“Uh, Dad?” said Bernie with a laugh. “Are you falling asleep? What’s going on?”
“No no no, I’m fine. Just pooped. I was up there with the guy doing the gutters,” Isidore said. “I think also it’s the leaves, hay fever.”
Yawn. Oh, not again, Isidore thought. He’d found himself yawning a lot. It was kind of a tic.
“Thank you, Isidore,” Harriet was saying across the table. She sipped from a glass of table wine. (Harriet had taken to dinnertime drinking whether Isidore was or not.) “It is good stew, I think,” she said. This was Mary’s night off.
Since the loss of the phone number, Harriet struck Isidore as maybe extra-buoyant; here, at its end, her sentence had pirouetted up, a jaunty turn of agreement. Maybe it was the wine. Her hair had gone silver-streaked, and about her face there was a nimbus of stray curls and intelligence—he found himself hating and pitying her, in turn.
“Yaaaawgff,” he said, the back of his hand to his open mouth.
“Ho ho—again, Iz?” Harriet leaned forward in a sort of clunky way to look at his eyes. Her voice’s false cheery note told him it wasn’t her first drink of the day. “You’ve been so tired lately?”
Isidore made his Don’t be anxious, please laugh fondly with me rather than be concerned face; Harriet’s answer was her Well, you may be right face. Or her No, actually I’m concerned face. If a family is a language you learn to speak, Isidore in exile lost the vernacular.
Not that he’d ever leave—unless something forced his hand. She leaned back now. Just making myself happy, that’s the thing I lost, Isidore thought. Just that.
It would be such a relief to be able to howl about this.
Bernie kept on. “But, your eyes, Dad. You don’t look good.”
Isidore’s body couldn’t make armor against guilt. What it could make is yawns. Yawns and tears. “It’s just my eyes are bothering me,” he said. All this is what’s actually real, he thought. “From, you know, the gutters.” This family is what’s real, if I don’t think of the other possible reality.
“What has gotten into you?” his brother Norman had said recently. “Pushing, pushing, pushing these crazy land deals? It’s not like you, Iz, the risk.”
Isidore could have hired someone to try to reach Lucille again, but it felt too late for that. All the clocks read too late. “I’m fine, Bernie, excuse me,” he said now. “There may be eye drops in the bathroom.”
Since coming back from Los Angeles, he’d initiated an uncharacteristic deal with Sam LeFrak, and his hands trembled; an uncharacteristic deal with Fred Trump, and his hands trembled; he’d uncharacteristically pushed Norman to be bolder and bolder again; he’d leveraged himself to make a risky deal with Harold J. Kalikow, his hands had trembled, but he’d felt a kind of celebrity by deputation—you’re special because someone special liked you once. He felt the infantile need to tell Lucille, See, I was right; you really didn’t like me or think about me anymore because I wasn’t famous.
But look at what I’m doing with real estate! he would tell her. Maybe he, too, could be someone who’s always raising a toast to the present?
The image of Lucille crumpling his number (had he even given it to her?) merged in his head with another: Lucille all a-snuggle with Desi on a couch, kissing him, tearing off his shirt so the buttons popped. Was Isidore even entitled to jealousy? Of course he hated these strolls around the felled trees and blighted forest of his understanding. Not a sapling, not a single blossom of comprehension anywhere.
* * *
—
FIVE MINUTES BEFORE tonight’s sleep, Harriet takes another drink. None for me, thanks, Isidore says.
* * *
—
HE HAD FOUND himself alone with Harriet a lot—through 1954, into 1955. Arthur and especially Bernie had entered adolescence, that parent-free journey. Hey, Harriet—looks like life recast us into a couple’s act, huh? Often, they covered over their paired isolation by spending time with Gary and Mona; but at other times, he was solicitous of his wife, attentive. And sometimes, nowadays, surprisingly, she appeared more solicitous of him, too. Often all day, actually.
Yawn.
