Ball of Fire Read online

  For the 1956–1957 season, Lucy rubber-stamped a decision to relocate the Ricardos and the Mertzes. The quartet moved from New York City to suburban Connecticut in order to refresh the series and give the writers new plot lines, and Ricky moved up in his professional world—he was now the owner of his own nightclub, the Babalu.

  The changes could be effective; a classic episode, “Lucy Does the Tango,” was produced during this period. The two couples decide to earn money by raising chickens in their backyards. When the hens fail to produce, Ricky threatens to sell the house and move back to the city. But now Lucy and Ethel have fallen in love with country life; retreat is unthinkable. To foil Desi they buy dozens of eggs, conceal them in their clothing, and proceed to the chicken house, where they plan to stuff the nests. Before they can get to their destination, however, Desi interrupts them. He needs Lucy right now, to go over a tango for an upcoming PTA fund-raiser. Lucy and Vivian deliberately rehearsed without eggs, and their reactions at show time were authentic and explosively funny. Indeed, the dodging and writhing, and the final crunching of eggs in her costume, brought Lucy a sustained sixty-fivesecond laugh—the longest of her career. “No matter what we wrote for the scene with the eggs,” recalled Robert Schiller, “Lucille did it better than we could have imagined it.” His partner Robert Weiskopf added: “And that bit where Frawley opens the door and hits Viv in the ass, cracking the eggs, was the topper.”

  As usual, Desi struggled to maintain his composure when scenes like that were under way. Several weeks later—and for very different reasons—his façade broke down when he was one of the hosts at the Ninth Annual Emmy Awards. “Usually Arnaz, despite personal problems, was completely professional,” recalls Geoffrey Mark Fidelman in The Lucy Book. This evening, however, Desi’s manner was “forced and overdone.” It was the only time in Desi’s career when his drinking was detectable onscreen. Formally attired, sweating profusely, he kept telling bad jokes to an unresponsive audience, and weaving in and out of focus, flummoxing the cameramen.

  During this period, no one knew which Arnaz would appear on the set or in the office, the high Desi and or the low one, the gregarious glad-hander or the irresponsible alcoholic, the great straight man or the distracted executive, the affectionate family man or the driven womanizer. Yet throughout it all, he remained one of the best talent scouts and developers in the business. One evening, as he and Lucy idly watched bandleader Horace Heidt on his NBC show, a five-year-old percussionist debuted. Billed as “the World’s Tiniest Drummer,” Keith Thibodeaux possessed stage presence, musical ability, and that great desideratum, a fleeting resemblance to Desi IV. Within days Desi Sr. signed the child and hired Keith’s father as a Desilu publicist, thereby assuring his loyalty. Under the name Richard Keith, the little musician appeared on I Love Lucy in the part of Little Ricky. The cast welcomed him aboard—with the exception of Frawley, who did his customary curmudgeon act. As the boy amused himself by drawing on a scratch pad during breaks, someone asked, “Richard, what are you doing?” From the sidelines, Frawley grumbled, “He’s writing me out.” To the Cuban community, as to many other Latinos, Thibodeaux actually served to widen the cultural separation between father and son. In Life on the Hyphen, a study of Hispanic-Americana, Gustavo Pérez Firmat observes: “[Little Ricky’s] appearances in the show make clear that, his father’s bedtime stories notwithstanding, the cultural identity is papi’s alone. Little Ricky couldn’t speak accented English even if he tried. There is a healthy continuity between father and son, but there is also a healthy distance. When Ricky gets old enough to play an instrument, he follows in his father’s steps by choosing drums. But instead of the Afro-Cuban tumbadora, little Ricky plays the American trap drums.”

  Offscreen, young Thibodeaux played another kind of role as he quickly became absorbed into the Arnaz family. “It was as if we had three children instead of two,” Desi wrote proudly. The truth was not quite so benign. Although Keith was two years older than Desi IV, the boys did become fast friends, and under Desi’s tutelage they learned how to swim, fish, and ride horses. From the outside, it seemed an idyll—a little boy turned into a TV star, and enjoying the benefits of two happy families. In reality, Keith’s father and mother later divorced, and the elder Thibodeaux married a Desilu secretary. Chez Arnaz, Keith remembered, “Desi was a really great guy when he wasn’t drinking.” Unhappily, those occasions grew more infrequent as the seasons went by: “As kids, we’d definitely stay away from him when he was drunk.” One evening when Keith was sleeping over, the boys were awakened by a ruckus outside the bedroom. Desi had heard that his son’s tutor had called Desi IV “spoiled” and later, Keith recalled, “caught the guy talking to a girl in the living room and just beat him badly. Desi IV and I hid in the maid’s quarters.”

