The Queen of Tuesday

by Darin Strauss

  Shmendrik! An actress talks to you, next thing you’re climbing streetlamps and dancing with parking meters. And, there down the street, there’s Harriet. That’s your truth. Facing the other way, kind of dopily, at the end of the block.

  Anybody else looking at Harriet would have seen a handsome if stiff woman, fur coat and pointed nose and anxious posture, waiting. What did Isidore see?

  Arguments, laughs, that one crack in the playroom wall he has yet to seal up. Countless reminders of countless events. He slowed. The inscrutable emotion that sparked a very pretty glow to Harriet’s face that time, right before she asked Isidore how did he like them apples. Shoving his hands in his pockets now, Isidore sighed. Back in 1938 or ’39, he’d thought that Harriet’s having opened her coat to him at Brandt’s Flatbush theater was the only real happiness that ever surprised him or ever would.

  “Hey—Hold-on! Hold-on!”

  * * *

  —

  AND NOW HE can feel Lucille’s presence in the shadows. Her dressing room is dark. “Not much of a hideaway,” she says to him.

  Isidore’s shyly smiling. He’s barely here. This backstage moment is not real life. This backstage moment is literature and cinema, is the American songbook, is boffo footage, reaction shots and shadows, is delicious agony in frames that flicker; it’s all the dreams of romantic deceit to be found in the modern savoir faire.

  Minutes ago, she’d called to Isidore on Seventh Avenue, just up from Fiftieth—“Come back, come back!”—and explained that she’d sent Desi off by asking him to let her go to the powder room. Same excuse as Isidore’s, pretty much. He took her hand. His own wife had been sixty yards away, maybe fifty, how much longer will she wait, she must even now be looking for him.

  The shared lie and rush gave the added heart-jolt of communion—an intimate, exhilarating secret.

  “Well, I never doubted it,” Isidore had said. This had been untrue, but he believed anyway. “I never doubted you’d come.”

  He’d forgotten about the dimple of her collarbone. Hello, dimple, hello!

  “I should go back to my husband,” she said already, not seeming to realize she’d gentled Isidore’s hand downward. “It was nice to see you again. But I really came, if I can say this, I really came just to apologize. And now I should, um, I really should—”

  She stopped talking.

  She stood so close, anyway, out there on Seventh Avenue. Her hand still in his. I am Hold-on. She’s christened me.

  “But I can’t,” he’d said. Miraculous that he could hear his own voice over the whamming in his chest. “I can’t accept your apology.”

  His heart was a sledgehammer on a trampoline.

  “But, God, you’re a kick,” she said. They might as well have been—it was as if she wanted to be—dance partners, chest touching chest.

  Never had Isidore been described as a kick. But he wasn’t Isidore just now. He asked, “What say we go somewhere?”

  The hard little slash of her laughter. She said, “My my, Hold-on.” He watched her cheek flush its affection. “Hold on, Hold-on.”

  Isidore’s question beckoned—what say we go?—a substitute feature suddenly playing at the cinema. Her hand felt like it softened in his. My movie-star girlfriend.

  And the laugh on her face changed—she tilted her head.

  “I was feeling very tired, Hold-on.” Her mouth, her eyes, gorgeous with pleasure and nerves. “Now I’m not.

  “You were nice to me on the beach that night,” she said. “We danced. I don’t know.” A Lucille scaled down now by shyness, into a particularized woman.

  “There is a place, come to think of it, Hold-on.” An intense bright desire had passed into Lucille’s throat. “My dressing room,” she’d whispered. “My dressing room.” The words had come from deep in her. “My dressing room.”

  And now here they are.

  (It’s a cozy place once Lucille snaps on the lights: sunflowers, framed photos, a chocolate sampler on the table. Domesticity. Lucille is always seeking a home.)

  She comes to Isidore now; he holds her at her arms.

  “A simpering, whimpering child again, Hold-on.” For a moment, Isidore doesn’t know she’s quoting.

  “Rodgers and Hart,” he says at length.

  “They knew.”

  She ashtrays her Fatima (Isidore must let her arms go), and he watches the blue smoke climb and curl. “Hold-on,” she says. “If you were to try, I’d like it.”

