Ball of Fire (43 page)

But for the most part
A Book
was a straightforward account of the romantic, financial, and familial relationship of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, from Desi’s point of view. Desi summoned up the grand beginnings, the exciting heyday of
I Love Lucy,
the building of the studio, the children as youngsters, and finally the arguments, the split, and the paradise lost. “The irony of it all,” he concluded, “is how our undreamed-of success, fame, and fortune turned it all to hell.” Only a few books have been encapsulated by the pictures on the dust jacket. Desi’s was one of them. On the back, a handsome young Cuban flashed a brilliant smile as he hammered a set of conga drums. A lifetime later, Desi squinted out from the cover, gesturing to an audience with cigarillo in hand. The younger man hadn’t a line on his face. The older man was seamed and weary, battered by life and circumstances and—as he ruefully acknowledged in his memoir—by too damn many self-inflicted wounds.

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

“You think
it’s funny
getting old”

IN THE MID-1970S and beyond, the losses went on. Lucy’s onetime neighbor Jack Benny, the man who had taught her so much about timing, died in 1974. Early in 1977, DeDe, aged eighty-five, suffered a stroke that confined her to a house in Brentwood. Lucy had bought the place to provide DeDe with the illusion of independence, but she called in every morning, dreading the day when no one would pick up the phone. It came on July 22.

DeDe had been in the audience for thousands of broadcasts, and Lucy remained shocked and disoriented long after her mother’s death. Two months later, as taping began for the special “Lucy Calls the President,” the star abruptly shouted: “Cut!” She explained to the onlookers: “I’m sorry, I got off to a bad start. My DeDe is usually in the audience, and damn it, that threw me at the top. That was my Mom. She’s made every show for all these years and it suddenly dawned on me as I was coming down the stairs. Forgive me! I’m glad I got that out of my system and I’m awfully glad you’re here. It was maudlin, but I just couldn’t help it.”

In the cast of that special was Vivian Vance, making what was to be her last public appearance. She had suffered a minor stroke, and Lucy sent her to a specialist. Back came Vivian with the news: “Your fucking doctor says I have cancer!” The diagnosis was correct. She immediately went off to northern California to receive radiation treatments.

During this time Lucy appeared in a number of other specials, ranging from
Circus of the Stars
to the
Mary Tyler Moore Hour,
the latter an experience she preferred to forget: “I’d say something to Mary and she’d smile that big toothy smile and walk away.” Lucy became notorious for her crankiness on the set, no doubt a reaction to all that was going on around her, and to her consciousness of encroaching age. Late in 1977 she sat for an unpleasant interview with Barbara Walters, during which she retailed what had already become a standard cascade: “Desi is a loser. A gambler, an alcoholic, a skirt chaser . . . a financially smart man but self-destructive.” She characterized Gary, who sat beside her, as a welcome contrast. All the pent-up bitterness began to affect her performances. On a
Steve Allen Comedy Hour
special, for example, Allen resurrected an old hospital routine he had written with comedian Gene Rayburn. Originally, Rayburn had played a patient swathed head to toe in bandages; Jayne Meadows had played the man’s wife. “Jayne got screams,” Allen recalled, “doing it perfectly as she grabs at him in innocence, concern, and hysteria. We were looking for something strong for Lucy to do on this show. Yet, to our surprise, when she did it there were no laughs at all. We had to sweeten the laugh track later. She didn’t do the right kind of hysterics. There was no believability to what she did.” The irony of all this was that in 1977 Lucy had been named one of the ten most admired women in a Gallup poll, coming in ahead of Mamie Eisenhower, Barbara Walters, and Queen Elizabeth II.

To many of her colleagues it seemed that Lucille Ball had suddenly become obsolete—reason enough for the Friars Club to give her a tribute. It was their way of acknowledging comedians who were passé without being senile. An extraordinary group of performers and politicians attended, including the opera diva Beverly Sills, comedian Carol Burnett, and Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley. They were joined by a parade of movie stars, among them John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda. When the accolades were over, Lucy stood up and said wistfully: “I must have done something right, but I cannot be as great as everyone’s said. So I’ll just accept a third of the compliments, gratefully.”

