Ball of Fire Read online

  That he did. And on November 6, 1957, U.S. Steel doubled its rating in the bargain.

  The second show, broadcast a month later, did not enjoy the same smooth transition. Originally, Bette Davis was scheduled to be the guest on the program subtitled “The Celebrity Next Door.” She was still lording it over her former classmate from the John Murray Anderson school thirty years before. The movies’ grand dame demanded a $20,000 fee, return airfare to her home in Maine, and, in case anyone doubted her enduring star power, equal billing with the Arnazes. She got them all—and then suffered a horseback riding accident, which aggravated a back injury, broke her arm, and put her out of commission.

  Second choice was Tallulah Bankhead. The casting seemed appropriate: Bankhead’s hooting, extravagant style was widely considered the source of Davis’s performance in the 1950 film All About Eve. Asked about that movie, Bankhead claimed to bear no ill feelings. “Bette and I are very good friends,” she purred in her distinctive whiskey drawl. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t say to her face—both of them.” This malice, coupled with her dependence on alcohol, made rehearsals a running psychodrama. The actress would arrive at the set promptly at 9:30 a.m. But, complained Desi, “she wouldn’t really wake up until eleven. Between eleven and twelve she was fine. But one p.m., right after lunch, we’d lose her again.”

  Lucy was not used to having her orders questioned on the set. Only a few times had she backed down when challenged, and then only when a director asserted himself. Performers never dared to disobey her.

  The condition was about to change. Lucy had a way of snapping her fingers and giving line readings to cast members; when she tried that on her guest, Tallulah grabbed her hand and responded before the cast in a distinctive throaty bellow, “Don’t ever do that to me!” Shocked at such a mutinous reply, Lucy could only mumble, “Well, I want you to read the lines right.” “I have been acting for a long time,” Bankhead reminded her. “I know how to read my lines. Don’t give me readings.” With that she walked off the set. The move was just another stagy tantrum; later in the day Bankhead came back and rehearsed as if nothing had happened. But tensions rebuilt over the next week as Tallulah showed up late, blew her lines, and bumped into the furniture.

  The night before the actual filming, Desi invited principals, writers, and selected personnel into his office for a drink. There, he felt, last-minute notes could be given in an atmosphere of conviviality, and past difficulties could be smiled away. As the group sat in a circle chatting amiably, Lucy made a special effort to charm. She indicated the crocheted garment Bankhead wore around her shoulders: “I love that sweater.”

  “My dahling, take it!” Tallulah practically threw the thing in Lucy’s face, despite her protests. There was a moment of icy silence, broken by Vivan Vance’s cheery remark: “Well, for me, the slacks. I love the slacks.” Tallulah promptly stood up and peeled off her slacks. Anything to oblige. She was not wearing any panties.

  Madelyn covered her eyes. Bob Weiskopf jumped from the couch and headed out the door. “Desi, get her a robe!” Lucy yelled. “Get her a robe!”

  “Tallulah was all set to sit there with her legs crossed on the floor for the rest of the evening,” recalled Maury Thompson. “Here came Desi with a dressing gown and put it on her and she condescended.” It was no wonder that Lucy chain-smoked up to the time she went on camera for the real performance, and that Desi planned to go on a bender as soon as they wrapped—after the inevitable retakes, of course. What possessed them to hire this aging egomaniac lush in the first place? he wondered.

  Tallulah surprised them all. When it counted, she knew every line cold, hit every mark, elicited every laugh. She was so professional that it was Lucy who flubbed words so badly a scene had to be reshot. Later Tallulah told the press, “I’ve got not even one picayune derogatory thing to say about those wonderful people.” That sentence alone should have warned the Arnazes to duck. “Of course,” she went on, “I did have pneumonia at the time. And someone nearly blinded me one day at rehearsals with hairspray. But Lucy? She’s divine to work with! And Desi? He’s brilliant. He has a temper, however. But that’s because he’s fat. It worries him.”

  The Ford Lucille Ball–Desi Arnaz Show outrated all other programs the week the episode was broadcast, and Variety, like many another paper, found the leading ladies “an irresistible combination.” Nevertheless “The Celebrity Next Door” was a program that Lucy found hard to watch in later years: “It reminds me how I allowed Bankhead to mop up the floor with us.” There would be no more mopping-up from the guests. From here on, misery would be an inside job.

