CHAPTER FOUR
RUMMAGING THROUGH souvenirs of the late 1930s, Lucille reminisced to a friend, “I was very happy being Queen of the B’s.” Bestowed by derisive studio folk, the title was accepted with equanimity. “Actually, that’s one of my problems,” she admitted. “I’m very happy in my nice little ruts.”
This particular rut turned out to be long, profitable, and almost entirely devoid of glamour. For a time Lucille and Eve Arden competed for minor wisecracking roles: “One of us would be the lady executive and the other would be the ‘other woman.’ They were the same roles. We’d walk through a room, drop a smart remark, and exit. I called us the ‘drop-gag girls.’ ”
Next came screwball comedies like The Next Time I Marry and Beauty for the Asking. In the former Lucille plays a potential heiress. The good news is that she has fallen in love with a handsome foreigner. The bad news is that she can inherit $20 million only if she marries an American. To outwit the estate lawyers, Lucille marries the first eligible Yankee in sight, and the couple sets off for Reno and a quickie divorce, only to find through various calamities and arguments that they cannot live without each other. In the latter movie she plays a young woman thrown over by a young man in search of a dowry. Fueled by resentment, she invents a beauty cream that women find irresistible. The cosmetic becomes a national sensation, whereupon the fortune hunter finds that Lucille is rather fetching after all.
A glance at Lucille Ball’s films from this period shows a wide range of parts, almost all of them in bottom-of-the-bill movies. In the comedy That’s Right, You’re Wrong she is cast as a starlet helping bandleader Kay Kyser and his Kollege of Musical Knowledge pass their screen test; in the flagwaver The Marines Fly High she portrays a cocoa-plantation owner kidnapped by bandits and rescued by daring pilots; in the melodramatic Panama Lady she plays a conniving cabaret dancer out to separate an alcoholic oilman from his money. Buried in that sump of cinematic clichés, she still managed to attract critical attention: The New York Daily News critic deemed Panama Lady “another minor triumph for Lucille Ball . . . It is high time RKO recognized her potential and put her in something more deserving of her ability than the last things she has appeared in. I don’t contend that she is a Duse, but she is one of the most up-and-coming players around.”
The comer did win a role in Room Service, playing an aspiring actress and straight woman to the Marx Brothers. In theory, the Marx Brothers feature should have been her breakthrough. Pandro Berman thought so highly of the Brothers he paid half a million dollars for the rights to film the stage hit. That money included the salaries of Groucho, Chico, and Harpo, borrowed for this occasion from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Unfortunately, the producer failed to notice something vital: every one of the previous seven Marx Brothers movies had been built from the ground up, the scenario carefully shaped to their talents and idiosyncrasies. Room Service was a Broadway comedy hastily rejiggered to fit the trio. The plot concerns a theatrical con man who refuses to leave his hotel room until he can find a backer rich enough to pay his bills and underwrite a new play. Audiences and critics were more tolerant than Groucho. “It was the first time we tried doing a play we hadn’t created ourselves,” he complained later. “We can’t do that. We’ve got to originate the characters and situations ourselves. Then we can do them. Then they’re us. We can’t do gags or play characters that aren’t ours. We tried it and we’ll never do it again.”
Lucille learned only one skill from her Marx Brothers experience: how to eat an exotic vegetable. At a dinner at Sam Goldwyn’s palatial home she was seated next to Harpo. When an artichoke was placed before her, Lucille panicked. She had never encountered one before, and thought to go at it with knife and fork until Harpo quietly showed her how to peel the leaves one by one. Harpo’s kindness was not duplicated by his younger brother. Privately, Groucho appraised Lucille Ball as “an actress, not a comedienne. There’s a difference. I’ve never found her to be funny on her own. She’s always needed a script.”
Here the usually astute comedian was wrong. Granted, Lucille would never be as furiously amusing as the Brothers, who could turn any occasion into a comic sketch. They were already notorious for squatting nude and roasting potatoes in Irving Thalberg’s faux fireplace when the production chief was late for a meeting. During the filming of Room Service they picked up where they had left off at MGM. RKO had promised to close the set of the movie, then reneged. Angry that visitors were on the way, Groucho, Chico, and Harpo prepared themselves for a scene in which they were to run after Lucille. That they did—but they had removed every stitch of clothing. The astonished tour group, composed of priests and nuns, averted their eyes.
But if Lucille could not match the Brothers for bare lunacy, she was not above making some memorable mischief of her own. Frank Albertson, who had played the hapless playwright in Room Service, booked himself into a local hospital. There he underwent a long-delayed hemorrhoid operation. Painfully recuperating, Albertson looked up one afternoon to see a group of his fellow performers, led by Lucille. She had talked the head nurse into allowing a visit. They were on a lunch break, she lied, and had only an hour before shooting resumed. They would be the very essence of sympathy and dignity.
