CHAPTER EIGHT
THE NEXT morning the New York Times weighed in with some encouraging words: “I Love Lucy has the promise of providing a refreshing half-hour of video entertainment.” Not all was well; the paper went on to pan the “poor second act” and to warn that Lucy’s farcical situations might easily get out of hand. Variety, like many another paper, preferred the on-camera personnel to their gags: “As storyline comedies go it is the better part of appreciation not to ask yourself too many questions and just go along with what transpires on your screen.”
By and large the viewers did exactly that, in increasing numbers as the weeks went on. By then the characters were firmly established, and Lucy and Ricky had worked out their marital and ethnic relationships. In “Be a Pal,” the third show to be broadcast, Lucy fears that the honeymoon is over and that Ricky is losing interest in her. Even when she gets herself up in alluring outfits, he pays no attention. She takes Ethel into her confidence, and the landlady theorizes that the Latino is out of his element in New York. “Surround him with things that remind him of his childhood.” In the next scene Lucy has filled the apartment with Latin American items, including two peons dressed in serapes and sombreros, plus a donkey and some fake palm trees. Lucy costumes herself in a hat full of fruit à la Carmen Miranda, and sings Miranda’s signature number, “Mamae Eu Quero.” As she sings, five children appear—a reminder that Ricardo grew up in a large family. The bewildered Ricky demands to know what all this is about. Lucy explains, “I thought you were getting tired of me and if I reminded you of Cuba you might like me better.” His response sets the tone for all the episodes to come: “Lucy, honey, if I wanted things Cuban I’d have stayed in Havana. That’s the reason I married you, ’cause you’re so different from everyone I’d known before.” It was an endearing and valuable speech, but not so valuable as the time in which it was articulated.
For CBS had given Desilu the greatest gift of all: Monday nights. On television, Tuesdays were dominated by Milton Berle, “Uncle Milty” to the millions who watched his famously gross comic movements. Manic, tasteless, unsubtle, irrepressible, Berle was fond of appearing in drag, heavily lipsticked and girdled, or playing a grand piano until fireworks shot out from the instrument, or interfering with guest performers and unsettling the singers and dancers. Most viewers had never been exposed to the Borscht Belt from which Berle originated and thought of him as an exotic. They made his show number one throughout the country. Wednesdays belonged to Your Show of Shows, a variety program starring Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, and Carl Reiner in brilliant freewheeling skits that parodied foreign films, sent up domestic crises, and regarded all human misbehavior as fair game. Mondays from 8 to 9 p.m. EST were the property of Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. The show had been a hit on radio and transferred easily to TV, hosted by an easygoing freckle-faced redhead. (It would take years for audiences to realize that Godfrey’s folksy manner hid an imperious and deeply self-involved personality.) Allegedly, Talent Scouts featured amateur performers looking for a show-business break. Actually, most of them were professionals on their way up. But this deception served the audience well; the level of performance was high, and the host was wise enough to let more talented people consume a goodly portion of time and space. Talent Scouts provided Lucy with the ideal lead-in. There were no remotes in 1951; in order to change the channel it was necessary to get out of the easy chair or couch, walk to the set, and turn a knob. Out of a mixture of indolence and curiosity the viewers stayed put as Godfrey’s show gently led them to I Love Lucy. Once they got a glimpse of the Ricardos and their comic problems, they stayed to see how things worked out.
As the show established itself, Jess Oppenheimer discovered just how different Lucy and Desi were as performers and as individuals. Desi was painfully aware that CBS regarded him, in the words of one executive, as the Cuban caboose on Lucy’s Twentieth Century train. He worked overtime to show that he was an intelligent, focused player as well as a responsible leader. Thus, on Monday mornings when the cast assembled to look over the new script, Desi made sure to absorb the material as soon as he read it, and he always delivered a solid reading the first time through. In contrast, Lucy needed many rehearsals to get the comedy right. Wrote Oppenheimer: “Lucy didn’t know what she was doing—at the first reading. But after stumbling through, she would take the material to the mat. She fought with it, examined it, internalized it, and when it reappeared, she owned it.” Those efforts came at a price. Lucy was querulous and demanding on the set, hardest of all on her fellow performers. The star’s makeup man, Hal King, was appalled when Lucy “went over to Vivian Vance and pulled off Vivian’s false eyelashes. Lucy said, ‘Nobody wears false eyelashes on this show but me.’ ” In the beginning, before they got to know each other, recalled script clerk Maury Thompson, “Lucille gave Vivian a hard time. I mean a really hard time. One day I pulled Viv aside and I said, ‘What are you going to do about her?’ Vivian was very smart. She said, ‘Maury, if by any chance this thing actually becomes a hit and goes anywhere, I’m gonna learn to love that bitch.’ ”
Desi tried to adjust his schedule to Lucy’s, but that proved impossible. As the weeks went on he was forced to split his time between acting and making decisions for Desilu, leaving the set to sign papers or participate in meetings. As he prepared to depart Lucy would invariably beseech him, “But Desi, we need the rehearsal!” His answer remained the same: “What are you talking about? We know the words.” In Oppenheimer’s view, Desi “never could quite understand what was going on inside of Lucy’s head”—a disability apparent to anyone who knew the Arnazes’ calendar. With all of the efforts to create a nuclear family, Lucy spent much of the week alone with the baby, while Desi went to his thirty-eight-foot power cruiser Desilu and joined the roistering buddies who had been banished from the ranch. The growing popularity of I Love Lucy seemed to push the couple apart even as it increased their influence. “Lucy needed to be dominated,” Oppenheimer observed, “and Desi wasn’t happy in a relationship where his wife had a more powerful reputation than he did. He was deeply hurt by all the publicity that said that the success of the show was entirely due to her artistry.”
