CHAPTER THIRTEEN
AFTER I Love Lucy went off the air in 1957, Lucille Ball was never again to glow with such intensity—save on one occasion. In Yours, Mine and Ours, she played opposite Henry Fonda on the big screen for the first time in twenty-five years. As Helen North, a middle-aged widow with a large family, Lucy develops a crush on Frank Beardsley, a similarly burdened widower. The career naval officer is intrigued with her; his ten children are not. At a crucial moment the youngsters try to sabotage the romance, spiking Mrs. North’s mild drink with heavy doses of vodka, gin, and scotch. At the dinner table she becomes cockeyed drunk, uncoordinated, batting her false eyelashes, spilling food, laughing raucously at the wrong moments.
The scene was not a simple replay of the “Vitameatavegamin” routine. In that episode, as in all of Lucy Ricardo’s classic moments, there was never really anything at stake. The audience knew that no matter how the TV heroine was embarrassed, she would always extricate herself and be forgiven by Desi—even if she had some “’splainin’ ” to do. In Yours, Mine and Ours the future of North, Beardsley, and their eighteen children depends on her stability, and her inebriation is nearly fatal to the relationship. Many comedians could do impersonations of sots—indeed, two celebrated performers, Jack Norton and Foster Brooks, rarely played anything else. But as Lucy goes through her pivotal scene, Helen is not merely falling-down funny, she is deeply poignant—at first amused, then bewildered, and finally appalled by her own behavior. To be simultaneously attractive, hilarious, and melancholy is a gift given to few, and Lucy was probably the only actress of her generation who could have played Helen North with such conviction. It was as if she were finally able to shake loose from the past and become a grand dame of American cinema, fit company, at last, for Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford.
Shooting the film had been difficult for Lucy and formidable for Melville Shavelson, who impatiently battled his star’s attempts to control the lighting, the camera work, the tempo of dialogue. Toward the close of filming the director pointedly informed Lucy that it was the first time he ever directed nineteen children—a comment that caused her to cry and afterward to cut him dead. Six months later the hostility ended when Yours, Mine and Ours was released to extraordinary critical and popular acclaim. In its customary jargon, Variety said what other papers expressed more traditionally: “Socko family entertainment. Based on actual characters, the film is marked by uniform excellence. Literate scripting, excellent performances, and superior direction are underscored by top-notch production.” Made for less than $2 million, the movie grossed $25 million in 1968, one-quarter of which went to the female star. Lucy had almost forgotten what raves could do to restore the spirit. She could hardly be blamed for mistaking the dusk for the dawn.
Setting up as president of a smaller operation, Lucille Ball Productions, Lucy installed Gary Morton as vice president and went to work in a space provided by Paramount. The relationship with Paramount did not endure. Bluhdorn’s emblematic phrase was, “Well, what is the bottom line?” and he turned out to be as bad as his word. Within a few months he saw to it that much of Lucy’s old staff was dismissed or phased out. Callers to Desilu’s phone number were greeted by operators chirping, “Paramount Gower.” Perhaps fancifully, Lucy complained that when she called the office and asked for herself she received the answer, “Lucy who?”
It was not a question that the public ever put to her. CBS had been running the old I Love Lucy shows during the daytime, and when CBS news director Fred Friendly wanted to use the time slot to show a Senate committee hearing on U.S. Vietnam policy, he was overruled. His superiors at the network opted to stay with an I Love Lucy rerun instead. “It was not a matter of deciding between two broadcasts,” Friendly was to write in his memoirs, “but a choice between interrupting the morning run of the profit machine—whose admitted function was to purvey six one-minute commercials every half hour—or electing to make the audience privy to an event of overriding importance.” Friendly was advised that “housewives weren’t much interested in Vietnam,” and he resigned over the controversy. He was backed by an unexpected ally: Lucille Ball. The newsman had a legitimate gripe against the network, she said. “They throw in the old I Love Lucys instead of something vital.”
Altruism is always laudable. Nevertheless, the profit-motivated network sensed something Lucy did not: a revolution in popular culture. Even the greatest pictures were revived only after long intervals, or at festivals confined to universities and clubs. Television was different. In the 1960s the business of reruns started in earnest. TV became a repository of popular culture, the storehouse of national memory. From its very beginnings, I Love Lucy had been designed as a family show. Thus adults could enjoy a half hour of nostalgia as they watched the old images of Lucy capering on the little screen. The children looked on, introduced to the woman they had only heard about from their parents. Lucille Ball now existed in two time periods, in black-and-white and color, with Desi and without him—television’s first schizoid superstar.
