CHAPTER SEVEN
FOLLOWING a broadcast of My Favorite Husband, the Hollywood Reporter told readers it was “too bad that that Lucille Ball’s funny grimaces and gestures aren’t visible on the radio.” The line was too provocative to be ignored. So were the notices that Desi and Lucy had received on their vaudeville tour. Variety, for example, had called their Chicago act “one of the best bills to play the house in recent months,” and said: “If the red-headed gal wants to slide on her tummy for five or six shows a day past the initial five-week booking for this package, her agency should have no trouble lining up dates.”
Bolstered by newspaper clips and their own enthusiasm, Don Sharpe and Jess Oppenheimer made a pitch to CBS. The network’s radio division produced My Favorite Husband, and 1951 seemed the ideal time and place for Lucy and Desi to make the jump to prime-time television. The network thought otherwise. Sharpe and Oppenheimer pressed on. They found the sponsors of Lucy’s radio show mildly receptive to the idea of a TV program centered on the Arnazes. Executives at General Foods’ advertising agency, Young and Rubicam, called Lucy and Desi in and convinced them that CBS would never be persuaded by sales talk alone. The network needed proof that a Desi-and-Lucy comedy would work on the screen. “Produce your own audition program,” counseled a Y&R vice president with a lot of experience in production and promotion. “That way you can sell it to the highest bidder.”
Admen had a way of making the arduous sound simple; for Lucy and Desi such an audition program would mean a tangle of fiscal and emotional investments, and the word around the broadcasting business was far from encouraging. Executives warned that the public was not ready to see a Latino in a domestic role and that Lucy was far too glamorous to be accepted as a housewife. Desi wavered; not Lucy. “Look,” she pointed out, “I was born in Jamestown, New York, and waited on tables and jerked sodas. You’ve been kicking around this country for seventeen years. Hell yes, we’re average Americans. And we’re going to do I Love Lucy even if we go broke.” This despite the advice of friends who urged them to abandon the project. Studios, the Arnazes were reminded, did not look kindly on apostates. Desi could always lead a band, but what would happen to Lucy? She answered them by quoting the voice of Carole Lombard. Lucy insisted that her late friend had appeared in a dream, speaking ten magic words: “Honey, go ahead. Take a chance. Give it a whirl!”
Whirl they did. Because Oppenheimer, Carroll, and Pugh had exclusive contracts with CBS, Lucy and Desi were forced to commission scripts from outside teams. Every one of these was held at arm’s length. Nevertheless, several were passed on to Don Sharpe, and he, in turn, shopped them around to the networks. One script contained just enough to intrigue programmers at NBC. In this scenario Desi played a successful bandleader, and Lucy his movie star wife. The plot revolved around their plans for a quiet wedding anniversary—until reporters and photographers from Lifemagazine crash the party. News of NBC’s interest was carefully leaked to Harry Ackerman, CBS’s executive in charge of radio and television production. The thought of losing Lucy was too alarming to ignore, and he capitulated—partway. Ackerman put Desi under contract as the master of ceremonies for a radio quiz show, Tropical Trip. (Another quiz show, to be called “Win Your Vacation,” had been planned for the same time slot. It would have starred a young comedian named Johnny Carson. He was deemed expendable.)
For the first time in her career Lucy stopped being a “gamer,” ready and eager to go along with whatever the studio ordered. The independent spirit that animated her youth had been suppressed for years. The adolescent who had auditioned in New York City, and put red pieces of paper on her face to break up Eddie Cantor in Hollywood, had been missing for so long that people had forgotten her. But Lucy remembered Lucille. That audacious youth had been suppressed by the actress’s need to work and the woman’s desire to preserve two families—the one she began with, and the one she was trying to create with Desi. It was time for a reappearance.
Lucy sensed that she had the upper hand with CBS, and impudently refined her list of demands. The Lucy show, whatever it was, would have Jess Oppenheimer as its producer and head writer. A running part would be found for Desi. The show would be produced in Hollywood so that she could continue her film career. The newly created Desilu Productions was to own 50 percent of the program. CBS would pick up the tab for the audition film. Ackerman agreed to these conditions. Thus began a series of brainstorming sessions at CBS. “We were asking ourselves,” Oppenheimer later wrote, “what do you do with a comedienne and a Cuban orchestra leader?” They began with the working title of “Lucy.” Even that was to cause trouble when Desi demanded top billing. After about a week of negotiating, Oppenheimer recalled, “I had finally managed to convince him on the basis that it was the ‘gallant’ thing to do—to let the lady go first. But even then he had come back to me one more time, saying, ‘I tell you what, Jess. Why don’t we compromise and make it alphabetical?’ ”
In time Lucy and the writers arrived at the same conclusion: a situation comedy built around a supposedly famous bandleader and his celebrity wife was unworkable. In her words: “The general public doesn’t think that movie stars have any problems. They think it’s just party after party.” Many meetings later Oppenheimer came up with a premise that he put in writing:
I LOVE LUCY
This is the title of an idea for a radio and/or television program incorporating characters named Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. He is a Latin-American bandleader and singer. She is his wife. They are happily married and very much in love. The only bone of contention between them is her desire to get into show business, and his equally strong desire to keep her out of it. To Lucy, who was brought up in the humdrum sphere of a moderate, well-to-do, middle western, mercantile family, show business is the most glamorous field in the world. But Ricky, who was raised in show business, sees none of its glamour, only its deficiencies, and yearns to be an ordinary citizen, keeping regular hours and living a normal life. As show business is the only way he knows to make a living, and he makes a very good one, the closest he can get to this dream is having a wife who’s out of show business and devotes herself to keeping as nearly a normal life as possible for him.
