Ball of Fire (32 page)

Lucy later claimed, “I had a lawyer in his office in twenty minutes.” That was not the case. She walked away, enraged. Whether she was angry because he had jumped the gun and asked for a split before she did, or because this was just the latest in an endless line of insults— how dare he confront her at the water cooler instead of in the privacy of their house?—was never made clear. She got home before he did, and when Desi entered she confronted him with her own question: “You meant what you said?”

“Yes, I’m very sorry, but I did. I cannot keep on living this way.”

All the misery poured out. “Why don’t you die then?” Lucy cried. “That would be a better solution, better for the children, better for everybody.”

“I’m sorry, but dying is not on my immediate schedule.”

Her tirade continued. “I’ll tell you something. You bastard, you cheat, you drunken bum, I got enough on you to hang you. By the time I get through with you you’ll be as broke as when you got here.” Now she ran completely off the rails. “You goddam spic, you . . . you wet-back!”

Desi broke away to find a cigarette in his dressing room. Lucy ran after him, and there occurred a scene that could have come straight out of
I Love Lucy
in its early years. She grabbed an ornamental dueling pistol that lay on his desk, aimed it at his face, and pulled the trigger. She knew very well that it was a cigarette lighter, not a real firearm; she had used the movement and the prop before, usually to conclude whatever argument they were having at the time. But this time was different; behind her gesture were years of resentment and hostility, and behind
that
was a lethal intent. The end of the barrel ignited and Desi lit his cigarette on the flame. After an aching silence he conceded. Lucy could be the one to sue for divorce; he would not stand in the way of a fair financial settlement. He ended by asking, a little too theatrically, “Please, don’t ever threaten me again.” After that, there was nothing to do but make an exit.

That their parents were not getting along was no secret to Lucie or Desi IV. Their anxiety and depression were reflected in poor school-work and in temperamental outbursts. Yet both continued to deny what everyone else knew was true. To be sure, their father was not around the house much. These days he spent a lot of evenings at the office, and frequently lived away from their L.A. home, usually at their Palm Springs house, but also at the Circle JR Ranch, a Thoroughbred stock farm, where he owned some racehorses. Still, other daddies were just as busy, just as scarce. And if Mommy seemed distressed much of the time, other mommies were similarly unhappy. They remained secure in the knowledge that their parents were married, that their house was not run by stepmothers and stepfathers, as were the houses of so many of their schoolmates.

The denial ended on the afternoon Lucy and Desi took the children to Palm Springs. She broke the news gently: “I have to tell you that Mommy and Daddy are not getting along and I know the unhappiness you see is affecting you. And I want you to know that it has nothing to do with you. We love you very much.”

An embarrassed silence ensued. Lucie broke it. She had an intense air, even at the age of eight, and her question bore in on her parents: “You don’t have to get divorced, do you?”

The six-year-old Desi chimed in: “Can’t you take it all back—and make up?”

No, both parents informed them, they could not. The next moments were almost unbearable. More than thirty years afterward Lucy still heard “the sound of those two kids weeping. That really stays with you. I never thought they would go to pieces like that.” She and Desi tried to assure the children that he would be around as often as they wanted to see him, but their grief was not to be assuaged. As much as Lucie and Desi IV had heard and overheard, it was not enough to make them understand their parents. “I thought they knew what was going on, but they were little kids . . . and so it was like a bomb dropped.”

In retrospect, Lucy reflected, perhaps she should have told her daughter and son their parents were splitting because “he’s a drunk and he lays every broad in Hollywood.” She continued: “It was important for me that they know that I didn’t cause the divorce. That it wasn’t me who failed. I wanted to tell them, ‘It’s all your father’s fault. Blame him!’ ” But she couldn’t make herself say the words. “I knew that if I told them to blame him, they’d only blame me anyway. I had to let them find out for themselves what their father was like. And unfortunately, they did.”

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 money 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.