Ball of Fire

by Stefan Kanfer

  When the week was up they headed for New York, where Desi and Lucy were booked at the Roxy. She arrived on Friday and made clandestine arrangements for a pregnancy test, using her hairdresser’s name to avoid publicity. That Sunday night she and Desi were relaxing in their dressing room. Desi fell asleep to the clack of Lucy’s knitting needles and the staccato of Walter Winchell doing his radio broadcast. The next few moments were right out of a vaudeville skit, but they were real.

  “After ten childless years of marriage,” said Winchell, “Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz are infanticipating!”

  Lucy dropped her knitting and woke up her husband. “We’re going to have a baby!”

  Desi rubbed his eyes. “How d’ya know? We aren’t supposed to hear until tomorrow.”

  “Winchell just told me.”

  “How d’ya like dat?”

  Actually, they were delighted, even though the couple resented Winchell’s notorious practice of bribing doctors, nurses, and medical technicians to get inside information on ailing or pregnant celebrities. The Arnazes finished out the week, canceled the rest of their bookings, and went home to Chatsworth. With a contractor Desi began work on a $23,000 addition to their $14,500 house. It would include two bedrooms, a patio, and a white tile room Lucy called “the Lab,” to be outfitted with the latest cooking and laundry appliances. As a final touch Desi added an outside door at the far end of the playroom. No doubt remembering his own youth, he told Lucy, “When our son’s a teenager, he’ll need a private entrance.”

  Everything went well for the first two months of the pregnancy, but before the trimester ended Lucy was back in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital with acute pain and bleeding. She miscarried five days later. “They kept me in the hospital for a week,” Lucy remembered, “doped with sedatives. I cried and cried, but the doctors assured me that I still had a chance to become a mother.” She took them at their word and returned to work, determined not to succumb to melancholy. In the next three months she made six round trips to New York for guest shots on television variety shows, continued with My Favorite Husband, and had an agonizing kidney stone removed. All the while she kept at Don Sharpe, reminding him that audiences accepted the Cuban and the Redhead as a couple. Surely he could find some way for them to appear in the same radio program—or perhaps something in the burgeoning new medium of television. His replies were not encouraging.

  That October she received good news for the first time since the miscarriage. Through her agent, Cecil B. DeMille had offered Lucy a part as the elephant trainer in his new circus picture, The Greatest Show on Earth. Her costars would include Jimmy Stewart, Charlton Heston, Cornel Wilde, and Dorothy Lamour. Lucy was thirty-nine, and she knew this was her last chance at a big-budget A picture. She accepted without hesitation. There was only one snag. The actress Lucille Ball was still under contract to Columbia and its ogre Harry Cohn. Lucy begged to be released from her obligation to the studio.

  Cohn not only refused, he sent her the script of The Magic Carpet. In that harem melodrama Lucy would be cast as a temptress “whose lips and temper are hotter than the desert sands.” The producer was Sam Katzman, known in Hollywood for making “lease breakers.” Katzman productions, in Lucy’s words, were “strictly class E. Anyone of any stature was supposed to say, ‘Over my dead body! I’ll never do that!’ ” Having made a legitimate offer, Harry Cohn could then cancel the player’s contract without paying her off. He had reckoned without Lucy’s resolve. She phoned Cohn and was put right through. He expected outrage; instead he got sweetness. “I’ve just read the Sam Katzman script,” she cooed. “I think it’s marvelous! I’d be delighted to do it.”

  To the production chief’s distress—as well as that of Sam Katzman, who had to pay her $85,000, a large part of his budget—Lucy showed up on the set five weeks later, her harem pants and jacket fitting snugly. A little too snugly, for she was pregnant again. This time she kept her condition totally secret, not only to beat the jinx but because there was a subclause about pregnancy in the fine print. If Cohn had tumbled to the news he could have canceled Lucy’s contract overnight. On the set, everyone was kept from the truth except for Harriet McCain. Each night she let out the waist on Lucy’s harem pants a notch or two. “I collected eighty-five grand for a total of five days’ work,” the actress was to crow, “and got out of my Columbia contract very nicely.”

