CHAPTER SIX
SERGEANT Desiderio Alberto Arnaz, U.S. Army 392-956-43, was discharged in November 1945, three months after V-J Day. During the war, film studios had come to a collective arrangement. Those in the service would not be paid salaries while they were away, but upon their return they would be granted one large raise. This was intended to acknowledge the periodic increases that would have accrued had they been working all along. Desi’s salary was $650 a week just before he was drafted; with the raise his weekly paycheck now came to $1,000.
Desi knew the MGM scuttlebutt about the beautiful swimmer Esther Williams (“Wet, she was a star”), but he also knew that she was a big box office attraction. When he heard that a Williams movie was in development at MGM, and that the script called for a Latin leading man, Desi went to the producer and offered himself for the role.
Jack Cummings was succinct: “I’ve already got someone else.”
Desi asked the name of this other Latin lover.
“Ricardo Montalban.”
“Ricardo who?”
“Montalban. A Mexican actor. He’s going to play the lead opposite Esther.”
“I have been in the army for two and a half years,” Desi reminded him. “This is a perfect part for me and you are going to give it to someone else who’s not even under contract to the studio?”
“It’s already done.”
With those three words Desi Arnaz’s film career effectively ended. Montalban was the new boy on the block, MGM’s official Latin stud— twenty-six years old, skilled in comedy and drama, unconventionally handsome. The spurned veteran tried to be philosophical, but his acrimony could not be masked: “I guess it was out of sight out of mind. I had been gone two and a half years and they had forgotten what they had hired me for.”
There was more bad news: Desi had been lax about various financial responsibilities before the war. The Internal Revenue Service calculated that he owed $30,000 in back taxes.
In the past, whenever Desi had experienced a reversal—professional, marital, emotional—he had turned to the one arena that had never let him down: music. In the 1930s he had observed Xavier Cugat closely, watched the way the Rhumba King managed musicians, bargained hard with nightclub owners, and squeezed profits out of short engagements as well as long ones. Now was the time to use what he had learned. Desi organized a group of instrumentalists and persuaded the manager of Ciro’s on Sunset Strip to book the Desi Arnaz Orchestra in the club’s first black-tie opening since the war. The leader played his specialties, featuring the bogus native incantation “Babalu”:
Jungle drums were madly beating
In the glare of eerie lights
While the natives kept repeating
Ancient jungle rites.
All at once the dusky warriors began to
Raise their arms to skies above
And a native then stepped forward to chant to
His Voodoo goddess of love
And the more genial “Cuban Pete”:
They call me Cuban Pete
I’m the King of the Rhumba beat.
When I play the maracas
I go chicky-chicky-boom
Chick-chicky-boom.
Si, Senorita, I know that you will like the chicky-boom-chick
’Cause it’s the dance of Latin romance.
A self-mockery attended these numbers; Desi became a caricature of the Latin fellow Louis B. Mayer had dismissed so airily. No matter; the smiling Cuban was willing to do whatever it took to reestablish his name. Mugging, rolling his eyes, and swaying with the music, he basked in applause and celebrity, paying conspicuous attention to the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn, who chatted with him between sets and stayed until the finale. Opening night was a grand success. But in that triumph were the seeds of more domestic misery.
Lucy was busy at MGM, working in comic trivia like Abbott and Costello in Hollywood and Easy to Wed with Keenan Wynn, and then loaned out to Twentieth Century–Fox for the melodrama The Dark Corner, with Mark Stevens as a detective and Lucy as his loyal, tough-minded secretary. Her scrapbook was getting fat with encomia. The New York Times verdict on Without Love: “Lucille Ball throws wise-cracks like baseballs.” The New York Sun on Easy to Wed: Wynn and Ball “make it clear that they are the funniest comic team on the screen just now—and by a big margin.” The Hollywood Press Club had named Danny Kaye the King of Comedy, and Lucy the Queen. This recognition provided meager compensation for a home life that, once again, was deteriorating.
MGM required actresses to be at the studio hairdresser promptly at 6 a.m., and Desi’s schedule called for him to be at the club until the small hours of the morning. The couple would meet at the top of Coldwater Canyon as she was driving off to work and he was returning to the ranch for some sleep. On many mornings they merely waved as they passed. Sometimes they would park side by side and chat. If Desi was feeling especially amorous he would board Lucy’s car and neck with his wife before driving home. At the other end of the day the process reversed itself: she returned to bed as he headed off to work. On weekends Lucy would stop by Ciro’s, trying to rekindle what remained of their marriage.
Inevitably the group had to go on tour, and Lucy persuaded Desi to hire her brother Freddy as the band manager. But Freddy was a man who checked receipts, not beds; if she expected a report on Desi’s notorious prowling she was to be disappointed. One evening Lucy spent an entire phone call accusing her husband of disloyalty, and he yelled at her for being oversuspicious. She slammed down the phone. It rang in her room and she picked up the receiver, ready to resume her argument. The voice was not Desi’s; it was the operator’s. She had eavesdropped on the conversation. “Why haven’t you called him back?” she demanded. “I know he’s in his room feeling miserable, waiting for you to call him. He didn’t mean any of the things he said and I’m sure you didn’t either, so why don’t you call him back and make up with him? He’s just a baby.” Lucy laughed, melted, and did as asked. For that evening, at least, the conversation was filled with apologies and pledges of commitment.