  The odd thing was,” said a veteran of the one-hour shows, “that while Desi was going downhill personally, he remained at the absolute top of his game professionally.” Bert Granet, who produced those programs, agreed: “Desi was a very, very bright man. And a wonderful boss.” However, he added, that wonderful boss “would sometimes go away for two or three weeks at a time. He loved to play. Desi was really a silent-picture star at heart.”

  His flamboyance, coupled with a gambler’s instinct and a seducer’s charm, had brought Desi every material object he could have desired. And he was not parsimonious with his fortune. When one of the hour-long programs was in trouble, Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf came up with a saving idea. Recollecting that comedian George Jessel had made a long-running routine out of phone calls to his mother, the writers created “tag scenes” in which Lucy telephoned Desi and made funny comments about the show she (and the audience) had just seen. It extended her airtime without involving her in any of costume changes or story lines, and, incidentally, saved the show. Lucy showered the men with praise, but Desi had a more dramatic way of showing his gratitude: he gave each of them a Jaguar sports car.

  Generous though his gesture was, there were not enough Jaguars in London or, for that matter, writers in Hollywood to keep the Lucy-Desi program from going stale. Under new sponsorship for the 1958–1959 season, it was given a new and ungainly listing: The Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse Presents the Lucille Ball–Desi Arnaz Show. Looking back, Granet regretfully acknowledged: “Every comedy show reaches a point where it has outwritten itself. So you do the best you can to keep the thing afloat. Of these hour-long shows, five or six of them are really memorable. The rest are probably better left forgotten.” One of the most memorable featured Lucy’s great admirer, Red Skelton. The comedian had performed his Chaplinesque pantomime, “Freddy the Freeloader,” for decades. It was never quite the same from performance to performance, delighting his fans, who found something new every time they watched the sketch. But that very mutability was what drove Lucy to distraction. She wanted every take to be exactly like the one before—except a little bit better—and ultimately she showed Skelton how to do his own material. Professional to his fingertips, Red followed her instructions. But they were never to work together again.

  The most forgettable episode featured the acting couple Ida Lupino and Howard Duff. Lucy warned her director, Jerry Thorpe, that Lupino had no gift for comedy, and the result bore her out. The scene is a summer cabin in Vermont. A travel agent has booked the Ricardos in for the week, forgetting that he has already leased the place to the Duffs. The two pairs ultimately agree to share the place, and so begins the familiar, and no longer very risible, boys-against-the-girls routine, with a worn-looking Desi and an acerbic Lucy throwing lines in a game with no catchers. Offscreen, matters were every bit as grim. Desi made some verbal passes at Lupino in the presence of his wife and her husband; Lucy reacted coldly. This was followed by a greater drop in temperature when Lupino learned of Lucy’s misgivings about her acting skills. The gelid relations between the couples was enough to wreck the timing and ruin the program. Variety remarked that “Lucy’s Summer Vacation” was the only episode that “falls flat most of the way,” and Bob Weiskopf later admitted, “This was not our finest hour.”

  As the 1950s wound down, both William Frawley and Vivian Vance took advantage of their natio
nal celebrity. Frawley recorded an album on the Dot label. Bill Frawley Sings the Old Ones presented the actor in a serious mode, crooning with surprising control and a mellifluous voice. The numbers included several that he had helped to popularize in his vaudeville days, including “Melancholy Baby,” “Carolina in the Morning,” “For Me and My Gal,” and “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now.” Vance filmed the pilot for a half-hour situation comedy based on the Patrick Dennis novel Guestward Ho! The show was not, strictly speaking, a spin-off of I Love Lucy, but Vance would play a very similar character. This time out, however, she would be the lead. On the first take, the star seemed to freeze in her tracks. A second and third take found her equally immobile. The director asked her what was wrong. Vance explained: “This is the first time in eight years I’ve been in my own light.” She had been dominated by Lucy for so long she scarcely knew how to move on her own. (The show did not find a buyer until 1960, when Joanne Dru took the part. The latter-day Guestward Ho! ran for thirty-eight episodes.)