The fact is, though, that it was mainly due to Lucy. As the producer himself admitted, “Remove any other actor from the project and it would be diminished. Take away Lucille Ball, and it would be demolished.” All the upstate eccentrics Lucy had known in Jamestown and Celoron, all the society ladies she had observed in the months she had modeled for Hattie Carnegie, all the timing she had picked up from her stage work, all the tricks she had learned from the film farces and dramas, from radio shows, from Damon Runyon, Buster Keaton, and Jack Benny, were used to forge the character of Lucy Ricardo. The writers created the situations, and Lucy embodied them. If she schemed to get around Ricky and he discovered the plot, she spoke the lie but expressed the truth in fluent body language. No comic situation fazed her or appeared too extreme for her abilities. In the first series she does variety turns, sings, gets herself twisted during a ballet sequence, and, most memorably, auditions for the part of television saleswoman, extolling the benefits of Vitameatavegamin, a tonic whose principal ingredient is grain alcohol. Sampling a spoonful or two with each take, she is soon unable to stand up straight, but not too sloshed to keep pitching the product. Lucy later said, “While this may not be my favorite episode per se, I think that Vitameatavegamin bit is the best thing I ever did.” It was unquestionably the funniest; even Desi had to chew the inside of his cheeks to keep from laughing while she performed.
In other situation comedies (most of them employing a single camera), scenes with the same backdrop were filmed together, often out of sequence, over a three-day period. If someone came up with a new idea it was impossible to rework the script—too many key exchanges of dialogue had already been shot. I Love Lucy was different. Its complicated three-camera work allowed each episode to be filmed in sequence at the end of the week. The delay allowed the writers, and the star herself, to incorporate bits that had occurred to them during the week. Lucy took advantage of the flexibility, sometimes at high, if hilarious, cost. Two sequences illustrate the consequences of the program’s extempore farce. For a candy-dipping sequence, Desi hired the real thing after he saw Amanda Milligan working at the farmers’ market on Fairfax Avenue. He thought the professional’s deadpan movements would make her an ideal straight lady for Lucy’s antics, and he hired Miss Milligan on the spot. As Lucy remembered it, “The only thing that this woman ever did her whole life was dip candy. I don’t think she ever watched television, and she didn’t have the faintest idea who the hell I was. We explained the scene to her a couple of times, and she thought we were all crazy. She never cracked a smile once. We began to think, ‘Is this funny or isn’t it?’ ” They rehearsed the sequence several times without chocolate in their hands, miming the movements. Lucy hit Amanda, but Amanda just tapped her in return. “She wouldn’t give me the whack I needed to get the laugh. We hoped for the best when we filmed. We started the scene, and there was Amanda dipping the chocolate the way she had for the last thirty years. Well, it came time for me to hit her, which I did, and then for her to hit me, which she did! Bam! She gave me such a shot. I thought she had broken my nose. I almost called for a cut, and then I thought, no, we’d have to do it again, so I kept on going. But Lord, she really did bust me in the face. After the show, I said, ‘Boy you really did hit me,’ and she looked at me deadpan as ever and said, ‘That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’ ”
Similarly, in the spirit of Sid Caesar and company, I Love Lucy did a parody of neorealismo Italian movies. In the episode Lucy is recruited by a foreign director, who intends her for the part of an American tourist. She mistakenly believes he wants to feature her as a grape stomper, producing juice for wine. By the early 1950s most California wineries were mechanized, but there were a few holdouts, and Desi managed to find one of the last remaining stompers. Her name was Teresa and she had no English, so a translator was brought on the set to convey the director’s wishes. The amateur seemed to understand. “The time came for us to get in the vat, which was full of real grapes,” Lucy remembered. “God, it was like stepping on eyeballs. We started stomping on the grapes, and I made a dance out of it, and then I slipped.” As she did, she accidentally hit Teresa, a large woman, who believed that the sock was intentional and replied in kind, bopping Lucy on the cranium. “Down I went, with Teresa on top of me. My head was supposed to pop up and then my arm and then my leg, and nothing popped up. She just held me down, hitting me. I thought she was trying to kill me. I had grapes up my nose, up my ears. She was choking me. The audience thought it was part of the show, and they were hysterical. I started banging her back to get her off of me. Finally, I gave her one good shove and threw her off and yelled ‘Cut.’ I had to catch my breath. The director came over and calmed Teresa down and then calmed me down, and said we had to continue with the fight. The translator came over and explained it all again, and I thought it was okay. As soon as he yelled ‘Action,’ the fight was on again. I thought it was my last moment on earth.”
Lucy’s willingness to turn herself inside out for a laugh was almost—but not quite—enough to make her show a phenomenon. For that, she needed an exceptional cast and a series of fortunate circumstances. The most fortunate was public knowledge that Lucy and Ricky Ricardo were husband and wife in real life. Other real-life couples made radio or TV comedy their specialty, but none offered the strong contrast of a WASP wife with a Latino husband whose excited accent ran against her chirpy, uninflected speech. In the beginning, Ricky’s botched pronunciations were mocked by other members of the troupe, but the jokes went over poorly with audiences. Soon, only Lucy was allowed to make fun of her husband, because the mockery was done with affection, especially when his malapropisms went over the top: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him a drink.” “I’ll cross that bridge when I burn it.” Added to those by-plays were little angry looks, furtive exchanges, swallowed smiles that no script-writer or director could have supplied. Moreover, Ricky Ricardo brought a touch of salsa to the bland fare of prime-time television. As a husband he was only a well-meaning greenhorn, barely able to understand (and head off) Lucy’s grandiose and loony plans. But at the Tropicana Club he was shown as an impresario, a Cuban bandleader with ambition and authority. Watching him operate in situ, viewers understood what had attracted Lucille Ball to Desi Arnaz in real life.
