Ball of Fire Page 23
In doing so they tried to find their bearings in an industry—and a society—that was redefining itself by the day. Nineteen fifty-six was one of those pivotal years that can only be understood in retrospect. Two hundred thousand Soviet troops and tanks crushed a Hungarian rebellion, and Premier Nikita Khruschev of the U.S.S.R. told Western ambassadors, “History is on our side. We will bury you!” newly alarming the Pentagon. As if to answer Khruschev, that year the Dow Jones Industrial Average marked a new high of 500 points, the Gross National Product reached a new high of $434 billion, and unemployment dipped to 4.2 percent. No one could be sure whether the Cold War would heat up again. The Korean War had ended in a truce in 1953. But what if fighting broke out in Western Europe? Would U.S. soldiers go forth in another battle? Was this to be a century of total war? Schoolchildren underwent air-raid drills, and their parents tossed in their beds at night, wondering about the country, about their jobs, and most of all about the Bomb. Many of them spent what they earned—what was the point of saving for tomorrows they might not be alive to see?
Lucy and Desi were no different from their countrymen, only richer and more unhappy with each other than most husbands and wives. They spent what they had, too.
Desi acquired additional acres in Palm Springs, facing the green swaths of the Thunderbird Country Club. No one had bothered to tell him that in addition to being one of the most beautiful clubs in the state, the Thunderbird was also one of the most biased. It did not admit Jews, Negroes, or Latinos. Desi may have been a celebrity of means, but he was barred from membership. In response he began construction on a luxury motel nearby. “We won’t discriminate against Gentiles, Jews, or Cubans,” he proudly informed reporters. (By the time all the additions were made he would spend close to $1 million on his forty-two-room hostelry—a price that worked out to $24,000 per rental unit.)
Lucy was no less manic and extravagant: “I ordered new contemporary living room and bedroom suites from—where else—Jamestown, New York. The order was flown to Los Angeles in a special chartered plane.” For the front hallway of her new home she chose a Japanese silk print that went for $90 a roll. Only after the wall covering was up did she notice the flaw: shadowy birds were a subtle part of its design. Lucy’s neurotic dread of feathered things, present since the death of her father four decades before, reasserted itself. There was a brief, unpleasant scene and the silk print came down. And then, for the sake of appearances, and for her own stability, life resumed, as if nothing untoward had happened.
When everything was finally installed to their liking, Lucy and Desi moved out of the Beverly Hills Hotel and prepared to take up residence at 1000 North Roxbury. Lucie, Desi IV, and DeDe, Lucy’s devoted mother, stood by beaming as Desi ceremoniously carried his wife across the threshold. Then there was a collective gasp. During the night, some water pipes in the eighteen-year-old house had burst. The thick white wall-to-wall carpet, Lucy recalled, was a stained, sodden mess and the newly plastered walls were disintegrating. “Desi really flipped. As the children huddled against me in terror, he ranted, raged, stormed, kicked the walls, and then began tearing them down with his bare hands.” DeDe gathered the children and took them outside: “Come, dears, your father is rehearsing.”
The leakage was stopped, the carpet replaced, the stains removed. Insurance covered a lot of the damage and the Arnazes made up the rest. It was only money, after all, and money was not the cause of Desi’s flare-up. Nor were the scandal sheets; he had too hard a carapace to be distracted by gossip. What pushed him to the edge was worry about the future—if indeed there was to be a future—and overwork at the office. In addition to I Love Lucy, Desilu owned and supervised half a dozen television shows. The Western series Wyatt Earp and the hillbilly comedy The Real McCoys were filmed on the studio lots; so were December Bride and the Danny Thomas, Eve Arden, and Red Skelton shows. Not so long before, Desilu had had a total of seven employees. Now it was a preeminent symbol of the American dream, with more than a thousand people on the payroll. Desi tried to keep on playing the part of patrón, a father figure who knew the name and needs of every man and woman at Desilu, but these days it was impossible. Success had taken away his favorite role. And then there was his self-image, something he rarely spoke about. As a producer, as the husband (and straight man) of a great television personality, Desi had been accepted rather than embraced by the Hollywood establishment. He sensed the difference: in the end they were Anglos and he was a Latino. There was no getting around it; his accent was a permanent reminder of his outsider status, a status, ironically, that made him a demigod in the barrios with which he had long ago lost touch.