  Marcella Rabwin, wife of Dr. Marcus Rabwin, Desi’s physician, recollected the Low Desi. When he imbibed heavily, “there wasn’t a personality change, but an intensification of all the worst things about him—the swearing got much worse. His language was always offensive. He used the worst language I’ve ever heard. It would get even worse when he got drunk. But it took a lot of liquor to make him drunk—he drank all evening long.”

  At the same time, the High Desi operated his business with an amalgam of luck, instinct, and acuity. It was he who saw dollar signs upon reading The Untouchables by retired G-man Eliot Ness, leader of the group that nailed Al Capone. Warner Brothers had taken an option on the book, but never got around to developing it. Desi ordered his legal department to stay on the qui vive: the day Warner dropped its option they were to grab the project for Desilu. Warner let the contract lapse, and Desilu acquired The Untouchables. Desi assigned a writer, Paul Monash, bounced the first draft, got the cops-and-robbers scenario he wanted, and made plans for a two-part series bankrolled at a half-million dollars. His top executives were against this extravagance, but the matter was settled with a Lucy-style vote: the opposition made their case and Desi overruled them.

  There were more obstacles. Desi’s childhood friend, Sonny Capone, called when he learned of the undertaking. “Why you? Why did you have to do it?” he demanded. Desi gave his standard rationale: “If I don’t do it somebody else is going to do it, and maybe it’s better that I’m going to do it.” Sonny replied with a million-dollar nuisance lawsuit claiming defamation of character.

  And that was the least of the worries. Desi entertained a brief fantasy about playing Eliot Ness himself, but his first serious choice of leading man was Van Heflin. When that actor turned it down, Desi went to another Van, Johnson, who readily agreed to do the pilot film for $10,000. Desilu proceeded with arrangements, ordering sets to be built, contracting for cameras, crews, and the requisite technicians. Less than forty-eight hours before the shooting was to begin, Evie Johnson phoned. Speaking in the dual role of Van’s wife and his manager, she demanded a 100 percent salary increase. After all, Evie reminded Desi, The Untouchables program was going to be in two parts. Upon reflection she’d decided the right price would be $10,000 per episode.

  “It was Saturday night,” Desi rancorously noted. On Monday morning the first scene to be filmed “was the one in which Eliot Ness took a truck, busted into a brewery with his men, and proceeded to tear it apart. We had about 150 union people—and you can’t cancel a call on a weekend.

  “Evie knew this, so she was putting a gun in my back. ‘Either give him $20,000,’ she said, ‘or he won’t be there Monday morning.’ ”

  Desi slammed down the phone and called his chief of production. The advice: pay the $20,000. “It’s going to cost you $150,000 if you don’t shoot on Monday.”

  “Maybe it will,” replied the boss, “but I am not going to kiss this lady’s ass.” So saying, Desi began to comb through the Academy Directory. He settled on the name and image of Robert Stack. The former juvenile lead was best known for having given Deanna Durbin her first kiss more than ten years before; nevertheless, at that moment Desi professed to see in him an “Alan Ladd
kind of quality and the same even-toned performance.” Operating on adrenaline and coffee, he tracked the actor down at Chasen’s on Saturday night, made an offer via phone: $10,000 for the two-part Untouchables, with a guarantee of $7,500 per episode plus 15 percent of the profits if the show became a weekly series. By the time Stack got home, a script was waiting for him. He read it and before dawn agreed to the conditions without a written contract—Desi’s word was good enough.

  With the cast in place, Desi went to William Paley and announced Desilu’s series for the fall: The Texan, with Rory Calhoun, The Ann Sothern Show, starring Lucy’s old friend, and The Untouchables. The CBS chief agreed to run the first two, but passed on the third. In the first place, Paley grumbled, “What the hell are you going to do after you do Capone?”

