CHAPTER ONE
FEW INTIMATIONS of Lucille Ball’s character and career can be found on her family tree. Hers is a classic instance of the comic talent that surfaces without genetic antecedent. There have been, of course, many such “sports” in show business, performers who sprang from generations of laborers or small-time entrepreneurs. But most often these comedians and clowns were first-generation Americans, breaking out from the poverty, illiteracy, and prejudice that still afflicted their parents. Moreover, the great majority of them came from the streets of New York City, where demonic energy was the only résumé they needed, and where opportunity lay all around them—from larceny and murder to medicine, law, and entertainment.
Lucille had little in common with the generation that was to beget laughter in vaudeville, in the legitimate theater, and on the sound stages of the 1930s. Compared to them she is a bloodline aristocrat. “My mother, Desirée Hunt,” her account proudly states, “was of French-English descent, with a touch of Irish from her father’s side that showed in her porcelain-fine English complexion and auburn hair.” Lucille’s father, Henry Durrell Ball, was descended from landed gentry in England; some of the family came to the New World as early as the seventeenth century. She was delighted to note that there was “some Ball blood in George Washington” since “his mother’s maiden name was Mary Ball.” If there were any deeper investigations of the Ball genealogy, Lucille did not record them. Actually, George Washington’s relationship with his mother was one that grew increasingly unpleasant and embarrassing. Hardly had George left home when Mary began to complain publicly about her son’s neglect. Rather than take pride in his early career, she used it as a lever to pry favors from him. During the French and Indian War, for example, he suffered terrible privations in the service of King George III. Mary displayed little interest in his ordeal; her letters demanded more butter and a new house servant. Irritation between parent and child remained until her death in 1789.
Evidently a number of Mary’s descendants were working folk and farmers, scattered about the United States, with little in the way of wealth or prospects. For one of them, fate intervened in 1865, when oil was discovered in the appropriately named town of Pithole, Pennsylvania. Clinton Ball, Lucy’s great-grandfather, had property in the vicinity, accepted the enormous bid of $750,000, and headed for the progressive, gaslit village of Fredonia, New York. There he built a large house and acquired an additional four hundred acres. Clinton must have found Protestant fundamentalism to his liking; he donated generous sums to local churches, but made certain that anyone who preached there hewed to his literal interpretation of the Bible. Unsurprisingly, he looked upon city life as licentious and went so far as to forbid any of his six children to dance.
Five of them obeyed; the sixth was an adventurer who wanted something more than received wisdom. Jasper Ball—“Jap,” as he preferred to be called—married young and became a father soon afterward. He settled the family in Jamestown, New York, and began to invest his savings in the newfangled telephone business. When the hinterlands proved inhospitable to the invention he sought employment out west. The Securities Home Telephone Company of Missoula, Montana, hired him as manager, and for many years he shuttled between work and family, from the towns and villages of Montana to his home in upstate New York. In time Jap’s admiring son Henry Durrell Ball (“Had” to family and friends) came to Missoula and signed on as a lineman for the phone company. In 1910 Had returned to Jamestown to visit his mother and sisters, and while he was there someone introduced him to the eighteen-year-old Desirée Evelyn Hunt, the daughter of a professional midwife and a man who had worked at a number of trades, including hotel management, mail delivery, and furniture construction. (She chose the Frenchified spelling; “Desire” was the name on her birth certificate.) The twenty-four-year-old Had qualified as an attractive older man. Several months later, on September 1, 1910, the two were married at the two-story gabled home of Frederick and Flora Belle Hunt. Some 140 guests witnessed the ceremony, conducted by the Reverend Charles D. Reed, pastor of the Calgary Baptist Church. It was the biggest social event of the season. Contemporary photographs show a pale, conventionally pretty young woman, and a husband so lean he appears to be two profiles in search of a face.
