Ball of Fire (45 page)

A week later she woke up in the middle of the night and went to the bathroom. She had just seated herself on the toilet when a heavy object seemed to fall into her lap. For a moment she thought a piece of the ceiling had broken off. Then she looked down. The object was her lifeless right arm. Gary drove Lucy to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where an examination revealed that she had suffered a stroke.

Lucy was a terrible patient and, ironically, crankiness is what kept her indisposition out of the papers. For she had been at the hospital for only a few hours when she began to hallucinate, probably due to the drugs she had been given intravenously. Roaches appeared on her stomach, marching, she was to recall, to the tune of “Seventy-six Trombones.” She screamed. Nurses strapped her down, but they failed to stop her protests. “Get me out of this goddamned place,” she yelled. “I want to go home.” Lucy happened to be directly under a microphone broadcasting to nurses’ stations all over the hospital. The authorities acceded to her wishes. Hours later they sent Lucy back to Roxbury Drive for convalescence.

Lucy’s powers of recuperation were still in force. A private nurse, Trudi Arcudi, was hired, and was immediately nicknamed Trudy-ArcudiPrivateDuty. Working with her, and with Onna White, the sufferer was cured of her facial paralysis, and in about three months the numbness in her right side went away. To prove to herself, as well as to the family and the public, that Lucille Ball was still a big-time entertainer, she agreed to appear on yet another
Super Password.
She would be playing for the John Wayne Cancer Center along with other celebrity guests including Betty White, Carol Channing, and Dick Martin. It was a mistake. Lucy’s diction was uncertain and the most casual onlooker could see that she was unable to concentrate on the questions. “She had been a sharp game player,” Martin said wistfully, “but was now very slow on the pickup. She wanted to do it so badly. But she couldn’t keep up. It was kind of sad.” All the same, those who counted her out had one more surprise coming.

She was asked to be a presenter at the Academy Awards on March 29, 1989, along with Bob Hope. The pair would salute the “Oscar Winners of the Future”—a nod from the seasoned pros to the promising newcomers. Without hesitation Lucy agreed, but then she had second thoughts. “I hate the way I look,” she told Tannen. “That goddamn wig with all that goddamn netting gives me a goddamn headache.” Hope called to cheer her up, and once again she agreed to be his co-presenter, only to complain afterward, “Goddamn Hope, nobody cares what the hell he looks like, but everybody cares what I look like—God, I’m so tired of myself.”

Perhaps she was, but her public was not. The designer Ret Turner fashioned a black sequined evening gown with a slit that went all the way up her left thigh. She wore it with confidence—until she was about to go on. “Do my eyes look baggy?” she asked Hope’s publicist, Frank Liberman. “Don’t worry about it,” he replied. “You and Hope have a way of straightening up and dropping thirty years when the lights hit you and you hear the applause.” He was not flattering her. Gasps issued from the audience when Lucy came out. At the age of seventy-eight she was still radiant, with the gait and gams of a showgirl. The ovation lasted for several minutes while she and Bob Hope exchanged smiles and inaudible ad-libs. The applause died down and she picked up her cue—only to stumble over the names of some of the newcomers. Later Lucy complained that she looked terrible, that her teeth had pained her, that she was deeply disappointed in her performance. If she felt that way she was alone. At Irving “Swifty” Lazar’s post-Oscar party, celebrities stopped by her table to praise her affect and her wardrobe. When she and Gary exited, a group of fans cheered Lucille Ball and she lifted her hem to show off the legs once more, threw kisses to the crowd, got in the limousine, and went home beaming.

For the next two weeks, though, she seemed abstracted and depressed, and on April 17 she felt excruciating chest pains. Gary and Lucie drove her to Cedars-Sinai, the hospital she hated. She was rushed to an operating room for nearly seven hours of open-heart surgery: her aorta had ruptured. Again she bounced back; eight days later, doctors gave permission to have her moved from the intensive care unit to a private room.