As I Love Lucy proceeded to the top of the rating charts, certain rules and restrictions came into play. When Desi expressed discomfort with a scene it was usually changed, not because he was the boss but because, as Oppenheimer observed, “if he didn’t like a piece of material he was simply incapable of performing it.” There was, for example, a story line involving a surprise visit from an IRS auditor. The script called for Lucy to answer his questions truthfully—thereby revealing that her husband had fudged on some income tax deductions. Ricky was then called upon to do some fancy explaining, and ultimately to pay a fine for his lapses. Desi flatly refused to let the program go on as written. He granted that the premise was amusing; in his view, however, Ricky Ricardo would never attempt to cheat the U.S. government. “A short but lively discussion ensued,” Oppenheimer recalled, “but there was no changing Desi’s mind. In a matter of hours we came up with an entirely new second act in which Lucy’s fibs unwittingly land her a job as a knife thrower’s assistant (and target).”
As Lucy and Desi sculpted their personae, Vivian Vance and William Frawley also gave their characters dimension and personality. The fact that the actors disliked each other worked to the show’s advantage. Fred and Ethel Mertz seemed to be an old married couple who could neither take nor leave their situation, and the tension between them became a risible battle of the sexes. Ethel was only too glad to live vicariously through Lucy’s schemes to get around Ricky. And Fred radiated gratification every time he could foil their plans. Yet, in the rules of the show, the curmudgeon was intensely loyal: his back went up anytime an outsider criticized Ethel or Lucy—that was his job, and his alone.
What viewers saw on the screen was not very different from what the performers dealt with on the set. Upon presentation of the script, Frawley would take home only the pages marked FRED, in order to memorize his lines. “So sometimes,” Desi recollected, “we would get to a joke and he would say to me, ‘This is not funny.’
“ ‘What do you mean?’ I’d ask. ‘It’s not funny? You haven’t read the five other pages where we have been building up to your entrance.’
“ ‘What are you talking about?’
“ ‘You’re just reading what you are supposed to say and we’ve been building up for you to come in and say, “Hello, Ethel,” and get a big laugh.’
“ ‘You think “Hello, Ethel” is funny?’
“ ‘No, “Hello, Ethel” is not funny, but we’ve been building up this situation in which Ethel is inside a costume, representing the last half of a horse, and as you come in the door, she is bending down and facing away from you. All you can see is the last half of this horse—the horse’s ass is all you can see—and you say, “Hello, Ethel,” and that is funny.’
“ ‘Oh, yes, that is funny!’ ”
And yet Frawley continued to exhibit some unpredictable virtues. No matter how much he drank at night, he always showed up clear-eyed and sober. Not once was Desi forced to cover for him. Furthermore, the actor’s years on the stage gave him an uncanny ability to ad-lib. Backstage, a list of Lucy performers was pinned to the wall, and next to each name a gold star appeared every time he or she came up with a funny, unrehearsed line. Frawley’s line of stars far exceeded anyone else’s.
Vance provided a striking contrast to her onscreen partner. After the first few months, according to Maury Thompson, the actress established herself as an instinctive editor. “She was like a story detector, and wasn’t shy about bringing up points that didn’t seem right to her. Around this time, Lucille began to take notice that most often Vivian was right. Lucille realized she had in Vivian a lot more than she thought, and she began to trust Viv’s comedic instincts.” By year’s end, I Love Lucy had defined its personalities and solidified its comic style. New viewers dropped by each week, stayed for a half hour of laughter, and marked future Mondays at 9 p.m. as Lucy Time.
In the spring of 1952 CBS learned just how popular the program had become. For the first time in the history of television, a regularly scheduled TV program was being welcomed into 10 million homes. Lucille Ball was now outpulling Arthur Godfrey; in three months she had become Miss Monday Night. The American Research Bureau pointed out that I Love Lucy was more than simply the top-rated TV show in the nation. Because an average of 2.9 viewers watched each television set, each episode actually was seen by 30,740,000 individuals—nearly a fifth of the U.S. population. Partisans of Milton Berle pointed out that water use went down during his show because so few people used the toilet; Lucy fans claimed that she owned the new title of Queen of the John. (That battle was never truly settled.)
In the fall, Democratic strategists, thinking to tap into the show’s popularity, preempted five minutes of I Love Lucy for their candidate, Adlai Stevenson. They realized their gaffe when thousands of outraged viewers wrote and phoned the network: how dare this politician take up valuable Ricardo time? In Chicago, Marshall Field’s department store bowed to the latest trend. A sign on the front door read: WE LOVE LUCY TOO, SO FROM NOW ON WE WILL BE OPEN THURSDAY NIGHTS. Lucy was nominated for an Emmy Award in her first season, an unusual accolade, to be followed by an even more unusual one. When she lost out to Red Skelton, the comedian told the onlookers: “You gave this to the wrong redhead. I don’t deserve this. It should go to Lucille Ball.”
There was a good deal of truth behind his ostentatious modesty. In the first run of thirty-five episodes, Lucy had shown the world a rare versatility. Not since Carole Lombard had there been a glamorous woman so willing to make a fool of herself in pursuit of laughter. Lucy’s routines included capering like a circus clown, mocking Ricky as a Cuban singer, getting flung around as an Apache dancer, and pretending to be a ballet star and getting a leg tangled in the barre. Not once did she keep herself glamorous at the cost of the comedy. For one bit she wore a goatee and then found that the makeup glue was impossible to remove, for another she locked herself in a meat freezer, and she capped the season off with the classic Vitameatavegamin commercial. In recognition, Time put her on its cover. Inside, the magazine raved about her show: “This is the sort of cheerful rowdiness that has been rare since the days of the silent movies’ Keystone comedies. Lucille submits enthusiastically to being hit by pies; falls over furniture; gets locked in home freezers; is chased by knife-wielding fanatics. Tricked out as a ballerina or a Hindu maharani or a toothless hillbilly, she takes her assorted lumps and pratfalls with unflagging zest and good humor.”