Laden with gifts of silver, linen, and furniture, the couple boarded a train and headed toward the sunset. They settled in the little town of Anaconda, Montana, about twenty-five miles from Butte. A couple of months later Desirée became pregnant. She expressed a desire to have the baby back home in Jamestown, where her mother could act as midwife. Had consented, and the couple went east in the summer of 1911. On August 6, Lucille Desirée was born.
Once Flora had pronounced her granddaughter fit for travel, the Balls returned to Montana—only to turn around and head back east. Securities Home Telephone had recently acquired the Michigan Telephone Company, and the company needed experienced linemen. The little family resettled in Wyandotte, outside Detroit, a town just far enough from the automobile industry to offer quiet tree-lined streets and clean air. Had regarded it as a fine place to raise a family, and pretty soon Desirée was pregnant again. Everything went well: Had was making five dollars a week, a good salary in those days, and the doctor said that Desirée was the ideal age and weight to bear a second child. As for little Lucille, she was an active, healthy youngster, fond of her mother and crazy about roughhousing with her father—she would scream with delight when he tossed her into the air and caught her inches from the floor.
All this was to change in the awful winter of 1915. In January, cases of typhoid fever were reported in the Detroit area. Public health officials warned citizens to boil their water and to stay away from unpasteurized dairy products. Desirée scrupulously followed their instructions. Had went along for a while, but in early January he treated himself to a dish of ice cream. A week later he began to suffer from sleeplessness, then intestinal problems, and finally he developed a fever of 104 degrees accompanied by delirium. Physicians made a grim diagnosis and nailed a sign to the Balls’ front door: KEEP OUT—HEALTH AUTHORITIES. Neighbors shut their windows and drew the curtains; there was no vaccine at the time. The family doctor could do little beyond making Had comfortable and preparing Desirée for the end.
Distraught and overburdened, she kept Lucille out of the sickroom and in the fresh air for hours at a time. To ease her mind she tied one end of a rope around the child’s waist, the other end to a steel runner on the backyard clothesline. As long as she heard the metal squeal, Desirée knew that her little daughter was running like a trolley from the back of the yard to the front. Whenever the noise stopped for longer than a few minutes she ran outside to see if Lucille had slipped the knot. The three-and-a-half-year-old never did escape, but on at least one occasion she tried. After an ominous silence Desirée found her batting her eyes and negotiating with a milkman: “Mister, help me. I got caught up in this silly clothesline. Can you help me out?”
Had died on February 28, 1915. He was twenty-eight years old. Lucille retained only fleeting memories of that day, all of them traumatic. A picture fell from the wall; a bird flew in the window and became trapped inside the house. From that time forward she suffered from a bird phobia. Even as an adult, she refused to stay in any hotel room that displayed framed pictures of birds or had wallpaper with an avian theme.
Had’s widow was twenty-two. She was five months pregnant, with a dependent child, little insurance, and no professional skills. Somehow she summoned the strength to make funeral arrangements in two cities: Wyandotte, where her late husband was embalmed, and Jamestown, where he was to be interred. In order to get a little peace, Desirée enlisted the aid of a sympathetic grocer. Six decades later, Lucille gratefully summoned up images of Mr. Flower: “He let me prance up and down his counter, reciting little pieces my parents had taught me. My favorite was apparently a frog routine where I hopped up and down harrumphing. Then I’d gleefully accept the pennies or candy Mr. Flower’s customers would give me—my first professional appearance!” Those gifts came from customers who would rather donate money than pay condolence calls to a quarantined house.
Several days later Desirée and Lucille accompanied Had’s body on the long train ride to upstate New York. On the chill, iron-gray morning of March 5, Had was buried at Lake View Cemetery in Jamestown. Lucille looked on blankly, oblivious to the glances in her direction. At the last moment, as Had’s casket was lowered into the grave, the loss suddenly hit home. The little girl was led away screaming to her grandparents’ house on Buffalo Street in Jamestown. Mother and child had no other refuge.
