CHAPTER TWO
JOHNNY’S SWAGGER did not derive from movies or pulp fiction. He was the son of Louis DeVita, a nouveau riche who sold insurance and produce to Italian immigrants. On the side, it was rumored, he was involved with prohibited booze and illegal gambling. As Louis’s chauffeur and heir apparent Johnny had the use of several automobiles, not to mention a steady income and a status enjoyed by few men his age. He and his new romance became the object of lurid high school gossip, a situation that Lucille found immensely pleasing: once again she was on center stage. The adult response was not so pleasurable, particularly when it issued from DeDe. Lucille protested that her boyfriend was from an honest and caring family; she reminded her mother of all the times Louis had given her dishes of pasta and bags of vegetables to bring home. As for Johnny himself, she went on, her young man was not an irresponsible playboy; he was going to medical school in a year or two. DeDe bought none of this but did nothing, on the assumption that the affair would burn itself out in a few weeks. When the weeks turned into months she took Johnny aside and asked him to stay away from her daughter. He refused to do it. They were in love. What right had she to interfere?
After a year of soul-searching, and some painful ransacking of her bank account, DeDe saw a way out. Lucille liked to talk about the vaudeville acts Johnny took her to see at the local houses, Shea’s and the Palace. When she spoke of those evenings her voice thrummed and her eyes took on a glitter that Johnny himself could not evoke. Clearly she yearned to be in a real spotlight. And who could tell? With Lucille’s background in amateur theatrics, perhaps she had a chance to be a chorine or a soubrette. Everyone said she had talent—even Mr. Drake had proclaimed as much, on the night of Charley’s Aunt. Still, the fifteen-year-old needed professional instruction, and such lessons were not available in upstate New York. For those, Lucille would have to go to Manhattan, geographically six hundred miles and emotionally light-years away from the small-town life in Chautauqua County.
At the time, the Robert Minton–John Murray Anderson School of Drama on East Fifty-eighth Street in Manhattan was the most prominent institution of its kind, and one of the most demanding, financially as well as psychologically; in 1926 the tuition was $180 per five-month term for a playwriting course, $270 for scenic and costume design, $350 for drama lessons, $390 for musical comedy, and $500 for motion picture acting, a fee that included a screen test. The faculty and advisers included such luminaries as choreographer Martha Graham, composer Jerome Kern, actor Otis Skinner, writers Christopher Morley and Don Marquis—as well as the founders themselves. Anderson was a longtime producer of the hugely successful Greenwich Village Follies, and Minton had directed a number of breakthrough symbolic pieces, including the afterlife drama Outward Bound and the Russian allegory He Who Gets Slapped.
DeDe cobbled together enough money for the first semester and persuaded some friends in Manhattan to board her daughter. This seemed too rare an opportunity to pass up. Lucille was to characterize herself at that time as “struck by the lightning of show business”—a flash that Johnny could not hope to outshine. He was philosophical about it; he drove his young inamorata to the station in Buffalo and saw her off on the train to New York. She carried a small valise full of clothing deemed proper for the city, $50 sewn into her underwear, and a passage she had copied from a Julius Tannen routine. The monologist had inspired her in upstate New York, and now he brought her luck in Manhattan. The other girls auditioned with stilted deliveries of Shakespearean verse. With her vaudeville turn, the fifteen-year-old from Jamestown gave the impression of originality and freshness. Alas, from that moment everything went downhill.
“Ridicule,” Lucille was to recall acrimoniously, “seemed to be part of the curriculum.” In an elocution class, Minton mocked his student for what he called her “midwestern” pronunciations of “wawter” and “hawrses.” She retreated into silence. Lucille hoped for a better time in dancing class, where she could let her legs do the talking. The pupil was promptly informed that she had “two left feet.” In another period the school might have carried her for a second term, until she acquired some polish and timing. But it was Lucille’s misfortune to be there at the same moment another young actress was making her mark. Bette Davis arrived as a powerhouse with more gifts than the rest of the pupils combined. Anderson questioned Lucille’s instructors, received negative reports from all of them, and sent a letter to DeDe informing her that she was only wasting her money. Little comfort came from the knowledge that her daughter was not alone: of an entering class of seventy, only twelve survived the first term. Lucille never forgave her teachers. “All I learned in drama school,” she claimed later, “was how to be frightened.”
