Ball of Fire

by Stefan Kanfer

  Oppenheimer left the building. About halfway down the block he heard the clatter of rapid footsteps. Don Sharpe caught up with him and made a short-winded appeal: “She’s crying and hysterical. She knows she was wrong. She agrees with you and wants to apologize.” They went back into the building and Lucy said and did all the right things, which included making a small act of contrition for Carroll and Pugh, who had not seen her Jekyll-and-Hyde act. “I’ve been a shit,” she told them. After Lucy had walked away Pugh asked, “What the hell was that all about?” It was about establishing modes of behavior and regard, and about understanding that Lucy’s outbursts were signs not of certainty but of an insecurity that had been with her since childhood. Oppenheimer, Pugh, and Carroll would have to bear that in mind from now on.

  Within weeks Oppenheimer wrought other changes in the scripts. He used the technique of the long-running Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse play Life with Father, wherein Mother Day (Vinnie) uses her ditsy feminine arithmetic on Father:

  FATHER

  Vinnie, whatever happened to that six dollars?

  VINNIE

  What six dollars?

  FATHER

  I gave you six dollars to buy a new coffeepot and now I find that you apparently got one at Lewis & Conger’s and charged it. Here’s their bill: “One coffeepot—five dollars.”

  VINNIE

  So you owe me a dollar and you can hand it right over.

  In My Favorite Husband, Oppenheimer slyly modernized and reworked the dialogue:

  LIZ

  You should be glad I bought that dress, George. I made twenty dollars by doing it.

  GEORGE

  You made twenty dollars?

  LIZ

  Absolutely. I bought the dress on sale at Cramer’s for thirty-nine dollars and the identical dress is selling for fifty-nine fifty—so I made twenty dollars!

  GEORGE

  But you don’t have that twenty dollars.

  LIZ

  I know I don’t. I spent it on a hat to go with the dress!

  Oppenheimer also made two emendations that were to have profound impact on the history of situation comedy. He felt that Lucille Ball and Richard Denning could not support a thirty-minute show by themselves. They needed comic support, and early in 1949 he supplied it by bringing on another, older couple. These were the Atterburys— Rudolph, George’s boss at the bank (Gale Gordon), and his scatter-brained wife, Iris (Bea Benaderet). Both actors were seasoned radio farceurs, and a few weeks after they were introduced on the air their presence allowed scripts to develop in new directions. Gordon’s Rudolph came across as a decent but hopelessly pompous banker, thereby humanizing George; Benaderet’s Iris supplied a partner for all of Liz’s harmless, funny schemes, usually in contrivances that pitted the wives against their husbands. Even with all this backup Lucy was having trouble making the comedy work to its full potential. Oppenheimer brought in a live audience to laugh at the jokes, and that helped somewhat. Still, he felt that something else was needed. During one rehearsal he handed Lucy tickets to Jack Benny’s radio show.

  She looked at him blankly. “What are these for?”

  “I want you to go to school.”

  The Benny show provided her postgraduate course in pace and delivery. “Oh, my God, Jess,” she said when she came back. “I didn’t realize!” For the first time, she understood how Benny could make a funny remark and then, simply by gazing deadpan at the audience, sustain the laughter for twenty-five seconds. The exposure to a master of timing made all the difference. Lucy began to relate to the audience— often to the point of mugging—and it roared its approval. Sponsors signed on; My Favorite Husband rose in the ratings.

  There was only part of the show that displeased Lucy: she was required to do a Jell-O commercial at the end of every program. When she performed the spots in her own voice she sounded so uncomfortable that Oppenheimer rewrote them as nursery rhymes—Jack and Jill, Goldilocks, Little Miss Muffet and the Spider:

  ANNOUNCER

  She was just about to eat her next dish when along came a spider and sat down besider . . . and what do you think he said?

  LUCY

  He said—wait till I find my spider voice—(In different character) “Pardon me, but isn’t that Jell-O Orange Coconut Tapioca—an exciting new combination of refreshing orange and tropical coconut?”