Frank “knew we were up to no good the minute he saw us,” Lucille said, “and he begged us to leave. Well, that’s all we needed.” At her instigation, the callers did everything they could to break him up. “He shut his eyes as tightly as he could, trying to pretend we weren’t there, but it didn’t work. He bit his lip so hard it turned purple. He finally gave in, alternating screams of laughter with screams of pain. The nurse came running in like a sketch nurse in a vaudeville scene, and threw us all out on the spot. As I was leaving, Frank looked at me with the purplest face I’ve ever seen and said, ‘I never knew my eyelids were connected to my asshole.’ ”
By mid-1939 Lucille was forced to acknowledge what everyone else already knew: Ginger Rogers had risen to become RKO’s A-picture star, and Lucille Ball had fallen into the category of B-picture comedienne, a rut from which there seemed no exit. Given these conditions, she considered other career opportunities. Nostalgic for the energy that came across the footlights from a live audience, Lucille thought about doing a legitimate play or working in the dying medium of vaudeville and the immensely vigorous one of radio. “In pictures,” she noted, “by the time they get around to the close-up, the comedy is gone.” She heard that the Jack Haley and Phil Baker radio programs, both top-rated shows, were looking for actresses, and she auditioned for and won both jobs. She made the most of them. After one successful show Variety commented: “[Lucille Ball’s] material was only so-so, but her timing and knock ’em dead emphasis on the tags italicized the humor. Her withering style of always belittlin’ was particularly well suited to go with Baker’s fooling.”
This emphasis on humor came to overshadow every assignment and audition, no matter how serious the intent. During the season she was establishing herself as a foil, Lucille (like almost every other Hollywood actress under thirty not actively employed in a brothel) was asked to test for David O. Selznik. The producer was on a widely publicized search for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in his muchballyhooed production of Gone With the Wind. Lucille suspected that she was wrong for the role, but no performer ever refused a command from Mr. Selznick. And besides, stranger things had happened in Hollywood. Mindful that this could be a lifetime opportunity, Lucille bought a new outfit reminiscent of the Old South, complete with flower-printed wide skirt and matching broad-brimmed hat. Her plan was to approach the Selznik studio in a big convertible, passing through the gate like a superstar. En route an unpredicted downpour soaked Culver City. The convertible failed to convert, and by the time Lucille reached her destination she and the dress were waterlogged.
A sympathetic secretary told her that Selznik was running behind schedule. That gave the actress a chance to dry out in the boss’s office. “She took a decanter of brandy off his desk and offered me a glass,” Lucille remembered. “I was shaking so much and so chilled that I took it and downed it in one gulp. She offered me another, and I downed that, too. By the time Selznik came in, I was smashed.” He smiled reassurance and asked her to do the scene she had prepared. “I read Scarlett’s speech to Ashley, the one where they don’t see Rhett on the sofa, looking like I went over Niagara Falls in a barrel.” When she finished, the producer offered congratulations on her ingenuity; it was very daring to make such a choice. “I didn’t know what he was talking about. Selznik said, ‘To do the scene on your knees like that!’ I was kneeling the whole time, and never even knew it.”
While she strove for name recognition, Lucille kept earnest suitors at bay. As she saw it, her career progress had been slow enough without the encumbrance of marriage. When Alexander Hall came along, he provided an easy choice for a long-term, emotionally uninvolving liaison. Hall, a director best known for guiding Shirley Temple in Little Miss Marker, had already been divorced twice and had no intention of marrying again. He was middle-aged, dour, and physically unattractive, but he had been a child star in vaudeville, had great stories about the old days, and knew almost every local and visiting comedian. Hall introduced Lucille to radio headliner Fred Allen and his wife, Portland Hoffa, and to George Burns and Gracie Allen. He also cleared up an old misunderstanding when he brought Lucille to meet Ed and Ebba Sedgwick. Several years before, Lucille had snubbed Edward Sedgwick, convinced that the Keystone Kops director was just another dirty old man. Now she realized that he was a true believer, an expert in knockabout farce who thought Lucille Ball could become as big a luminary in her day as Mabel Normand and Constance Talmadge were in theirs.
Like any other actress, Lucille doted on praise, but she knew better than to rely on the flattery of an emeritus director. Work was the important thing, whether it was in light comedy or in such melodramas as Five Came Back. Directed by John Farrow from a script by Nathanael West and Dalton Trumbo, this was a suspense film about a plane crash in the jungles of South America. Of a dozen passengers who survive, only five will avoid the tribe of headhunters who surround them. Lucille Ball, playing a world-weary trollop, is one of the five—a plum role in what seemed to be a cursed production. First, torrential rains delayed the shooting. Then one character actor, John Carradine, fell ill. Another, Chester Morris, confused his costar Lucille’s onscreen role with her private life and kept pawing her whenever she let down her guard. Farrow displayed his sadistic side, arguing with and humiliating whatever cast member got in his way on a given day. Lucille became his unwitting victim one afternoon when she leaned on some tropical vegetation brought to the set for verisimilitude. It housed two tarantulas, and both fell onto her hair. She had hysterics and had to be assisted to her dressing room, much to the derisive amusement of the director.
