In the 1950s, a favorite escape from the twin threats of communism and McCarthyism was to tune in to the antics of the country’s zaniest housewife. However, while America loved Lucy, the person behind the I of the show’s name was the staff, support, and soul mate of the iconic redhead.
The man who was to break television’s color barrier, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III, was born in Santiago, Cuba, the scion of prestige. His maternal grandfather was a founder of Bacardi Rum; his paternal grandfather was the doctor assigned to Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders after their ride up San Juan Hill. But the privileged life of his ancestors was not destined to be his. Desiderio’s life was derailed with Batista’s revolution, and the family fled to Florida. To save money, the family lived in a warehouse and subsisted on cans of pork and beans; baseball bats warded off the rats.
Despite his fall down the social strata, Desiderio was a survivor who quickly learned English and made American friends, including his best buddy, Al Capone Jr. While still in high school, armed with a pawnshop guitar, Desiderio (known as “Desi”) auditioned for a band with his piece “Babalu.” He had practice with the instrument from serenading señoritas back in Cuba and was hired. Desi began his career for $39 a week at the Roney Plaza Hotel. In 1937 he started his own band in Miami Beach and helped launch the conga craze that swept over America. As acclaim spread, he was offered a role in Too Many Girls as the Latin lover.
The woman who became famous for making millions laugh was born into a Baptist family in Jamestown, New York. The great tragedy of Lucille’s childhood was the death of her father when his wife was four months pregnant with their second child, Fred. Her grandfather, similarly named Fred, stepped in as her male role model, and as such took her to vaudeville shows and fostered her innate love of theater. When Lucille fell for the bad boy, a gangster’s son, Johnny DeVita, her mother agreed to send the sixteen-year-old to the John Murray Anderson American Academy of Dramatic Art in Manhattan. Unlike Bette Davis, who was the school’s shining star, Lucille left after a few weeks when her drama coaches informed her she “had no future at all as a performer.” However, the word no was not part of Lucille’s lexicon, and she eventually obtained work as a Goldwyn Girl in Hollywood. Her destiny would have remained that of a minor starlet except for an encounter that would make her one half of America’s most beloved couple.
The first time Desi met Lucille was at RKO, one of the five big studios from Hollywood’s Golden Age. She was dressed for a scene involving a catfight with Maureen O’Hara, which led to Desi’s remark that she looked “like a two-dollar whore who had been badly beaten by her pimp.” Later that afternoon Lucille happened to stroll by, sans costume, and Desi’s first words to her were “Would you like me to teach you how to rumba? It may come in handy for your part in the picture.” She accepted his invitation to join him at a Mexican restaurant, where they had dinner, danced, and drank. Lucille later recalled of their meeting, “It wasn’t love at first sight. It took a full five minutes.”
The following Sunday Desi and a date attended a Malibu party, where he decided to take a solitary stroll, on which he saw Lucille sitting alone on the beach. Desi later recalled, “I did not go back to the Hollywood Roosevelt. I went to Lucille’s apartment, and that was our first night together.” Six months later Desi and Lucy eloped to Connecticut, where they married on November 30, 1940. Lucy said of her nuptials, “My friends gave the marriage six months. I gave it six weeks.” Because of the haste, they had to settle with a wedding ring purchased at the last minute from Woolworths; she wore it all through her marriage. The new wife did not change only her surname. In his autobiography, Arnaz explained, “I didn’t like the name ‘Lucille.’ That name had been used by other men. ‘Lucy’ was mine alone.”
Much to Lucille’s unhappiness, holy matrimony did nothing to curtail Desi’s amorous flings. The Arnazes had lived together for four years when Lucy, convinced of his serial infidelity, filed for divorce. However, they reconciled and returned to Desilu, their five-acre ranchito in California. In 1949 the couple renewed their vows, this time in a Catholic church to compensate for their earlier civil ceremony. They hoped this would help bring the children they both desperately wanted. However, an ongoing impediment was Desi’s constant absences as he toured with his band. Lucy lamented about this situation, “You can’t have a baby on the phone.”
