Ball of Fire (35 page)

But no one seemed to care about Lucille Ball’s appearance or about the mediocrity of
The Good Years.
The news, as expressed on the cover of Life, said it all: LUCY’S BACK ON TV. Nothing else counted to the network or the viewers. Lucy wasn’t so easily impressed. After all, she had been here before. To a publicist who asked about her future on the tube she responded: “I will never do another TV series. It couldn’t top
I Love Lucy,
and I’d be foolish to try. In this business you have to know when to get off.”

She had already been the undisputed First Lady of TV, and, for better or worse, a Broadway diva. She had even starred in radio. Only one medium remained for Lucy to dominate. She had never come close to the first rank of film stars, and it was much too late for ingenue parts. But there was still time for her to be a character lead, the comic equivalent of Bette Davis or Joan Crawford. Several ideas were batted around. Columbia offered a costarring role in
The Great Sebastians,
a Broadway hit when the Lunts appeared in it. An independent producer had the notion of casting Lucy as a congenital liar opposite James Cagney as her psychiatrist in the comedy
Here Lies Ruthie Adams.
Lucy’s favorites, Bob Carroll and Madelyn Pugh Martin, were preparing the script for
Full House,
concerning the romance of a widow with eight children and a widower with ten. And James Kirkwood’s
There
Must Be a Pony,
a drama about his mother, a silent-movie actress, briefly exerted some appeal. Lucy considered all projects, then opted for a Bob Hope vehicle,
Critic’s Choice.
Ira Levin’s comedy was based loosely on the conflict of theater critic Walter Kerr and his wife, playwright Jean Kerr, who had written the vastly successful
Mary, Mary—
a play he was forced to review.

The decision did much to restore Lucy’s morale, as did her new husband. Gary Morton was assiduously attentive at home and at social events. At the same time, he tried to maintain a distance financially, playing club dates and feeding a personal bank account with his earnings. (That money, however, was soon supplemented by unsolicited contributions from a generous wife.) Though Gary settled into Lucy’s home and circle, he made a point of asserting his own style and personality, even imposing some of it on the household cuisine—Lucy was making the trip, said her friends, from Cuban to Reuben. In fact, this voyage was not as new as it seemed; in a strange way she had always been subject to Jewish influence. Way back in the Celoron days there were the owners of Lerner’s department store; in Manhattan there was Hattie Carnegie, née Henriette Kannengiser. In the early Hollywood days there was Eddie Cantor, then the studio heads like Sam Goldwyn and David Selznick whom she regarded as “papas.” In television there were Jess Oppenheimer and William Paley. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the provincial towns of upstate New York were not know for their philo-Semitism. Yet Lucy had never shown the slightest bias against any group, no matter what the feelings of her friends and neighbors. “My mother,” observed Lucie Arnaz, “was a rebel wherever she went, and if she sensed prejudice around her she always went the other way.” And then, of course, there was the example of Grandpa Fred. Lucy’s dissidence was a matter of both nature and nurture.

In this intricately structured household Morton would remain Jewish, Lucy would identify herself as Protestant, and Lucie and Desi IV would continue to be Catholic. The separation of church and family worked for the adults; for the children it was no guarantee of happiness. Lucy entered her younger child in St. John’s Military Academy in Los Angeles, only to find that the boy was totally out of his element. “He was having nightmares. He couldn’t sleep. I said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ And he said, ‘They gave me detention for tying a shoelace during drill when I was supposed to be at attention.” Lucy learned that “thirteen-year-old ‘generals’ were giving these bullying orders.” She took Desi IV out of yet another school and mentioned the move to reporters, exacerbating the situation. This was the time to address her son’s resentments, but other matters and other people had priority. In a way, Morton was Lucy’s newest child now. In the coming years he would receive more and more attention from her; his toys were the expensive watches (Rolex, Patek Philippe) and cars (Mercedes-Benz, Rolls-Royce) formerly out of his price range. But what did that matter, she responded when a critical friend pointed out the vast discrepancy between his finances and hers. Gary didn’t chase girls, didn’t booze, was unfailingly polite, a real gentleman. She had had the other kind, and enough was too much, thank you just the same.