A few months later Lucille found it in her heart to forgive him. Farrow had bullied his cast into tense, convincing performances, and Five Came Back turned into the sleeper of 1939. The New York Times called it “as exciting as a pinwheel” and singled out Lucille Ball for her “gripping realism.” The front office began to regard Lucille in a different way. Studio press agents came around, hinting that big things were in store—perhaps the A films she had been striving for. In December she was sent east to make a series of personal appearances in New York. While in the city, she was told, it would be a good idea to see the new Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart musical. RKO had just bought Too Many Girls, and casting would begin just after New Year’s Day. Was this the studio’s way of telling her that Lucille Ball was at long last an A-picture talent?
Because of her own foolhardiness, two weeks went by before she got tickets to the show. Studio publicists had set up a shoot with Lucille skating at the rink in Rockefeller Center. They asked her to do a pratfall and she obliged them: anything for a laugh. “After so many years in California,” she reflected, “I guess I’d forgotten how hard ice can be. I landed with a slight crack on my sacroiliac.” She was carried off on a stretcher and spent the next ten days of her holiday in a hospital. Friends dropped in and told her about Too Many Girls. It was not much on plot, they said, but how could you beat songs like “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” and “I Like to Recognize the Tune”? And the cast wasn’t half bad. There was an outstanding new comedian, Eddie Bracken; a promising blond chorus boy, Van Johnson; and a good-looking Cuban kid who stopped the show with a conga dance at the end of act 1. As soon as she could walk, the visitors urged, Lucille had to go down to the Imperial Theatre and catch Desi Arnaz in person.
Lucille hobbled to her orchestra seat, made herself as comfortable as possible, and waited to be entertained. The opening scenes were amusing rather than entrancing; she wondered what all the fuss was about until the first big number, “Tempt Me Not.” “I couldn’t take my eyes off this Desi Arnaz,” she was to write. “A striped football jersey hugged his big shoulders and chest, while those narrow hips in tight football pants swayed to the catchy rhythms of the bongo drum he was carrying. I recognized the kind of electrifying charm that can never be faked: star quality.” And this was before Desi had spoken a line.
Lucille momentarily toyed with the idea of pursuing him, then reconsidered. The program said Arnaz was twenty-two, almost six years her junior, and she had a comfortable relationship with an older man. Besides, she had to get back to the Coast, where her next film, Dance, Girl, Dance, was already under way. The plum part of Judy, the prima ballerina, had gone to Maureen O’Hara. Lucille, thanks to typecasting, was assigned to play her rival, Bubbles, a salty, hard-bitten stripper. Turning blonde again, Lucille took well-publicized tours of strip joints in downtown L.A., allegedly to pick up pointers on bumping and grinding.
During the first few months of shooting, RKO patted itself on the back for liberality, pointing out that the cast was being directed by a woman, Dorothy Arzner. The first female member of the Directors Guild of America, Arzner had previously been responsible for Samuel Goldwyn’s pretentious failure Nana, as well as the sentimental box office smash Craig’s Wife. (Studio handouts failed to mention that Arzner was RKO’s second choice, hired after Roy del Ruth withdrew from the project.) Fitfully, her work on the bromidic feature showed what might have been. A smackdown between Bubbles and Judy, for example, was spectacular in rehearsal. The encounter was so eagerly anticipated that the stars charged admission, with proceeds to be turned over to charity. Aided by fight choreographers, they went at it in the film’s most galvanic scene. To demonstrate that there were no hard feelings afterward, Maureen O’Hara and Lucille Ball went off to lunch together, chuckling all the way to the commissary.
Caparisoned in a slinky gold lamé dress slit halfway up the thigh, her bleached tresses falling over a bogus black eye, Lucille stopped by a table to say hello to George Abbott, the director of Too Many Girls, then in rehearsal. At Abbott’s side were several musicians and actors, including one he had brought west for the film version. Over the years biographers and journalists have compared the next few moments to such epochal meetings as the one between Romeo and Juliet (“She speaks, yet she says nothing”), and Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (“You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive”). In fact, neither participant thought much of it at the time and neither was dressed to impress.
Outfitted in the striped jersey and scuffed tights of a college football player, Desi stood up, mumbled his name in a heavy Cuban accent, and flashed a perfunctory smile. He thought Lucille “looked like a two-dollar whore who had been badly beaten by her pimp.” She found him quite different from the charismatic actor she had seen onstage—the one with the strange Spanish name—what was it again?
After Lucille returned to her table, Desi asked Abbott, “Who the hell is that?”