After crossing the country in a series of split weeks and one-night stands, the Desi Arnaz Orchestra settled in for a long engagement at the Copacabana in New York City. Lucy took a few days off and flew into town. A visit to the club aroused new misgivings. On display were the Copa chorus girls, beautiful, highly publicized young women who embodied temptation. Lucy accused her husband of carrying on with the chorines. Desi protested that he never chased the women he worked with. She didn’t believe a word he said. In an interview with Look magazine, she attempted to adopt her husband’s cavalier manner. Desi’s macho style didn’t bother her in the least, said Lucy, and went on to boast, “I like to play games, too.” This was pure bravado, putting a good face on a melancholy situation. The journalist bought the line, but Lucy knew she was faking it.
The only thing the couple could agree upon was their unhappiness. She was running in place at MGM, as she had once done at RKO, even though the pay was better. Desi was improving as a musician; jazz historian Will Friedwald was to note, “Arnaz had virtually the only success story of any new band launched after the war.” Yet as a husband Desi was an abject failure and in low moments he acknowledged the fact.
As if to underline the speed of the passing years, MGM released Lucy in the summer of 1946. It was a good time for the studios: more people went out to the movies than ever before. The war was over; peace dividends included a renewed economy, veterans’ housing, and a great national hunger for entertainment. Lucy should have been part of it, but somehow her timing was off. She had been born too late or too soon, had passed through various phases at the studio—glamour girl, rising star, comedienne, second lead—without finding a screen identity. Audiences knew who she was and liked her, but without taking her to their hearts. Louis B. Mayer had had enough. Just as there were newer Latin actors to replace Desi, there were fresher talents to replace a thirty-six-year-old redhead.
During this period Lucy began to decline physically and emotionally. She actually began to stutter, something she had never done before, even in childhood. Lucy blamed some of the difficulties on her current agent, Arthur Lyons, and fired him. That left her without representation. On the other hand, she may have thought, what was left to represent?
During the weeks that Lucy was in mourning for her career an influential agent named Kurt Frings made a surprise visit to Chatsworth. He had heard about the trouble at MGM from a vigorously independent client, Olivia de Havilland, who had gone through her own battles with studios, sometimes refusing roles and going on suspension. The actress admired Lucy’s work, and when she heard about her travail, she pushed Frings to represent this gifted redhead. “I hardly knew Olivia except to say hello,” Lucy later wrote. “I was bowled over by her kindness.”
Frings told his new client that she was unlikely to land a long-term contract. Still, current conditions might work in her favor. Why not freelance, he suggested, go wherever the jobs were? As a matter of fact, there was a picture about to get under way at Universal, Lover Come Back, costarring the suave Irish-American actor George Brent. Lucy would be ideal for the part of a comically jealous wife. “I can’t, I can’t,” Lucy responded. “All I can do is stut-stut-stutter.” Frings dismissed her fears; the actress was simply tired and out-of-sorts. What Lucy had to do was learn new lines instead of going over old grievances. She remained unconvinced until the director of the film, William Seiter, phoned with his encouragement: “You’re a great gal. We need you. Come over to Universal and go to work.”
She protested: “I c-c-can’t read a l-l-line.”
The director knew better: “Of course you can.”
For several days Lucy struggled with the role, stammering through rehearsal. By the fifth day she began to recover her normal rhythm and tone. Lover Come Back might more accurately have been called “Lucy Come Back.” The picture was universally panned, but the critics were kind to the female lead. “Our sympathy to Miss Ball, “who is fetching in Travis Banton’s gowns in spite of the plot’s ennui,” said the New York Herald Tribune. The New York Times reviewer also preferred the apparel to the scenario: “Miss Ball wears a wardrobe of costumes and acts as if she really had a script. The poor lady is sadly deluded, she is completely without support.”
Poor as the film was, it saved Lucy and rescued her marriage in the process. She came back into play just as Desi began to prosper in New York. As the mobile one, she came to Manhattan, and the Arnazes took up residence in the Delmonico Hotel at Park Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street. To all appearances they were a happily reunited, hand-holding couple.
Gossip columnists suspected otherwise. Stories occasionally appeared about Desi’s wanderlust and Lucy’s accusations. Sheilah Graham paid particular attention. After a tip from a hotel employee, Graham wrote an item that riled Lucy’s mother in California. DeDe telephoned that night: “It says here you lock Desi out of the bedroom and he pounds on the door and shouts and hollers.” Lucy traced the columnist to her home and went on the attack. She had accidentally locked Desi in the bedroom, not out of it. And what business was it of Graham’s anyway? By now Lucy had worked herself into a rage. In a sudden flare-up she gave away more than she realized: “You’ve got two children and you don’t care. You say things like this about me and I will never have children!”
So there it was. She had withstood loneliness, Desi’s infidelities, being cut loose from MGM. From the age of three, when she lost her father, Lucy had idealized the notion of family. Nothing hurt so much as the feeling that biology had caught up with her, that she was on the cusp of a sterile middle age. Lucy was not one to keep her misery to herself, and when some of her listeners asked why she didn’t adopt a child she wailed, “I want Desi’s baby.”
At the end of the year Desi appeared in his last film for MGM, Cuban Pete, a hastily fabricated musical, capitalizing on the postwar craze for Latin music. The best notice came from Variety, and it was tepid: “Arnaz tries hard, and his songs and music are an aid.” From Hollywood he went back to bandleading as Lucy resumed her film work.