Lucy’s high income was not guaranteed. As vice president of Desilu she did almost nothing. But she was kept abreast of the company’s fiscal condition, and in 1962 it was not exactly robust. The company had peaked in 1957, when its shows dominated the television schedule. Now Desilu had but one dominant series,
The Untouchables,
which had recently come under fire from parents for its graphic violence, and from Italian-American groups for its stereotypical Mafia villains. The Federation of Italian-American Democratic Organizations had boycotted the show’s sponsor, and eventually the Liggett & Meyers Tobacco Company succumbed to pressure and withdrew its sponsorship. After that, no less a personage than Frank Sinatra expressed his displeasure. In one of its let’s-you-and-him-fight pieces,
Variety
noted that Sinatra and Arnaz almost came to blows at Desi’s Indian Wells Hotel when Frank looked him up at midnight to discuss the depiction of Italians as ruthless mobsters on the
Untouchables
programs.

The truth was a little more graphic and a lot more absurd. On an April evening in Palm Springs, Sinatra told friends, “I’m going to kill that Cuban prick.” With that aim in mind, according to his hostile biographer, Kitty Kelley, Sinatra drove to Indian Wells, accompanied by actress Dorothy Provine, composer Jimmy Van Heusen, and Van Heusen’s date. Desi, flanked by two large Italian-American bodyguards, entered the lounge. Obviously drunk, he spotted Sinatra and yelled, “Hi ya, dago.” Desi assumed that Sinatra was at the place to have a good time, and blithely wove his way to the table. Tight-jawed, Sinatra told Desi what he and his friends thought of
The Untouchables
and its ethnic bias. Desi exploded: “What do you want me to do— make them all Jews?” A muttered argument began. Sinatra admitted that he had never actually seen the program, but maintained that he was correct because, “I
always
know what I’m talking about. That’s how I got where I am.”

Desi gave a derisive laugh. The Cuban accent was more pronounced when he was liquored up. “Oh, yeah? Well, I remember when you couldn’t get a yob. Couldn’t get a yob. So why don’t you forget all this bullshit and just have your drinks and enjoy yourself. Stop getting your nose in where it doesn’t belong, you and your so-called friends.”

“Unruffled,” Kelley maintains, “Desi meandered back to the bar with the two bodyguards, leaving Frank full of unspent bluster. Obviously embarrassed, he looked around the table and said, ‘I couldn’t just hit him. We’ve been pals for too long.’ ” Sinatra eventually expressed his hostility in a nonviolent manner, relocating his production company from the Desilu lot to the Samuel Goldwyn studios.

In this fallow period Desilu’s real estate holdings seemed more valuable than the company’s television products—weary programs like
The
Texan
and
Guestward Ho!
So it was not a surprise to see the former Arnazes in conference, not to discuss the sunny days of their marriage but to plan a new program using the talents of Lucille Ball. “They asked me to save the studio,” Lucy was to claim with permissible exaggeration. “I wondered if there was anything to save. The only salable product we had was Lucy.”

Desilu boasted quite a few assets besides its cofounder, but none with her universal appeal. Still, she could no longer represent herself as Mrs. Ricky Ricardo. How should she be made presentable to a public still unsettled by her divorce and remarriage? Many consultations later, it was announced that Lucille Ball would star in a new half-hour series,
The Lucy Show.
It would be based on
Life without George,
Irene Kampen’s novel woven around the life of a suburban divorcée. By the time the writers finished with it, Madelyn Pugh Martin and the three Bobs, Carroll, Schiller, and Weiskopf, had turned the star into a widow. The change of her status was vital; the public knew the fictive Lucy as a happily married woman. In real life the only way she could divest herself of Desi was to divorce him; in her screen life the only way to get rid of her husband was to bury him. Lucy retained her Christian name, but her surname was now Carmichael. “Lucille could be very superstitious,” said actress Carole Cook. “She liked the letters ‘ar’ together. That’s part of the reason for the name ‘Carmichael.’ . . . I reminded her once that she had done pretty well with the name Lucille Ball, but she said, ‘Yeah, but I didn’t do really well until my name was ARnaz and RicARdo.’ ”

Lucy’s Mrs. Carmichael is a somewhat ditsy inhabitant of West-chester, New York, who rents rooms to her friend, divorcée Vivian Bagley. (Vivian Vance, who had foresworn Hollywood upon marriage to her fourth, and much younger, husband, the editor–literary agent John Dodds, was enticed out of Connecticut retirement to play the part. William Frawley had left Desilu to appear as a regular in the sitcom
My
Three Sons.
) Both women have children: Lucy a teenage daughter, Chris, and a younger son, Jerry. Vivian has a preteen son, Sherman.