Back in Jamestown Lucille tried to put a good face on her failure by dismissing the New York City experience as a waste of time, resuming the romance with Johnny, and throwing herself back into high school activities with a will. She became a football cheerleader, played center on the girls’ basketball team, ice-skated in the winter, and rode horseback in the spring. Most of her classmates were unaware of her humiliation in drama school; they knew only that Lucille had dared to skip town on her own. Years afterward, when Lucille had become a global celebrity, she was topic A for her former high school classmates. They vied with each other for the clearest memory of the young, hyperkinetic adolescent who seemed in perpetual motion, pounding downstairs two at a time, flashing elegant legs as she whirled in her pleated skirt. At sixteen Lucille was back in good spirits, comely, and popular. By the time the school year ended she was having too good a time to obsess about cracking show business. The summer of 1927 looked to be the best of them all.
In July 1927, Freddy Ball would turn twelve, and Grandpa Hunt thought the Glorious Fourth might be a perfect moment to salute the season, the nation, and the boy. The day before the national holiday he presented the boy with a long, thin, mysterious package. Freddy impatiently peeled off the brown wrapping paper and gave out whoops of delight. Grandpa let him carry on; not every lad got a .22 caliber rifle on his birthday. Yet when Freddy headed outdoors to shoot some crows, he was forbidden to use the firearm. “Tomorrow,” Grandpa promised, “I’ll show you how.”
According to Lucille, July 4 dawned bright and hot, with the aroma of lilacs and clover wafting over the backyard. Rehired as a short-order cook at Celoron Park, Lucille was about to go off to work, but she lingered to watch Freddy’s shooting lesson. Before Grandpa Fred set up a tin can in the backyard he gave a brief lecture about guns and safety, emphasizing that behind the target were open fields with no houses or people. “Besides me,” Lucille was to write about this occasion, “there were Cleo and Johanna, a girl Freddy’s age who was visiting someone in the neighborhood.” The company also included an unexpected visitor. “There was an eight-year-old boy who lived at the corner whose name was Warner Erickson. Every once in a while you would hear his mother shriek, ‘War-ner! Get home!’ and Warner would streak for his yard since his mother spanked him for the slightest infraction. This Fourth of July weekend he had wandered into our yard and was peeking around the corner of our house watching the target practice.” At first no one noticed the boy; then Grandpa Hunt spotted Warner and ordered him to sit down and stay out of the way. From her back stoop, a safe distance away, Pauline Lopus watched the action unfold. Freddy took a number of shots at the tin can; then it was Johanna’s turn. She picked up the .22 and held it to her shoulder, one eye closed. At that very instant came the strident voice of Mrs. Erickson: “War-ner, get home this minute!” The boy rose and bolted in the direction of his home, crossing in front of the rifle just as Johanna pulled the trigger. The pressure of her finger was to change everything that Lucille knew and cherished. She watched in silent horror as Warner fell spreadeagled into a lilac bush.
“I’m shot! I’m shot!” he screamed.
Grandpa Hunt refused to believe what he had just witnessed. “No you’re not,” he insisted. “Get up.”
Then, Lucille recalled, “we saw the spreading red stain on Warner’s shirt, right in the middle of his back. Cleo screamed, and I took her into my arms. The slam of a screen door told me that Pauline was running to tell her mother.” Grandpa Hunt lifted Warner and, accompanied by Lucille and Freddy and Cleo, carried him the hundred yards to his house as the boy murmured, “Mama, I am dying.” Before they could arrive, Warner’s mother burst out of the house shouting, “They’ve shot my son! They’ve shot my son!”
They implied the entire group, but within an hour everyone knew that a child had done the shooting and that an adult had been responsible for the tragedy. On July 5, the Jamestown Post-Journal told the story: “Warner Erickson, eight years old, of Celoron, is still in critical condition at Jamestown General Hospital as a result of being shot in the back. The Erickson lad stepped out in the range as Johanna Ottinger, a young girl, fired at about the same time, the bullet entering the boy’s back and passing through his lungs, lodging in the chest. Mr. Hunt, grandfather of the Ball children, was watching the target practice.” In fact, the wound was even worse than originally reported. The slug had severed Warner’s spinal cord, paralyzing him below the waist.
