CHAPTER FIVE
IN HIS HASTE Desi had neglected a few items. Connecticut law required couples to observe a five-day waiting period before taking marriage vows. In order to get around the law, he and Lucy had to round up a judge to make an official exception. Once that was done, they still were short of a vital, if sentimental, item. Desi had neglected to purchase a wedding band. While the couple fretted, Desi’s manager ran into a local Woolworth’s and bought a brass ring from the costume jewelry counter. On November 30, 1940, Justice of the Peace John P. O’Brien agreed to conduct a ceremony at the Byram River Beagle Club. After that, the couple ate their wedding breakfast before the glowing fireplace in the club lounge, kissed each other, and then kissed the marriage certificate. (Decades later, when the paper had begun to show signs of age, Lucy’s lipstick still glowed red upon the surface.)
By now word had leaked out, and local reporters gathered in the lounge. Desi consulted his watch. It was nearly noon, and he was due to lead his band at the Roxy Theatre in midtown Manhattan. He made his way to a pay phone, called the theater manager, and identified himself.
“You’re on in five minutes,” came the annoyed reply.
“That’s what I called you about,” said Desi. “I’m in Connecticut.”
“You can’t be in Connecticut.”
“I know. But I am. I been marrying Lucy.”
On their way back to New York the couple heard a radio announcer read a bulletin: actress Lucille Ball and band leader Desi Arnaz had wed. DeDe, in California, received the news from the same coast-to-coast broadcast. A knot of boisterous fans waited outside the Roxy, greeting the new Arnazes with a clamorous ovation. Desi brought his bride onstage to another chorus of cheers. That night, calls to relatives and friends reassured Desi and Lucy. Everyone seemed ecstatic—with the sole exception of Harriet McCain. Lucy’s maid had never been certain about this Cuban courtier, and when Lucy phoned to ask about the wardrobe, Harriet inquired, “Who did we marry?”
It was a shrewder question than she knew. The charmer and devoted lover had many hidden traits that were to emerge in subsequent years. He turned out, for example, to be a possessive and dictatorial male in the much-caricatured Latin tradition. Desi was not as extreme as Fernando Lamas, who refused to see Esther Williams’s children because they were evidence that she had slept with another man. Yet Desi wasted no time staking out his territory and making his demands clear. On the wedding night, for example, he shook Lucy awake because he was thirsty. “I was out of bed and running the tap in the bathroom,” she remembered, “before I woke up sufficiently to wonder why in the hell he didn’t get it himself.” He also refused to let his wife ride in a taxi alone, because it would place her in close proximity to an unknown male. And it was his taste in food that determined what was on the menu (arroz con pollo, picadillo, rice and black beans) and not her meat-and-potatoes preferences. Nevertheless, Lucy warmed to the role of married woman. If marriage called for her to play a supporting role to the star, so be it.
The Roxy engagement ended a week later, and the couple traveled home on the Super Chief to Los Angeles. Desi had arranged for adjoining bedrooms, opening the door between them to fashion a rolling honeymoon suite. Between passionate embraces he sat in a corner mumbling to himself while he strummed a guitar. Lucy wrote about her primal fear at the time: “My God, he’s already tired of me.” In fact, her new husband was simply composing a love song in her honor. When it was completed he serenaded the bride, playing it over and over for the rest of the journey:
When I looked into your eyes And then you softly said “I do,” I suddenly realized I had a new world A world with you A world where life is worth living A world that is so new to me A world of taking and giving Like God meant the world to be Where good times will find two to greet Where hard times will find two to beat I found my new world with you, darling When you softly said “I do.”
Back in Los Angeles the Arnazes set up living quarters in Lucy’s apartment, each fully aware that this could be only a temporary arrangement. Each had grown up in a house; both wanted four walls and a patch of earth they could call their own. Lucy had been friends with Jack Oakie since their days on the Annabel films. Early one evening the comedian welcomed the couple to his house at Chatsworth in the San Fernando Valley. A local developer had built small ranch houses on five-acre plots surrounded by gently sloping mountains, and Oakie invited them to look around. Within an hour the Arnazes found a spread with a large grove of orange trees and a swimming pool. Negotiations got under way. The asking price was $14,500, to be paid up front. That was more than the Arnazes wanted to advance. There was a brief hesitation, then the developer relented. After all, the prospective buyers were recognizable Hollywood names; perhaps he could use their celebrity to attract others. Lucy and Desi were allowed to make the purchase for a minuscule down payment of $1,500 and a ten-year mortgage.