Reluctantly and distractedly, he went with her to the movies. Tonight, they were seeing Cinderfella, Jerry Lewis playing a Jewish commoner who’s after Princess Charming, the 3:30 show. “That was pretty good, eh, Iz?” A week later, on the steep, scuffed steps of Grand Central, he still thought about the film. Cinderfella had feared Princess Charming could never love him because she was “a person” while he was “a people.” But the Princess told the Fella that, under the crown, she was “a people,” too…
Yawn.
Anyway, sometimes, nowadays, surprisingly, he had a sense Harriet wanted to be left alone. But only at very specific times.
Harriet at the edge of the mattress pulled her pale cotton nightshirt on. Unzipping and letting her slacks drop, then pulling back the blankets, she was about to get into bed. Wind shook the window and then lost interest. Isidore hugged her from behind; resting an ear on her, he felt conflicted about it. Maybe in who I am there runs a streak of masochism that others take, at least initially, for kindness, he thought.
He kissed her neck. It must be too late for that, right? All the clocks read too late.
“Come on,” Harriet said. Then, turning, she gave him a little crumple of a smile. “No, I’m sorry. Tired.” And a shrug he’d never before seen from her. In these past few weeks, she had been solicitous of him all day but never, anymore, at night, in the bedroom.
He said it was fine.
Up close now—even through the fog of lust—he was able clearly to see something. A blush had risen to Harriet’s skin. She was, he realized with confusion, nervous. Or upset. The redness spread, her throat, even her ears.
Now came the soft-voiced inevitables. Isidore smiles. A few Sorry, I justs (her), at least one Please, don’t apologize (him). He coughed, looked away from her. If a power station is thrown offline, there’s a lot of stalled energy—there’s a terrible shuddery fizz. Stunned generator; turbine seething in its coils. A congested potency. He managed to say another nearly affectionate thing at her. “Love you. Good night.” But his insides juddered and sadly moaned. What more could he expect from his wife?—he was a low-down cheat, and maybe she knew it. He couldn’t in good conscience be annoyed at her for this. But the boss in the control room may have morals that are powerless to keep the reactor from entering meltdown.
She was nearly affectionate at him too, a smile, a brave, somehow self-conscious face. She’d smiled for him sitting on the couch at his father’s house as the old man said something Isidore hadn’t liked, and she’d smiled for him at milestone synagogues and cemeteries, and in the hospital she had smiled at him as he held each of their children for the first time, and, over a million days and nights, a million million, she’d smiled at him in this house, which he built and that she turned into a home. And all these smiles and moments had accumulated, had mounted. And now, one by one, they made a distance between them that felt like a thousand acres.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE WOMAN WHO’D loved my grandfather for his last twenty-five years—the woman whom my family held up as a kind of accessory-grandma—was Mona, his more or less common-law wife, who had always been kind to me, had treated me as if I were one of her own. And yet, after my grandfather’s death, when I looked around my life for some terrain on which my sympathy might land, I didn’t think of her, the woman who’d lost her companion after decades of common-law togetherness. My sympathy, I realized, was spoken for.
There was a surprise claim on it.
WINTER 1956–WINTER 1961
DESI’S HAIR BY the middle 1950s turned fully white under the heavy dye. His gut paunched out, his eye ticced, his brain habitually ached. His personality kind of rolled up and went. Drinking that intensely can do it to anyone
. And the drift was hastened by Confidential and the article that had cut its malicious path through their lives.
You could see it in the 1957 interview he gave to Variety to blunt the Confidential debacle—and to show what a clean-living family man he really was. “You both do appear happy,” said the reporter, sitting in Desilu’s lunchroom. Desi said and Lucille said: “We thank you.” But when the interviewer turned to his notes, Desi sucked air, wiped sweat from his brow, and generally looked like the first man to have gone into labor. He tried to concentrate. But he kept eyeing his watch—had enough time passed for the exit to be natural?—and then he said, “I have to go to the john.” Go, he didn’t add, to the bottle of Jack Daniel’s he’d hidden behind the toilet.