Lucy was grateful for her unique position but wary of becoming an antique in the public mind. She opted to look through the windshield rather than at the rearview mirror. The Lucy Show was renamed Here’s Lucy, and it took off without Desi or the Mertzes. With an eye to the ratings, the producers did invite Vivian Vance to appear on one of the early programs, but Lucy pointedly stayed away from references to the original series. I Love Lucy, she said, was from “another era,” and Lucille Ball was going to be as relevant as the 11 p.m. news.
She was also going to be totally in charge of her life and art. Accordingly, she bided her time, then abruptly moved her outfit off the Paramount lot—“Eat that, Charlie Bluhdorn,” cheered a colleague—and went with Universal, where she had the respect of studio head Lew Wasserman. (She also had the backing of Bernard Weitzman, the former Desilu executive, who had moved to Universal months before.) Universal set her down in a place dubbed “Lucy Lane” with a private dressing room for herself and a public dressing room for tourists to visit. Performers who worked with Lucy during this period saw a newly confident persona—perhaps a little too confident. Booked onto The Lucy Show, Joan Crawford, always a formidable personality, showed up late for a rehearsal. Lucy telephoned her ultimatum: “If you’re not here tomorrow morning at ten on the nose, you’re fired. You get that? Fired!” Next day Joan Crawford came in on time—and promptly regretted it when Lucy made her go through a dance number again and again, faulting her rhythm and tempo. When it was all over, an exhausted Crawford allowed that Lucy could “outbitch” her any day of the week. As a lark Lucy appeared in a minor role on The Untouchables. There she tried to tell Robert Stack how to play his part—and would have taken over the program had Stack not politely reminded his boss that he had played Eliot Ness longer than she had played Lucy McGillicuddy, the name of her character on The Lucy Show. And then came the Burtons.
In 1970, Welsh superstar Richard Burton and the former child actress Elizabeth Taylor, sometimes referred to by her sobriquet “violet eyes to die for,” were the most famous couple in the world. Eight years before, they had been cast in Cleopatra. While filming it, the two began an epic affair that crowded other news from the papers and eventually led to two divorces, Burton’s from the former Sibyl Williams, and Taylor’s from singer Eddie Fisher. The publicity continued as the lovers battled openly, split up, came together again, and then married in 1964. Burton was famous not only for his histrionics but also for his fondness for alcohol, and Taylor for her beauty and her affection for the mirror. Anyone could have predicted the couple would bring trouble with them, but Lucy was hell-bent on having Liz and Dick appear on her program. At that point she was up against the NBC show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, and the younger, hipper rival had become a ratings front-runner. Lucy needed some punch, and for that reason she had made peace and rehired Bob Carroll and the recently remarried Madelyn Davis (formerly Madelyn Pugh Martin). The Burtons, never averse to publicity or a big payoff, agreed to appear in the opening show of the 1970–1971 season.
The premise of the show was simple: Burton gets mobbed at his hotel and dodges the fans by donning Sam the Plumber’s overalls. Lucy mistakes him for a real plumber and hires him to take care of the office plumbing. He does the job while reciting Shakespeare. When he leaves, Lucy discovers a large diamond ring in his abandoned overalls. She tries it on, and can’t get it off—just as the press arrives to examine the jewel. Taylor appears and Lucy hides behind a curtain near her, thrusting out her hand as if it were Liz’s.
Filming was hell from day one. Amid all sorts of publicity, Burton had presented his wife with that now-notorious ring. It held a diamond of 69.42 carats, ostentation incarnate. Wherever Elizabeth appeared, the insurance company was sure to follow, and the premiums were gigantic. Richard insisted that if Lucy wanted the Burtons (and, of course, the Ring), she would have to pay not only for the team, but for their jewelry insurance. Lucy agreed.
Perhaps to gall his employer, Burton kept mumbling in rehearsal. Taylor followed suit. “Richard kept throwing away comedy lines in that British ‘drawing room’ way of his,” Lucy claimed. She counted six big laughs he was failing to get, drew his attention to them, and forced him to change his timing and diction. “He didn’t take too kindly to it,” she went on, “but after the filming he came over to me and said, ‘There were eight!’ ” Privately the actor was not so conciliatory. His diaries speak to the situation: “Those who had told us that Lucille Ball was ‘very wearing’ were not exaggerating. . . . She lives entirely on that weekly show which she has been doing and successfully doing for nineteen years. Nineteen solid years of double-takes and pratfalls and desperate upstaging and nervously watching the ‘ratings’ as she does so.”
