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  After crossing the country in a series of split weeks and one-night stands, the Desi Arnaz Orchestra settled in for a long engagement at the Copacabana in New York City. Lucy took a few days off and flew into town. A visit to the club aroused new misgivings. On display were the Copa chorus girls, beautiful, highly publicized young women who embodied temptation. Lucy accused her husband of carrying on with the chorines. Desi protested that he never chased the women he worked with. She didn’t believe a word he said. In an interview with Look magazine, she attempted to adopt her husband’s cavalier manner. Desi’s macho style didn’t bother her in the least, said Lucy, and went on to boast, “I like to play games, too.” This was pure bravado, putting a good face on a melancholy situation. The journalist bought the line, but Lucy knew she was faking it.

  The only thing the couple could agree upon was their unhappiness. She was running in place at MGM, as she had once done at RKO, even though the pay was better. Desi was improving as a musician; jazz historian Will Friedwald was to note, “Arnaz had virtually the only success story of any new band launched after the war.” Yet as a husband Desi was an abject failure and in low moments he acknowledged the fact.

  As if to underline the speed of the passing years, MGM released Lucy in the summer of 1946. It was a good time for the studios: more people went out to the movies than ever before. The war was over; peace dividends included a renewed economy, veterans’ housing, and a great national hunger for entertainment. Lucy should have been part of it, but somehow her timing was off. She had been born too late or too soon, had passed through various phases at the studio—glamour girl, rising star, comedienne, second lead—without finding a screen identity. Audiences knew who she was and liked her, but without taking her to their hearts. Louis B. Mayer had had enough. Just as there were newer Latin actors to replace Desi, there were fresher talents to replace a thirty-six-year-old redhead.

  During this period Lucy began to decline physically and emotionally. She actually began to stutter, something she had never done before, even in childhood. Lucy blamed some of the difficulties on her current agent, Arthur Lyons, and fired him. That left her without representation. On the other hand, she may have thought, what was left to represent?

  During the weeks that Lucy was in mourning for her career an influential agent named Kurt Frings made a surprise visit to Chatsworth. He had heard about the trouble at MGM from a vigorously independent client, Olivia de Havilland, who had gone through her own battles with studios, sometimes refusing roles and going on suspension. The actress admired Lucy’s work, and when she heard about her travail, she pushed Frings to represent this gifted redhead. “I hardly knew Olivia except to say hello,” Lucy later wrote. “I was bowled over by her kindness.”

  Frings told his new client that she was unlikely to land a long-term contract. Still, current conditions might work in her favor. Why not freelance, he suggested, go wherever the jobs were? As a matter of fact, there was a picture about to get under way at Universal, Lover Come Back, costarring the suave Irish-American actor George Brent. Lucy would be ideal for the part of a comically jealous wife. “I can’t, I can’t,” Lucy responded. “All I can do is stut-stut-stutter.” Frings dismissed her fears; the actress was simply tired and out-of-sorts. What Lucy had to do was learn new lines instead of going over old grievances. She remained unconvinced until the director of the film, William Seiter, phoned with his encouragement: “You’re a great gal. We need you. Come over to Universal and go to work.”

  She protested: “I c-c-can’t read a l-l-line.”

  The director knew better: “Of course you can.”

  For several days Lucy struggled with the role, stammering through rehearsal. By the fifth day she began to recover her normal rhythm and tone. Lover Come Back might more accurately have been called “Lucy Come Back.” The picture was universally panned, but the critics were kind to the female lead. “Our sympathy to Miss Ball, “who is fetching in Travis Banton’s gowns in spite of the plot’s ennui,” said the New York Herald Tribune. The New York Times reviewer also preferred the apparel to the scenario: “Miss Ball wears a wardrobe of costumes and acts as if she really had a script. The poor lady is sadly deluded, she is completely without support.”

  Poor as the film was, it saved Lucy and rescued her marriage in the process. She came back into play just as Desi began to prosper in New York. As the mobile one, she came to Manhattan, and the Arnazes took up residence in the Delmonico Hotel at Park Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street. To all appearances they were a happily reunited, hand-holding couple.

