CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IN THE MID-1970S and beyond, the losses went on. Lucy’s onetime neighbor Jack Benny, the man who had taught her so much about timing, died in 1974. Early in 1977, DeDe, aged eighty-five, suffered a stroke that confined her to a house in Brentwood. Lucy had bought the place to provide DeDe with the illusion of independence, but she called in every morning, dreading the day when no one would pick up the phone. It came on July 22.
DeDe had been in the audience for thousands of broadcasts, and Lucy remained shocked and disoriented long after her mother’s death. Two months later, as taping began for the special “Lucy Calls the President,” the star abruptly shouted: “Cut!” She explained to the onlookers: “I’m sorry, I got off to a bad start. My DeDe is usually in the audience, and damn it, that threw me at the top. That was my Mom. She’s made every show for all these years and it suddenly dawned on me as I was coming down the stairs. Forgive me! I’m glad I got that out of my system and I’m awfully glad you’re here. It was maudlin, but I just couldn’t help it.”
In the cast of that special was Vivian Vance, making what was to be her last public appearance. She had suffered a minor stroke, and Lucy sent her to a specialist. Back came Vivian with the news: “Your fucking doctor says I have cancer!” The diagnosis was correct. She immediately went off to northern California to receive radiation treatments.
During this time Lucy appeared in a number of other specials, ranging from Circus of the Stars to the Mary Tyler Moore Hour, the latter an experience she preferred to forget: “I’d say something to Mary and she’d smile that big toothy smile and walk away.” Lucy became notorious for her crankiness on the set, no doubt a reaction to all that was going on around her, and to her consciousness of encroaching age. Late in 1977 she sat for an unpleasant interview with Barbara Walters, during which she retailed what had already become a standard cascade: “Desi is a loser. A gambler, an alcoholic, a skirt chaser . . . a financially smart man but self-destructive.” She characterized Gary, who sat beside her, as a welcome contrast. All the pent-up bitterness began to affect her performances. On a Steve Allen Comedy Hour special, for example, Allen resurrected an old hospital routine he had written with comedian Gene Rayburn. Originally, Rayburn had played a patient swathed head to toe in bandages; Jayne Meadows had played the man’s wife. “Jayne got screams,” Allen recalled, “doing it perfectly as she grabs at him in innocence, concern, and hysteria. We were looking for something strong for Lucy to do on this show. Yet, to our surprise, when she did it there were no laughs at all. We had to sweeten the laugh track later. She didn’t do the right kind of hysterics. There was no believability to what she did.” The irony of all this was that in 1977 Lucy had been named one of the ten most admired women in a Gallup poll, coming in ahead of Mamie Eisenhower, Barbara Walters, and Queen Elizabeth II.
To many of her colleagues it seemed that Lucille Ball had suddenly become obsolete—reason enough for the Friars Club to give her a tribute. It was their way of acknowledging comedians who were passé without being senile. An extraordinary group of performers and politicians attended, including the opera diva Beverly Sills, comedian Carol Burnett, and Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley. They were joined by a parade of movie stars, among them John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda. When the accolades were over, Lucy stood up and said wistfully: “I must have done something right, but I cannot be as great as everyone’s said. So I’ll just accept a third of the compliments, gratefully.”
Except for appearances in the occasional special, compliments were about all Lucy was to receive for the next year and a half. To pass the time she taught a course in television film and aesthetics at California State University, Northridge. Essentially, she said, she would instruct those majoring in communications in the practical, get-you-through-the-day basics of survival in the TV and film industries. “They [the students] are thrown out with what they think are all the ingredients, but sometimes they have to start from scratch. I emphasize self-preservation.”
Self-preservation was something Lucy had majored in all her life, but at that moment she could have used a little help. Character actress Mary Wickes tried to supply it. The I Love Lucy stalwart was acting in summer stock in 1979 when she persuaded Lucy to fly to San Francisco for a sentimental journey. Together the two old friends called on a bedridden Vivian Vance. Most of the stay was spent in happy reminiscence between Lucy and Vivian, with Mary off in a corner. The laughter lasted for two hours; afterward the visitors cried all the way to the airport. Vance died that August.