  A wife, material comfort, a slice of pie after dinner. If these are all you get, what is the point of being born into this adventurous century?

  The head of a match scrapes inside his chest, flashes. The lovely feel of her. He has entered the next room of his desire.

  And so Isidore’s lips do try; they try her soft and perfumed neck. They try the line of her jaw.

  They try her lips, slippy and sweet.

  He doesn’t think about the husband and whether the guy’s looking for Lucille, even now. Her hands float along his face and shiver the skin. He doesn’t think of his wife or all that had been the foundation of who he was. If reckless abandon is in the cards—

  “Now,” Lucille says. “Do what I want you to.”

  —let’s abandon ourselves to recklessness.

  ACT TWO

  “A stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine.”

  —Vladimir Nabokov

  —SET PIECE—

  Tennessee.

  Sundown. The curtain of day is falling, and the dead won’t shut up.

  It is 1864, wartime. On the banks of the Mississippi, across from Fort Pillow, we see a Union soldier named Meriday Edgefield argue with ghosts.

  Forty men, thirteen of them wounded, lie on the windswept scrub that is Chickasaw Bluff. Everyone’s been killed. Everyone. They’ll kill us, too, soon as they find us, the men around Edgefield are saying.

  Edgefield doesn’t listen to these wounded; he is listening to the already dead. You have to take command, the dead say. You must lead.

  Me?

  Edgefield is not used to ghost logic, ghost arguments. He holds the rank of private. Never has he led anyone—never.

  Red is spilled all across the horizon; the long white neck of the sky has only just been slit.

  A CinemaScope view now of the land between the fort and these hiding survivors, a wide shot from a helicopter. The camera pans the entire distance from river to bluff—a flood plain, scattered with dead and wounded soldiers.

  Cut to Meriday Edgefield’s dark-complected face, thoughtful in close-up…

  —Opening of The March of the Tenth, a film treatment by Isidore Strauss, with Lucille Ball; handwritten on Beverly Hills Hotel letterhead

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MY GRANDFATHER AND I had talked literature at long, haphazard intervals. He’d slipped me The Jungle Book, Thanksgiving 1985; at high school graduation, I showed him my senior essay, “Gatsby: How to Endure a Bigoted Work,” 1992. He was a real estate man who admitted he’d wanted—once, long ago—to be a novelist; I confided my identical hope. We rarely discussed it. But this near-secret commonality, a tough little garden, flourished even under such irregular watering.

  And now I learned he had done it! It turned out that, furtively, when he was a young man, he had done it. Or, almost. And with someone famous.

  STAGE 2, GENERAL SERVICES STUDIO, LOS ANGELES, SEPTEMBER 15, 1951, EIGHT P.M.

  FOUR, THREE, TWO—BEEP. Go, go!

  The natural thing is to respond. But you can’t. You can’t just turn your face to the wind of applause.

  The soundstage as Lucille crosses it feels awfully big. Red camera lights blink like alien eyes.

  Call it, this blinking red evening, her last last chance.

  This is not the pilot episode. There had been a pilot epis
ode—she and Desi filmed it back in March. The pilot episode did not air. The pilot episode had been terrible….

  An audience wants you to be happy, and that goes into your blood and makes you happy. But turning your face to applause is not acting. Turning to applause is acting’s opposite. But maybe huge stardom—the phosphorescent super-prominence she’s after—involves more than acting. More, and less. (Though nobody knows yet if TV can bring that intensity of stardom.)

  Lucille would swear this is beyond the last chance for her.

  Her image is going to be sent out via unfathomable technology—or maybe it is fathomable, but in the way prayer is fathomable—and aimed at the montage of between New York and Los Angeles, where adults are judged too prissy to see a married couple in their marriage bed; the farm towns, sure, but mainly the hopeful and somehow still rural-in-feel urban centers of greater America, your Lansings, your Cheyennes, your Tulsas, pale towns—thataway, past Piscataway—where, to hear Lucille tell it, neighbors provide a real community (it’s the sense of many hands giving you a boost), which can be lovely until in one way or another you distinguish yourself. And then the many hands slide up and seize your throat.

