CHAPTER THREE
AT THE TRAIN station Lucille was picked up by studio limousine and chauffeured from Pasadena to Hollywood, in 1933 a relatively small town with groves of orange and olive trees, flocks of birds, and unsaturated air. The United Artists studio, distributor of Samuel Goldwyn productions, found her a one-room apartment on Formosa Street. It had a Murphy bed, a kitchen, and an ideal location—about three blocks from the film studio. She could save money by cooking at home, and she could save even more by walking to work. This was going to be a profitable sojourn.
Lucille had barely checked into the apartment when she received a notice to report for work. At the studio the next morning, she and her fellow chorines were issued skimpy jersey bathing suits and told to line up. As the others primped and prepared, Lucille extracted a piece of red crepe paper from her purse. She had been carrying the fragment around, waiting for an opportunity to use it for maximum comic effect. This was her chance. As Eddie Cantor began his inspection she tore the paper into small dots and applied them to her face, Dorothy Gish–style. The other girls filled out their bathing suits more voluptuously (at five-foot-nine Lucille weighed 111 pounds), and some of them had theatrical experience, but not one of them elicited the reaction she did. Cantor walked down the line, casually giving each new Goldwyn Girl the once-over until he came to Lucille. When he confronted the bogus case of measles he tried to keep a straight face. It was no good. The comedian’s famous exophthalmic eyes bulged and he dissolved in laughter. Cantor asked Lucille to identify herself, then proceeded down the line chuckling about “that Ball dame—she’s a riot.” For the first time since Lucille boarded the Super Chief, she lightened up. Working for Eddie was going to be a lot easier than modeling for Hattie.
As Mick LaSalle points out in Complicated Women, a history of Hollywood before the censors moved in, “Pre-Code musicals were often daring. One reason is that, just by their nature, musicals featured lots of young chorus girls. But perhaps more important is that audiences were more ready to relax their standards when music was playing. . . . Pre-Code musicals tell audiences how great it is to be young.” Roman Scandals was just such a production, with all the vital ingredients on hand: a comic star, comely chorines, a few melodies, and a happy ending to take the public mind away from the Depression for an hour and a half. Producer Sam Goldwyn intended his picture to be the biggest musical of 1933, and United Artists did not stint on production values or talent. At forty-one, Eddie Cantor had gone from headliner in the Ziegfeld Follies to Hollywood star, as big a draw as Will Rogers, Clark Gable, or Jean Harlow. Eddie’s previous film, The Kid from Spain, had been a smash, and Roman Scandals was expected to exceed its grosses. George S. Kaufman and Robert E. Sherwood, each of whom would become a Pulitzer Prize winner in a few years, had been assigned to do the scenario. Dissatisfied with their dialogue, Goldwyn hired two of the Marx Brothers’ most inventive writers, Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin, to add gags and visual business. The cinematographer was Gregg Toland, who would go on to make Citizen Kane. Busby Berkeley, master choreographer of the 1930s, supervised the dances. The songs were written by Harry Warren and Al Dubin, later known for their score for 42nd Street. The cast included the popular singer Ruth Etting and character actors Edward Arnold and Alan Mowbray.
If the plot was less than original, at least it borrowed from prime sources: Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion. Cantor, as a whimsical delivery boy named Eddie in West Rome, Oklahoma, falls asleep on the job. In a dream he is projected back to ancient Rome, where he serves as official food taster to the wicked emperor Valerius (Arnold). Before Cantor awakens, there are songs, anachronistic gags (for example, a slavemaster is disabled by fits of mirth when he inhales lava gas), an attempt to overthrow Valerius followed by a prolonged chase scene, a love story, and, predictably, many close-ups of scantily clad slave girls locked in chains as they await the emperor’s pleasure.
Lucille played one of the slaves, and she learned the hard way that filmmaking was neither as amusing nor as easy as it looked from the outside. Back in the 1930s the actor’s workday knew no limits. Sometimes shooting went on until 3 a.m. Even more demanding than the oppressive schedule, in Lucille’s view, was the studio’s decree that all the girls must resemble Harlow, the blonde luminary whose eyebrows were represented by two carefully penciled-in crescents. Accordingly, Lucy shaved off her eyebrows—and found to her distress that they never quite grew back. Every morning from that day to the end of her life, the first item she reached for upon rising was her eyebrow pencil.