In the following year came an event that seemed a reproach—until Lucy realized how much it would change her daughter’s life for the better. In 1979 Lucie Arnaz had truly emerged from the family shadow to star in the Neil Simon–Marvin Hamlisch Broadway musical They’re Playing Our Song. Time enthusiastically noted that Lucie “hurdles the barricade of being the daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz by imitating neither, but she has inherited their incomparable comic timing.” Down the street, Laurence Luckinbill was making his own mark in another Simon production, the autobiographical comedy Chapter Two. The actors met at Joe Allen, a restaurant in the theater district, fell in love, and announced marriage plans. Not only had Luckinbill previously been married and fathered two sons, he was also seventeen years older than Lucie—a marked difference from Lucy, whose two husbands were each six years her junior. Desi had no trouble accepting his prospective son-in-law, and Lucy soon came around. (And wisely so: the Arnaz-Luckinbill marriage was to prove successful and durable, and made her the grandmother of two boys and a girl.) Both Lucy and Desi showed up for the wedding in upstate New York. Lucy surprised no one when she cried during the ceremony. Afterward her ex-husband, always a crowd-pleaser, sang the I Love Lucy theme.
Back in Hollywood, Lucy made only one significant comedy special in 1980: Lucy Moves to NBC. She had been with CBS for almost thirty years, and the broadcast signaled that her old network no longer needed or wanted her. In theory, Lucille Ball Productions would be creating comedies at her new home; in reality, very little would come from the association, and that little was not to be popular.
Discomfort seemed to follow Lucy these days. She hit the white wine bottle a little harder than usual, and sometimes the clear fluid in her water glass was vodka. Richard Schickel had written the narration for a special, High Hopes: The Capra Years, an homage to director Frank Capra. The critic-scenarist provided a picture of Lucy at that time when he journeyed out to her house one afternoon and found her “slightly in her cups.” He reported: “She was nice and slightly vague and uninterested in the niceties of the hostly prose I’d drafted for her to speak. On set, I noticed she was wearing those little weights behind her ears that older actresses sometimes use to pull the skin on their faces tighter. But basically she came, did her brief job, and departed. What she had to do with Capra I’ll never know. Probably just the network seeking stars—any stars—to perk up a show they eventually played just once (on Christmas Eve).”
That year was not a good one for her ex-husband, either. When Jimmy Durante died in 1980, his widow asked Desi to help with the funeral. According to comedian Jack Carter, “He was so out of it that he kept inviting people who were dead. He kept calling that old racetrack crowd, and they were all gone. He was thinking of people from thirty years ago when they were all kids. At the funeral Desi stood in the back, stammering. He didn’t know where he was. He was even bombed that day.”
In 1981, rehearsing for a Milton Berle special for HBO, Lucy saw Gary Morton attempting to provoke the host. “Hey, Uncle Miltie,” Morton asked loudly. “Why don’t you relax and let everyone do their jobs?” Berle rose to the bait: “And what did you ever direct, you son of a bitch, that your wife didn’t arrange for?” The seventy-year-old Lucy was clearly uncomfortable with the argument that followed, and with the resolution—sullen laughter on the part of both comedians. Two years later she and Gary took an apartment in Manhattan at 211 East Seventieth Street in order to spend more time with the grandchildren—Lucie and Laurence Luckinbill then lived across town. The place was decorated with much more formality than her California house, and the little Luckinbills sensed it. They were not comfortable there, nor was Lucy with them. Mainly, when she got the urge to see grandchildren, she went to their place. Lee Tannen, Gary Morton’s cousin, grew very close to Lucy in her last years. He observed that the family visits were infrequent and later wrote that he found the situation “sad, because it seemed to me like it was always such an obligation for Lucy to be with her children and now with her grandchildren as well.”
She seemed to take more solace in the handful of ceremonies arranged in her honor. One occurred in 1984, when at a televised All-StarParty for Lucille Ball, Sammy Davis Jr. gushed before a crowd of fellow performers: “God wanted the world to laugh, and He invented you. Many are called, but you were chosen.” Davis went on to analyze Lucy’s talent. “Clown you are not. All of the funny hats, the baggy pants, the moustaches and the wigs, the pratfalls and the blacked-out teeth—they didn’t fool us for one minute. We saw through the disguises, and what we found inside is more than we deserve.” More accolades came her way: the Television Hall of Fame made her the first female inductee in 1984, and the Museum of Broadcasting in New York staged an evening in her honor.
Grateful as Lucy was for such tributes, they gave her the feeling that she was being eulogized rather than saluted. The things that were said were the kind one said about the dear departed. And, indeed, it was not until 1985 that she was again welcomed back on television as an actress. At the age of seventy-three she appeared in Stone Pillow, playing a homeless crone wandering the cold Manhattan streets. Lucy was still a star, and certain script changes were made on her insistence. The protagonist’s name, for example, became Flora Belle, in honor of Lucy’s maternal grandmother. She also decided that the character would be a vegetarian—“because it’s healthier. I’d just need one carrot.” And she devised Flora Belle’s makeup and costume. What she did not choose was the weather—Stone Pillow was supposed to take place in February, but was shot in the middle of an unexpectedly sweltering New York spring. Suffering under layers of clothing, Lucy lost twenty-three pounds over the course of the six-week production. In addition, she suffered periodically from dehydration, and as if that were not enough, she tore a tendon during a rehearsed fight when an actress held on to her too long. All this failed to bank the fire of her performance. Lucy was tough on herself and tougher on the staff. Even a bunch of street rodents, trained for the purpose, were reviled for being too tame. “These are sissy rats,” she proclaimed. “I want real ones.” Stone Pillow’s scenarist and coproducer, Rose Leiman Goldemberg, was amused by Lucy’s confrontation with a supposedly stray canine: “The dog they hired didn’t want to come. In the final cut, she just grabbed that dog and pulled him down. She was gonna have him whether he wanted to come or not.”
