Ball of Fire Page 18

  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 elemen
ts. 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.