Led by Lucy, Desi honed his skills in timing and setting up gags. And, in response, the writers tried to elevate Ricky Ricardo from bandleader to nightclub manager in order to give him more comic moments. Among the most memorable—and one that could not have been played by anyone else in 1950s television—was “Lucy Hires an English Tutor.” Distressed that Ricky’s accent will hold them back, Lucy tries to teach her husband the fine points of English, demonstrating the difference between words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently, “rough,” “through” and “cough,” for instance. He pronounces them “row,” “thruff,” and “coo.” When his errors are pointed out, Desi condemns Lucy’s native tongue as “a crazy language,” whereas Spanish makes complete sense. Lucy’s solution: she will hire a tutor for Ricky. The instructor, Mr. Livermore (farceur Hans Conried), turns out to be a haughty and humorless pedant whose attempts to improve Ricky’s English result in spectacular failure—in the end, the teacher, infected by Ricky’s approach to communication, starts speaking with Cuban intonations and chanting the lyrics to “Babalu.” Lucy surrenders: “It was a battle of the accents, and Mr. Livermore lost.”
Pleasing as this interlude was, it departed from the show’s mainstream comedy. To keep I Love Lucy consistent, Desi had to play second banana in almost every episode, setting up his wife’s jokes and physical shtick. In the second season Lucy began to hear echoes of the 1940s, when they were the Bandleader and the Movie Star and nearly divorced. With that time in mind, she told any journalist who would listen that her husband was the real power of Desilu. Desi read the interviews, and persuaded himself that she was right. One morning he walked into Jess Oppenheimer’s office and asked for a new credit: “What I really want to do is produce, but I need to build a reputation as a producer. How would you feel about letting me take ‘executive producer’ on the show?”
His question opened a new a clash of egos. Oppenheimer also sought to be recognized as a producer and had no intention of relinquishing his hard-won title. “I had made it clear at the outset,” he later remarked, “that if I was going to be the producer, I would have to have ultimate control of all of the show’s creative elements. My contract spelled that out.” He suggested that Desi take the title of “executive in charge of production” or “coproducer.” Desi refused. A period of bad feeling began and both men agreed to discuss the matter in a few weeks, after they had had time to consider alternatives.
Production resumed without further incident—until March 2, 1952, when the cast celebrated Desi’s thirty-fifth birthday. By then Oppenheimer was exhausted with the preparation of so many shows produced under deadline. The notion of having Desi take over some of his duties exerted more appeal than it had when the subject was first broached. Sensing his vulnerability, the Arnazes double-teamed him. First Lucy privately asked him to let Desi have executive producer credit “as a personal favor in order to keep the peace” in their marriage. Then Desi assured him that the credit would have no effect whatsoever on the real producer’s authority. Oppenheimer acceded to their wishes.
When the official ratings came in I Love Lucy was indeed the top television show in America, with some 23 million people tuning in every week. In honor of the occasion, Desi presented Oppenheimer with a trophy engraved “Jess Oppenheimer: The Man Behind the Ball. 4–18–52 #1 Nielsen.” “It was a nice gesture by Desi,” the producer noted gratefully. “I decided that I probably had been wrong to be so concerned about letting him have the executive producer credit.”
That was on a Friday. The following Monday, Oppenheimer received an upsetting call from the Biow advertising agency. A column in the Hollywood Reporter was read aloud to him. It burbled about the new girl on the block, scattering credit for I Love Lucy like chocolates before a crowd of children. Don Sharpe was praised, as was Harry Ackerman “for never once throwing cold water on Desi’s starry-eyed idea of not only filming the show but filming it before a live audience.” Jess Oppenheimer and Karl Freund also received accolades. But the highest praise was reserved for Desi: “The crazy Cuban whom Oppenheimer insists has been the real producer all along and who in two weeks reluctantly starts taking screen credit as executive producer.”
Livid, Oppenheimer presented himself in Desi’s office, with the offending reportage in hand. “How can you quote me like that?” he demanded.
Desi replied blandly: “It’s like I told you, amigo. I need to build a rep as a producer.”
Shouts and recriminations followed; they led nowhere. Oppenheimer observed that “there was nothing I could do about the publicity without seriously damaging both the series and Lucy’s precarious marriage. And I would never do anything to hurt Lucy or the show. I was stuck, and Desi and I both knew it.” It was not a bad scene in which to be mired; the money was flowing in faster than anyone could count it. But the real producer never really forgave the usurper; years later he resentfully mentioned “Desi’s habit of taking credit for other people’s accomplishments.” And sometime afterward, perhaps out of guilt, Desi corrected a story in Cosmopolitan. “Lucy’s antics can’t be underrated,” the article maintained. “But no show is better than its producer, and Desi Arnaz is the producer.” Desi sent a letter to the editor, begging to differ. “Actually I am executive producer. Jess Oppenheimer is the producer and also head writer, which means he does most of the work.” All very well, but after that self-promotion in the Hollywood Reporter nothing was quite the same between the two men. Not that it mattered. The Arnazes were hardly a match made in heaven, and Vance and Frawley intensely disliked each other. As the Cuban proverb had it, the dogs yapped, the pageant traveled on.