With this as armature, he and the writers constructed a different kind of comedy. The couple, Ricky and Lucy Ricardo, would be supported by Pepito the clown, and the actor Jerry Hausner, playing Ricky’s agent. In 1951 television was such a novelty that when Hausner offered to buy his father a TV set, Hausner Sr., a Hungarian immigrant, declined. The old man had spent his Friday nights peering at wrestling matches through the window of a furniture store on Hollywood Boulevard. There, the only noise he could hear came from the traffic at his back. “Not yet,” he told his son. “Just wait. Wait till they get sound. They’ll figure it out one of these days. You’ll see. Just like they did with the movies.”
The I Love Lucy pilot went before cameras on March 2, 1951, Desi’s thirty-fourth birthday. A kinescope—a film taken off the closed-circuit TV tube—was made during the proceedings. As technicians stood by in CBS Studio A, a meltdown occurred backstage. Lucy was now five months pregnant and showed it. Costumers outfitted her with loosefitting pajamas and hoped for the best, while Desi and a network executive wrangled about the Arnazes’ still-unsigned contract. With only a few seconds to go, the executive gave Desi a directive: “Sign the contract right now, as is, or the show will not go on.”
Desi held his ground. “How much does the kinescope cost to shoot?”
“Nineteen thousand dollars.”
“Okay,” Desi yelled, “I’ll pay for it myself, and it will belong to us.”
The executive backed down. “We’ll go ahead and shoot it now, and thrash out the details later.”
After the kinescope was made, other details had to be thrashed out as well. To no one’s surprise, the Lucy and Ricky Ricardo characters were convincingly funny. The clown and agent, however, seemed to diminish rather than augment the comedy. And the couple’s locale, an apartment overlooking the Plaza Hotel at Central Park South, felt wrong, somehow. The show took a week of painstaking edits; even so, there were many rough spots and ill-timed moments. Upon viewing the kinescope, Hubbell Robinson, head of CBS programming in New York, phoned Oppenheimer and barked: “What are you sending me, Jess? This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. How can I possibly sell this?” Two weeks later, without a buyer or sponsor for I Love Lucy, the final episode of My Favorite Husband was taped. When the last commercial was delivered, Lucy addressed the studio audience, unable to keep the desperation out of her voice when she spoke of the day when “we’ll be able to come back on the air in the not-too-distant future.” As she read the credits of all the people connected with the program for the last two and a half years she began to weep. Though she had become expert at turning on the tears, this was not an act. Lucy had good reason to feel that this time the dice were not going to come up in the Arnazes’ favor.
Robinson shopped the kinescope around to various advertising agencies. The asking price was $26,000 for each episode, a bargain at a time when most shows cost upward of $50,000 to produce. He had no takers. Then, at the last moment, Milton Biow, head of the advertising agency that bore his name, evinced a mild interest. Biow’s principal client, Philip Morris, had already backed two unsatisfactory programs: the television versions of Truth or Consequences and Youth Opportunity emceed by the bandleader Horace Heidt. The tobacco company was in the market for something to greet the new decade of the 1950s. Biow rolled the kinescope in his private screening room. He was quick to spot flaws and amateurisms, but he thought there might be something salvageable in the situation comedy of Lucy vs. Desi. Unwilling to trust his instincts, he called in his old friend Oscar Hammerstein II, one of Broadway’s greatest lyricists and an expert on humorous scenes and characters. At a private screening the author of Show Boat and Oklahoma!chuckled at Lucy’s antics and Desi’s accent. Yes, he agreed, the kinescope was awkward and the premise needed work, but there was real potential here. That was good enough for Biow. He and Sharpe worked out an arrangement with Philip Morris, with Sharpe guaranteeing a stronger and more professional show by airtime. The cost of each episode was not to exceed $19,500. In the initial season of 1951–1952 there would be thirty-nine episodes, and then Philip Morris would have the option to continue the series or to cancel its sponsorship. By meeting’s end, I Love Lucy had been guaranteed a network, a sponsor, and a time period—Monday night at nine o’clock. Desi was on a hot streak.