  The first line of aired I Love Lucy dialogue—“You didn’t get that dish clean, you know”—isn’t spoken by Lucille Ball. “There’s a schmutz still.”

  “Nuh-uh, Ethel. That’s not schmutz,” Lucille, as Lucy, responds. (No, she can’t show that the applause makes her happy.) “That’s a floral decoration!” Her character is doing housewifely work in the kitchen.

  “You sure, Lucy?”

  “Positive, Ethel”—pointing to the mark on the plate. “Can’t you see? Flowers in a pattern of [pause] gravy.” A specially calibrated comic beat. “Okay, fine. Schmutz.”

  The audience’s laughter: respectful, obedient, we’ll give you this one. The other speaker is a heavy-haired actress named Vivian Vance—tonight and forever Ethel Mertz.

  The script wants Lucille to come off as miserable here, a housewife scrubbing at a greasy life. But why would her character be cleaning the dinner dishes midafternoon—and accompanied by a friend? Not important. (Let Lucy scrub; Lucille, on the other hand, hasn’t cleaned a thing in at least seven years. Ricardo isn’t Ball.)

  * * *

  —

  AGAIN, THIS IS not the pilot episode. Lucille during the pilot episode had been four months pregnant and caught in some choppy physical seas. Swollen ankles, belly; painful swollen walk—she’d been asked to hide the evidence, couldn’t. Bad nausea, too. In the pilot, the Ricardos had no comical neighbors. No Ethel, no Fred. More, it was overtheatrical and sluggish; it lacked a second act. (But it did have thrilling comic eruptions.) CBS shopped the pilot to the big advertising agencies; in the space the Mertzes would later fill, the pilot had singing, the numbers “The Continental” and “Babalu,” it had Pepito the Spanish Clown. Not one agency wanted it. Still, after the Arnazes agreed to an insultingly small salary (in exchange for their getting one hundred percent ownership of I Love Lucy’s film prints and negatives, which anyway seemed pie-in-the-sky), CBS had managed to get Philip Morris tobacco to take a flier on Lucille. One condition, though: CBS had to agree not to broadcast the awful pilot, ever.

  The upshot is they’re now filming Episode No. 2. Which will air as Episode No. 1. Or will if it’s any good.

  So, the last, last chance. And Lucille delivers her line.

  * * *

  —

  “ETHEL, YOU WANTED to ask me something about you and Fred?”

  Vivian/Ethel: “Oh, right! About Wednesday evening.” That half-decibel-too-loud 1950s TV voice, if a bit mumbled.

  Well, if Vivian Vance doesn’t want to be here, fine. I mean, if Vivian Vance fails to see the appeal of television. But jeez-o-pete, Lucille thinks, don’t just mumble it in. It’s odd—crass and superficial—to need to be the most famous person in the world. I know that, Lucille thinks.

  Lucille has her hair tied with a kerchief that comes to top knots like puppy ears. And the dialogue leaving her mouth tastes a little stale and expository.

  “Isn’t that your big night, Ethel?” she says.

  Can the audience even follow the story line? (In the pilot episode, there had been some voice-over: “In Manhattan, you’d find Ricky and Lucy Ricardo. Ricky Ricardo you know— the famous bandleader. And Lucy is a renowned, um, well—her hair is very bright. And she’s married to him….” But the writers have dropped that announcer, that explanation, for this second try.)

  Now Vivian/Ethel is saying: “Yes, Wednesday’s our wedding anniversary.”

  “Yours and Fred’s?”

  “No, mine and Gary Cooper’s.”

  Laughter even less enthusiastic. Nobody likes dialogue that exists just to tell the viewers who is with whom.

  Vivian/Ethel: “I was wondering if you could help plan something for it?”

  “What are you thinking?”

  (Without that narrator, how will this audience know who Ricky is? Lucille worries this script might be hopeless.)