Sam Goldwyn had a notorious predilection for ladies with fuller figures. He found little to admire in Lucille’s understated torso and tried to convince Berkeley to release the new girl. The choreographer held firm; true, this scrawny blonde radiated little sensuality, but there was something different and appealing about her. Not that the choreographer gave Lucille any breaks. He was a hard taskmaster, sometimes drunk and always demanding, rehearsing dances over and over again until she could barely walk home. The next day, though, she would be back on the job, looking for a way to insinuate herself into a scene, lobbying the writers for additional camera time. Perrin admired her willingness to do anything for a laugh; when Cantor wanted to restate the old custard-pie-in-the-face gag with mud taking the place of the pie, none of the girls wanted any part of it except Lucille. She also volunteered to get gummed by a trained crocodile. Perrin rewarded her with a couple of lines.
The weeks stretched out to months. Goldwyn was forced to extend the Lucille Ball contract, and she made herself at home in Hollywood. While the movie ground away, she discovered that Darryl F. Zanuck’s fledgling company, Twentieth Century–Fox, had leased studio space from Sam Goldwyn. During her downtime she hitched rides with trucks making their way onto various Fox sets, where she’d ask if anybody needed a walk-on. For two of Zanuck’s productions, small parts did become available, and Lucille was there to grab them. Before Scandals was released, moviegoers saw her, unbilled, in Broadway Thru a Keyhole and Blood Money. One of Goldwyn’s executives described her apprenticeship: “She sweated out every goddamn break she got. She was one of dozens of girls at the studio watching and waiting for the opportunity. The difference was that she was a worker. That, and Jesus, what energy!” Lucille’s unique amalgam of vigor and humor caught the eye of a touring New York journalist, Walter Winchell, who gave her a few modest plugs in his column. These were duly noted by studio executives and helped her keep her job. The trouble was that her job was little more than human decoration, a cut above those faceless players who filled out crowd scenes.
While Lucille caromed from Fox to United Artists and back again playing small parts, she expended very few ergs on romance. Only one of the men she dated expressed any long-term interest: an actor named Ralph Forbes, who had just been divorced from the stage actress Ruth Chatterton. Forbes’s elegant carriage and English accent dazzled Lucille—until he proposed marriage. Lucille immediately dropped him. “I’m not the crooked-finger-and-teacup type,” she explained. But the breakup had nothing to do with two people separated by a common language. It was simply that romantic commitment terrified her. She was more at ease with blithe, emotionally uninvolving dates, like the ones she had with Mack Grey. Né Max Greenberg, the former boxing manager served as factotum and bodyguard for George Raft, an exhoofer, now middle-level movie star who had trouble separating his tough-guy roles from real life. Both men had risen from the streets of Manhattan, both were known to carry guns and slap people around— although when Raft did the slapping it was usually while Grey held the victim’s arms behind his back. Yet Raft had a sentimental side. He took an avuncular interest in Lucille, encouraged by Carole Lombard, his current flame. The blonde actress could be every bit as foulmouthed as her date, if not more so. (Groucho Marx described her with admiration: “She talked like a man, used words men use with other men. She was a gutsy dame. She was a real show business girl.”) Even though Lucille’s vocabulary was comparatively chaste, the real show business girl recognized a sister under the skin. Carole began to advise her new friend on what she called “studio behavior”: how to speak to producers, staying genial without actually winding up on the casting couch; how to negotiate for bigger parts; and how to drop names.
The twenty-three-year-old Lucille worked in a succession of pictures, but despite the sagacious advice, casting directors assigned her to roles so small she went unlisted in the credits. Besides appearing in Roman Scandals, she was in three bottom-of-the-bill pictures released by United Artists: first Broadway Thru a Keyhole, then The Bowery and Blood Money. She also had a bit part in the film version of Nana, Émile Zola’s naturalistic novel about the life of a demimondaine. Sam Goldwyn’s inflated production was a critical failure and a box office bomb. “In all these pictures,” Lucille would wryly and accurately note, “I was just part of the scenery, strolling past the camera in chiffon and feathers.” She briefly became a stand-in for Constance Bennett, and she tried to strike up a conversation with the actress, only to learn that Bennett could not remember meeting the young Hattie Carnegie model. Lombard urged Lucille to try out for comedy, but Goldwyn and United Artists displayed little interest in the genre and even less in Lucille, beyond offering a modest extension of her contract. All things considered, it was not a bad deal. After all, of the dozen Goldwyn Girls who had started out together, only four were still in town.
Every week or so Lucille felt pangs of homesickness. To allay them she called home, pleading with her mother, brother, and grandfather to come out to California and live with her. The weather was ideal, she assured them: no more upstate New York winters—no winter at all, in fact. They could play in the sun, sit on the porch as long as they liked. The job market was beginning to pick up; maybe they could nab some sort of assignment at one of the studios. Even if they couldn’t, she was making $150 a week. And once she got a screen credit, who knew how high her salary might go? Quite sensibly, DeDe asked where Lucille intended to put the family—surely not in her tiny apartment.