Precious few pleasures could be derived from the making of the TV movie, but anonymity was one of them: Lucy liked to walk a few blocks in her costume, trying it out on the public to see if anyone would recognize her. No one ever realized that the hunched old woman was Lucille Ball. She related the experience to Katharine Hepburn, when they met on the East Side. Instead of being amused at the bag lady role, Hepburn warned, “You know, of course, darling, you’ll be inundated with those.” Hepburn was right: the only scripts that came Lucy’s way that summer were about pathetic old folk. Yet Lucy remained optimistic about the work; as she saw it, good reviews were just about guaranteed. Goldemberg’s spousal-abuse drama, The BurningBed, had impressed critics the year before, and the director would be George Schaefer, winner of numerous awards for his elegant Hall-markTelevision Playhouse productions.
If Lucy was impressed by these résumés, the critics were not. Their appraisals were almost uniformly negative. The New York Times was among the most lenient when its reviewer observed, “Anyone in search of biting, or even illuminating, social insights in Stone Pillow can look elsewhere, perhaps only as far as the streets outside the window.” The Boston Globe fumed: “At a recent press conference, Ball said she gave up on television comedy because it was all filth—‘sex, sex, sex.’ But there aren’t many situation comedies as obscene as a television movie that would exploit the plight of the homeless for the sake of the ratings envisioned from resurrecting a faded comedian’s career.” The WashingtonPost added: “What Ball does with the character of Flora the bag lady qualifies more as an appearance than an actual performance.”
Looking back, Lucie Arnaz remarked on just how difficult Stone Pillowhad been for her mother: “She wasn’t well. She kept getting these attacks where she got very hot and couldn’t work. She had a bad heart. It was in the middle of summer, and here she was dressed in these layers of clothes. She had always been claustrophobic anyway. And the script was not that strong. I think at this time in her life it was almost too much for her to learn a script and create a character that was different from ‘Lucy.’ She just wasn’t up to it physically.” Lucy took some comfort from the Nielsens: that season Stone Pillow earned the second-highest rating for TV films. But it was not enough to make her forget the situations of the two Desis.
Desi Jr. had married an aspiring actress, Linda Purl, in 1979. She had appeared with him on a couple of TV movies, and Lucy had come to accept her as a daughter-in-law. At times she appeared to think that Linda might be marrying beneath herself, if only because she seemed so organized. “If there’s anyone in the world who isn’t organized, it’s my son,” said Lucy to a People magazine reporter. “I hope she rubs off on him and he doesn’t rub off on her.” Neither rubbing occurred; a year later Desi Jr. and Linda divorced, and several columnists hinted that the cause of the split was the young man’s problems with substance abuse.
Desi Sr. continued to have his own bouts with alcoholism, spurning friends who refused to give him a drink, and sinking deeper into despair, intensified by the news that his second wife, Edie, was dying of cancer. Then, through an act of will and the counsel of the family physician, Marcus Rabwin, Desi Jr. checked into the recovery center at Scripps Memorial Hospital, determined to overcome his addictions. When he walked out he was clean, and he stayed that way. Convinced that he could serve as an example to others, Desi Jr. persuaded his father to come to the recovery center. There the gray-haired, sallow figure stood next to his son and daughter, who came along for moral support, and in the time-worn manner addressed the assembled addicts: “I’m Desi and I’m an alcoholic.” For two months the stoicism worked— then the backsliding began. Desi Sr. missed meetings, stayed home, and finally drugged himself with painkillers. In the year of Stone Pillow Edie passed away, and Desi moved into a small house in Del Mar with his old and ailing mother. The money, once so plentiful, was ebbing along with his health. Conditions were to get worse. In 1986 his persistent cough was diagnosed: he had lung cancer.
The encroachments and reminders of age were too painful for Lucy to contemplate, and too close to ignore. The only salvation was work. But who would have her? She had already been rejected by CBS, and the arrangement with NBC had not been satisfactory. Of the big networks, only ABC was left. It was all she needed. Executives at the American Broadcasting Company were impressed with the ratings of Stone Pillow, and they convinced themselves that Lucy’s celebrity was still viable.
