Ball of Fire Read online

  The weeks stretched out to months. Goldwyn was forced to extend the Lucille Ball contract, and she made herself at home in Hollywood. While the movie ground away, she discovered that Darryl F. Zanuck’s fledgling company, Twentieth Century–Fox, had leased studio space from Sam Goldwyn. During her downtime she hitched rides with trucks making their way onto various Fox sets, where she’d ask if anybody needed a walk-on. For two of Zanuck’s productions, small parts did become available, and Lucille was there to grab them. Before Scandals was released, moviegoers saw her, unbilled, in Broadway Thru a Keyhole and Blood Money. One of Goldwyn’s executives described her apprenticeship: “She sweated out every goddamn break she got. She was one of dozens of girls at the studio watching and waiting for the opportunity. The difference was that she was a worker. That, and Jesus, what energy!” Lucille’s unique amalgam of vigor and humor caught the eye of a touring New York journalist, Walter Winchell, who gave her a few modest plugs in his column. These were duly noted by studio executives and helped her keep her job. The trouble was that her job was little more than human decoration, a cut above those faceless players who filled out crowd scenes.

  While Lucille caromed from Fox to United Artists and back again playing small parts, she expended very few ergs on romance. Only one of the men she dated expressed any long-term interest: an actor named Ralph Forbes, who had just been divorced from the stage actress Ruth Chatterton. Forbes’s elegant carriage and English accent dazzled Lucille—until he proposed marriage. Lucille immediately dropped him. “I’m not the crooked-finger-and-teacup type,” she explained. But the breakup had nothing to do with two people separated by a common language. It was simply that romantic commitment terrified her. She was more at ease with blithe, emotionally uninvolving dates, like the ones she had with Mack Grey. Né Max Greenberg, the former boxing manager served as factotum and bodyguard for George Raft, an exhoofer, now middle-level movie star who had trouble separating his tough-guy roles from real life. Both men had risen from the streets of Manhattan, both were known to carry guns and slap people around— although when Raft did the slapping it was usually while Grey held the victim’s arms behind his back. Yet Raft had a sentimental side. He took an avuncular interest in Lucille, encouraged by Carole Lombard, his current flame. The blonde actress could be every bit as foulmouthed as her date, if not more so. (Groucho Marx described her with admiration: “She talked like a man, used words men use with other men. She was a gutsy dame. She was a real show business girl.”) Even though Lucille’s vocabulary was comparatively chaste, the real show business girl recognized a sister under the skin. Carole began to advise her new friend on what she called “studio behavior”: how to speak to producers, staying genial without actually winding up on the casting couch; how to negotiate for bigger parts; and how to drop names.

  The twenty-three-year-old Lucille worked in a succession of pictures, but despite the sagacious advice, casting directors assigned her to roles so small she went unlisted in the credits. Besides appearing in Roman Scandals, she was in three bottom-of-the-bill pictures released by United Artists: first Broadway Thru a Keyhole, then The Bowery and Blood Money. She also had a bit part in the film version of Nana, Émile Zola’s naturalistic novel about the life of a demimondaine. Sam Goldwyn’s inflated production was a critical failure and a box office bomb. “In all these pictures,” Lucille would wryly and accurately note, “I was just part of the scenery, strolling past the camera in chiffon and feathers.” She briefly became a stand-in for Constance Bennett, and she tried to strike up a conversation with the actress, only to learn that Bennett could not remember meeting the young Hattie Carnegie model. Lombard urged Lucille to try out for comedy, but Goldwyn and United Artists displayed little interest in the genre and even less in Lucille, beyond offering a modest extension of her contract. All things considered, it was not a bad deal. After all, of the dozen Goldwyn Girls who had started out together, only four were still in town.

  Every week or so Lucille felt pangs of homesickness. To allay them she called home, pleading with her mother, brother, and grandfather to come out to California and live with her. The weather was ideal, she assured them: no more upstate New York winters—no winter at all, in fact. They could play in the sun, sit on the porch as long as they liked. The job market was beginning to pick up; maybe they could nab some sort of assignment at one of the studios. Even if they couldn’t, she was making $150 a week. And once she got a screen credit, who knew how high her salary might go? Quite sensibly, DeDe asked where Lucille intended to put the family—surely not in her tiny apartment.