  Gossip columnists suspected otherwise. Stories occasionally appeared about Desi’s wanderlust and Lucy’s accusations. Sheilah Graham paid particular attention. After a tip from a hotel employee, Graham wrote an item that riled Lucy’s mother in California. DeDe telephoned that night: “It says here you lock Desi out of the bedroom and he pounds on the door and shouts and hollers.” Lucy traced the columnist to her home and went on the attack. She had accidentally locked Desi in the bedroom, not out of it. And what business was it of Graham’s anyway? By now Lucy had worked herself into a rage. In a sudden flare-up she gave away more than she realized: “You’ve got two children and you don’t care. You say things like this about me and I will never have children!”

  So there it was. She had withstood loneliness, Desi’s infidelities, being cut loose from MGM. From the age of three, when she lost her father, Lucy had idealized the notion of family. Nothing hurt so much as the feeling that biology had caught up with her, that she was on the cusp of a sterile middle age. Lucy was not one to keep her misery to herself, and when some of her listeners asked why she didn’t adopt a child she wailed, “I want Desi’s baby.”

  At the end of the year Desi appeared in his last film for MGM, Cuban Pete, a hastily fabricated musical, capitalizing on the postwar craze for Latin music. The best notice came from Variety, and it was tepid: “Arnaz tries hard, and his songs and music are an aid.” From Hollywood he went back to bandleading as Lucy resumed her film work.

  Now it was Desi’s turn to express jealousy as Lucy appeared with a series of attractive leading men. The Russian-English actor George Sanders, whose reputation as a seducer extended to two continents, played the romantic lead to Lucy’s taxi dancer in Lured. There were those, among them Zsa Zsa Gabor, later Sanders’ wife, who were convinced that George and Lucy had an affair during the filming. If they did, discretion marked their intimacy; the town’s most relentless gossip columnists could never find the incriminating evidence they needed for a scoop. So they switched direction and boosted the marriage. Louella Parsons went so far as to say Lucy was little more than a lovesick slave, wearing a bracelet that read, “My name is Lucille Ball. If lost, return me to my master, Desi Arnaz.” Hedda Hopper had a different take: “About once every six months someone notifies me that Lucy and Desi Arnaz are separating. I’ve learned to doubt the reports, but dutifully get on the phone; and we have a long amiable conversation. Doubtless they have their spats, as which couple doesn’t.” Hopper added inaccurately, “Lucille is Irish and Desi is Latin—a combination that occasionally makes for some spectacular fireworks; but it’s nothing serious.”

  The fact was, though, that the couple had blackslid on their promises and obligations. Lucy prevailed on Bob Hope to hire Desi as music director for his radio show; what caused the comedian to consent became a matter of salacious Hollywood speculation. Whatever the case, Desi got the job. A lot of good it did Lucy; when he was not on the radio bandstand he was touring the United States and Canada with scant attention paid to his wife—except for expressions of jealousy when she filmed Her Husband’s Affairs, opposite the dashing Franchot Tone. Edward Everett Horton, who supplied the comic relief for that movie, proclaimed that Lucy had “more talent than these people realize.” “These people” were the executives at Columbia. The picture did not thrive, and the studio offered her no other roles.

  During an unhappy time Lucy played host to June Havoc, a serious act
ress with a long and famous background in entertainment—her older sister, Gypsy Rose Lee, had become the most celebrated striptease dancer in America. According to Lucy, Havoc suddenly announced: “I know you’re going stir-crazy! Why don’t you take a big chunk of time—now that Desi’s away and you’re free-lancing—and tour the country with a play?”

  The whole encounter may well have been a setup, for shortly thereafter the men who ran the Princeton Drama Festival paid a call. Lucy allowed them to talk her into appearing in the title role of Elmer Rice’s Dream Girl. Almost a decade before, she had starred in Hey Diddle Diddle at the same theater. Her memories of that occasion, if not of the end results, were happy ones. What she failed to take into account was the piece itself. Of all the legitimate theater works in 1947, this was far and away the most demanding. A modernist fantasy, it called for the central character, Georgina Allerton, to escape from her everyday existence in a bookshop to a universe of dreams. In separate episodes in her imagination she gives birth to twin babies and becomes a murderess, a Shakespearean heroine, and a suicidal prostitute before finding true love in the real world.