In Richard Burton: A Life, the actor’s sympathetic biographer, Melvyn Bragg, theorizes that the Burton and Ball were programmed for a collision course. Richard “waited for his gift to materialize: if it did not, he was helpless. Lucille Ball worked on her talent like an engineer, forever shaping and restructuring, driving the machine of her shows to performance whatever.” Vastly experienced in stage and film, Burton had never been cast in a situation comedy before. He was totally unprepared for the schedule and the pace, and grew more impatient by the hour. His discomfort, writes Bragg, may well have been fueled by guilt. “Why, after all, was he doing it? For exposure? (Did he fear he might need it?) For money? (Surely not. He was very wealthy by now.) For fun? That is most likely. In which case it back-fired badly.” Days of discomfort preceded Burton’s final appraisal of Lucy, written just before shooting wrapped up: “I loathe her today but now I also pity her. After tonight I shall make a point of never seeing her again. . . . She can thank her lucky stars that I am not drinking. There is a chance that I might have killed her.”
Burton found it fascinating to watch Lucy’s reaction to his wife. Lucy sent Elizabeth a dozen roses a week before rehearsals began. Elizabeth returned the compliment by sending Lucy eighteen roses. Lucy replied with a gift of two dozen. The one-upwomanship continued until both dressing rooms looked like flower shops. Burton was amused to find Lucy calling Liz “for the most part Mrs. Burton or Miss Taylor and occasionally Elizabeth but [she] corrects it to the more formal immediately.” (Taylor, whose tendency toward the scatological was kept from the public, returned the favor by referring to Lucy as “Miss Cunt.”) Burton himself was addressed in the third person as His Highness, Mr. Burton, or sometimes Mia. “This is a joke that E. made on the first day when she, E., said that I had become so thin—I am now about 160 lbs—that sleeping with me was like sleeping with Mia Farrow, who is first cousin to a matchstick.”
Actually Burton, appalled as he was by Lucy’s insistence on giving him line readings, acted like a gentleman for most of the week. He complimented Gale Gordon and expressed sympathy for the second banana, Cliff Norton. That comedian was indignant because Gary Morton had tried to cut his salary—the Burtons had consumed too much of the budget, he said. Only once did Burton become irascible, and then he did it privately, advising director Jerry Paris to warn Lucy that if she tried to pull any rank on Elizabeth “she would see, in person, what a Thousand Megaton Hydrogen Bomb does when the warhead is attached and exploded.” The detonation never took place, and for all the little insults Lucy had no reason to regret booking Liz and Dick— “Lucy Meets the Burtons” pulled the highest ratings Here’s Lucy ever received.
Other episodes showed flashes of brilliance, and during this period several veteran comedians saluted Lucy’s way with a script. Norton, for example, called her “a walking, living authority on comedy,” and actor-director Charles Nelson Reilly remarked: “Lucille Ball taught me one of the most important things I’ve ever learned about comedy. We were sitting around the table, and she said, ‘Great joke—wrong place!’ I can’t tell you how many shows I’ve done that I have made better by remembering her wisdom.” And Tony Randall, who had vast experience in every medium from stage to film and TV, praised Lucy even as he acknowledged that many people found her difficult to work with. “She bossed everybody around and didn’t spare anybody’s feelings. But I didn’t mind that because she knew what she was doing. If someone just says ‘Do this!’ it’s awful if they are wrong. If they are right, it just saves a lot of time. And she was always right.”
About comedy, he might have added. Not necessarily about anything else. Show business aside, the years 1970 and 1971 would have to qualify as anni horribiles in the life of Lucille Ball. Desi showed up on the set from time to time, engaging in banter with his ex-wife. She kidded him along and stayed away from the obvious: he was a seamed and puffy figure who had already undergone a colostomy yet still struggled with alcohol and smoking addictions. Desi once said he looked forward to the end of his acting career because he could relax and get old and fat. He had done exactly that. These days he was just a well-off retiree in short sleeves, wearing thick-soled shoes to give himself stature. In the old days no one noticed how tall or short he was—as president of Desilu he had all the stature he needed. And when Desi looked at Lucy he saw a different woman from the one he had known so intimately; now she was a take-charge person who still smoked too much and who needed a lot of help from the makeup department. He noted, a little sadly and more than a little egocentrically: “She’d been boiled hard by the hatred of me. She needed the hatred yet.”
Actually, Lucy was fueled more by insecurity than by animosity. “With all her talent,” Bernie Weitzman testified, “she didn’t really believe she had that much talent.” The doubt caused her to observe, “When you’re Number One there’s only one place you can go.” She resolved that no one was going to push her downhill. In fighting to maintain her place she began to lose friends, or to distance herself from them. Jayne Meadows, whose husband, comedian Steve Allen, had always complimented Lucy on her style, was treated like a piece of furniture, and was made to pay for her own wardrobe when she appeared in a Here’s Lucy episode. “Lucy was very cheap,” Meadows said afterward. “She was what Jack Benny played.” And Jack Benny himself, a man who made a point of never criticizing anyone in the business, stated privately after an appearance on Here’s Lucy that the boss-lady was “tough, very tough,” and suggested that she ought to get herself to a good psychiatrist.
