desi, and Billy.” He went on: “I wasn’t asking her permission; I just wanted an opinion about the car.”
Aware of his son’s emotional distress (and of his own inability to alleviate it by example), Desi offered guidance via mail. A sad irony attended this act. For the letter sent Desi Jr. was a copy of one Desi Sr. had received from his own father, back in 1933:
Well, pardner, you are now sixteen, and in my book you are no longer a child; you are a man. . . .
A note of warning about driving, particularly about driving on the road that lies before you—the one we all have to travel—the road of life.
It is very much like the road from Santiago to El Cobre. There are stretches that are so smooth and beautiful that they take your breath away, and there are others that are so ugly and rough that you wish you had never gotten on the damn thing, and you wonder if you will ever get through.
Somewhere along the way, you will get into a particularly bad spot that presents a very difficult problem, and you may not know exactly what to do. When that happens, I advise you not to do anything. Examine the situation first. Turn it upside down and sideways as many times as you have to. But then, when you have finally made up your mind, do not let anything or anybody stop you. If there is a mountain in your way, go through it.
Sometimes you will make it; sometimes you will not. But, if you are honest and thorough in your decision, you will learn something either way. We should learn as much from our mistakes as we do from our successes.
And when you do come up with a minus, try to convert it into a plus. You will be surprised how many times it will work. Use a setback as a stepping stone to better times ahead.
And don’t be afraid to make mistakes; we all do. Nobody bats five hundred. Even if you did, that means you were wrong half of the time. But don’t worry about it. Don’t be ashamed of it. Because that is the way it is. That is life.
Remember, good things do not come easy, and you will have your share of woe—the road is lined with pitfalls. But you will make it, if when you fail you try and try again. Persevere. Keep swinging. And don’t forget that the Man Upstairs is always there, and all of us need His help. And no matter how unworthy you think yourself of it, don’t be afraid to ask Him for it.
Good luck, son.
Love,
Dad
Each letter was assiduously read and preserved. Neither had the desired effect. Something in the blood, maybe.
Whatever the case, the conflict between Lucy and Desi Jr. could not long endure. It came to a head one day when the youth pulled up at the house at 6 a.m. His mother and stepfather were at the front door to greet him. The two had been up half the night; in the small hours Lucy had dialed the police asking them to search for her son. Desi Jr. got out of the car and tried to explain: he had been out with his latest girlfriend and they had completely lost track of time. “I’m in love,” was his lame excuse. Lucy exploded: “Don’t you see that your actions affect other people? How could you be so irresponsible?” When her temper had cooled, Lucy tried to have a conversation with Desi Jr., stressing duty and accountability. They were not concepts he wanted to hear, and she found herself laying down the law. It was one thing to go off early, as she did, seeking a career. It was another thing to hurt the family; young Lucille had never done that to her family. Quite the contrary, her grandparents and brother and mother and cousin had leaned on Lucille and she had not let them down. “You can either live here and follow the rules, or you can leave,” she concluded. “But if you go, you’re entirely on your own.”
Desi Jr. rose to the challenge: “I can take care of myself.” It was a poignant moment, and a deeply painful one for Lucy. At the time, her son embraced his freedom eagerly. Later he conceded: “A part of my life was ending. I already belonged to the adult world and I couldn’t go back to being a regular teenager. So although I was only sixteen, I chose to move into my own apartment. Over the years I drifted farther and farther away emotionally.”
As busy and conflicted as she was, Lucy found time to act in Gene Kelly’s film A Guide for the Married Man, a cheerful, flawed compilation of sketches about adultery in the 1960s. Several TV celebrities starred in the movie, including Sid Caesar, Jack Benny, and Art Carney, who appeared in the skit with Lucy. Playing an aggressive male anxious to go out on the town, Carney engendered fewer laughs than he did on The Honeymooners. Lucy wasn’t funny at all. Her takes were obvious, her upswept hairdo was unflattering, and her pancake makeup was heavy and obvious. She was fifty-six, and for the first time in her life truly looked her age.