  Lucille’s answer came in the spring of 1934, when she took an expensive rental about half a mile from the studio. The financial aid came from Raft—money that would take six years to pay back. The new dwelling place at 1344 North Ogden Drive was little more than a bungalow, with three small bedrooms and a yard wide enough for a garden, but it was enough. Freddy was the first family member to come west, and he wasted no time landing a job as a page boy at the Trocadero supper club. One of Lucille’s colleagues, actress Ann Sothern, helped her decorate her place. When Lucille was satisfied with the look, she issued an invitation to DeDe and Grandpa Fred Hunt.

  While she was feeling energized, Lucille hammered away at Sam Goldwyn to let her do comedy. Beyond making a halfhearted move on her, Goldwyn had nothing to offer beyond another minuscule and unbilled part in Kid Millions, the new Eddie Cantor movie. Lucille accepted the role and promptly became a major pain on the set. The demanding Busby Berkeley was in charge again, and he gave the cast very short breaks. After each one, Lucille was the last to appear. Over the public address speakers would come the message: “Miss Ball . . . Miss Ball . . . On set, please.” The film’s second lead, George Murphy, whispered: “Honey, I don’t understand you. One of these days they’ll fire you.” Lucille conceded that he might be right. “But one thing you can be sure of,” she added. “They’ll know who I am.”

  A snappy comeback, Murphy had to admit, but not one likely to advance her career. Indeed, by the end of 1934 Lucille had appeared in ten films without acquiring a single screen credit. “It galled her that schleps with no talent were getting billing while she wasn’t,” recalled a colleague from those days. Manifestly she had to get out of the shadow of Goldwyn and United Artists. The trouble was, she had nothing to bargain with—no credits, no reputation, no friends, no luck. All that was to change late in 1934 when the comedy writers Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin learned that their agent, Bill Perlberg, had just been hired as casting director of Columbia Studios. He asked his former clients if they knew any performers he should look at. Both mentioned Lucille’s off-camera clowning on the set of Roman Scandals. “We didn’t mention her as an actress,” Perrin would recall, “because we knew her as a personality. We told him she was funny and amusing.”

  On the strength of their recommendation, Perlberg offered Lucille a contract at $75 a week, half what she had been making with Goldwyn. She sighed and she signed—anything for a crack at comedy. “I wanted to learn,” she was to write. “And my forte, I figured, was that. I didn’t know what I was getting into.”

  That was not quite true. Everyone in Hollywood knew about Columbia and its Neanderthal head of production, Harry Cohn. With his brother Jack, and Joel Brandt, a pal from New York, the high school dropout and former song-plugger had founded Cohn-Brandt-Cohn Film Sales in 1919. While Jack and Joel stayed in the East, Harry moved to Los Angeles. There he leased studio space for CBC on Gower Street, known to the movie colony as Poverty Row because it housed so many companies specializing in low-budget, “quickie” productions. Cohn-Brandt-Cohn was typical; it turned out so many cheap, slam-bang comedies that actors said “CBC” stood for Corned Beef and Cabbage—reason enough for Harry to change the name to Columbia Pictures.

  Beneath the new sign the Cohn philosophy remained the same: low budgets and fast schedules. A number of talented actors and directors chose to work with Columbia anyway. The reason was as basic as Cohn hims
elf. Although he refused to underwrite expensive sets or locations, he respected established talents and gave them the freedom they required. Director Frank Capra was one of those who stayed with Columbia despite offers from bigger studios, and when Lucille entered the place, Carole Lombard and John Barrymore were busy on the same lot. The difference was that Lombard and Barrymore were cast in Twentieth Century while Lucille was capering with the Three Stooges. Cohn had decreed that his new contract player would be perfect as the dumb blonde foil in Larry, Moe, and Curly’s latest effort, Three Little Pigskins. The farce about college football used her mainly as a target. Again she maintained, “I didn’t know what I was getting into,” and again this was not quite accurate. The Stooges’ pratfall reputation preceded them, and not a soul in Hollywood expected them to be anything short of gross. Lucille dutifully allowed them to pelt her with lemon meringue and squirt soda in her face. All she learned from the trio, she insisted, was that “seltzer up the nose really hurts.” But all affronts to her dignity vanished when she was rewarded with something money could not buy: a screen credit. Lucille Ball was no longer an elevated extra, a supernumerary glamour girl. Heartened by the prospect of more film comedies, she wired money for the rest of the family to take the Super Chief to L.A. The reunion was only days away.