Eager to find a project that would keep her husband home, and faithful, Lucy became interested in CBS’s offer of a television version of the radio show she was performing in, My Favorite Husband. However, the network vetoed her idea of Desi as her co-star. They thought of him as “just that bongo player.” Moreover, executive Hub-bell Robinson felt that American audiences would not be receptive to a show involving an interracial couple. The studio executives were concerned that an audience would not believe she was married to the man who, in actuality, she was married to. Once more, the word no would be Lucille’s response to their rejection. Later Ball would remark, “How I Love Lucy was born? We decided that instead of divorce lawyers profiting from our mistakes, we’d profit from them.”
The year 1951 was a golden one for the Arnazes. In July, one month before Lucy’s fortieth birthday, after several miscarriages, Ball gave birth to Lucie Désirée Arnaz, and on October 15 I Love Lucy debuted. For his wife’s twenty-ninth birthday Desi had given her a diamond-encrusted heart-shaped watch, which became the show’s logo. Lucy’s role of the zany housewife led to Desi’s oft-repeated remark, “Lucy, you got some ’splainin’ to do!” Often, in frustration, he would revert to Spanish, as if it took him two languages to deal with his wife. However, at the close of every episode, no matter what, Ricky still loved Lucy.
A year and a half later, Ball gave birth to Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV, and his arrival was written into the script. This was groundbreaking news, as CBS had never before permitted a pregnant woman to even appear on TV. The event made the first cover of TV Guide in January 1953, and more people viewed the birth of “Little Ricky” than tuned in to the inauguration of President Eisenhower.
In 1953 Lucille found herself in a far more serious scrape than her fictitious counterpart ever did: She was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Immediately before the filming of episode 68 of I Love Lucy, Desi informed the audience about the situation. He ended with a quip: “The only thing red about Lucy is her hair, and even that’s not legitimate.” When he presented his wife, the audience gave her a standing ovation. The Arnazes weathered the McCarthy storm; however, another one was brewing.
Desi’s womanizing had not ended with marriage or parenthood. Tension between the two escalated when Desi’s private indiscretions became public in the tabloid Confidential. Its headline blared, “Does Desi Really Love Lucy?” The article stated that Arnaz “proved himself an artist at philandering as well as acting.” It also quoted an inebriated Desi stating, “A real man should have as many girls as he has hair on his head.” The movie where they had first met, Too Many Girls, had taken on a symbolic overtone. After this scandal, it was Desi who had some “’splainin’ to do.”
Desi tried to fend off rumors of marital discord by remarking that when a redhead and a Cuban got together they were bound to argue, but eventually it got to the point where the couple could no longer deny their crumbling marriage. Just as the Ricardos said good-bye to television, Ball and Arnaz said good-bye to each other with a divorce. Lucy said, “I hate failure and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes. It was the worst period of my life. Neither Desi nor I have been the same since, physically or mentally.”
Ball bought her ex-husband’s share of their company Desilu for $3 million, which made her the first woman to single-handedly run a TV studio. Desi’s comment on this was one of no regrets: “It ceased to be fun. I was happier chasing rats.” As head of the world’s largest production company, Lucille proved that she was not as ditzy as her character Lucy; she arranged the purchase of RKO Studios for $6.15 million and eventually sold i
t for $17 million.
Desi, pursued by his addictions to alcohol, gambling, and womanizing, retreated to a Del Mar, California, oceanfront estate, where he spent his days visiting the racetrack and smoking cigars. He also married his second wife, Edith Mack Hirsch, in 1963. As they prepared for their Palm Springs honeymoon, Lucy sent the couple roses in the shape of a horseshoe. The card read: “You Both Picked a Winner.” In 1976, when Desi published his autobiography, its epilogue confirmed that his second wife had not supplanted his first: “I loved Lucy very much and, in my own and perhaps peculiar way, I will always love her.”
After the divorce, Lucille Ball Arnaz was professionally secure, but she was emotionally distraught and lamented that she was in the horrific position of approaching fifty and being “lonely and loaded.” She ended up marrying Gary Morton, who was referred to as “Mr. Ball,” because she was the powerhouse; it was also because he was attempting to fill Desi’s unfillable shoes.