Their belief was born out of desperation. At the National Broadcasting Company, comedian Bill Cosby had broken racial barriers with his family-centered Cosby Show, and a new comedy series about older women, The Golden Girls, was reinforcing NBC’s reputation as the network to watch. As ABC programmers saw it, Lucille Ball’s credentials would make her the ideal candidate for a rival sitcom—after all, the woman had made her fortune with family comedy, and she certainly qualified as a golden-ager. So anxious was the network for her services that Lucy was given full creative control over her new series. With the writers and producers, she decided to build it around an ornery widow who had inherited one-half of a hardware store. Gale Gordon would be her disputatious partner. Together the two would display their familiar knack for getting into, and out of, comic catastrophes.
Gary Morton was listed as executive producer along with Aaron Spelling, but it was the latter who would do the heavy lifting. Spelling had a unique history with Lucy. Close watchers of I Love Lucy reruns could spot him as the young performer who played the foil to “Tennessee Ernie” Ford when the singer made guest appearances. Spelling had forsaken his acting career to become a producer—one of the most successful in television history. He was the creative force behind Charlie’sAngels, Dynasty, The Love Boat, and other hit series, and when he signed on to produce Life with Lucy ABC confidently booked the series for Saturday nights. It was expected to dominate the evening.
The show was bought without a pilot. Network programmers assumed that Lucy knew all there was to know about making a Lucille Ball comedy—what was the point in wasting money on a tryout? Lucy began on a note of triumph. From his bedside, Desi cheered her on: “What took you so long to get back to work?” Buoyed by his spirit and by happy memories of the old days, she hired Bob and Madelyn. Gale Gordon happily clambered aboard. “He’d try anything,” she remarked to her friend Jim Brochu with admiration. “Do anything we asked him to. He was always taking chances. He was eighty years old, and he could still turn a cartwheel.”
Gordon proved to be the show’s only asset. Lucy had trouble memorizing lines and depended heavily on cue cards. These completely threw off her comic timing. Moreover, no makeup could disguise the fact that she was more than threescore and ten, and her physical bits caused anxiety rather than amusement. The first episode pulled well; ratings went precipitously downhill from there. As Steve Allen saw it, “Lucy’s comedy did not age well, meaning the things she did weren’t as funny as she got into her late sixties and seventies. She couldn’t handle the physicality or pull off being so cutesy.” Allen found himself agreeing with Pauline Kael: “Like most attractive women in show business, Lucy eventually wound up looking a little like a drag queen.”
The critics closed in. Lucy tried to harden herself against negative reviews, but the appraisals of Life with Lucy were more than pans, they were condemnations. In Channels magazine, William A. Henry III summed up the general feeling of hostile disappointment: “That wasn’t Lucy up on the screen. It was some elderly imposter. Caked with makeup, she looked mummified.” The article went on to describe the protagonist’s voice as akin to “a bullfrog’s in agony,” and added: “She gamely attempted her old style of slapstick but her impeccable timing had fled. Worse, what used to be cute and girlish in a younger woman, and in a male chauvinist era, turned out to be embarrassing in a senior citizen. . . . Her new impossible dream of agelessness only saddened audiences with its intimations of mortality.”
Lucy appealed to Desi for counsel; he was too ill to help, and in any case Life with Lucy was already on life support. When the Nielsens listed it in seventy-first place, ABC pulled the very expensive plug. In all, thirteen episodes were filmed and eight were aired. However, the network had agreed up front to fund all twenty-two, and it paid in full. Each segment was worth $150,000 to Lucy, $100,000 to her husband, and $25,000 to Gordon.
The money, good as it was, did not assuage Lucy’s misery. Whatever her experiences in film and theater, she had always been able to dominate the electronic media. This was the first time she had ever failed on television, and the flop was a very public one. Ann Sothern remembered the phone call from her old friend: “She said, ‘Ann, I’ve been fired. ABC’s let me go. They don’t want to see an old grandma. They want to see me as the Lucy I was.” Alas, that lady was available only on reruns.
Illness had weakened Desi severely. He never would get around to writing volume two of his autobiography, provisionally entitled Another Book. But in his decline he found several moments of grace: Lucie had grown close to her father in his last years. Her children were to remember the old man in the baseball cap, hobbling down the inclined walkway in Del Mar and leaning on their station wagon for support as he kissed them good-bye. Desi had lost much of his hair because of the radiation treatments, and he had lost a good deal of weight. His son and daughter and their spouses and grandchildren were all welcome. But he had no wish for Lucy to see him in such a reduced state. Lucie persuaded him to change his mind, and she brought her parents together in Desi’s final months.