Friends showered them with presents and congratulatory dinners, topped by a champagne supper at Chasen’s given by Carole Lombard and her new superstar husband, Clark Gable. All that was missing was a name for the Arnaz property. “We had heard of Pickfair, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks’s elegant million-dollar estate, so why shouldn’t we have one?” Desi wrote. “Our place looked like a million to us. We tried Arnaball (no good), Ballarnaz (ugh), Lucy’s Des (no), Desi’s Ball (definitely not), Ludesi (not quite), Desilu—BINGO!” It was the first time he had received top billing over Lucy. She offered no objection; it was part of her role as second fiddle. Besides, they were both thrilled with Thornton Wilder’s judgment. The playwright and novelist was spending some time in town as a screenwriter; he heard of the name for their home and told them “Desilu” sounded like the past participle of a French verb.
For a short, delirious time, the bucolic appeal of Desilu helped to divert the newlyweds’ attention from Hollywood reality. The calf and the chickens they’d acquired, the orange grove, the vegetable garden gave the couple a strong sense of well-being. While Lucy was newly beguiled by the land, she remained enthralled with her husband. In Collier’s magazine, Kyle Crichton, biographer of the Marx Brothers, noted: “You start interviewing Miss Lucille Ball and then Mr. Desi Arnaz enters and Miss Ball leaves. It is not that she leaves in person, she merely leaves in spirit. Miss Lucille Ball looked at Mr. Desi Arnaz as if he were something that had floated down from above on a cloud.”
Yet the professional situation could not be ignored for much longer. Desi’s accent had slowed his rise in pictures. When RKO got around to offering him a part, it was the dual role of prince and commoner in the hack farce Four Jacks and a Jill, ineptly directed by former film editor Jack Hively. Desi labeled it a lesson in “how not to do comedy,” called the director a broken-down bum, threatened him with bodily harm, and predicted box office disaster. His prediction was accurate. Notwithstanding, the studio had no patience for Latin temperament. Desi was next assigned the very minor role of singing stowaway in Father Takes a Wife, with Adolphe Menjou and the faded star Gloria Swanson. As a crowning irony, Desi’s version of the song “Perfidia” was dubbed by an operatic tenor. Later, he observed, “I received letters from Latin America, Spain, and especially Cuba, asking me, ‘What the hell were you trying to do with “Perfidia” and where did you pick up that Italian accent?’ ”
Lucy’s career was nearly as uncertain. Rattled by several recent turkeys, RKO hired pollsters to question the public about the studio’s contract players. The results were not good news for Lucille Ball: only 58 percent of those questioned recognized her name, and she and Desi were among forty-five performers who were long shots to become box office draws. Still, she did appear irregularly on Rudy Vallee’s and Edgar Bergen’s radio programs, and that made her exploitable in the short term. Early in 1941 Lucy played Bergen’s love interest in Look Who’s Laughing, a modest hit built around such radio personalities as Fibber McGee and Molly, and Harold Peary, better known to listeners as the Great Gildersleeve. That fall she was assigned to appear as a restaurant owner in a second-rate “oater” called Valley of the Sun, starring James Craig as a federal agent.
Desi briefly visited the set in New Mexico before setting off to promote his own film, back on the road with a band—no “Mr. Ball” for him, he indignantly proclaimed. Following the Western fiasco (Variety labeled her as “low-voltage marquee strength”), Lucy was told to report for work as the second lead in Strictly Dynamite. She declined to play in Betty Grable’s shadow—and immediately went on suspension. “This shows how her career was being handled,” observed a prominent agent. “Her studio wasn’t interested in building her into a long-range star. They were content to make a quick buck on a loan-out, even though it would have been bad for her career.”
As the Arnazes’ marriage approached the one-year mark it became distinguished not by the annealing passion Desi had promised but by the separations he had chosen. Their relationship was largely maintained via telephone. In those days, Lucy said, “We spent a lot of money on the word ‘what.’ When Desi was calling me or I was calling him, the connection was always so bad we couldn’t hear each other. That’s why ‘what’ was so expensive.” A week after their first anniversary Desi and his band were booked into New York. For once he would be in a large city for at least a fortnight. Lucy flew to his side. “I knew he was fooling around with somebody,” she grumbled, “and I couldn’t do anything about it long distance. Also I knew I couldn’t get pregnant over the telephone.” In New York all sexual and professional skirmishes seemed to dissipate in the crisp December air. A friend loaned them his apartment, and one Sunday the Arnazes took over the place, enjoying brunch in bed, kissing and embracing as they listened to a football game. Early in the afternoon a terse announcement put an end to the fun and games: Japanese planes had attacked Pearl Harbor. New York suddenly seemed like alien territory, an arena of bad news. The Arnazes left for their ranch the next morning.