If Lucy knew about these opinions she refused to recognize them. She was too preoccupied by the inadequacies of her show, and by the problems of the next generation of Arnazes. Desi Jr. had begun to drink in secret at the age of eleven. From alcohol he had gone on to experiment with drugs, particularly when the trio Dino, Desi & Billy was on the road. The trio had run its course by 1970, but he was an addict at that point—a skilled one who hid his habit from public and family view. Lucy and her seventeen-year-old son had since reconciled, but a tension remained and it was impossible for either of them to break it. For Desi Jr., like Lucie, had been incorporated into Here’s Lucy, playing roles that featured them almost every week. So they were with their mother not only at home but on the set. Lucy, recalled Desi Jr., “would treat us—rightfully so—as cast members at work, but we would still take things personally that probably weren’t intended that way. When most people are hassled at work, they can blow off steam when they get home. But it didn’t work that way for us because we just continued the same arguments when we got home.”
At the age of eighteen, Lucie moved out of the house and got her own apartment, much to Lucy’s distress. The following year, 1970, she began dating Phil Vandervort, an actor-director, and she announced her intention to marry him. Lucy, who tended to characterize her daughter’s dates as “fishheads,” thought Lucie was too inexperienced— she needed to date other men, gain some knowledge of herself and the world. Still, Lucie’s problems paled besides Desi Jr.’s.
As his sister declared her love for a disapproved man, the seventeen-year-old Desi Jr. began a romance with the twenty-three-year-old Patty Duke. The actress’s résumé read like something from a Zola novel. The child of alcoholics, Anna Marie Duke had been abused psychologically and sexually by her managers, a couple who lived off the earnings of their young client. At the age of sixteen, Anna (now called Patty) landed the part of the young Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker and won an Academy Award. She also married at that age, at least partly to get away from the people who were driving her to the brink of madness. Several years later the gifted actress was the centerpiece of The Patty Duke Show, in which she played identical cousins. All the while, she drank and experimented with drugs. Currently she was separated from her husband but not divorced, a volatile young woman who squandered money, bit her fingernails down to the quick, had a history of suicide attempts, and was dependent on chemicals, alcohol, and tobacco—in short, a mother’s nightmare.
Lucy did what she could to break up the affair; as Duke noted in her memoir, Desi’s mother “felt she was in a crisis situation, and her attitude was efficient and cold, with barely a veneer of politeness.” The attitude had no effect. Late in the year Patty gave out the news that she was pregnant, and that Desi Jr. was the father. Desi Sr. was apparently unperturbed at the thought of becoming a grandfather; “boys will be boys” seemed to be his view of the matter. Lucy was not so sanguine. She said Duke was “living in some fantastic dreamworld, and we’re the victims of it. Desi being the tender age of seventeen when they met, she used him.”
Sean Duke was born in February 1971, and the tabloid press closed in. Lucy visited the infant, wearing a heavy veil so that reporters wouldn’t recognize her, but she refused to acknowledge the child as a blood relative. Thinking back to the beginnings of the romance, and noting Sean’s birthday, she said, “none of the dates made sense to me.” Her math was correct. Much later Duke admitted that the father was John Astin, a married actor who eventually left his wife in order to marry Patty. Desi Jr. promptly took up with Liza Minnelli, almost seven years his senior.
In the meantime, Lucie had gone against her mother’s wishes and wed Phil Vandervort. The marriage would be over in a year. After that she began to date Jim Bailey, a female impersonator and ex-boyfriend of Liza. Bailey was to tell Lucy biographer Charles Higham: “Lucy liked me very much. But when I started my involvement with her daughter she told me she used to lie awake nights trying to figure it all out. She kept asking herself, ‘Isn’t he? Is he? Is he gay? Isn’t he? If he wears a dress, which is he? How could he be having an affair with my daughter?” Some evenings, the obsession with her children’s affairs got completely out of hand. At a screening of Woody Allen’s cheeky EverythingYou Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, Lucy did her Queen Canute act, erupting in fury: “Am I seeing a man making love to a sheep? Am I seeing a man who is married with children wearing a gown? Am I seeing a breast appearing over the horizon? Has civilization come to an end? Take this picture off! Now! Immediately! This is filth!” It was as if by an act of will she could push time backward, past the Vietnam War, the youthquake, the clanging music of the Doors, the lyrics of Bob Dylan warning his older listeners about what was blowing in the wind, the experiments with drugs, the sexual revolution, the bumper stickers reading QUESTION AUTHORITY—as if she could re-create 1952, when she and Desi ruled the airwaves and all things and all people were in their places and the music was good and the laughter did not come out of a can and the world was as stable as Twentieth Century–Fox.