About a fortnight later the invalid returned, permanently bound to a wheelchair. Almost every day Mrs. Erickson wheeled her son up and down the block, moving very slowly as she passed the Hunt house. The children were told to ignore her but Cleo kept peeking out and crying. Mrs. Erickson’s gesture was only the beginning. A lawsuit got under way, accusing Fred Hunt of Eighth Street, Celoron, New York, of negligence in the wounding and paralysis of the eight-year-old victim. The plaintiffs’ lawyers asked for $5,000 plus court costs and insisted that the sum was, if anything, too low to cover Warner’s medical expenses. (In this they were correct; the boy lived for six more years and needed care for the rest of his short life.) In any case, the sum represented more than Fred Hunt’s savings. He declared bankruptcy. The only asset left was the house, and he deeded that to his daughters. The plaintiffs sued once more, claiming that Hunt’s maneuver was “fraudulent, designed to delay and defraud his creditors.” Again the court agreed. The sheriff foreclosed on the house. Over the course of a year Fred Hunt lost everything. He was sixty-two, and, as Lucille observed, with the two court judgments “the heart went out of him.” Without a cent, bereft of a job and a place to call his own, he became totally dependent on DeDe. Distant relatives allowed him to board at their upstate farm, where he subsisted on a diet of their main crop: strawberries. This meant strawberries for breakfast, lunch, and supper. Lucille, Freddy, DeDe, and Ed moved into a bleak ground-floor apartment on East Fifth Street in Jamestown, and Lucille was transferred to Jamestown High School. There she was an unhappy stranger, outside of the cliques and clubs that had enlivened her days in Celoron. Lola abandoned any plans to reopen her beauty parlor and enrolled in a nursing program far from Jamestown. Cleo went to live with her father, George Mandicos. The family would never be whole again.
After the “the Breakup,” as DeDe bitterly called it, long-dormant urges reawakened in Lucille. Upstate again came to represent mediocrity, and Broadway the main chance. No matter how devoted she was to Johnny, or how sorry she felt for Fred Hunt, she had to test herself in New York City, to prove John Murray Anderson wrong. To that end she would often leave school for a week or more without bothering to get permission from any authority other than DeDe. On the bus she would practice her locution and work out a plan of attack. Once in Manhattan she would head to a cheap rooming house on Columbus Circle, buy a copy of Variety, read the notices for open calls, and go to the auditions. Nineteen twenty-eight was not a bad time to be looking in the musical theater. In those flush times audiences paid top prices to see the Ziegfeld Follies, Earl Carroll’s Vanities, and whatever musicals the Shuberts were presenting in their theaters. All of these shows employed chorus lines made up of girls in feathers and furs. The trouble was, producers wanted dancers with experience, and Lucille was as green as the lawns of Jamestown.
After a few weeks of total frustration, she presented them with an audacious new persona. Instead of encountering Lucille Ball of upstate New York, they saw a fresh-faced newcomer, “Diane Belmont” of Butte, Montana. (The surname was taken from a racetrack just outside New York City, and the locale was a bow to the place where Had and Desirée had once been young and happy.) To get her story straight, Lucille had written to the Montana chamber of commerce asking for literature. Poring over the booklets and brochures, she committed statistics to memory, in case producers inquired about her background. They rarely did, and once in a great while Miss Belmont from Butte actually landed in the third company of a revue.
The assignment never lasted. For one thing, Lucille met unexpected hostility from members of the chorus line. The Shubert girls, for example, turned out to be an insular, backbiting group that closed ranks against outsiders. For another, the seventeen-year-old lacked basic technique. The producer of the revue Stepping Stones kept her on for five weeks—a new record for Lucille. She was preparing to write home with the good news when late one night her benefactor told the cast: “We’re going to add some ballet, girls. Anybody who can’t do toe work is out of the show.” He made a point of addressing Lucille privately: “You’re a nice kid but you just don’t have it. Why don’t you go home to Montana and raise a big family?”