“Oh,” the interviewer said, “I think I’ll join you. Hot day today, had lot of water, if you catch my meaning.” Trembling, Desi said, “Okay, fine”—his eyes burning with panic.
“I’ll hold down the fort,” Lucille said. “Not that I’m invited.”
When Desi and the interviewer came back to the commissary, Desi managed not to grimace, but he never unclenched his brow.
“I hear you kids are going to be in the next Minnelli picture? What a treat.”
Lucille would’ve answered but Desi groaned. He closed his eyes, offered a queasy smile, and, through clasped teeth, said, “Yes, excited.”
The interviewer had some follow-up about Father of the Bride and Desi looked at him with uncomprehending eyes, with a face that said, Has anyone ever suffered as much as I?
The interviewer was saying, “Don’t you find Minnelli to be quite—”
“I have to go,” Desi said. “I’ve got a call with New York.”
“It’s almost eight P.M. there,” said the interviewer. Then, to fill the silence, “A call with an entire city of seven million? I can see why you have to take it.”
“I get going so much, sometimes I forget the time,” Desi said. “Is it already four now?”
“Working like the devil,” the interviewer said. “That’s how you get ahead in movies and TV, I suppose. It’s nearly five. Who else is in this Minnelli picture, by the way?”
“I’ll go get the call sheet for you,” Desi said, making to stand.
“Nonsense. I can ring the studio later. I’ve got you two here now and that’s more valuable to me,” the interviewer said.
“I’d rather not forget anyone.”
“Desi, stay,” Lucille said, “and have some coffee. I already poured you a cup.”
“But our friend here is right.” Desi did stand now, his voice close to a whine. “I’m a professional. I want the world to know the reports are false. Let me go get the call sheet.”
“I already poured you a cup when you went to the john,” Lucille said. “Just the way you like it.”
In admiration and hope Desi looked at his wife. Could she have? Was she that thoughtful?
“Thank you,” he said and drank the concoction—the only gasoline that could start his motor—faster than anyone could drink hot liquid. “Thank you, Lucille!” And then they finished the interview without any further problem. “Minnelli is a prince, an absolute prince!” Desi said. And how they laughed (except for Lucille)!
“Desilu is a family,” Jess Szilárd had taken to saying, “but Daddy’s never home anymore.”
Well, I can run it, Lucille thought. It’s my company.
At the end of Season 5, she set about turning herself into an executive. The business had always provided her with a focus, a distraction that now pulled into a calling. But Desi had always handled the business end of the business. She began staying even later. The quiet, dark soundstages she owned; the pencils and pens and staplers and desks she owned; the gated fence with her fancy logo stamped across both opening halves; the talent assembled in all the shows, on all the stages, in front of all the audiences—she owned them, too; the plaster smell over the new backlot; the dark gray carpets of the offices she owned; the coffee steaming in the countless paper cups she owned; the chill of the newfangled air conditioners, the goose-pimpled skin of aspiration. She owned it all.
This new kind of achievement was rejuvenating. Desi, by the end of Season 6, did almost nothing.
Learning a new trade can be a sort of amnesia. You can almost forget your marriage is shit. When you decide—in the face of your close relationship with CBS—to develop programming for other networks; when you sign a clutch of weekly checks for more dough than your father earned in a year; when you beget from nothing a lunchroom, a conference room, an office; when you buy and renovate the old Guion-Handelman theater to establish an in-house training program for Desilu actors; when you find a new calling, your mind can sort of fly above all that earthbound stuff. It can for a while, anyway. After Mose Bock had approved a quick-failing show for the gossip columnist Walter Winchell—a double insult (such a reward for someone who tried to ruin her with Red Scare hearsay; such an uncommercial idea)—she’d said, Screw it. I’ve been in more movies than Technicolor. I can see what audiences like. I can make sure I’m the only decider.