Conscription touched the lives of nearly everyone around Lucy and Desi—at the studio, in the stores, on the street. Lucy miscarried early in her first pregnancy, but there was no point in feeling sorry for themselves; many of their friends and acquaintances had suffered much more painful losses. During a war bond drive in January 1942, Lucy’s pal and mentor, Carole Lombard, perished in a plane crash outside Las Vegas. And all around the Arnazes were reminders of the war: the dispiriting headlines, the lonely wives, the men in uniform getting ready for combat duty overseas. At twenty-five Desi was within draft age; the Selective Service notice was due to arrive any day. He wanted to go on the road to take his mind off the situation—and, Lucy suspected, to prove his masculinity and professional viability. She tried to talk him out of it, but in the spring of 1942 he signed on to the Victory Caravan, effectively removing himself from the Hollywood scene without really leaving it. This group of fund-raisers for army and navy relief included Bob Hope, James Cagney, Mickey Rooney, and Olivia de Havilland; along with some eighteen others, they acted, sang, joked, and gave speeches as they traversed the country in a railroad car. As Robert S. Sennett details in Hollywood Hoopla, the stars of the Caravan “may have been genuinely interested in helping the war effort, but they were flushed out of their private hiding places by necessity. The war had destroyed the foreign market for films, and domestic sales needed tremendous boosting. Glittering premieres with fancy cars and floodlights were disallowed. There was nothing for the stars to do but roll up their sleeves and go to work like everybody else.”
When he was not working like everybody else, Desi went in avid pursuit of anything in skirts, a pastime that provoked comment even among such spirited seducers as Rooney. Word got back to Lucy, who hit the ceiling—and then persuaded herself that Desi was just reflecting the strain and craziness of the war, and his inability to catch on in Hollywood. The best thing to do in the interim was to keep busy. At this moment of great distress an unusual opportunity came her way.
The film was The Big Street, based on a Damon Runyon story. Lucy had met Runyon at least twice, once when Walter Winchell introduced them, and again when the creator of Sky Masterson and Nicely-Nicely Johnson came to RKO as a producer. In the previous year Carole Lombard had recommended Lucy for the role of the mean, manipulative nightclub singer, Gloria, in a screen adaptation of Runyon’s short story “Little Pinks.” Runyon remembered the suggestion and sent Lucy a copy of the script.
One reading convinced Lucy that Gloria was the part of a lifetime, “a girl with a foolish, unhealthy obsession which made her more ruthless than Scarlett O’Hara. It was anything but a sympathetic part, but it was exciting because it was so meaty—so rich in humor, pathos and tragedy.” Even so, she hesitated to sign the contract. “It was the only time,” Desi was to remark, “that I’d seen her afraid to tackle a role.” Lucy could hardly be blamed for her concern. Gloria is wheelchair-bound, thanks to a brutal attack by her ex-lover, and brimming with hostility to men. In her view, “Love gives you a one-room apartment, two chins, and a long wash line.” She vents her hostility on the one soul who truly loves her, a shy busboy called Little Pinks, to be played by Henry Fonda. Fonda had grown several cubits in stature as an actor since their date, and Lucy was edgy about working with a bona fide leading man—something she had never done before. Of greater concern were the disagreeable aspects of her on-screen character. She whispered her doubts to a respected acquaintance, Charles Laughton. Much to her astonishment, the English actor agreed to scan the scenario. That night he summoned the young woman to his house. His counsel was direct and highly professional. She was not to fall back on her familiar “drop-gag” persona. The role needed a vixen, not a pussycat.
Easy for him to say; Lucy was not so sure. Only after heated discussion with friends and family did she agree to do the part as written, hoping that Fonda would help her delineate the character of Gloria. No such luck. This was the last RKO picture in Fonda’s contract, and as far as he was concerned it was good riddance to bad celluloid. He came to the set aloof, and remained so for the duration of the filming, totally absorbed in his own interpretation of Little Pinks. After the first day Lucy realized she was on her own, and made the best of it. Director Irving Reis professed delight in her performance. Runyon was so moved by Lucy’s interpretation that when the movie was completed he watched it in the privacy of a screening room, where he hoped no one would see him snuffling. He had forgotten about the projectionist.
But the film seemed to sail under a curse. Just after The Big Street wrapped, Runyon left the studio, Reis joined the army and was thus unavailable for postproduction refinements, and the editor, William Hamilton, died of a heart attack while cutting the picture. With all this going against it, The Big Street had little chance at the box office, even though it earned the best notices Lucy had ever received. The New York Herald Tribune reviewer wrote: “Lucille Ball gives one of the best portrayals of her career as the ever-grasping, selfish Gloria who takes keen delight in kicking the hapless Pinks about.” Life magazine concurred: “Ball’s performance is superb—the girl can really act.” And in Time James Agee offered a review that was particularly gratifying because he detested Fonda’s work (to him Little Pinks possessed all “the dignity of a wax grape of wrath”), whereas “pretty Lucille Ball, who was born for the parts Ginger Rogers sweats over, tackles her ‘emotional’ role as if it were sirloin and she didn’t care who was looking.”
