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Six weeks after the delivery Lucy appeared at Stage 2 for the show’s first rehearsal, wearing dark glasses and seeming ill at ease. She greeted Frawley with warmth. He looked and sounded right, and if the old boy could stay off the sauce, she reflected, he could be a perfect foil. Lucy was less sure about Vance. She had expected a female version of Frawley; instead she confronted an attractive blonde, her junior, it was said, by almost a year. “She doesn’t look like a landlady,” Lucy whispered to Daniels. Vance overheard the complaint. “I photograph dumpy,” she assured them. In a disappointed voice Lucy blurted, “I expected you to look like Bill.” Frawley took his cue from Lucy. As the hammering and sawing of set construction echoed around him, he motioned toward Vance and asked Desi, “Where did you get this bitch?” Vance had her own view of Frawley, and she made sure that he overheard it: “How can anyone believe I’m married to that old coot?” The cast of I Love Lucy was off and running.

  Complicating the technical problems was Desi’s dual role as actor and as president of Desilu Productions. During rehearsals, he would be approached in the middle of a comic scene and asked to make an executive decision. Having done so he was then required to dive back into the part of Ricky Ricardo with exactly the same brio as before. At the same time, Lucy was going into overdrive, puffing cigarette after cigarette, trying out props in a dozen different ways, badgering Al Simon, the production coordinator brought in from Truth or Consequences,a quiz show that utilized three cameras. (“You don’t know how much this means to me. Can you really do it?”) Lucy was operating at such a high tempo that at one point she enlisted the aid of Vance and some Bon Ami and cleaned the studio washrooms for want of something more creative to do. Annoyances cropped up in unexpected places: the letters I.L.L. on a script caused Lucy to explode: “I don’t want a show that’s ill.” Desi explained what the initials meant, but she would not be placated. Sighing, he sent out a memo announcing that the only proper abbreviation from now on was “LUCY.”

  In the beginning Lucy had no feel for story lines. She concentrated instead on individual scenes, wringing every laugh she could out of objects, or being padded out to look twenty pounds overweight. Extra poundage was the essential gag in “The Diet,” one of the first scripts filmed, but the third to be broadcast. All the basic elements of the program were contained within its two acts: Lucy Ricardo has ballooned in weight because of an unchecked appetite. One of the chorus girls in her husband’s nightclub quits. Ever anxious to break into show business, Lucy auditions for the job. The casting director informs her that she can join the chorus—if she can shed the excess avoirdupois. How many pounds? Twelve. How long does she have? Four days. There follows a period of frantic exercise, but all she loses is a few ounces. Lucy presses on. At dinner, for example, she crunches a stalk of celery while Fred Mertz and Ricky enjoy a hearty meal, with second helpings. As the pounds begin to melt away, the diet begins to drive Lucy to distraction. She winds up stealing meat from the Mertzes’ dog. With just hours left in which to lose the last five pounds, Lucy buys a portable steam cabinet, sweats away the remaining weight, and hastens to the nightclub. There she belts out a song—and faints dead away from malnutrition.

  In all, six episodes were shot before I Love Lucy went on the air, and the first one to be filmed became the fourth to be shown. “Lucy Thinks Ricky Is Trying to Murder Her” assumes that the protagonist is one of world’s most suggestible women. Having read the chilling Mockingbird Murder Mystery, Lucy overhears Ricky talking to his agent about getting rid of a singer. She misinterprets the conversation and believes that Ricky wants to do away with his wife. Her feelings are intensified by the dire fortune-telling of Ethel. Some hysterical maneuvers result, among them Lucy’s strapping a skillet around her middle to shield her from bullets. Ricky, convinced that his wife has lost her reason, slips her a sleeping powder. Before Lucy can nod off, however, she barges into his nightclub, the Tropicana, where she intends to shoot him before he eliminates her—a plan foiled in the last five minutes when all becomes embarrassingly clear.

  The episode was an audience-pleaser, an ideal way to display all the characters at high pitch. Lucy and Desi were as confident as possible under the circumstances—circumstances that included carpenters banging in the final nails; Desi’s band tuning up endlessly; CBS and Philip Morris executives standing around, looking imperious; a line of potential audience members on the sidewalk outside; overanxious ushers borrowed from CBS to seat all the people in the new bleachers; and a distracted Karl Freund, still uncertain that his cameras would work simultaneously. Backstage, the Arnazes were going over last-minute changes with Frawley and Vance when Desi was pulled aside by an inspector from the Los Angeles health department.

