Ball of Fire (42 page)

Desi’s show business career was not quite finished. “I was tired,” he claimed, “of seeing Ricardo Montalban and Fernando Lamas in all those Mexican roles.” He was also tired of being television’s forgotten man. And so he appeared in an episode of
The Men from Shiloh,
a Western series, some twenty-five pounds heavier but looking none the worse for his bouts with severe diverticulitis. He had sold his horse-breeding farm and now spent almost all his leisure hours fishing in Mexico or relaxing on the grounds of his Del Mar house. If no new money was coming in, he had plans to produce several new series. And perhaps he would do some more acting now that he had gotten his feet wet again. Lucy wasn’t the only one with talent, the networks were continually reminded.

True enough, but Desi’s greatest gifts lay in his uncanny ability to put writers on the appropriate properties, and to cast the ideal actors in the right roles. Thus he could not help but feel a great sadness and frustration at the start of 1973, when the cameras began to film Lucy in
Mame.
For Desi it must have been like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The skiing accident had caused a sixteen-month postponement, and George Cukor, who had directed Judy Garland in
her
sensational comeback film,
A Star Is Born,
dropped out to fill other commitments. Cukor was replaced by the inexperienced Gene Saks, director of the Broadway
Mame.
Leonard Gershe, who had adapted the Gershwins’
Funny Face
and Cole Porter’s
Silk Stockings,
was announced as the scenarist, but the script was eventually done by Paul Zindel. That writer’s main credits were for stage works, most notably the off-Broadway play
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon
Marigolds.
Bette Davis, who made no secret of her desire to play Vera Charles, Mame’s “bosom buddy,” was passed over in favor of Beatrice Arthur, the original Broadway Vera—and, not coincidentally, Gene Saks’s wife. The comic actress Madeline Kahn had been signed to play Agnes Gooch, the terrified spinster who becomes liberated by Mame’s lust for life. Five weeks into rehearsals Lucy challenged her, “When are you going to show us Gooch?” Replied Kahn, “I have.” It was the wrong answer. Kahn later claimed, “The producers explained a few things, and let me go, wishing I could have stayed.” Lucy thought there was more to the dismissal than that: Madeline “got them for fifty grand, and she knew all she had to do was play it cool—she would get paid off and go to work immediately on [Mel Brooks’s comedy]
Blazing Saddles.
She had no intention of giving me Gooch.” Jane Connell, who had played the part on the stage, took Kahn’s place.

For most of the nineteen weeks of shooting, Lucy suffered from anxiety and leg pains. The tension manifested itself in an argument with her longtime makeup man, Hal King, who had been using a liquid adhesive to conceal the actress’s wrinkles. The device hurt, and Lucy’s temper was short anyway; she slapped him during an argument and he walked off the picture.

As soon as the doctors gave her the green light to begin rehearsals, Lucy began to rise at 5 a.m. and spend ninety minutes every morning stretching and bending before she drove to the set. With all this preparation, choreographer Onna White could do only so much with an actress whose great versatility had never included terpsichore. When writer Charles Higham visited her on the set, Lucy exploded: “Why am I doing this? I must be out of my mind. Dancing for a whole hour, exercise, the vocal coach, Jesus. Movies! The
hours
! It’s like running backward!” As a friend remarked, “Lucy knew very well why she was working her tail off: it was in the hope of firing the last stage of her rocket—becoming a movie diva in her sixties.”

When the filming concluded, Lucy gave out interviews pushing
Mame
as a family movie. She made it, she insisted, “because I don’t want the industry to go down the sewer, and I mean sewer! There are too many lines around the wrong movie houses these days.” She cited the Bernardo Bertolucci film
Last Tango in Paris
as a prime example of sex gone wrong. “I don’t know why Marlon Brando would lower himself to do a film like that. I think there are a lot of dirty old men making a fast buck—and confusing young people.” She kept making that point wherever she journeyed, and, as the New York opening approached, turned an episode of
Here’s Lucy
into a half-hour plug for the upcoming
Mame.