Bouquets and flower baskets had arrived by the score and more than five thousand well-wishers had called from across the United States, Europe, and Australia. Entire towns sent get-well cards. Lucy’s private room overlooked the Hard Rock Café. In consideration, the trendy youth hangout put up a sign reading GET WELL LUCY. She waved at it from her bed. The hospital fax machine and switchboard became overloaded, prompting a Cedars spokesman to burble: “On a scale of one to ten, this is an absolute ten. Before it’s over the hospital will look like a combination of the U.S. post office and the botanical gardens.” To protect herself, and Cedars-Sinai, Lucy employed a code name. The only way to get through was to call “Diane Belmont”—the monicker Lucy had used a half-century before, when as a gangly novice she tried to convince Broadway producers that she hailed from Montana. With her son and daughter, Lucy watched footage of the overwhelming response on the local news. “Can you believe what’s going on here?” she chirped. “It’s
wonderful
!” Lucie and Desi Jr. left in high spirits; their mother was regaining strength. And why not? DeDe had lived to eighty-five; if genes told the tale, Lucy would have at least another eight years.

Early the next morning the patient’s back seemed to be acting up. She tried to raise herself, then sank back, unconscious. Her aorta had ruptured again. More than a dozen emergency doctors and nurses labored to undo the damage. It was irreparable. The heroic measures stopped at 5:47 a.m. when Lucille Ball was pronounced dead.

Word went out immediately. The
New York Times
ran an immense obituary, “Spirited Doyenne of Television Comedy Series Is Dead at 77,” and followed that with an unprecedented editorial. Under the heading “We Love Lucy, Too,” it posited: “If a clown’s face is humanity’s writ large, then Lucille Ball was born to her work. The red of her hair came out of a bottle, but who else would have chosen a shade so fiery? And who in this world ever had bigger, bluer, rounder eyes, or a mouth that slid so quickly into smiling? Hers was the mask of comedy.”
Variety
’s tribute ran over five pages, with a heavy emphasis on money: in syndication, said a headline, “Lucy Will ‘Run Forever’; Grossed $75-mil So Far.” The front page of the
Hollywood Reporter
read: “Thanks, Lucy, We Had a Ball!” Every major newspaper in the country printed a large, lyrical obit; most had been written months before when word circulated that Lucille Ball was seriously ill.

That Lucy had been hospitalized for over a week, that she was elderly and somewhat infirm, was no secret. Even so, her death came as a kind of national shock. Much of the populace had grown up with Lucy in their living rooms; to them she was a member of the family and the grief was personal.
Entertainment Tonight,
as might be expected, devoted its entire half-hour program to Lucy; so did ABC’s
Nightline.
CBS hastily assembled footage from the best
I Love Lucy
shows and presented the clips in an hour-long format hosted by the network’s former anchor, Walter Cronkite. The surprise was an appearance by William S. Paley, the eighty-eight-year-old chairman of CBS, going on camera to state that Lucy “was in a class by herself.” He followed that up with a press release claiming that Lucille Ball would “always be the first lady of CBS,” and adding that her “extraordinary ability to light up the screen and brighten our lives is a legacy that will last forever.” Unmentioned was the fact that the network had allowed “the first lady” to go to NBC in 1980 because her usefulness appeared to be at an end. Business, after all, was business, and in lapidary inscriptions one was not under oath.

The following week,
Time
ran a full-page eulogy, comparing Lucy to a quartet of men: “Lucille Ball was as deft and daring as Harold Lloyd, as rubber-faced as Bert Lahr, as touching as Chaplin—and more ladylike than Milton Berle. In reruns, she is eternal.”
Newsweek
called her “probably the most popular woman in the history of show business.” Tributes came from all over. In Los Angeles, fans pasted condolence letters on the door of her house. Two presidents saluted Lucille Ball: ex-President Ronald Reagan called her “an American institution,” and his successor, George Bush, defined her as “a legendary figure.” In Paris, Sammy Davis Jr. called her “a great artist—one of the world’s great clowns.” And in Boston, comedian Lily Tomlin said: “It’s a sad day. She was a great role model for me, and a great funny woman.” Comedienne Kaye Ballard could not speak about Lucy without mentioning Desi. Despite their remarriages, she maintained, “She was in love with him until the end. And he was in love with her.” Actress Paula Stewart agreed, privately quoting a comment made by Gary Morton: “I guess she’s happy now. She’s with Desi.”

In a follow-up to the obituary, the
Los Angeles Times
ran two appraisals of Lucille Ball side by side. Charles Champlin, the paper’s arts editor, observed that the star’s “craft was invisible, the skills so perfected they concealed themselves totally. It was a brilliant illusion, generating a charm that hid the hard work and the artful writing and editing as well as the performing. The result was probably the finest and certainly the most durable single series in television’s history thus far.” He went on to observe that “when Lucy began to commandeer our hearts on
I Love Lucy
in 1951, the movies were already in considerable trouble, their audiences staying home in large numbers to watch the likes of Lucy in their living rooms. As always, her timing was impeccable.”