  The part required Lucy to be onstage for almost the entire play, and the feat of memory was prodigious. She suffered an occasional lapse in rehearsals, and even on opening night, but she recovered quickly enough to impress her producers, the audience, and the critics. Rice later wrote that of all those who had portrayed Georgina—including the original Broadway performer, Betty Field—“the only actress whose performance really delighted me was Lucille Ball.” Lucy “lacked tender wistfulness, but her vivid personality and expert timing kept the play bright and alive.”

  The reaction that gave her the biggest lift came from two authoritative figures who dropped backstage during the tour. They were familiar to Lucy; both were on the faculty of the Robert Minton–John Murray Anderson School of Drama. The pair oozed compliments, which she accepted with a polite curtsey. Lucy was kind enough not to remind them that the school had rejected her as unpromising.

  Dream Girl toured the Midwest and headed to California, pleasing audiences and critics wherever it went. Toward the end of the year, however, a virus began to work its way through the cast. By the time the show hit Los Angeles, Lucy was barely able to stand. Somehow she got through opening night. No one out front knew how sick she was; the Los Angeles critic went out of his way to praise her energy and skill: “Here is a young lady of the films who could, if she would, have a dazzling footlight career. And what is more—though this may be a brash statement to make—she is, in a sense, wasting her talents in pictures. Miss Ball is a striking presence in the footlight world. She has efficiency as a comedienne. She can tinge a scene delicately with pathos. She has special facility in dealing with sharp-edged repartee.” The review meant more to the entertainment industry than it did to Lucy. She went through one matinee with a fever of 102 degrees and ultimately had to be hospitalized. There was no understudy; after a week the show folded ingloriously.

  At one point during this period, Harry Ackerman, a vice president of the Columbia Broadcasting System, was airborne, shuttling from New York to Los Angeles. In the 1940s coast-to-coast air travel could take more than ten hours, and on his flight Ackerman idly perused Mr. and Mrs. Cugat: The Record of a Happy Marriage. Isabel Scott Rorick’s recently published novel centered on a young executive and the light-headed wife who kept placing him in awkward social situations, but who, in the end, proved to be as lovable as she was frenetic. Ackerman saw commercial possibilities in these characters. In Hollywood he met with Don Sharpe, an astute agent-packager in the Kurt Frings office. Sharpe had already designed radio shows featuring such film stars as Dick Powell (Richard Diamond, Private Eye) and Cary Grant (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House); he sparked to the property Ackerman had brought him. They began to develop Mr. and Mrs. Cugat as a radio comedy series, selling the idea to Hubbell Robinson, CBS vice president of programming. Robinson in turn brought it to Lucy.

  “I was interested,” she was to recall, “especially if Desi could co-star.” Even though the fictive couple’s name suggested Xavier Cugat’s, and thus an indeterminate Hispanic background, Robinson thought Desi was hardly the type to play the part of a typical American spouse. “But he is my husband,” Lucy insisted, “and I think it helps make a domestic comedy more believable when the audience knows the couple are actually married.” She added that the demands of radio broadcasting were much less intrusive than those of every other entertainment medium, “a fact borne out by the experiences of such happily married radio greats as Mary Livingstone and Jack Benny, Fred Allen and Portland Hoffa, Gracie Allen and George Burns, and Harriet and Ozzie Nelson.” CBS turned her down cold. She would play opposite a man of their choice or she could forget about a radio series; it was as simple as that. Lucy gave way.

  Originally the experienced stage and radio actor Lee Bowman was slated to be Mr. Cugat, but CBS delayed the opening when sponsorship failed to materialize. By the time the network agreed to back the program with its own funds, Bowman had signed for another show. Another well-known actor, Richard Denning, took his place. The ingratiating star of B pictures had a resonant voice capable of conveying Mr. Cugat’s stuffiness without making him unsympathetic. The next change was in the name of the characters: Mr. and Mrs. Cugat metamorphosed into the unambiguously WASP Liz and George Cooper, and the title changed to My Favorite Husband.