In Hollywood, then as now, reviews ran a far second to profits, and The Big Street barely broke even. In June 1942, less than a week after Lucy completed her last scene for the Runyon film, she was back in harness. The B musical Seven Days’ Leave costarred Victor Mature as a soldier who must marry an already engaged woman (Lucille Ball) in order to inherit a fortune. The movie featured a few good tunes by Frank Loesser and Jimmy McHugh, but the plot was banal and so was Mature, on loan from Twentieth Century–Fox and resenting every minute of it. At the time he was carrying on with Rita Hayworth and wanted her as his costar. Harry Cohn, boss of Columbia Pictures, refused to loan Hayworth out. Petulantly, Mature blamed it all on Lucille. He gave an even more subaqueous performance than usual, and during love scenes he held his costar painfully close. While he groped her he kept up a steady stream of invective just out of microphone range. Sometimes Lucille screamed at him; on other occasions she just ran to her dressing room and bawled.
As shooting wound down, RKO’s new president summoned Lucy to his office and gave her the straight story. The studio brass no longer regarded the actress Lucille Ball as a comer. Good notices were all very well, but public response had never been impressive and now she was bumping her head on the ceiling. “For your own good,” Charles Koerner told Lucy, “you should get up the gumption to leave. A couple of other studios have been asking for you since The Big Street. I’ll share your contract with Metro or Paramount. Which do you want?”
She chose Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, principally because it was considered the Cadillac of studios (her salary was increased to $2,000 a week), but also because it gave her a chance to rub shoulders and other parts with the most impressive names in the industry. In a sense, the jump was intimidating. She would have to compete with such established personalities as Irene Dunne, Greer Garson, and Margaret Sullavan, as well as with relative newcomers like Kathryn Grayson, Esther Williams, and the young Lana Turner, eleven years younger than the thirty-one-year-old Lucy. Yet it was also exhilarating: MGM’s leading men included Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Jimmy Stewart.
If Lucy was not in their stratum, neither was she a cipher. Louis B. Mayer agreed to sign Lucille Ball because he knew her to be a thoroughgoing professional, able to deliver a comic line with flair, pretty enough to be in A pictures, and devoid of star temperament. He saw to it that she got the dressing room that had once been Norma Shearer’s in the grand old days when Shearer was married to MGM’s late production genius Irving Thalberg. And he made sure that Lucy would be tested for MGM’s flattering Technicolor process.
She was preparing for that test when a momentous decision was made. It would enhance her professional life in more ways than she could count, though at the time she regarded the alteration as a nuisance. Sydney Guilaroff, Metro’s chief hair stylist, took a look at the newest addition to the stable and proclaimed, “The hair is brown but the soul is on fire.” Accordingly, he had Lucy’s hair dyed “Tango Red,” a shade between carrot and strawberry. Guilaroff, Lucy wrote, “also changed the style of my hair from long and loose and flowing to up and laquered, until I had to take the crust off it at night by cracking it with a brush.”
Uncomfortably, gingerly, Lucy took a big step up. Her first project for MGM was a carefully scrubbed adaptation of Cole Porter’s risqué musical Du Barry Was a Lady, with a cast that included Red Skelton, as the comic lead; a young dancer named Gene Kelly; and comedian Zero Mostel, making his film debut.
Events in Lucy’s private life did not correspond with those on her résumé. Grandpa Fred was obviously failing. Her brother Freddy seemed to be dogged with bad luck since the beginning of the war. He was hired on the night shift for Vega aircraft—and then dismissed without notice, coldly informed that he was not a good citizen. Freddy was no longer a wide-eyed innocent; he suspected that this was pay-back for registering as a Communist in that long-ago election. He assembled a sheaf of letters testifying to his good character. Employers nodded sympathetically but refused to hire him. He left Los Angeles and found work with airplane companies in Wichita, Kansas, where the tolerance for “security risks” was evidently higher than on the Coast. But the stigma would not go away. Frederick Ball was drafted, only to be deferred—something in his background, Selective Service hinted, although its representatives would not be more precise. Returning to L.A., Freddy opened a roller-skating rink. When he was away from his place of business Lucy bought hundreds of admission tickets and gave them to her friends. Nothing helped; despite all this surreptitious aid the rink failed. “The only money it was taking in,” Lucy remarked, “was the money I was sending in.”