There were times when Lucy must have wondered why fate had turned against her with such a will. Even in small matters she seemed to be rolling snake-eyes. Jess Oppenheimer, the father of I Love Lucy and in many ways a father figure for Lucille Ball, threatened a lawsuit. He charged that the character Lucy played in The Lucy Show and Here’s Lucy was basically Mrs. Ricky Ricardo. As such she derived her humor from his conception of a scheming, though genial, ditz. Lucy’s lawyers knew he had a case and advised her to settle out of court. She did, to the tune of $220,000, and avoided him thereafter. (Gary Morton quietly continued to play golf with Oppenheimer, without mentioning the fact to his wife.) The payout, and various wrangles with Desi Jr. and Lucie, coupled with reminders of advancing age, seemed to accentuate Lucy’s eccentricities. On cross-country flights she would suddenly unbuckle her seat belt and begin compulsively cleaning the floors and the toilets, distressing the stewardesses who recognized her and astonishing the passengers who didn’t. She raised hell in rehearsals when things went wrong, and anyone and anything that contradicted her anywhere got the full force of her wrath. Actress Kaye Ballard remembered biking alongside Lucy when a dog appeared from a yard and barked at them ferociously. “Get back in those bushes, you son of a bitch!” ordered Lucy. The dog turned tail and ran off. DeDe, vigorous in her eighties, warned director Herbert Kenwith that her daughter was the bitch everyone said. Lucy, who heard the remark, protested, “I am not! Only when I’m working.” Countered her mother reasonably, “But that is when people see you.”
The only pleasant news—or so it seemed at the time—was Lucy’s continuing popular appeal. Jerry Herman’s arch, campy musical Mame opened on Broadway 1966 and ran for 1,508 performances. Two years later Warner–Seven Arts bought the film rights for $3 million plus a percentage of the remaining theatrical grosses. Several high-powered actresses were rumored to be up for the role, including Elizabeth Taylor, and also Angela Lansbury, who had played the original Mame Dennis onstage and who made the mistake of saying, “If they’re going to do my Mame, then I’ll have to do the film.” Lucy got the part.
All these years, Lucy had relied on Desi’s advice, but this time when he told her to pass on the role she ignored him. Author Patrick Dennis had made a fortune when he introduced the world to his quotable aunt—“Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death”—in the 1955 best-seller. Rosalind Russell took the title role in the 1958 film, Auntie Mame; she got fine notices and for most moviegoers became the definitive Mame. Lucy thought she could top Roz; playing the extravagant Mame Dennis would be the capstone of her career and no one was going to talk her out of it.
As usual, Desi’s instincts were on the money. It was not only a question of age—for much of the play and film Auntie Mame is supposed to be a woman in her forties, as indeed Angela Lansbury was when she played her in New York. Lucy was also an inappropriate choice because her comic persona was that of a naïf, a sweet conspirator undone by her own strategies. Mame Dennis was a sharp-tongued, sophisticated professoressa in the school of life.
The film was still in the planning stage when Lucy took a break and traveled to Snowmass, Colorado. She had found a new retreat in the white-capped mountains, where she bought three condominiums, one on top of the other, for herself, the children, and any visitors who might drop in. Gary had no use for cold weather; golf was his game, not skiing. Lucy sometimes went there on her own, happy for a little solitude after so much family tsuris. However, in an extended celebration of the Christmas season, Gary was there early in January 1972, as were DeDe, Lucie, and Desi Jr. and Liza Minnelli. Lucy had begun to take up skiing. She had mastered stilts when one of the Lucy shows called for her to walk on them, and done somersaults on a wire in her fifties. To a natural athlete, what was the big deal about going downhill on a couple of boards? So what if she was sixty years old? In hindsight, Lucy’s insouciance seemed to have tempted fate, for as she was standing and talking, a female skier lost control and collided with her. There was the confusing sound of a snap, much louder to Lucy than to the onlookers, and she collapsed in agony. Her right leg had been broken in four places.
Medical help arrived almost immediately, and Desi Jr., Liza, and Lucie followed the ambulance to the local hospital. Lucie remembered her mother screaming, “not from the pain, but because of the hundreds of people she thought would be thrown out of work because of her condition. She thought it was over.” “It” was not only Mame but Here’s Lucy and Lucille Ball Productions. Almost as soon as Lucy came out from under the anesthetic, depression set in. “I’ll never work again,” she was heard to say. “To hell with it. To hell with it all.” A few days later she changed her mind, ripping off the leg-length cast twice before she got something that allowed her more freedom of movement. “It was hell,” she remembered. Then she added philosophically: “Of course, things always happen to me like this. All my life it’s been arms legs arms legs arms legs.” Flown to Palm Springs for convalescence, she received Robert Fryer, producer of Mame. He guaranteed that she would not be replaced; preproduction of the movie would stop in its tracks until she had made a total recovery.