Assistants on the I Love Lucy set were quick to flash cue cards reading APPLAUSE. CHEERS. LAUGHTER. Only the first two were needed. Audiences came in laughing. They had waited patiently for a chance to see the show performed live before their very eyes, and everything said onstage rendered them helpless with mirth. Gratifying as this was, the writers, performers, and production crew had little time to enjoy their accomplishment. Hardly had they finished shooting one show when preparations for the next one began. Tuesdays were devoted to the script, as cast and writers sat at a long table going over the story line and the gags. Because I Love Lucy was perceived as family fare, plots had to be tasteful and credible. When some routine was deemed unacceptable, Pugh, Carroll, and Oppenheimer went back to work and began again under severe deadline pressure, often, though not always, emerging with something funnier than before. On Wednesdays an informal on-set rehearsal took place, with actors expected to know their lines. The breaks were short, with the principals sitting back in director’s chairs. One chair was marked “Desi Arnaz, Pres.,” another “Lucille Ball, Vice Pres.,” the third “Vivian Vance, Girl Actress,” and the last “William Frawley, Boy Actor.” No one appeared in costume for these occasions, and there were times when Lucy and Vivian made a point of dressing down. On a blazing summer day the two lounged in shorts and halters, while Desi and Bill lay on the floor in trousers and undershirts. At that unpropitious moment, a tour guide brought in a group of ladies. The visitors were greeted by an astonished quartet. “They were all be-ribboned, be-hatted, and be-orchided,” Vance remembered. “Some of them even had gloves on. When the guide said, ‘This is the I Love Lucy company,’ you should have seen the unbelieving expressions on their faces. They’re still probably talking about how awful we looked, and I don’t blame them.” Once the drop-ins had disappeared, work resumed in earnest and continued until the heat overtook them all.
Wednesday afternoons, Karl Freund supervised a camera run-through, carefully measuring distances to get the most from each take. On Thursday mornings, Freund worked on the lighting for four sets: two for the interior of the Ricardo apartment, one for Ricky’s club, and one for all other scenes necessary to the plot. At noon the cast gathered and dress rehearsal commenced. Generally it lasted until 6 p.m. Friday there were final revisions, and at 8 p.m. filming took place before the live audience. Hardly had the cast and crew begun to relax when the whole process resumed.
As might be expected, the stress exacted the greatest price from Lucy. The get-along-and-go-along girl of film and radio had achieved something she had dreamed about for four decades, national renown. The trouble was, everything she had ever cherished—her father, her immediate family, the little triumphs of her early career, her marriage, even her health—had all been stolen from her or jeopardized in some drastic manner. There was no reason to believe that I Love Lucy couldn’t also be taken away, too. To guard against that possibility she became obsessive about story lines, technical details, personnel. More than ninety people were now involved in the production of the show, and she wanted every one of them to be super-efficient, loyal, and willing to work an eighty-hour week if that was what it took to keep the show number one.
But the person on whom she made the greatest demands was Lucille Ball herself. Nothing seemed to put her at ease anymore. Lucy consulted a psychiatrist, yet remained anxious and fearful—although she learned to present a different face to the world. The analyst, she later claimed, “only saw me for three weeks. Then she told me there was nothing psychologically wrong with me. I was just worn out from having a baby and a television show at the same time.” As a result of the therapy, Lucy learned only “how to rest in a roomful of people, to hold my emotions in, instead of talking about them. That’s why people sometimes complain that I’m staring at them deadpan. I’m trying to be deadpan inside, too, so that I won’t fly apart.”
Lucy would need all the centripetal force she could summon in the spring of 1952. First, she learned that investigators for the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) had unearthed a fact she had tried to forget: California voting records showed that a Lucille Ball had registered as a Communist back in 1936. This was no small item. In 1947, the Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters and one-time members of the Communist Party, had been blacklisted out of the business. At the urging of HUAC, studios initiated a campaign to rid themselves of all those with a radical past. The fear and intimidation soon spread to the broadcasting business.
In 1950, during the intense heat of the Korean War, a pamphlet entitled “Red Channels” landed on the desks of network officials. Privately printed, the pamphlet declared that “where there’s red smoke there’s usually Communist fire.” Accompanying that declaration was a list of performers and directors who had “leftist” associations. Some familiar names were on the roster: Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Leonard Bernstein. But there were many unfamiliar ones as well. Some of the people named were Communists, some fellow travelers, and some had merely signed a petition or attended a single meeting of a suspect organization. All were charged with subversion. General Foods bowed to pressure and fired an actress named Jean Muir from The Aldrich Familybecause one unnamed witness, cited in “Red Channels,” said she attended pro-Communist meetings. Irene Wicker, radio’s “Singing Lady,” was fired because “Red Channels” said she had sponsored the reelection of a Communist congressman. She protested that she had done nothing of the kind, that in fact she had allowed her only son to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air force in 1940, when Moscow was virulently antiwar. Eventually the publishers of “Red Channels” realized that they had made a false accusation, and they allowed Wicker to enter an anti-Communist statement in one of their other publications. But she was not rehired, after twenty-five years on the air. She had been at the center of controversy, and controversy now equaled sin.
Terrified of what might happen to their nascent television business, CBS instituted a loyalty oath “to make sure that the full confidence of our listeners is unimpaired.” From then on, a climate of fear overtook television. Blacklisting organizations were hired to check the background of anyone involved in performance or production. First check: five dollars per name. Additional research: two dollars.
With talent so cheaply valued, all those who had attended meetings or signed petitions, no matter how long ago or under what circumstances, waited for the ax to fall. If it had fallen earlier, when Lucy appeared on My Favorite Husband, she might have been forced out of radio. But by the time HUAC caught up with her in April 1952, I Love Lucy was too big to suffer a frontal assault. Every courtesy was afforded the reigning star of situation comedy. She testified in secret, explaining her background as directly as possible: Grandpa Fred Hunt— “Daddy”—was an eccentric populist, a union organizer but hardly a Muscovite radical. And besides, Lucy and her brother had registered as Communists only to keep the old man from having a stroke. They had never actually voted in that long-ago election. The congressmen seemed satisfied with this family history and Lucy was excused without prejudice. No reporters were privy to the meeting, no stories appeared in the papers the next day. Lucy got the impression that HUAC had bigger flesh to fry.