On the first occasion he was in parlous shape and the visit was brief and inconclusive. On the second he was vigorous but edgy, until Lucie ran some videotapes of I Love Lucy. She left her mother and father chatting and laughing like kids, she said, on their first date. As Lucy got up to leave, Desi asked, “Where are you going?” She told him, “I’m going home.” “You are home,” he replied. It was Lucy’s most difficult exit.
Later Lucy and Desi Jr. and Lucie walked on the beach, reminiscing. Lucy was to speak to her ex one more time, on November 30, 1986, repeating the words “I love you, I love you, Desi, I love you” on the phone. He assured her that he loved her, too. Had they stayed together, it would have been their forty-sixth anniversary. Two days later he died in his daughter’s arms.
The news went out over the radio that morning. Lucy heard it on the set of the quiz show Super Password and turned to the other guest. Actress Betty White recalled the moment: “She turned to me and said, ‘You know, it’s the damnedest thing. Goddamn it, I didn’t think I’d get this upset. There he goes.’ It was a funny feeling, kind of a lovely private moment.” Lucy issued a statement to the press, carefully scrubbed of references to their marriage: “Our relationship has remained very close, very amiable over the years, and now I’m grateful to God that Desi’s suffering is over.” Like Willie Loman, Desi had expected his funeral to be well attended by members of his own profession. In fact, except for Lucy and Danny Thomas, who gave the eulogy, there was no one from the television business Desi had so powerfully influenced.
As the 1980s dwindled down, Lucy’s main comforts came from her children. Desi Jr. had remained clean and had remarried, to Amy Bargiel, a recovered addict he had met at the New Life Foundation. The organization, dedicated to physical and spiritual renewal, turned the couples’ lives around. Desi Jr.’s second marriage, like his sister’s second, was to endure.
In other ways, though, Lucy’s days were not happy. She regarded her enforced retirement as a living death; her only hobbies were games like Scrabble and backgammon. She played endless contests with younger friends, among them Jim Brochu, a scenarist, and Lee Tannen, an aspiring writer; they saw her loyally through the last years. Brochu was to remember her induction into the Television Hall of Fame: after a film clip of Lucy’s historical career, Lucie Arnaz came onstage and sang the I Love Lucy theme. “At the end, she looked out front, and with her voice breaking said, ‘I love you, Mom.’ ” Lucy stepped up to the podium to receive the award. “The mascara was running down her face in rivers as she finally managed to say a few words: ‘This tops ’em all!’ ”
The expression Lucy wore on that occasion was a welcome contrast to the face she presented to her daughter in talking about plans to write her own autobiography. She was worried about what to write concerning people she had known and worked with through the years. Should she tell all, or omit some telling incidents? “What the hell,” she burst out. “Half of them are dead already.” Lucie reminded her that Desi had written the very candid A Book, and Lucy snapped, “He didn’t tell all the stuff he could have.” Lucie offered some advice: “You’ve never done this. Why don’t you sit down with a therapist and talk about the stuff you’re afraid of and see what comes out? Maybe you won’t feel so bad about everything.” Lucy was having none of that. “She called therapists every name in the book,” Lucie would recall. “I was offended, because at the time I was having tremendous success with a therapist who was helping me be a mom and a wife. She said, ‘What do you need to go to a therapist for?’ And I thought, here we go. She wigged out. I ended up having to pack up my kids, leave Palm Springs. It was a nightmare. We didn’t speak for weeks and weeks.” If you were in therapy in Lucy’s day, “it meant you were crazy, and word would get out to the Hedda Hoppers and Louella Parsonses that you were seeing a shrink, and it was a no-no.”
In the mid-1980s tributes began to come in bunches—there was the Life Achievement Award at the Kennedy Center, the Lifetime Achievement Award in Comedy from the American Comedy Awards, the Woman of the Year from Harvard Hasty Pudding Theatricals, the East-man Kodak Second Century Award, the Emmy Governor’s Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. How much they meant may be gauged from an exchange reported by Lee Tannen in his memoir, I Loved Lucy:
“She said, ‘God, it seems like only yesterday when I was with Roosevelt at the White House.’
“Without missing a beat I asked, ‘Which Roosevelt, Franklin or Teddy?’
“Gary Morton looked up from his magazine and laughed out loud. ‘Hey, Luce, that’s funny,’ he said.
“But I knew a split second after I said it that I had said the wrong thing. Lucy’s whole face turned to flame. She started ranting, almost foaming at the mouth. ‘You think it’s funny getting old. Just wait until you’re old and nobody wants you around, and they throw awards at you when they know you’re gonna die soon anyway. You think it’s funny to lose your job and the people you love? You think it’s funny when you can’t do a thing for yourself anymore? Well, you can all go fuck yourselves!’ Then she stormed into her bedroom and slammed the door behind her.”
