Ball of Fire (36 page)

In a complicated chicken-and-egg situation, it was impossible to tell whether Desi drank because his company was faltering, or whether Desilu was in a slump because its president was an alcoholic. All that was certain was that something had to change.

Newton Minow, appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission by President John F. Kennedy, had warned that U.S. viewers were facing “a vast wasteland” every night. Even so, he had to concede, “When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better.” The early 1960s offered an opening for creative producers to flourish in the week-wide desert of
The Jetsons, I’ve Got a Secret, I’m Dickens—He’s Fenster, Dennis the
Menace, Laramie,
and
Sing Along with Mitch.
Many of them did, but not Desi, who had lost his focus and attention to detail. He was ill and burned out, an old man at forty-five. He had a last hurrah, billboarding his plans for the upcoming 1963–1964 season. Desilu would produce a game show; a TV series based on Cecil B. DeMille’s all-star circus spectacular,
The Greatest Show on Earth;
spin-offs of
The Untouchables;
and more situation comedies starring the likes of Ethel Merman and Glynis Johns.

That was the reason why an announcement from Desilu on Friday, November 9, 1962, shocked the industry. Desi was abruptly leaving the company he had founded, selling out to his ex-wife and heading for retirement. Insiders knew that the drama could have ended no other way. The stock had fallen from a high of $20 per share to $7. The company was in debt, and in a literal and figurative sense Desi no longer had the stomach to engineer a turnaround. In point of fact, he was responsible for the current status of Desilu Productions. When the company went public in December 1958, the Arnazes had signed an agreement. Should the time come when either wanted to quit, one partner would have the right buy the other out. Desi, embittered but weary, and in a much steeper decline than Desilu, was ready to go. But he needed money to live in style once his regular income was gone. With the help of Mickey Rudin, Lucy, the vice president, borrowed $3 million from City National Bank and bought the president’s shares— 52 percent of the total outstanding stock. Depressed as it was, Lucy’s advisers believed she was still getting a bargain.

Desi insisted that he had been planning on early retirement all along, and he posed for the press wearing a tight smile. All feeling seemed to have vanished from his face and from his outlook. And, indeed, when he left the company for the last time he paused only long enough to take a picture cube with photos of Lucie and Desi IV from his desk. Everything else was left in place. He wanted no part of the studio anymore. But Lucy still felt sentimental; she couldn’t bear to think of Desilu without him. She worked out a rationale for the press. “Desi has wanted to sell out for five years,” she claimed, “and I had first refusal on the stock. It’s a big and wonderful company—the real estate alone is worth six million—and I didn’t want to close up shop and hand over my shares to a stranger.” Besides, she added, “if I get in a jam I can always call up Desi and ask him what he’d do.” Even now, remarried and resettled, the first woman to head a major Hollywood studio since Mary Pickford produced her own pictures in the silent era, Lucy could not cut the cord.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

“What are you
trying to do,
ruin my career?”

SHE HASN’T even got her name on the door,” wrote the admiring
New York Times
reporter Gilbert Milstein after a tour of Desilu. Essentially, Milstein found, the new president, Lucille Ball, planned to get along and go along with the company’s top executives—every one of them installed by Desi. Ed Holly remained in charge of finance and administration; W. Argyle Nelson, of production; Jerry Thorpe of programming. As in the past, the
Times
man continued, Lucille Ball “will turn up at the irregular meetings of her executives, listening a lot, saying little, signing papers, and making it known if she has definite ideas on anything.”

Stockholders heard that Lucy was just hanging back, waiting for the right moment to turn into a hard-driving administrator. She put that rumor to rest in an interview: “I’m mad about this idea that I’m a workaholic. I spent some time researching words like ‘workaholic’ and ‘perfectionist.’ Workaholic is not what people think.” She invited the press and the public to examine her history. “For God’s sake, I always took long vacations, eight weeks at a time in Europe, with the kids, and I always had three-day weekends.” The fact is, though, that those holidays were not for relaxation. As she inadvertently admitted, they were for delusion: “I thought that time away could save the marriage to Desi.”

“My mother was uncomfortable with it all,” Lucie Arnaz remembered. “Basically she was a performer, not a businesswoman. The trappings of power meant very little to her. She was happy to delegate authority.” Privately Lucy hoped that everything and everyone would go on as before, leaving her with no decisions to make. But irrevocable changes had already occurred, and more were on the way. This was the season of divorce, for example. After the splits of the Arnazes and Vivian Vance and Philip Ober, cousin Cleo and her husband Ken Morgan separated, as did Madelyn Pugh and Quinn Martin. Lucy sometimes wondered, unhappily, if these breakups occurred because she and Desi had led the way.