He was informed that Lucille was the actress assigned to play the part of the ingenue in Too Many Girls. Desi shook his head. The skills of the makeup artists notwithstanding, it would be impossible to change this run-down hooker into a coed.
That night the young actor, cleaned up and wearing a new outfit, was rehearsing the Rodgers and Hart song “She Could Shake the Maracas” when Lucille walked in. She had showered and exchanged her costume for a yellow sweater and a pair of tight-fitting beige slacks. In a heavy Cuban accent Desi whispered to the piano player, “Man, that is a honk of woman!”
“You met her today,” the pianist reminded him.
Lucille strolled by and said hello.
“Miss Ball?” Desi inquired, just to make certain there was no mistake.
“Why don’t you call me Lucille?” she offered. “And I’ll call you Dizzy.”
At the time he and Lucille met, Desi was engaged to a dark-haired dancer named Renée de Marco, the partner and estranged wife of Tony de Marco. Renée had been treated brutally by her husband; she was grateful for the attentions of this boyish Cuban. Some of Desi’s friends said Renée was rather like his mother, Lolita Arnaz—dark, beautiful, willful. He paid them no mind. To him, Renée was “a jewel, a rare and unique find.” That was before the encounter with Lucille Ball.
For two years Lucille had enjoyed Al Hall’s company, his advice and guidance. That was before she got a closer look at Desi Arnaz. Ann Miller was in the room when the meeting took place. Love at first sight is one of those phenomena, like sunrises, that occur daily but are watched by few. Miller was one of the observant. “When Desi first was introduced to Lucille,” she claimed, “his eyes just lit up. He was the cutest thing around. God, he was attractive.” Seven hours after the studio lunch the couple went dancing at a Mexican restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. Two days later they broke off relations with their former lovers. “A Cuban skyrocket,” Lucille wrote, had “burst over my horizon.” In Desi’s words, “those damned big beautiful blue eyes” had trivialized everything and everyone else.
Love is an autobiographical passion, and during their first few dates the couple related their life stories. Lucille’s, as we have seen, provided a winding and unusual narrative; Desi’s tale was a good deal more exotic. Those who thought him a slum kid from the streets of Havana (and Lucille was one of them) were astonished by the news that Desi had been a child of privilege. Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III was the only son of a prominent and moneyed Cuban politician. Desiderio II was not only the mayor of Santiago, a major port city; he also owned three large ranches with scores of employees. Desi’s maternal grandfather was a cofounder of the Bacardi Rum company. The boy was expected to attend college and law school, and eventually to take over the family business. The summer of 1933 changed everything. It was in the month of August that Fulgencio Batista led the Cuban army in revolt against the corrupt regime of El Presidente Gerardo Machado. Politicians who had been close to the president were marked for execution or imprisonment, and their lands were confiscated. Desiderio II was placed under arrest and jailed, but in the chaos of la revolución, Desi and his mother, uncle, and cousin escaped the newly empowered Batista police force. The Arnazes had only the clothes they wore, a few pesos, a car, and a tank of gas—enough to get them to a port city in the western part of the island. En route, they pretended to be fervent supporters of the new regime, shouting “ Viva la Revolución!” whenever they saw figures of authority. A day later the four made their escape on a ferry headed for Key West. On the voyage to Florida, Desi played and replayed in his mind the years of ease and the days of fear. Among his last sights of Cuba was the explosion of a bomb released from an open-cockpit plane; the bomb missed its target and blew the arm off a young bystander. The final image of his autobiographical account describes “a man’s head stuck on a long pole and hung in front of his house. The rest of the body was hung two doors down in front of his father’s house.”
With an increasing number of barrios rising in Miami, the family could have retreated into an insular, resentful life of poverty and rage. But they refused to give in to circumstance. Six months after Desiderio II was incarcerated, strings were pulled and he was released, penniless but physically unharmed. He made his way to the beach city and attempted to set himself up in business.
Desi III tried to earn his own way, cleaning cages for a canary breeder, driving taxis, clerking in stores. On his parents’ insistence, the youth attended a Catholic high school part-time. His closest friend at St. Patrick’s was a boy he called Sonny. Desi never mentioned Sonny’s absent father, although he knew the old man’s identity and his whereabouts: Alcatraz. One morning Desi read that the old man had been paroled. He called Sonny and heard a strange speaker.
“He had a very high voice,” Desi wrote, “almost a soprano.
“ ‘May I speak to Sonny please?’ I asked.
“ ‘Who’s this?’
“ ‘Who am I talking to?’
“ ‘This is Al, his father.’
“ ‘Oh, Mr. Capone!’ Jesus Christ, I was talking to Al Capone.”