For Lucy to say she could not do things for herself was something of an exaggeration. True, she suffered from high blood pressure and angina; Onna White, who had been the choreographer of Mame, helped her work out the kinks in a painful shoulder; and in January 1988 she had a cyst removed from her thyroid gland. But Lucy still managed to get around by herself, and she had sufficient energy to clean the house and straighten the drawers over and over, as if she were marking time, waiting for a new job offer to come in. In May, one opportunity did arise: Lucy’s old pal Bob Hope asked her to do a song-and-dance number on his eighty-fifth-birthday special. Entitled ComedyIs a Serious Business, the piece of special material was written by Cy Coleman and James Lipton, and was performed with considerable difficulty. Supporting actress Brooke Shields remembered the tall lady with the dyed red hair “frustrated, and embarrassed that she was having trouble with the steps.” Lucy collapsed soon after the performance.
A week later she woke up in the middle of the night and went to the bathroom. She had just seated herself on the toilet when a heavy object seemed to fall into her lap. For a moment she thought a piece of the ceiling had broken off. Then she looked down. The object was her lifeless right arm. Gary drove Lucy to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where an examination revealed that she had suffered a stroke.
Lucy was a terrible patient and, ironically, crankiness is what kept her indisposition out of the papers. For she had been at the hospital for only a few hours when she began to hallucinate, probably due to the drugs she had been given intravenously. Roaches appeared on her stomach, marching, she was to recall, to the tune of “Seventy-six Trombones.” She screamed. Nurses strapped her down, but they failed to stop her protests. “Get me out of this goddamned place,” she yelled. “I want to go home.” Lucy happened to be directly under a microphone broadcasting to nurses’ stations all over the hospital. The authorities acceded to her wishes. Hours later they sent Lucy back to Roxbury Drive for convalescence.
Lucy’s powers of recuperation were still in force. A private nurse, Trudi Arcudi, was hired, and was immediately nicknamed Trudy-ArcudiPrivateDuty. Working with her, and with Onna White, the sufferer was cured of her facial paralysis, and in about three months the numbness in her right side went away. To prove to herself, as well as to the family and the public, that Lucille Ball was still a big-time entertainer, she agreed to appear on yet another Super Password. She would be playing for the John Wayne Cancer Center along with other celebrity guests including Betty White, Carol Channing, and Dick Martin. It was a mistake. Lucy’s diction was uncertain and the most casual onlooker could see that she was unable to concentrate on the questions. “She had been a sharp game player,” Martin said wistfully, “but was now very slow on the pickup. She wanted to do it so badly. But she couldn’t keep up. It was kind of sad.” All the same, those who counted her out had one more surprise coming.
She was asked to be a presenter at the Academy Awards on March 29, 1989, along with Bob Hope. The pair would salute the “Oscar Winners of the Future”—a nod from the seasoned pros to the promising newcomers. Without hesitation Lucy agreed, but then she had second thoughts. “I hate the way I look,” she told Tannen. “That goddamn wig with all that goddamn netting gives me a goddamn headache.” Hope called to cheer her up, and once again she agreed to be his co-presenter, only to complain afterward, “Goddamn Hope, nobody cares what the hell he looks like, but everybody cares what I look like—God, I’m so tired of myself.”
Perhaps she was, but her public was not. The designer Ret Turner fashioned a black sequined evening gown with a slit that went all the way up her left thigh. She wore it with confidence—until she was about to go on. “Do my eyes look baggy?” she asked Hope’s publicist, Frank Liberman. “Don’t worry about it,” he replied. “You and Hope have a way of straightening up and dropping thirty years when the lights hit you and you hear the applause.” He was not flattering her. Gasps issued from the audience when Lucy came out. At the age of seventy-eight she was still radiant, with the gait and gams of a showgirl. The ovation lasted for several minutes while she and Bob Hope exchanged smiles and inaudible ad-libs. The applause died down and she picked up her cue—only to stumble over the names of some of the newcomers. Later Lucy complained that she looked terrible, that her teeth had pained her, that she was deeply disappointed in her performance. If she felt that way she was alone. At Irving “Swifty” Lazar’s post-Oscar party, celebrities stopped by her table to praise her affect and her wardrobe. When she and Gary exited, a group of fans cheered Lucille Ball and she lifted her hem to show off the legs once more, threw kisses to the crowd, got in the limousine, and went home beaming.
For the next two weeks, though, she seemed abstracted and depressed, and on April 17 she felt excruciating chest pains. Gary and Lucie drove her to Cedars-Sinai, the hospital she hated. She was rushed to an operating room for nearly seven hours of open-heart surgery: her aorta had ruptured. Again she bounced back; eight days later, doctors gave permission to have her moved from the intensive care unit to a private room.