Lucille’s answer came in the spring of 1934, when she took an expensive rental about half a mile from the studio. The financial aid came from Raft—money that would take six years to pay back. The new dwelling place at 1344 North Ogden Drive was little more than a bungalow, with three small bedrooms and a yard wide enough for a garden, but it was enough. Freddy was the first family member to come west, and he wasted no time landing a job as a page boy at the Trocadero supper club. One of Lucille’s colleagues, actress Ann Sothern, helped her decorate her place. When Lucille was satisfied with the look, she issued an invitation to DeDe and Grandpa Fred Hunt.
While she was feeling energized, Lucille hammered away at Sam Goldwyn to let her do comedy. Beyond making a halfhearted move on her, Goldwyn had nothing to offer beyond another minuscule and unbilled part in Kid Millions, the new Eddie Cantor movie. Lucille accepted the role and promptly became a major pain on the set. The demanding Busby Berkeley was in charge again, and he gave the cast very short breaks. After each one, Lucille was the last to appear. Over the public address speakers would come the message: “Miss Ball . . . Miss Ball . . . On set, please.” The film’s second lead, George Murphy, whispered: “Honey, I don’t understand you. One of these days they’ll fire you.” Lucille conceded that he might be right. “But one thing you can be sure of,” she added. “They’ll know who I am.”
A snappy comeback, Murphy had to admit, but not one likely to advance her career. Indeed, by the end of 1934 Lucille had appeared in ten films without acquiring a single screen credit. “It galled her that schleps with no talent were getting billing while she wasn’t,” recalled a colleague from those days. Manifestly she had to get out of the shadow of Goldwyn and United Artists. The trouble was, she had nothing to bargain with—no credits, no reputation, no friends, no luck. All that was to change late in 1934 when the comedy writers Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin learned that their agent, Bill Perlberg, had just been hired as casting director of Columbia Studios. He asked his former clients if they knew any performers he should look at. Both mentioned Lucille’s off-camera clowning on the set of Roman Scandals. “We didn’t mention her as an actress,” Perrin would recall, “because we knew her as a personality. We told him she was funny and amusing.”
On the strength of their recommendation, Perlberg offered Lucille a contract at $75 a week, half what she had been making with Goldwyn. She sighed and she signed—anything for a crack at comedy. “I wanted to learn,” she was to write. “And my forte, I figured, was that. I didn’t know what I was getting into.”
That was not quite true. Everyone in Hollywood knew about Columbia and its Neanderthal head of production, Harry Cohn. With his brother Jack, and Joel Brandt, a pal from New York, the high school dropout and former song-plugger had founded Cohn-Brandt-Cohn Film Sales in 1919. While Jack and Joel stayed in the East, Harry moved to Los Angeles. There he leased studio space for CBC on Gower Street, known to the movie colony as Poverty Row because it housed so many companies specializing in low-budget, “quickie” productions. Cohn-Brandt-Cohn was typical; it turned out so many cheap, slam-bang comedies that actors said “CBC” stood for Corned Beef and Cabbage—reason enough for Harry to change the name to Columbia Pictures.
Beneath the new sign the Cohn philosophy remained the same: low budgets and fast schedules. A number of talented actors and directors chose to work with Columbia anyway. The reason was as basic as Cohn himself. Although he refused to underwrite expensive sets or locations, he respected established talents and gave them the freedom they required. Director Frank Capra was one of those who stayed with Columbia despite offers from bigger studios, and when Lucille entered the place, Carole Lombard and John Barrymore were busy on the same lot. The difference was that Lombard and Barrymore were cast in Twentieth Century while Lucille was capering with the Three Stooges. Cohn had decreed that his new contract player would be perfect as the dumb blonde foil in Larry, Moe, and Curly’s latest effort, Three Little Pigskins. The farce about college football used her mainly as a target. Again she maintained, “I didn’t know what I was getting into,” and again this was not quite accurate. The Stooges’ pratfall reputation preceded them, and not a soul in Hollywood expected them to be anything short of gross. Lucille dutifully allowed them to pelt her with lemon meringue and squirt soda in her face. All she learned from the trio, she insisted, was that “seltzer up the nose really hurts.” But all affronts to her dignity vanished when she was rewarded with something money could not buy: a screen credit. Lucille Ball was no longer an elevated extra, a supernumerary glamour girl. Heartened by the prospect of more film comedies, she wired money for the rest of the family to take the Super Chief to L.A. The reunion was only days away.