Out of luck and money, Lucille took any job she could find. (For a week she jerked sodas at a midtown fountain, only to be fired when her mind wandered and she forgot to put the banana in a banana split.) She began to patrol short-order joints, seeking a “one-doughnut man”—an individual who sat at a counter, ordered doughnuts and coffee, downed the cup, and left a nickel tip after eating only one doughnut. “I’d do a fast slide onto his stool,” she said, “yell for a cup of coffee, pay for it with his nickel, and eat the other doughnut.” Her finances touched bottom the day she reached into her purse and found four cents, one short of the subway fare. “So I panhandled for a penny. One well-dressed older man stopped to listen, then offered me a ten-dollar bill. ‘Listen, mister,’ I told him with a withering look, ‘all I want is one penny.’ ” Thoughts of suicide entered her head. “I thought, ‘I’ll get killed faster in Central Park because cars go faster there. But I want to get hit by a big car—with a handsome man in it.’ Then I had a flash of sanity. I said to myself, ‘If I’m thinking this way, maybe I don’t want to die.’ So I regrouped my forces.”
The Sunday papers were full of want ads. Lucille chose one seeking attractive young women to model overcoats. If I’m good-looking enough to be a chorus girl, she reasoned, maybe I can at least be a clotheshorse. The stores and boutiques liked what they saw, and thus she began a freelance career. It was slow at first, but the other young models were a refreshing change from the Broadway felines. They told her which stores were hiring, arranged blind dates, and taught her a few tricks to use at restaurants. One evening, as the waiter moved away from the table, she watched a fellow mannequin put a linen table napkin into her handbag, followed by several buttered rolls, celery and olives, a large slice of roast beef, and a French pastry. Lucille followed suit. These cadged meals did not provide enough to get by, however, and she did some posing for photographers. These pictures she later came to regret: a topless shot was to remain in circulation for the next sixty years.
Then, late in 1928, Lucille’s luck changed. At about the same time she started using her real name again, a cameraman passed the word that coat models were needed at Hattie Carnegie’s. Lucille dropped by the East Forty-ninth Street salon. The proprietress looked her over and noticed a fleeting resemblance between the newcomer’s willowy figure and that of Constance Bennett, second wife of the Marquis de la Falaise (his first was Gloria Swanson). The blonde celebrity had yet to make her mark as a light comedienne, but she was already famous as an international party girl and trend-setter. Lucille was ordered to drastically lighten her own brunette hair. She obediently showed up the next day as a peroxide blonde; no one ever said no to Hattie Carnegie.
This was the first truly powerful woman Lucille had ever met. Born Henriette Kannengiser in Vienna, Hattie arrived in the United States in 1886 at the age of six. In 1904 she quit the Lower East Side ghetto and started working in overdrive, first as a messenger at Macy’s, and five years later as the owner and operator of a stylish Greenwich Village boutique. By this time she had taken the name of another immigrant who was not afraid to follow his dream: Andrew Carnegie. Her well-tailored merchandise attracted the attention of rich window-shoppers, including Mrs. Randolph Hearst. The publisher’s wife passed the word to friends, and by 1923 Hattie Carnegie was prosperous enough to move her salon to a town house, where she catered to duchesses, society folk, and film celebrities.
“Hattie,” Lucille gratefully noted, “taught me how to slouch properly in a $1,000 hand-sewn sequin dress and how to wear a $40,000 sable coat as casually as rabbit.” A New Yorker profile described Miss Carnegie as a small, fashionably haggard boss-lady with hair rather more reddish-gold than her age would suggest, and possessing “the temper of a termagant.” Her youngest model readily endorsed that opinion. Soon after signing on, she found herself covered with bruises where Hattie had kicked her in the shins or pinched her in the ribs— reminders that a Carnegie model must watch her posture at all times. These souvenirs were invisible to customers; Lucille was always swathed in long-sleeved, sweeping gowns. Typically, she made twenty to thirty costume changes a day, hustling into the back room, kicking off whatever shoes went with the ensembles she was wearing, and cramming her feet into another pair to match the next outfit. By nightfall she was footsore and shopworn. She was also considerably richer: her salary was $35 a week, a very decent wage in 1929.