  Then she and Desi got an audience with C. B. There, in the great man’s office, Lucy went public with a formal announcement: “Mr. DeMille, I cannot do your picture, because I’m going to have a baby.”

  Decades later Lucy told the story as if it had happened the day before. DeMille did not react immediately. He paused, as if he were the central actor in one of his biblical epics.

  Aware that Lucy ached to be in The Greatest Show on Earth, he also knew that she was nearly forty and that this might be her last chance at motherhood. At last he turned to Desi and delivered a line that Lucy was to treasure for the rest of her life: “Congratulations. You are the only person in the world to screw Harry Cohn, Columbia Pictures, Paramount, Cecil B. DeMille, and your wife, all at the same time.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “How can I possibly sell this?”

  FOLLOWING a broadcast of My Favorite Husband, the Hollywood Reporter told readers it was “too bad that that Lucille Ball’s funny grimaces and gestures aren’t visible on the radio.” The line was too provocative to be ignored. So were the notices that Desi and Lucy had received on their vaudeville tour. Variety, for example, had called their Chicago act “one of the best bills to play the house in recent months,” and said: “If the red-headed gal wants to slide on her tummy for five or six shows a day past the initial five-week booking for this package, her agency should have no trouble lining up dates.”

  Bolstered by newspaper clips and their own enthusiasm, Don Sharpe and Jess Oppenheimer made a pitch to CBS. The network’s radio division produced My Favorite Husband, and 1951 seemed the ideal time and place for Lucy and Desi to make the jump to prime-time television. The network thought otherwise. Sharpe and Oppenheimer pressed on. They found the sponsors of Lucy’s radio show mildly receptive to the idea of a TV program centered on the Arnazes. Executives at General Foods’ advertising agency, Young and Rubicam, called Lucy and Desi in and convinced them that CBS would never be persuaded by sales talk alone. The network needed proof that a Desi-and-Lucy comedy would work on the screen. “Produce your own audition program,” counseled a Y&R vice president with a lot of experience in production and promotion. “That way you can sell it to the highest bidder.”

  Admen had a way of making the arduous sound simple; for Lucy and Desi such an audition program would mean a tangle of fiscal and emotional investments, and the word around the broadcasting business was far from encouraging. Executives warned that the public was not ready to see a Latino in a domestic role and that Lucy was far too glamorous to be accepted as a housewife. Desi wavered; not Lucy. “Look,” she pointed out, “I was born in Jamestown, New York, and waited on tables and jerked sodas. You’ve been kicking around this country for seventeen years. Hell yes, we’re average Americans. And we’re going to do I Love Lucy even if we go broke.” This despite the advice of friends who urged them to abandon the project. Studios, the Arnazes were reminded, did not look kindly on apostates. Desi could always lead a band, but what would happen to Lucy? She answered them by quoting the voice of Carole Lombard. Lucy insisted that her late friend had appeared in a dream, speaking ten magic words: “Honey, go ahead. Take a chance. Give it a whirl!”

  Whirl they did. Because Oppenheimer, Carroll, and Pugh had exclusive contracts with CBS, Lucy and Desi were forced to commission scripts from outside teams. Every one of these was held at arm’s length. Nevertheless, several were passed on to Don Sharpe, and he, in turn, shopped them around to the networks. One script contained just enough to intrigue programmers at NBC. In this scenario Desi played a successful bandleader, and Lucy his movie star wife. The plot revolved around t
heir plans for a quiet wedding anniversary—until reporters and photographers from Life magazine crash the party. News of NBC’s interest was carefully leaked to Harry Ackerman, CBS’s executive in charge of radio and television production. The thought of losing Lucy was too alarming to ignore, and he capitulated—partway. Ackerman put Desi under contract as the master of ceremonies for a radio quiz show, Tropical Trip. (Another quiz show, to be called “Win Your Vacation,” had been planned for the same time slot. It would have starred a young comedian named Johnny Carson. He was deemed expendable.)