Hardly had that crisis passed when a new one arose. On one hand, this was a happy problem; on the other hand, it could lead to the demise of I Love Lucy just when it was destined to dominate television for the season of 1952–1953. At the age of forty-one, the star was pregnant again. An interesting bit of dialogue occurred when Desi conveyed the news to Jess Oppenheimer.
“Oh, my God,” exclaimed the producer. “What are we going to do?”
Desi laughed. “What do you mean, what are we going to do? She’s going to have a baby. Whatever there was to be done about it, Lucy and I have already done it.”
“Yeah, but what about the show? You know how big she gets. There’s no way we can hide it for more than a couple of months at the most.”
“I know. So how about Lucy Ricardo having a baby as part of our shows this year?”
Bearing in mind the current network restrictions—no sexually suggestive language of any kind, no double beds for couples to sleep in, not even the use of the word “pregnant”—Oppenheimer warned the prospective father, “They’ll never let you do that.”
“Why won’t they? And who are ‘they’?”
“The sponsor, the network, the advertising agency.”
“Lucy and Rick are married,” Desi declared impatiently. “She’s pregnant. There is no way we can hide that fact from the audience. We have already signed the contracts.”
Oppenheimer was pensive. Then he brightened. “It’d be a hell of a gimmick.”
So it would, but CBS wanted no part of the scheme. Nor did the sponsor, Philip Morris. Company executives insisted that the show go on without a mention of Lucy’s condition. “Can’t you hide her behind chairs or something?” became their favorite question. Desi refused. Finally they asked, “Can you just do one or two shows about it?” Again he said no. One show was to be devoted to Lucy’s springing the news to Ricky. And then at least eight had to be devoted to the last six months of her pregnancy, with all the appropriate sentiment and humor.
No one bought his argument. Agitated beyond measure, Desi decided on one last effort before he gave up. He and Lucy had met Alfred Lyons, the British chairman of the board of Philip Morris. The old man had been extremely courteous and willing to entertain other points of view at the time. Perhaps he would listen to Desi’s side of the debate. A letter—very sincere, but perhaps not in the most felicitous English—was airmailed to London, quite literally over the heads of the big shots in New York. After explaining the situation, Desi left the decision up to Lyons.
You are the man who is paying the money for this show and I guess we will have to do whatever you decide. There’s only one thing I want to make certain that you understand. We have given you the number-one show in the country and, up till now, the creative decisions have been in our hands. Your people are now telling us we cannot do this, so the only thing I want from you, if you agree with them, is that you must inform them that we will not accept them telling us what not to do unless, in the future, you will also tell us what to do. At that point, and if this is your decision, we will cease to be responsible to you for the show being the number-one show on television, and you will have to look to your people, to the network, and to the Biow agency for that responsibility.
Thank you very much for all you have done for us in the past.
Within a fortnight the negative comments had stopped. Desi heard no more objections to Lucy’s onscreen pregnancy, and no one, at either the network or the agency, insisted that the shows about her condition be limited to one or two. If Desi wanted eight or nine or more, that was his business, not theirs. Only later did he learn that the letter to Alfred Lyons had borne fruit. The Philip Morris president had sent a private memo to certain key employees. It read, in its entirety, “To whom it may concern: Don’t fuck around with the Cuban! A. L.”
Powerful as Lyons’s words were, they could not alter the network’s rigid internal law. Lucy could be “expecting” or “with child,” but the word “pregnant” could not be uttered in prime time. After a series of unpleasant meetings Oppenheimer arrived at a solution. A priest, a rabbi, and a minister would vet each of the “baby show” scripts, and attend each of the screenings. If a phrase, a sequence, or even a word was found offensive it would be excised. “Everyone,” he was pleased to report, “was enthusiastic about the idea of having the baby shows ‘blessed’ by local clergymen. The network executives were finally starting to get comfortable with what we had been telling them all along— we could deal humorously with pregnancy on a television show and at the same time keep the program on a high moral plane.”
And so, with the editorial assistance of Monsignor Joseph Devlin, head of the Catholic Legion of Decency; Rabbi Alfred Wolf of the Wilshire Temple, and Reverend Clifton Moore of the Hollywood Presbyterian Church, I Love Lucy tiptoed into its second season. Because the baby would be born, like Lucie, by cesarean section, there was no mystery about the date of birth. Obstetricians scheduled the event for January 19, 1953. The shows dealing with Lucy’s pregnancy could thus be counted backward, and begun on December 8, 1952. Before that historic episode, the show went on as if nothing untoward was about to occur. By now Lucy’s expressions were so familiar that the writers referred to them in a kind of shorthand. “Puddling Up” meant a pause, watery eyes, followed by a loud wail. “Light Bulb” referred to a sudden (and ultimately disastrous) idea crossing her mind. “Credentials” signified righteous indignation.
The main difference from the first season—discernible to the cast and crew but not to the public—was a change in directors. The restless Marc Daniels had moved on, in part because, as Variety reported, Desilu “refused to meet his demands for upped coin.” Daniels’s place was taken by William Asher, the director who had brought Eve Arden’s radio show, Our Miss Brooks, to television. Things did not begin well. Early on, Asher left the set to deal with some technical difficulties. Lucy and the cast went off by themselves. When they resumed the rehearsal, according to Asher, “everything was different and it was obvious that Lucy had redirected everything.” He called her aside and firmly advised: “There can only one director, and that’s me. If you want to direct, send me home and save yourself some money.” Surprised by his own outburst, Asher took a half-hour break, which he spent in the men’s room composing himself, talking to mirrors, and throwing wadded-up papers into wastebaskets. He returned to the stage to find Desi pacing furiously. “After I explained to him what had happened,” Asher said, “he agreed I was right. He spoke to Lucy, and then brought me back into her dressing room.” There followed the standard confrontation and retreat, familiar to those who knew Lucy’s history with men she perceived as father figures. “She was crying, I was crying, and I said, ‘Why don’t we get back to work?’ She agreed, and we never had another problem like this again.”
