Fifties (32 page)

Television had catapulted him to the very head of the line in the Democratic party, which was at that moment in dire trouble, among other reasons because of the hearings he had just held. When his young counsel Halley, a novice in elective politics, ran for president of the New York City Council in the fall of 1951 as a reform candidate on the Liberal line, he won, beating all the major-party candidates. Kefauver understood immediately that he was in an ideal position to run for the presidency without seeming to run. He could travel from city to city, reporters would attend his press conferences, and he would push aside questions of his own ambition and talk instead on the grave question of crime in the nation’s cities. Kefauver claimed he was not interested in running for office. He was the outsider taking on the corrupt politicians from the corrupt machines. Without even knowing it, he had become the prototype for a new kind of politician, who ran not against his opponents but against the political system itself.

Eventually, Estes Kefauver did announce his candidacy for the presidency and filed for the New Hampshire primary. By chance, at almost the same time
Time
magazine polled the television industry for its annual awards and the Kefauver hearings won two; he also
won an Emmy from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for special achievement in “bringing the workings of our government into the homes of the American people.” He could not attend the awards banquet but accepted the Emmy by phone from New Hampshire, where he was busy campaigning.

FIFTEEN

B
Y 1952 TELEVISION WAS
seeping ever more deeply into the nation’s bloodstream. By the end of the year there were 19 million sets in the country, and a thousand new stores selling television sets opened each month.

Politics, for the first time, was being brought to the nation by means of television. People now expected to
see
events, not merely read about or hear them. At the same time, the line between what happened in real life and what people saw on television began to merge; many Americans were now living far from their families, in brand-new suburbs where they barely knew their neighbors. Sometimes they felt closer to the people they watched on television than they did to their neighbors and distant families. In 1954 Gardner Murphy, research director of the famed Menninger Foundation in Kansas, arranged a demonstration for some advertising firms in
Chicago. He rented a suite at the Drake Hotel in Chicago, set up eight television sets in it, and then directed a team of social scientists to study advertisers and the programs they sponsored. The team’s conclusions about
The Arthur Godfrey Show,
then the top-rated morning program, were intriguing: “Psychologically, Mr. Godfrey’s morning program creates the illusion of the family structure. All the conflicts and complex situations of family life are taken out and what is left is an amiable, comfortable family scene—with one important omission: there is no mother in the Godfrey family. That gives the housewife-viewer the opportunity to fill that role. In her fantasy Godfrey comes into her home as an extra member of her family; and she fancies herself as a specially invited member of his family ...”

Nothing showed the power of this new medium to soften the edge between real life and fantasy better than the coming of Lucille Ball. In 1951 she was forty years old, in the middle of a less than dazzling show-business career. In films she was seen more as a comedienne than as an actress, and she tended to draw what one executive termed “second-banana roles”—generally low-budget that did not go to the top stars. “The Queen of the B movies,” she was sometimes called. Often, it seemed, she was hired because someone else did not want the role. In the opinion of casting agents and directors, she was a little rough, a little obvious for the more sophisticated roles that might go to Katharine Hepburn. She had enjoyed some measure of success in radio, and in 1948, hoping to save her shaky eight-year marriage to Cuban band leader Desi Arnaz, she opted to do a radio comedy show called
My Favorite Husband
so that she would not have to travel away from home so much. Her radio husband was a pleasant Midwestern banker from Minneapolis, as Lucy herself later said, “certainly not—great heavens—Desi Arnaz from Cuba.” In 1950, when CBS executives asked her to do a weekly situation comedy on television, no one was unduly excited. That was their mistake, for Lucille Ball was destined for television, where her slapstick talents could be properly appreciated. Lucy had a marvelous comic voice but, like Berle, she was primarily a
visual
comedienne. She had a perfect sense of timing, a wonderfully expressive face, and was just wacky and naive enough to generate sympathy rather than irritation. In this early sitcom she would encounter weekly dilemmas of her own creation, but she always managed to stay just this side of the brink of disaster, remaining lovable to her husband and her friends, Fred and Ethel Mertz.