Now it was Desi’s turn to express jealousy as Lucy appeared with a series of attractive leading men. The Russian-English actor George Sanders, whose reputation as a seducer extended to two continents, played the romantic lead to Lucy’s taxi dancer in Lured. There were those, among them Zsa Zsa Gabor, later Sanders’ wife, who were convinced that George and Lucy had an affair during the filming. If they did, discretion marked their intimacy; the town’s most relentless gossip columnists could never find the incriminating evidence they needed for a scoop. So they switched direction and boosted the marriage. Louella Parsons went so far as to say Lucy was little more than a lovesick slave, wearing a bracelet that read, “My name is Lucille Ball. If lost, return me to my master, Desi Arnaz.” Hedda Hopper had a different take: “About once every six months someone notifies me that Lucy and Desi Arnaz are separating. I’ve learned to doubt the reports, but dutifully get on the phone; and we have a long amiable conversation. Doubtless they have their spats, as which couple doesn’t.” Hopper added inaccurately, “Lucille is Irish and Desi is Latin—a combination that occasionally makes for some spectacular fireworks; but it’s nothing serious.”
The fact was, though, that the couple had blackslid on their promises and obligations. Lucy prevailed on Bob Hope to hire Desi as music director for his radio show; what caused the comedian to consent became a matter of salacious Hollywood speculation. Whatever the case, Desi got the job. A lot of good it did Lucy; when he was not on the radio bandstand he was touring the United States and Canada with scant attention paid to his wife—except for expressions of jealousy when she filmed Her Husband’s Affairs, opposite the dashing Franchot Tone. Edward Everett Horton, who supplied the comic relief for that movie, proclaimed that Lucy had “more talent than these people realize.” “These people” were the executives at Columbia. The picture did not thrive, and the studio offered her no other roles.
During an unhappy time Lucy played host to June Havoc, a serious actress with a long and famous background in entertainment—her older sister, Gypsy Rose Lee, had become the most celebrated striptease dancer in America. According to Lucy, Havoc suddenly announced: “I know you’re going stir-crazy! Why don’t you take a big chunk of time—now that Desi’s away and you’re free-lancing—and tour the country with a play?”
The whole encounter may well have been a setup, for shortly thereafter the men who ran the Princeton Drama Festival paid a call. Lucy allowed them to talk her into appearing in the title role of Elmer Rice’s Dream Girl. Almost a decade before, she had starred in Hey Diddle Diddle at the same theater. Her memories of that occasion, if not of the end results, were happy ones. What she failed to take into account was the piece itself. Of all the legitimate theater works in 1947, this was far and away the most demanding. A modernist fantasy, it called for the central character, Georgina Allerton, to escape from her everyday existence in a bookshop to a universe of dreams. In separate episodes in her imagination she gives birth to twin babies and becomes a murderess, a Shakespearean heroine, and a suicidal prostitute before finding true love in the real world.
The part required Lucy to be onstage for almost the entire play, and the feat of memory was prodigious. She suffered an occasional lapse in rehearsals, and even on opening night, but she recovered quickly enough to impress her producers, the audience, and the critics. Rice later wrote that of all those who had portrayed Georgina—including the original Broadway performer, Betty Field—“the only actress whose performance really delighted me was Lucille Ball.” Lucy “lacked tender wistfulness, but her vivid personality and expert timing kept the play bright and alive.”
The reaction that gave her the biggest lift came from two authoritative figures who dropped backstage during the tour. They were familiar to Lucy; both were on the faculty of the Robert Minton–John Murray Anderson School of Drama. The pair oozed compliments, which she accepted with a polite curtsey. Lucy was kind enough not to remind them that the school had rejected her as unpromising.
Dream Girl toured the Midwest and headed to California, pleasing audiences and critics wherever it went. Toward the end of the year, however, a virus began to work its way through the cast. By the time the show hit Los Angeles, Lucy was barely able to stand. Somehow she got through opening night. No one out front knew how sick she was; the Los Angeles critic went out of his way to praise her energy and skill: “Here is a young lady of the films who could, if she would, have a dazzling footlight career. And what is more—though this may be a brash statement to make—she is, in a sense, wasting her talents in pictures. Miss Ball is a striking presence in the footlight world. She has efficiency as a comedienne. She can tinge a scene delicately with pathos. She has special facility in dealing with sharp-edged repartee.” The review meant more to the entertainment industry than it did to Lucy. She went through one matinee with a fever of 102 degrees and ultimately had to be hospitalized. There was no understudy; after a week the show folded ingloriously.
At one point during this period, Harry Ackerman, a vice president of the Columbia Broadcasting System, was airborne, shuttling from New York to Los Angeles. In the 1940s coast-to-coast air travel could take more than ten hours, and on his flight Ackerman idly perused Mr. and Mrs. Cugat: The Record of a Happy Marriage. Isabel Scott Rorick’s recently published novel centered on a young executive and the light-headed wife who kept placing him in awkward social situations, but who, in the end, proved to be as lovable as she was frenetic. Ackerman saw commercial possibilities in these characters. In Hollywood he met with Don Sharpe, an astute agent-packager in the Kurt Frings office. Sharpe had already designed radio shows featuring such film stars as Dick Powell (Richard Diamond, Private Eye) and Cary Grant (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House); he sparked to the property Ackerman had brought him. They began to develop Mr. and Mrs. Cugat as a radio comedy series, selling the idea to Hubbell Robinson, CBS vice president of programming. Robinson in turn brought it to Lucy.