Guaranteed a season of employment, Oppenheimer, Pugh, and Carroll reexamined their handiwork. They agreed that having Ricky’s agent as a main character would skew the program away from the couple and toward Desi. The character was dropped. They also looked back to their success with My Favorite Husband, in which Lucille Ball and Richard Denning played against, and with, an older couple. It was decided to change the locale from an expensive apartment building to a middle-class brownstone owned by Fred and Ethel Mertz—named for a couple who had lived on the same block with Pugh during her childhood in Indianapolis. The Mertzes could thus be landlords and second bananas at the same time. The logical choices for these parts were Gale Gordon and Bea Benaderet, the second leads on the radio show. The job offer came too late: by the time I Love Lucy was sold both character actors were booked for other assignments. The veteran character actor James Gleason was also considered until his salary demands were made known. At $3,500 a week, he had priced himself out of the game.
As an intense casting search began, Oppenheimer received a call from the East Coast. Milton Biow had just returned from a vacation in Europe and could scarcely contain his exuberance. “I was thinking about the show all the time I was away,” he burbled. “I think it’s going to be a great program.” Oppenheimer was glad to hear it. Was there anything else? Well, there was one question: “When are you moving to New York?” The producer blanched. “New York? Who’s moving to New York? Nobody told me anything about that! I thought the deal called for the show to originate from here—live—with kinnies for the cable, like Burns and Allen and The Alan Young Show.” He added that neither Lucy nor Desi nor their staff had any intentions of moving three thousand miles from their homes. “Jess,” returned Biow, “I bought a show that’s going to be done from New York. I am not about to put on a program where fifteen percent of the audience see it clearly and eightyfive percent see it through a piece of cheesecloth.”
The adman was referring to the primitive state of television broadcasting in 1951. That year, when only 8 million Americans owned TV sets, shows were carried city-to-city via coaxial cable. It failed to reach even halfway across the country. Some 85 percent of viewers were located in the East and Midwest. Instead of seeing I Love Lucy live, they would be forced to see a kinescope made earlier—a blurred and, indeed, cheesy version of the show.
Desi consulted technical experts. They all told him the same thing. There was only one way out of his fix: put I Love Lucy on celluloid. Costly though the cinema process was, it would allow Desi to make as many prints as he wanted. These would be sent out to TV stations throughout the country, and each station would broadcast the same show with the identical first-quality footage. Biow expressed doubts about the process until he was reminded that it had already been done. The perennial radio favorite Amos ’n’ Andy had been adapted for CBS television, with an all-black cast. Every episode was filmed instead of kinescoped. The executive screened a program, liked what he saw, and gave Desi the go-ahead—with certain ground rules. Keenly aware of why My Favorite Husband had garnered such high ratings, CBS insisted that I Love Lucy be shot before a live studio audience, and that the production price stay within reason. Desi, fluently talking through his hat, assured the network that he would have each episode shot with three or four 35mm motion picture cameras for a price he picked out of the air: $24,500 per. And, he went on, it would be no trouble to film I Love Lucy before a theaterful of “civilians”—this despite the fact that no situation comedy had ever been filmed in that way.
Desi’s assurances came at a cost. In order to compensate for the additional expenses, the stars would have to take a pay cut. The Arnazes were slated to receive $5,000 each per show; instead they would receive $1,000 less, the money used to defray production costs. Now the businessman in Desi made itself heard. Since he had agreed to everything CBS wanted, he asked the network for one small favor. Desilu would take the pay reduction for the first thirty-nine shows—if his company could own those shows outright. Somewhat to Desi’s astonishment there was no objection. In hindsight he wrote: “I think the reason CBS agreed is because they did not think filming the shows the way we wanted to was going to work. So what the hell? they probably thought. Let them struggle for a few episodes and they’ll soon be glad to come to New York and do them live.”
It was only to Lucy that Desi confessed his dilemma: he hadn’t the slightest idea of how to proceed. “How about it,” he asked in a private, desperate exchange. “Do you have any thoughts or ideas?”
She had one. “Well, it’s going to be photographed on film, same as a motion picture—right?”
“Sí, señora.”
“Well then, señor, you better start by getting someone who knows how to photograph it.”
Desi brightened. “You just gave me my first clue.”
In certain ways, Karl Freund’s career paralleled Lucy’s. He, too, had started out in show business at age fifteen. His first job was as a projectionist in his native Germany. Two years later he started working behind the camera, making newsreels and shorts. In the 1920s Freund worked on one of the most celebrated movies in Germany’s Golden Age of cinema, The Last Laugh. In order to film one drunken scene, Freund strapped the camera to his chest and stumbled about like an inebriate. For the first time, the motion picture camera became a vital part of the narrative. When other filmmakers were satisfied to keep the action on one stage, Freund employed dollies and cranes. For the full-length documentary Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, he devised a special high-speed film stock and shot so quickly that no one spotted the camera. In 1929, the Technicolor Company lured him to the United States to work on its new color process. Two years later the cinematographer was hired by Universal Pictures, where he burnished his reputation by filming Dracula and Murders in the Rue Morgue. In 1938 he won an Academy Award for The Good Earth, and in the 1940s he developed a light meter that was still being used a generation later. But technology and stark imagery were not his only strengths; he also knew how to make women look glamorous on the screen. He was the favorite of Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn. Lucy knew why when she saw the luminous print of Du Barry Was a Lady.