All the plans, all the promises and aspirations crashed in March 1974, when
Mame
had what was called a World Premiere at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. (The film then moved on to Radio City Music Hall.) Desi proved to be right in all respects. Lucy was miscast and unprotected; everything had slalomed downhill from there. Worse musicals had preceded it in the 1970s, among them the tuneless
Song
of Norway,
starring an unconvincing Florence Henderson, and the plodding
Lost Horizon,
which contained Bert Bacharach and Hal David’s worst score. But this one seemed to irritate the critics in a new and different manner, and most of them went out of their way to be unkind. It was as if they were personally affronted by a TV personality who dared to criticize the film business, and who had the effrontery to go above herself. In
Newsweek,
Paul D. Zimmerman wrote: “There she stands, her aging face practically a blur in the protective gauze of softer-than-soft focus, her eyes misting, her remarkably well kept figure gift-wrapped in the fashions of the twenties, looking alternately like any one of the seven deadly sins and a decorator wing chair.” In
Time,
Jay Cocks observed: “Miss Ball has been molded over the years into some sort of national monument, and she performs like one too. Her grace, her timing, her vigor have all vanished.” Cocks wrote that only Bea Arthur brought the film to life: “She tucks
Mame
under her arm and walks away with it, although not far enough.” In the
New
Yorker,
Pauline Kael made the cruelest assessment, giving the project a homosexual spin: “Why did Lucille Ball do
Mame
? After more than forty years in movies and TV (and five years of chorus work and assorted jobs before that)—after conquering the world—did she discover in herself an unfilled ambition to be a flaming drag queen?” The audience, looking at the star, is “not thinking of fun,” Kael goes on, “we’re thinking of age and self-deception. When Mame’s best friend, Vera Charles (Bea Arthur), asks her, ‘How old do you think I am?’ and Mame answers, ‘Somewhere between forty and death,’ one may feel a shudder in the audience. How can a woman well over sixty say a line like that, with the cameraman using every lying device he knows and still unable to hide the blurred eyes?”

Lucy called the critical response “a shellacking” and never really got over it. She put up a cheery front, pointing out that
Mame
’s first weeks had broken box office records at Radio City. As time went on, though, she kept rereading the knocks, like a casualty whose fingers keep straying to the wound.
People
magazine reporter Jim Watters was less than friendly about the way she was “regally apportioning her time” during a publicity trip to New York: “ninety minutes with prestigious if low-rated Dick Cavett to an evening accepting a ‘Ruby’ (named after Keeler) award hosted by a homosexual-oriented magazine.” When he confessed that he was less than enthusiastic about
Mame,
she should have stayed away from the subject. Instead she gave Watters a ten-minute diatribe on the deterioration of American cinema: “ ‘Don’t you think there is a need for pictures that won’t strain to the nth degree every bone in your body? Don’t you have enough reality so that in a theater you should be entertained? I suppose you like covering the water-front. I bet you even liked
Last Tango,
’ she asserted in her best basso tones.” In Chicago Lucy broke down during an interview with
Sun-Times
critic Gene Siskel. “It’s not that I’m tired,” she said as tears rolled down her face. “Why do the newspapers have to send people just so they can take ugly pictures of me?” she wailed. “So I look my age— what’s wrong with that? These stories make me feel wrong and old.”

I
n a sad synchrony, the rest of her career wound down in 1974.
Here’s
Lucy
had slipped badly in the ratings; for the first time in her life, a Lucille Ball program failed to make the Nielsen Top Twenty. CBS statisticians had been charting her waning popularity for months, but the network’s management had not dared to intervene because Lucy was still a beloved figure all across the United States. But by the winter of 1974 it was decided that
Here’s Lucy
had turned into a liability. Meeting upon meeting followed, until an announcement confirmed the water-cooler speculations. After twenty-three years as a television superstar, Lucille Ball would ring down the curtain on weekly comedy. A CBS press release hastily added that Miss Ball and the network were still great friends. To demonstrate that affection she would be in an “undisclosed number of specials” in the 1975–1976 season.

Here, at least, the press was indulgent. The
New York Times
noted that the various
Lucy
shows were running in seventy-seven countries. In a valedictory, the paper saluted Lucy, saying she “was to CBS what Milton Berle had been to the National Broadcasting Company during the early days of television, and she was credited by CBS with winning an audience to make it competitive.” The
Los Angeles Times
saw Lucille Ball as an international figure on the order of Chaplin. Her works were “playing in so many countries that a salesman once said that he knew when
Lucy
had reached a new nation of Africa or Asia by finding babies named Lucy.”

