Ball of Fire Page 27

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “From Cuban *to Reuben”

  FILMING of the last Lucille Ball–Desi Arnaz show on March 2, 1960, coincided with Desi’s forty-third birthday. This time around, no one on the set expected a celebratory spirit, so none were disappointed—except for the program’s guest performers, Ernie Kovacs and his wife, Edie Adams. The comedian and the singer had just arrived in town and knew little of the impending divorce. They learned the hard way. Edgy and querulous, Lucy insisted that Kovacs, whose specialty was improvisation, read his lines exactly as written. She also demanded that Adams lose her pageboy hairstyle. No sooner had Adams complied than Lucy decided that the old look was better. “I just couldn’t seem to please her,” the singer remarked. “If I concentrated on learning my blocking, she’d say, ‘Stop! That’s no way to read that line!’ So, I’d do it full out as if I were on Broadway, and she’d say, ‘Stop! You’re not in your light!’ So it went, back and forth. And not just with me, but with all of the cast and crew.”

  Desi had taken over direction of the show at the beginning of the 1959–1960 season, and he carried out his chores with a professional sangfroid as if to stay above the battle. Nonetheless, conceded Adams, long experience at watching others at the helm made Desi “a marvelous director because he knew what was funny and what was not.” Moreover, “he was a hands-on floor director, as opposed to someone who just sat up in the booth and talked over a microphone.” But Desi kept his hands off when dealing with Lucy. He addressed her through others—“Would you please tell Miss Ball to move over?” She responded in kind—“Will you tell Mr. Arnaz I can’t move over there?” The plot of the show concerned Ricky’s inability to find work as a bandleader. In order to get a gig for her husband, Lucy entices Kovacs to pay a visit to the house. Her plans are thwarted when Kovacs is charmed by the boy and decides to hire Little Ricky rather than the big one. Lucy refuses to give up. She pastes on a mustache and tries to worm her way into Kovacs’s confidence by disguising herself as his chauffeur, a masquerade foiled when Desi gets invited along for a ride.

  Except when they acted, Vance and Frawley looked at the floor or the ceiling, loath to watch the pair uncoupling before them. Between takes Lucy went into her dressing room, emerging each time with wet eyes. The final lines had a subtext no one wanted to contemplate too closely:

  LUCY

  Honest, honey, I just wanted to help.

  RICKY

  From now on, you can help me by not trying to help me. But thanks, anyway.

  The script called for a kiss and embrace, with Lucy removing her mustache at the last moment. “This was not just an ordinary kiss for a scene in a show,” Desi was to write. “It was a kiss that would wrap up twenty years of love and friendship, triumphs and failures, ecstasy and sex, jealousy and regrets, heartbreaks and laughter . . . and tears. The only thing we were not able to hide was the tears.

  “After the kiss we just stood there looking at each other and licking the salt.

  “Then Lucy said, ‘You’re supposed to say “Cut.” ’

  “ ‘I know. Cut, goddamn it!’ ”

  Those words seemed to draw a curtain down on the proceedings and the marriage and, quite possibly, the whole Desilu enterprise. Backstage, everyone choked back tears, including the curmudgeon Frawley. Not once, in all the years he worked for the Arnazes, had he been disabled by drink. True to the agreement he had made with Desi, he never missed a show or blew a line because of booze. But that night he went on a well-earned bender. In the past, his hands sometimes shook; from here on the tremor was so visible that whenever he acted he jammed them in his pockets, unless a scene called for gestures.

  Right after the farewell Desi picked up his belongings from the house and departed for Las Vegas. The next day, March 3, 1960, outfitted in a modest black-and-white tweed silk suit, Lucy chatted with waiting reporters before entering a Santa Monica courtroom to file for divorce. Before Judge Orlando H. Rhodes she charged Desiderio Arnaz, her husband of nineteen years, with having caused her “grievous mental suffering,” and went on to lament Desi’s “Jekyll-and-Hyde” personality. When Hyde was in the ascendant, she said, there were “temper tantrums in front of the children; there was no discussing anything with him. . . . We could have no social life for the last three or four years.” Called on to corroborate her cousin’s testimony, Cleo stated that Desi did indeed exhibit “completely irrational behavior.” Desi made a brief denial through his lawyer, Milton A. “Mickey” Rudin. A little while later he admitted to the charges, but did so, maintained Rudin, to keep this an amicable divorce in accordance with promises made to the children. “Did you try to work things out?” Lucy was asked in the courtroom. “There’s no discussing anything with him,” she replied, Lucy Ricardo–style. “He doesn’t discuss very well.”