  Still, for this episode, there are things she and Desi have made certain of. This time, shoot in a theater that’s closer to movie studio than to radio set. Have water-cooled lights, three cameras, constant dolly movement. And a live audience for a filmed show. (All firsts.) Yes, they learned from the pilot episode, but you can’t rig the calendar. Streetcar with Brando, armistice negotiations at Kaesong, Judy Garland at the Palace—Lucille has found herself in a rainy news season; it won’t stop drizzling headlines. Which is to say the time feels kind of event-drenched, and how can a never-quite-was become umbrella enough to shield America from the downpour?

  Ethel: “Fred and I have been together since I was a girl, and I promised myself that at least once in my life I would visit a fun nightspot with him.”

  “Who would deny you that?” Lucy says.

  She puts the soiled pot down without having scrubbed it, nor does she sweat. A performer can exemplify the audience, but a star shouldn’t change herself too much. Screw the collective average—even when the collective average is what’s meant to be portrayed. Average is no path to veneration. Would-be idols forget that.

  “Why, a fun nightspot is your due,” Lucy’s telling Ethel.

  Mary Pickford and Jean Harlow put silly ideas into our brains about what matters, Lucille thinks. Of course it’s cockamamie to want that much celebrity. All the same…

  Lucy: “Okay, tell me your plan.”

  Ethel: “We march in and say to our husbands, ‘I know what let’s do. A fun night out.’ You back me up. Then Ricky hops to his feet to say, ‘Wonderful—’ ”

  “Ricky hops to his feet?”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course not,” Lucy says. “Ricky hates fun nights out.”

  “But he works in a fun nightspot.”

  Lucille has Lucy answer with her trusty pout-smile. “Exactly.”

  Every other television show Lucille can name is broadcast live from New York. But she’s more comfortable in L.A. What a hassle executives gave them! Do it from California when the whole damn country’s on the East Coast? “Well, we can record it in L.A. and ship it to New York,” Desi answered. And Philip Morris, too: Wouldn’t recording a show mean the sound quality will be crap? “All right—so we do it as film.” Then CBS weighed in. Is that even feasible? The cost! Lucille: “I learned doing Hey Diddle Diddle, I need to hear the laughs. And I’m not moving back to New York.”

  And so here she stands now. Filming; acting; L.A. That is, she tries to appear a harried housewife people believe in while being a star they desire. She’s in an apron, a modest kitchen, and full glamour makeup. (The room is only three-walled, as if there has been a shift in the accepted disposition of things.) Doors that won’t shut, windows that can’t open. And because wardrobe changes cause a lag, Lucille wears two layers of clothes. She’
s flanked by gaffers working the light-dim machine; a “script girl” stands in a booth ten feet over the stage. And each set and everything in it has been painted various shades of gray, is built from tobacco profits. Audience cigarette smoke looks like pencil lines in the glare. You try ignoring all activity. You turn down the flame of charisma just enough and still get the audience to boil like water.

  Lucille feels her hands go slick.

  “No, guess what I think, Ethel?” Lucy’s saying. “You should have a special night out.”

  Why am I nervous? Wasn’t I the star of The Big Street? Lucille thinks. But—what’s the plot of this show now? Not enough, maybe?

  There’s also something else that causes her nervousness.

  This is all very strange. Her ambition has never eased off before. But now there’s a serpent in the garden, a thought. What is so great about veneration? Who needs to put forth superhuman effort? For what?

  Could the way out of unnameable discontents be found someplace other than in this show—in something already there in her brain? Yes, maybe. Anyway, she’s been thinking about him since makeup. About the relaxing normality of him.

  * * *

  —

  TWO HOURS EARLIER, she’d sat in a chair by a mirror, and a man brushed color onto her cheeks. “Whaddya know?” the man had said. His name was Hal Brade. He dressed all in black like a Greenwich Village Prospero. “Whaddya see?”

  And she told Brade, “You’re going to make me a knockout if it kills us both.”

  How much would any man understand about mirrors? For Lucille, a mirror was a thing you approached lightly, then dug out a few purse-articles of faith to begin a 1950s woman’s liturgy.

  She’d heard Brade had worked with Jean Harlow on Red-Headed Woman.

  “Oh, Red-Headed Woman was before my time,” he said.