The association was not one that met with the approval of the elder Arnazes, who still had plans to send their son to college (Notre Dame was their first choice). It was not to be. In the winter of 1936 Desi got a temporary gig singing and playing the guitar with a pickup rhumba band at the Roney Plaza Hotel in Miami Beach. The salary was more than he had ever earned in his life: $39 a week. A month later, the most prominent Latin musician in America dropped by. Xavier Cugat summoned Desi to his table. Satisfied that the young Cuban was properly deferential and naive about money, Cugat hired him to sing and play with his band. Salary: only $30 a week—but it offered the chance to travel, all expenses paid. Desi pounced. The tour started in Cleveland and wound up in Saratoga at the height of the racing season. On the way to the bandstand for a second set, he stopped to gawk at a patron. Bing Crosby greeted him in Spanish, invited the awed singer to hoist a glass, and asked about his salary. Desi told the truth.
“That cheap crook. Come on, let’s talk to him.”
As Cugat approached the table, Crosby spoke out: “Listen, you cheap Spaniard, what do you mean paying this fine Cuban singer thirty dollars a week?”
“He’s just starting, Bingo.”
“Never mind the Bingo stuff. Give him a raise. One of these days you are going to be asking him for a job.”
“Okay, okay. How about singing a song with the band, Bing?”
“Will you give him a raise?”
“Of course.”
Crosby performed many songs that night, some with his new friend. “He sang in Spanish, which was pretty good,” Desi was to write, “and then I sang in English, which was pretty bad. The next time I saw Bing was when I was a guest on his Kraft Music Hall radio show. It was the very first time I appeared on national radio.
“The first thing he asked me was, ‘Did you ever get that raise?’
“ ‘You bet. The following week he raised me to thirty-five dollars, and the only thing extra I had to do was walk his dogs until they completed their business.’ ”
Desi’s offhand charm and intriguing accent made him an audience favorite, and in six months he felt confident enough to break away from Cugat and tour with his own band. Yet he remained insecure enough to want a safety net—a twenty-one-year-old singer-bandleader was unlikely to attract crowds without some sort of gimmick. He presented an idea to the conductor: what if he billed himself and a band of pickup musicians as “Desi Arnaz and His Xavier Cugat Orchestra”? That way Cugat would receive free publicity and Arnaz could get bookings. The boss agreed with one proviso. The brash young man had to pay him a royalty of $25 a week for the use of the Cugat brand name, work or no work.
Desi found himself in the black before the first note sounded. Mother Kelly’s Club in Miami, impressed by the band’s association with a headliner, offered $650 a week with a guarantee of three months’ playing time. Then came opening night. Underrehearsed and cacophonous, the musicians displeased the audience and infuriated the owner. This was not even road-company Cugat, this was Amateur Night. Desi was fired on the spot. He begged for one more chance and received it only because no other talent could be found to replace the band on such short notice. The next evening, under the shaky baton of their leader and arranger, the orchestra offered “La Conga.” Here was a Cuban dance so elemental that Desi had never thought to play it in America. He illustrated the number with a brief demonstration: “It’s very simple: one . . . two . . . three . . . KICK. One . . . two . . . three . . . KICK.” As he watched, a conga line of listeners began to form, with the musicians showing them the way, kicking backward in unison as they made their way around the room. In a week, audiences were forming conga lines around the block. The craze that was to sweep America had begun.
The U.S. fascination with Latin American music was hardly a new phenomenon. It could be seen and heard in the 1933 Astaire-Rogers film Flying Down to Rio; in Al Jolson’s mocking number, “She’s a Latin from Manhattan” (“You can tell by her mañana / She’s a Latin from Manhattan / and not Havana”); in the rhumba standard “South American Way”; and, of course, in the glib syncopations of Xavier Cugat’s orchestra. But this was something new: a dance that could be appreciated by the tone-deaf and performed by the flat-footed. Mother Kelly’s was renamed La Conga, and there Desi reigned supreme. At the age of twenty-two he traded Miami for New York City, leading his band at a new midtown nightery, also called La Conga. It was here that he embraced his first redhead. She was sitting with another beautiful young woman and an older woman with a husky and resonant voice. The place was noisy; Desi barely managed to catch the elder’s name: Polly Adler. He had never heard of New York’s most notorious madam, and when she invited him to have breakfast at her place he politely assented. There, after he had enjoyed caviar, sturgeon, scrambled eggs, and champagne, Polly gestured to a redhead at the end of the long table. She asked if the guest liked her. By now Desi realized that he had stumbled into a very high-priced whorehouse. The young lady’s fee, he suspected, would bankrupt him. Adler looked at the guest’s melancholy face, boomed her famous contralto laugh, and assured him, “That’s all right, sonny. This one’s on the house.”
Desi’s charmed life continued that way throughout 1939. Wherever he went, celebrities cottoned to him. He became the great and good friend of Brenda Frazier, an unruly debutante whose notorious antics were parodied by in a song by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart:
I’ll buy everything I wear at Sax, I’ll cheat plenty on my income tax, Swear like a trooper, Live in a stupor. . . . Swimming in highballs, Stewed to the eyeballs, Just disgustingly rich, Too disgustingly rich!