So an autonomous nuclear family backslid to total dependence, as Desirée returned to the adolescence she had fled, reliant on her parents for food and shelter. Still, Fred and Flora Belle Hunt were kind and undemanding folks; they did everything possible to make their daughter and granddaughter feel wanted and comfortable. The Hunts had lost their own son, Harold, at the age of eighteen, and when Desirée presented them with a grandson on July 17, 1915, they were deeply gratified. When she announced that she would christen him Frederick, after Grandpa Hunt, they were beside themselves. To all appearances, Lucille was once again in an affectionate and secure household.
But she was not satisfied with appearances. “I was largely ignored,” she remembered, “and I became very jealous.” Lucille had been struck two terrible and inexplicable blows. As she interpreted them, a beloved father had abandoned her without so much as a good-bye. Five months later she had been displaced by a wailing rival who absorbed 100 percent of her mother’s love and attention. Confused, anxious about her own mortality, the child became fixated on her grandparents, a pair whose idiosyncrasies she came to cherish. Fred Hunt was an imposing figure, overweight and garrulous, with a wardrobe of three-piece suits that had seen better days. He stoked his omnipresent pipe with Prince Albert tobacco, played popular tunes on the parlor piano, whittled toys for his grandchildren, and palavered incessantly about the sorry condition of the Working Man in America. Hunt’s favorite philosopher was Eugene V. Debs, and he was forever booming the virtues of that fighter against economic injustice—a man “baptised in Socialism.”
As for Flora Belle, she had been a hotel maid in her youth and she retained both a winsome air and a vivid physical presence; Lucille was to remember her Grandma Flora as “a real pioneer woman.” Together, the Hunts encouraged Lucille to learn the piano and to take pleasure in the familiar. These included free visits to the local amusement center. A five-cent streetcar ride brought her to Celoron Park, and admission was free. There Lucille Ball became an upstate Dorothy Gale, “dazzled by the brilliance of the Wonderful City,” with Celoron as her Oz. Four-decker picnic boats floated along the twenty miles of Lake Chautauqua; stands offered pink cotton candy on a stick; strollers could gawk at a bearded lady, a strong man, a snake charmer, a fortune-teller. As the wide-eyed children shrieked and giggled, the Phoenix Wheel took them a hundred feet in the air before descending to street level. A ramp let them slide deleriously into the shallows of the lake. John Philip Sousa’s men blared away on the bandstand. And a zoological garden allowed glimpses of exotic tigers, as well as the chance to ride Shetland ponies around a little track. Best of all were the nickelodeons, with their joyous two-reelers of Charlie Chaplin and the cliff-hanging serials of Pearl White.
It was as if Lucille had been granted compensation for all the losses of the last year—and a new kind of freedom was still to come. Desirée, brought low by Had’s early death, suffered from postpartum depression. Nothing seemed to lighten her burden, and after a few months Fred and Flora Belle determined that the only cure would be a complete change of scene. They bought their daughter a round-trip railroad ticket to California and took over the raising of the children. Two active youngsters were one too many for the aging couple; they entrusted Lucille to her mother’s sister, Lola, then operating Jamestown’s busiest beauty salon. The move turned out to be one of the happiest periods in Lucille’s life. Aunt Lola had just married a Greek immigrant, George Mandicos, and the couple had eyes only for each other. Their charge came and went as she pleased, making faces in the wide glittering mirrors, nourishing a harmless crush on her uncle George, getting pats and compliments from her aunt’s customers. Looking back on those halcyon days, Lucille recalled: “Once again I was an only child, with a mother and a father, and it was such a happy, relaxed time for me.”
She was never again to enjoy that status. Desirée came back restored and balanced. Of all the things she had seen out west, only one incident remained in her now placid mind. She had been riding on the same train as Douglas Fairbanks, and as it drew into Los Angeles the actor jumped from the train, vaulted a low barrier, and leaped into the arms of his wife, Mary Pickford, waiting for him in a baby-blue convertible. It was like a dream, Desirée told her parents; she never expected to see movie stars up close again.