It was during those days that Harry Cohn made one of his periodic slashes of the Columbia budget. More than a dozen performers were summarily fired. Lucille remembered the collective feelings of shock and fear. “One night at six o’clock, Boom! We were on the streets, going, ‘What happened?’ Nobody knew. They just—got rid of everybody. ” Lucille had a date that night with Dick Green, brother of Johnny Green, a studio musician and composer of such hits as “Body and Soul” and “Out of Nowhere.” He took note of the glum face. “Lost my job,” Lucille snuffled: Dede and her brother and grandfather were coming to stay at the house in Gower. But now—
He cut her off. It so happened that there was an opportunity. Why, this very evening RKO had an open call for showgirls.
Lucille put her tongue in her cheek.
No, Green insisted: this new Astaire-Rogers film really needed chorines.
They’re auditioning them after dark? she demanded.
Yes, she was assured, in the p.m.
Lucille showed up for the casting call, invented a long history of modeling for Bergdorf Goodman in New York, and was offered a job. The salary seemed insultingly low, as if she was backsliding rather than rising in Hollywood—$50 a week. She signed immediately.
Informed that she was going by bus to meet her mother and grandfather at the railroad station, George Raft was appalled. That was no way to greet the family. He advanced Lucille $65 and gave her the use of his limousine for the day so that she could arrive in style. As soon as DeDe laid eyes on the house on North Ogden she started to cry, moved by her daughter’s success. What seemed a striver’s dwelling to Lucille was paradise to her mother.
DeDe kept weeping at intervals throughout the day. In the evening the two went for a drive around town. They parked at the top of Mulholland Drive, the local lovers’lane. Lights from the San Fernando Valley and the Los Angeles basin twinkled below them. The sentimental DeDe began to cry again and Lucille put her arm around her mother. “We sat there for a few minutes,” Lucille would recall, “when all of a sudden there was a cop next to us. He banged his nightstick against the running board and said, ‘Okay, you dames. None of that stuff up here. Run along, butch.’ I don’t think my mother had ever heard the word ‘lesbian’ and when I told her what it meant and that the cop thought we were necking, she cried all the way home.”
Grandpa Fred worked hard at adjusting to the new climate and the new house. Lucille eased the way as best she could, calling him Daddy, deferring to him in little matters, and creating a small studio for him in the garage. Seated behind a desk, Fred Hunt gave political lectures to his new friends, the milkman, the trash collector, and various retirees he met on his Ogden Drive constitutionals. Overhearing the talks, his granddaughter was amused to see that the old man’s radical leanings had been brought to Los Angeles intact. Harmless, she thought, and very good for Daddy to exercise his opinions as well as his body.
Not that she could spare much time for the family once everyone had settled in. Lucille was, after all, a contract player with RKO Pictures, and she was determined not to lose this job.
The company letters stood for Radio-Keith-Orpheum, vestiges of the company’s vaudeville origins. At one time it had been under the control of the financial shark Joseph P. Kennedy, now the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and David Sarnoff, president of the Radio Corporation of America. The executives had believed in the future of talking pictures, and attempted to create a rival to Warner Brothers, acknowledged leader of the revolution in sound. But that was before the Depression gutted the parent company, which fell into the hands of the receivers. Kennedy and Sarnoff were back in New York, and RKO Pictures was left to founder on its own. In the early 1930s it did better than anyone had dared to predict. No genre was left untouched. A series of revolving-door executives experimented with special effects, as in King Kong; dramas featuring the high-toned young actress Katharine Hepburn, who won an Academy Award with her third picture, Morning Glory; and adaptations of Broadway musicals, including Roberta, starring Irene Dunne and a newly popular dance team, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
It was for this last film that Lucille was hired, specifically as an onscreen clothes model. Roberta is set in Paris, where Dunne plays a White Russian princess turned couturier, Rogers is an American singer posing as an Eastern European aristocrat, and Astaire is a fellow American undeceived by Rogers’s bogus accent. Lucille again tried to lobby the writers for more work, but it was no use: she was supposed to be Parisian, and French intonations were totally beyond her. Rather than give the actress additional dialogue, the director William A. Seiter excised her only speech. All that remained in the finished film was a walk-on, with Lucille striding around in ostrich plumes and silk.
The event was disappointing rather than dispiriting. Lucille was the first to acknowledge that she had a lot to learn. She would begin by devoting herself to the task at hand—any task at all. According to her testimony: “I adopted RKO as my studio family. I talked to everyone I met, from office boys to executives—possibly because of that urgent need I’d always had to make people like me—and I posed for every cheesecake picture they asked for. I could never say no.”
These frantic efforts were to pay large dividends. During the first few months she caught the eye of Pandro S. Berman. Nine years her senior, Berman had risen from editor to RKO’s most important executive, overseeing Katharine Hepburn’s films and the Astaire-Rogers musicals. He was surrounded by beautiful women on the lot and around town, but somehow, this year, 1934, he preferred Lucille’s fresh and audacious style. For her part, Lucille thought him attractive enough; since the days of her crush on Uncle George Mandicos, and through four years with Johnny DeVita, she had shown a distinct preference for swarthy Mediterranean types—even if they were married. Berman fit the mold. They started to see each other, and within a month Lucille became Topic A among the studio gossips.