Other seismic shifts served to make her days long and uneasy. Two Desilu shows were brought on with an avalanche of publicity.
Be Careful,My Love,
a comic mystery series starring Glynis Johns and Keith Andes, was produced by Jess Oppenheimer and looked to be a winner. And the long-awaited television adaptation of
The Greatest Show on
Earth
seemed ideal for family viewing. Neither made it out of the 1963–1964 season. Moreover,
The Untouchables
was coming to the end of its historic run, and none of the spin-offs was working out.
Critic’s
Choice,
the movie Lucy made with Bob Hope upon her return from New York, was supposed to announce her triumphant reentry into cinema. Instead, the picture was a perfunctory and shallow version of the stage play, of more interest to curious Broadway fans than to filmgoers. It was met with yawns from the critics and indifference from a nationwide audience, even though Lucy outshone the script and the costar. Reluctantly she came to the conclusion that her professional life had been a restatement of children’s tales from Aesop to
The Wizard of Oz.
In the end, all the wandering through various media had taught her that there was no place like home, and for Lucille Ball that home was the sound stage of a television studio.

Whatever Desi’s personal shortcomings, he had always been a shrewd judge of scripts and a sage career counselor. His advice would have been welcome. But he was out of the picture now, emotionally and geographically distant, with little apparent interest in the business he had foresworn. In the tradition of playing up birthdays, he celebrated his forty-sixth in Las Vegas by taking a new wife, Edie Hirsch, a striking redhead who reminded many of Lucy. The best man was Dr. Marcus Rabwin, the physician who had rescued Desi from many incidents of ill health; Jimmy Durante’s wife, Marge, served as matron of honor. To show the world there were no hard feelings, Lucy sent the couple a huge bunch of roses in the shape of a horseshoe. The card read, “You both picked a winner.” That message contained more irony than Lucy knew.

Edie was the ex-wife of Clement Hirsch, who had made his fortune manufacturing and selling Kal Kan dog food. Suspicious that his wife was carrying on with Desi, Hirsch had hired detectives to follow the pair. Desi heard about the move and employed detectives of his own to follow the men who were shadowing
him.
The farce ended when Desi persuaded Edie to leave her husband and join him in a new and luxurious life. It was new all right, but far from luxurious. On their wedding night Desi spent more time at the roulette table than with his new wife. That was only the beginning; he was soon to squander thousands at casinos and racetracks. “He was a real addicted gambler,” lamented Dr. Rabwin’s wife, Marcella. “It was impossible to stop him.”

Desi’s reputation as a troublemaker stayed with him in the post-Lucy days. One day he received notice that he was being sued for thousands of dollars. The plaintiff was an old man who said Desi had punched him at the Thunderbird Country Club during an argument. Melvin Belli had been hired to represent the plaintiff, and Desi appeared to be in deep trouble. Then he discovered that there was an eyewitness to the argument. That person was willing to swear Desi had not thrown a single punch. Now confident, Desi refused to settle out of court and retained a local lawyer, Donald Brown, to defend him. “I knew he was explosive,” said Brown, “and I knew he was an actor. And I told him that if I were Melvin Belli, I’d put him on the stand and try to get him to lose his temper in front of the jury. He said to me, ‘Don’t worry. When I get on the stand, I’m Ricky Ricardo.’ ” True to form, Belli did try to provoke Desi: he asked if he had cursed out the old man’s wife, and used an expletive for illustration. “I am a Cuban gentleman,” Desi responded. “I would never call a woman that.
You
I would call that.” The answer brought down the house. Brown then summoned the star witness. “State your name,” the bailiff directed. “James Francis Durante,” came the hoarse reply. That, too, brought down the house—everyone recognized comedian Jimmy Durante. Just in from Las Vegas, he completed his exculpatory testimony and exited. The jury deliberated for seventeen minutes. The old man and his wife went away without a cent.

Lucy heard about this from afar, relieved for Desi’s sake, and glad for herself—she was beyond the reach of a man who seemed to draw trouble the way he used to attract women. Logically, she should have installed her new husband at Desilu, as a welcome Desi Arnaz substitute. She astonished the employees, to say nothing of the town, by refusing to do so. Gary Morton went on doing what he did best, appearing at nightclubs, until Lucy realized that in one respect the second marriage was repeating the first—the man would be on the road too much of the time. During the first months of their marriage, Lucy had been only too happy to edit Gary’s routines, encouraging him to emphasize a word to elicit a bigger laugh, fine-tuning his timing and approach. Now she demanded that he put a stop to his road shows, and he complied. His performances would be confined to audience warm-ups before the
Lucy
shows were filmed, and occasional appearances on the show.

A scratch golfer, Gary began to develop a course in the San Fernando Valley. The rest of the time he spent as a substitute father, attempting with some success to befriend Lucy’s children, staying discreetly out of the way, and making sure that Lucy was treated with great deference. His first anniversary present to her was a tiny gold watch and matching gold pocketbook.