When World War I began, Desirée found work in a local assembly plant. There she caught the attention of the strapping, thirty-one-year-old Ed Peterson, a foreman in the sheet metal department. Ed’s large features were a mixture of the ungainly and the attractive, and he seemed surprisingly intelligent and well read. Not many eligible men lived in Jamestown; Desirée overlooked the foreman’s reputation for drinking to excess. Their courtship was brief; the pair announced wedding plans in the summer, and got married on September 17, 1918.
Lucille fancied that Ed would simply slide into her father’s place and make the family whole again. Her dreams were dashed when she sidled over to the groom on his wedding day.
Taking his hand tightly, the seven-year-old inquired in her most flirtatious tone, “Are you our new daddy?”
Peterson frowned down and pulled loose from her grip. “Call me Ed,” he instructed.
Lucille and little Freddy scarcely got to know Ed Peterson before he and Desirée took off for Detroit in search of well-paying jobs. Once again Lucille was farmed out. Ed thought it best if the outspoken little girl got some lessons in deportment, so this time she was sent to the home of hisparents. There could have been no greater contrast than the indulgent Mandicoses and the severe and elderly Petersons. Grandpa Peterson was to remain a shadowy character, but Grandma let it be known early on that she would brook no backtalk or misbehavior. Sophia Peterson was something of a pioneer woman herself. The Swedish immigrant believed in the literal truth of the Bible, with emphasis on the seven deadly sins as off-ramps to Purgatory. To keep her granddaughter busy she ordered her to hand-roll linen toweling—a difficult assignment for small hands—and to wash the dinner dishes over and over again until Sophia was satisfied that they were spotless. As if these character-building exercises were not sufficient, Lucille was also forbidden any traces of vanity. Sophia spoke derisively about her granddaughter’s oversize feet, ungainly posture, squeaky voice, maloccluded teeth. The house had but one mirror, in the bathroom. When Lucille was caught examining her face in it she was sent to bed early. It was summer, and in her autobiography she bitterly recollected the sounds of neighborhood children playing outdoors while she tossed restlessly. Yet these restrictions failed to suppress the girl’s spirit, reason enough for Grandma Peterson to regard her grandchild as “nervous,” “sassy,” “bold,” and “silly,” words she repeated when she complained about Lucille to the Hunts.
Like many children similarly traumatized and oppressed, Lucille sought refuge in fantasy. When Grandma Peterson was off tending her garden, her step-granddaughter played with clothespin dolls, assigning them personalities and speaking to them like intimates. She invented several playmates to console her. Sassafrassa was a smooth amalgam of the silent film actresses Pearl White and Pola Negri. Madeline was a cowgirl inspired by the heroine of Zane Grey’s pulp western The Light of Western Stars. At the library Lucille read what she could find about the state of Montana, a place her mother always spoke of with powerful nostalgia. Lucille tried to imagine what life might have been like had the family stayed in the West. Perhaps her father would not have gotten sick and died. Perhaps she could have become a cowgirl. To her fanciful intimates she confided her miseries and her aspirations— among them the wish to visit the far-off Wonderland she had heard Fred Hunt mention in glowing terms, New York City.
Lucille was not friendless at school; still, the notion that she was poorer than her classmates kept her withdrawn and self-conscious. More than once she left the room for a drink of water and kept on going toward what she thought was Manhattan until someone spotted the child and brought her back. There was a touch of Cinderella in all this, except that there was no handsome prince to ride up and rescue the waif. All the ingredients for misery were now in place: self-doubt, obsessive-compulsive behavior, insecurity—the sort of psychological afflictions that attend a deprived childhood. As we will see, one way or another she carried these difficulties intact, from her early years into old age. Yet in her nervous accommodations with the past she came to regard this period as the Making of Lucille Ball. Looking around at the celebrities of business, entertainment, and politics, she concluded that society’s followers were the ones with happy beginnings. Its leaders were those who had endured early emotional and physical misfortune.
