Ball of Fire (44 page)

Looking back, Lucie Arnaz remarked on just how difficult
Stone Pillow
had been for her mother: “She wasn’t well. She kept getting these attacks where she got very hot and couldn’t work. She had a bad heart. It was in the middle of summer, and here she was dressed in these layers of clothes. She had always been claustrophobic anyway. And the script was not that strong. I think at this time in her life it was almost too much for her to learn a script and create a character that was different from ‘Lucy.’ She just wasn’t up to it physically.” Lucy took some comfort from the Nielsens: that season
Stone Pillow
earned the second-highest rating for TV films. But it was not enough to make her forget the situations of the two Desis.

Desi Jr. had married an aspiring actress, Linda Purl, in 1979. She had appeared with him on a couple of TV movies, and Lucy had come to accept her as a daughter-in-law. At times she appeared to think that Linda might be marrying beneath herself, if only because she seemed so organized. “If there’s anyone in the world who isn’t organized, it’s my son,” said Lucy to a
People
magazine reporter. “I hope she rubs off on him and he doesn’t rub off on her.” Neither rubbing occurred; a year later Desi Jr. and Linda divorced, and several columnists hinted that the cause of the split was the young man’s problems with substance abuse.

Desi Sr. continued to have his own bouts with alcoholism, spurning friends who refused to give him a drink, and sinking deeper into despair, intensified by the news that his second wife, Edie, was dying of cancer. Then, through an act of will and the counsel of the family physician, Marcus Rabwin, Desi Jr. checked into the recovery center at Scripps Memorial Hospital, determined to overcome his addictions. When he walked out he was clean, and he stayed that way. Convinced that he could serve as an example to others, Desi Jr. persuaded his father to come to the recovery center. There the gray-haired, sallow figure stood next to his son and daughter, who came along for moral support, and in the time-worn manner addressed the assembled addicts: “I’m Desi and I’m an alcoholic.” For two months the stoicism worked— then the backsliding began. Desi Sr. missed meetings, stayed home, and finally drugged himself with painkillers. In the year of
Stone Pillow
Edie passed away, and Desi moved into a small house in Del Mar with his old and ailing mother. The money, once so plentiful, was ebbing along with his health. Conditions were to get worse. In 1986 his persistent cough was diagnosed: he had lung cancer.

The encroachments and reminders of age were too painful for Lucy to contemplate, and too close to ignore. The only salvation was work. But who would have her? She had already been rejected by CBS, and the arrangement with NBC had not been satisfactory. Of the big networks, only ABC was left. It was all she needed. Executives at the American Broadcasting Company were impressed with the ratings of
Stone Pillow,
and they convinced themselves that Lucy’s celebrity was still viable.

Their belief was born out of desperation. At the National Broadcasting Company, comedian Bill Cosby had broken racial barriers with his family-centered
Cosby Show,
and a new comedy series about older women,
The Golden Girls,
was reinforcing NBC’s reputation as the network to watch. As ABC programmers saw it, Lucille Ball’s credentials would make her the ideal candidate for a rival sitcom—after all, the woman had made her fortune with family comedy, and she certainly qualified as a golden-ager. So anxious was the network for her services that Lucy was given full creative control over her new series. With the writers and producers, she decided to build it around an ornery widow who had inherited one-half of a hardware store. Gale Gordon would be her disputatious partner. Together the two would display their familiar knack for getting into, and out of, comic catastrophes.

Gary Morton was listed as executive producer along with Aaron Spelling, but it was the latter who would do the heavy lifting. Spelling had a unique history with Lucy. Close watchers of
I Love Lucy
reruns could spot him as the young performer who played the foil to “Tennessee Ernie” Ford when the singer made guest appearances. Spelling had forsaken his acting career to become a producer—one of the most successful in television history. He was the creative force behind
Charlie’sAngels, Dynasty, The Love Boat,
and other hit series, and when he signed on to produce
Life with Lucy
ABC confidently booked the series for Saturday nights. It was expected to dominate the evening.

The show was bought without a pilot. Network programmers assumed that Lucy knew all there was to know about making a Lucille Ball comedy—what was the point in wasting money on a tryout? Lucy began on a note of triumph. From his bedside, Desi cheered her on: “What took you so long to get back to work?” Buoyed by his spirit and by happy memories of the old days, she hired Bob and Madelyn. Gale Gordon happily clambered aboard. “He’d try anything,” she remarked to her friend Jim Brochu with admiration. “Do anything we asked him to. He was always taking chances. He was eighty years old, and he could still turn a cartwheel.”