  The San Francisco Chronicle headed its front-page story: LUCY—“I JUST CAN’T GO ON.” The Los Angeles Times went into detail—“Life With Volatile Cuban Was Nightmare, Court Told”—and reported on the agreement worked out by Rudin and Lucy’s counsel, Art Manella. Time summed up the settlement: “For Lucy, their two children, half of their $20 million Desilu interests, the leaky mansion, two station wagons, a cemetery plot at Forest Lawn. For Desi: the other half of the $20 million, a golf cart, a membership in a Palm Springs Country Club, a truck, and several horses.” There were other considerations. Desi agreed to pay support of $450 a month for each child. The income from his 210-room Indian Wells Hotel would be divided between the exes— until 1966, when Lucy would buy out Desi and place the money in a trust fund for Lucie and Desi IV.

  With everything so neatly buttoned up, Lucy professed herself astonished by the negative public reaction. Some eight thousand letters came in, urging her to reconsider: surely there was a way of patching things up. In the minds of Americans the Arnazes were the nation’s Ideal Married Couple. And besides, they had split in 1944, only to reconcile. Wasn’t a rerun possible, even now? Her monosyllabic answer, “Nope,” satisfied no one but the speaker. “Even when I was called a Communist,” she complained, “a few nuts called me terrible things, but in general everybody was so supportive. But when Desi and I got divorced, it was unbelievable. They called me everything in the book. Others just begged for us not to do it. Everybody asked us to think it over. I couldn’t believe that everybody in the United States had an opinion about our divorce.”

  Desi put on his game face and went out in public, attempting to assure everyone that he had done the right thing. Those who knew him were unconvinced. During the hearing he sulked at the Desert Inn, drinking heavily and using such foul language that the management asked him to go someplace else. Returned to Los Angeles, he set up a dwelling at the Château Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. There he was more orderly, playing the host at parties and lavishly tipping the help. But he laughed a little too hard and drank a little too much, and he had trouble remembering little things and kept forgetting big ones. Disturbed and frightened, he checked into a Los Angeles hospital, where he dried out and followed a strict diet. Ten days later Desi checked himself out, determined to show everyone that the old spring was back in his step. When he returned to his office at Desilu, the vice presidents and assistants gratefully acknowledged that the boss did seem extraordinary cheerful and lucid. In the afternoons he was as sensible as he had been in the mornings, and on the golf links he shaved several strokes off his game. Moreover, he made a fresh start by moving to a forty-acre ranch in Corona.

  In the coming months Desi would need to be in good shape; the company he headed was beginning to lose its place as a major factor in TV production. Warner Brothers, Columbia (Screen Gems), Four Star, and Revue had entered the race, and Desi, used to being numero uno, looked up to see Desilu outclassed, outspent, and outdistanced. Only The Untouchables remained in the Top Ten; Desilu’s new sitcoms Harriganand Son and Guestward Ho! would not make it past their first seasons, and even the once-popular Ann Sothern Show was beginning to falter. To be sure, the studio could make m
oney by renting out space for such programs as The Jack Benny Show, Lassie, and The Barbara Stanwyck Show, but as a production house Desilu seemed to be losing its touch. To regain it, Desi went after big Hollywood names, hoping to star them in television vehicles: he had meetings with Burt Lancaster, Eva Gabor, Tony Curtis, Jane Wyman, John Wayne, and Mickey Rooney, among others. Nothing came to fruition.

  As her ex-husband pushed on, Lucy made plans to trade the small screen for the big one, and the sound stage for the Broadway boards. The film was The Facts of Life, a comedy costarring Bob Hope. The theater piece was originally supposed to be an adaptation of “Big Blonde,” a Dorothy Parker short story to be produced by Kermit Bloomgarten and directed by Morton Da Costa. The script displeased her, however. While it was being rewritten, she turned to another project, Wildcat, a musical created by an extraordinary confluence of talents. The book was by N. Richard Nash, writer of the 1954 smash The Rainmaker. Music and lyrics were by the new young team of Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, who had written such Frank Sinatra favorites as “Witchcraft” and “The Best Is Yet to Come.” The director would be Michael Kidd, who had choreographed the megahits Guys and Dolls and Can-Can. Wildcat was being touted as the story of “the Annie Oakley of the Oil Fields,” and Lucy was reminded of another musical about another Annie Oakley. By playing the original Annie in Annie Get Your Gun, Ethel Merman became the biggest musical comedy star of the 1940s.