The worst of those hardships ended in 1919, when Desirée returned with her second husband to reclaim the children. Lucille’s ordeal had lasted little more than a year; even so, it was to transfigure the rest of her life. (For children it is not the length of the pain and discomfiture that matters, but the intensity. A century before, the respectable clerk John Dickens was sent to debtors’ prison and his young son forced to work long hours in a blacking factory. Charles’s stay was only a few months, but one way or another the humiliating experience was to echo in every novel.) Lucille took to calling Grandpa Fred Hunt “Daddy,” just as her mother did, trying always to keep him within sight, cheering his every idea. Her favorite was the one about moving the entire family under one roof. In Grandpa Fred’s opinion, that roof had to be over a much larger dwelling, and to everyone’s surprise he made good on his notion early in 1920. On February 1, he sold the old house and bought a two-story dwelling on Eighth Street in Celoron, moving everyone closer to the enchanted amusement park. The assets of the new house included lilac bushes and a coop full of chickens in the backyard. Inside were plenty of mirrors, large bedrooms, and the luxury of two toilets, one in a half-bathroom downstairs, one in the full bathroom upstairs.
Lucille was to remember the Celoron household as a version of the George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart play You Can’t Take It With You. That comedy concerned a family as freewheeling and odd as her own—except that hers had no curtain that could descend when things got out of hand. In addition to the elder Hunts, there were Ed and Desirée Peterson (she was now called DeDe, a nickname Lucille and Freddy used in addressing her), plus Aunt Lola Mandicos, who had just separated from her husband, and Lola’s three-year-old daughter, Cleo. To stay afloat Grandpa Fred ran a lathe in a furniture factory, Ed labored in whatever local plant would have him, Desirée took a job selling hats at an upscale dress shop in Jamestown, and Lola ran her beauty parlor in the house. The children were given specific assignments: Cleo dusted, Freddy made beds, and Lucille led the other two in the dishwashing and table-setting chores. That left Grandma Flora, whose strange mood swings bewildered the children. Where once she had been smiling and indulgent, she was now edgy and critical. A piano sat in the parlor, and Desirée, convinced that Lucille possessed musical talent, had hired a piano teacher. In the beginning, Flora loved to hear her granddaughter practice the scales and attempt new pieces. Now, mysteriously, the sounds seemed to grate on her nerves. Lucille was finally told the truth: Flora was very ill. She had been diagnosed with uterine cancer. The girl watched her grandmother grow weaker and smaller until, toward the end, the patient was confined to a big mahogany bed placed in the front parlor. When Flora died, the adults thought it better to keep the children away from what would be another traumatic funeral. Lucille disobeyed the order to stay at home. Taking Cleo and Fred by the hand, she led them down the streets of the little town until she spotted a procession to the graveyard. The three children followed at a distance, their silence broken only by the older girl’s sobs.
Grandma Flora’s death signaled the end of supervision. No adult remained in the house during the day, and at the age of eleven Lucille found herself in charge. School took up the weekday mornings and early afternoons. After that, freedom reigned until about 6 p.m., when the clang of a streetcar bell indicated the approach of Desirée. This was the moment for Freddy to set the table while Lucille and Cleo frantically made all the beds. DeDe was undeceived by this last-minute activity: a thousand dust motes danced in the air. Upon seeing them she generally made a wry remark or two, and these let the children know that they had not fooled her—but that they would not be punished for the tardy cleanup.
Between the end of the school day and DeDe’s arrival, the children liked to fill the hours by playacting, with Lucille as the leader. Their dramas and comedies started out as miniature versions of the two-reelers she had seen at Celoron Park. Later they reflected the influence of monologists who had enchanted her at a local theater.