  That “spider voice” came out as a high-pitched nasal tone. Audiences found it irresistible. She quickly adapted the character to regular portions of the show, where laughter frequently began before she finished the punch line. “SPIDER,” a private note scrawled in the margin, came to mean her trademark reaction to being discovered mid-plot against George or Rudolph. The success of her vocal tricks and timing settled Lucy down. Very gradually she came to trust the writers, and then to lean on them to an almost pathological degree. Although Carroll and Pugh dated briefly, they were only interested in each other professionally. “Once, when we came back from Europe,” Carroll was to recollect, “Lucy said, ‘Did you get married?’ We said no. She said, ‘Well, don’t do me any favors.’ She was furious.”

  While My Favorite Husband developed and grew in 1949, Lucy continued a parallel life in motion pictures. Early in the filming of SorrowfulJones, Hope received a rare lesson in acting from his costar. “Bob at first was rather afraid of the straight scenes,” Lucy remembered wistfully. “He was feeling his way and so was I. But after a few days, when he still seemed uneasy, I found the courage to take him aside and say, ‘Don’t be afraid to play it straight. If you believe in the scene, the audience will, too.’ ” Using a mixture of credible pathos and all-out comedy, the stars made Sorrowful Jones a commercial and critical hit. To most reviewers Lucille was the big surprise. Newsweek: “Lucille Ball, who has played a Runyon doll before (The Big Street, 1942), makes as delightful a one as any guy could hope to find between Times Square and Lindy’s.” After that film she unwisely chose to make Easy Living for RKO. This second feature costarred Victor Mature, whose past rudeness she had never forgiven, and Lizabeth Scott, who offered weak support. It quickly disappeared from neighborhood theaters.

  Some fifteen years back, Lucy had been dismissed from Columbia Pictures. Since the Neanderthal Harry Cohn was still in charge of production, she saw no reason why the studio would be interested in her. She had failed to consider Buster Keaton and Ed Sedgwick, two of her longtime fans. Groucho Marx and many of his fellow comedians considered the alcoholic Keaton to be as obsolete as the Keystone Kops. Sedgwick had directed Keaton in two-reelers, and he, too, was widely regarded as a fossil from the silent era. Nevertheless, both men had worked their way onto the Columbia lot as advisers, and both believed that Lucille Ball had yet to show the range of her comic talent on the screen. They persuaded Columbia to sign her for the title role of Eleanor Grant, secretary, in Miss Grant Takes Richmond. With William Holden as her costar and sometimes foil, she played a wide-eyed secretary who believes that she’s working for a real estate office when in fact the place is a bookie joint. Eleanor’s gradual enlightenment, and her ability to siphon illegal gambling funds to a worthy housing project, gave Lucy an opportunity to mug and to play a few farcical scenes with unexpected panache.

  Finally, when Lucy made The Fuller Brush Girl in 1950, her gifts for physical comedy went on full display. This follow-up to Red Skelton’s comedy hit The Fuller Brush Man was written by Frank Tashlin. The former gagman for the Hal Roach comedies and director of animated cartoons went for the outrageous, the incongruous, and the obvious and got away with it because he knew more about comic construction than anyone else at the studio. Lucy gamely went along with the scenario, playing Sally Elliot, the bright fiancée of a clueless executive, Humphrey (Eddie Albert). In order to earn enough money to get married, Sally signs on as a door-to-door saleswoman. Customers treat her rudely, brats tie her up with rope, and, eventually, one of her customers is murdered and she’s suspected of the crime—all giving Lucy a chance to react. Before Sally can prove her in
nocence she gets chased by a posse of bald women, hung up on a clothesline, and banged around by a TV roof antenna; she founders in a forest of banana peels, impersonates a bump-and-grind burlesque queen, and becomes the target of the real killers in a wine cellar—providing Lucy with an opportunity for her first drunk scene.

  Standing just offscreen, Buster Keaton dispensed advice. His reward, and Lucy’s, was the review in Variety: “If there were any doubts as to Miss Ball’s forte, Fuller Brush Girl dispels them. She is an excellent comedienne and in this rowdy incoherent yarn, with its Keystone Kop overtones, she garners major laurels.”