Adler and Frazier brought hundreds of new customers to La Conga. These ranged from out-of-town businessmen to society divas and their dates, all looking for someplace new to spend an evening. Between sets, Desi whiled away the hours with Brenda Frazier’s crowd, or hung around at Polly Adler’s. Working at night, sleeping most of the day, he lived an animal existence with no plan beyond the approaching meal and the next coition. When Rodgers and Hart dropped by his dressing room one night, he thought it was just another pair of Broadway celebrities making a pit stop. He had no idea his life was about to be changed forever.
Months before, Hart had seen Desi cavorting in the Miami club. Watching him on a New York stage, the lyricist saw new possibilities in the young Cuban. He might be right to play a Latin football player called Manuelito in the new Rodgers and Hart musical, Too Many Girls. The trouble was, Desi had never played a part other than his ebullient self. Hart took him in hand, taught him the rudiments of auditioning, and slipped him a script—in direct violation of director George Abbott’s policy. Abbott liked actors to undergo cold readings so that he could evaluate their talents while they squirmed and struggled. Upon hearing Desi sing, Abbott gave Hart an instant evaluation: “Well, he’s loud enough.” Desi was then handed a script and ordered to read the part where a young Argentinian football player is recruited by an American college. The Latino agrees to go, provided the institution has a superabundance of senoritas.
“Oh,” says the talent scout. “You mean coeducational.”
“Tha’s it,” replies Manuelito. “Cooperational.”
Desi seemed ideal for the part, all right. A little too ideal. He read the rest of the lines flawlessly, and as Abbott and Rodgers exchanged looks Hart tiptoed up the aisle toward the exit.
“Larry!” Abbott called. “You gave him the script, didn’t you?”
Hart sputtered, “Who? Me? How? Why?”
“Because he hasn’t looked at one goddamned word of that scene. He did the whole thing like a big ham, emoting and waving all over the place. You taught him, didn’t you? And, I may add, you did a bad job of it.”
Hart broke down and confessed, and Desi sheepishly admitted his part in the plot. Abbott, less out of charity than out of a sense that Desi really was right for Manuelito, forgave the composer and the actor and signed up the man he addressed as “Dizzy” from then on. Desi did more than charm his director. The first-act finale, “Look Out,” was built on a shave-and-a-haircut tempo that mentioned the names of college football teams. Rodgers wrote it as a march, and Desi had trouble adapting to the four-quarter time. He kept imposing his own conga beat, to the conductor’s intense annoyance. In the middle of the rehearsal Rodgers came in and heard about the contretemps.
“What’s the matter with your guys?” he asked the musicians. “We’ll have the first chorus straight, and then when Desi starts the conga beat, we’ll change it to fit his thing. To tell you the truth, I like it better his way.”
Rodgers’s instinct for the note juste was infallible. During rehearsals Desi’s beat gradually took over the entire number, the young Cuban banging out the rhythm on his drum while Diosa Costello sang and wiggled on the beat as the chorus wove a serpentine line around the stage. Too Many Girls opened on October 14, 1939, at the Imperial Theatre. Desi had never attended a Broadway show. Now he was starring in one created by some of the most dazzling talents in the musical theater. In the end, it was naivete that kept him from being nervous. He recited his lines without error, ended the first act with that triumphant dance, and got a standing ovation for his efforts. The song he delivered with Costello was to take on another meaning in later years:
She could shake the maracas
He could play the guitar,
But he lived in Havana
And she down in Rio del Mar.
And she shook her maracas
In a Portuguese bar
While he strummed in Havana.
The distance between them was far.
By and by
He got a job with a band in Harlem.
She got a job with a band in Harlem.
Ay! Ay! Ay!
He said, “I’m the attraction!”
She said, “I am the star!”
But they finally married
And now see how happy they are.
So shake your maracas,
Play your guitar!
When the curtain came down Desi walked to La Conga and did the midnight show as if nothing unusual had occurred. The last set ended at 4 a.m. At last he could cool down and chat with Richard and Dorothy Rodgers, George Abbott, and Larry Hart. “About half an hour later,” Desi ecstatically wrote, “I saw Polly Adler heading for our table. She had all the newspapers in her hands, and as she approached she hollered in that big, deep voice of hers, ‘Cuban, you are the biggest fucking hit in town!’ ” Within a few weeks Walter Winchell had dubbed the conga line “the Desi Chain,” and young Arnaz became a New York fixture whose celebrity seemed to increase with each performance. There were offers to appear in other shows, other nightclubs, films.