Here’s Lucy employees were astonished and gratified to find their president back in the saddle less than a month after the accident, filming the next episode. “For Mom,” Lucie said, “it was like doing Whose Life Is It Anyway?” That play concerned a paraplegic whose only moving part was his face. Lucy was luckier; the scripts, rewritten to accommodate her disability, put her in bed or in a wheelchair, where she could at least use her torso. As Geoffrey Mark Fidelman remarks in The Lucy Book, the accident turned out to be a plus for the series. It provided a continuity and focus previously absent from the program. Because Lucy was in a wheelchair or leg cast it would have been unseemly for her boss to yell at her, so the writers gave Gale Gordon a more agreeable persona. The former antagonists became emotional equals rather than simply boss and employee, and the Lucy character, at long last, was allowed to grow older. No one referred to her as a young lady anymore.
Desi’s show business career was not quite finished. “I was tired,” he claimed, “of seeing Ricardo Montalban and Fernando Lamas in all those Mexican roles.” He was also tired of being television’s forgotten man. And so he appeared in an episode of The Men from Shiloh, a Western series, some twenty-five pounds heavier but looking none the worse for his bouts with severe diverticulitis. He had sold his horse-breeding farm and now spent almost all his leisure hours fishing in Mexico or relaxing on the grounds of his Del Mar house. If no new money was coming in, he had plans to produce several new series. And perhaps he would do some more acting now that he had gotten his feet wet again. Lucy wasn’t the only one with talent, the networks were continually reminded.
True enough, but Desi’s greatest gifts lay in his uncanny ability to put writers on the appropriate properties, and to cast the ideal actors in the right roles. Thus he could not help but feel a great sadness and frustration at the start of 1973, when the cameras began to film Lucy in Mame. For Desi it must have been like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The skiing accident had caused a sixteen-month postponement, and George Cukor, who had directed Judy Garland in her sensational comeback film, A Star Is Born, dropped out to fill other commitments. Cukor was replaced by the inexperienced Gene Saks, director of the Broadway Mame. Leonard Gershe, who had adapted the Gershwins’ Funny Face and Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings, was announced as the scenarist, but the script was eventually done by Paul Zindel. That writer’s main credits were for stage works, most notably the off-Broadway play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. Bette Davis, who made no secret of her desire to play Vera Charles, Mame’s “bosom buddy,” was passed over in favor of Beatrice Arthur, the original Broadway Vera—and, not coincidentally, Gene Saks’s wife. The comic actress Madeline Kahn had been signed to play Agnes Gooch, the terrified spinster who becomes liberated by Mame’s lust for life. Five weeks into rehearsals Lucy challenged her, “When are you going to show us Gooch?” Replied Kahn, “I have.” It was the wrong answer. Kahn later claimed, “The producers explained a few things, and let me go, wishing I could have stayed.” Lucy thought there was more to the dismissal than that: Madeline “got them for fifty grand, and she knew all she had to do was play it cool—she would get paid off and go to work immediately on [Mel Brooks’s comedy] Blazing Saddles. She had no intention of giving me Gooch.” Jane Connell, who had played the part on the stage, took Kahn’s place.
For most of the nineteen weeks of shooting, Lucy suffered from anxiety and leg pains. The tension manifested itself in an argument with her longtime makeup man, Hal King, who had been using a liquid adhesive to conceal the actress’s wrinkles. The device hurt, and Lucy’s temper was short anyway; she slapped him during an argument and he walked off the picture.
As soon as the doctors gave her the green light to begin rehearsals, Lucy began to rise at 5 a.m. and spend ninety minutes every morning stretching and bending before she drove to the set. With all this preparation, choreographer Onna White could do only so much with an actress whose great versatility had never included terpsichore. When writer Charles Higham visited her on the set, Lucy exploded: “Why am I doing this? I must be out of my mind. Dancing for a whole hour, exercise, the vocal coach, Jesus. Movies! The hours! It’s like running backward!” As a friend remarked, “Lucy knew very well why she was working her tail off: it was in the hope of firing the last stage of her rocket—becoming a movie diva in her sixties.”
When the filming concluded, Lucy gave out interviews pushing Mame as a family movie. She made it, she insisted, “because I don’t want the industry to go down the sewer, and I mean sewer! There are too many lines around the wrong movie houses these days.” She cited the Bernardo Bertolucci film Last Tango in Paris as a prime example of sex gone wrong. “I don’t know why Marlon Brando would lower himself to do a film like that. I think there are a lot of dirty old men making a fast buck—and confusing young people.” She kept making that point wherever she journeyed, and, as the New York opening approached, turned an episode of Here’s Lucy into a half-hour plug for the upcoming Mame.
