Ball of Fire

by Stefan Kanfer

  Love is an autobiographical passion, and during their first few dates the couple related their life stories. Lucille’s, as we have seen, provided a winding and unusual narrative; Desi’s tale was a good deal more exotic. Those who thought him a slum kid from the streets of Havana (and Lucille was one of them) were astonished by the news that Desi had been a child of privilege. Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III was the only son of a prominent and moneyed Cuban politician. Desiderio II was not only the mayor of Santiago, a major port city; he also owned three large ranches with scores of employees. Desi’s maternal grandfather was a cofounder of the Bacardi Rum company. The boy was expected to attend college and law school, and eventually to take over the family business. The summer of 1933 changed everything. It was in the month of August that Fulgencio Batista led the Cuban army in revolt against the corrupt regime of El Presidente Gerardo Machado. Politicians who had been close to the president were marked for execution or imprisonment, and their lands were confiscated. Desiderio II was placed under arrest and jailed, but in the chaos of la revolución, Desi and his mother, uncle, and cousin escaped the newly empowered Batista police force. The Arnazes had only the clothes they wore, a few pesos, a car, and a tank of gas—enough to get them to a port city in the western part of the island. En route, they pretended to be fervent supporters of the new regime, shouting “ Viva la Revolución!” whenever they saw figures of authority. A day later the four made their escape on a ferry headed for Key West. On the voyage to Florida, Desi played and replayed in his mind the years of ease and the days of fear. Among his last sights of Cuba was the explosion of a bomb released from an open-cockpit plane; the bomb missed its target and blew the arm off a young bystander. The final image of his autobiographical account describes “a man’s head stuck on a long pole and hung in front of his house. The rest of the body was hung two doors down in front of his father’s house.”

  With an increasing number of barrios rising in Miami, the family could have retreated into an insular, resentful life of poverty and rage. But they refused to give in to circumstance. Six months after Desiderio II was incarcerated, strings were pulled and he was released, penniless but physically unharmed. He made his way to the beach city and attempted to set himself up in business.

  Desi III tried to earn his own way, cleaning cages for a canary breeder, driving taxis, clerking in stores. On his parents’ insistence, the youth attended a Catholic high school part-time. His closest friend at St. Patrick’s was a boy he called Sonny. Desi never mentioned Sonny’s absent father, although he knew the old man’s identity and his whereabouts: Alcatraz. One morning Desi read that the old man had been paroled. He called Sonny and heard a strange speaker.

  “He had a very high voice,” Desi wrote, “almost a soprano.

  “ ‘May I speak to Sonny please?’ I asked.

  “ ‘Who’s this?’

  “ ‘Who am I talking to?’

  “ ‘This is Al, his father.’

  “ ‘Oh, Mr. Capone!’ Jesus Christ, I was talking to Al Capone.”

  The association was not one that met with the approval of the elder Arnazes, who still had plans to send their son to college (Notre Dame was their first choice). It was not to be. In the winter of 1936 Desi got a temporary gig singing and playing the guitar with a pickup rhumba band at the Roney Plaza Hotel in Miami Beach. The salary was more than he had ever earned in his life: $39 a week. A month later, the most prominent Latin musician in America dropped by. Xavier Cugat summoned Desi to his table. Satisfied that the young Cuban was properly deferential and naive about money, Cugat hired him to sing and play with his band. Salary: only $30 a week—but it offered the chance to travel, all expenses paid. Desi pounced. The tour started in Cleveland and wound up in Saratoga at the height of the racing season. On the way to the bandstand for a second set, he stopped to gawk at a patron. Bing Crosby greeted him in Spanish, invited the awed singer to hoist a glass, and asked about his salary. Desi told the truth.

  “That cheap crook. Come on, let’s talk to him.”

  As Cugat approached the table, Crosby spoke out: “Listen, you cheap Spaniard, what do you mean paying this fine Cuban singer thirty dollars a week?”

  “He’s just starting, Bingo.”

  “Never mind the Bingo stuff. Give him a raise. One of these days you are going to be asking him for a job.”

  “Okay, okay. How about singing a song with the band, Bing?”

  “Will you give him a raise?”

  “Of course.”