  It has become a commonplace to observe that the sharpest humor springs not from funny things, but from such complex sources as emotional deprivation, anger, humiliation, and envy. Like so many of her fellow comedians, ranging back to Charlie Chaplin and Keaton himself, Lucy was deeply unhappy even as she cavorted blithely on the set. Her brother Freddy and her cousin Cleo (whom she tended to regard as a younger sister) each had married and become a parent while she remained childless. She would repeatedly ask friends, “How can you conceive on the telephone?” And she would moan about Desi’s peripatetic life with the band. Even when he was around, Desi seemed preoccupied with a bunch of hangers-on who arrived early and stayed late. Lucy maintained her own circle of friends, among them Rory Calhoun and his wife Lita, Farley Granger, Priscilla Lane, Eve Arden, and the Czech actor Francis Lederer and his wife Marion. They all could see how restive and melancholy she had become. Lucy tried to lose herself in various avocations and expenditures: she studied Shakespeare, tried to learn Spanish, took up oil painting with a special emphasis on the snowy landscapes she remembered from Jamestown, cooked, ordered dresses that sat in her closet, tried a new hairstyle every week.

  Lolita Arnaz thought she knew why Lucy and Desi had failed to become parents. Granted, her boy was not the best-behaved man in the world. And there was the business of the couple’s conflicting schedules. But the real trouble, according to Lolita, was that Lucy and Desi remained unmarried in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Desi listened to his mother for the first time in years. He acknowledged that he wanted a son desperately; if getting married in a ceremony would make things right he would do it—if only Lucy would agree. She would, with certain provisos: “Desi and I sat in our cabbage-rose-papered living room and talked far into the night. We finally decided that Desi would give up his cross-country tours and only take local engagements with his band. We would both consult doctors to see why we did not have children.

  “And we would ‘kick out the bums’—drinking, brawling, constantly dropping in, they gave us no peace. We had to take over our home again, losing the parasites for good.”

  On June 19, 1949, in the local cathedral of Our Lady of the Valley, Father Michael Hurley officiated at the Roman Catholic wedding of Desiderio and Lucille Arnaz, with Lucy in a blue satin wedding dress and matching hat, and Desi in a bright white suit. Eight years after the first Arnaz marriage, with DeDe and Cleo looking on and wiping away tears, Ed Sedgwick gave the bride away. Desi’s mother was matron of honor, and Captain Ken Morgan, Cleo’s husband, served as best man. Looking back many years later, Lucy noted: “It was a beautiful ceremony and I believed in it. At the time, I seriously intended to become a Catholic. I took instruction for a long time, but lost the inspiration when I realized that Catholicism did not seem to help Desi in his life.”

  By now slapstick had become Lucy’s natural comic mode. As Miss Grant, and as the Fuller Brush girl, she had often gone over the top. The trouble was that her laughs came at a cost. By the end of The Fuller Brush Girl, Lucy was deep in the throes of migraine headaches reminiscent of the ones her mother had experienced thirty years before. In addition, she had sprained both wrists and displaced six vertebrae, irritated her sciatic nerve by pacing ankles-inward for a long drunken walk, come down with a severe cold when she was dunked in a wine vat for three straight days, found her eyeballs temporarily paralyzed when a wind machine accidentally blew a cloud of talcum powder directly into her face, and, for good measure, been severely bruised by several tons of cascading coffee beans during a chase scene. On the last day of shooting she gamely appeared at Hollywood and Vine for publicity shots on behalf of the local tuberculosis society. A mobile X-ray machine sat at the curb, and as she coughed and wheezed a technician asked her to step inside for a free examination. Shortly afterward, he emerged with the news that Lucy had walking pneumonia. She spent the next nine days in the hospital.

  Restored to health late that summer, she began work on another Bob Hope movie, Fancy Pants. This remake of Ruggles of Red Gap starred Lucy as an American arriviste and Hope as an unemployed actor posing as her butler. Lucy sustained more injuries in the making of this film: a horse stomped on one of her feet, and the two-hundred-pound Bruce Cabot accidentally stepped on the other one. More therapy was needed, but the treatments did little to boost her sagging spirits.