As much as she found Ed Peterson unlikable and remote, Lucille conceded that it was he who introduced her to Chautauqua. This was an institution that began in 1874 in upstate New York as a summer retreat for Sunday-school teachers, then grew into a series of year-round venues for lecturers, musicians, and actors. Lucille liked to reminisce about the winter evening “a monologist named Julian Eltinge was appearing. A female impersonator, yet. Ed insisted I go.” Eltinge used to get into fistfights—most of them staged—to scotch any rumor of effeminacy, and though he used rouge, lipstick, and yards of female costumery, he kept his material resolutely clean and simple. Lucille watched as a solitary figure amused audiences with nothing more than a bare lightbulb, a table, a glass of water, and his extraordinary skills at mimicry. She was equally impressed by another soloist, Julius Tannen, who went on to major character roles in Preston Sturges films. Tannen affected the air of a peering, self-involved businessman complete with pince-nez and a pompous manner. A vaudeville historian remembered his “fine command of English” and the way he liked “to switch in the middle of his monologue to ‘dese, dose and dems’—maybe just show he was the same kind of a guy that was sitting up in the gallery.” No one could squelch hecklers with a lighter touch. Razzed by one, he replied simply: “Save your breath, you may want it to clean your glasses later.” Tannen favored word pictures; he said that using a paper cup reminded him of drinking out of a letter, and he excused himself for being late by saying he had squeezed out too much toothpaste and couldn’t get it all back in the tube. To Lucille he was pure enchantment: “Just this voice, and this magnificent man enthralling you with his stories, his intonations, which I never, never forgot. He changed my life. I knew it was a very serious, wonderful thing to be able to make people laugh and/or cry, to be able to play on their emotions.”
Ed Peterson did more than take Lucille to events on the Chautauqua circuit. He was a Shriner, and when his organization needed female entertainers for the chorus line of their next show, he encouraged his twelve-year-old stepdaughter to audition. Her enthusiasm outran her ungainliness; they awarded her the part. Onstage she understood what Tannen and Eltinge felt: the energy of performance and the assurance of applause. This could be more than a kick, Lucille decided. This could be a vocation.
Empowered by her little triumph, Lucille tried out for a musical produced by the Jamestown Masonic club; she won a role in that as well. During rehearsals, a partner threw her across the stage so vigorously that she dislocated a shoulder. Rather than discourage her, the accident only provided a goad. Next time out she appeared in a straight play, and a local critic compared her to Jeanne Eagles. The family assured Lucille that the notice was flattering; she had never heard of the silent-film star. The following year, with DeDe’s approval, she took a bus to New York and went to an open call for the chorus line of an upcoming Shubert musical, Stepping Stones. Her bright blue eyes and long legs attracted the attention of the choreographer, and Lucille thought that if this was all it took to crack Broadway, conquering show business was going to be a snap. Before rehearsals began it was discovered that the dancer was thirteen years old. She was unceremoniously sent back to Celoron. More than three decades would pass before Lucille Ball took a bow on Broadway. Nevertheless, the appetite for recognition had been awakened. It would take few naps from now on.
The mixture of Hunts and Petersons was a lot merrier from the outside than within. The effects of Prohibition had reached upstate New York. With the closing of the public bars, many of the hotels around Lake Chautauqua lost their clientele and shut their doors for the last time. Tourism began to dry up on the shorefront and in the towns. Along with many of his neighbors, Ed hung around the local speakeasy, and he returned drunk on too many evenings. DeDe kept her voice down when she bawled him out; Ed was not so discreet, and Lucille overheard their arguments. She was distressed but not surprised to see her mother come home early on certain afternoons, laid low by the pains of a migraine headache. DeDe would draw the shades and remain bedridden, unable to move or talk until the pain had lifted. Fred Hunt no longer seemed his cheerful and anecdotal self; since the death of Flora he had spent hours at the Crescent Tool Company griping about conditions and urging workers to demand a bigger piece of the pie. DeDe heard about the agitation and disapproved. Stirring up trouble might well be a firing offense, and the loss of his salary would mean a backslide to penury.
Lucille watched all this and said nothing. But she began to spend more time away from the house, performing stunts and taking dares from her new friends in high school, roller-skating across the freshly varnished school gymnasium floor, sitting on the front radiator of a classmate’s jalopy as it roared through the streets of Celoron, playing hooky whenever she was in a vagabond mood. She was a difficult student, bright but distracted. She fought with other girls—and sometimes with boys—and once got so angry with a teacher she threw a typewriter at her.