In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos’s luminous novel of expatriate Cuban life, Desi and Lucy drop into a New York nightclub. The narrator speaks of a fictive evening when, chatting with the expatriate Cuban musicians, Desi seemed all business, with the fatigue of responsibility showing on his face. Or perhaps he had an air of weariness and exhaustion about him that reminded Cesar and Nestor of their father, Don Pedro, down in Cuba. Perhaps he had sadly yawned and said, “Me siento cansado y tengo hambra”—“I am tired and hungry.” Whatever happened, he and his wife accompanied the brothers uptown to the house on La Salle Street.
From that visit comes an invitation for the musicians to make a guest appearance on I Love Lucy. It is the zenith of their lives—the greatest Cuban of their time bestowing a favor they can never pay back. Desi’s affect and the powerful iconography of his program are so strong that years later the nephew of one musician has a dream of his uncle’s funeral, the deceased’s heart swelling to the size of the satin heart on the I Love Lucy show, and floating free from his chest over the rooftops of La Salle. . . . the organist starts to play, except, out of each key, instead of pipe-organ music, instead of Bach, what sounds is a mambo trumpet, a piano chord, a conga, and suddenly it’s as if there’s a whole mambo band in the choir stall, and so when I look, there is a full-blown mambo orchestra straight out of 1952 playing a languid bolero, and yet I can hear the oceanic scratching, the way you do with old records. Then the place is very sad, as they start carrying out the coffin, and once it’s outside, another satin heart escapes, rising out of the wood, and goes higher and higher, expanding as it reaches toward the sky, floating away, behind the other.
In Hollywood, the place where those symbols had been manufactured, Desi was not so highly regarded. Every day new demands were made on his already jammed schedule, and at the same time his support system began to give way. After the 1956 season two faces would vanish from the Desilu crowd, and they were among the most important of all. First, NBC made Jess Oppenheimer an offer he could hardly wait to accept; after the years of wrangling with Desi he was leaving to develop new shows for the network. At the farewell party, Desi tried to put a good face on the defection: “We’re not losing a producer, we’re gaining a parking space.” But he and everyone else knew what industry watchers were predicting: I Love Lucy could not run without its mainspring. Oppenheimer retained a percentage of the show, so he had mixed feelings about it now that he was going. As Bob Schiller put it, “He was hoping that Lucy would fall on its ass, and yet he stood to make a lot of money if it didn’t.” Karl Freund was also calling it quits; the old pro had worked longer and harder than he had ever expected to, and this seemed the right time to say farewell. More dire predictions were heard around Hollywood.
With the stalwarts gone or going, the average age of the Desilu employees was thirty-two, and Desi had trouble remembering all their names. He continued to do his gung ho act at company picnics and trips to Disneyland, but there was something sad about his bonhomie, something that seemed to suggest another farewell in the offing.
It was time to clear the air with Lucy, to speak about their marriage and their future. “We have two alternatives,” Desi told her. “Now that we have two wonderful children, after waiting all these years, it’d be a shame not to be able to spend more time with them, enjoy watching them grow
. Desi will be two and a half and Lucie four this summer. We could teach them to fish, ride a horse, and I could take all of you to Cuba to meet your thousands of relatives. What do you think?”
“You said we had two alternatives. What is the other one?”