“I was interested,” she was to recall, “especially if Desi could co-star.” Even though the fictive couple’s name suggested Xavier Cugat’s, and thus an indeterminate Hispanic background, Robinson thought Desi was hardly the type to play the part of a typical American spouse. “But he is my husband,” Lucy insisted, “and I think it helps make a domestic comedy more believable when the audience knows the couple are actually married.” She added that the demands of radio broadcasting were much less intrusive than those of every other entertainment medium, “a fact borne out by the experiences of such happily married radio greats as Mary Livingstone and Jack Benny, Fred Allen and Portland Hoffa, Gracie Allen and George Burns, and Harriet and Ozzie Nelson.” CBS turned her down cold. She would play opposite a man of their choice or she could forget about a radio series; it was as simple as that. Lucy gave way.
Originally the experienced stage and radio actor Lee Bowman was slated to be Mr. Cugat, but CBS delayed the opening when sponsorship failed to materialize. By the time the network agreed to back the program with its own funds, Bowman had signed for another show. Another well-known actor, Richard Denning, took his place. The ingratiating star of B pictures had a resonant voice capable of conveying Mr. Cugat’s stuffiness without making him unsympathetic. The next change was in the name of the characters: Mr. and Mrs. Cugat metamorphosed into the unambiguously WASP Liz and George Cooper, and the title changed to My Favorite Husband.
With everything and everyone in place, CBS still hesitated to go on the air; the dialogue was judged to be insufficiently funny and credible. Comedian Steve Allen learned of the difficulties—and so did his writers. Two of them, Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll Jr., were in their twenties and restless. They submitted a script, received an offer within days, and traded the security of an established program for the challenges of an untried one. Carroll was a bearded, Mephistophelian character who had learned how to construct situations and gags, and Pugh was a pert brunette who knew how to make feminine characters credible. They were novices, however, and Lucy rode all over their work. The smiling lady, so amiable when they first met, proved to be a tyrant in script conferences. Carroll was confused by Lucy’s tempests, and now and then Pugh was reduced to tears. The CBS brass liked their ideas, but it was clear that a firmer presence had to be added to the mix. A veteran comedy writer and producer was brought in.
At the age of thirty-five, Jess Oppenheimer had already written for Fred Astaire, Edgar Bergen, and, most significantly, Fanny Brice. One of the most skilled dialect comedians in America, Brice had headlined in vaudeville and the Ziegfeld Follies, and, after some false starts, found a home in radio as the voice of “Baby Snooks.” Oppenheimer wrote that show, taking advantage of Brice’s hilarious yammer, but always eschewing cheap gags for a credible relationship of father and child. In a typical episode, Snooks misbehaves and Daddy (Hanley Stafford) administers a spanking. The brat speaks up:
SNOOKS
I don’t want you to be my father no more.
DADDY
What kind of talk is that?
SNOOKS
You hate me.
DADDY
Nonsense. I spanked you this morning because I love you.
SNOOKS
You got a funny way of showing it.
DADDY
If I had hated you, you know what I would have done?
SNOOKS
Yeah. You would have killed me.
DADDY
No. I would have left you alone to grow up into a selfish, greedy girl who always has to have her own way. How would you like that?
SNOOKS
(Wisely) I’d like it.
DADDY
Oh, what’s the use? Will you at least talk to me?
SNOOKS
No. You spanked me, and I’m sore at you.
DADDY
Look, Snooks, I spanked you, in the first place, for your own good. And in the second place, you’re not “sore.” You’re angry. Do you understand?
SNOOKS
Yeah, I’m angry in the second place.
DADDY
Right. Now come over and sit down.
SNOOKS
No.
DADDY
Why not?
SNOOKS
’Cause I’m sore in the first place!
Carroll and Pugh had followed the outline of Mr. and Mrs. Cugat. In their introduction, George Cooper was portrayed as a man of substance in his thirties, newly married to “the socially prominent Elizabeth.” After the honeymoon, “George sold his polo pony, bought a stylish suburban home, took the first job that came along—fifth vice president of a bank—and now they’re just George and Liz, two people who live together and like it.” Audiences had no problem with wealthy protagonists: during the 1930s Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had become Hollywood royalty by dancing their way through the Depression in dinner jackets and gowns. The 1940s called for some changes in approach and personality. In a memoir Oppenheimer said, “I decided to make Liz a little bit less sophisticated, a little bit more childish and impulsive, than the character who appeared in the first few shows—in short, more like Baby Snooks. She would be a stagestruck schemer with an overactive imagination that got her into embarrassing situations. This would give me an excuse to engage Lucy in some broad slapstick comedy.”
During the last months of 1948, as the scripts went in for revisions, Lucy began working on a new film with Bob Hope, Sorrowful Jones, based on yet another Damon Runyon tale. Filming during the day and rehearsing at night frazzled her nerves and upset her judgment. As one deadline approached, the story line was still in trouble. “Bob and Madelyn and I worked practically all night,” Oppenheimer wrote. “We were confident that we had saved the script. We weren’t too proud of the very last line, but the rest of it was good, and we had all day to work on that one last line.” At daybreak Lucy and Don Sharpe arrived. She sank into an overstuffed chair and went through the script, laughing at regular intervals as she turned the pages. According to Oppenheimer, “I thought we were home free, until she came to that last line. Well, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were identical twins compared to the transformation Lucy served up.” She arose, threw the script across the room, and yelled, “I won’t do this shit!” Oppenheimer waited for her to finish. Then he responded: “I thought we had a team effort going here. We’re happy to stay up all night or all week, and break our butts to make the script right for you. But not if you’re going to ignore a major rewrite, which you loved, and crucify us over one little line, which can easily be fixed. We need quite a bit more respect than that.” He took Lucy’s hand and shook it. “I can’t say that it’s been a pleasant experience working for you, but at least it’s over.”