Bouquets and flower baskets had arrived by the score and more than five thousand well-wishers had called from across the United States, Europe, and Australia. Entire towns sent get-well cards. Lucy’s private room overlooked the Hard Rock Café. In consideration, the trendy youth hangout put up a sign reading GET WELL LUCY. She waved at it from her bed. The hospital fax machine and switchboard became overloaded, prompting a Cedars spokesman to burble: “On a scale of one to ten, this is an absolute ten. Before it’s over the hospital will look like a combination of the U.S. post office and the botanical gardens.” To protect herself, and Cedars-Sinai, Lucy employed a code name. The only way to get through was to call “Diane Belmont”—the monicker Lucy had used a half-century before, when as a gangly novice she tried to convince Broadway producers that she hailed from Montana. With her son and daughter, Lucy watched footage of the overwhelming response on the local news. “Can you believe what’s going on here?” she chirped. “It’s wonderful!” Lucie and Desi Jr. left in high spirits; their mother was regaining strength. And why not? DeDe had lived to eighty-five; if genes told the tale, Lucy would have at least another eight years.
Early the next morning the patient’s back seemed to be acting up. She tried to raise herself, then sank back, unconscious. Her aorta had ruptured again. More than a dozen emergency doctors and nurses labored to undo the damage. It was irreparable. The heroic measures stopped at 5:47 a.m. when Lucille Ball was pronounced dead.
Word went out immediately. The New York Times ran an immense obituary, “Spirited Doyenne of Television Comedy Series Is Dead at 77,” and followed that with an unprecedented editorial. Under the heading “We Love Lucy, Too,” it posited: “If a clown’s face is humanity’s writ large, then Lucille Ball was born to her work. The red of her hair came out of a bottle, but who else would have chosen a shade so fiery? And who in this world ever had bigger, bluer, rounder eyes, or a mouth that slid so quickly into smiling? Hers was the mask of comedy.” Variety’s tribute ran over five pages, with a heavy emphasis on money: in syndication, said a headline, “Lucy Will ‘Run Forever’; Grossed $75-mil So Far.” The front page of the Hollywood Reporter read: “Thanks, Lucy, We Had a Ball!” Every major newspaper in the country printed a large, lyrical obit; most had been written months before when word circulated that Lucille Ball was seriously ill.
That Lucy had been hospitalized for over a week, that she was elderly and somewhat infirm, was no secret. Even so, her death came as a kind of national shock. Much of the populace had grown up with Lucy in their living rooms; to them she was a member of the family and the grief was personal. Entertainment Tonight, as might be expected, devoted its entire half-hour program to Lucy; so did ABC’s Nightline. CBS hastily assembled footage from the best I Love Lucy shows and presented the clips in an hour-long format hosted by the network’s former anchor, Walter Cronkite. The surprise was an appearance by William S. Paley, the eighty-eight-year-old chairman of CBS, going on camera to state that Lucy “was in a class by herself.” He followed that up with a press release claiming that Lucille Ball would “always be the first lady of CBS,” and adding that her “extraordinary ability to light up the screen and brighten our lives is a legacy that will last forever.” Unmentioned was the fact that the network had allowed “the first lady” to go to NBC in 1980 because her usefulness appeared to be at an end. Business, after all, was business, and in lapidary inscriptions one was not under oath.
The following week, Time ran a full-page eulogy, comparing Lucy to a quartet of men: “Lucille Ball was as deft and daring as Harold Lloyd, as rubber-faced as Bert Lahr, as touching as Chaplin—and more ladylike than Milton Berle. In reruns, she is eternal.” Newsweek called her “probably the most popular woman in the history of show business.” Tributes came from all over. In Los Angeles, fans pasted condolence letters on the door of her house. Two presidents saluted Lucille Ball: ex-President Ronald Reagan called her “an American institution,” and his successor, George Bush, defined her as “a legendary figure.” In Paris, Sammy Davis Jr. called her “a great artist—one of the world’s great clowns.” And in Boston, comedian Lily Tomlin said: “It’s a sad day. She was a great role model for me, and a great funny woman.” Comedienne Kaye Ballard could not speak about Lucy without mentioning Desi. Despite their remarriages, she maintained, “She was in love with him until the end. And he was in love with her.” Actress Paula Stewart agreed, privately quoting a comment made by Gary Morton: “I guess she’s happy now. She’s with Desi.”