She also got to go to significant places and meet important people. In addition to Constance Bennett and her sister Joan, Lucille showed Carnegie styles to Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson, and the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton; paraded before debutantes at the Plaza and Pierre Hotel fashion shows; and went out to horse shows on Long Island to model the latest Carnegie garments. It was at one of those affairs that she saw the Gish sisters, Lillian and Dorothy, sitting in a box with their dates. Presently Lillian went off with both gentlemen, leaving Dorothy to amuse herself. She did exactly that, tearing tiny bits off her bright red program. When the trio returned, they saw that Dorothy had stuck the particles to her face like measles spots. All four dissolved in laughter, and Lucille made a mental note to try the Gish trick sometime.
Not every outing was a triumph or a learning experience. Once, Lucille wore a disastrously tight Paris import to an outdoor show on Long Island. The dress was made of organza with a hand-painted fishscale design. A sudden squall ruined the afternoon, and rain made the scales slip from the textile and onto Lucille’s skin. She spent the rest of the day trying not to look like a drowned mermaid. And then there was the persistent clannishness of the other models—an echo of that other closed society, the chorines of Broadway. The Carnegie mannequins deliberately froze Lucille out, speaking an unintelligible jargon to one another and discomfiting the new employee.
She dated from time to time, but none of the young men seemed as exciting or, in a curious way, as comfortable as Johnny, and none of the restaurant meals seemed as restorative as the ones DeDe prepared. Homesickness kept eating away at her, and early in 1929 she said a reluctant good-bye to Hattie, put her modeling career on hold, and returned to the compensations of home and family. Almost overnight Lucille went from the high glamour of Manhattan to the backwater milieu of upstate New York, from imitating Constance Bennett to aping the styles of the other girls in Jamestown High School. The brown roots of her hair grew longer. She resumed the pleated skirts and inane chatter of adolescence. It had all come to nothing.
Lucille made only one good friend in high school, Marion Strong, who envied her air of self-reliance. Many years later Marion remembered the months when she and Lucille were inseparable, attending double features, looking up at the screen with wide eyes, then fantasizing endlessly about life’s possibilities at the local teen hangout. Many times the search was for gainful employment. Even before the Depression hit with full force, the Ball and Hunt families barely got by. Lucille never asked for money; she just went out and took whatever job was available for as long as it lasted. She sold cosmetics, concocted malteds at the Walgreens soda fountain, ran an elevator at Lerner’s department store. Together she and Marion adopted a terrier puppy, named it Whoopee after a new film starring an ex-vaudevillian, Eddie Cantor, and presented it to Mrs. Peterson, the grandmother Lucille wasn’t afraid of anymore.
The two girls watched firemen battle the blaze that took down the old Celoron Pier Ballroom, and subsequently went to the Jamestown Players Club, where a director was auditioning candidates for the featured role of Aggie Lynch in Bayard Veiller’s melodrama Within the Law. The play about a wronged woman’s revenge had already been given the silent-movie treatment, most recently in 1923 with Norma Talmadge in the starring role. It was now in the repertory of theater groups throughout the country. A well-connected attorney’s wife had nailed down the Talmadge part and sought a supporting cast of at least minimal professionalism. She inquired into the background of this brash young brunette, and when she learned that Lucille had washed out of drama school—a school in Manhattan, however—she felt safe enough to secure her the part of a tough-talking, gold-hearted thief. Miss Ball might be just good enough to remember her lines, but she would offer no threat to the female lead.
After a one-shot performance at the Nordic Temple in Jamestown, the production moved on to the Chautauqua Institution’s Norton Auditorium. Lucille had done well enough in her debut, but this time she ran off with the show, ringing every laugh out of lines like “I only said a few words in passin’ to my brother Jim. And he ain’t no common pickpocket. Hully Gee! He’s the best dip in the business!” The Jamestown Morning Post praised Lucille’s comic relief, “so necessary in the play of the intensity of Within the Law.” And the Chautauqua Daily was rhapsodic: Miss Ball, said the critic, “lived the part of the underworld girl with as much realism as if it were her regular existence. It was her sparkling action and lines that brought continued applause from her audience.” At the finale of Within the Law, continued the review, she “played with even more enthusiasm than before and put her part across to the audience in the best manner of the evening. In a role that required action, and a good deal of it, she exhibited remarkable maturity and poise.”