Oppenheimer left the building. About halfway down the block he heard the clatter of rapid footsteps. Don Sharpe caught up with him and made a short-winded appeal: “She’s crying and hysterical. She knows she was wrong. She agrees with you and wants to apologize.” They went back into the building and Lucy said and did all the right things, which included making a small act of contrition for Carroll and Pugh, who had not seen her Jekyll-and-Hyde act. “I’ve been a shit,” she told them. After Lucy had walked away Pugh asked, “What the hell was that all about?” It was about establishing modes of behavior and regard, and about understanding that Lucy’s outbursts were signs not of certainty but of an insecurity that had been with her since childhood. Oppenheimer, Pugh, and Carroll would have to bear that in mind from now on.
Within weeks Oppenheimer wrought other changes in the scripts. He used the technique of the long-running Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse play Life with Father, wherein Mother Day (Vinnie) uses her ditsy feminine arithmetic on Father:
FATHER
Vinnie, whatever happened to that six dollars?
VINNIE
What six dollars?
FATHER
I gave you six dollars to buy a new coffeepot and now I find that you apparently got one at Lewis & Conger’s and charged it. Here’s their bill: “One coffeepot—five dollars.”
VINNIE
So you owe me a dollar and you can hand it right over.
In My Favorite Husband, Oppenheimer slyly modernized and reworked the dialogue:
LIZ
You should be glad I bought that dress, George. I made twenty dollars by doing it.
GEORGE
You made twenty dollars?
LIZ
Absolutely. I bought the dress on sale at Cramer’s for thirty-nine dollars and the identical dress is selling for fifty-nine fifty—so I made twenty dollars!
GEORGE
But you don’t have that twenty dollars.
LIZ
I know I don’t. I spent it on a hat to go with the dress!
Oppenheimer also made two emendations that were to have profound impact on the history of situation comedy. He felt that Lucille Ball and Richard Denning could not support a thirty-minute show by themselves. They needed comic support, and early in 1949 he supplied it by bringing on another, older couple. These were the Atterburys— Rudolph, George’s boss at the bank (Gale Gordon), and his scatter-brained wife, Iris (Bea Benaderet). Both actors were seasoned radio farceurs, and a few weeks after they were introduced on the air their presence allowed scripts to develop in new directions. Gordon’s Rudolph came across as a decent but hopelessly pompous banker, thereby humanizing George; Benaderet’s Iris supplied a partner for all of Liz’s harmless, funny schemes, usually in contrivances that pitted the wives against their husbands. Even with all this backup Lucy was having trouble making the comedy work to its full potential. Oppenheimer brought in a live audience to laugh at the jokes, and that helped somewhat. Still, he felt that something else was needed. During one rehearsal he handed Lucy tickets to Jack Benny’s radio show.
She looked at him blankly. “What are these for?”
“I want you to go to school.”
The Benny show provided her postgraduate course in pace and delivery. “Oh, my God, Jess,” she said when she came back. “I didn’t realize!” For the first time, she understood how Benny could make a funny remark and then, simply by gazing deadpan at the audience, sustain the laughter for twenty-five seconds. The exposure to a master of timing made all the difference. Lucy began to relate to the audience— often to the point of mugging—and it roared its approval. Sponsors signed on; My Favorite Husband rose in the ratings.
There was only part of the show that displeased Lucy: she was required to do a Jell-O commercial at the end of every program. When she performed the spots in her own voice she sounded so uncomfortable that Oppenheimer rewrote them as nursery rhymes—Jack and Jill, Goldilocks, Little Miss Muffet and the Spider:
ANNOUNCER
She was just about to eat her next dish when along came a spider and sat down besider . . . and what do you think he said?
LUCY
He said—wait till I find my spider voice—(In different character) “Pardon me, but isn’t that Jell-O Orange Coconut Tapioca—an exciting new combination of refreshing orange and tropical coconut?”
That “spider voice” came out as a high-pitched nasal tone. Audiences found it irresistible. She quickly adapted the character to regular portions of the show, where laughter frequently began before she finished the punch line. “SPIDER,” a private note scrawled in the margin, came to mean her trademark reaction to being discovered mid-plot against George or Rudolph. The success of her vocal tricks and timing settled Lucy down. Very gradually she came to trust the writers, and then to lean on them to an almost pathological degree. Although Carroll and Pugh dated briefly, they were only interested in each other professionally. “Once, when we came back from Europe,” Carroll was to recollect, “Lucy said, ‘Did you get married?’ We said no. She said, ‘Well, don’t do me any favors.’ She was furious.”