  It was during those days that Harry Cohn made one of his periodic slashes of the Columbia budget. More than a dozen performers were summarily fired. Lucille remembered the collective feelings of shock and fear. “One night at six o’clock, Boom! We were on the streets, going, ‘What happened?’ Nobody knew. They just—got rid of everybody. ” Lucille had a date that night with Dick Green, brother of Johnny Green, a studio musician and composer of such hits as “Body and Soul” and “Out of Nowhere.” He took note of the glum face. “Lost my job,” Lucille snuffled: Dede and her brother and grandfather were coming to stay at the house in Gower. But now—

  He cut her off. It so happened that there was an opportunity. Why, this very evening RKO had an open call for showgirls.

  Lucille put her tongue in her cheek.

  No, Green insisted: this new Astaire-Rogers film really needed chorines.

  They’re auditioning them after dark? she demanded.

  Yes, she was assured, in the p.m.

  Lucille showed up for the casting call, invented a long history of modeling for Bergdorf Goodman in New York, and was offered a job. The salary seemed insultingly low, as if she was backsliding rather than rising in Hollywood—$50 a week. She signed immediately.

  Informed that she was going by bus to meet her mother and grandfather at the railroad station, George Raft was appalled. That was no way to greet the family. He advanced Lucille $65 and gave her the use of his limousine for the day so that she could arrive in style. As soon as DeDe laid eyes on the house on North Ogden she started to cry, moved by her daughter’s success. What seemed a striver’s dwelling to Lucille was paradise to her mother.

  DeDe kept weeping at intervals throughout the day. In the evening the two went for a drive around town. They parked at the top of Mulholland Drive, the local lovers’lane. Lights from the San Fernando Valley and the Los Angeles basin twinkled below them. The sentimental DeDe began to cry again and Lucille put her arm around her mother. “We sat there for a few minutes,” Lucille would recall, “when all of a sudden there was a cop next to us. He banged his nightstick against the running board and said, ‘Okay, you dames. None of that stuff up here. Run along, butch.’ I don’t think my mother had ever heard the word ‘lesbian’ and when I told her what it meant and that the cop thought we were necking, she cried all the way home.”

  Grandpa Fred worked hard at adjusting to the new climate and the new house. Lucille eased the way as best she could, calling him Daddy, deferring to him in little matters, and creating a small studio for him in the garage. Seated behind a desk, Fred Hunt gave political lectures to his new friends, the milkman, the trash collector, and various retirees he met on his Ogden Drive constitutionals. Overhearing the talks, his granddaughter was amused to see that the old man’s radical leanings had been brought to Los Angeles intact. Harmless, she thought, and very good for Daddy to exercise his opinions as well as his body.

  Not that she could spare much time for the family once everyone had settled in. Lucille was, after all, a contract player with RKO Pictures, and she was determined not to lose this job.

  The company letters stood for Radio-Keith-Orpheum, vestiges of the company’s vaudeville origins. At one time it had been under the control of the financial shark Joseph P. Kennedy, now the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and David Sarnoff, president of the Radio Corporation of America. The executives had believed in the future of talking pictures, and attempted to create a rival to Warner Brothers, acknowledged leader of the revolution in sound. But that was before the Depression gutted the parent company, which fell into the hands of the receivers. Kennedy and Sarnoff were back in New York, and RKO Pictures was left to founder on its own. In the early 1930s it did better than anyone had dared to predict. No genre was left untouched. A series of revolving-door executives experimented with special effects, as in King Kong; dramas featuring the high-toned young actress Katharine Hepburn, who won an Academy Award with her third picture, Morning Glory; and adaptations of Broadway musicals, including Roberta, starring Irene Dunne and a newly popular dance team, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