  For the first time in her career Lucy stopped being a “gamer,” ready and eager to go along with whatever the studio ordered. The independent spirit that animated her youth had been suppressed for years. The adolescent who had auditioned in New York City, and put red pieces of paper on her face to break up Eddie Cantor in Hollywood, had been missing for so long that people had forgotten her. But Lucy remembered Lucille. That audacious youth had been suppressed by the actress’s need to work and the woman’s desire to preserve two families—the one she began with, and the one she was trying to create with Desi. It was time for a reappearance.

  Lucy sensed that she had the upper hand with CBS, and impudently refined her list of demands. The Lucy show, whatever it was, would have Jess Oppenheimer as its producer and head writer. A running part would be found for Desi. The show would be produced in Hollywood so that she could continue her film career. The newly created Desilu Productions was to own 50 percent of the program. CBS would pick up the tab for the audition film. Ackerman agreed to these conditions. Thus began a series of brainstorming sessions at CBS. “We were asking ourselves,” Oppenheimer later wrote, “what do you do with a comedienne and a Cuban orchestra leader?” They began with the working title of “Lucy.” Even that was to cause trouble when Desi demanded top billing. After about a week of negotiating, Oppenheimer recalled, “I had finally managed to convince him on the basis that it was the ‘gallant’ thing to do—to let the lady go first. But even then he had come back to me one more time, saying, ‘I tell you what, Jess. Why don’t we compromise and make it alphabetical?’ ”

  In time Lucy and the writers arrived at the same conclusion: a situation comedy built around a supposedly famous bandleader and his celebrity wife was unworkable. In her words: “The general public doesn’t think that movie stars have any problems. They think it’s just party after party.” Many meetings later Oppenheimer came up with a premise that he put in writing:

  I LOVE LUCY

  This is the title of an idea for a radio and/or television program incorporating characters named Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. He is a Latin-American bandleader and singer. She is his wife. They are happily married and very much in love. The only bone of contention between them is her desire to get into show business, and his equally strong desire to keep her out of it. To Lucy, who was brought up in the humdrum sphere of a moderate, well-to-do, middle western, mercantile family, show business is the most glamorous field in the world. But Ricky, who was raised in show business, sees none of its glamour, only its deficiencies, and yearns to be an ordinary citizen, keeping regular hours and living a normal life. As show business is the only way he knows to make a living, and he makes a very good one, the closest he can get to this dream is having a wife who’s out of show business and devotes herself to keeping as nearly a normal life as possible for him.

  With this as armature, he and the writers constructed a different kind of comedy. The couple, Ricky and Lucy Ricardo, would be supported by Pepito the clown, and the actor Jerry Hausner, playing Ricky’s agent. In 1951 television was such a novelty that when Hausner offered to buy his father a TV set, Hausner Sr., a Hungarian immigrant, declined. The old man had spent his Friday nights peering at wrestling matches through the window of a furniture store on Hollywood Boulevard. There, the only noise he could hear came from the traffic at his back. “Not yet,” he told his son. “Just wait. Wait till they get sound. They’ll figure it out one of these days. You’ll see. Just like they did with the movies.”

  The I Love Lucy pilot went before cameras on March 2, 1951, Desi’s thirty-fourth birthday. A kinescope—a film taken off the closed-circuit TV tube—was made during the proceedings. As technicians stood by in CBS Studio A, a meltdown occurred backstage. Lucy was now five months pregnant and showed it. Costumers outfitted her with loosefitting pajamas and hoped for the best, while Desi and a network executive wrangled about the Arnazes’ still-unsigned contract. With only a few seconds to go, the executive gave Desi a directive: “Sign the contract right now, as is, or the show will not go on.”

  Desi held his ground. “How much does the kinescope cost to shoot?”

  “Nineteen thousand dollars.”

  “Okay,” Desi yelled, “I’ll pay for it myself, and it will belong to us.”

  The executive backed down. “We’ll go ahead and shoot it now, and thrash out the details later.”