All the plans, all the promises and aspirations crashed in March 1974, when Mame had what was called a World Premiere at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. (The film then moved on to Radio City Music Hall.) Desi proved to be right in all respects. Lucy was miscast and unprotected; everything had slalomed downhill from there. Worse musicals had preceded it in the 1970s, among them the tuneless Song of Norway, starring an unconvincing Florence Henderson, and the plodding Lost Horizon, which contained Bert Bacharach and Hal David’s worst score. But this one seemed to irritate the critics in a new and different manner, and most of them went out of their way to be unkind. It was as if they were personally affronted by a TV personality who dared to criticize the film business, and who had the effrontery to go above herself. In Newsweek, Paul D. Zimmerman wrote: “There she stands, her aging face practically a blur in the protective gauze of softer-than-soft focus, her eyes misting, her remarkably well kept figure gift-wrapped in the fashions of the twenties, looking alternately like any one of the seven deadly sins and a decorator wing chair.” In Time, Jay Cocks observed: “Miss Ball has been molded over the years into some sort of national monument, and she performs like one too. Her grace, her timing, her vigor have all vanished.” Cocks wrote that only Bea Arthur brought the film to life: “She tucks Mame under her arm and walks away with it, although not far enough.” In the New Yorker, Pauline Kael made the cruelest assessment, giving the project a homosexual spin: “Why did Lucille Ball do Mame? After more than forty years in movies and TV (and five years of chorus work and assorted jobs before that)—after conquering the world—did she discover in herself an unfilled ambition to be a flaming drag queen?” The audience, looking at the star, is “not thinking of fun,” Kael goes on, “we’re thinking of age and self-deception. When Mame’s best friend, Vera Charles (Bea Arthur), asks her, ‘How old do you think I am?’ and Mame answers, ‘Somewhere between forty and death,’ one may feel a shudder in the audience. How can a woman well over sixty say a line like that, with the cameraman using every lying device he knows and still unable to hide the blurred eyes?”
Lucy called the critical response “a shellacking” and never really got over it. She put up a cheery front, pointing out that Mame’s first weeks had broken box office records at Radio City. As time went on, though, she kept rereading the knocks, like a casualty whose fingers keep straying to the wound. People magazine reporter Jim Watters was less than friendly about the way she was “regally apportioning her time” during a publicity trip to New York: “ninety minutes with prestigious if low-rated Dick Cavett to an evening accepting a ‘Ruby’ (named after Keeler) award hosted by a homosexual-oriented magazine.” When he confessed that he was less than enthusiastic about Mame, she should have stayed away from the subject. Instead she gave Watters a ten-minute diatribe on the deterioration of American cinema: “ ‘Don’t you think there is a need for pictures that won’t strain to the nth degree every bone in your body? Don’t you have enough reality so that in a theater you should be entertained? I suppose you like covering the water-front. I bet you even liked Last Tango,’ she asserted in her best basso tones.” In Chicago Lucy broke down during an interview with Sun-Times critic Gene Siskel. “It’s not that I’m tired,” she said as tears rolled down her face. “Why do the newspapers have to send people just so they can take ugly pictures of me?” she wailed. “So I look my age— what’s wrong with that? These stories make me feel wrong and old.”
I n a sad synchrony, the rest of her career wound down in 1974. Here’s Lucy had slipped badly in the ratings; for the first time in her life, a Lucille Ball program failed to make the Nielsen Top Twenty. CBS statisticians had been charting her waning popularity for months, but the network’s management had not dared to intervene because Lucy was still a beloved figure all across the United States. But by the winter of 1974 it was decided that Here’s Lucy had turned into a liability. Meeting upon meeting followed, until an announcement confirmed the water-cooler speculations. After twenty-three years as a television superstar, Lucille Ball would ring down the curtain on weekly comedy. A CBS press release hastily added that Miss Ball and the network were still great friends. To demonstrate that affection she would be in an “undisclosed number of specials” in the 1975–1976 season.
Here, at least, the press was indulgent. The New York Times noted that the various Lucy shows were running in seventy-seven countries. In a valedictory, the paper saluted Lucy, saying she “was to CBS what Milton Berle had been to the National Broadcasting Company during the early days of television, and she was credited by CBS with winning an audience to make it competitive.” The Los Angeles Times saw Lucille Ball as an international figure on the order of Chaplin. Her works were “playing in so many countries that a salesman once said that he knew when Lucy had reached a new nation of Africa or Asia by finding babies named Lucy.”