It wasn’t easy. The slow steps forward, the managerial not-knowing—and so being made to feel young again, for good and ill—and, finally, the edging from shadows into this new and warm waiting success. Over about two years she approved:
The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp
Meet McGraw
Whirlybirds
The Real McCoys
Those Twins!
The Ann Sothern Show
San Francisco Beat
Sheriff of Cochise
…and other such televisual nuggets you haven’t seen or even heard of but that were very successful in the late fifties, along with:
The Untouchables
and
The Andy Griffith Show
…those big fat hits you have heard of. She bounded from one task to another, and with each new jump her pride was fully realized. A window by the stage in the Guion-Handelman often caught the sun; when she stood there telling the prospective teenage comedian Joe DiPietro that surprise was key, because “ha” and “aha!” were related industries, her face looked warm in the fierce glare—and warm with the personal flush of deep satisfaction. She didn’t have the time to think of her marriage, or of Hold-on—except when she did.
“And what are these?” she asked Mose one office morning early in her self-education.
“These?” Mose shambled over. “These are official show presentations. Writers propose, in a formalized way, ideas for television shows.” While he spoke, her shoulder had to contend with the meat of his hand, his drumming fingers.
“And we can revise them? I mean, make changes?” Lucille said.
“That would, in theory, be acceptable, yes. But.” Out the window, sunny Cahuenga was already trafficked. “Depends on the extent, and the manner,” Mose said. “We, generally, as executives, steer clear of the creative side of things.”
And then Mose hoped to be asked a follow-up question. But Lucille had gotten all she needed. She was thinking that she’d rewrite the character of the hotel’s assistant manager for a woman; and she’d make the boss’s wife an overbearing bully, maybe played by Reta Shaw; and the bellboy would now have a crush on the heroine; and, for laughs, the clerk should be French and have a Pepe Le Pew accent….
In her eyes, there was again the gleam of joy.
Business took ascendancy now. Not just over home but over acting. Around Desilu, people had the feeling that Executive Lucille had drawn into the business all her stores of creativity and vision and left I Love Lucy Lucille more than a bit drained. But if the show suffered, only the critics—only the few best of the critics—noticed. She walked from one of her lots to another, one of her sets to another and, in her mind, she stood hands on hips, thin-muscled and caped atop the Hollywood sign, looking down at Bea
chwood Canyon. She owned more studios than MGM did when in 1949 it had fired her. It may have been the first time she felt truly independent, truly unreliant on Desi. On any man. She had climbed above her humiliation, her subservience, and her heart was reinflating in the kicked places.
A setback came when Lucille tried to pitch a movie to Paramount about a freeman named Meriday Edgefield, who had to march with fellow black soldiers through the Civil War South. (“Good idea. But no one is going to let you make a movie about blacks.”)
And—and—and…the time, early in 1958, when Desi, at the ranch in Chatsworth, had just for an instant smiled when she’d walked in on him with another woman—a prostitute, it turned out—and she realized that maybe it brought Desi joy to hurt her.
The prostitute more or less ran out of the house, and the whole time Desi refused to award Lucille a pause in his cold stare. “Despite what some people think,” he said, “I’m still part of this family.”
Oh! Lucille marveled at him. You had to tip your hat. The masterful self-righteousness.
“Why do you despise me?” he said. “That’s why I do this.”
“Despise you?” she said. “No, I just like to picture you falling off the Capitol Records building and landing on your head.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “But not the head that people care about. I mean the one on your neck.”
Desi took a step to her. “I look at you here, and I don’t see a wife. I don’t see a woman.”
She stood. “Why are you—”
“I don’t.”
“—so goddamn cruel?”
“I look at you sometimes. I never see a woman.”
“The only reason for your success.” Her voice was shaking, her hand, her leg. “That’s what you see when you look at me. Your success.”
“If you were a woman, I’d take you right here,” he said. “Too bad.”
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