Ball of Fire (31 page)

“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.”

Members of the Friars Club took a lighter approach to the Arnazes’ dissolution. When Lucy and Desi were being honored by twelve hundred club members, Milton Berle warned Desi not to get a divorce because “she’ll get the kids and you’ll get Olivera Street”—an unsubtle reference to the L.A. barrio. He went on to refer to the honored couple as “the Cuban Leopold and Loeb.” Lucy and Desi dutifully broke up on cue, as they did at the gags of Harry Einstein, a.k.a. the Greek radio comedian “Parkyakarkus.” Einstein reminded the audience that when the guest of honor started out he had been introduced as “Dizzy” and “D. C.,” before citing “Danny” the Cuban as one of his best friends. Milton Berle described the next moments: “Harry had been sick and a lot of people said, ‘Don’t do it,’ but he was really the smash hit of the evening. He got a standing ovation. As he sat down I looked at him and his face was turning colors. I’m sitting to his right. He took a breath and went boom and hit my shoulder, dead. I heard a lot of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ from the audience. They guessed what happened. I never saw so many pillboxes thrown. I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, take it easy; just a little accident here.’ Backstage about eight top physicians were in a tumult, working on him. They used scissors, knives, forks, I don’t know, and they tried to revive him and they couldn’t. Desi was crying. He was so beside himself, and so was Lucy. He said, ‘We’re grateful for this wonderful tribute, but we can’t go on.’ ” Comedians in attendance, among them Eddie Cantor, George Burns, Sammy Davis Jr., and Berle himself, tried to restore some lightness to the evening.

A reporter from
Variety
was there, and in the next issue summed up the occasion: “A great and funny dinner had become veiled with the pall of a mortuary.” For Lucy and Desi, things were not to improve. In the late 1950s, honors and dividends came at a price that neither of them had calculated.

In December 1958, Desilu became a publicly held company. Desi claimed that new money was necessary to help expand the business, and to some extent that was true. But he had more pressing financial obligations just then: seven-figure gambling debts. Shares went for $10 per at the initial public offering, and since Lucy and Desi were major stockholders, they each stood to make some $2.5 million, after taxes. Lucy kept every cent and invested it in blue-chip companies. Desi paid his creditors and wound up with less than $100,000. Only his ability to find and develop hit shows kept him solvent; he was hitting the bottle harder than ever, spiking his tomato soup with liquor, and attending meetings with a cup of 7-Up laced with vodka. Alcohol may well have been what prompted him to sell the old films of
I Love Lucy
to CBS for the bargain price of $4.5 million. “Even forsaking
Lucy
’s potential as a syndication entry,” observed
Variety,
“CBS estimates a $6,000,000 annual bonanza in sales of quarter-hour network segments across-the-board.” Certainly alcohol acted as the main solvent of the Arnazes’ marriage.

A few last efforts were made to save their union. Lucy persuaded Desi to accompany her when she visited a psychiatrist; perhaps a specialist could get to the roots of their trouble. It was a futile venture. “Desi and I would scream and yell in front of the doctor,” she told a friend, “because we weren’t screaming and yelling in front of the children. I felt sorry for the poor guy, he’d ask a question and the two of us would jump down his throat.” After a few sessions Desi stopped coming, and a short time later Lucy gave up as well.

A trip to Hawaii produced similar results. The couple argued for much of the time, and once, to cool off, Desi took a dip in the Pacific. He body-surfed for a while and emerged minus a glittering gold chain that held a St. Christopher medal and his wedding ring. Lucy was to categorize this as “Kind of symbolic. Our marriage was gone—so why shouldn’t his ring be, too?”

But the marriage was not quite gone—not yet. A few more painful moments had to be endured, a few more nerves rubbed raw. In early May 1959, Lucy consented to perform at a Kiwanis Club youth rally against juvenile delinquency in Oklahoma City. Lucy arrived at Taft Stadium expecting the twelve-thousand-seat arena to be overflowing with ticket-holders. At most, two thousand people showed up. It was a hot day and she decided that if this was the best Oklahoma could do, the program could jolly well go on without her. A widely syndicated Associated Press account stated that Lucille Ball “refused to leave her air-conditioned Cadillac for a scheduled comedy routine and a talk on juvenile delinquency.” Lucy’s explanation failed to convince her disappointed audience. It wasn’t just the size of the crowd, she maintained. “I’ve played to thirteen people in a dugout. It doesn’t matter to me how many there are. But when they don’t care enough to publicize the affair, it’s high time they stopped getting people to go thousands of miles to perform.”