In an adjoining column Howard Rosenberg, the
Times
television critic, wrote: “The more you think about Lucy as an icon, the more remarkable she becomes, for her esteem has grown and grown despite Lucy Ricardo being in many ways the flighty, manipulative, narrowly defined female of her time, a stereotype far outdistanced by today’s woman.” A spokesman at the Museum of Broadcasting commented that Lucy “influenced almost every comic to come after her, whether it be Carol Burnett or Tomlin or the actors on
Saturday Night Live.
Her Lucy character is like Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Little Tramp’ figure. It is a classic, and it is a reference point. There aren’t a whole lot of characters like that, which have transcended their format.” Perhaps the most vivid reminiscence came from Mike Dann, an NBC program executive when Lucy made her mark. “We had a show on the air called
Lights
Out,
sponsored by Amident. Both the show and the toothpaste were tremendously popular
—everybody
watched
Lights Out.

“Then Desi and Lucy came on the air opposite that show, and
Lights
Out
was canceled. We at NBC were flabbergasted, we just couldn’t believe it. Here was this girl who wasn’t that famous, and this bongo player from Cuba—and it never lost its momentum. It was the first time we used the word ‘runaway’ to describe a show.” Only the
Nation,
grumpy and scrubbed of humor, had anything bad to say. Speaking for the hard left, the journal recalled that Lucy had registered to vote as a member of the Communist Party in 1936, and when she appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities named no names and went back to work on Monday. The article went on, “Lucy told HUAC she had registered only to make her granddad, a lifelong socialist, happy. Was Lucy putting the committee on or kowtowing to it? Which mattered more to CBS, harboring a Red or being in the black? One can’t find the answer in such mainstream media as the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post, Time,
or
Newsweek,
since none of their obits mentioned the HUAC encounter. That’s at least consistent with their failure to report on the blacklist in the first place.”

By the time these entries were printed, Lucille Ball had been laid to rest at Forest Lawn cemetery, her ashes set in a place next to her mother’s remains. Gary Morton was alone at the interment; soon after, Lucie and Laurence Luckinbill, accompanied by their children, and Desi Jr. and Amy Arnaz gathered at the grave.

Lucie scheduled three memorial services: one in Los Angeles, one in Chicago, one in New York. On May 8, in their various time zones, they would start at exactly 8 p.m. on Monday night, the day of the week, and the hour, when
I Love Lucy
ran in its heyday. The Manhattan service took place at St. Ignatius Loyola Church, on Park Avenue at Eighty-third Street. Lee Tannen had asked Diane Sawyer to deliver the eulogy. Lucy had long been an admirer of the ABC anchor, even though they had never met. In her speech, Sawyer commented: “Isn’t it funny. I cannot for the life of me remember how the furniture was laid out in the living room of the house I grew up in, but I can remember where every stick of furniture was in the Ricardo house.” The comment could have been made by any one of Sawyer’s two thousand listeners, and by any of Lucy’s millions of devotees. In the end, credibility had been the secret of her comedy.

As sentimental as Lucy had been in life, she wanted no ceremony after her death. Instructions were left that her passing should be honored with a picnic and not a lugubrious testimonial dinner. According to Jim Brochu, Lucy was specific about the food and drink: ham, baked beans, potato salad, watermelon—all the dishes that she remembered from the delirious summers in Celoron when her only responsibility was making the beds, before she left to find a career and a life. The feast was held on May 14, Mother’s Day, at an estate in Mandeville Canyon. A benign feeling enveloped some fifty guests, including Lucy’s old comrades Mary Wickes and Onna White, as well as Lucie’s and Laurence’s former spouses, Phil Vandervoort and Robin Strasser. The press and much of the Los Angeles public had been informed of the picnic, but was barred from attending. No matter. Inside and outside the gates, the quotes were much the same. People spoke lengthily of the deceased’s virtues, and briefly of her shortcomings. Almost everyone remembered one or another of Lucy’s famous apothegms: “Knowing what you can
not
do is more important than knowing what you
can
do. In fact, that’s good taste.” “I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it, and I’m afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: hard work and realizing what is opportunity and what isn’t.”