  In December, however, there occurred some heartening news: she was pregnant. Lucy and Desi made plans for a nursery; she watched her diet and measured her days, careful to get enough sleep, enough protein, enough quiet time. The measures were insufficient. She began bleeding one night at Chatsworth, and Desi drove her to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital praying that this was only a minor problem. In the morning the doctor gave them the sad report: she had lost the baby. But he also presented them with some encouraging information: after her first miscarriage, an inept physician had closed off one of Lucy’s fallopian tubes. The team at Cedars had repaired the problem; all she and Desi needed to do was wait three months before trying to conceive again.

  The story of Lucy’s miscarriage could not be kept secret. When it made the papers, sympathetic listeners of My Favorite Husband wrote 2,867 letters of consolation. Over the course of the next six months Lucy answered every one of them.

  By the time she signed the last letter Lucy felt fully recuperated and ready to begin again. But begin on what? She felt numb when someone told her yet again that Hollywood producers were looking for someone to play a “Lucille Ball–type role”; she had been on that treadmill too long. Radio was easy and, judging by the fan mail, it had renewed her popularity. But it still kept her from Desi, whose only skill was music, a field that would always take him away from her. Why couldn’t they work together on something—a radio show maybe, or a routine with the band?

  She consulted Don Sharpe, as always a fount of ideas. Doing a Lucy-Desi act was an intriguing notion, in his view, but such a project should not be cobbled together overnight. The show needed writers, planning, booking. To that end, the Arnazes formed an official legal partnership, Desilu Productions, and put Jess Oppenheimer, Bob Carroll, and Madelyn Pugh on the payroll.

  Lucy also sought the advice of Pepito Perez, a skillful Spanish clown who had appeared with Desi, and Buster Keaton, who, despite a downhill alcoholic spiral, had never lost his ability to devise comic bits with inanimate objects. Among these objects was a trick cello. Its various hiding places contained flowers, a step stool, and a toilet plunger. Once Lucy learned how to operate it, she and Desi started to work on a carefully timed routine. When it was ready they tried it out before an audience. He played the straight man, earnestly attempting to conduct his orchestra. She was the baggy-pants clown in white tie and tails, her hair hidden beneath a battered fedora. In the middle of a musical number she loudly barged down the aisle demanding to be heard.

  “What’s going out there?” Desi inquired in a bewildered manner. “Please put the lights on.”

  The spotlight hit Lucy and her cello. “Where is Dizzy Arnazzy?”

  The bandleader corrected her. “Desi Arnaz.”

  “That’s what I say. Dizzy Arnazzy.”

  “Look, mister, what is it you want?”

  “I want a job with your orchestra.”

  “Oh, are you a musician?”

  “That’s right.”

  To prove her claim she would do off-key solos on the cello, wringing laughter from a
ll the props, then play the xylophone in the manner of a trained seal. Later she would appear in a provocative outfit, swinging a purse and singing, her lyrics interrupted by the drummer’s rim shots.

  They call me Sally Sweet

  I’m the queen of Delancey Street

  When I start to dance everything goes

  Chick, chicky boom

  Chick, chicky boom

  Chick, chick boom.

  With the ultimate “boom” she would do an exaggerated hip-swinging bump and knock the straw hat off Desi’s head. Then the two would join in a wild rhumba, exiting into the wings. Lucy’s manic routines, plus a short he-and-she sketch written by the team from My Favorite Husband, made up the act.

  Lucy and Desi appeared in a few army camps before making an official debut at the Paramount in Chicago, where live performers alternated with first-run films. That hot June week in 1950, every gag seemed to work, and word quickly spread that the Arnazes had a hit on their hands. Offers came in from theaters around the country, and from the Palladium in London. While they were in Chicago their hotel room was robbed; Lucy lost almost all of her jewelry, but refused to be distracted. She was high on the news that audiences and critics loved the show, and higher on the suspicion that she might be pregnant. “I was elated, nearly delirious,” she maintained, “but I was also frightened. Now I was scared to do my act because it was so physically strenuous. In my seal act, I had to do a real belly whacker, flip over on my stomach three times, and slither offstage. But I had six months’ worth of contracts to fulfill. And I was so happy to be working with Desi again that I hated to call anything off until I was sure.”