Desi, who had often visited the set of that film, remembered Freund as “a big, fat, jolly man who waddled around all over the set carrying a Thermos full of martinis and giving orders in his thick German accent.” His account continued: “I never saw him drunk, though, and he was a kind and brilliant man. Everybody called him Papa.” Desi traced Papa to Washington, D.C., where the sixty-one-year-old was working for the government in its film research and development laboratory. Desi did a little research before stating his problem via telephone. There followed a conversation that was to alter the course of broadcasting. “I want to stage the show as a play,” Desi explained, “film it in continuity in front of an audience of perhaps three hundred people, using three thirty-five-millimeter cameras and recording the audience’s laughter and reactions simultaneously with our dialogue.” All cameras would be synchronized on one sound track so that the film could be edited from master shot to medium shot to close-up without missing a beat.
Papa was concise. “You cannot do it.”
Desi asked him to elaborate.
“Because, my dear boy, you must light for the master shot one way, light for the medium shot another way, and light for the close-ups in yet another way. You can’t photograph all three angles at the same time and get any kind of good film quality. On top of that you want to do it in front of an audience.”
“Well, I know that nobody has done it up to now, but I figured that if there was anybody in the world who could do it, it would be Karl Freund.”
“That’s very flattering.”
With that reply as his cue, Desi turned on all the charm he possessed. “My God, Papa, you showed how to use a moving camera, you invented the light meter. . . . For such a genius, what I want you to do should be a pushover.”
Pointing out that “Lucy’s no chicken,” Freund said he would have to “use special lighting, put gauze on the lens.”
“I don’t care what you have to do, Papa. I’ll get you whatever you need.”
A bit more wrangling and Papa ventured, “Okay, I come out and we talk and we look.”
Freund came out, talked, looked, and signed on, consenting to work for basic union scale until I Love Lucy showed a profit. “Papa was loaded, anyway,” Desi recalled. “He could buy and sell Lucy and me three or four times. The money he had made out of the light meter alone, plus a lot of acreage in orange trees he owned in the San Fernando Valley, made him a man of considerable means. The challenge was what got him, and that’s what I was counting on.”
Before the cinematographer could go to work, his new employer had to locate a workplace. Network facilities were measured and found insufficient for Freund’s demands. Some studio sound stages looked promising, but they were for filming only. Fire laws forbade the seating of three hundred people in any of them, and no movie studio would permit architectural revisions to be made to accommodate a lowly TV show. After a long search Desi found the new home of Desilu Productions, the General Service Studios Stage 2 on Las Palmas Avenue. The abandoned building contained an arena large and airy enough for sets, technicians, and an audience. All that it required was $50,000 worth of work. The floor needed replacing, fire exits would have to be created, bleachers built, a sprinkler system installed. Desi presented CBS with a plan and a budget. Once again the network proved agreeable. With the money advanced, he gave an audible and grateful sigh, assuming that the last obstacle had been hurdled. He had forgotten Jess Oppenheimer.
The producer had designed the show, worked with the writers, created personnae. He had even arranged for a theme song by Disney arranger Eliot Daniel. The lyrics were as basic and functional as the tune:
I love Lucy and she loves me, We’re as happy as two can be. Sometimes we quarrel, but then, How we love making up again. Lucy kisses like no one can, She’s my missus and I’m her man, And life is heaven, you see, ’Cause I love Lucy, yes, I love Lucy, And Lucy loves me.
And yet Jess Oppenheimer had not been vouchsafed a look at his contract. He decided to speak to the boss about it, reminding Desi that Harry Ackerman—and therefore CBS, his employer—had promised Oppenheimer 20 percent of I Love Lucy. The network, however, had never informed Desi of this arrangement. “This can’t be!” was the wounded reply. “Lucy and I own the package. How can CBS do this? No way are we going to do the show. Forget the whole thing!” Storming off the lot, Desi drove home and, still steaming, told his wife, “The show is off.” Lucy refused to go along. “We can’t back out now,” she argued. Desi was unmoved. In desperation she phoned Oppenheimer. “Jess, everyone knows we’re doing it. If we don’t go through with it, they’ll say we failed. My entire career is at stake!”
Oppenheimer was as implacable as Desi. The only reason he agreed to do the audition program, he reminded Lucy, was because of the 20 percent understanding. If Desilu was going to renege he would back out of the show. Period. Furious negotiations began. Ultimately Desi conceded; he recognized that Oppenheimer was too integral to the writing and production. Sensing an advantage, Oppenheimer asked that percentages be given to Carroll and Pugh. This time it was Desi who refused to budge, and it was the producer who conceded. He made a private arrangement to share 5 percent with the writers, leaving him with 15 percent. With these financial arrangements made, the dust settled. All warring parties made peace and returned to their mutual task: casting the supporting players for I Love Lucy.