The reasons were manifold and complicated. The unhappy upstate girl had invented herself over and over again; she had built several careers, reconstructed her family and created a second one. The walk-on had become a superstar; the nobody, a mogul; the childless woman, a mother. In other arenas, this would have been a recipe for satisfaction; in the great tradition of Hollywood, it was a prescription for misery. The children were going their own ways more rapidly than she had anticipated, the Lucy show was nowhere near as funny as it should have been, and as a result the president of Desilu was walking around with an abstracted air, unable to focus on the company. According to one of the company’s key executives, Herbert Solow, Desilu was “a dying studio.” He would recall: “Lucy was still puttering away, doing the same thing over and over again. I explained at a meeting that I wanted to get some new things going.” He sent a copy of a modernized Desilu logo for her approval. “As usual, I never heard from her.”
Ever since the day Desi left, rumors had circulated about Desilu: a consortium of investors wanted to buy Lucy out; Paramount, recently swallowed up by Gulf + Western, had its eye on the company; Desilu’s top executives wanted to pool their resources and take over. After a few years the fuss died down, only to be revived shortly after the 1966 stockholders’ meeting, when investors were informed that for the first time ever, the company was declaring a 5 percent dividend, due to some adroit accounting. All well and good, but the gross revenue announced at that meeting had told the real story. In 1965, Desilu had brought in $18,997,163. In 1966 the figure was $18,797,502, and much of the income was due to sales of I Love Lucy to forty-eight countries overseas. According to Solow, “The professional Desilu was awful. Because it had nothing. It was all Lucy. Everyone loved to watch Lucy.” Many of the old programs were thriving, but Desilu had lost the ability to develop new ones—the lifeblood of dominant studios.
Otto von Bismarck once remarked that he never believed anything until he heard the official denial, and this time out, the Hollywood smart money all seemed to have studied the Iron Chancellor. No sale, Lucy kept assuring the press. Meantime, reliable insiders spoke of her wavering in Miami, where she had gone to consult with Jackie Gleason about a movie—or so she claimed. He would play Diamond Jim Brady, she said; she would be Lillian Russell. The real reason she had gone south was to avoid the calls of her lawyer, Mickey Rudin, who was anxious to close a deal with Charles Bluhdorn.
Through a combination of drive, avarice, and cunning, Viennese immigrant Bluhdorn had made an art of acquisitions, takeovers, and mergers. He was currently chairman of Gulf + Western, a conglomerate whose competitors called it “Engulf and Devour,” and one of his prize acquisitions was Paramount Pictures. Frank Yablans, who was to become the head of Paramount, once characterized his boss as “an uncivilized pig.” As if to live up to his billing, Bluhdorn announced that he wanted Desilu as another trophy and he wanted it now. No stalling or the deal was off.
Rudin flew down to Florida and confronted Lucy at her hotel. Bluhdorn needed an answer in twenty-four hours. Would she sell, or would she stay in a company that offered her only headaches and overwork? The era of independent production was drawing to a close, couldn’t she see that? The big companies, the networks, were taking over. What chance would she have swimming with sharks? Lucy’s reaction to a crisis remained the same from childhood to adolescence to maturity, from actress to comedienne to powerhouse—she cried. She mentioned the head of Gulf + Western: “Do you know, Mickey, I haven’t even seen this man?” Rudin offered to make a call. She refused. “I like to see a man’s eyes, shake his hand.” She settled for a phone conversation. Bluhdorn turned on the charm: “Miss Ball, one of the things I am prepared to like about you is that you care.” Lucy cried again.
Bluhdorn had great powers of persuasion, but these alone would not have won the day. The fact was that Lucy, owner of a paper fortune, was deeply in debt. She had managed to acquire another block of stock and now held 59 percent of Desilu. But those shares, valued at some $6 million, were held by the City National Bank of Beverly Hills. The stock was security for the loan she took out back in 1962 to buy out Desi. In order to get rid of the debt Lucy had to sell. And in order to enjoy a whopping profit, she had to sell to Bluhdorn. The clock began to tick down. Lucy cried one last time. Then she said yes.