In a follow-up to the obituary, the Los Angeles Times ran two appraisals of Lucille Ball side by side. Charles Champlin, the paper’s arts editor, observed that the star’s “craft was invisible, the skills so perfected they concealed themselves totally. It was a brilliant illusion, generating a charm that hid the hard work and the artful writing and editing as well as the performing. The result was probably the finest and certainly the most durable single series in television’s history thus far.” He went on to observe that “when Lucy began to commandeer our hearts on I Love Lucy in 1951, the movies were already in considerable trouble, their audiences staying home in large numbers to watch the likes of Lucy in their living rooms. As always, her timing was impeccable.”
In an adjoining column Howard Rosenberg, the Times television critic, wrote: “The more you think about Lucy as an icon, the more remarkable she becomes, for her esteem has grown and grown despite Lucy Ricardo being in many ways the flighty, manipulative, narrowly defined female of her time, a stereotype far outdistanced by today’s woman.” A spokesman at the Museum of Broadcasting commented that Lucy “influenced almost every comic to come after her, whether it be Carol Burnett or Tomlin or the actors on Saturday Night Live. Her Lucy character is like Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Little Tramp’ figure. It is a classic, and it is a reference point. There aren’t a whole lot of characters like that, which have transcended their format.” Perhaps the most vivid reminiscence came from Mike Dann, an NBC program executive when Lucy made her mark. “We had a show on the air called Lights Out, sponsored by Amident. Both the show and the toothpaste were tremendously popular—everybody watched Lights Out.
“Then Desi and Lucy came on the air opposite that show, and Lights Out was canceled. We at NBC were flabbergasted, we just couldn’t believe it. Here was this girl who wasn’t that famous, and this bongo player from Cuba—and it never lost its momentum. It was the first time we used the word ‘runaway’ to describe a show.” Only the Nation, grumpy and scrubbed of humor, had anything bad to say. Speaking for the hard left, the journal recalled that Lucy had registered to vote as a member of the Communist Party in 1936, and when she appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities named no names and went back to work on Monday. The article went on, “Lucy told HUAC she had registered only to make her granddad, a lifelong socialist, happy. Was Lucy putting the committee on or kowtowing to it? Which mattered more to CBS, harboring a Red or being in the black? One can’t find the answer in such mainstream media as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, or Newsweek, since none of their obits mentioned the HUAC encounter. That’s at least consistent with their failure to report on the blacklist in the first place.”
By the time these entries were printed, Lucille Ball had been laid to rest at Forest Lawn cemetery, her ashes set in a place next to her mother’s remains. Gary Morton was alone at the interment; soon after, Lucie and Laurence Luckinbill, accompanied by their children, and Desi Jr. and Amy Arnaz gathered at the grave.
Lucie scheduled three memorial services: one in Los Angeles, one in Chicago, one in New York. On May 8, in their various time zones, they would start at exactly 8 p.m. on Monday night, the day of the week, and the hour, when I Love Lucy ran in its heyday. The Manhattan service took place at St. Ignatius Loyola Church, on Park Avenue at Eighty-third Street. Lee Tannen had asked Diane Sawyer to deliver the eulogy. Lucy had long been an admirer of the ABC anchor, even though they had never met. In her speech, Sawyer commented: “Isn’t it funny. I cannot for the life of me remember how the furniture was laid out in the living room of the house I grew up in, but I can remember where every stick of furniture was in the Ricardo house.” The comment could have been made by any one of Sawyer’s two thousand listeners, and by any of Lucy’s millions of devotees. In the end, credibility had been the secret of her comedy.
As sentimental as Lucy had been in life, she wanted no ceremony after her death. Instructions were left that her passing should be honored with a picnic and not a lugubrious testimonial dinner. According to Jim Brochu, Lucy was specific about the food and drink: ham, baked beans, potato salad, watermelon—all the dishes that she remembered from the delirious summers in Celoron when her only responsibility was making the beds, before she left to find a career and a life. The feast was held on May 14, Mother’s Day, at an estate in Mandeville Canyon. A benign feeling enveloped some fifty guests, including Lucy’s old comrades Mary Wickes and Onna White, as well as Lucie’s and Laurence’s former spouses, Phil Vandervoort and Robin Strasser. The press and much of the Los Angeles public had been informed of the picnic, but was barred from attending. No matter. Inside and outside the gates, the quotes were much the same. People spoke lengthily of the deceased’s virtues, and briefly of her shortcomings. Almost everyone remembered one or another of Lucy’s famous apothegms: “Knowing what you can not do is more important than knowing what you can do. In fact, that’s good taste.” “I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it, and I’m afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: hard work and realizing what is opportunity and what isn’t.”
At day’s end, there came the wistful sentiments that customarily follow such memorials: final thoughts, a stressing of laughter over tears, and, inevitably, the pronouncing of the deceased as the last of her kind. It was, by general agreement, Lucille Ball’s final curtain, finis, fade out, credits on a crawl, the end. No one at the picnic, or outside it, realized that the lights were actually coming up.