She had a few thousand more miles to travel in the next fortnight. In a last, desperate attempt at reconciliation, the Arnazes agreed to exchange the stresses of California for the vistas of Europe. As a holiday à deux, the trip might have worked a temporary miracle. But the inclusion of the children, Lucy’s cousin Cleo, and Cleo’s husband just about guaranteed failure. On May 13, 1959, the Arnaz party boarded the
Liberté
in New York City and settled into six staterooms. A week later Lucy sent Hedda Hopper a letter from France. “I don’t know if Paris is ready,” she wrote, “but we sure are. . . . Forty bags, two trunks and look out, here we come—Capri, Rome, Paris, London. Everyone loves our kids—that makes us happy.”

“Happy” was, in fact, the antonym for their situation. Cleo remembered that “Desi was falling-down drunk everywhere.” In her memoir Lucy summoned up the image of a man who, “when he wasn’t drinking, spent most of his time on the phone with the studio checking the Del Mar racetrack.” She continued: “I was completely disenchanted, bitter, and unforgiving, and the kids saw and heard way too much.”

Lucy’s spirits were not aided by a London press conference. She was unfamiliar with the London gossip reporter, a species lower down the evolutionary scale than its Hollywood or New York counterpart. The questions were relentless and impolite: “How much money do you have?” “How old are you? . . . Well, if you admit to that, you must be five years older.” One paparazza took hold of little Lucie and maneuvered her behind a potted palm. “What’s it like to be rich?” she grilled the eight-year-old. “Is it true your father and mother fight all the time?” Nor was Desi bolstered by a package that came to their hotel addressed to “Mr. Ball.” He hit the bottle harder, and by the time the family visited Maurice Chevalier he was flushed and incoherent much of the time. The elderly Frenchman, living in retirement outside Paris, had done a guest shot for one of the hour-long shows in 1958; he could see what was going on between the husband and wife. Chevalier took Lucy aside and advised, “the end of a love affair is more painful than anything else on earth except for staying in a love affair that has no love left.” She assigned him the temporary role of Daddy: “He was like a father telling me it was all right to go. We cut the trip short and came back on the
Île de France.
”

There could have been no more appropriate vessel; this was its final voyage as an ocean liner—and the last trip the Arnazes would take as a couple. As soon as she unpacked, Lucy began to reckon how soon she could initiate divorce proceedings.

Lawyers and friends told her to proceed slowly, not only for the sake of the children but for the future of Desilu. “You and Desi signed the Westinghouse contract as partners,” a counselor reminded her. “If you walk out now, they could cancel and sue you.” In addition, Desilu was now a corporation, responsible to its many investors. To scotch rumors of an impending divorce, and to bolster an image of financial stability, Lucy and Desi sat together at the first annual stockholders’ meeting, in July 1959. Assembled at a Desilu sound stage, investors were given the official word. “We now estimate that our gross income during the current television season will be not less than $23.5 million,” company president Desi Arnaz declared, reminding them that this was “an increase of 15 percent over the last fiscal year.” In fact, as he was later to write, the company had realized a
net
profit of only $250,000 for the year. “We could have done better,” he admitted, “if we had put our money in a savings account.” Later in the week he and Lucy discussed a sale of the corporation. If the right bidder could be found they could probably sell at $14 or $15 per share. Everyone, he argued, would wind up richer—especially Desi and Lucy. She refused to countenance a sale.