This could scarcely be called a casting couch stratagem. Beguiled though he was, Berman knew the actress’s limitations and offered her no major roles. All the same, studio folk knew of the involvement and treated Miss Ball with extreme politesse. She had only one line in I Dream Too Much, a vehicle built for the talents of soprano Lily Pons. As an American parvenu touring Paris, Lucille denounces the city’s attractions: “Culture is making my feet hurt.” A larger role came with Chatterbox, where she played a combative actress. This was followed by minor roles in two subsequent Astaire-Rogers features, as a dancer in Follow the Fleet and a flower seller in Top Hat.
Manifestly, her connection with the boss was not enough to elevate Lucille from the bottom rungs of RKO, a situation she discussed at a commissary lunch with Margaret Hamilton. The beaky character actress would become an icon when she played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, but at the time she was just another RKO performer punching the clock like the rest. “Am I ever going to succeed?” Lucille demanded. “I have financial responsibilities for my mother and I need to make money.” Hamilton could only provide a sympathetic ear; she had no counsel, and no inside information. Still, there was one avenue as yet unexplored.
One of the clichés of Hollywood, Lucille was to observe, is “Behind every successful actress is a hairdresser and a mother.” “Hairdressers come and go,” she wrote, “but Ginger Rogers has only one fabulous mother, a woman who played mother to many of us on the way up.” In order to further her daughter’s career, and to give herself something to do, the restless Lela Rogers had founded an acting school on the RKO lot. Lucille made a point of matriculating at this institution, headed by a most unusual woman.
Lela Rogers had several ex-husbands but only one child, and she resolved to make that girl famous. The goal required concentration and discipline, two attributes Lela had acquired as a female Marine during World War I. Returned to civilian life, Lela applied them to her daughter, training the child for a career in show business. At fourteen Ginger won a Charleston contest in Dallas; after that there was no stopping mother or daughter. Lela hired some dancers, wrote original songs and special material, and arranged a vaudeville contract for Ginger Rogers and Her Redheads. On the road she served as Ginger’s press agent and tutored her in academic subjects. The troupe played the circuits until Lela pronounced the appealing little blonde ready for New York. In 1929, at the age of eighteen, Ginger Rogers made her debut in a Broadway musical; the following year she appeared in her first film, Young Man of Manhattan. At RKO, with Lela’s backing, she sang and danced in the films that would make her reputation as Fred Astaire’s partner, doing everything he did, as she liked to point out, backward and in high heels.
When Ginger was not on the set, she polished her craft in Lela’s acting classes. Lucille joined the group of apprentices and found herself in a position of considerable delicacy. She wanted to improve her skills, to secure larger roles, to become somebody. At the same time, Lucille could not threaten Ginger, the focus of all this schooling, by letting her ambition show. The humble attitude worked so well that after one class Lela took Lucille aside.
“What would you give to be a star in two years?” the older woman demanded. “Would you give me every breath you draw for two years? Will you work seven days a week? Will you sacrifice all your social life?”
Lucille nodded her assurance.
“Okay, let’s start.”
For Lucille, the Lela Rogers regimen meant getting her teeth straightened, wearing dresses instead of slacks and shirts, reading English literature to improve her vocabulary and get a better understanding of character, taking elocution lessons in order to lower her voice by four tones. Of all the counsel Lela dispensed, Lucille had trouble with only one piece of advice: to her instructor, sex was “more of a hindrance than a help to a would-be star.” More actresses, she insisted, “have made it to the top without obvious sex appeal than with it.” This contradicted all that Lucille had experienced, but what Lela wanted Lela got: her young pupil learned the value of subtlety in performance and deportment.
These lessons were not absorbed all at once; there were times when Lucille forgot she was a lady and reverted to Jamestown rebel. Early one morning she was preparing for yet another publicity photograph when Mary, Queen of Scots, strode into the makeup room. The staff whisked Lucille to the adjoining wardrobe department as Katharine Hepburn, dressed as Mary, studied her script and settled luxuriously into the chair. Lucille peeked through a small window and saw that she had left behind in the makeup room a box of caps for her teeth. She tried to catch the eye of the makeup man; he deliberately snubbed her. Furious, Lucille grabbed a container of coffee and hurled it through the window at him. The missile missed its target and hit a chair, spattering coffee over Hepburn’s costume. Mary of Scotland would not be filmed that day. The postponement cost RKO several thousand dollars and infuriated the front office. But Hepburn, forever skirmishing with RKO management, refused to blame Lucille. Pandro Berman argued that it was just an accident that could have happened to anyone, and Lela advised the bosses that Lucille Ball happened to be the most promising student in her class. The transgression was overlooked, but unforgiven; Lucille would have to work twice as hard merely to stay in place.