To find the right man to play Fred Mertz, Desi pored over casting directories and went through résumés. Along the way a call came in from William Frawley, a short, plump performer with long experience playing gruff but loveable characters. Desi looked him up. The sixty-four-year-old actor had been born in Burlington, Iowa. He and his handsomer brother, Paul, had kicked around vaudeville in the 1920s. When Paul’s looks began to fade, so did his career. William went on solo or with a series of partners, one of them his wife, Edna Louise. The marriage lasted less than seven years; after that William opted for lifelong bachelorhood. His beefy, cantankerous character played well on Broadway, particularly as a profane and disillusioned press agent in the Ben Hecht–Charles MacArthur hit Twentieth Century. That success consolidated his reputation as a dependable character actor and brought him to Hollywood. Audiences saw Frawley in a variety of films, backing up the likes of Bing Crosby, Pat O’Brien, and James Cagney, and playing key roles in films as disparate as the Gary Cooper vehicle The General Died at Dawn, in which he played a gunrunner, and Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux. In the latter movie he articulated a Chaplin line with autobiographical zest: “You know, it’s a peculiar thing. At funerals one’s inclined to laugh; and at weddings, weep.”
But whiskey had slowly eroded his career, and as the 1950s began, Frawley found himself at liberty. He lived alone or with one of his sisters, happy to sit and drink and watch Yankee games, dependably loyal, grouchy and uncomplicated, oblivious to his reputation as a boozer, wondering when someone would call and offer him another role. He did a lot of waiting.
Desi went over the films and liked what he saw. Then he began to ask around. “I checked with the CBS people, the sponsor, and the agency,” he noted. “They all said ‘Yeah, we know what he has done in the past, but what has he done lately? Besides, he’s an alcoholic. You’d be out of your mind to hire him. There are a lot of actors who are much more dependable and can play that part.’ ” The contrarian in Desi became intrigued with these bad reviews and invited Frawley to lunch at Nickodell’s, a restaurant on Melrose Avenue behind the RKO studios. While the two men enjoyed their preprandial drinks, Desi mentioned the rumors of insobriety, and the warnings that Frawley might be too drunk to show up for rehearsals, let alone filmings.
“Well, those bastards, those sonsabitches,” responded the player. “They’re always saying that about me. How the hell do they know, those bastards?”
“Look,” Desi reassured him, “I don’t give a damn whether you drink or not. I like to drink myself and I’ll drink you under the table anytime you’d like to give it a try, except during working hours. But Lucy and I have everything going on this project. If we fail, I don’t want it to be because some character like you loused it up.”
A few drinks later Desi elaborated on the theme. “I have considered many good character actors for this part, especially Gale Gordon, who’s very well liked by the agencies and the networks.”
“What’s he do that I can’t?”
“Nothing, it’s what you do that he doesn’t do that louses you up. But I am convinced that there’s no one better in the whole world to play Fred Mertz than William Frawley.”
“All right, so what’s your problem? William Frawley is now sitting next to you and willing to listen to the kind of proposition you are willing to offer him to make your show a success.”
Desi made his proposal. “The first time you are not able to do your job, I’ll try to work around you for that day. The second time, I’ll try to manage again. But if you do it three times, then you are through, and I mean through, not only on our show, but you’ll never work in this town again as long as you live. Is that fair enough?”
Frawley nodded, ordered another drink, and announced, “Okay, Cuban, we have a deal and we’ll show all them bastards how wrong they are.”
That left the part of Ethel Mertz to be filled. Desi had hired Marc Daniels, who had won awards for his use of multiple cameras in television drama, to direct the first season of I Love Lucy. Familiar with the work of a stage actress named Vivian Vance, Daniels pressed Desi and Jess Oppenheimer to catch her in a revival of John Van Druten’s The Voice of the Turtle at the La Jolla Playouse. The star was the comelier Diana Lynn, but all three pairs of eyes were trained on Vance. She played a heart-of-gold whore who managed to be salty and touching at the same time. At the first-act intermission Desi turned to his colleagues and said, “I think we’ve found our Ethel.”
There could have been no greater contrast between second bananas.
At thirty-nine, Vance had been married three times, and her latest marriage, to actor Philip Ober, was heading toward the rocks. Abused as a child, she had suffered from psychosomatic illnesses and a nervous breakdown before undergoing intensive psychotherapy. Yet even in her early years Vivian Roberta Jones was marked as a girl with promise. More promise, said her neighbors in Cherryvale, Kansas, than her playmate Louise Brooks, the silent-film star. “I always thought Vivian was ten times the actress Louise ever was,” claimed one of them. There was no way to tell the accuracy of this appraisal; Brooks walked away from a film career at the age of thirty-two and thereafter became a symbol of the I-don’t-care flapper, tossing her Dutch bob and heading into the wind. The Jones family moved to Albuquerque, where Vivian, like Lucy, starred in high school productions. The teenager then went on to seek a theatrical career, over the vociferous objections of her Protestant fundamentalist parents. She married to get away from home, was divorced two years later at the age of twenty-one, and was attractive and talented enough to make the chorus line of the Jerome Kern musical Music in the Air at twenty-three. Parts offered to her grew larger, and she began to garner a reputation as “the little Albuquerque bombshell.” She also acquired a second husband, advanced to starring roles in straight plays, and eventually became, according to the New York critics, the onstage embodiment of a “hussy,” “blonde menace,” “alluring vixen,” and “other woman.” She took a lover during the second marriage, actor Philip Ober, who became husband number three after her divorce.