While My Favorite Husband developed and grew in 1949, Lucy continued a parallel life in motion pictures. Early in the filming of SorrowfulJones, Hope received a rare lesson in acting from his costar. “Bob at first was rather afraid of the straight scenes,” Lucy remembered wistfully. “He was feeling his way and so was I. But after a few days, when he still seemed uneasy, I found the courage to take him aside and say, ‘Don’t be afraid to play it straight. If you believe in the scene, the audience will, too.’ ” Using a mixture of credible pathos and all-out comedy, the stars made Sorrowful Jones a commercial and critical hit. To most reviewers Lucille was the big surprise. Newsweek: “Lucille Ball, who has played a Runyon doll before (The Big Street, 1942), makes as delightful a one as any guy could hope to find between Times Square and Lindy’s.” After that film she unwisely chose to make Easy Living for RKO. This second feature costarred Victor Mature, whose past rudeness she had never forgiven, and Lizabeth Scott, who offered weak support. It quickly disappeared from neighborhood theaters.
Some fifteen years back, Lucy had been dismissed from Columbia Pictures. Since the Neanderthal Harry Cohn was still in charge of production, she saw no reason why the studio would be interested in her. She had failed to consider Buster Keaton and Ed Sedgwick, two of her longtime fans. Groucho Marx and many of his fellow comedians considered the alcoholic Keaton to be as obsolete as the Keystone Kops. Sedgwick had directed Keaton in two-reelers, and he, too, was widely regarded as a fossil from the silent era. Nevertheless, both men had worked their way onto the Columbia lot as advisers, and both believed that Lucille Ball had yet to show the range of her comic talent on the screen. They persuaded Columbia to sign her for the title role of Eleanor Grant, secretary, in Miss Grant Takes Richmond. With William Holden as her costar and sometimes foil, she played a wide-eyed secretary who believes that she’s working for a real estate office when in fact the place is a bookie joint. Eleanor’s gradual enlightenment, and her ability to siphon illegal gambling funds to a worthy housing project, gave Lucy an opportunity to mug and to play a few farcical scenes with unexpected panache.
Finally, when Lucy made The Fuller Brush Girl in 1950, her gifts for physical comedy went on full display. This follow-up to Red Skelton’s comedy hit The Fuller Brush Man was written by Frank Tashlin. The former gagman for the Hal Roach comedies and director of animated cartoons went for the outrageous, the incongruous, and the obvious and got away with it because he knew more about comic construction than anyone else at the studio. Lucy gamely went along with the scenario, playing Sally Elliot, the bright fiancée of a clueless executive, Humphrey (Eddie Albert). In order to earn enough money to get married, Sally signs on as a door-to-door saleswoman. Customers treat her rudely, brats tie her up with rope, and, eventually, one of her customers is murdered and she’s suspected of the crime—all giving Lucy a chance to react. Before Sally can prove her innocence she gets chased by a posse of bald women, hung up on a clothesline, and banged around by a TV roof antenna; she founders in a forest of banana peels, impersonates a bump-and-grind burlesque queen, and becomes the target of the real killers in a wine cellar—providing Lucy with an opportunity for her first drunk scene.
Standing just offscreen, Buster Keaton dispensed advice. His reward, and Lucy’s, was the review in Variety: “If there were any doubts as to Miss Ball’s forte, Fuller Brush Girl dispels them. She is an excellent comedienne and in this rowdy incoherent yarn, with its Keystone Kop overtones, she garners major laurels.”
It has become a commonplace to observe that the sharpest humor springs not from funny things, but from such complex sources as emotional deprivation, anger, humiliation, and envy. Like so many of her fellow comedians, ranging back to Charlie Chaplin and Keaton himself, Lucy was deeply unhappy even as she cavorted blithely on the set. Her brother Freddy and her cousin Cleo (whom she tended to regard as a younger sister) each had married and become a parent while she remained childless. She would repeatedly ask friends, “How can you conceive on the telephone?” And she would moan about Desi’s peripatetic life with the band. Even when he was around, Desi seemed preoccupied with a bunch of hangers-on who arrived early and stayed late. Lucy maintained her own circle of friends, among them Rory Calhoun and his wife Lita, Farley Granger, Priscilla Lane, Eve Arden, and the Czech actor Francis Lederer and his wife Marion. They all could see how restive and melancholy she had become. Lucy tried to lose herself in various avocations and expenditures: she studied Shakespeare, tried to learn Spanish, took up oil painting with a special emphasis on the snowy landscapes she remembered from Jamestown, cooked, ordered dresses that sat in her closet, tried a new hairstyle every week.
Lolita Arnaz thought she knew why Lucy and Desi had failed to become parents. Granted, her boy was not the best-behaved man in the world. And there was the business of the couple’s conflicting schedules. But the real trouble, according to Lolita, was that Lucy and Desi remained unmarried in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Desi listened to his mother for the first time in years. He acknowledged that he wanted a son desperately; if getting married in a ceremony would make things right he would do it—if only Lucy would agree. She would, with certain provisos: “Desi and I sat in our cabbage-rose-papered living room and talked far into the night. We finally decided that Desi would give up his cross-country tours and only take local engagements with his band. We would both consult doctors to see why we did not have children.
“And we would ‘kick out the bums’—drinking, brawling, constantly dropping in, they gave us no peace. We had to take over our home again, losing the parasites for good.”