  With everything and everyone in place, CBS still hesitated to go on the air; the dialogue was judged to be insufficiently funny and credible. Comedian Steve Allen learned of the difficulties—and so did his writers. Two of them, Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll Jr., were in their twenties and restless. They submitted a script, received an offer within days, and traded the security of an established program for the challenges of an untried one. Carroll was a bearded, Mephistophelian character who had learned how to construct situations and gags, and Pugh was a pert brunette who knew how to make feminine characters credible. They were novices, however, and Lucy rode all over their work. The smiling lady, so amiable when they first met, proved to be a tyrant in script conferences. Carroll was confused by Lucy’s tempests, and now and then Pugh was reduced to tears. The CBS brass liked their ideas, but it was clear that a firmer presence had to be added to the mix. A veteran comedy writer and producer was brought in.

  At the age of thirty-five, Jess Oppenheimer had already written for Fred Astaire, Edgar Bergen, and, most significantly, Fanny Brice. One of the most skilled dialect comedians in America, Brice had headlined in vaudeville and the Ziegfeld Follies, and, after some false starts, found a home in radio as the voice of “Baby Snooks.” Oppenheimer wrote that show, taking advantage of Brice’s hilarious yammer, but always eschewing cheap gags for a credible relationship of father and child. In a typical episode, Snooks misbehaves and Daddy (Hanley Stafford) administers a spanking. The brat speaks up:

  SNOOKS

  I don’t want you to be my father no more.

  DADDY

  What kind of talk is that?

  SNOOKS

  You hate me.

  DADDY

  Nonsense. I spanked you this morning because I love you.

  SNOOKS

  You got a funny way of showing it.

  DADDY

  If I had hated you, you know what I would have done?

  SNOOKS

  Yeah. You would have killed me.

  DADDY

  No. I would have left you alone to grow up into a selfish, greedy girl who always has to have her own way. How would you like that?

  SNOOKS

  (Wisely) I’d like it.

  DADDY

  Oh, what’s the use? Will you at least talk to me?

  SNOOKS

  No. You spanked me, and I’m sore at you.

  DADDY

  Look, Snooks, I spanked you, in the first place, for your own good. And in the second place, you’re not “sore.” You’re angry. Do you understand?

  SNOOKS

  Yeah, I�
��m angry in the second place.

  DADDY

  Right. Now come over and sit down.

  SNOOKS

  No.

  DADDY

  Why not?

  SNOOKS

  ’Cause I’m sore in the first place!

  Carroll and Pugh had followed the outline of Mr. and Mrs. Cugat. In their introduction, George Cooper was portrayed as a man of substance in his thirties, newly married to “the socially prominent Elizabeth.” After the honeymoon, “George sold his polo pony, bought a stylish suburban home, took the first job that came along—fifth vice president of a bank—and now they’re just George and Liz, two people who live together and like it.” Audiences had no problem with wealthy protagonists: during the 1930s Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had become Hollywood royalty by dancing their way through the Depression in dinner jackets and gowns. The 1940s called for some changes in approach and personality. In a memoir Oppenheimer said, “I decided to make Liz a little bit less sophisticated, a little bit more childish and impulsive, than the character who appeared in the first few shows—in short, more like Baby Snooks. She would be a stagestruck schemer with an overactive imagination that got her into embarrassing situations. This would give me an excuse to engage Lucy in some broad slapstick comedy.”

  During the last months of 1948, as the scripts went in for revisions, Lucy began working on a new film with Bob Hope, Sorrowful Jones, based on yet another Damon Runyon tale. Filming during the day and rehearsing at night frazzled her nerves and upset her judgment. As one deadline approached, the story line was still in trouble. “Bob and Madelyn and I worked practically all night,” Oppenheimer wrote. “We were confident that we had saved the script. We weren’t too proud of the very last line, but the rest of it was good, and we had all day to work on that one last line.” At daybreak Lucy and Don Sharpe arrived. She sank into an overstuffed chair and went through the script, laughing at regular intervals as she turned the pages. According to Oppenheimer, “I thought we were home free, until she came to that last line. Well, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were identical twins compared to the transformation Lucy served up.” She arose, threw the script across the room, and yelled, “I won’t do this shit!” Oppenheimer waited for her to finish. Then he responded: “I thought we had a team effort going here. We’re happy to stay up all night or all week, and break our butts to make the script right for you. But not if you’re going to ignore a major rewrite, which you loved, and crucify us over one little line, which can easily be fixed. We need quite a bit more respect than that.” He took Lucy’s hand and shook it. “I can’t say that it’s been a pleasant experience working for you, but at least it’s over.”