Added to these difficulties was the unending problem of Desi. Interludes of domesticity were broken by his tours, and these always seemed to lead to more womanizing. When he did get a break, it revealed the ugly underside of casting. Since the early days, Latin leading men—Ramón Navarro, Gilbert Roland, Cesar Romero—had found a place in Hollywood, but that place was precarious. In his description of a Latin band, Raymond Chandler caught the attitude of the time: “Whatever they play, it all sounds the same. They always sing the same song, and it always has nice open vowels and a drawn-out sugary lilt, and the guy who sings it always strums on a guitar and has a lot to say about amor, mi corazón, and a lady who is ‘linda,’ but very hard to convince, and he always has too long and too oily hair and when he isn’t making with the love stuff he looks as if his knife work in an alley would be efficient and economical.”
That viewpoint was much in evidence when Louis B. Mayer caught Desi’s act at a live show in Hollywood, Ken Murray’s Blackouts. The executive asked the singer to drop by sometime. Thrilled, Desi showed up the next day. “You remind me of Busher,” Mayer informed him. Busher was the top racehorse in Mayer’s stable, and Desi took this as a compliment until the studio chief elaborated: “Busher looks very common when he’s around the barn, but when they put a saddle on him, and he goes around the track, you know he’s a champion. The same thing happens to you when you hang that drum around your shoulder. Up to that point you’re just another Mexican.”
“Not Mexican, sir. Cuban.”
“Well, one of those Latin fellows.”
Mayer’s verbal affront was followed by a financial one. Desi did something he had never done before. He swallowed the insults, humbly signing with MGM for $650 a week, less than half what Lucy was making. Now he had two choices: he could play househusband— gardening, straightening up, waiting each day for Lucy to come home from work—or he could go back on the road raising money for the USO. As Lucy expected, he signed up for the next available trip. In what amounted to a challenge, she went out on her own brief USO journey, flying cross-country even though she had been terrified of planes since the death of Carole Lombard. Her Hollywood group included Betty Grable, Marie “the Body” McDonald, Ann Sheridan, and the vaudeville and theater performer Frank Fay. “Fay lusted after Marie McDonald like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Lucy later recounted. “But he went about it in the most disgusting ways possible. He would back her into a corner and say, ‘I’m going to fuck you.’ Or he’d call her hotel room in the middle of the night and say, ‘I’d love to see the back of your belly.’ ”
As the plane circled the field one evening, Fay sat across the aisle from McDonald, lasciviously appraising her bodice. “Suddenly,” Lucy went on, “we hit the worst turbulence I ever felt in my life, and the plane was all over the sky. Up and down. Up and down. I was sure we were going to crash. All I could think about was Carole. I looked over at Marie bouncing around in her seat and everybody’s screaming except Frank Fay, who can’t get his eyes off Marie’s tits. She was clutching the armrest, and her face was white as a sheet. She looked over at Frank and said, ‘So you want to fuck me?’ Frank shook his head yes. McDonald grabbed him and said, ‘Okay . . . NOW!’ ”
With Desi away so much of the time, Lucy threw herself into the making of Du Barry Was a Lady. Her voice was deemed inadequate, and a singer was hired to do the songs while the redhead mouthed them. Lucy had trouble with her footwork, but this inadequacy was addressed by dance director Charles Walters, who spent weeks getting the steps right, and by Robert Alton, who oversaw the musical portions and the lip-synching. In addition, Buster Keaton, the old silent farceur, was on the set to give pointers about physical comedy.
The plot of Du Barry revolved around Red Skelton as a coat-checker yearning for a nightclub singer, played by Lucille Ball. Someone slips him a Mickey Finn and his fevered brain propels him back to the eighteenth century. He becomes Louis XIV and Lucy metamorphoses into Madame Du Barry. Their wooing comes to involve lords and ladies-in-waiting, servants and jesters, as well as the entire Tommy Dorsey band. With most of the racier material excised, the humor was labored and obvious, save for a bit with a celery stalk conceived by Keaton.
Even though Skelton and Ball knew their way around a funny line, the two stars never enjoyed a close rapport. The comedian tried for big moments; the comedienne shrank from them. On the set, nothing seemed to work in her favor. Hours spent rehearsing on a trampoline made her seasick. Her newly tinted hair was buried beneath mounds of white wigs, and her figure obscured by vast, unflattering hoopskirts. She disliked the exaggerated mouth movements she had to make while pretending to sing, and, burdened by heavy costumes in every scene, she found the Technicolor lighting hot, harsh, and intimidating. But the experience was not a total waste. When Lucy saw the dailies, she was dazzled by the way everyone looked. The German cameraman Karl Freund had found a way to make the cast—especially Lucy—blithe and glamorous. She remembered his name above all the other technicians and actors; clearly, this was a man to cultivate.