On June 19, 1949, in the local cathedral of Our Lady of the Valley, Father Michael Hurley officiated at the Roman Catholic wedding of Desiderio and Lucille Arnaz, with Lucy in a blue satin wedding dress and matching hat, and Desi in a bright white suit. Eight years after the first Arnaz marriage, with DeDe and Cleo looking on and wiping away tears, Ed Sedgwick gave the bride away. Desi’s mother was matron of honor, and Captain Ken Morgan, Cleo’s husband, served as best man. Looking back many years later, Lucy noted: “It was a beautiful ceremony and I believed in it. At the time, I seriously intended to become a Catholic. I took instruction for a long time, but lost the inspiration when I realized that Catholicism did not seem to help Desi in his life.”
By now slapstick had become Lucy’s natural comic mode. As Miss Grant, and as the Fuller Brush girl, she had often gone over the top. The trouble was that her laughs came at a cost. By the end of The Fuller Brush Girl, Lucy was deep in the throes of migraine headaches reminiscent of the ones her mother had experienced thirty years before. In addition, she had sprained both wrists and displaced six vertebrae, irritated her sciatic nerve by pacing ankles-inward for a long drunken walk, come down with a severe cold when she was dunked in a wine vat for three straight days, found her eyeballs temporarily paralyzed when a wind machine accidentally blew a cloud of talcum powder directly into her face, and, for good measure, been severely bruised by several tons of cascading coffee beans during a chase scene. On the last day of shooting she gamely appeared at Hollywood and Vine for publicity shots on behalf of the local tuberculosis society. A mobile X-ray machine sat at the curb, and as she coughed and wheezed a technician asked her to step inside for a free examination. Shortly afterward, he emerged with the news that Lucy had walking pneumonia. She spent the next nine days in the hospital.
Restored to health late that summer, she began work on another Bob Hope movie, Fancy Pants. This remake of Ruggles of Red Gap starred Lucy as an American arriviste and Hope as an unemployed actor posing as her butler. Lucy sustained more injuries in the making of this film: a horse stomped on one of her feet, and the two-hundred-pound Bruce Cabot accidentally stepped on the other one. More therapy was needed, but the treatments did little to boost her sagging spirits.
In December, however, there occurred some heartening news: she was pregnant. Lucy and Desi made plans for a nursery; she watched her diet and measured her days, careful to get enough sleep, enough protein, enough quiet time. The measures were insufficient. She began bleeding one night at Chatsworth, and Desi drove her to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital praying that this was only a minor problem. In the morning the doctor gave them the sad report: she had lost the baby. But he also presented them with some encouraging information: after her first miscarriage, an inept physician had closed off one of Lucy’s fallopian tubes. The team at Cedars had repaired the problem; all she and Desi needed to do was wait three months before trying to conceive again.
The story of Lucy’s miscarriage could not be kept secret. When it made the papers, sympathetic listeners of My Favorite Husband wrote 2,867 letters of consolation. Over the course of the next six months Lucy answered every one of them.
By the time she signed the last letter Lucy felt fully recuperated and ready to begin again. But begin on what? She felt numb when someone told her yet again that Hollywood producers were looking for someone to play a “Lucille Ball–type role”; she had been on that treadmill too long. Radio was easy and, judging by the fan mail, it had renewed her popularity. But it still kept her from Desi, whose only skill was music, a field that would always take him away from her. Why couldn’t they work together on something—a radio show maybe, or a routine with the band?
She consulted Don Sharpe, as always a fount of ideas. Doing a Lucy-Desi act was an intriguing notion, in his view, but such a project should not be cobbled together overnight. The show needed writers, planning, booking. To that end, the Arnazes formed an official legal partnership, Desilu Productions, and put Jess Oppenheimer, Bob Carroll, and Madelyn Pugh on the payroll.
Lucy also sought the advice of Pepito Perez, a skillful Spanish clown who had appeared with Desi, and Buster Keaton, who, despite a downhill alcoholic spiral, had never lost his ability to devise comic bits with inanimate objects. Among these objects was a trick cello. Its various hiding places contained flowers, a step stool, and a toilet plunger. Once Lucy learned how to operate it, she and Desi started to work on a carefully timed routine. When it was ready they tried it out before an audience. He played the straight man, earnestly attempting to conduct his orchestra. She was the baggy-pants clown in white tie and tails, her hair hidden beneath a battered fedora. In the middle of a musical number she loudly barged down the aisle demanding to be heard.
“What’s going out there?” Desi inquired in a bewildered manner. “Please put the lights on.”
The spotlight hit Lucy and her cello. “Where is Dizzy Arnazzy?”
The bandleader corrected her. “Desi Arnaz.”
“That’s what I say. Dizzy Arnazzy.”
“Look, mister, what is it you want?”
“I want a job with your orchestra.”
“Oh, are you a musician?”
“That’s right.”
To prove her claim she would do off-key solos on the cello, wringing laughter from all the props, then play the xylophone in the manner of a trained seal. Later she would appear in a provocative outfit, swinging a purse and singing, her lyrics interrupted by the drummer’s rim shots.
They call me Sally Sweet
I’m the queen of Delancey Street
When I start to dance everything goes
Chick, chicky boom
Chick, chicky boom
Chick, chick boom.
With the ultimate “boom” she would do an exaggerated hip-swinging bump and knock the straw hat off Desi’s head. Then the two would join in a wild rhumba, exiting into the wings. Lucy’s manic routines, plus a short he-and-she sketch written by the team from My Favorite Husband, made up the act.