  “I don’t think you can go on and do the show,” he said.

  Desi’s blood froze. It wasn’t enough to have opening night jitters. Now this civil servant, this nit-picking creep . . .

  The inspector continued frostily: “According to our regulations, you have to have two bathrooms, one for ladies and another for men, within a certain prescribed distance from where the audience is sitting. You have one for the men within that distance, but none for the ladies. I cannot allow that audience in unless you have both.”

  A quick huddle occurred. Oppenheimer got wind of it and exploded, “We’re about to go on and do our first show and you’re looking for a bathroom ?”

  That they were, and the only one within the proper distance was the private john in Lucy’s dressing room. She spoke up: “Tell the ladies to be my guests.”

  Desi turned to the inspector. Now would it be all right to let the audience into the theater? It would. But the delay had led to a new problem. The spectators were beginning to sound restive after their unscheduled half-hour wait. Oppenheimer pointed out: “We sure as hell don’t want a grouchy, unhappy audience. They won’t react well to our jokes.” He appealed to Desi. “Why don’t you go out there and warm them up?”

  “What the hell does that mean, warm them up?”

  “Oh, for Crissake, go out there, welcome them, make them feel at home, tell them about the technique we’re using to film our shows, then tell them a few jokes to get them in the mood to laugh. After that, introduce the cast and we’ll start filming.”

  Desi obeyed, welcoming the strangers and informing them that they were going to see a kind of stage play for television. He also warned them that there might be a moment or two when the cameras interfered with their line of vision. Then he hit a light note: “I was told to tell you a few funny stories to get you in the mood to laugh. I don’t know many funny stories but there was an old vaudevillian with us for several weeks on our first theater tour. I heard this one so many times that I think I know it pretty good.”

  He told them about a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl who was innocently swimming in a lake when she heard a voice appealing to her. She saw no one but a little turtle on a rock.

  “The young, beautiful girl said to the turtle, ‘Are you the one who was calling me?’

  “ ‘Yes, I was.’

  “ ‘How come? You are a turtle and you can talk?’

  “ ‘I was not always a turtle. I used to be an army sergeant, but some witch put a curse on me and turned me into a turtle. The reason I called you over here is because you can help me.’

  “The girl asked, ‘How can I help you?’

  “ ‘If you take me home with you and let me sleep in your bed under your pillow, by tomorrow morning I’ll be an army sergeant again.’

  “ ‘I don’t think I can do that.’

  “ ‘Oh, please, you have to. I am so tired of being a turtle. I just have to get back into the army.’

  “ ‘All right,’ the young, beautiful girl said, ‘I’ll help you.’ She took the little turtle home with her, took it to bed with her, and let it stay there for the night.

  “The next morning her mother came into the room. The young girl was late getting up to go to school. And there in the bed, lying right next to her daughter, was th
is very handsome six-foot-two army sergeant.

  “And do you know, to this very day that little girl’s mother doesn’t believe the story about the turtle?”

  Desi got the desired response, and when the laughter died down introduced the cast. First came Frawley and Vance as the Mertzes, then he added with great fanfare: “Here’s my favorite wife, the mother of my child, the vice president of Desilu, my favorite redhead, the girl who plays Lucy, Lucille Ball!” The power passed to Lucy as she embraced the supporting players and yelled at Desi, “How ya doing, you gorgeous Cuban?” She drew attention to the fact that her mother and Desi’s were in the audience, blew kisses to everyone in sight, and created what Desi was to remember as “a happy, carnival type of feeling.”