But Lucille had absorbed too much moral training to go completely wild. She yearned for some direction in her life, and when it was not forthcoming at home or school, she imposed it on herself. One of her cronies, Pauline Lopus, was to remain in Jamestown for most of her life. More in awe than envy, she liked to look back to the days of 1925 when Lucille called her Sassafrassa for some reason, when her new friend seemed to be “the first girl in town who dared to talk aloud about her dreams—about one day being able to have nice cars, nice clothes, a nice home; about one day doing something and being somebody special.”
Along with Pauline and another pal, Violet Robbins, Lucille founded a musical group called the Gloom Chasers Union. Pauline conducted, Violet played the piano, and Lucille provided the rhythm on a set of borrowed drums. It was not a success. Egged on by their leader, the girls then recruited two more members and founded an acting company. Their most memorable production was a version of Charley’s Aunt, adapted and directed by Lucille. She not only gave the story another spin by starring as a man who impersonates a woman, she dragged furniture from her house to use as scenery, sold the homemade tickets for twenty-five cents apiece, put makeup on the cast, and persuaded the school principal, Mr. Drake, to let them have the gym for the evening. The prompter was DeDe, who got so caught up in the plot and gags that she kept laughing, applauding, and losing her place in the script.
Although tourism was off that summer, Celoron Park still needed extra help to get through July and August. Lucille talked her way into a job as short-order cook. “Look out! Look out!” went her spiel. “Don’t step there!” When the startled passerby stopped, one foot in the air as he stared worriedly at the ground, Lucille closed the sale: “Step over here and get yourself a delicious hamburger!” Off-hours were spent experimenting with makeup and fashion. Passing a shop window one day, she stopped to admire a leather hat in black and white. Over dinner she bargained with DeDe: the hat for hours and hours of extra work around the house. Her mother refused at first, then gave in to the entreaties. The delighted teenager wore the hat everywhere, including the kitchen as she washed and dried the dishes.
DeDe’s response was not so lenient after Lucille attended her first dance at the Celoron Pier Ballroom. For the occasion DeDe made a taffeta dress and trimmed the hem with real fur, prompting envious sighs when Lucille’s classmates first clapped eyes on it. At the end of the dance, a drably dressed classmate went out of her way to admire the outfit. The next day Lucille presented it to her. DeDe remonstrated when she learned about the gift. Her daughter’s explanation—the donee came from a poor family and had never owned a decent dress before—left her unmoved. Weeks went by before DeDe forgave Lucille.
The teenage Lucille was aware that women dressed to please the opposite sex, but she knew next to nothing about that sex. Because of her daughter’s innocence, DeDe allowed her only a few tentative experiments with lipstick and makeup. The colors widened Lucille’s mouth and accentuated her bright blue eyes so effectively that some laws had to be laid down. Lucille was strictly forbidden, for example, ever to go canoeing with any young male except her brother. Predictably, she could hardly wait to paddle around the shallows with a local boy. When he tried some amateurish overtures, however, she managed to tip the canoe, tossing them both overboard. “I got wet,” she recorded proudly, “but I was still virtuous!”
That state was not to last much longer. In time she bobbed her brown hair and shortened her skirts, thereby advertising an interest not only in fashion but in young men. Lucille was tall, willowy, physically mature, and emotionally undeveloped. “Maybe I was still searching for a father,” she was to speculate. There was no maybe about it. When the DeVita sisters introduced Lucille to their big brother Johnny at Celoron Park, she was instantly beguiled. A bit shorter than her five foot seven, much heavier than her weight of just under one hundred pounds, Johnny wore an unflattering moustache, and his hairline was already beginning to recede. But he had acquired a reputation as a local hood, someone who gambled, trafficked booze, and carried a gun. As if these enticements were not enough, he owned his own car and had a closetful of expensively tailored suits. Best of all, he was an adult. Johnny DeVita’s driver’s license offered proof: he had recently passed his twenty-first birthday. Lucille was fourteen.