She understood the situation and applied herself to acting and cultural lessons. There was no point in playing office politics; studio executives seemed to come and go with the seasons. Drawing on past experience and present lessons, she was creditable as the second lead in another Lily Pons film, That Girl from Paris, and garnered her first rave review from a New York paper. The Daily Mirror accurately termed her a “capable actress” and mistakenly judged her “an agile dancer” before getting to her real strength: “Miss Ball plays it quite straight, intensifying the comedy of each disaster. She rates, thereby, more conspicuous roles and more intense promotion. She is a comedienne, which is always a ‘find.’ ” As a brunette gangster’s moll in Don’t Tell the Wife, she was funnier between takes than when the cameras rolled, but even as a practical joker she attracted an unusual amount of attention. In the middle of one ad-lib routine Lucille was approached by a heavy, hard-breathing old gentleman. He whispered, “Young lady, if you play your cards right, you can be one of the greatest comediennes in the business.” She responded with a wry look and stepped away. “I figured he was one of the guys who came around measuring the starlets for tights,” she later remarked. Too late, she learned that the speaker was not on the make and that he had meant what he said. He was Edward Sedgwick, the retired comedy director who had been responsible for many Keystone Kops and Buster Keaton movies.
Late in 1936 the studio acquired the rights to George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s Stage Door, a Broadway hit about the rivalries and friendships of ingenues. Every actress under the age of thirty ached to be in the cast, and Lucille lobbied Berman for a part—any part. His endorsement was not enough. Leland Hayward, Kaufman’s agent, believed there were at least a dozen more adept performers at RKO and he vetoed her. Never mind, Berman consoled Lucille, there might be another way into the project. He knew of a straight play bound for Broadway. If she could win a role and appear on the Main Stem for a couple of months, she might yet persuade these provincial New Yorkers that Lucille Ball had the talent and experience for Stage Door.
The name of the play was Hey Diddle Diddle. Written by an unknown playwright, Bartlett Cormack, it would be directed and coproduced by Anne Nichols, author of Abie’s Irish Rose. That comedy of intermarriage opened to scathing reviews (the New Yorker ran a contest for the most amusing pan, won by Harpo Marx: “No worse than a bad cold”) and proceeded to run for a record-breaking 2,327 performances. Now wealthy and immune to criticism, Nichols was persuaded to hire Lucille. She would play one of a trio of roommates trying to make a career in show business.
An eager young actor, Keenan Wynn, son of the comedian Ed Wynn, was also in the cast. The lead was the silent-movie veteran Conway Tearle, whose last film had been Romeo and Juliet, with Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer as the lovers. Rehearsals augured well and Hey Diddle Diddleopened to an enthusiastic crowd late in January 1937, at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey. The Variety critic reported: “Miss Ball fattens a fat part and almost walks off with the play. She outlines a consistent character and continually gives it logical substance. Has a sense of timing and, with a few exceptions, keeps her comedy under control.” The notice was not a fluke. After a performance in Washington, D.C., the Washington Post reviewer expressed dissatisfaction with the play, but not with its comedienne: “If there is one young person who is going to add to her professional stature in Hey Diddle Diddle it is Lucille Ball, just about the slickest trick you ever saw in slacks.” Lucille read the notices and mused about the future. Let Hollywood treat her as a clownish newcomer; she would become a headliner in the place she belonged—the legitimate theater.
It was not to be. Conway Tearle, succumbing to the illness that would cause his death a few months later, was forced to leave the play. In less than a month Hey Diddle Diddle was due to open at the Vanderbilt Theatre on Broadway. There was barely enough time to find another suitable lead and make the extensive revisions that Nichols demanded. Both alternatives were within reach, until Cormack announced that his work needed no drastic rewrites; he thought the script required only a few minor brush strokes. The argument escalated from shouting match to power struggle. Nichols settled matters several days later by closing the production out of town.