A crew from Life came to the filming; a story in the magazine showed Lucy on the trampoline and, recalling her performance in The Big Street, called her “almost a Damon Runyon character.” It continued: “She is ambitious, hard, flamboyant and luxury-loving. Yet paradoxically, she is generous, funny and extremely sensitive.”
Lucy’s teeth, apparently, were among her most sensitive parts. A few days after a dentist put in some temporary fillings she heard music inside her convertible. She swiveled the dial on the car radio, then realized that the sound was not issuing from the loudspeaker. It was coming from inside her mouth: the fillings were picking up a broadcast from a local station. Some days later, an odd rhythm sounded in her molars again. No music this time—it seemed to be Morse code. She reported the incident to MGM’s security officers, and they dutifully passed the word to the FBI. To the studio’s astonishment, investigators canvassed the area and discovered an underground radio station run by a Japanese gardener. Lucy dined out on the story for months. She related the incident to Ethel Merman—the stage Du Barry—and Merman passed it on to Cole Porter. It became part of the plot of his next Broadway show, Something for the Boys.
Desi had gone missing for several days—no word, no wire, no telephone call. Frantic, Lucy traced him with the help of Pentagon officials. They located her husband on tour in St. Thomas, part of the American Virgin Islands. He was about to go on at a hotel when she had him paged. He ran to the phone convinced that something terrible had happened.
“Lucy, don’t tell me,” he shouted. “You’re dead.”
“Can’t you hear me?” she yelled back. “I’m alive!”
“Mother is dead.”
Lucy told him Lolita Arnaz was still among the living.
“Your mother is dead. The house burned down!”
“Just listen—”
“You may not be dead, but if you found me here, you must be dying!”
“None of those things. Get your ass back here. You’re wanted to star in Bataan!”
Louis B. Mayer had found a part in MGM’s big war movie of 1943, a role the chief thought would make Desi more than “just another Mexican.” He was to play Felix Ramirez, a Hispanic GI condemned to die in defense of a bridge. Robert Taylor led the cast, perishing heroically in the last scene. Others to be killed by enemy fire included George Murphy, Lloyd Nolan, Thomas Mitchell, and Robert Walker. Desi’s finish was nowhere near as dramatic. Ramirez was to perish of malaria, vibrating with fever. It was not the way Desi preferred to go but he seized the opportunity with both hands, arguing that the mosquito net would be in the way of his big scene, and that Ramirez would not speak English. He would go back to his childhood and dramatically recite the Act of Contrition in Latin, as Desi had done in Jesuit school.
Garnett thought it over. The suggestions seemed reasonable enough; if the star agreed he would go along. Taylor offered no objection and the scene was played as proposed. An unexpected change came over Desi. Now that he had been in an A picture and had even improved his role, Lucy’s higher salary struck him as irrelevant. After he completed work on Bataan, Desi threw himself into domesticity. He and Lucy acquired five dogs and innumerable cats, raised egg-laying hens, nurtured a much-beloved cow and a pig with the idea of providing meat at a time of rationing. When slaughter time came around, though, the gentleman farmer and his lady didn’t have the heart to kill either mammal; both the cow and the pig died later of natural causes. The couple produced home movies of themselves in casual clothes, Lucy pretending to be Scarlett O’Hara, Desi posing as the lord of the manor, gesturing toward his swimming pool; his garden of corn, artichokes, and strawberries; his bright red convertible. The family came around: Fred Hunt, enfeebled but still capable of wandering the estate with cranky awe along with DeDe and Freddy; Lolita Arnaz, proud of her son but intimidated by his surroundings. Friends dropped in— Desi’s pals played Cuban melodies, Lucy’s colleagues stepped to the music of the square dance, and the two genres never quite met. Lucy’s friends, most of them in show business, vied with each other in Monopoly, Scrabble, and the Game, a fierce version of charades.
On an evening in 1944, one special version of the Game featured Lucy; her cousin Cleo and Cleo’s new husband, Ken Morgan; Keenan Wynn and his wife; the burly actor Laird Cregar, who had just made a name for himself as Jack the Ripper in The Lodger; and several other performers. The group laughed, drank, and played hard, and finished the evening by jumping into the pool en masse. The following day as Lucy drove to the studio she heard that Cregar had died of a massive heart attack that very evening—probably a few minutes after he got home. It was a long time before she could play Hollywood charades again.