On the surface Vivian seemed a lighthearted, if fickle, personality. In fact she was continually hovering on the edge of emotional collapse, and finally she did suffer a nervous breakdown. It took years of therapy before she could acknowledge that from adolescence onward two opposing forces pulled her apart. As she came to understand, the first was “a compulsive, an irresistible urge to act. I could no more have fought it than I could have willed myself not to breathe.” The second was “the deep-set, unshakeable conviction on the part of my mother and father, splendid folk but tempered in inflexible religious and moral dogma, that the stage was a sinful business.”
During her slow recovery, the shaky actress appeared in several unmemorable films before returning, very tentatively, to the theater. It was in 1951 that she received a call from Mel Ferrer, who wanted her for the Van Druten drama. Five years before, in Chicago, she had played the same role and received rave reviews. She signed on, terrified but unwilling to relinquish her vocation. “In the wings,” she recalled, “a moment before the curtain rose, I nearly fainted. Then I spoke my first line, and knew I was all right.” Better than all right, Desi concluded. Informed of her problems, he pushed them aside. In his view, Vance, like Frawley, was worth the risk.
Meantime, Lucy had other things on her mind. The baby was two weeks overdue. She felt too bulky and uncomfortable to go down to the La Jolla Playhouse or to bother with any more hiring; all matters pertaining to the show were ceded to Desi. To her surprise, she would learn that the naming of the infant was also left to him. On July 17, 1951, twenty days before her fortieth birthday, Lucy went under anesthesia when doctors saw that she was about to have a breech birth. The parents had already agreed upon a name: Desi if the child was male, Susan if female. When Lucy awoke, she was informed that she had given birth to a girl. She demanded to see Susan. “You mean Lucie,” corrected the nurse. No, came the answer, “I’m Lucy.” She was shown the birth certificate. Desi had signed it while she was asleep, having decided that one Lucy in the family was not enough.
Six weeks after the delivery Lucy appeared at Stage 2 for the show’s first rehearsal, wearing dark glasses and seeming ill at ease. She greeted Frawley with warmth. He looked and sounded right, and if the old boy could stay off the sauce, she reflected, he could be a perfect foil. Lucy was less sure about Vance. She had expected a female version of Frawley; instead she confronted an attractive blonde, her junior, it was said, by almost a year. “She doesn’t look like a landlady,” Lucy whispered to Daniels. Vance overheard the complaint. “I photograph dumpy,” she assured them. In a disappointed voice Lucy blurted, “I expected you to look like Bill.” Frawley took his cue from Lucy. As the hammering and sawing of set construction echoed around him, he motioned toward Vance and asked Desi, “Where did you get this bitch?” Vance had her own view of Frawley, and she made sure that he overheard it: “How can anyone believe I’m married to that old coot?” The cast of I Love Lucy was off and running.
Complicating the technical problems was Desi’s dual role as actor and as president of Desilu Productions. During rehearsals, he would be approached in the middle of a comic scene and asked to make an executive decision. Having done so he was then required to dive back into the part of Ricky Ricardo with exactly the same brio as before. At the same time, Lucy was going into overdrive, puffing cigarette after cigarette, trying out props in a dozen different ways, badgering Al Simon, the production coordinator brought in from Truth or Consequences,a quiz show that utilized three cameras. (“You don’t know how much this means to me. Can you really do it?”) Lucy was operating at such a high tempo that at one point she enlisted the aid of Vance and some Bon Ami and cleaned the studio washrooms for want of something more creative to do. Annoyances cropped up in unexpected places: the letters I.L.L. on a script caused Lucy to explode: “I don’t want a show that’s ill.” Desi explained what the initials meant, but she would not be placated. Sighing, he sent out a memo announcing that the only proper abbreviation from now on was “LUCY.”
In the beginning Lucy had no feel for story lines. She concentrated instead on individual scenes, wringing every laugh she could out of objects, or being padded out to look twenty pounds overweight. Extra poundage was the essential gag in “The Diet,” one of the first scripts filmed, but the third to be broadcast. All the basic elements of the program were contained within its two acts: Lucy Ricardo has ballooned in weight because of an unchecked appetite. One of the chorus girls in her husband’s nightclub quits. Ever anxious to break into show business, Lucy auditions for the job. The casting director informs her that she can join the chorus—if she can shed the excess avoirdupois. How many pounds? Twelve. How long does she have? Four days. There follows a period of frantic exercise, but all she loses is a few ounces. Lucy presses on. At dinner, for example, she crunches a stalk of celery while Fred Mertz and Ricky enjoy a hearty meal, with second helpings. As the pounds begin to melt away, the diet begins to drive Lucy to distraction. She winds up stealing meat from the Mertzes’ dog. With just hours left in which to lose the last five pounds, Lucy buys a portable steam cabinet, sweats away the remaining weight, and hastens to the nightclub. There she belts out a song—and faints dead away from malnutrition.