Only one faux pas was committed in this period, and that was made not by Desi but by his mother, Lolita. At a party at Desi’s new apartment, a duplex overlooking Central Park, Larry Hart’s mother was enthusing about her son. Suddenly Lolita reached out and sat Larry on her lap. Hart was something of a faun in appearance, five feet tall and excruciatingly self-conscious about his diminutive height and build. Lolita held the lyricist in place, laughing uproariously as he attempted to shake loose from her maternal grasp. Helpless and humiliated, he started to cry.
Desi was to remember 1939 as one of the most triumphant years imaginable—but also as one of the saddest. For during that year his father filed for divorce, a rare event for Catholic Cubans, and unthinkable when it involved two people who had seemed so devoted to each other. When Desiderio II called his son to explain the situation, Desi hung up on him. The two were not to reconcile for many years, and during that time Desi assumed the role of guardian for Lolita, a dispirited woman exhibiting some unattractive aspects of middle age.
While his father moved in with a younger woman, Desi and Lolita lived in Desi’s duplex, an ideal bachelor pad before the bad news arrived, but now an unnaturally quiet place. Desi thought his mother needed an attentive listener, and he curtailed his tomcat prowls. But this devotion only served to increase Lolita’s dependence on her only child. She spent most evenings at La Conga, beaming at her son from a front table. It was all too much for the young, charged-up performer, and he sought the classic exit from a suffocating family arrangement: marriage. Most recently he had been seeing Renée de Marco, and together they made the necessary arrangements. Desi would accept a Hollywood offer to appear in the film version of Too Many Girls, driving cross-country and meeting Renée on the Coast as soon as she received her divorce. Everything went according to plan—until that fateful evening when the “honk of woman” entered Desi’s orbit. From that moment, all bets were off.
Desi started calling his new flame Lucy a day after they met. The reason was less aesthetic than proprietary. “I didn’t like the name Lucille,” he commented. “That name had been used by other men. ‘Lucy’ was mine alone.”
Hollywood is a town that runs on rumor, and the Desi-Lucy romance had barely begun when studio gossips started odds-making. Unsolicited advice issued from Lucy’s friends and acquaintances: “He’s flashy and egotistical.” “He’s Catholic and you’re Protestant.” “He’s immature—almost six years younger than you are.” “He dumped Renée de Marco without a backward glance. You’ll be the next.” And indeed, apart from the obvious physical attraction they felt for each other, there seemed no reason to believe the affair would be any more than a brief, passionate fling destined to burn itself out, as studio Cassandras forecast, in six months. Even in little matters Desi’s impulsive character seemed at odds with Lucy’s calculating one. He would take her for rides in his Buick Roadmaster convertible, pushing down on the gas pedal until they reached a speed of a hundred miles an hour on the straightaway. At one point Lucy began to scream uncontrollably.
“What’s wrong?” Desi shouted.
Nothing, she claimed; she had been instructed to lower her voice an octave or two, and Katharine Hepburn said that screaming was the best way.
“Okay,” Desi replied. “You scream and I’ll drive.”
On the set of Too Many Girls, Lucy paid close attention to the advice of director George Abbott. In contrast, according to Garson Kanin, who was assisting Abbott, “Desi came on strong, bossy, and a pain in the ass.” The Arnaz charm went a very short way, not only with Kanin but with many other Anglos of the period, men and women. A few years prior to Desi’s first Hollywood role, Helen Lawrenson had written a widely quoted article that appeared in Esquire, “Latins Are Lousy Lovers.” Many a jealous suitor and disappointed paramour could recite passages by heart, particularly the one about Cubans: “God knows, the Cuban man spends enough time on the subject of sex. He devotes his life to it. He talks of it, dreams it, reads it, sings it, dances it, eats it, sleeps it—does everything but do it. That last is not literally true, but it is a fact that they spend far more time in words than in action. . . . According to them, they always had their first affair at the age of two. This may account for their being worn out at twenty-three.”
Lucy was familiar with all the objections and well aware that Desi was not winning friends and influencing people at the studio. She was too smitten to care. For the first time since her arrival in town, she dated at the end of a workday, and on weekends she and Desi escaped the heat by motoring to Palm Springs. Saturdays and Sundays brimmed with passionate declarations, but very heat of their affair made meltdowns inevitable. Almost every Sunday night ended with a furious argument about each other’s intentions and infidelities. By nightfall Desi would drop Lucy off at the apartment she kept on North Laurel Avenue and announce hotly that he was going home to look after his mother. Lucy would plead for him not to go so soon—there was still so much left unsaid. It happened that two of the town’s greatest magpies witnessed many of the quarrels. F. Scott Fitzgerald and his inamorata, columnist Sheilah Graham, used to watch the spats from Fitzgerald’s balcony. “She always seemed to be asking him not to drive away,” Graham wrote. “We couldn’t understand his reluctance and sometimes made bets on the outcome. No matter which of us lost, we were both pleased when Lucille won.”