  Desi replied: “Don’t you know how many crooks you had in this country? We can go on forever telling the stories about all the gangsters.”

  “Well, Chico, there is another problem. Paramount is doing a pilot for us about gangsters.”

  Insisting emptily that his was better, Desi went hunting for a new home for The Untouchables. He found it at ABC. There was yet another hurdle. Desi sensed that an authoritative voice-over, someone from the Capone era, was needed to make the program work. Walter Winchell seemed ideal for the role—except that he was involved in a lawsuit with the network. Moreover, Lucy had never forgiven Winchell his cheap scoop, nearly wrecking her career with news about the Communist Party registration. Yes, she acknowledged, the columnist had backtracked and apologized. But that was only after the public and the President had come to her rescue. Operating under the classic Hollywood motto “I’ll never speak to you again—until I need you,” Desi pointed out, “Look, honey, this is business, so let bygones be bygones.” She allowed herself to be persuaded. ABC grumbled about Winchell, but had no voice in casting.

  In the end, everything went Desi’s way. The two-part Untouchables performed so well in the ratings that ABC agreed to do it as a series, underwriting thirty-two hour-long episodes, each one bloodier and more violent than the one before. In another extension of the Desilu family, the show would be produced by Quinn Martin, the husband of Madelyn Pugh.

  All this time Desi was rolling sevens as a high-stakes gambler and genially telling the press he was a “verry locky Cuban.” He believed that his dark side was out of view. Only occasionally would an article hint that things were less than ideal at Desilu. In one issue Life commented, “Sometimes the old worry over playing second-fiddle to Lucy’s fame shows beneath his brashness.” For instance, the story continued, when he bought a champion racehorse the papers paid more attention to Lucy. With derisive attention to Desi’s accent, the magazine offered a quote: “Geez, how do you like that? I pay 31,000 bucks for dees horse, and who gets her peecture on zee front page—my wife.” This was accompanied by a wide smile, as if to indicate that it was all in fun. It was not.

  As the anger and resentment mounted, so did the need to go on long alcoholic binges. Desi got too many calories from liquor, and began putting on pounds that he could not diet away. His face was frequently flushed, and instead of making him appear youthful, the hair dye only seemed to accentuate his onrushing middle age. Important documents were brought to Desi in the morning when he was clearheaded. The drinking could begin as early as 10 a.m., and after lunch it was useless to talk to him seriously about contractual matters. That meant involving Lucy in the process, if only to rubber-stamp decisions that had already been made. Not that it mattered; for the most part she was content to leave the big Desilu matters to others. Only on trivial items did she exert her authority, ruling on the commissary menus, and choosing the sites for company picnics. It was another manifestation of her deference to men, something that she could not shake even now. And besides, whenever matters got too complicated, whenever the alcohol and abuse became too much to bear, she could always retreat to the character she had invented: television’s own Lucille Ball.

  At the conclusion of the 1956–1957 season, Lucy, Desi, and CBS agreed that they ought to go out on top. There had been a few tight moments: Charles Van Doren’s last two weeks on Twenty-One (rigged, as it turned out) had topped Lucy in the ratings. And there were other moments when Desi regretted selling all the past I Love Lucy shows to CBS for $4.5 million, a sum that was beginning to look like a bargain for the network. But overall Lucy and Desi had exceeded their most exaggerated hopes. Almost every aspect of popular culture had been influenced by the show. Licensing fees brought them dividends from a syndicated “I Love Lucy” comic strip running in 132 newspapers, and from the sale of a million Little Ricky dolls. Between the Arnazes and the cast there had been more than two hundred awards, including five Emmys and twenty-three Emmy nominations. Only so many changes could be wrung out of the same half-hour format, with the same conniving couples. I Love Lucy had even run out of ideas for amusing guest shots, like the visit from Orson Welles, playing Orson Welles, egomaniest magician and Shakespearean ham, or the appearance of George Reeves, TV’s Superman, at Little Ricky’s birthday party. Yet because the public still loved Lucy, Desi devised a scheme to take advantage of this profitable affection: the Ricardos would carry on in semimonthly hour-long episodes. The notion of giving the Mertzes their own spinoff comedy was quickly chloroformed by Vance. She refused to make a half-hour pilot because it would extend her on-camera relationship with Frawley. “Whenever I received a new I Love Lucy script,” she declared, “I raced through it, praying that there wouldn’t be a scene where we had to be in bed together.” Desi offered a $50,000 bonus if she would change her mind, but Vance was adamant.