To stay as they were, in Desi’s view, was to drown. Therefore, if he and Lucy were not to get out they had to grow. They had won awards, made money, achieved national recognition. Yet he could not let go of the idea that the town still considered him a pushy Cuban, a bonito swimming with the sharks. In A Book, his candid memoir, Desi recalls his feelings, summarized in a warning to Lucy: “Unfortunately there is no such thing as a nice little company surviving anymore. You don’t see many individually owned grocery stores or the little drugstore on the corner. They’re all gone. Big Fish eats them all up.”
Lucy’s rhetorical question said it all: “How do you quit a number-one show?”
There was more to her decision than staying at the top of the heap. To retire meant that she and Desi would be forced to share each other’s company day in and day out, month in and month out. Something of the fantasist lingered in Lucy; on rare occasions she caught herself wishing for an intimate and comfortable middle age with her husband, shuttling casually between Palm Springs and Los Angeles, visiting Europe when the spirit moved them, watching the children grow and learn. But the realist in her knew better than to batten on a dream. “I still preferred to spend my weekends resting, playing cards, and sitting on the floor with the kids,” she was to write. Sad to say, Desi was “too keyed up and restless for such pleasures.” Typically, after the last business was completed on Friday night, chauffeurs drove the Arnazes home in a limousine and station wagon. Once Lucy and the children were settled in, Desi would take off. “It was go, go, go, all the time,” she added resentfully, “to the golf links, to his new motel, the gambling tables, or his yacht.”
Yet she could often be enough of an irritant to drive her husband away. The script man Maury Thompson recounted Lucy’s aggressive behavior off the set: “She loves to hurt a man. She’s kicked Desi in the nuts several times. Just bowled him over. She laughed about it. If he’s stooped over, she’ll kick him in the butt, and she’ll aim low and she’ll hit him right in the balls.” On another occasion, Desi insisted on remaining at the country club to watch the Kentucky Derby. Lucy wanted to go home, and when he refused she got in a golf cart and furiously drove off. Thompson happened to be there that day as well, and she took him home to look after the children. He, Lucie, and Desi IV were in the swimming pool when Lucy joined them. “You’re the only one in the world I would ever show myself to in a swimming suit,” she told the guest. “Well, you look marvelous,” Thompson responded. “And she did. She was tight, thin, no stomach, long legs, just freckles on her legs. She got in the water, and she swam the breaststroke, always keeping her head above water. I treasure that moment. Because she was thoroughly relaxed and enjoying it. Then Desi got home, and she got mad again. There were only those few moments that there was no one to worry about.”
As the year drew on, Desi found it impossible to play the genial Latino around the office. His smile turned into an unconvincing rictus, and casual conversations took on a metallic edge. The higher he rose, the greater became his fear of falling. “Failure is the most terrible thing in our business,” he observed. “When we fail, the whole world knows it. When a Fuller Brush man fails, does the whole world know it? That’s why we break our ass not to.” Assurances from Lucy were not enough to put him at ease anymore. He lost his temper at home, often over trivial matters. “He stopped discussing any of our personal problems,” she was to say. “I had to dig and dig to discover what caused his rages, and generally it had nothing to do with anything I’d done. I wanted to help him, find out where I was at fault. But as soon as I started questioning, he’d stalk angrily out of the room. Or the house.”
Edgy and unwell, Desi consulted his physician. What Dr. Marcus Rabwin learned could hardly have been a surprise. The patient’s colon was full of diverticula, inflamed by continuous mental pressure and tension. Untreated or exacerbated, this was the kind of ailment that could kill. The doctor advised Desi to rent a house on the beach and get away from the studio the minute he finished filming. “Have somebody drive you to the beach and stay there until Monday morning,” he prescribed. “Have Lucy and the children join you there for Saturday and Sunday and don’t even think about the business. During the summer take six or eight weeks off, and even if they offer you the entire CBS network to come back to work during those weeks, tell them to stick it.”
Looking back, Desi agreed that this was “wonderful advice and it helped a lot, at least for a while.” A very short while. Then other panaceas took over: booze, women, and intense labor. You had to work pretty goddamn hard if you were going to be a Big Fish.