In November 1986, on what would have been the Arnazes’ forty-sixth wedding anniversary, Lucille called Desi, who was dying of lung cancer. When the phone rang, their daughter, Lucie, put the phone to her father’s ear with the words, “It’s the redhead.” Lucie could hear her mother’s pain-laden voice repeating over and over, “I love you. I love you, Desi, I love you.” His last words to her were, “I love you, too, honey. Good luck with your show.” Lucie said of her parents, “They had one of those historical marriages, like Napoleon and Josephine, Richard and Liz—destined to be trouble but destined for them to never find anyone as passionate or fabulous.”
Five days later Lucille Ball was honored at the Kennedy Center. Robert Stack read a written statement that Desi had prepared just days before for the occasion. Desi’s last words to his first love: “I Love Lucy was never just a title.”
Postscript
Lucille was among the hundreds of mourners who attended Desi’s funeral at St. James Roman Catholic Church near San Diego. His eulogy was delivered by former Desilu actor Danny Thomas. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean, in front of his Del Mar home.
In 1989, Lucille died of cardiac arrest at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. When the news broke, an easel bearing a memorial sign was erected over her Walk of Fame star on Hollywood Boulevard. A block-long condolence card bore the names of hundreds of fans. She was initially interred in Forest Lawn—Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. However, in 2002, her children moved her ashes to the family plot at Lake View Cemetery in Jamestown, New York.
22
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall
1943
The word whistle carries different connotations for different people: To Disney aficionados, it is what seven dwarves do while they work; to those of an artistic bent, it is reminiscent of a painter’s tribute to his mother; to those with wanderlust, it brings to mind the mournful sound of a train. However, to a legendary pair, the word symbolized their love.
The man who began his Hollywood career in the role of the noble thug, Humphrey DeForest Bogart, was born in New York, a child of wealth and private schools. He disappointed his parents when he followed the lure of the sea and enrolled in the navy instead of Yale. He later recalled, “At eighteen, war was great stuff. Paris! French girls! Hot damn!” He drifted into movies and became a star in High Sierra, in which he played a gangster with a soul; he got the audience to root for the bad guy. Bogart had his first romantic role in Casablanca, of which he was characteristically humble. Of his performance he stated, “When the camera moves in on that Bergman’s face, and she’s saying she loves you, it would make anybody look romantic.” Although his role as the nightclub owner made him immortal, it was in an Ernest Hemingway adaptation where he first saw his Ilsa.
Humphrey’s destiny, Betty Joan Perske, was a New York-born Jewish seventeen-year-old. To help support herself and her single mother, she began working as a model. Diana Vreeland, the legendary fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar, saw something in the unknown girl and placed her on a 1943 cover. When director Howard Hawks’s wife saw her seductive beauty, she urged her husband to bring the teenager to Hollywood for a screen test. The erstwhile model would later remark of the Harper’s Bazaar cover that it was “the twist of fate that changed my life forever.”
Betty was chosen to star in the film To Have and Have Not, and Howard Hawk, in Svengali fashion, changed her name to Lauren Bacall.
The first time Bogart met Bacall was when Hawks introduced them on the set of the film Passage to Marseilles. A couple of weeks before To Have and Have Not began filming, as Lauren was walking out of the director’s office her future co-star was about to walk in. When he encountered his leading lady, he said, “I just saw your test. We’ll have a lot of fun together.”
Just as life imitates art, so reel love often transforms to real love, as was the case with Bogie and Bacall. When the siren uttered, “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow,” Bogie was bewitched. A short time into the filming of the picture, Humphrey came into Lauren’s dressing room to say good night and suddenly leaned over, put his hand under her chin, and kissed her. He took a matchbook from his pocket and asked her to put her phone number on its back. She did so, though there were impediments to their romance: He was forty-five and she was nineteen, he was Christian and she was Jewish; and furthermore, he was married.
Humphrey’s third wife, actress Mayo Methot, was an affable woman when sober, a virago when drunk. Bogart didn’t believe in adultery, but Methot nevertheless was serially suspicious and threw objects, mostly plates, at what she assumed was her cheating spouse. In one rage, she stabbed him. Dorothy Parker said of their marriage that “their neighbors were lulled to sleep by the sounds of breaking china and crashing glass.” The “Battling Bogarts” (as the press had dubbed them) kept a carpenter on call to repair the damage from their drunken fights. However, the chemistry between Bogart and Bacall was so magnetic that they eventually embarked on a clandestine affair, which soon became public.