  After the kinescope was made, other details had to be thrashed out as well. To no one’s surprise, the Lucy and Ricky Ricardo characters were convincingly funny. The clown and agent, however, seemed to diminish rather than augment the comedy. And the couple’s locale, an apartment overlooking the Plaza Hotel at Central Park South, felt wrong, somehow. The show took a week of painstaking edits; even so, there were many rough spots and ill-timed moments. Upon viewing the kinescope, Hubbell Robinson, head of CBS programming in New York, phoned Oppenheimer and barked: “What are you sending me, Jess? This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. How can I possibly sell this?” Two weeks later, without a buyer or sponsor for I Love Lucy, the final episode of My Favorite Husband was taped. When the last commercial was delivered, Lucy addressed the studio audience, unable to keep the desperation out of her voice when she spoke of the day when “we’ll be able to come back on the air in the not-too-distant future.” As she read the credits of all the people connected with the program for the last two and a half years she began to weep. Though she had become expert at turning on the tears, this was not an act. Lucy had good reason to feel that this time the dice were not going to come up in the Arnazes’ favor.

  Robinson shopped the kinescope around to various advertising agencies. The asking price was $26,000 for each episode, a bargain at a time when most shows cost upward of $50,000 to produce. He had no takers. Then, at the last moment, Milton Biow, head of the advertising agency that bore his name, evinced a mild interest. Biow’s principal client, Philip Morris, had already backed two unsatisfactory programs: the television versions of Truth or Consequences and Youth Opportunity emceed by the bandleader Horace Heidt. The tobacco company was in the market for something to greet the new decade of the 1950s. Biow rolled the kinescope in his private screening room. He was quick to spot flaws and amateurisms, but he thought there might be something salvageable in the situation comedy of Lucy vs. Desi. Unwilling to trust his instincts, he called in his old friend Oscar Hammerstein II, one of Broadway’s greatest lyricists and an expert on humorous scenes and characters. At a private screening the author of Show Boat and Oklahoma!chuckled at Lucy’s antics and Desi’s accent. Yes, he agreed, the kinescope was awkward and the premise needed work, but there was real potential here. That was good enough for Biow. He and Sharpe worked out an arrangement with Philip Morris, with Sharpe guaranteeing a stronger and more professional show by airtime. The cost of each episode was not to exceed $19,500. In the initial season of 1951–1952 there would be thirty-nine episodes, and then Philip Morris would have the option to continue the series or to cancel its sponsorship. By meeting’s end, I Love Lucy had been guaranteed a network, a sponsor, and a time period—Monday night at nine o’clock. Desi was on a hot streak.

  Guaranteed a season of employment, Oppenheimer, Pugh, and Carroll reexamined their handiwork. They agreed that having Ricky’s agent as a main character would skew the program away from the couple and toward Desi. The character was dropped. They also looked back to their success with My Favorite Husband, in which Lucille Ball and Richar
d Denning played against, and with, an older couple. It was decided to change the locale from an expensive apartment building to a middle-class brownstone owned by Fred and Ethel Mertz—named for a couple who had lived on the same block with Pugh during her childhood in Indianapolis. The Mertzes could thus be landlords and second bananas at the same time. The logical choices for these parts were Gale Gordon and Bea Benaderet, the second leads on the radio show. The job offer came too late: by the time I Love Lucy was sold both character actors were booked for other assignments. The veteran character actor James Gleason was also considered until his salary demands were made known. At $3,500 a week, he had priced himself out of the game.

  As an intense casting search began, Oppenheimer received a call from the East Coast. Milton Biow had just returned from a vacation in Europe and could scarcely contain his exuberance. “I was thinking about the show all the time I was away,” he burbled. “I think it’s going to be a great program.” Oppenheimer was glad to hear it. Was there anything else? Well, there was one question: “When are you moving to New York?” The producer blanched. “New York? Who’s moving to New York? Nobody told me anything about that! I thought the deal called for the show to originate from here—live—with kinnies for the cable, like Burns and Allen and The Alan Young Show.” He added that neither Lucy nor Desi nor their staff had any intentions of moving three thousand miles from their homes. “Jess,” returned Biow, “I bought a show that’s going to be done from New York. I am not about to put on a program where fifteen percent of the audience see it clearly and eightyfive percent see it through a piece of cheesecloth.”