  From the booth Daniels’s voice broke into that carnival: “Please take your places for the first scene. Cameras get ready. Roll the sound. Roll the film. Now go on and do a good show for us tonight. Action!” They did do a good show. The cameras rolled noiselessly on the new floor, the audience chortled in the right places and the pacing seldom faltered. But what the audience saw as a miniplay was quite a different comedy on film. Observed in a screening room, many of the shots seemed mismatched, and the “flat” lighting that Freund had arranged so that all cameras were set to the same exposure caused harsher contrasts than expected. A specially designed Movieola editing machine held multiple reels of film from three cameras, while a fourth component dealt with the sound. This contraption, dubbed “Desilu’s Four-headed Monster,” allowed the editors to mix and match as they pleased. Even so, it took nearly a month to pare the first episode to the requisite twenty-two minutes, and meanwhile others were being written, rehearsed, and filmed. By now, the costs had gone over budget by almost $250,000, and CBS executives were betting that I Love Lucy would lose more than half a million dollars in its first year. The idea of a second year was beyond their most malicious imaginations. William S. Paley, president of the network, heard about the wagers and fretted in his corner office.

  Uncertain of just how the show would play, Desi tested “The Diet” in a movie theater in Riverside in Orange County, some forty miles from Los Angeles. There the episode provoked laughter so loud that it sometimes drowned out the dialogue. The theater reception did much to boost studio morale, but the second episode to be shot, “The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub,” was judged to be technically superior. It was the first “I Love Lucy” to reach the general public.

  On October 15, 1951, 9 p.m. EST, I Love Lucy debuted on CBS, running against the highly rated dramatic program Lights Out on NBC, featuring such players as Boris Karloff, Billie Burke, and Yvonne De Carlo. Curtain Up, another dramatic series, ran on ABC, while the smaller Dumont network featured professional wrestling. Comedy was thought to play best at an earlier hour, and conventional wisdom held this to be another strike against Desilu.

  Earlier in the day the cast had been working through the script for the seventh Lucy episode, “The Séance.” Its plot centered around Lucy and Ethel’s obsession with the occult, and their belief that Desi’s career depends on the stars. This is the day, predicts his horoscope, when he must answer “Yes” to every question. As the bandleader follows their instructions he is led deeper and deeper into comic catastrophe. The premise was weak, and required a great deal of rewriting, and the cast and writers became so intensely involved that they nearly forgot to watch the first episode. The Desliu studio was loaded with fancy technical equipment, but no one had thought to supply the place with a television set. It was thirty miles to the ranch; the Arnazes would have to break the speed limit to get there in time. Marc Daniels intervened. He invited everyone to his house in nearby Laurel Canyon. There was still time for a quick bite, the director reminded them. No one expressed any appetite for dinner.

  One actor was missing from the company. William Frawley, blasé as always, had opted to go home and listen to the heavyweight fights on radio. The other principals watched intensely, without cracking a smile. The only sound of amusement came from Vance’s husband, Philip Ober. It was a mark of their deteriorating marriage that his loud, flat cackle seemed to annoy rather than please her. Lucy found him irritating as well: “He was a terrible man. Loved to embarrass her. He was nuts and he made her nuts. She was seeing all these shrinks. God, it was a mess. I told her to get rid of the guy, but if Vivian was one thing, it was loyal.” As the show rolled on, the viewers at Daniels’s house looked at each other in acute distress. An echo issued from the TV speaker, mangling the dialogue. Each CBS station had worked out a failsafe procedure: a 16mm backup print ran in synchronization with the pristine 35mm one. If anything went wrong, the station would simply make a switch. For reasons unknown, the Los Angeles outlet had inadvertently gone to the 16mm version while the preferred one was playing. To Oppenheimer, “with both sound tracks going at the same time, one playing three or four sprockets ahead of the other, the dialogue sounded as if it were being played over the public address system of Yankee stadium.”

  Hysterical inquiries ensued. Desi and Lucy learned to their relief, and everyone else’s, that technical problems had occurred only on that one local station. Yet the next day, even though the 35mm print rolled without a hitch across the country, not all were pleased with what they saw. Perhaps the most discontented was the president of Philip Morris, one O. Parker McComas. After viewing the initial I Love Lucy he called the Biow agency to ask how much it would cost to cancel the show. The cigarette commercials came across well, he conceded, but as for the episode itself—in his view it was “unfunny, silly and totally boring.” The advertising executives asked him to reconsider. At least wait for next week’s show, they pleaded. McComas grudgingly told them he would go along, warning them that he spoke from experience. They were only putting off the inevitable.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Lucy Is Enceinte”

  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 an
d 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.’ ”