The days of denial were growing short, and they ended when Desi took off for Europe that fall. On October 28, 1959, United Press International scooped its competitors with the story: “Desi Arnaz left for Europe today aboard the liner
Queen Mary
without a bon voyage from his wife, Lucille Ball, amid reports that their marriage was breaking up.” Desi denied the rumors; he was going to Rome and North Africa to scout locations and oversee some productions. Lucy had to stay stateside to edit a script. “We’re working too hard, that’s the only trouble. Probably someone heard we had an argument, but we have lots of arguments.” He added a line that had grown stale through the years: “When a redhead and a Cuban get together we argue pretty good.” Reporters who turned to Lucy got some more of the company line. Scuttlebutt about an impending breakup was, in her words, “cruel and absolutely false,” as were stories that Desilu was up for sale.

Lucy was always an orderly person, but in this period she became a demon of organization. Lucy told friends she looked upon her life as a chest of drawers: she opened one drawer, tended to whatever needed attention, closed it, and moved to the next drawer—comedy, children, Desilu, shopping, friends, each in its own time. She plastered memos to herself on the dashboard, peeling them off as soon as the assignment was done.

Desi ran his life in precisely the opposite manner. He returned from his holiday looking puffier and older; his hair, when he failed to dye it, was shot with gray. Lucy, on the other hand, had settled gracefully into her forties. She was quick to play into self-deprecation: on the show Desi’s uncle inquires, “Where did you get your beautiful red hair?” The answer: “I get my red hair every two weeks—(
gasp
) oops!” But the long bones and bright blue eyes were permanent gifts of nature, and her still-shapely legs and model’s carriage gave her the aura of a woman ten years younger. Nobody who met Lucy for first time believed that she was already forty-eight, whereas newcomers who encountered Desi had trouble accepting the fact that he was only forty-two. The once-boyish husband now seemed older than his wife, rather than six years her junior. The drinking had gone from self-indulgence to sickness, and in early fall he was stopped for “weaving down Vista Street,” a place known to the police as a red-light district. The arresting officers were roundly cursed on their way to the station, and while he was booked Desi threatened to call his friend J. Edgar Hoover. After half an hour in a jail cell he posted bail of $21 and was released. No harm done—except that his habit had been entered in the official record.

In the wake of this arrest, it was all but certain that the Arnazes would separate and that Desilu would be put on the block. One financial reporter noted that National Theaters & Television was interested in buying the company. It seemed a logical step; the conglomerate of movie theater owners and operators had already invested in several profitable Desilu shows, among them Grand Jury and U.S. Marshal. But negotiations never had a chance; as soon as Desi expressed interest Lucy put a stop to the talks by again refusing to sell. Four Star Production, a company headed by Dick Powell, offered to merge with Desilu. Here Desi was responsible for a breakdown in negotiations. The new company, he maintained, needed a single guiding vision. Powell agreed. The problem was that both of them wanted to be president. In the end, neither got the job.

Although those talks went nowhere, the press confirmed that Desilu was in play and concluded, not unreasonably, that Lucy and Desi were about to divorce. A story in the
Hollywood Reporter
suggested that battle lines had already been drawn: “We hear Lucy may align with Martin Leeds so there would no longer be a solid Arnaz block of stock.”

Lucy and Desi kept nursing separate grievances: she resented his descent into alcoholism and his driven womanizing—why, at this stage of his life, when he was rich and famous, did he have to go slumming to prostitutes? He thought of her as a woman who had suddenly become a prig in middle age. The final confrontation came on an autumn evening in 1959. They agreed to attend a formal party at Dean Martin’s house. As they entered a chauffeur-driven limousine, he threw her a compliment: “Lucy, you look like a doll. I’m going to have the best-looking date at the party.”

Coldly she inquired, “Are we going to be the last ones to leave the party again?”

“For Chrissakes, Lucy, we haven’t even left the fucking driveway yet and you’re worrying about whether we’re going to be the last ones to leave the party. I’ve got to be the last one to leave the party now. There ain’t no way I can miss. You know, in Cuba, when we have a party and it doesn’t wind up with everybody having breakfast the next morning, we consider it a lousy party. And now, if I’m having fun and want to stay a little longer than the other people, you consider me an asshole.”

It was only a question of who would be the first to crack. The answer came in late November. Another argument had occurred at the Desilu offices, and this time Desi followed Lucy down the hall. When she stopped to have a drink at the water cooler he asked her outright for a divorce. They were both miserable—why not end it now?