Gordon proved to be the show’s only asset. Lucy had trouble memorizing lines and depended heavily on cue cards. These completely threw off her comic timing. Moreover, no makeup could disguise the fact that she was more than threescore and ten, and her physical bits caused anxiety rather than amusement. The first episode pulled well; ratings went precipitously downhill from there. As Steve Allen saw it, “Lucy’s comedy did not age well, meaning the things she did weren’t as funny as she got into her late sixties and seventies. She couldn’t handle the physicality or pull off being so cutesy.” Allen found himself agreeing with Pauline Kael: “Like most attractive women in show business, Lucy eventually wound up looking a little like a drag queen.”

The critics closed in. Lucy tried to harden herself against negative reviews, but the appraisals of
Life with Lucy
were more than pans, they were condemnations. In
Channels
magazine, William A. Henry III summed up the general feeling of hostile disappointment: “That wasn’t Lucy up on the screen. It was some elderly imposter. Caked with makeup, she looked mummified.” The article went on to describe the protagonist’s voice as akin to “a bullfrog’s in agony,” and added: “She gamely attempted her old style of slapstick but her impeccable timing had fled. Worse, what used to be cute and girlish in a younger woman, and in a male chauvinist era, turned out to be embarrassing in a senior citizen. . . . Her new impossible dream of agelessness only saddened audiences with its intimations of mortality.”

Lucy appealed to Desi for counsel; he was too ill to help, and in any case
Life with Lucy
was already on life support. When the Nielsens listed it in seventy-first place, ABC pulled the very expensive plug. In all, thirteen episodes were filmed and eight were aired. However, the network had agreed up front to fund all twenty-two, and it paid in full. Each segment was worth $150,000 to Lucy, $100,000 to her husband, and $25,000 to Gordon.

The money, good as it was, did not assuage Lucy’s misery. Whatever her experiences in film and theater, she had always been able to dominate the electronic media. This was the first time she had ever failed on television, and the flop was a very public one. Ann Sothern remembered the phone call from her old friend: “She said, ‘Ann, I’ve been fired. ABC’s let me go. They don’t want to see an old grandma. They want to see me as the Lucy I was.” Alas, that lady was available only on reruns.

Illness had weakened Desi severely. He never would get around to writing volume two of his autobiography, provisionally entitled
Another
Book.
But in his decline he found several moments of grace: Lucie had grown close to her father in his last years. Her children were to remember the old man in the baseball cap, hobbling down the inclined walkway in Del Mar and leaning on their station wagon for support as he kissed them good-bye. Desi had lost much of his hair because of the radiation treatments, and he had lost a good deal of weight. His son and daughter and their spouses and grandchildren were all welcome. But he had no wish for Lucy to see him in such a reduced state. Lucie persuaded him to change his mind, and she brought her parents together in Desi’s final months.

On the first occasion he was in parlous shape and the visit was brief and inconclusive. On the second he was vigorous but edgy, until Lucie ran some videotapes of
I Love Lucy.
She left her mother and father chatting and laughing like kids, she said, on their first date. As Lucy got up to leave, Desi asked, “Where are you going?” She told him, “I’m going home.” “You
are
home,” he replied. It was Lucy’s most difficult exit.

Later Lucy and Desi Jr. and Lucie walked on the beach, reminiscing. Lucy was to speak to her ex one more time, on November 30, 1986, repeating the words “I love you, I love you, Desi, I love you” on the phone. He assured her that he loved her, too. Had they stayed together, it would have been their forty-sixth anniversary. Two days later he died in his daughter’s arms.

The news went out over the radio that morning. Lucy heard it on the set of the quiz show
Super Password
and turned to the other guest. Actress Betty White recalled the moment: “She turned to me and said, ‘You know, it’s the damnedest thing. Goddamn it, I didn’t think I’d get this upset. There he goes.’ It was a funny feeling, kind of a lovely private moment.” Lucy issued a statement to the press, carefully scrubbed of references to their marriage: “Our relationship has remained very close, very amiable over the years, and now I’m grateful to God that Desi’s suffering is over.” Like Willie Loman, Desi had expected his funeral to be well attended by members of his own profession. In fact, except for Lucy and Danny Thomas, who gave the eulogy, there was no one from the television business Desi had so powerfully influenced.