Except for appearances in the occasional special, compliments were about all Lucy was to receive for the next year and a half. To pass the time she taught a course in television film and aesthetics at California State University, Northridge. Essentially, she said, she would instruct those majoring in communications in the practical, get-you-through-the-day basics of survival in the TV and film industries. “They [the students] are thrown out with what they think are all the ingredients, but sometimes they have to start from scratch. I emphasize self-preservation.”

Self-preservation was something Lucy had majored in all her life, but at that moment she could have used a little help. Character actress Mary Wickes tried to supply it. The
I Love Lucy
stalwart was acting in summer stock in 1979 when she persuaded Lucy to fly to San Francisco for a sentimental journey. Together the two old friends called on a bedridden Vivian Vance. Most of the stay was spent in happy reminiscence between Lucy and Vivian, with Mary off in a corner. The laughter lasted for two hours; afterward the visitors cried all the way to the airport. Vance died that August.

In the following year came an event that seemed a reproach—until Lucy realized how much it would change her daughter’s life for the better. In 1979 Lucie Arnaz had truly emerged from the family shadow to star in the Neil Simon–Marvin Hamlisch Broadway musical
They’re
Playing Our Song. Time
enthusiastically noted that Lucie “hurdles the barricade of being the daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz by imitating neither, but she has inherited their incomparable comic timing.” Down the street, Laurence Luckinbill was making his own mark in another Simon production, the autobiographical comedy
Chapter Two.
The actors met at Joe Allen, a restaurant in the theater district, fell in love, and announced marriage plans. Not only had Luckinbill previously been married and fathered two sons, he was also seventeen years older than Lucie—a marked difference from Lucy, whose two husbands were each six years her junior. Desi had no trouble accepting his prospective son-in-law, and Lucy soon came around. (And wisely so: the Arnaz-Luckinbill marriage was to prove successful and durable, and made her the grandmother of two boys and a girl.) Both Lucy and Desi showed up for the wedding in upstate New York. Lucy surprised no one when she cried during the ceremony. Afterward her ex-husband, always a crowd-pleaser, sang the
I Love Lucy
theme.

Back in Hollywood, Lucy made only one significant comedy special in 1980:
Lucy Moves to NBC.
She had been with CBS for almost thirty years, and the broadcast signaled that her old network no longer needed or wanted her. In theory, Lucille Ball Productions would be creating comedies at her new home; in reality, very little would come from the association, and that little was not to be popular.

Discomfort seemed to follow Lucy these days. She hit the white wine bottle a little harder than usual, and sometimes the clear fluid in her water glass was vodka. Richard Schickel had written the narration for a special,
High Hopes: The Capra Years,
an homage to director Frank Capra. The critic-scenarist provided a picture of Lucy at that time when he journeyed out to her house one afternoon and found her “slightly in her cups.” He reported: “She was nice and slightly vague and uninterested in the niceties of the hostly prose I’d drafted for her to speak. On set, I noticed she was wearing those little weights behind her ears that older actresses sometimes use to pull the skin on their faces tighter. But basically she came, did her brief job, and departed. What she had to do with Capra I’ll never know. Probably just the network seeking stars—any stars—to perk up a show they eventually played just once (on Christmas Eve).”

That year was not a good one for her ex-husband, either. When Jimmy Durante died in 1980, his widow asked Desi to help with the funeral. According to comedian Jack Carter, “He was so out of it that he kept inviting people who were dead. He kept calling that old racetrack crowd, and they were all gone. He was thinking of people from thirty years ago when they were all kids. At the funeral Desi stood in the back, stammering. He didn’t know where he was. He was even bombed that day.”

In 1981, rehearsing for a Milton Berle special for HBO, Lucy saw Gary Morton attempting to provoke the host. “Hey, Uncle Miltie,” Morton asked loudly. “Why don’t you relax and let everyone do their jobs?” Berle rose to the bait: “And what did you ever direct, you son of a bitch, that your wife didn’t arrange for?” The seventy-year-old Lucy was clearly uncomfortable with the argument that followed, and with the resolution—sullen laughter on the part of both comedians. Two years later she and Gary took an apartment in Manhattan at 211 East Seventieth Street in order to spend more time with the grandchildren—Lucie and Laurence Luckinbill then lived across town. The place was decorated with much more formality than her California house, and the little Luckinbills sensed it. They were not comfortable there, nor was Lucy with them. Mainly, when she got the urge to see grandchildren, she went to their place. Lee Tannen, Gary Morton’s cousin, grew very close to Lucy in her last years. He observed that the family visits were infrequent and later wrote that he found the situation “sad, because it seemed to me like it was always such an obligation for Lucy to be with her children and now with her grandchildren as well.”