Lucy and Desi appeared in a few army camps before making an official debut at the Paramount in Chicago, where live performers alternated with first-run films. That hot June week in 1950, every gag seemed to work, and word quickly spread that the Arnazes had a hit on their hands. Offers came in from theaters around the country, and from the Palladium in London. While they were in Chicago their hotel room was robbed; Lucy lost almost all of her jewelry, but refused to be distracted. She was high on the news that audiences and critics loved the show, and higher on the suspicion that she might be pregnant. “I was elated, nearly delirious,” she maintained, “but I was also frightened. Now I was scared to do my act because it was so physically strenuous. In my seal act, I had to do a real belly whacker, flip over on my stomach three times, and slither offstage. But I had six months’ worth of contracts to fulfill. And I was so happy to be working with Desi again that I hated to call anything off until I was sure.”
When the week was up they headed for New York, where Desi and Lucy were booked at the Roxy. She arrived on Friday and made clandestine arrangements for a pregnancy test, using her hairdresser’s name to avoid publicity. That Sunday night she and Desi were relaxing in their dressing room. Desi fell asleep to the clack of Lucy’s knitting needles and the staccato of Walter Winchell doing his radio broadcast. The next few moments were right out of a vaudeville skit, but they were real.
“After ten childless years of marriage,” said Winchell, “Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz are infanticipating!”
Lucy dropped her knitting and woke up her husband. “We’re going to have a baby!”
Desi rubbed his eyes. “How d’ya know? We aren’t supposed to hear until tomorrow.”
“Winchell just told me.”
“How d’ya like dat?”
Actually, they were delighted, even though the couple resented Winchell’s notorious practice of bribing doctors, nurses, and medical technicians to get inside information on ailing or pregnant celebrities. The Arnazes finished out the week, canceled the rest of their bookings, and went home to Chatsworth. With a contractor Desi began work on a $23,000 addition to their $14,500 house. It would include two bedrooms, a patio, and a white tile room Lucy called “the Lab,” to be outfitted with the latest cooking and laundry appliances. As a final touch Desi added an outside door at the far end of the playroom. No doubt remembering his own youth, he told Lucy, “When our son’s a teenager, he’ll need a private entrance.”
Everything went well for the first two months of the pregnancy, but before the trimester ended Lucy was back in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital with acute pain and bleeding. She miscarried five days later. “They kept me in the hospital for a week,” Lucy remembered, “doped with sedatives. I cried and cried, but the doctors assured me that I still had a chance to become a mother.” She took them at their word and returned to work, determined not to succumb to melancholy. In the next three months she made six round trips to New York for guest shots on television variety shows, continued with My Favorite Husband, and had an agonizing kidney stone removed. All the while she kept at Don Sharpe, reminding him that audiences accepted the Cuban and the Redhead as a couple. Surely he could find some way for them to appear in the same radio program—or perhaps something in the burgeoning new medium of television. His replies were not encouraging.
That October she received good news for the first time since the miscarriage. Through her agent, Cecil B. DeMille had offered Lucy a part as the elephant trainer in his new circus picture, The Greatest Show on Earth. Her costars would include Jimmy Stewart, Charlton Heston, Cornel Wilde, and Dorothy Lamour. Lucy was thirty-nine, and she knew this was her last chance at a big-budget A picture. She accepted without hesitation. There was only one snag. The actress Lucille Ball was still under contract to Columbia and its ogre Harry Cohn. Lucy begged to be released from her obligation to the studio.
Cohn not only refused, he sent her the script of The Magic Carpet. In that harem melodrama Lucy would be cast as a temptress “whose lips and temper are hotter than the desert sands.” The producer was Sam Katzman, known in Hollywood for making “lease breakers.” Katzman productions, in Lucy’s words, were “strictly class E. Anyone of any stature was supposed to say, ‘Over my dead body! I’ll never do that!’ ” Having made a legitimate offer, Harry Cohn could then cancel the player’s contract without paying her off. He had reckoned without Lucy’s resolve. She phoned Cohn and was put right through. He expected outrage; instead he got sweetness. “I’ve just read the Sam Katzman script,” she cooed. “I think it’s marvelous! I’d be delighted to do it.”
To the production chief’s distress—as well as that of Sam Katzman, who had to pay her $85,000, a large part of his budget—Lucy showed up on the set five weeks later, her harem pants and jacket fitting snugly. A little too snugly, for she was pregnant again. This time she kept her condition totally secret, not only to beat the jinx but because there was a subclause about pregnancy in the fine print. If Cohn had tumbled to the news he could have canceled Lucy’s contract overnight. On the set, everyone was kept from the truth except for Harriet McCain. Each night she let out the waist on Lucy’s harem pants a notch or two. “I collected eighty-five grand for a total of five days’ work,” the actress was to crow, “and got out of my Columbia contract very nicely.”
Then she and Desi got an audience with C. B. There, in the great man’s office, Lucy went public with a formal announcement: “Mr. DeMille, I cannot do your picture, because I’m going to have a baby.”
Decades later Lucy told the story as if it had happened the day before. DeMille did not react immediately. He paused, as if he were the central actor in one of his biblical epics.
Aware that Lucy ached to be in The Greatest Show on Earth, he also knew that she was nearly forty and that this might be her last chance at motherhood. At last he turned to Desi and delivered a line that Lucy was to treasure for the rest of her life: “Congratulations. You are the only person in the world to screw Harry Cohn, Columbia Pictures, Paramount, Cecil B. DeMille, and your wife, all at the same time.”