Card games were another matter. Lucy never stopped playing them, and revealing an unpleasant part of her nature in the process. Players who made mistakes were chewed out in public, and often reduced to tears. Lucy’s quick temper indicated more than an aggressive streak. The Arnazes had resumed their quarrels and jealousies, and she acted out her frustrations at the card table. From various clues and rumors Lucy knew that Desi was involved with other women; meanwhile, he convinced himself that she was being unfaithful. On weekends, for example, Clark Gable, still in mourning for Carole Lombard, would come by on his motorcycle, driving the Harley-Davidson recklessly, as if in search of an accident. There was a time when Lucy thought the actor “handsome but such a lump.” Now she spent hours encouraging him to talk out his sorrow, encouraging Gable to stay off the bike and come for a drive. Desi stayed behind, wondering whether Lucy was becoming more than a good listener.
And matters were about to worsen on the professional front. Lucy’s and Desi’s recent movies were both box office smashes. Du Barry Was a Lady grossed almost $3.5 million, and Bataan, in addition to receiving good notices and big box office receipts, won Desi the Photoplay award for best performance of the month. (“It wasn’t the Academy Award,” he allowed, “but damn good enough for me.”) Yet this was to be his last big moment at MGM. Mayer had no plans to put the Latin fellow in any upcoming feature, whereas Lucy was already in rehearsal for Best Foot Forward,replacing the pregnant Lana Turner. That film about a fading star and a young cadet was of little moment—which was why the studio cast an actress who could neither sing nor dance in a musical. Still, Best Foot Forward kept Lucille Ball’s name before the public and gave her a chance to work with such promising newcomers as June Allyson and Gloria De Haven. As she worked, the distance between her and Desi widened. June Allyson paid Lucy a visit during this period and expressed envy at the house and garden, and all the other signs she mistook for happiness. Lucy let slip a remark about the situation: “We’re not ships that pass in the night so much as cars that pass in the morning. This is supposed to be married life?”
The Arnazes’ troubles might have gone public had Lucy’s star continued to rise and had Desi continued to be a bandleader on the road to nowhere. But in May 1943, the draft notice finally arrived. Desi planned to enter the air force and with his flair for self-dramatization spoke about becoming a bombardier, making hazardous forays deep into enemy territory. The day before he was to report for duty, Desi joined a pickup team and played baseball at the Arlington Reception Center near Riverside, California. His first time up, he swung at a ball, missed, and tore the cartilage in his good knee. The other one bore the scars of operations done during his adolescence in Cuba, and this new accident put him out of commission. Desi spent weeks in a hospital, and when he was released doctors pronounced him unfit for bombardier school. He entered the infantry as a private. After basic training he was assigned to the Army Medical Corps, not as a technician but as an entertainer. Looking at the bright side, Desi saw himself entertaining the troops overseas. Then one evening Lucy received a call.
“I’m going to be in Birmingham, honey,” declared her husband.
“Gee, that’s great,” she responded. “I’m leaving for a bond tour in the East next week and I’ll come to Alabama to see you.”
“Birmingham, California,” he groaned. That Birmingham was less than five miles from the Desilu ranch. At a base hospital Desi worked with wounded soldiers returned from Corregidor, Tarawa, and, ironically enough, Bataan. He taught English to illiterate draftees, rounded up books and radios, ran films, acquired sports equipment. In his spare moments he put on one-man shows. Once in a while he brought in Lucy for some offhand comedy. Nevertheless, she was to note, it was obvious that Desi was restless and unhappy. “It galled him not to be overseas himself. He was allowed to leave the hospital every night and weekends, which turned out to be unfortunate. He was too close to Hollywood.” For in the early 1940s, the tone of Hollywood’s social life was set by the studio chiefs. Louis B. Mayer had just left his wife and moved into a mansion formerly occupied by Marion Davies. Once the town’s most powerful executive showed the way, many other middle-aged producers abandoned their spouses and, along with Mayer, took up yachting, horse breeding, gambling, and the pursuit of younger women. Parties went on every weekend, and Desi wangled invitations to most of them. All the while Lucy kept working in pictures, caroming from Meet the People, a musical starring Dick Powell, to As Thousands Cheer, a morale builder with MGM stars playing themselves in a show for GIs headed overseas.
Lucy shied away from the parties, warning Desi that his pursuit of immediate gratification could be a costly error, and not only because of what it was doing to her: “No one approves of an actor enjoying wild parties and late nights; it’s too exhausting and shows up immediately in the face and the voice before a camera.” She repeatedly reminded her husband that his hosts were also his employers, “and they would have no respect for his ability and talents as an actor if all they ever saw was a charming irresponsible playboy.”