The coltish performer of the past had vanished. “It was funny,” Lucille later wrote, “to think how awkward and tongue-tied I had been in drama school; here in my beloved Jamestown I didn’t have a shred of self-consciousness.” She had less than two months to enjoy her euphoria. In August 1930, Aunt Lola died after having been kicked in the stomach by a mentally disturbed patient in the hospital where she was working. The little family was reduced yet again. DeDe and her second husband had not been getting along, and Lola’s death seemed to push their marriage over the edge. DeDe arranged to get a job at a department store in Washington, D.C.; Ed remained in Jamestown. Lucille was left entirely on her own, melancholy about her aunt and unsure of her future.
One thing was certain: Lucille’s romance with Johnny was just about over. She had finally begun, after four years, to see him for what he was, a provincial charmer and a thug in the making. A month after Lola’s death Johnny was arrested for transporting whiskey. Other charges followed, including illegal gun possession and running a gambling establishment. In the winter of 1931 Louis DeVita, Johnny’s father and mentor, was shot and killed just after he emerged from church services. The assassin was said to have been a foreign-looking man in a brown overcoat. There was not enough evidence to make an arrest. There would never be enough.
By then Lucille was living in New York City once more. For a brief period she shared a room at the Kimberly Hotel with her Jamestown crony, Marion Strong. Emboldened by Lucille’s tales of the city, Marion had taken the bus to Manhattan and talked herself into a job as a secretary to an antiques dealer at $20 a week. Lucille did better. Hattie Carnegie welcomed her back; Constance Bennett had remained one of Carnegie’s best customers, and the designer was glad to have the look-alike on board again. Lucille’s salary was boosted to about $2,000 a year, supplemented by occasional freelance work for commercial photographers—this at a time when most New York City dwellers brought home an annual income of $1,200.
In an effort to replace Johnny, Lucille dated some prominent men, including the public relations counselor Pat di Cicco, who would one day marry Gloria Vanderbilt; and Sailing Baruch, nephew of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s financial adviser, Bernard Baruch. If others were not so well known, they all had enough money to treat a pretty girl to a night on the town. What they failed to appreciate was Lucille’s yokel mannerisms. At a high-toned nightclub, her escort introduced some friends. As he spoke, Lucille vigorously smacked one of them in the face. A mosquito, Lucille explained, had just landed on the lady’s forehead. The young man never called again.
As countrified and robust as she appeared, Lucille was growing pale beneath the makeup. The demanding schedule, social pressures, and increasingly acute pangs of homesickness all took their toll. Her health failed late in 1930; pneumonia forced her to leave work for a couple of weeks. She returned too early—and immediately regretted it. As she stood on the dais for a fitting, both her legs suddenly felt inflamed. The pain was so severe she sank to the floor, clutching her calves. Amid the chatter and panic Hattie Carnegie kept order. She summoned her own physician and he took Lucille to his office. An instant diagnosis was offered: she had some violent form of arthritis. There were many varieties of the disease. The one to worry about right now was rheumatoid. If she had that she was likely to be crippled for life. In any case, she had to go to a hospital at once. Lucille thought of her last bank statement. “I have eighty-five dollars to my name,” she moaned. Very well then, the doctor responded tersely, she must go to a clinic serving the poor of New York. That night Lucille waited three hours to see a specialist donating his services in Harlem. He offered a new and radical injection of serum made from horse urine. Lucille could barely choke out her consent. For several weeks she stayed in her room; periodically the doctor stopped by to administer an injection. A month later the money ran out and she arranged to be taken to the train station in a wheelchair. Once more Lucille went home, unable to break the thread that kept tugging her back to Jamestown—permanently, it seemed. By then Grandpa Fred and DeDe had also returned. Together the family worked on Lucille’s morale and aided in her intensive physical therapy.