She seemed to take more solace in the handful of ceremonies arranged in her honor. One occurred in 1984, when at a televised
All-StarParty for Lucille Ball,
Sammy Davis Jr. gushed before a crowd of fellow performers: “God wanted the world to laugh, and He invented you. Many are called, but you were chosen.” Davis went on to analyze Lucy’s talent. “Clown you are not. All of the funny hats, the baggy pants, the moustaches and the wigs, the pratfalls and the blacked-out teeth—they didn’t fool us for one minute. We saw through the disguises, and what we found inside is more than we deserve.” More accolades came her way: the Television Hall of Fame made her the first female inductee in 1984, and the Museum of Broadcasting in New York staged an evening in her honor.

Grateful as Lucy was for such tributes, they gave her the feeling that she was being eulogized rather than saluted. The things that were said were the kind one said about the dear departed. And, indeed, it was not until 1985 that she was again welcomed back on television as an actress. At the age of seventy-three she appeared in
Stone Pillow,
playing a homeless crone wandering the cold Manhattan streets. Lucy was still a star, and certain script changes were made on her insistence. The protagonist’s name, for example, became Flora Belle, in honor of Lucy’s maternal grandmother. She also decided that the character would be a vegetarian—“because it’s healthier. I’d just need one carrot.” And she devised Flora Belle’s makeup and costume. What she did not choose was the weather
—Stone
Pillow
was supposed to take place in February, but was shot in the middle of an unexpectedly sweltering New York spring. Suffering under layers of clothing, Lucy lost twenty-three pounds over the course of the six-week production. In addition, she suffered periodically from dehydration, and as if that were not enough, she tore a tendon during a rehearsed fight when an actress held on to her too long. All this failed to bank the fire of her performance. Lucy was tough on herself and tougher on the staff. Even a bunch of street rodents, trained for the purpose, were reviled for being too tame. “These are sissy rats,” she proclaimed. “I want real ones.”
Stone Pillow
’s scenarist and coproducer, Rose Leiman Goldemberg, was amused by Lucy’s confrontation with a supposedly stray canine: “The dog they hired didn’t want to come. In the final cut, she just grabbed that dog and pulled him down. She was gonna have him whether he wanted to come or not.”

Precious few pleasures could be derived from the making of the TV movie, but anonymity was one of them: Lucy liked to walk a few blocks in her costume, trying it out on the public to see if anyone would recognize her. No one ever realized that the hunched old woman was Lucille Ball. She related the experience to Katharine Hepburn, when they met on the East Side. Instead of being amused at the bag lady role, Hepburn warned, “You know, of course, darling, you’ll be inundated with those.” Hepburn was right: the only scripts that came Lucy’s way that summer were about pathetic old folk. Yet Lucy remained optimistic about the work; as she saw it, good reviews were just about guaranteed. Goldemberg’s spousal-abuse drama,
The BurningBed,
had impressed critics the year before, and the director would be George Schaefer, winner of numerous awards for his elegant
Hall-markTelevision Playhouse
productions.

If Lucy was impressed by these résumés, the critics were not. Their appraisals were almost uniformly negative. The
New York Times
was among the most lenient when its reviewer observed, “Anyone in search of biting, or even illuminating, social insights in
Stone Pillow
can look elsewhere, perhaps only as far as the streets outside the window.” The
Boston Globe
fumed: “At a recent press conference, Ball said she gave up on television comedy because it was all filth—‘sex, sex, sex.’ But there aren’t many situation comedies as obscene as a television movie that would exploit the plight of the homeless for the sake of the ratings envisioned from resurrecting a faded comedian’s career.” The
WashingtonPost
added: “What Ball does with the character of Flora the bag lady qualifies more as an appearance than an actual performance.”