  It was for this last film that Lucille was hired, specifically as an onscreen clothes model. Roberta is set in Paris, where Dunne plays a White Russian princess turned couturier, Rogers is an American singer posing as an Eastern European aristocrat, and Astaire is a fellow American undeceived by Rogers’s bogus accent. Lucille again tried to lobby the writers for more work, but it was no use: she was supposed to be Parisian, and French intonations were totally beyond her. Rather than give the actress additional dialogue, the director William A. Seiter excised her only speech. All that remained in the finished film was a walk-on, with Lucille striding around in ostrich plumes and silk.

  The event was disappointing rather than dispiriting. Lucille was the first to acknowledge that she had a lot to learn. She would begin by devoting herself to the task at hand—any task at all. According to her testimony: “I adopted RKO as my studio family. I talked to everyone I met, from office boys to executives—possibly because of that urgent need I’d always had to make people like me—and I posed for every cheesecake picture they asked for. I could never say no.”

  These frantic efforts were to pay large dividends. During the first few months she caught the eye of Pandro S. Berman. Nine years her senior, Berman had risen from editor to RKO’s most important executive, overseeing Katharine Hepburn’s films and the Astaire-Rogers musicals. He was surrounded by beautiful women on the lot and around town, but somehow, this year, 1934, he preferred Lucille’s fresh and audacious style. For her part, Lucille thought him attractive enough; since the days of her crush on Uncle George Mandicos, and through four years with Johnny DeVita, she had shown a distinct preference for swarthy Mediterranean types—even if they were married. Berman fit the mold. They started to see each other, and within a month Lucille became Topic A among the studio gossips.

  This could scarcely be called a casting couch stratagem. Beguiled though he was, Berman knew the actress’s limitations and offered her no major roles. All the same, studio folk knew of the involvement and treated Miss Ball with extreme politesse. She had only one line in I Dream Too Much, a vehicle built for the talents of soprano Lily Pons. As an American parvenu touring Paris, Lucille denounces the city’s attractions: “Culture is making my feet hurt.” A larger role came with Chatterbox, where she played a combative actress. This was followed by minor roles in two subsequent Astaire-Rogers features, as a dancer in Follow the Fleet and a flower seller in Top Hat.

  Manifestly, her connection with the boss was not enough to elevate Lucille from the bottom rungs of RKO, a situation she discussed at a commissary lunch with Margaret Hamilton. The be
aky character actress would become an icon when she played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, but at the time she was just another RKO performer punching the clock like the rest. “Am I ever going to succeed?” Lucille demanded. “I have financial responsibilities for my mother and I need to make money.” Hamilton could only provide a sympathetic ear; she had no counsel, and no inside information. Still, there was one avenue as yet unexplored.

  One of the clichés of Hollywood, Lucille was to observe, is “Behind every successful actress is a hairdresser and a mother.” “Hairdressers come and go,” she wrote, “but Ginger Rogers has only one fabulous mother, a woman who played mother to many of us on the way up.” In order to further her daughter’s career, and to give herself something to do, the restless Lela Rogers had founded an acting school on the RKO lot. Lucille made a point of matriculating at this institution, headed by a most unusual woman.

  Lela Rogers had several ex-husbands but only one child, and she resolved to make that girl famous. The goal required concentration and discipline, two attributes Lela had acquired as a female Marine during World War I. Returned to civilian life, Lela applied them to her daughter, training the child for a career in show business. At fourteen Ginger won a Charleston contest in Dallas; after that there was no stopping mother or daughter. Lela hired some dancers, wrote original songs and special material, and arranged a vaudeville contract for Ginger Rogers and Her Redheads. On the road she served as Ginger’s press agent and tutored her in academic subjects. The troupe played the circuits until Lela pronounced the appealing little blonde ready for New York. In 1929, at the age of eighteen, Ginger Rogers made her debut in a Broadway musical; the following year she appeared in her first film, Young Man of Manhattan. At RKO, with Lela’s backing, she sang and danced in the films that would make her reputation as Fred Astaire’s partner, doing everything he did, as she liked to point out, backward and in high heels.