Lucy and Desi Arnaz were an unlikely couple, not merely on television but in real life as well. If Lucy was to be a dizzy housewife,
she deserved at the very least, in the minds of the CBS executives, a straight-arrow husband to put up patiently with her foibles, but no, she insisted that Arnaz be cast as her husband. The people at CBS, from Bill Paley on down, were appalled. So were the advertising people, who had a big say in the casting. Desi Arnaz was not exactly a household name; his English was poor. No one, a CBS executive told her, would believe a show in which she was married to a Cuban bandleader. “What do you mean nobody’ll believe it?” she answered. “We
are
married.” She remained adamant, and finally a reluctant Paley gave in. After the pilot was shot and shown to a high-level group of entertainment people in New York, they voted resoundingly against Arnaz. “Keep the redhead but ditch the Cuban,” said the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein. He was told it was a package deal. “Well, for God’s sake, don’t let him sing. No one will understand him,” Hammerstein said.

But Lucy understood something that the producers initially did not: Viewers certainly knew that Desi was her real husband, and that made the show itself all the more believable. Since Desi played a Cuban bandleader on the show, his profession in real life, who could tell where reality ended and the show began?

At first Lucy, the producer, and the writers grappled with the story line. There was talk that Lucy should be a Hollywood star, but she vetoed that—she knew that the heroine should not be a star, because ordinary Americans believed that movie stars had no problems. Who would identify with an actress? But an ordinary housewife who longs to be a star, she suggested—that was another thing entirely. “Everybody wants to be in show business like Lucy did and they could relate to that,” she later said of the program’s main theme. Slowly, the concept evolved: They were Ricky and Lucy Ricardo; he was a musician who longed for an ordinary life and an ordinary marriage. “I want a wife who’s just a wife,” he said in the pilot. She was the housewife who wants nothing more than to be a star. Gradually, against great odds, the show was put together, and after a series of rejections, the producers found a sponsor, the Philip Morris company. It premiered on Monday, October 15, 1951. The first episode was called “The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub.” An announcer named John Stevenson introduced the show by speaking from the Ricardos’ living room. “Good evening and welcome. In a moment we’ll look in on Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. But before we do, may I ask you a very personal question? The question is simply this—do you inhale? Well, I do. And chances are you do too. And because you inhale you’re better off—much better off—smoking
Philip Morris and for good reason. You see, Philip Morris is the one cigarette proved definitely less irritating, definitely milder than any other leading brand. That’s why when you inhale you’re better off smoking Philip Morris.... And now Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in
I Love Lucy.
”

The first episode was characteristic of what was to come. Ricky and his sidekick, Fred, want to go to the fights even though it is Fred and Ethel’s wedding anniversary; Lucy and Ethel want to go to a nightclub. The men arrange for blind dates. Lucy and Ethel find out, dress up in outrageous costumes, and pose as the dates. The reviews were generally good, although
The New York Times
critic was dubious—he thought it was all a bit lowbrow. That alone was enough to make the head of Philip Morris nervous, and the next day he called the people at his advertising agency to get out of the sponsorship. But he was advised to give the show a little time: He did, and it was not long before it was in the Nielsen top ten.

In fact, the show had perfect pitch. Broad in its humor yet able to appeal to a wide variety of tastes, it was number one in New York within four months. Soon, as many as two out of three television sets were tuned to her. Marshall Field, the prominent Chicago department store, which had used Monday as its clearance sale night, surrendered and switched to Thursday by putting a sign in its window: “We love Lucy too so we’re closing on Monday nights.”