The subject of this adulation was unwilling to call it a day, to put her feet up, take stock of her career, and organize her scrapbooks. DeDe was still around, and watching the spry old lady with the dyed red hair allowed Lucy to feel that she herself was in an extended period of middle age. And since neither Desi Jr. nor Lucie had settled down yet, she could compare herself with women decades younger, whose children were in much the same fix.

In his twenties, Desi Jr. embarked on a new career as a film actor, appearing as Marco Polo in the comedy
Marco,
and as a young half-Indian in the Western
Billy Two Hats,
costarring Gregory Peck. The years of performing on the stage and television had given him a professional sheen. In addition, the now lean and attractive young man had inherited great measures of his father’s charm and his mother’s drive. Still, he never quite caught on. There were new romances after Liza Minnelli became distracted by Peter Sellars when she was off filming in England. And there were more drug trips and more alcohol.

In contrast, Lucie was beginning to carve out an independent show business career. A tall, striking young woman, she developed a cabaret act, did regional theater, then landed her first major role, as the neurotic dancer Gittel Mosca in the 1974–1975 national tour of the musical
Two for the Seesaw.
In 1975, she played the title role in NBC’s
Who Is
the Black Dahlia?,
based on the true story of an unsolved Los Angeles slaying. The same year she starred in
Death Scream,
an ABC drama inspired by the murder of Kitty Genovese, whose screams for help were ignored by her New York City neighbors.

Lucy kept almost as busy in 1975. She was the lodestar of
Grand Ole
Opry
’s farcical “Lucy Comes to Nashville,” and of the CBS seriocomedy
Three for Two,
opposite Jackie Gleason. Lucy had long nourished the idea of playing Lillian Russell to Jackie Gleason’s Diamond Jim Brady; this was the closest she was to come. In the first vignette, Lucy, wearing a black wig with silver highlights, impersonated a neglected wife. In the second, as a plain hausfrau having an affair, she wore an upswept blonde wig and a feather boa. In the third, sporting an upswept brown wig and a close-fitting gown, she played a manipulative mother and wife. Lucy’s versatility was not enough to save the show. Too few of the lines were moving or funny, and
Three for Two
found no favor with the critics
—Variety
judged it a “dismal trio of one-act plays about unpleasant and stupid people.” Despite this assessment, the paper held no grudge, praising her work in the semi-autobiographical
What Now, Catherine Curtis?
on CBS. For the first time since her pregnancy Lucy had gained noticeable weight. Nevertheless, under a well-made brunette wig she looked more attractive than she had in years, and she acted with unaccustomed subtlety and poignance. Miss Ball, maintained
Variety,
gave “an outstanding performance as a middle-aged divorcée emotionally shattered by the end of a twenty-year marriage.”

One show broadcast that year was notable for Lucy’s absence. “NBC’s Saturday Night,” shot in New York, employed its young
Saturday
Night Live
stars—plus Desi Arnaz Sr. and Jr.—to send up
I Love
Lucy
and Desilu’s
The Untouchables.
Desi Jr. was to look back benignly on the program. “
I
Love Lucy
had never been satirized by anyone,” he told Geoffrey Mark Fidelman. “It was groundbreaking in a strange way.” His sister was not so sanguine. “I remember watching that show in my mother’s condo in Aspen and thinking it was dreadful. I had a feeling they were making fun of my father, and fooling him into thinking they were tributing him. It really bothered me that they never even let him finish singing ‘Babalu.’ I felt really sad for him afterward, like he had been used.”

Desi got his own back, and more, when his autobiography,
A Book,
was published the following year. It was a candid, oddly appealing work, done without a ghostwriter. The author enjoyed a little self-mockery, as in the account of his sexual initiation: “I was obviously anxious and noticeably ready for action, and getting more and more frustrated by the minute. We had tried a number of ridiculous experiments and were working on a new one when there was a loud knock on the door. It was her mother, the cook, asking her to come out. I didn’t have any trouble putting on my trunks in a hurry. The small proof of my anxiety had disappeared. I wish I could have done the same.”