He ignored the tocsins, and as a result Lucy spent many lonely weekends with no other company than her maid and confidante, Harriet McCain. One unhappy day she clipped a picture of a baby from a women’s magazine and pasted it in her scrapbook side by side with the movie reviews. Underneath she scrawled a caption in the infant’s imagined voice: “I don’t see any pictures of me in this book and this is your third year of marriage—quit kiddin.’ ”
Early in January 1944, Lucy and Desi briefly appeared together to mourn the passing of Grandpa Fred Hunt, who died at the age of seventy-eight. “We never even considered burying him in Hollywood,” Lucy said. “He belonged next to Flora Belle in the elm-shaded Hunt family plot in Jamestown.”
She took the body back and stayed in the old Jamestown Hotel alone, a visiting celebrity whose visit was heavily covered in the local press. It was no accident that the reporters turned out; MGM had sent a publicity man along to make sure everyone in town knew that Lucille Ball, screen star, was back. The adventurous adolescent turned Goldwyn Girl was now a bona fide movie personality, and wherever she went crowds followed her, from the hotel to the cemetery and back. She saw old girlfriends, reminisced about her favorite teachers, visited Johnny DeVita and his mother. Not an ember of the amour remained. Dutifully she stopped by the local defense plant and attended a bond rally. Then she was off on a train for Philadelphia to sell war bonds at yet another rally. Wrapped in silver fox, her red hair coiffed and her makeup, lipstick, and eyebrows artfully applied, the epitome of glamour looked back and waved to a fervent crowd. Jamestown receded into memory. The place seemed so small and irrelevant these days, as if what occurred in the 1920s had happened to someone else, someone in a forgotten bottom-of-the-bill movie released long, long ago.
Lucy returned to Hollywood, where she took a small part in an overblown and inconsequential film, Ziegfeld Follies. That led to a major supporting role in Without Love, starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Wherever she went, reporters asked about Desi. The reply was always the same: everything was fine, rumors about their difficulties were pure fiction created by malicious columnists or jealous actresses. The only bad feature of 1944, she told a reporter, was: “I haven’t had Desi. I don’t begrudge him to the Service, but I miss him. When Desi comes back, I don’t believe there’s any doubt but that MGM will realize they have one of the biggest bets in the business.” Unmentioned was the fact that in the summer of that year her husband stopped coming home altogether. The scurrilous Confidential magazine ran a feature about Desi’s Palm Springs weekend with another woman, and that story, along with Hollywood’s unending rumor machine, pushed Lucy over the edge.
In the afternoon of the first day’s shooting on Without Love, she drove to Domestic Relations Court in Santa Monica and filed for divorce. The charge was mental cruelty. Even now, however, she refused to say anything specific about Desi’s extramarital capers. She told Judge Stanley Mosk that the Arnazes’ differences were mainly about money. “When we argued about it, he became angry and went away,” she claimed. “That was a habit of his—going away whenever we had an argument. He always ran out on me rather than stay to talk the matter out. It left me a nervous wreck. I got no rest at night at all.”
Desi did not plan to contest the decree; he knew that Lucy had him dead to rights and that she could have gone into damaging detail if she chose to. But the evening before she was due to appear in court to sign the final papers, he took one last chance and dialed the number at Chatsworth.
“What are you doing tonight?” he asked.
“Nothing particular. You know I’m divorcing you tomorrow morning.”
“Yeah, I know that. But what are you doing tonight?”
“Nothing special.”
“Well, would you like to have dinner with me?”
Lucy sighed. “All right.”
Desi wheedled a twenty-four-hour pass from his commanding officer, picked up his wife, and took her to a Beverly Hills restaurant. Afterward, they returned to an apartment Lucy had borrowed for the occasion. Desi wrote about the next few hours:
“We had a beautiful night. At seven-thirty in the morning she got up and said, ‘Oh, my God, I’m late. I’ve got to go.’
“ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Where are you going?’
“ ‘I told you I’m divorcing you this morning.’
“ ‘Yeah. I know you told me but you’re not going through with it now, are you?’
“ ‘I gotta go through with it,’ she answered. ‘All the newspaper people are down there. I got a new suit and a new hat. I gotta go.’
“She went to court, got the divorce, came right back and joined me in bed. This, of course, annulled the divorce immediately because in California in those days there was a one-year waiting period between the interlocutory and final decree, and if during that period the principals got together and had an affair, the divorce was automatically null and void.”
Reconciled against all odds, the couple vowed to be different from now on. Desi and Lucy swore to work on the marriage: he would do no more straying, she would do no more complaining. Both would curb their tempers. In fact, neither did much in the way of adjustment. Desi’s concession to Lucy consisted in sleeping with the windows open because Lucy liked it that way, and occasionally joining her friends in a square dance instead of confining himself to Cuban music with his friends. As for Lucy, as she wrote later, “I closed my eyes, put blinders on, and ignored what was too painful to think about.” Since the divorce didn’t work out, marriage would have to. But it would not bear examining. Work was the main thing now; she would concentrate on that.