  Crosby performed many songs that night, some with his new friend. “He sang in Spanish, which was pretty good,” Desi was to write, “and then I sang in English, which was pretty bad. The next time I saw Bing was when I was a guest on his Kraft Music Hall radio show. It was the very first time I appeared on national radio.

  “The first thing he asked me was, ‘Did you ever get that raise?’

  “ ‘You bet. The following week he raised me to thirty-five dollars, and the only thing extra I had to do was walk his dogs until they completed their business.’ ”

  Desi’s offhand charm and intriguing accent made him an audience favorite, and in six months he felt confident enough to break away from Cugat and tour with his own band. Yet he remained insecure enough to want a safety net—a twenty-one-year-old singer-bandleader was unlikely to attract crowds without some sort of gimmick. He presented an idea to the conductor: what if he billed himself and a band of pickup musicians as “Desi Arnaz and His Xavier Cugat Orchestra”? That way Cugat would receive free publicity and Arnaz could get bookings. The boss agreed with one proviso. The brash young man had to pay him a royalty of $25 a week for the use of the Cugat brand name, work or no work.

  Desi found himself in the black before the first note sounded. Mother Kelly’s Club in Miami, impressed by the band’s association with a headliner, offered $650 a week with a guarantee of three months’ playing time. Then came opening night. Underrehearsed and cacophonous, the musicians displeased the audience and infuriated the owner. This was not even road-company Cugat, this was Amateur Night. Desi was fired on the spot. He begged for one more chance and received it only because no other talent could be found to replace the band on such short notice. The next evening, under the shaky baton of their leader and arranger, the orchestra offered “La Conga.” Here was a Cuban dance so elemental that Desi had never thought to play it in America. He illustrated the number with a brief demonstration: “It’s very simple: one . . . two . . . three . . . KICK. One . . . two . . . three . . . KICK.” As he watched, a conga line of listeners began to form, with the musicians showing them the way, kicking backward in unison as they made their way around the room. In a week, audiences were forming conga lines around the block. The craze that was to sweep America had begun.

  The U.S. fascination with Latin American music was hardly a new phenomenon. It could be seen and heard in the 1933 Astaire-Rogers film Flying Down to Rio; in Al Jolson’s mocking number, “She’s a Latin from Manhattan” (“You can tell by her mañana / She’s a Latin from Manhattan / and not Havana”); in the rhumba standard “South American Way”; and, of course, in the glib syncopations of Xavier Cugat’s orchestra. But this was something new: a dance that could be appreciated by the tone-deaf and performed by the flat-footed. Mother Kelly’s was renamed La Conga, and there Desi reigned supreme. At the age of twenty-two he traded Miami for New York City, leading his band at a new midtown nightery, also called La Conga. It was here that he embraced his first redhead. She was sitting with another beautiful young woman and an older woman with a husky and resonant voice. The place was noisy; Desi barely managed to catch the elder’s name: Polly Adler. He had never heard of New York’s most notorious madam, and when she invited him to have breakfast at her place he politely assented. There, after he had enjoyed caviar, sturgeon, scrambled eggs, and champagne, Polly gestured to a redhead at the end of the long table. She asked if the guest liked her. By now Desi realized that he had stumbled into a very high-priced whorehouse
. The young lady’s fee, he suspected, would bankrupt him. Adler looked at the guest’s melancholy face, boomed her famous contralto laugh, and assured him, “That’s all right, sonny. This one’s on the house.”

  Desi’s charmed life continued that way throughout 1939. Wherever he went, celebrities cottoned to him. He became the great and good friend of Brenda Frazier, an unruly debutante whose notorious antics were parodied by in a song by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart:

  I’ll buy everything I wear at Sax, I’ll cheat plenty on my income tax, Swear like a trooper, Live in a stupor. . . . Swimming in highballs, Stewed to the eyeballs, Just disgustingly rich, Too disgustingly rich!