  Coleman spoke about an early meeting with Lucy, a huge star who, he was dismayed to find, “sang like Jimmy Durante.” He said: “I had a lot of trouble writing the opening number. Finally, one day Carolyn said, ‘If it was for anybody who wasn’t as famous as Lucy, if it was just somebody who sang like her, what would you write?’ and I wrote ‘Hey, Look Me Over,’ right there.” The day came when Coleman and Leigh played and sang Lucy the full score. “She was as nervous as I was,” said a surprised Coleman. “In a strange way, we were auditioning for her, but she was auditioning for us. When we got to ‘Hey, Look Me Over,’ she jumped from her seat and said, ‘I can sing that!’ In our mutual fear we got into one of those eye locks, and through terror we got through the song for the first time. When she finally got through it, she said, ‘Let’s not do that again—my eyeballs hurt.’ ” Actually she did it again and again, and when she was certain that the notes were not out of her limited range, agreed to do the musical as soon as she finished her movie. Moreover, she promised to stay in the show for a minimum of a year and a half.

  The Facts of Life had a ten-week shooting schedule, Lucy told a TV Guide reporter. “Then I go to New York with the two children, my mother, and two maids. We have a seven-room apartment on Sixty-ninth Street at Lexington. I’ll start rehearsals right away for a Broadway show, Wildcat.” Her emotions seesawed as she discussed the project. “I’ve never been on the stage before, except in Dream Girl years ago. But we always filmed I Love Lucy before a live audience. I knew a long time ago that I was eventually going to go to Broadway and that’s one reason why we shot Lucy that way. But I’m still terrified. The contract for the play runs eighteen months. Maybe it will last that long. Maybe longer. And maybe it will last three days.” Lucy chain-smoked through the interview. “Nervous habit. I don’t inhale, never did. Just nerves,” a reaction from the divorce. She picked up a framed picture of Desi in her dressing room. “Look at him,” Lucy said in a throaty, wistful tone. “That’s the way he looked ten years ago. He doesn’t look like that now. He’ll never look like that again.”

  Everything about the revised Facts of Life seemed to resonate with Lucy. The script not only gave her a chance to trade gags with Bob Hope, it recounted the sorrows and yearnings of middle age. In Hope’s quip, Facts was “the story of two handicapped people who fall in love. Their handicaps are his wife and her husband.” Supported by fine character actors (including Philip Ober, then in the process of getting divorced from Vivian Vance), Lucy played Kitty, the middle-aged wife of a genial bore, Jack Weaver (Don DeFore). Hope was Larry Gilbert, husband of the ennui-producing Mary, played by Ruth Hussey. Kitty and Larry enjoy each other’s company and make many adulterous plans, all of which go amusingly awry. “Am I really doing this?” Kitty asks herself en route to an assignation. “Me? Pasadena housewife, secretary of the PTA, den mother of the Cub Scouts. Have I really come to Monterey to spend a weekend with the husband of my best friend?” Their desires unconsummated, the frustrated and guilt-ridden lovers finally forsake their schemes and philosophically return to their respective spouses.

  To demonstrate that he harbored no hard feelings toward Lucy, Desi agreed to coproduce the United Artists movie along with Hope. The official production company was headed by writer Norman Panama and director Melvin Frank. On June 2, 1960, just before filming began, the studio hosted a luncheon for the press. The head of Desilu made an appearance, wished the project well, and planted a kiss on his ex-wife. She returned his smile to generous applause. An aura of good feeling enveloped the project. It was not to last.

  On July 1, during a boating scene, Lucy lost her footing and fell hard. An ambulance whisked her to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital to be treated for disfiguring leg and facial bruises. Desi heard the news, sped to her room, and refused to leave until doctors assured him that Lucy’s injuries were not life-threatening. That evening he sent Hope a telegram: “I played straight man to her for nine years and never pushed her—why couldn’t you control yourself?” One day after Lucy’s accident, Melvin Frank broke his ankle during a golf tournament. A few weeks later, Don DeFore strained his back. Returned to work, Lucy complained about the crowded sound stage. “How do you get out of this firetrap?” she cracked. Several nights later the set went up in flames. Several more minor disasters occurred, including a hand injury to Hope. He concluded, “This film should have been shot at Cedars.” Nevertheless, disasters and all, The Facts of Life managed to conclude on schedule.