In all, six episodes were shot before I Love Lucy went on the air, and the first one to be filmed became the fourth to be shown. “Lucy Thinks Ricky Is Trying to Murder Her” assumes that the protagonist is one of world’s most suggestible women. Having read the chilling Mockingbird Murder Mystery, Lucy overhears Ricky talking to his agent about getting rid of a singer. She misinterprets the conversation and believes that Ricky wants to do away with his wife. Her feelings are intensified by the dire fortune-telling of Ethel. Some hysterical maneuvers result, among them Lucy’s strapping a skillet around her middle to shield her from bullets. Ricky, convinced that his wife has lost her reason, slips her a sleeping powder. Before Lucy can nod off, however, she barges into his nightclub, the Tropicana, where she intends to shoot him before he eliminates her—a plan foiled in the last five minutes when all becomes embarrassingly clear.
The episode was an audience-pleaser, an ideal way to display all the characters at high pitch. Lucy and Desi were as confident as possible under the circumstances—circumstances that included carpenters banging in the final nails; Desi’s band tuning up endlessly; CBS and Philip Morris executives standing around, looking imperious; a line of potential audience members on the sidewalk outside; overanxious ushers borrowed from CBS to seat all the people in the new bleachers; and a distracted Karl Freund, still uncertain that his cameras would work simultaneously. Backstage, the Arnazes were going over last-minute changes with Frawley and Vance when Desi was pulled aside by an inspector from the Los Angeles health department.
“I don’t think you can go on and do the show,” he said.
Desi’s blood froze. It wasn’t enough to have opening night jitters. Now this civil servant, this nit-picking creep . . .
The inspector continued frostily: “According to our regulations, you have to have two bathrooms, one for ladies and another for men, within a certain prescribed distance from where the audience is sitting. You have one for the men within that distance, but none for the ladies. I cannot allow that audience in unless you have both.”
A quick huddle occurred. Oppenheimer got wind of it and exploded, “We’re about to go on and do our first show and you’re looking for a bathroom ?”
That they were, and the only one within the proper distance was the private john in Lucy’s dressing room. She spoke up: “Tell the ladies to be my guests.”
Desi turned to the inspector. Now would it be all right to let the audience into the theater? It would. But the delay had led to a new problem. The spectators were beginning to sound restive after their unscheduled half-hour wait. Oppenheimer pointed out: “We sure as hell don’t want a grouchy, unhappy audience. They won’t react well to our jokes.” He appealed to Desi. “Why don’t you go out there and warm them up?”
“What the hell does that mean, warm them up?”
“Oh, for Crissake, go out there, welcome them, make them feel at home, tell them about the technique we’re using to film our shows, then tell them a few jokes to get them in the mood to laugh. After that, introduce the cast and we’ll start filming.”
Desi obeyed, welcoming the strangers and informing them that they were going to see a kind of stage play for television. He also warned them that there might be a moment or two when the cameras interfered with their line of vision. Then he hit a light note: “I was told to tell you a few funny stories to get you in the mood to laugh. I don’t know many funny stories but there was an old vaudevillian with us for several weeks on our first theater tour. I heard this one so many times that I think I know it pretty good.”
He told them about a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl who was innocently swimming in a lake when she heard a voice appealing to her. She saw no one but a little turtle on a rock.
“The young, beautiful girl said to the turtle, ‘Are you the one who was calling me?’
“ ‘Yes, I was.’
“ ‘How come? You are a turtle and you can talk?’
“ ‘I was not always a turtle. I used to be an army sergeant, but some witch put a curse on me and turned me into a turtle. The reason I called you over here is because you can help me.’
“The girl asked, ‘How can I help you?’
“ ‘If you take me home with you and let me sleep in your bed under your pillow, by tomorrow morning I’ll be an army sergeant again.’
“ ‘I don’t think I can do that.’
“ ‘Oh, please, you have to. I am so tired of being a turtle. I just have to get back into the army.’
“ ‘All right,’ the young, beautiful girl said, ‘I’ll help you.’ She took the little turtle home with her, took it to bed with her, and let it stay there for the night.
“The next morning her mother came into the room. The young girl was late getting up to go to school. And there in the bed, lying right next to her daughter, was this very handsome six-foot-two army sergeant.
“And do you know, to this very day that little girl’s mother doesn’t believe the story about the turtle?”