Though Bogart’s nickname for Bacall was “Baby,” to the other people on the set she was nicknamed “the Cast”; this was because every time Bogie spent an evening with his girlfriend, he told his wife he was going out with the cast. News of the affair became public fodder when the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper came on the set; in an advance warning of her article she cautioned Lauren, “Better be careful. You might have a lamp dropped on you one day.” Then Hedda followed her quip with a line in her paper: “You can have your B&B at lunch any day at Lakeside.”
Howard Hawk warned Bacall to end the affair; he cautioned that she meant nothing to Bogart, and if she prolonged the scandal he would wash his hands of her and send her to Monogram (the studio that made the lowest pictures). Under his concern lay jealousy; although married, he too was smitten with Bacall. To distract his star, he fixed her up with Clark Gable; although the romantic icon kissed her under the moonlight, there were no sparks. Her mother, with whom she lived, was also aghast that her daughter consented every time Bogart called with his customary phone greeting, “Hello, Baby,” to arrange for a tryst. However, Lauren was willing to bet her heart on her belief that Humphrey’s love for her would triumph.
When To Have and Have Not wrapped, Bogart did not forget Lauren and sent her a love letter: “And now I know what was meant by ‘to say good-bye is to die a little.‘” He also gave her a gold ID bracelet; on one side was her name, and on the other were the words the whistler. However, he still was not willing to end his marriage. For her part, Mayo tried to stay on the wagon and change her behavior; she knew how enamored her husband was of the young and beautiful starlet.
At that juncture, Mary Chase’s play Harvey was debuting in New York; it was the story of a man in love with a giant rabbit who was invisible. In deference to the fact that Humphrey was supposed to have ended the affair to placate his wife, Lauren bought Bogie a small bronze rabbit to signify that Harvey absent was Harvey still.
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nally, during their second film together, The Big Sleep, it became apparent to all members of the ménage à trois that Mayo had thrown her last plate. Rick Blaine in Casablanca was willing to let Ilsa get on the plane; Humphrey Bogart, however, could not let go of Bacall. Mayo, not able to admit otherwise, admitted defeat and agreed to a Reno divorce. As soon as the ink was dry, Bogie and Bacall were married in a quiet ceremony at the country home of Humphrey’s close friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield, at Malabar Farm in Ohio, on May 21, 1945. The head of Warner Brothers, Jack Warner, gave the couple the Buick from The Big Sleep (one of the four movies they were to star in together). Bogart joked that the “something old” was himself, and despite his tough-guy image, he cried as he watched “Baby” walking down the aisle.
Humphrey, the highest paid actor in Hollywood, purchased a white brick mansion in an exclusive neighborhood in Holmby Hills, replete with two Jaguars and three Boxers. One of their neighbors was close friend Judy Garland. A few years later their son, Stephen, was born, named after Humphrey’s character in To Have and Have Not; this was followed by the birth of their daughter, Leslie, named after the British actor Leslie Howard, a friend of Bogart’s who had been killed in World War II. Lauren kept her finger in acting, though she considered her greatest role that of Humphrey’s wife. She was on location when he starred in The African Queen, as happy being a homemaker in the African jungle as on their Californian estate. It was a decision she never regretted. In her autobiography, Lauren Bacall by Myself, she wrote, “Whenever I hear the word happy now, I think of then.”
The Bogie and Bacall marriage was an extremely happy one until an afternoon in 1956 when the Grim Reaper knocked at the Holmby Hills door. Bogie had come home and told his wife that he had run into Greer Garson, who advised him to see her doctor about his cough. Humphrey, who had always been a heavy smoker, had contracted cancer of the esophagus. An operation was undertaken, but it was too late to spread the halt of the disease. At age fifty-seven, Hollywood’s once most romantic lead and resident tough guy was bedridden, his frame wasted away to eighty pounds.
And the Rest Is History Page 12