As the 1980s dwindled down, Lucy’s main comforts came from her children. Desi Jr. had remained clean and had remarried, to Amy Bargiel, a recovered addict he had met at the New Life Foundation. The organization, dedicated to physical and spiritual renewal, turned the couples’ lives around. Desi Jr.’s second marriage, like his sister’s second, was to endure.

In other ways, though, Lucy’s days were not happy. She regarded her enforced retirement as a living death; her only hobbies were games like Scrabble and backgammon. She played endless contests with younger friends, among them Jim Brochu, a scenarist, and Lee Tannen, an aspiring writer; they saw her loyally through the last years. Brochu was to remember her induction into the Television Hall of Fame: after a film clip of Lucy’s historical career, Lucie Arnaz came onstage and sang the
I Love Lucy
theme. “At the end, she looked out front, and with her voice breaking said, ‘I love you, Mom.’ ” Lucy stepped up to the podium to receive the award. “The mascara was running down her face in rivers as she finally managed to say a few words: ‘This tops ’em all!’ ”

The expression Lucy wore on that occasion was a welcome contrast to the face she presented to her daughter in talking about plans to write her own autobiography. She was worried about what to write concerning people she had known and worked with through the years. Should she tell all, or omit some telling incidents? “What the hell,” she burst out. “Half of them are dead already.” Lucie reminded her that Desi had written the very candid
A Book,
and Lucy snapped, “He didn’t tell all the stuff he could have.” Lucie offered some advice: “You’ve never done this. Why don’t you sit down with a therapist and talk about the stuff you’re afraid of and see what comes out? Maybe you won’t feel so bad about everything.” Lucy was having none of that. “She called therapists every name in the book,” Lucie would recall. “I was offended, because at the time I was having tremendous success with a therapist who was helping me be a mom and a wife. She said, ‘What do you need to go to a therapist for?’ And I thought, here we go. She wigged out. I ended up having to pack up my kids, leave Palm Springs. It was a nightmare. We didn’t speak for weeks and weeks.” If you were in therapy in Lucy’s day, “it meant you were crazy, and word would get out to the Hedda Hoppers and Louella Parsonses that you were seeing a shrink, and it was a no-no.”

In the mid-1980s tributes began to come in bunches—there was the Life Achievement Award at the Kennedy Center, the Lifetime Achievement Award in Comedy from the American Comedy Awards, the Woman of the Year from Harvard Hasty Pudding Theatricals, the East-man Kodak Second Century Award, the Emmy Governor’s Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. How much they meant may be gauged from an exchange reported by Lee Tannen in his memoir,
I Loved Lucy:

“She said, ‘God, it seems like only yesterday when I was with Roosevelt at the White House.’

“Without missing a beat I asked, ‘Which Roosevelt, Franklin or Teddy?’

“Gary Morton looked up from his magazine and laughed out loud. ‘Hey, Luce, that’s funny,’ he said.

“But I knew a split second after I said it that I had said the wrong thing. Lucy’s whole face turned to flame. She started ranting, almost foaming at the mouth. ‘You think it’s funny getting old. Just wait until you’re old and nobody wants you around, and they throw awards at you when they know you’re gonna die soon anyway. You think it’s funny to lose your job and the people you love? You think it’s funny when you can’t do a thing for yourself anymore? Well, you can all go fuck yourselves!’ Then she stormed into her bedroom and slammed the door behind her.”

For Lucy to say she could not do things for herself was something of an exaggeration. True, she suffered from high blood pressure and angina; Onna White, who had been the choreographer of
Mame,
helped her work out the kinks in a painful shoulder; and in January 1988 she had a cyst removed from her thyroid gland. But Lucy still managed to get around by herself, and she had sufficient energy to clean the house and straighten the drawers over and over, as if she were marking time, waiting for a new job offer to come in. In May, one opportunity did arise: Lucy’s old pal Bob Hope asked her to do a song-and-dance number on his eighty-fifth-birthday special. Entitled
ComedyIs a Serious Business,
the piece of special material was written by Cy Coleman and James Lipton, and was performed with considerable difficulty. Supporting actress Brooke Shields remembered the tall lady with the dyed red hair “frustrated, and embarrassed that she was having trouble with the steps.” Lucy collapsed soon after the performance.