Desi got the desired response, and when the laughter died down introduced the cast. First came Frawley and Vance as the Mertzes, then he added with great fanfare: “Here’s my favorite wife, the mother of my child, the vice president of Desilu, my favorite redhead, the girl who plays Lucy, Lucille Ball!” The power passed to Lucy as she embraced the supporting players and yelled at Desi, “How ya doing, you gorgeous Cuban?” She drew attention to the fact that her mother and Desi’s were in the audience, blew kisses to everyone in sight, and created what Desi was to remember as “a happy, carnival type of feeling.”
From the booth Daniels’s voice broke into that carnival: “Please take your places for the first scene. Cameras get ready. Roll the sound. Roll the film. Now go on and do a good show for us tonight. Action!” They did do a good show. The cameras rolled noiselessly on the new floor, the audience chortled in the right places and the pacing seldom faltered. But what the audience saw as a miniplay was quite a different comedy on film. Observed in a screening room, many of the shots seemed mismatched, and the “flat” lighting that Freund had arranged so that all cameras were set to the same exposure caused harsher contrasts than expected. A specially designed Movieola editing machine held multiple reels of film from three cameras, while a fourth component dealt with the sound. This contraption, dubbed “Desilu’s Four-headed Monster,” allowed the editors to mix and match as they pleased. Even so, it took nearly a month to pare the first episode to the requisite twenty-two minutes, and meanwhile others were being written, rehearsed, and filmed. By now, the costs had gone over budget by almost $250,000, and CBS executives were betting that I Love Lucywould lose more than half a million dollars in its first year. The idea of a second year was beyond their most malicious imaginations. William S. Paley, president of the network, heard about the wagers and fretted in his corner office.
Uncertain of just how the show would play, Desi tested “The Diet” in a movie theater in Riverside in Orange County, some forty miles from Los Angeles. There the episode provoked laughter so loud that it sometimes drowned out the dialogue. The theater reception did much to boost studio morale, but the second episode to be shot, “The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub,” was judged to be technically superior. It was the first “I Love Lucy” to reach the general public.
On October 15, 1951, 9 p.m. EST, I Love Lucy debuted on CBS, running against the highly rated dramatic program Lights Out on NBC, featuring such players as Boris Karloff, Billie Burke, and Yvonne De Carlo. Curtain Up, another dramatic series, ran on ABC, while the smaller Dumont network featured professional wrestling. Comedy was thought to play best at an earlier hour, and conventional wisdom held this to be another strike against Desilu.
Earlier in the day the cast had been working through the script for the seventh Lucy episode, “The Séance.” Its plot centered around Lucy and Ethel’s obsession with the occult, and their belief that Desi’s career depends on the stars. This is the day, predicts his horoscope, when he must answer “Yes” to every question. As the bandleader follows their instructions he is led deeper and deeper into comic catastrophe. The premise was weak, and required a great deal of rewriting, and the cast and writers became so intensely involved that they nearly forgot to watch the first episode. The Desliu studio was loaded with fancy technical equipment, but no one had thought to supply the place with a television set. It was thirty miles to the ranch; the Arnazes would have to break the speed limit to get there in time. Marc Daniels intervened. He invited everyone to his house in nearby Laurel Canyon. There was still time for a quick bite, the director reminded them. No one expressed any appetite for dinner.
One actor was missing from the company. William Frawley, blasé as always, had opted to go home and listen to the heavyweight fights on radio. The other principals watched intensely, without cracking a smile. The only sound of amusement came from Vance’s husband, Philip Ober. It was a mark of their deteriorating marriage that his loud, flat cackle seemed to annoy rather than please her. Lucy found him irritating as well: “He was a terrible man. Loved to embarrass her. He was nuts and he made her nuts. She was seeing all these shrinks. God, it was a mess. I told her to get rid of the guy, but if Vivian was one thing, it was loyal.” As the show rolled on, the viewers at Daniels’s house looked at each other in acute distress. An echo issued from the TV speaker, mangling the dialogue. Each CBS station had worked out a failsafe procedure: a 16mm backup print ran in synchronization with the pristine 35mm one. If anything went wrong, the station would simply make a switch. For reasons unknown, the Los Angeles outlet had inadvertently gone to the 16mm version while the preferred one was playing. To Oppenheimer, “with both sound tracks going at the same time, one playing three or four sprockets ahead of the other, the dialogue sounded as if it were being played over the public address system of Yankee stadium.”
Hysterical inquiries ensued. Desi and Lucy learned to their relief, and everyone else’s, that technical problems had occurred only on that one local station. Yet the next day, even though the 35mm print rolled without a hitch across the country, not all were pleased with what they saw. Perhaps the most discontented was the president of Philip Morris, one O. Parker McComas. After viewing the initial I Love Lucy he called the Biow agency to ask how much it would cost to cancel the show. The cigarette commercials came across well, he conceded, but as for the episode itself—in his view it was “unfunny, silly and totally boring.” The advertising executives asked him to reconsider. At least wait for next week’s show, they pleaded. McComas grudgingly told them he would go along, warning them that he spoke from experience. They were only putting off the inevitable.