And just like that, the long climb to the top was over. The years of struggle, the small victories, the big triumphs were in the record books. The minority stockholders agreed to go along with Lucy, and in February 1967, for the price of $17 million, Gulf + Western consumed Desilu. Of that sum, $10 million went to Lucille Ball as the principal stockholder. The day of the transaction, the rich retiree sat up in bed with her breakfast tray. When Lucie entered, Lucy informed her daughter unemotionally, “We sold the studio today,” as if she had just unloaded a burdensome country house. To be sure, she would stay on in some official capacity, but everyone knew this was largely a ceremonial assignment. When she finally met Bluhdorn, all Lucy could say afterward was: “He was charming. He travels fast, talks fast, and acts on impulse. I just hope he stays alive.” (He would survive for another sixteen years, then die as he had lived, in passionate overdrive, succumbing to a heart attack on his private plane at fifty-six, the same age that Lucy was when she sold Desilu.)
Once the sale was official, Lucy was free to put her feet up, relax, travel, do whatever struck her fancy. With a fortune in the bank, very little would have been out of reach. But if she had ever known how to take things easy, she had lost the knack long before the buyout. She peppered her speech with “kiddo,” like some survivor from vaudeville days; went around town in a gray Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce, her head held high like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard; stuck notes to herself on the dashboard and steering wheel; bragged about her pets (one watchdog was so dedicated, she told Rex Reed, “I’ve seen her sit for seven hours guarding an avocado seed”). She also clucked about the moral backslide in America. She allowed Gary to show the James Bond thriller Thunderball on their home screen. “Well, the blood is spurting, the bullets are flying, the sharks are biting, and then this 007 guy climbs into bed with this dame,” Lucy remembered. “I yelled, ‘Stop the film! What the hell kind of picture is this?’ ” Lucie protested, “Oh Mother, my God—we’ve seen it three times.” At the next private screening Lucy opted for Blow-Up. The import had received good reviews—but it did not get one from Lucy, who labeled it “that awful Italian thing.” The only reliable genre was the Western. She acquired one. “And so help me they’re in the fort, see, with the Indians coming through the gate, and I’ll be damned if the girl doesn’t make the sign of the cross, rip her clothes off, and climb on top of this cowboy, and they’re crawling over each other in bed like there’s no tomorrow! Ugh! Everybody’s taking their clothes off but me. You’ll never catch me in the buff, kiddo.”
Where she would be caught was in a film she had wanted to do for years. Full House, the true-life account of a widow with eight children who married a widower with ten, had been acquired by Desilu seventeen years before. Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll had adapted the story for the screen, titled it “The Beardsley Story,” and tailored the lead roles for Lucy and Desi. Years later, Lucy vainly attempted to enlist Fred MacMurray as her costar, and when that fell through she approached James Stewart. Still later, Lucy bounced the Pugh-Carroll version and signed Leonard Spigelgass, scenarist of The Big Street, for a rewrite. After that she thought of John Wayne, Art Carney, and Jackie Gleason as possible members of the cast. Other actors were considered, other rewrites prepared. Finally, in 1967, Melville Shavelson, writer-director of Bob Hope movies (Seven Little Foys, Beau James) and Mort Lachman, Bob Hope’s head writer, came up with a script that everyone liked. Shavelson agreed to direct Lucy, playing opposite her old costar Henry Fonda. Lucy had a last-minute request: she wanted Desi Jr. and Lucie to be cast as two of the couple’s eighteen offspring. Shavelson refused; the children were wrong for the roles. For a moment Lucy considered arguing with her director—who was paying for this film anyhow? The moment passed. What the hell, Lucie and Desi Jr. were under contract to her for her new TV show, Here’s Lucy. She could use them on that program. For all her display of temperament, Lucy was a realist. She knew she was not the “lu” of Desilu anymore; she was just a performer who needed to get laughs. Could she still provoke them on the little screen? The odds were good. But what about the big screen? Was there any heat left in the old Ball of Fire? She was afraid to find out, and more afraid not to.