  Meanwhile, Lucy made herself as busy as possible, if only to keep from obsessing about the continuing failure of her marriage. Much of her thought and energy went into the establishment of the Desilu Workshop, an homage to the school Lela Rogers had set up for young hopefuls in the RKO days. Abetted by Maury Thompson, Lucy auditioned some 1,700 applicants and chose 22 to take lessons and, eventually, to perform in the company’s two-hundred-seat theater. Lucy took great pains to explain that her classes were strictly nonprofit. In fact, she said, Desilu lost money on the deal: “We pay them sixty dollars a week—the Actors Equity minimum—and they’re free to work wherever they want. They’re not tied to us at all.” She bemoaned the catch-22 of show business: “You can’t get a job unless you’ve acted, and you can’t act unless you’ve had a job. We’re just trying to give them exposure.”

  As a teacher and adviser, Lucy had no rivals. She was an unquestioned authority, the biggest name in television comedy. The students cared little about the imperfect hourly shows, and had no notion of their teacher’s collapsing personal life. They regarded her as a goddess, and their adoration helped to salve a severely damaged ego. But it was not enough. Lucy had always flirted with superstition and numerology—she had been convinced, for example, that the letters A and R, as in “Arnaz” and “Ricardo,” brought good luck. Now she turned to astrology, accompanying Arlene Dahl, another unhappily married redhead, to the lectures of Carroll Righter.

  The man who called himself “the Gregarious Aquarius” had risen to the status of Astrologer to the Stars. Among his clients were Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Susan Hayward, and Charlie Chaplin. Dahl was especially impressed; she attended many of Righter’s “zodiac parties,” given for his favorites. The fete he gave for her had a Leo theme, complete with lion. The big cat was so drugged he fell into the swimming pool and had to be hauled out, but no one saw this as an embarrassment. Righter was much too important to be mocked. It was common knowledge that he had told Hayward the best time to sign a film contract was at exactly 2:47 a.m. She set her alarm for 2:45 so that she could obey his instructions. Like the others, she agreed with the astrologer’s self-appraisal: “They need me here. Just like they need a doctor.”

  The stargazer traced the roots of the Arnazes’ difficulties to the constellations. Lucy was a Leo and her husband a Pisces. Soon other astrologists summed up the fate of the union. One report read: “Desi is emotional, tender, sentimental, easily swayed by moods and appeals to sympathy. Lucille is as committed and loyal as Desi is, but Lucille is uncomfortable feeling or expressing softness, neediness, vulnerability, and emotion in general. She can easily dominate or trample over Desi’s feelings, and this can be a source of considerable unhappiness.”

  When the unhappiness persisted, Lucy turned away from the heavens and sought earthly help. She turned to the apostle of self-esteem, the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale. In his heyday from the late 1940s to the early 1980s, the pastor of Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate Church was the most popular minister in America. His book The Power of Positive Thinking sold in the millions (he wrote forty-six books in all), and his sermons were mailed to 750,000 adherents every month. A believer in “positive imaging,” a mixture of religious philosophy and motivational psychology, Peale had special appeal for middle- and high-level executives. In a typical speech to Merrill Lynch real estate associates, he declared: “If you see yourself as inferior in any way, and you hold that image in your conscious mind, it will presently, by the process of intellectual osmosis, sink into the unconscious and you will be what you visualize. If, on the contrary, you see yourself as organized, controlled, studious, a thinker, a worker, believing in your talent and ability and yourself, over a period of time that is what you will become.”

  Here was a philosophy Lucy could apprehend. She had been reading Peale’s words for some time, and when he visited California on a speaking tour, she sought him out and invited him to her Palm Springs home. Actress and singer Sheila MacRae, then suffering from her own marital tribulations, remembered: “We kneeled in front of her new fireplace and prayed with him for about an hour, and we both cried and hugged each other.” More could be gleaned from this inspiring figure, Lucy decided, and invited Dr. and Mrs. Peale to dinner sans Desi. Peale asked if he might bring his brother along. She was only too glad to oblige. The brother, as it happened, was an obvious alcoholic, and when Lucy tried to steer the conversation around to her current difficulties, Dr. Peale thrummed, “If only you knew what a role model you two are—a marriage with love.”