The opening show, “Job Switching,” was the fixture as before. In the continuing battle of the sexes, Desi and Fred complain about women’s inability to stay within the budget. Lucy and Ethel decide to show their husbands how hard housewives really work. For a week the men are to stay home and do the chores while the women go out to jobs as candy dippers. Lucy finds herself unable to keep up with the assembly line and, as the intimidating supervisor enters, crams the extra chocolates in her mouth, in her cap, and down her neckline in a wild, dialogue-free routine worthy of Chaplin. “Job Switching” met with overnight approval. Jack Gould, the influential television critic of the New York Times, praised Lucy’s “comic artistry” and continued: “Perhaps her greatest asset is one of those sublime senses of timing that are instinctive rather than acquired. Whether it is a gesture, a change of expression or delivery of a line, she performs with the split-second assurance that is the heart of real comedy.”
Another pre-pregnancy program centers on Lucy’s attempts to enter show business, this time by trying to play the saxophone in Ricky’s band—a move that, predictably, infuriates him. As a high school student Lucy once did try to play the saxophone, and she enjoyed fooling around with the instrument on the set. Soon, camera coordinator Maury Thompson reported, “she couldn’t leave it alone. Every day, when we weren’t rehearsing the actual script, Lucille was blowing that damn saxophone. She was such a perfectionist, trying to play that thing, that she almost ruined the bit by becoming too good.” Other segments included a witty operetta, with lyrics by Carroll, Pugh, and Oppenheimer; a furious argument between the Ricardos and the Mertzes during which Fred kicks in his neighbors’ picture tube; and an episode featuring Ricky with laryngitis and Lucy seizing her big break in show business, ineptly staging a show at the Tropicana.
“Lucy Is Enceinte” ushered in a new period of television history. The very title indicated the inhibitions of 1950s television. Not only was the word “pregnant” expunged from dialogue, it could not be shown in the title. Nevertheless, for those who had an inkling of French, episode 45 announced that Lucy was with child. The script indicated how heavily the writers depended on the star’s pantomimic skills. According to their stage directions, Lucy practices breaking the news to Ricky: “She puts her arms around an imaginary neck. This will be facing her away from the cameras toward the back of the set, which is the way this particular scene should be played, considering that Lucy has more talent in the back of her neck than most performers have in their whole bodies.” The script called for Desi to be so elusive that Lucy finally decides to break the news to him in public, at the Tropicana.
RICKY
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. The next number— (The maitre d’ walks onto the floor and hands Ricky a note. To audience ) Pardon me. (He reads the note) Oh, isn’t this sweet. “Dear Mr. Ricardo: My husband and I are going to have a blessed event. I just found out about it today and I haven’t told him yet. I heard you sing a number called ‘We’re Having a Baby, My Baby and Me.’ If you will sing it for us now, it will be my way of breaking the news to him.” (To audience) Oh, isn’t that wonderful? I have an idea. I think they ought to come right up here on the floor and I’ll sing it to them. (The audience applauds) Come on—who sent me the note? (He is looking around the room) Come on. We just want to wish you luck. (He starts walking toward the tables and the piano player starts playing“Rock-a-Bye Baby.” To first table on the side) Was it you? (The couple giggles and shakes their heads “No.” Ricky starts to sing along with the piano and ask with his eyes as he comes to each table. Singing) . . . in the treetop. Etc. Etc. (He sees an elderly couple—the woman is 95. He starts to ask with his eyes and quickly turns to the next table. As he is doing this Lucy comes in and sits at the empty table. Ricky sees her when she gets to the table, gives her a pantomime “Hi” between the words of the song, and, as though this were a big joke, asks her, with his eyes and expression, “You?” Lucy slowly nods her head “Yes.” Ricky gives her a wink, starts to look away as he sings the next verse of the song and then does a tremendous take. What???! Lucy again shakes her head “Yes.” Ricky rushes back to the table, sits down next to her, and has a hurried whispered consultation with her. Whisper) Lucy, you aren’t kidding?
LUCY
No, I’ve been trying to tell—
RICKY
Why didn’t you tell—
LUCY
You didn’t give me a chance—
RICKY
Oh, darling. (He kisses her)
That is not quite the way the scene played out. Historian Geoffrey Mark Fidelman notes in The Lucy Book that Desi flubbed the song lyrics and when he arrived at Lucy’s table, a strange thing happened. Recalled Jess Oppenheimer, “suddenly they remembered their own real emotions when they discovered that at last they were going to be parents, and both of them began crying. We had to yell at Desi to keep going and do the baby song.”
Lucy and Desi were not the only ones to wipe tears from their eyes. DeDe and Lolita attended this performance, and they cried as well. Asher, who welled up despite his stony expression, called for a retake. The audience, who had been weeping along with the others, cried out “No!” A second version was shot anyway, with the lyrics well articulated and the conclusion dry-eyed. The scene was crisp, well-timed, funny, and utterly bogus. Desilu bowed to the audience’s judgment. For all the flaws, the first take had a validity and tenderness no second performance could hope to reproduce.