  As soon as she shook off a case of pneumonia, Lucy headed east with Lucie and Desi IV. Whenever she appeared in public, reporters continued to ask personal questions, and she continued to resent them. A journalist who demanded to know whether she would marry again was met with a glare, a long pause, and a monosyllabic “No!” Another, who inquired whether she was happy, received a curt answer: “Not yet. I will be. I’ve been humiliated. That’s not easy for a woman.”

  Yet the man who had humiliated her was also one of her bulwarks when the Wildcat team went looking for producers. One night, said Nash, Desi called from Los Angeles after reading the script: “ ‘I love thees thin! I want to produce it!’ It was all packaged and literally taken out of my hands. The final product had nothing to do with what my original intentions had been.” Wildcat had started out as the tale of a nineteen-year-old oil prospector, supported by her elder sister in a comic role. The day that director-choreographer Michael Kidd first brought up the name of Lucille Ball, Nash naturally assumed that she would play the smaller part. Desilu’s $400,000 altered conditions and forced the author back to his desk, where he made intensive rewrites, changing the focus and excising any references to age. The star playing Wildcat Jackson, a pretty oil speculator costumed in blue dungarees and bright red hair, would need a special kind of leading man. He must either be (A) famous enough to attract ticket buyers on his own, or (B) obscure enough to cede the marquee to Miss Ball. First the producers tried A, offering the role to Kirk Douglas, who was both too short and too expensive, and Gene Barry, who was committed to his hit TV series, Bat Masterson. Then they tried B, securing the services of a tall, good-looking song-and-dance man, Keith Andes. The actor had played opposite Marilyn Monroe in Clash by Night, but could hardly be considered a box office draw. Lucy, and Lucy alone, would have that distinction.

  With everything bubbling along to her satisfaction, she settled into Imperial House on East Sixty-ninth Street with her son and daughter and their nanny, Willie Mae Barker. Lucy had the apartment decorated in vivid colors, California-style. She placed the children in private Catholic schools—Lucie in
Marymount, Desi IV in St. David’s—and described them to the press as “happy, adjusted kids” grateful to be in New York. She went into rehearsals, “mad for everyone in the company of Wildcat.”

  For Lucy to see the children in this light required an extraordinary amount of self-deception and denial. Of all people, the fatherless girl should have known the importance of paternal figures. She should also have known how vital it was to keep and maintain roots in a young child’s life. Instead, she thought mostly in terms of career rather than motherhood. She pulled Lucie and Desi IV along in her slipstream, scarcely considering what they might need or feel. In the ensuing months, Desi IV became the target of school bullies; neighbors could hear him in the evenings angrily banging away on his set of drums. Lucie was happier at Marymount, but described the experience of relocation as “very traumatic, leaving my friends, being ripped away from my father.” She noted: “I only remember those New York months as gray. The trees were gray, the sky was gray, the buildings were gray.”

  Work on Wildcat had scarcely begun when Lucy read a disturbing item in Variety. Martin Leeds, who had been the real force behind the daily operations at Desilu, was leaving the company. However unwittingly, Lucy had a hand in this breakup. During the first weeks of her New York sojourn Desi backslid to alcoholism. Leeds had complained via phone to Lucy, who agreed, “We’ve gotta do something about it.” The “something” was a de facto takeover, with Leeds going around Desi to make corporate and financial decisions. Lucy confided as much to friends who leaked like a colander, and word got back to Desi. He telephoned Leeds one morning at three, totally inebriated, and asked why the executive had reversed a decision Desi had made earlier in the week. “Because you were wrong,” came the irritable reply. “Then,” said Desi, “you’re fired.” Nothing further needed to be said; their business relationship was finished. Leeds had helped Desilu to its glory days, but that was when he esteemed his employer. Now he regarded him, with sorrow, as an irresponsible drunk. The vice president in charge of production had four years left on his contract. He took half of his entitlement—“I could never hurt this man,” Leeds said defensively—and never looked back.