CHAPTER TEN
“Why can’t I be happy?”
MORE THAN one industrialist has acquired a movie studio in the hopes of diversifying his holdings and maybe meeting a few starlets along the way. Almost all have unloaded the investment within a few years, victimized by circumstance, bad timing, and the Hollywood operators who always manage to fleece “civilians”—their pejorative term for those outside of show business.
Howard Hughes was just such a civilian, entering major motion picture production with the purchase of RKO in 1948. At first he enjoyed the glamour; columnists coupled his name with actresses including Linda Darnell, Yvonne De Carlo, Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, and Terry Moore (who later claimed to have been secretly married to him). His reputation for eccentricity took another leap when he paid particular attention to Jane Russell’s poitrine during filming of The Outlaw. Noticing that the leading lady’s lavish bust rose and sagged unpredictably, he asked for a drawing board and a pencil. “This is really just a very simple engineering problem,” he told a designer. He sketched a brassiere that would stabilize the focal points of the picture and saw to it that it was manufactured and worn. Extensively hyped, the Western made Russell a star, and established the name of Hughes in Hollywood. Unfortunately for him, the rest of RKO’s movies could not be treated as engineering problems; what followed The Outlaw was a string of undistinguished failures.
By 1955 Hughes wanted out. He sold the studio to the General Tire & Rubber Company; that company had no more luck than he did, and two years later it put RKO on the block. General Tire’s intention was to take a loss, offsetting capital gains for the past fiscal year. For $6.5 million a buyer would get all assets of properties in Los Angeles and Culver City, including sets and office equipment. “Everything,” said the company representative when he waved the offer before Desi, “except unproduced scripts and stories and unfinished films.”
The sum was more than Desilu had, and perhaps more than it could borrow. Before Desi dismissed the idea out of hand, however, he called the Great Eccentric himself and told him about the prospective sale of his old studio’s properties.
“What do they want for them?” barked Howard Hughes.
Desi gave him the details.
“Grab it! Even if you tear them down and make them into parking lots, you’ve gotta make money.”
Hughes’s argument not only convinced Desi, it persuaded a lender; the Bank of America advanced $2 million after he negotiated the selling price down to $6.15 million. One key individual had been deliberately shut out of the bargaining—Lucy. Leery of her reaction, Desi asked his chief financial officer, Edwin E. Holly, to break the news. According to Holly, Desi “wasn’t going to go out and tell Lucy she was going to have to mortgage the house, the kids, and everything else. This was, in effect, putting everything they and the company had on the line.” Holly approached the I Love Lucy set with trepidation, keeping out of the star’s way while she filmed a scene with Vivian Vance. When the two women took a break he hustled Lucy into her dressing room, briskly went through highlights of the RKO acquisition, and waited for the explosion. “Is this your recommendation?” was her sole
question. Holly nodded. “Then go do it,” Lucy told him. He responded with a mix of awe and dismay. Lucy “walked out of the dressing room right onstage with Vivian—she had just made the biggest decision she’d ever make in her lifetime from a business standpoint, and went right back into the routine they had been doing.”
To a degree, she was protecting herself. It was true that I Love Lucy was an autocracy. Desi liked to tell the writers that whenever there was a disagreement about stories or gags, there would be a simple vote: “We’ll do it democratically. Lucy wins.” To underline her value, when she tripped and fell over a cable, he ran over, ostentatiously helped her up, and said to the room, “Amigos, anything happens to her, we’re all in the shrimp business.”
Yet much of this deference was for display, and Lucy knew it. As Desilu’s vice president she had become little more than an ornament. Desi and his executives bought and developed the television programs going out under the company name; they were the ones who met the payroll and ran the day-to-day operations. It was an arrangement Lucy could live with; as an administrator Desi still had her full faith and credit. It was only as a husband that he had crucially diminished his wife’s trust.