  Adler and Frazier brought hundreds of new customers to La Conga. These ranged from out-of-town businessmen to society divas and their dates, all looking for someplace new to spend an evening. Between sets, Desi whiled away the hours with Brenda Frazier’s crowd, or hung around at Polly Adler’s. Working at night, sleeping most of the day, he lived an animal existence with no plan beyond the approaching meal and the next coition. When Rodgers and Hart dropped by his dressing room one night, he thought it was just another pair of Broadway celebrities making a pit stop. He had no idea his life was about to be changed forever.

  Months before, Hart had seen Desi cavorting in the Miami club. Watching him on a New York stage, the lyricist saw new possibilities in the young Cuban. He might be right to play a Latin football player called Manuelito in the new Rodgers and Hart musical, Too Many Girls. The trouble was, Desi had never played a part other than his ebullient self. Hart took him in hand, taught him the rudiments of auditioning, and slipped him a script—in direct violation of director George Abbott’s policy. Abbott liked actors to undergo cold readings so that he could evaluate their talents while they squirmed and struggled. Upon hearing Desi sing, Abbott gave Hart an instant evaluation: “Well, he’s loud enough.” Desi was then handed a script and ordered to read the part where a young Argentinian football player is recruited by an American college. The Latino agrees to go, provided the institution has a superabundance of senoritas.

  “Oh,” says the talent scout. “You mean coeducational.”

  “Tha’s it,” replies Manuelito. “Cooperational.”

  Desi seemed ideal for the part, all right. A little too ideal. He read the rest of the lines flawlessly, and as Abbott and Rodgers exchanged looks Hart tiptoed up the aisle toward the exit.

  “Larry!” Abbott called. “You gave him the script, didn’t you?”

  Hart sputtered, “Who? Me? How? Why?”

  “Because he hasn’t looked at one goddamned word of that scene. He did the whole thing like a big ham, emoting and waving all over the place. You taught him, didn’t you? And, I may add, you did a bad job of it.”

  Hart broke down and confessed, and Desi sheepishly admitted his part in the plot. Abbott, less out of charity than out of a sense that Desi really was right for Manuelito, forgave the composer and the actor and signed up the man he addressed as “Dizzy” from then on. Desi did more than charm his director. The first-act finale, “Look Out,” was built on a shave-and-a-haircut tempo that mentioned the names of college football teams. Rodgers wrote it as a march, and Desi had trouble adapting to the four-quarter time. He kept imposing his own conga beat, to the conductor’s intense annoyance. In the middle of the rehearsal Rodgers came in and heard about the contretemps.

  “What’s the matter with your guys?” he asked the musicians. “We’ll have the first chorus straight, and then when Desi starts the conga beat, we’ll change it to fit his thing. To tell you the truth, I like it better his way.”

  Rodgers’s instinct for the note juste was infallible. During rehearsals Desi’s beat gradually took over the entire number, the young Cuban banging out the rhythm on his drum while Diosa Costello sang and wiggled on the beat as the chorus wove a serpentine line around the stage. Too Many Girls opened on October 14, 1939, at the Imperial Theatre. Desi had never attended a Broadway show. Now he was starring in one created by some of the most dazzling talents in the musical theater. In the end, it was naivete that kept him from being nervous. He recited his lines without error, ended the first act with that triumphant dance, and got a standing ovation for his efforts. The song he delivered with Costello was to take on another meaning in later years:

  She could shake the maracas

  He could play the guitar,

  But he lived in Havana

  And she down in Rio del Mar.

  And she shook her maracas

  In a Portuguese bar

  While he strummed in Havana.

  The distance between them was far.

  By and by

  He got a job with a band in Harlem.

  She got a job with a band in Harlem.

  Ay! Ay! Ay!

  He said, “I’m the attraction!”

  She said, “I am the star!”

  But they finally married

  And now see how happy they are.

  So shake your maracas,

  Play your guitar!

  When the curtain came down Desi walked to La Conga and did the midnight show as if nothing unusual had occurred. The last set ended at 4 a.m. At last he could cool down and chat with Richard and Dorothy Rodgers, George Abbott, and Larry Hart. “About half an hour later,” Desi ecstatically wrote, “I saw Polly Adler heading for our table. She had all the newspapers in her hands, and as she approached she hollered in that big, deep voice of hers, ‘Cuban, you are the biggest fucking hit in town!’ ” Within a few weeks Walter Winchell had dubbed the conga line “the Desi Chain,” and young Arnaz became a New York fixture whose celebrity seemed to increase with each performance. There were offers to appear in other shows, other nightclubs, films.