Sexual jealousy was omnipresent. When the two were on the road, Desi plugging Too Many Girls and Lucy publicizing Dance, Girl, Dance, they kept in touch by phone. He tended to open the conversation with tart demands, like “Where were you when I called you last time? Who the hell were you having dinner with?” With that as an opener, the colloquy could only go downhill. Desi remembered one particular call from Lucy. Before he could get settled in his chair, she shouted, “You Cuban sonofabitch, where were you all last night? What are you trying to do, lay every goddamned one of those chorus girls in Too Many Girls? No wonder they picked you for the show.”
As a matter of fact, Desi was trying to do exactly that, and he felt that his best defense was a counteraccusation. When he saw a newspaper picture of a young, good-looking Milwaukee politician, he decided that Lucy was in that city for one purpose only. “I know why you’re staying there,” he yelled. “You’re screwing the Mayor.” Desi later commented, “How the hell we survived this period and still had the guts to marry I’ll never understand.”
Everyone else was similarly puzzled, with the exception of Desi’s mother, who spoke no English and smiled upon Lucy because of her kind face and good manners, and Lucy’s family, who welcomed Desi because he was what Lucy wanted. Whatever her cousin desired, Cleo maintained, “was accepted by one and all. We knew why she liked him. He was adorable looking. Lucy was a mature person. I suppose DeDe was delighted she had fallen head over heels and was confident she could handle it.” “Daddy,” as usual, was something of an exception. Fred Hunt whispered to Lucy that Desi “seems a nice fellow, but he doesn’t speak so good and he’s a little dark, isn’t he?” These objections did not stop Hunt from propagandizing his granddaughter’s newest beau. “Couldn’t get in the door without his reading all those People’s World editorials,” Desi would write. The Cuban needed no advice about revolutions; he had seen one at close range. “I told Fred Hunt to cut it out or I’d teach him to rhumba.”
Published more than thirty-five years later, Desi’s memoir states that he was in Manhattan in November 1940 when Lucy “finally finished her Milwaukee deal and came to New York. I was wrong about her screwing the Mayor—I think—and I was madly in love with her, and I knew she was in love with me.” He was doing five shows a day at the Roxy, and between appearances he made a few out-of-town phone calls, then taxied over to the Hotel Pierre, where Lucy had a suite. He found her in the middle of an interview with a magazine writer. The journalist had provisionally titled her article “Why Lucille Ball Prefers to Remain a Bachelor Girl,” and Lucy was enumerating the reasons for staying single. The questioner had just moved to the subject of Desi. As he listened, Lucy assured the journalist that while the couple would see each other in New York—after all, he was here right now—marriage was out of the question. There were too many cultural, professional, and emotional barriers between them. Even the geography made no sense. Desi was committed to a life on the road, a life of nightclubs and theater work; she was rooted in Hollywood. With growing impatience, Desi sat and twitched until the interviewer departed.
“This girl is going to have a hell of a time with that story,” he predicted.
Really, Lucy remarked. And why was that?
“Because I have everything arranged to marry you tomorrow morning, if you would like to marry me.”
“Where?”
“In Connecticut.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I’m not kidding. I want to marry you and I want to marry you tomorrow.”
“Why couldn’t we just live together?”
“No, I don’t want to just live together. I want to marry you and I want to have some children with you and I want to have a home. I am not like the image you have of me.”
The final sentence was his acknowledgment that there were two Desis: the handsome, inconstant Latin lover and the devoted family man. Yes, he had made many vows of love before only to go back on them, but this, he swore, was different. If a man was in love—truly in love—he could change, thoroughly, completely, forever. Of that Desi was certain. What better way to prove it than with a bout of intense lovemaking? But there was no time left—he had to race back to the Roxy to perform his fourth show of the day.
When Desi returned he found Lucy going over contracts with George Schaefer, the president of RKO. He was gratified to hear that they were discussing business, and not the impending nuptials; Desi wanted to break that news himself. As he made ready to speak, Schaeffer tried to attract his attention: Desi’s fly was open, and in his haste to dress he had forgotten to put on underwear.
Lucy caught the gesture and explained to Schaeffer, “He believes in advertising.”
Desi also believed—correctly, it turned out—that Lucy was about to change her mind. Her self-doubt expressed itself in hesitations and evasions, all of which Desi refused to acknowledge, talking fast and thinking later. Skating over thin ice, his safety was in his speed. He picked Lucy up the next morning at eight and headed for Greenwich, Connecticut, in a limousine driven by his business manager. The bride, still irresolute, still confused, wore black. A wool dress was all she had with her; the rest of her clothing had not yet been sent on from Milwaukee. Not that it mattered to Desi. As the car roared up the Merritt Parkway he smiled and necked with his intended, and when he came up for air, he serenaded her with songs in Spanish. She noticed the sheen of his dark eyes, and the adoring smile that softened his face. She also observed that the groom’s hands were trembling.