Lucy insisted the show be shot before a live audience—her experience in film and radio had taught her that she performed better when there was an audience she could see and reach out to. Opposite her, on NBC, there was a program called
Lights Out,
a mystery anthology that was a top-rated show. As Mike Dann, the NBC programmer who had so proudly made it so, remembered, “We were wiped out very quickly. We never knew what had happened, but it happened and it happened fast. And it happened without promotion—it wasn’t because CBS went in and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting this new show with a wacky redhead. It happened because it happened.” It did not matter what show Lucy went against: She triumphed. As such, she began to redefine the nature of sitcoms. Previously, they existed as carryovers from radio, in which old-fashioned storytelling and sound effects were emphasized. The great strength of the Lucy show, a television writer named Jack Sher and his wife, Marilyn, pointed out, was the mirror it held up to every married couple in America: “Not a regular mirror that reflects the truth, nor a magic mirror that portrays fantasy. But a Coney Island kind of mirror that distorts, exaggerates and makes
vastly amusing every little incident, foible, and idiosyncrasy of married life.”

Lucy cut across all age groups. Children loved her, could readily understand her routines, and seemed to like the idea of an adult who seemed so childlike. In later years her shows would probably have been deemed sexist, and actually they were. In one way or another they were all a takeoff on women-driver jokes. Lucy could not really do anything right; she had a God-given instinct to get into trouble. There was Lucy trying to make wine by crushing grapes with her feet, Lucy shoving too many marshmallows in her mouth, Lucy trying on the wrong size slippers, Lucy being crunched in the face with a pie. No one was ever better at such stunts, and no one sacrificed her body and her face more readily to them. Onstage she became the dippy person she was playing, and yet it was a show starring not just one wacko but
two.

To everybody’s surprise, Desi was just as good, the straight man who was anything but straight. He knew exactly when to be appalled, and irritated or amazed, by her, by the fact
that she had done it again.
Traditionally, straight men did not get laughs, they were there to be the foil, but with Desi there was always some word or phrase he could mispronounce. That seemed also to soften the humor of the show; it was not just Lucy who was screwy, it was the two of them—and their neighbors, too. At the end, though, there was Desi embracing her, understanding her. All was forgiven, and everything came out all right.

By April 7, 1952, 10.6 million households were tuning in, the first time in history that a television show had reached so many people. By 1954, as many as 50 million people watched certain segments. The show was so popular that it lifted not just its advertisers but CBS and the entire industry; in 1953 CBS-TV showed a net profit for the first time, in no small part because of her, and a year later television became the largest advertising medium in the world.

Reality and show business continued to intersect when Lucy got pregnant in real life in the spring of 1952. The producers and writers were delighted and immediately decided to incorporate the pregnancy into the story line. But CBS, the Milton Biow advertising agency, and Philip Morris were not so sure. These were more puritanical times. Previously, pregnant women had just not been seen in films or on television. A pregnant comedienne seemed in especially bad taste. The network and Philip Morris thought it might be all right for one or two shows to be based on Lucy’s pregnancy,
but that was all. From then on, they would have to hide her behind tables and chairs. Nor should there be any talk of it.

But Desi went to Alfred Lyons, the head of Philip Morris, and suggested that if he and Lucy could not control the content, the show, then number-one, might slip. Lyons was so impressed he sent a note to Jim Aubrey, the president of CBS: “Dear Jim,” it began. “Don’t fuck around with the Cuban.” But they were not to use the word
pregnancy.
CBS held the line on that. Lucy instead was an expectant mother. That was more genteel. The first show on Lucy’s pregnancy aired on December 8, 1952. It was a typical episode: Lucy wanted to tell Desi in the most romantic way possible, but he did not seem to have time to listen. “I want to tell you something,” she says. “Uh-oh, how much are you overdrawn?” he replies. There are endless interruptions. In the end she shows up at his club, passes him a note that a member of the audience is about to have a baby, and asks him to serenade her. As the crowded nightclub audience watches, he realizes that he is the father, and his wife the expectant mother. CBS lined up a priest, a minister, and a rabbi to review all pregnancy scripts to be sure that they were in good taste. “It looked like a revival meeting around the place,” Lucy once said.