By episode 46 CBS had relented enough to allow the P-word to be used in the title “Pregnant Women Are Unpredictable,” and shows thereafter featured a cascade of predictable jokes about unusual cravings (ice cream and sardines was a favorite), and other instances of whimsical behavior. By episode 47 the condition of the star was beyond hiding. In “Lucy’s Show Biz Swan Song” she persuades Ethel to join her in a rendition of “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” featuring Mrs. Ricardo in a hoop skirt with pantaloons that drop on cue. Later in the show, Fred, Ethel, Ricky, and Lucy join in a barbershop rendition of “Sweet Adeline,” with Lucy flatting most of her notes.
In his meticulous survey of every episode of I Love Lucy, Fidelman notes that the final commercial in that show was done by Philip Morris chief Alfred Lyons himself. “In it he practically blackmails the audience (whom he claims now number 32 million) with the notion that if more cigarettes are not purchased, the show (which is seen by more people than any other entertainment in show business history) might not be on the air much longer.” Lyons’s ominous message did not go unchallenged. Within days Variety reminded Philip Morris and the Biow agency: “Lucy is being paid for just one thing—to deliver an audience, which it is doing at the lowest cost per thousand viewers. If P. Morris can’t sell this vast audience there’s something wrong with the selling copy or the cigarette and certainly not with Lucy.”
Episode 47 was also notable for Lucy’s persistent, big, blue-eyed stare. At this stage of her pregnancy she tired easily. As exhaustion took over, her left eyelid had a tendency to droop. To counteract the appearance of fatigue she kept her penciled eyebrows at a high crescent, and the look of astonishment became the most photographed of Lucy’s trademark expressions. In addition, “Swan Song” was notable for the nonstop acrimony between the second leads. Vivian Vance, still steaming years later, spoke of Frawley’s inability to get the joke. He “insisted that he do the repeats in the ‘Sweet Adeline’ number, and somehow it became my job to pull him aside, and set him straight. I told him that Lucille was the star, and it would be funnier if she did them. He got loud with me, so I told him to shut up and that we had to do this thing the way we rehearsed it. He finally calmed down, but he growled at me, ‘You know what she’s going to sound like, don’t you? Like putting a shovel full of shit on baked Alaska.’ Which was exactly what she was supposed to sound like, but his ego couldn’t see it that way.”
As the countdown to January 19 continued, vital decisions had to be made. What would be the sex of Lucy’s onscreen baby? What was to be its name? In the days before amniocentesis all that could be determined was that the real Lucy would give birth on a Monday, the same night as her show. She hoped for a boy, and Desi was keen to have one even if the boy was fictive. “Look,” he told Oppenheimer, “Lucy gave me one girl. She might give me another. This is my only chance to be sure I get a son. You give me a boy on TV.” Thus it was decided that Mr. and Mrs. Ricardo would be the parents of Ricky Jr. no matter what happened in the maternity ward.
Feeling very much like “a cumulus cloud in a cloak,” Lucy went into Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on the evening of January 18. The following morning she was taken to surgery and given a spinal anaesthetic, allowing her to remain conscious during the cesarean. Since this was turning out to be the most anticipated blessed event since the birth of Princess Elizabeth of Great Britain, hundreds of journalists lobbied to attend. After lengthy consultations with Desilu, a single reporter, Jim Bacon of the Associated Press, was permitted in the delivery room. At 8:15, as if responding to stage directions, Lucy gave birth to Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV. Bacon heard the mother chortle that her baby’s nose was “turned up so much he’ll drown if it rains—oh, Desi will be so happy.” Ecstatic would be more accurate. After a glimpse of his eight-pound-nine-ounce son, Desi winked at waiting reporters. “That’s Lucy for you. Always does her best to cooperate.”
Another newsworthy incident occurred in this period: General Dwight David Eisenhower was inaugurated as the thirty-fourth president of the United States, watched by a television audience of 29 million. Impressive, thought the White House press corps, until they read the statistics the next day: 44 million had watched I Love Lucy episode 51, “Lucy Goes to the Hospital.”
As life and entertainment blended, flowers were sent to the Desilu studios and to Cedars of Lebanon. The bouquets at the hospital started at Lucy’s room and overflowed to the corridor and the stairway leading to a lower floor. In all, Lucy received thirty thousand congratulatory letters. (There were also twenty-seven letters scolding her for having the bad taste to be pregnant on television.) The popularity of I Love Lucy reached a fever pitch that winter; there were “Ricky Junior” dolls, “I Love Lucy” nursery tables and chairs, movie offers, fan clubs, games, and costume jewelry. Variety described the profits from these ventures as “Desiloot” and inquired: “Aren’t Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz carrying their endorsements a little too far? Their caricatures even adorn ‘potty’ seats.”
A good question. And there was a more pertinent one to be answered. In this heady time, Bob Carroll and Madelyn Pugh put up with Desi’s techniques of persuasion, half genial, half drop-forged steel, simply because whatever the couple suggested turned out to be right. In the spirit of cooperation they hung a sign in their office: IT’S ONLY A SHOW. But was it? A valentine had become the logo of I Love Lucy, and the program actually did have a heart beneath the gags. It starred two people who were married on the screen and off, whose genuine and sometimes raw emotions underlay the numbered episodes, people whose comic battles worked so well because they were miniatures of real domestic wrangles. The writers had no trouble separating actual truth from weekly fantasy; for their bosses the distinction was not always easy to make. In one episode Lucy looks at a photo album of the Ricardos’ life together. She asks her husband whatever happened to the young couple. “Haven’t you heard?” Ricky responds. “They lived happily ever after.” No irony is discernible in their faces and voices; nevertheless, their sincerity did not make it so. Lorenz Hart, the man who wangled Desi his first important job, came closer to the truth in his lyrics for “I Wish I Were in Love Again.” There he spoke wryly of “The furtive sigh / The blackened eye / The words ‘I love you till the day I die’ / The self-deception that believes the lie.”