A tougher, less malleable Lucy went public in August of 1963 when, as Desilu’s new president, she ran the stockholders’ meeting. More than one of those present must have recalled Bob Hope’s quip, “Who would have ever thought I’d kiss a company president—on the lips?” Lucy’s informal outfit—purple-and-white-flowered dress and open-toed sandals—clashed with her cool demeanor and prepared statements. The company had experienced some hard times, she stated: it had lost money the previous year. Now, however, things were looking up. For the first quarter of 1963 Desilu enjoyed a gross income of $4.8 million, up $1.5 million for the same period in 1962. And there were big plans for the upcoming season, with a heavy emphasis on situation comedy, the genre Desilu knew best. At the end, a few attendees asked pro forma questions; one wanted to know whether she could handle her executive duties and still star in her own program. Assuming the authoritative tone of a woman capable of having it all, she assured everyone that she could do several tasks at the same time and succeed in all of them.

Only afterward, when the listeners and the press had gone, did Lucy drop her guard. Those who knew her best could see evidence of the humiliated child as she went around collecting pencils distributed to the stockholders when the meeting began. Gathering up writing instruments was an old habit; she did the same thing after board meetings. “I could never find out what she did with all those pencils,” recalled Ed Holly.

Sitting atop her empire, Lucy remained just as threatened now as she was in the days of the HUAC hearings. The only difference was that back then she was bothered by the past; today she was threatened by the future. Who knew if any of these gaudy plans would really work? You could assure your investors and wow the networks, but in his own ungrammatical way Sam Goldwyn had it right: if people don’t want to watch you, you can’t stop them.

Whenever Goodman Ace was asked about Lucille Ball, his eyes rolled. The veteran writer had been hired by Desilu Productions to create a special for TV comedians, sponsored by General Foods. The 1963 experience was so unpleasant that he made detailed notes about it, and later published a vengeful piece in the
Saturday Review.
The program, he noted, ran in September, just before the second season of
The Lucy Show.
But it aired only after many revisions demanded by Lucy.

Ace had come up with the premise that General Foods was going to drop one of its five stars—Jack Benny, Danny Thomas, Garry Moore, Andy Griffith, and Lucille Ball. Onscreen, the comedians’ nerves would be on edge, competition would ensue, and jokes would abound. Or so it was expected when the sponsor approved the script. Then, Ace wrote, “in the purified vernacular of television, all heck broke loose. Miss Ball found it highly incompatible with her public image to pretend that she would worry about losing her job . . . because everybody knows she is president of Desilu Productions. She wanted a slight change—the script to state explicitly that she is president of Desilu and she wasn’t worried.” The changes were of course made, much to the detriment of the show. Grumbled Ace, “If I play my cards right, I may never have to write for her again.”

He was not the only writer to make Lucy an object of derision in 1963. At the end of the year,
Nobody Loves an Albatross
opened at the Lyceum Theatre in New York. The Broadway comedy was written by Ron Alexander, who had extensive experience in television. Essentially, his was a revenge play about demanding producers and the employees they overpaid and then humiliated. Robert Preston starred, with strong support from veteran actress Constance Ford in the telling role of Hildy Jones. The script describes Miss Jones: “She is one of those incredible women who, despite her 47 or 48 years, looks better than anybody else who is 30. Add to this the fact that Hildy has the talent of a clown and the steel trap mind of a tycoon, and you have a general picture.”

In a typical exchange, a writer pleads for his job:

NAT

Hildy, darling, I created and wrote the private eye show for you.

HILDY

That’s all you’ve come up with in a year and a half, it’s not enough for all the money I’m paying you, Baby. (
Smiles
) The difference between you and me is you’re a man of five-minute loyalties and I’m a woman of no loyalty at all. I’m staking your reputation on this show, Nat, and if it doesn’t work, you won’t either.

NAT

You’re very kind.

To New York critics and audiences, Hildy was just an amusing character—she could have been any female executive. Hollywood insiders had a specific boss-lady in mind.

Without offering an apology for Lucy’s behavior during this period, her daughter thought she knew the reasons for it. “The worst thing you can do is suppress pain,” observed Lucie, “and she made a career out of suppressing all her pain.” Lately the miseries of childhood had been supplanted by the very public divorce and the assumption of responsibility Lucy had never wanted. To be famous, yes, she had always desired that, and to be respected. But to be responsible? That was something else, something unplanned and intimidating. But if that was the hand she had been dealt, so be it. She would intimidate back. Small wonder that director John Frankenheimer seriously considered Lucy for the part of Laurence Harvey’s lethal, oedipal mother in the thriller
The Manchurian Candidate,
before awarding it to Angela Lansbury.

On the set, a different person began to show up. Through the
I Love
Lucy
years, the star had been difficult and querulous, particularly at first readings, seeking the right tempo and takes. But the persona she displayed at the filming of
The Lucy Show
was quite unlike what had gone before.