Disappointed and at loose ends, Lucille returned to RKO hoping that someone important had seen her out-of-town reviews. Someone had. Armed with the reviews, Pandro Berman convinced the higher-ups that Lucille belonged in the cast of Stage Door. The director, Gregory La Cava, gave way, and with that decision Lucille found herself in an A picture for the first time. She played Judy Canfield, one of a group of aspiring actresses hell-bent on stage careers. Compared with the others, Lucille’s part was not large. Katharine Hepburn won the central role of the haughty debutante Terry Randall. Ginger Rogers, who considered herself Hepburn’s number one rival in the rising-star category, was determined to outshine everyone as Jean Maitland, a sarcastic girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Other actresses regarded this film as their big break, including Eve Arden (as Eve), who specialized in the wry comeback, Andrea Leeds (as the doomed Kaye Hamilton), whom La Cava considered “the best natural actress” he had ever worked with, and Ann Miller (as Annie, a long-legged dancer), who looked several years older than her real age. Lucille had seen Miller on the stage in San Francisco; she knew that the girl was actually fourteen, but she assured RKO executives that Ann was eighteen and therefore outside the New Deal’s child labor laws.
Throughout the filming La Cava aimed for realism. He all but dismissed the wardrobe department; the women were to wear their own clothes instead of the usual studio ensembles. (Lucille complied, but audaciously sent her clothing bills to RKO. The studio refused to pick up the tab.) Despite the fact that Stage Door had thrived on Broadway, La Cava determined that the film adaptation would be an extempore affair. Actors would ad-lib their scenes around certain agreed-upon lines; scenarists would fill the gaps with smart gags and backchat. Making up dialogue was difficult enough for Lucille; working with Hepburn was excruciating. “She was s-o-o-o highbrow that I never really knew exactly what she was saying, but I’d nod my head and agree with her,” Lucille told a friend. “She’d never talk to anyone directly, she’d address you looking all around you but never at you. I was riveted to her when she was around. She wasn’t really standoffish. She ignored everyone equally.”
La Cava was not so easily intimidated. At opportune times he reminded Hepburn that RKO considered her “box office poison,” and made her recite an affected line she had been trying to forget. “The calla lillies are in bloom again” was from The Lake, a Broadway flop that had prompted Dorothy Parker to issue the widely quoted appraisal, “she [Hepburn] runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.” At La Cava’s insistence Hepburn spoke those words again in Stage Door, and thenceforward impersonators made sure she never forgot them.
The director was no more benign with others in the cast. Lucille felt that La Cava disliked her in particular. If that was the case, he did not allow his personal feelings to interfere with the filming. He and the scenarists saw to it that her character, Judy Canfield, remained the realist of the group, an appealing Seattlite who eventually chucks her stage career and heads west to marry a lumberjack. En route, Ball has several indelible encounters, including a defining one with Leeds and Arden:
LEEDS
I actually saw one manager. It wasn’t an interview. I just saw him as he rushed out of his office.
BALL
Well, at least you know there is such an animal. What did he look like?
LEEDS
Like any other animal. He had on pants, a tie and collar.
ARDEN
Did smoke come out of his nose?
BALL
Did he say “Man, man” when you squeezed him?
LEEDS
I didn’t get that close to him.
ARDEN
You didn’t see a manager, dearie. What you saw was a mirage.
Of all the films released in 1937, Stage Door received the best word-of-mouth and the most glowing reviews. It was honored with Academy Award nominations. Katharine Hepburn’s reputation was restored, and the New York film critics vindicated La Cava’s methods by naming him best director of the year.
On the strength of her new screen credit Lucille signed with Zeppo Marx, the Marx brother who had dropped out of the comedy act in 1933 to become an influential agent. He drove her salary up to $1,000 a week and negotiated for better billing in B movies like Having WonderfulTime, with Ginger Rogers and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and The Affairs of Annabel, a light satire of Hollywood in which Lucille headlined with Jack Oakie. The latter movie proved so popular that the studio offered a second Annabel feature. The New York Times preferred her to the film; Lucille Ball, said the reviewer, was “one of our brightest comediennes.”
With this rush of recognition she relaxed enough to enjoy her home, and to expand her social life. By now Cleo had joined the group at North Ogden Drive; it was as if Lucille had finally brought the entire emotional structure of Jamestown west, brick by brick. Everyone seemed happier now—save for Grandpa Fred Hunt. A recent stroke seemed to propel him backward in time. Although the country was in Recovery, he acted as if the Depression had just begun. To anyone who would listen, and to many who would not, he again boomed the virtues of socialism, Eugene V. Debs–style.
Flush with her grand new salary, Lucille hired a maid. Unlike most of her career moves, this one happened quite by accident. She was straightening the house and idly listening to a radio program presenting a series of job-seekers. Prospective employers were invited to call in. A young woman, Harriet McCain, spoke glowingly about her mother, who had been Jack Benny’s maid for fourteen happy years. Harriet had enjoyed a brief fling in show business; now she was ready to follow in Mama’s profession. On a whim Lucy called in, and the next day a plump, cheerful African American presented herself. “When I interviewed Harriet,” Lucille said, “I didn’t ask for any references, to her surprise. After about five minutes’ talk, I decided I liked her looks and manner and asked, ‘What size uniform do you wear?’ and that was that.”