  Only one faux pas was committed in this period, and that was made not by Desi but by his mother, Lolita. At a party at Desi’s new apartment, a duplex overlooking Central Park, Larry Hart’s mother was enthusing about her son. Suddenly Lolita reached out and sat Larry on her lap. Hart was something of a faun in appearance, five feet tall and excruciatingly self-conscious about his diminutive height and build. Lolita held the lyricist in place, laughing uproariously as he attempted to shake loose from her maternal grasp. Helpless and humiliated, he started to cry.

  Desi was to remember 1939 as one of the most triumphant years imaginable—but also as one of the saddest. For during that year his father filed for divorce, a rare event for Catholic Cubans, and unthinkable when it involved two people who had seemed so devoted to each other. When Desiderio II called his son to explain the situation, Desi hung up on him. The two were not to reconcile for many years, and during that time Desi assumed the role of guardian for Lolita, a dispirited woman exhibiting some unattractive aspects of middle age.

  While his father moved in with a younger woman, Desi and Lolita lived in Desi’s duplex, an ideal bachelor pad before the bad news arrived, but now an unnaturally quiet place. Desi thought his mother needed an attentive listener, and he curtailed his tomcat prowls. But this devotion only served to increase Lolita’s dependence on her only child. She spent most evenings at La Conga, beaming at her son from a front table. It was all too much for the young, charged-up performer, and he sought the classic exit from a suffocating family arrangement: marriage. Most recently he had been seeing Renée de Marco, and together they made the necessary arrangements. Desi would accept a Hollywood offer to appear in the film version of Too Many Girls, driving cross-country and meeting Renée on the Coast as soon as she received her divorce. Everything went according to plan—until that fateful evening when the “honk of woman” entered Desi’s orbit. From that moment, all bets were off.

  Desi started calling his new flame Lucy a day after they met. The reason was less aesthetic than proprietary. “I didn’t like the name Lucille,” he commented. “That name had been used by other men. ‘Lucy’ was mine alone.”

  Hollywood is a town that runs on rumor, and the Desi-Lucy romance had barely begun when studio gossips started odds-maki
ng. Unsolicited advice issued from Lucy’s friends and acquaintances: “He’s flashy and egotistical.” “He’s Catholic and you’re Protestant.” “He’s immature—almost six years younger than you are.” “He dumped Renée de Marco without a backward glance. You’ll be the next.” And indeed, apart from the obvious physical attraction they felt for each other, there seemed no reason to believe the affair would be any more than a brief, passionate fling destined to burn itself out, as studio Cassandras forecast, in six months. Even in little matters Desi’s impulsive character seemed at odds with Lucy’s calculating one. He would take her for rides in his Buick Roadmaster convertible, pushing down on the gas pedal until they reached a speed of a hundred miles an hour on the straightaway. At one point Lucy began to scream uncontrollably.

  “What’s wrong?” Desi shouted.

  Nothing, she claimed; she had been instructed to lower her voice an octave or two, and Katharine Hepburn said that screaming was the best way.

  “Okay,” Desi replied. “You scream and I’ll drive.”

  On the set of Too Many Girls, Lucy paid close attention to the advice of director George Abbott. In contrast, according to Garson Kanin, who was assisting Abbott, “Desi came on strong, bossy, and a pain in the ass.” The Arnaz charm went a very short way, not only with Kanin but with many other Anglos of the period, men and women. A few years prior to Desi’s first Hollywood role, Helen Lawrenson had written a widely quoted article that appeared in Esquire, “Latins Are Lousy Lovers.” Many a jealous suitor and disappointed paramour could recite passages by heart, particularly the one about Cubans: “God knows, the Cuban man spends enough time on the subject of sex. He devotes his life to it. He talks of it, dreams it, reads it, sings it, dances it, eats it, sleeps it—does everything but do it. That last is not literally true, but it is a fact that they spend far more time in words than in action. . . . According to them, they always had their first affair at the age of two. This may account for their being worn out at twenty-three.”