Ultimately there came a day when, with the support of Grandpa Fred and the doctor, Lucille got to her feet and tried a few tentative steps. Something was very wrong. Her left leg was marginally shorter than her right, and it pulled sideways, unbalancing her gait. To correct the imbalance she had to wear black orthopedic shoes, with a twenty-pound weight in the left one. The metal device was oppressive, cold and as ugly as the footwear. To boost her declining spirits Lucille took to wearing heavy blue satin pajamas. She was one of the first women in Jamestown with the audacity to wear slacks outside the house.
After her recovery Lucille used to speak about the nature of her affliction. Sometimes she referred to a mysterious automobile accident that had occurred in New York City—she had been thrown into a snowbank where she had suffered from frostbite. No record of a car crash involving Lucille Ball, or, for that matter, “Diane Belmont,” ever surfaced, but that did not keep early biographers from printing the story. Sometimes she spoke of a hard-won victory over rheumatoid arthritis. That was also untrue; Lucille did not suffer permanent muscle and nerve damage, almost always the case with rheumatoid cases. Kathleen Brady, Lucille’s investigative biographer, wonders if Lucille might have had a bout of rheumatic fever, cured, eventually, by a then experimental sulfa drug. It is not beyond possibility, given all that had gone before, that the failed actress and overstrained model suffered from a psychogenic illness only time would heal.
In any event, once she was literally and emotionally back on her feet Lucille felt ready to give New York City one last try. She would have to find a different confidante—Marion Strong had eloped with her high school sweetheart and set up house in Jamestown. Never mind; Lucille was the one who had gone over the wall so often she had lost count, and for local girls who yearned for a bigger life she represented glamour and audacity. Years afterward, a young hairdresser named Gertrude Foote spoke ruefully about the day she decided to follow Lucille to Manhattan. Lucille dropped into the beauty parlor and announced an intention to quit Jamestown and head for Manhattan. The envious “Footie” hesitated a moment, then quixotically left the job and joined her friend on a new escapade.
The romance of Depression New York failed to ignite Footie’s imagination. Lucille went right back to work as a model, but her friend had to scramble for low-paid work at a beauty parlor. Still, in the trough of the Depression they did well enough. Lucille cheerfully paid most of the rent at the Kimberly Hotel and picked up the bill whenever the roommates ate together. Lucille’s magnanimity was more than a way of caring for a pal without much money or ambition. The would-be actress had made few friends in Jamestown, and of those few only Footie had been bold enought to buy a ticket to New York. Buying dinners was Lucille’s way of saying thank-you without being maudlin.
Nevertheless, there was no shortage of men who wanted to take Lucille out and show her the town—including several gang members. Indeed, she picked up the nickname “Two Gun” in the ensuing months when a mishap occurred in her bathroom at the Kimberly. As she explained it, “A gang war was going on around the corner. I didn’t hear the bullet whang into the tub, but the water began to disappear. I got out and tried to mop the floor. That’s all there is to the story.” Not everyone believed that explanation, and the nickname took her a while to shake off.
Hard times intensified in the early 1930s, and even with two salaries Lucille and Gertrude sometimes had trouble making ends meet. There came a day when both paychecks were delayed, and all the young women had between them was twenty-five cents. They walked along in a melancholy state, Gertrude expressing the wish to get some food before she fainted dead away, Lucille wondering if there was any chance for her to get work in this unyielding town.
Between them they had exactly twenty-five cents. A gardenia seller passed by, offering flowers for a quarter. Without hesitation Lucille bought the blossom. Even at that desperate juncture, she preferred to please the eye rather than the stomach.
Yet flowers could do only so much. Lucille needed something more, something she had done without for too long: her family. There was no going back now; although Hattie Carnegie had let many models go, she had kept Lucille on, paying her a salary no upstate employer could match. The solution was to send for Jamestown. Separated from Ed Peterson, DeDe was only too glad to accept the invitation. “My friends in Jamestown thought I was crazy to move there,” DeDe said later. “But we all wanted to be with Lucy. We sold my father’s house, and he came too—he and Freddy and Cleo. I worked as a buyer for Stern Brothers’ store. Lucy modeled, and Fred and Cleo went to school. Our bathroom looked like a Chinese laundry every night—Freddy even washed and ironed his own shirts. But the main thing was that we were together. I didn’t realize how briefly.” Only Grandpa had trouble adjusting to the new situation. Too old to find a job, he wandered the slums for hours at a time. He had never witnessed such massive desperation and he began wondering aloud whether America could survive the economic crisis without radical alterations.