  Undeterred, he proposed a dozen new hour-long Lucy shows to CBS. The network allowed him to produce five. Each would be sponsored by the Ford Motor Company, which insisted on—and ultimately received—top billing. The first Ford Lucille Ball–Desi Arnaz Show, subtitled “Lucy Takes a Cruise to Havana,” was partially filmed in Cuba only a week before the Castro revolution. Built around a flashback, the program begins with columnist Hedda Hopper grilling the Ricardos and the Mertzes in Connecticut. How did it all begin? asks the news hen. In a dissolve to the past, Lucy McGillicuddy and her friend Suzy McNamara (Ann Sothern) are seen on a vacation cruise to Havana. Onboard they meet singer Rudy Vallee, and in Cuba Lucy is introduced to the man who will be the love of her life, musician Ricky Ricardo. At a café Lucy tries to persuade Vallee to hire Ricky for his band, thereby bringing him to New York. Lucy’s sales talk is lubricated with booze, and before the evening is finished she and Suzy are arrested for being drunk and disorderly. They just barely get up the gangplank before their boat departs for the States.

  Seasoned though they were, the four writers had script trouble. The weekly continuity of the half-hour Lucys had build up an audience of devotees over the years. It needed no “back story” to explain the characters. The one-hour format had to start from square one. Over thirty minutes, observed Bob Schiller, many episodes could be built on one large comedy scene. Not true of the long form, where shows had to have two or three to sustain the humor. In his view, “these were never as successful as the shorter ones, despite larger budgets and longer rehearsal time.”

  That was not how Desi saw it, however. To him, the cruise show was a triumph from start to finish: “It was beautifully written and it played great.” The comment was more than hyperbole. He approved the story line and the gags, played straight man with his usual cunning and enthusiasm, oversaw the editing, and pronounced the finished product too impressive to be further reduced. When William Paley called to find out how the show had turned out, Desi assured the CBS chief that it was the best work he and Lucy had ever done. “There’s only one little problem,” he added. “We got an hour and fifteen minutes.” Not to worry, Paley assured him. Simply cut the seventy-five minutes to the appropriate length. No, Desi protested, that wouldn’t do. Paley was willing to meet him halfway: “Well make your opening show an hour and a half and the rest will be an hour.”

  �
�I tried that, too, but it also louses it up. It slows it down here and there. What we’ve got is a great hour and fifteen minutes.”

  “Now, Chico, let me explain something to you. Television has fifteen-minute shows, half-hour shows, hour shows, sometimes even hour-and-a-half or two-hour shows, but it does not have any such thing as an hour-and-fifteen-minute show.”

  “Well, that’s what we’ve got. Why can’t we get fifteen more minutes from whoever follows us?”

  “Right after your hour special comes The United States Steel Hour.”

  “So tell them to give us fifteen minutes of their time.”

  There followed a sulfurous exchange, after which Paley concluded, “You want me to call United States Steel, tell them they’ve got such a lousy show it wouldn’t hurt them any if they give you fifteen minutes of their time.”

  “Would you mind if I called them?”

  “No, do whatever you want, just make sure you keep me out of it.”

  Now all Desi had to do was convince U.S. Steel and Ford to accede to his wishes. Operating with maximum chutzpah, he located the vice president in charge of TV for U.S. Steel. Aware that The United States Steel Hour had languished in the ratings, Desi proposed: “You give me fifteen minutes from the front of your show. Instead of you going on at ten o’clock, you go on at ten-fifteen. At the end of our show, at ten-fourteen exactly, I will come on, in person, as Desi Arnaz, not as Ricky, and thank The United States Steel Hour for allowing Lucy and me to cut into your time period, tell the audience we have seen your show and it is one of the best dramatic shows we have ever seen, and to make sure to stay tuned for it.”

  “Who pays for those fifteen minutes we are going to give up?”

  Improvising fluently, Desi declared: “Our sponsor, the Ford Motor Company.”

  “You got yourself a deal.”