  Lucy followed that unsatisfactory meeting with another. She wrote to Peale “in heartbreaking terms, and so he invited her to come to New York.” Psychiatrist Smiley Blanton “was Dr. Peale’s right-hand man. Norman wanted it known that she could talk to Smiley—whose wife just ‘happened’ to have a script for her to read.” (Lucy did read the script of Mrs. Margaret Gray Blanton’s best-seller, Bernadette of Lourdes, and persuaded Desi to have a look. He signed the author to adapt the book for television.) Deliberately ignoring evidence that she was being courted for her fame, Lucy devoured Peale’s and Blanton’s books. Surely these wise men would show her the way to tranquillity.

  While she was researching, she obtained more immediate help from her cousin Cleo, who flew into town and listened to Lucy’s litany of sorrows. “Why can’t I be happy?” Lucy cried. Cleo replied with another question: “What is it you want more than anything in the world?” For a woman supposedly wracked by domestic woes, Lucy gave an answer that was astonishing to both of them: “My career.”

  Later in the week she bought a ticket to the Broadway comedy The Marriage-Go-Round starring Claudette Colbert, an old acquaintance from the war bond days. Backstage, she ran into another Hollywood veteran, Greer Garson, appearing down the street in Auntie Mame. Instead of being mobbed, the three actresses were alone and unsought. They wound up in Colbert’s apartment for a late-night meal. “So here we were,” Lucy wistfully remembered, “three old broads making scrambled eggs at two o’clock in the morning and bored to tears with each other!”

  By now nothing seemed to work. Lucy remembered the words of Humphrey Bogart when he was slowly dying of cancer. He and his wife Lauren Bacall had no financial problems. In fact, he lamented, “Money is about all we do have.” That had become the Arnazes’ story. Desilu was booming. In addition to the Lucy programs, the studio owned a group of top-rated hits including The Ann Sothern Show, The Walter Winchell File, The Texan, and, of course, The Untouchables. In addition, Desilu provided the facilities and talent for such successful TV series as The Betty Hutton Show, The Danny Thomas Show, DecemberBride, The Millionaire, and Wyatt Earp. These were all manufactured in a place that had become, in terms of real estate and number of projects, the largest television studio in the world. Desilu boasted twenty-six sound stages and forty-three acres of back lot, far in excess of what such old giants as Warner Brothers, MGM, and Twentieth Century–Fox had.

  Lucy and Desi were always mentioned as a pa
ir, but their sole link these days was a monetary one. The affection had drained away. They were sleeping in separate rooms and barely communicating with each other, appearing together in public principally to maintain the corporate image of Desilu. Cosmopolitan sent Frederick Christian, one of its writers, to interview them; he came away with a very different image from the one he expected to see. In his view, Desi had the aspect of “a Latin American dictator, relaxing in sports clothes.” Christian continued: “He behaves rather like a dictator, too—not a relaxing one, but a hardworking, demanding one.” The only constant in his onscreen persona and the real thing was “the strong Cuban accent, which many believe is affected for the TV role but which is authentic. In life, the accent is liberally embellished with American profanities, but they constitute a kind of working language and are used mainly for emphasis and for release.

  “Desi’s accent is so strong that there are times when even Lucy cannot quite understand him.

  “ ‘What do I say here?’ she asked one day during a rehearsal.

  “ ‘You say, ‘I “can’t.” ’

  “ ‘Can?’

  “ ‘Can’t.’

  “ ‘Are you saying “can” or “can’t”?’

  “ ‘I’m saying “can’t,” dammit! Can’t!’ ”

  Christian knew the separation rumors and asked about them. At first Lucy denied everything: “Desi and I have been in this whole thing long enough to be accustomed to them. We’ve got through that kind of thing before and, we’ll get through it again. Maybe it’s good for some couples to be separated for a time—maybe it can renew and refresh a relationship.”

  “Or wreck it completely,” the journalist suggested.

  “Yes, there’s always that chance,” Lucy conceded. Her face was grave—so grave that Christian concluded, “Driving back to my hotel, I kept seeing their faces: Desi’s lined and intense. Lucy’s drawn, tired, and worried.” He considered I Love Lucy and “thought of Bing Crosby’s comment: ‘This show’s got a lot of heart.’ It does. And some of it may be broken.”