The subject of this adulation was unwilling to call it a day, to put her feet up, take stock of her career, and organize her scrapbooks. DeDe was still around, and watching the spry old lady with the dyed red hair allowed Lucy to feel that she herself was in an extended period of middle age. And since neither Desi Jr. nor Lucie had settled down yet, she could compare herself with women decades younger, whose children were in much the same fix.
In his twenties, Desi Jr. embarked on a new career as a film actor, appearing as Marco Polo in the comedy Marco, and as a young half-Indian in the Western Billy Two Hats, costarring Gregory Peck. The years of performing on the stage and television had given him a professional sheen. In addition, the now lean and attractive young man had inherited great measures of his father’s charm and his mother’s drive. Still, he never quite caught on. There were new romances after Liza Minnelli became distracted by Peter Sellars when she was off filming in England. And there were more drug trips and more alcohol.
In contrast, Lucie was beginning to carve out an independent show business career. A tall, striking young woman, she developed a cabaret act, did regional theater, then landed her first major role, as the neurotic dancer Gittel Mosca in the 1974–1975 national tour of the musical Two for the Seesaw. In 1975, she played the title role in NBC’s Who Is the Black Dahlia?, based on the true story of an unsolved Los Angeles slaying. The same year she starred in Death Scream, an ABC drama inspired by the murder of Kitty Genovese, whose screams for help were ignored by her New York City neighbors.
Lucy kept almost as busy in 1975. She was the lodestar of Grand Ole Opry’s farcical “Lucy Comes to Nashville,” and of the CBS seriocomedy Three for Two, opposite Jackie Gleason. Lucy had long nourished the idea of playing Lillian Russell to Jackie Gleason’s Diamond Jim Brady; this was the closest she was to come. In the first vignette, Lucy, wearing a black wig with silver highlights, impersonated a neglected wife. In the second, as a plain hausfrau having an affair, she wore an upswept blonde wig and a feather boa. In the third, sporting an upswept brown wig and a close-fitting gown, she played a manipulative mother and wife. Lucy’s versatility was not enough to save the show. Too few of the lines were moving or funny, and Three for Two found no favor with the critics—Variety judged it a “dismal trio of one-act plays about unpleasant and stupid people.” Despite this assessment, the paper held no grudge, praising her work in the semi-autobiographical What Now, Catherine Curtis? on CBS. For the first time since her pregnancy Lucy had gained noticeable weight. Nevertheless, under a well-made brunette wig she looked more attractive than she had in years, and she acted with unaccustomed subtlety and poignance. Miss Ball, maintained Variety, gave “an outstanding performance as a middle-aged divorcée emotionally shattered by the end of a twenty-year marriage.”
One show broadcast that year was notable for Lucy’s absence. “NBC’s Saturday Night,” shot in New York, employed its young Saturday Night Live stars—plus Desi Arnaz Sr. and Jr.—to send up I Love Lucy and Desilu’s The Untouchables. Desi Jr. was to look back benignly on the program. “ILove Lucy had never been satirized by anyone,” he told Geoffrey Mark Fidelman. “It was groundbreaking in a strange way.” His sister was not so sanguine. “I remember watching that show in my mother’s condo in Aspen and thinking it was dreadful. I had a feeling they were making fun of my father, and fooling him into thinking they were tributing him. It really bothered me that they never even let him finish singing ‘Babalu.’ I felt really sad for him afterward, like he had been used.”
Desi got his own back, and more, when his autobiography, A Book, was published the following year. It was a candid, oddly appealing work, done without a ghostwriter. The author enjoyed a little self-mockery, as in the account of his sexual initiation: “I was obviously anxious and noticeably ready for action, and getting more and more frustrated by the minute. We had tried a number of ridiculous experiments and were working on a new one when there was a loud knock on the door. It was her mother, the cook, asking her to come out. I didn’t have any trouble putting on my trunks in a hurry. The small proof of my anxiety had disappeared. I wish I could have done the same.”
But for the most part A Book was a straightforward account of the romantic, financial, and familial relationship of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, from Desi’s point of view. Desi summoned up the grand beginnings, the exciting heyday of I Love Lucy, the building of the studio, the children as youngsters, and finally the arguments, the split, and the paradise lost. “The irony of it all,” he concluded, “is how our undreamed-of success, fame, and fortune turned it all to hell.” Only a few books have been encapsulated by the pictures on the dust jacket. Desi’s was one of them. On the back, a handsome young Cuban flashed a brilliant smile as he hammered a set of conga drums. A lifetime later, Desi squinted out from the cover, gesturing to an audience with cigarillo in hand. The younger man hadn’t a line on his face. The older man was seamed and weary, battered by life and circumstances and—as he ruefully acknowledged in his memoir—by too damn many self-inflicted wounds.