Ball of Fire Read online

  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, th
e 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.