It did not take long for Grandpa Fred to agitate the new worker with lines like “You’re being exploited by your employers!” These exhortations annoyed Lucille, but could hardly have been a surprise. Ever since his arrival in Los Angeles Fred Hunt had been espousing radical causes, lecturing on street corners, quoting his favorite periodical, the Daily Worker, and joining most of the left-wing organizations in town, frequently signing up other members of the family without their knowledge. His arguments against the Roosevelt administration’s defense of capitalism grew so fierce and choleric that Lucille feared for his health. It was to placate the old man that she, her brother, and her mother followed his lead and registered as Communists for one primary. “I remember feeling quite foxy [about that day],” Lucille said in later years. After all, what was the harm of signing up as an L.A. Bolshevik? “I always felt I would be all right if I didn’t vote it.”
Between assignments at the studio and domestic chores, she allowed herself a limited social life. The involvement with Berman waned when his wife gave birth and Lucille saw herself in the unaccustomed role of temptress. “I knew what it was like to lose a beloved father early in life,” she declared later. “No child was going to be put through that torture because of me.” She was not alone for long. Another exotic type came along: Cesar Romero, a well-established Latin star. Lucille thought him “the best dancer in the world.” She recalled: “One night we both went to Mocambo, and we both had too much to drink. I thought maybe he’d make a pass after all the times we went out, but he didn’t. As we danced, he started to cry. I asked him what was the matter, and he just said, ‘I’m strange.’ I told him that we were all a little strange, and then he really broke down.”
Stranger still was Oscar Levant, the deadpan pianist-composer-actor who made a career of his neuroticism. On a lark Lucille agreed to have dinner with him. He picked her up at the house, then drove to the top of Mulholland Drive. Lucille mused, “If that cop came back, at least I was with a man this time.” After an interminable silence, Levant extinguished his fourth cigarette. “Well, I guess you’re wondering why I haven’t made a pass at you.”
“I just looked at him,” Lucille went on. “I didn’t know what to say. If I said yes, I thought he’d kiss me and I’d scream, and if I said no he’d do it anyway and I’d scream. Then he said, ‘Well, don’t worry. I’m not going to make a pass at you. I have syphilis.’ I don’t know if he was kidding or not, but that was the end of it. He started the car and took me home without another word.”
She also dated Henry Fonda, who had appeared with her in I Dream Too Much. Their association was extremely short-lived. One evening Lucille and Ginger Rogers double-dated with Fonda and his room-mate, Jimmy Stewart. They danced at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub until about 5 a.m. before stopping off at Barney’s Beanery to sober up with coffee and a light breakfast. The quartet hit the street at sunrise. Both actresses had spent a long time choosing their ensembles and applying heavy makeup, false eyelashes, and dark mascara. As long as the lighting was dim, they were the epitome of glamour. In the harsh morning glare, they suddenly looked like dime store mannequins. Fonda did a double take as he examined his companion, uttered one syllable—“Yuck!”—and took her home. There were no further dates.
RKO publicists had no idea how to sell Lucille Ball. They could hardly merchandise her dalliance with Berman, nor could they make much of her casual evenings with Broderick Crawford, fresh from his role as Lennie in the Broadway play Of Mice and Men; with comedian Milton Berle; or with screenwriter Gene Markey, whose chief distinction was a brief marriage to Joan Bennett.
So they invented a new Lucille Ball for their own use. Just as later publicists concocted a Joan Crawford who adored staying home in the kitchen with her daughter, or a Rock Hudson who was an unrestrained ladies’ man, the studio put together a Lucille who was a woman of multiple talents, an admixture of Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Aphrodite. With a straight face RKO offered the official biography to newspapers throughout the country. Among other things, it claimed: “She once took an open-cockpit plane up in weather 20 degrees below freezing to effect the rescue of a schoolboy; she plays a fast game of polo, has a hobby of woodcarving, owns a profitable florist shop, and is one of Hollywood’s best-dressed actresses.”
Lucille did not know how to fly, was not a horsewoman, had no financial interest in any flower shop, and dressed well but not as well as a hundred more successful actresses with their own couturiers. Not that this mattered. What was important was to convince editors that her RKO films were worth coverage. Image was everything. Accuracy had nothing to do with it.
The cumulative assault had an effect not only on editors and writers, but on studio executives as well. “Eventually,” she claimed, “they started sending me scripts and asked me if I’d like to do this or that. It was a big thrill. One day I saw a casting sheet that said, ‘A Lucille Ball type.’ I went to the casting office and said I’d be available in a week.” She took a screen test, only to be turned down by the producer. He said she was wrong for the role.