In the first episode, broadcast October 1, 1962, Lucy bounces around on a trampoline. Subsequent adventures involve the widow Carmichael in her son’s school football game, acquiring a sheep to trim the lawn, attempting to become an astronaut, and climbing into a kangaroo outfit. The show had the female ingredients of
I Love Lucy,
but that was all it had. Audiences knew that Lucille Ball was not Lucy Carmichael. They were keenly aware that she was not a widow and that she was too old to be repeating 1950s shtick, mugging and flashing her innocent blue eyes whenever plans went awry. With each show Lucy’s worries intensified. Was she was on a fool’s errand, trying to induce lightning to strike twice at the same studio? Candy Moore, who played Chris, described her screen mother: “I would talk to her sometimes before the show. It was scary—she’d be looking at me, and she wouldn’t hear a word I said. She was tuned in to her own thoughts, and she’d be looking right through me.” The fear was infectious: “Vivian was a nervous wreck, too. They were buzzing on adrenaline, they were so scared.”

Given these terrors, the first batch of episodes proved to be much better than Lucy expected, although things went downhill rapidly from there. Broadcast the same night of the week as
I Love Lucy
(though a half hour earlier),
The Lucy Show
acquired an audience of nostalgia buffs and new viewers.
Variety
spoke for them: “Lucille Ball is back and welcome.” Playing the good sport, Desi placed an institutional ad in the show-business paper, using snippets of favorable reviews surrounding a caricature of himself making a mock complaint: “How do you like that—they didn’t even miss me!” The
Hollywood Reporter
spoke for the disappointed fans: “It’s going to take a lot of getting-used-to-Lucy without Desi.” His absence was being felt with every show, “tribute indeed to any comedian.” A vague attempt was made to replace Desi with Lucy Carmichael’s drop-in suitor, an affable, ineffectual airline pilot played by Dick Martin. It was not convincing. As the program went on, wisecracking insiders, noticing the lack of significant males, used
The
Dick Van Dyke Show
as a reference. They called Lucy’s program the “Dyke Sans Dick Show” and, more explicitly, the “Dyke Show Sans Dicks.”

The production values were not all they could have been, either. The camera work was professional enough, as were the backgrounds and costumes, most of which not only flattered a heavily made-up Lucy but allowed Vivian to exhibit a little glamour of her own. The chief difficulty lay in Desilu’s (i.e., Desi’s) shortsightedness. In Desi’s opinion, comedy was “all black or all white” anyway: “It’s either funny or it’s not.” Why would an audience laugh any harder because a show was in shades of yellow, red, and blue? Like many others in the industry, he failed to realize that after Walt Disney’s
Wonderful World of
Color
debuted in the fall of 1961, a revolution was under way.
Fortune
magazine predicted that one in three homes (18 million viewers) would soon own a color set, and the year Lucy came back to prime time, RCA’s board chairman predicted that “it won’t be very long before color television will be a mass item of commerce.” Yet at a Desilu stockholders’ meeting in 1962, Desi informed investors that he had no intention of filming
The Lucy Show
in color. In his opinion, “she’s just as funny in black-and-white.”

In point of fact, he was correct. As we will see, Desi’s commercial misjudgment turned out to be the ultimate making of Lucille Ball. But he could not know that; at the time, his statement seemed symptomatic of a general picture of inattention, for once again drinking had taken over his life. In
Desilu,
their detailed history of the company, Coyne Steven Sanders and Tom Gilbert cite several occasions on which Desi couldn’t control his behavior, even with the children. “At Del Mar, he was teaching little Desi how to shoot a gun. The poor kid wasn’t doing it right. His dad just lit into him, yelling, ‘You motherfucker, can’t you do anything?’ ” And Lucie remembered the times when her father “wouldn’t understand things clearly. He would misunderstand situations. He would think people were talking about him. He would hear something and think he heard something else. When it was at its worst, he would blow up. If the TV was on too late, and it was bedtime, instead of saying, ‘It’s bedtime,’ doors would crash. It was awful. It was terrible. Then he’d be terrifically sorry and feel awful. After I got a little older, I stopped going down there.”