In the meantime, Lucille gave the lie to all that Fred Hunt had witnessed. After living on the margin she suddenly found herself in demand for freelance assignments and showroom work. By the spring of 1933 she was grossing $100 a week. Breadlines stretched for blocks, one-third of the nation was ill-clothed, ill-housed, and ill-fed, but for Lucille, Recovery was well under way. The only real drawback to her life in Manhattan was Manhattan. She had never been comfortable there. “New York City,” she was to write, “scared me to death. It had something to do with all that cold concrete and steel instead of grass and trees.”
That place of concrete and steel was all the more forbidding in the summer of that year. In the times before air-conditioning, the city baked and shimmered in the heat. The air felt heavy and dirty; the sun’s glare bounced off store windows and hurt the eyes; asphalt stuck to women’s high heels when they crossed the streets. On her lunch break Lucille walked to midtown, looking for a brief change of scene— as well as a glimpse of herself enlarged to giant size.
A few weeks earlier she had been freelancing in the showroom of Mrs. E. A. Jackson, whose principal designer was Rosie Roth, a former associate of Hattie Carnegie. Roth was fond of her best model, but hated to show it. While she draped and tucked and pleated, Lucille made faces, bent herself out of shape, and produced funny noises. Roth rose to the bait. “This girl’s fulla hell,” the designer complained, turning on the model. “You got flair, you got personality, a beautiful body you got. So why so aggravating? You make my ulcer ache. You’re fired.” That night she called Lucille and rehired her, throwing in an offer to let her borrow whatever gown she liked. Several days later Lucille did indeed wear one of Roth’s dresses when she posed for a Liggett & Myers ad. Dressed in a flowing chiffon number, flanked by Russian wolfhounds and holding a Chesterfield cigarette in slim fingers, she seemed the epitome of sophistication. Within weeks her picture was everywhere, including a large billboard at Times Square. On that epochal summer afternoon Lucille was looking up at herself, comparing the immense image with the smaller, far more important ones of real actors in the Palace Theatre lobby. A voice interrupted her reverie.
“Lucille Ball! What are you doing in New York in July?” The speaker was Sylvia Hahlo, a theatrical agent who had a nodding acquaintance with leading models. Lucille responded quite logically by reminding her that New York was where the jobs were. Not true, Hahlo said. “How’d you like to go to California?”
Forget it, Lucille said. “What would I do in California?”
“You’re the Chesterfield Girl, aren’t you? Well, Sam Goldwyn needs a dozen well-known poster girls for a new Eddie Cantor movie. He had all twelve picked. But one just backed out.’ ”
Hahlo told her to see Jim Mulvey, Goldwyn’s New York agent. His office was right here, in the Palace Theatre building. What the hell— Lucille ascended the stairs and presented herself to Mulvey. He looked her over. Tall. Thin legs, and not much frontage; uncapped teeth but maybe she could keep her mouth shut when she smiled. A lively face with sharp blue eyes. She photographed pretty in still pictures, like all models. But what about movies? And could she act? He would have to take a long shot. If it didn’t work out, the chief would have a fit. Mulvey rummaged through his desk for a contract.
That was on a Wednesday. On Saturday Lucille Ball departed for Hollywood on the Super Chief, MGM’s legal document in hand, already wrinkled and creased from close readings by everyone in the family. It guaranteed the newest Goldwyn Girl $125 a week for six weeks, plus free transportation. She left with the blessings of Grandpa, DeDe, and Freddy, and Carnegie, Jackson, and Roth. After all, the whole thing would take only a month and a half. She used the same phrase to reassure each of them. The granddaughter, the daughter, the sister, the model would be “back in New York before the maple leaves flamed in Central Park.” They had her word on it.