by Lucille Ball
Johnny met my train at Buffalo and drove me to my family’s apartment on Wilcox Avenue. Daddy was back home again, thank goodness. He lectured me on taking better care of myself, and DeDe, although still working all day long herself, devoted her evenings to massaging my legs and cheering me up.
For the first few months I was in such pain that time passed in a kind of blur. We kept up the horse serum injections, which were then considered a highly experimental, even last-ditch experiment. I was a guinea pig who survived, and the pain gradually subsided. Finally the day came when, with the support of Daddy and the doctor, I shakily stood up. We found that my left leg was now somewhat shorter than my right leg.
It also pulled sideways, and to correct this, I wore a twenty-pound weight in one of my ugly black orthopedic shoes. The metal weight felt cold against my foot, and the pain as I clomped around was like needles. For my morale, I wore some heavy blue satin pajamas that I had bought on sale at Hattie’s. Pajamas for women were just becoming fashionable; I think I was also the first female in Jamestown to appear on the street in slacks.
One happy result of my long illness was that I did learn to take better care of myself. I tried to get my full eight hours’ sleep a night, and I ate fewer starches and carbohydrates. I still go without the right food when I’m busy, and often skip lunch or dinner altogether. This has the strange effect of making me gain weight, since my body retains fluid. Dr. Henry Beiler, whose patients include Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson, wants me to eat a small meal every few hours, and I’m trying to do this. He doesn’t believe in pills or medicines, but he accomplishes wonders with food. It’s shocking how many doctors in Beverly Hills never once ask during a consultation what you eat.
In the late spring of 1930, I was still convalescing at home, my legs thin as matchsticks, when Bill Bemus came to see me. Bill had been a professional actor on Broadway and so the Jamestown Players had asked him to produce and direct a fast-paced melodrama called Within the Law. Bill had seen me in various amateur productions around town since he’d first been impressed by my work in The Scottish Rite Revue. He had a difficult part to cast in his new play: an ingenue who could convincingly play a cheap gangster’s moll and also a debutante. Back in 1930, debutantes were considered models of good manners and breeding.
Bill looked at me with my bright bleached hair, blue satin pajamas, and blood-red fingernails and burst out, “You are Aggie Lynch. Will you play the part?”
“Who’s Aggie Lynch?” I wanted to know. He then described to me the big scene of the play.
Aggie is a hard-boiled confidence woman who blackmails married men. But when she’s pinched and taken to the precinct station, she convinces the police inspector that he’s made a bad mistake. She isn’t the notorious Aggie at all, but the debutante daughter of the richest banker in town. The terribly cultured Aggie is highly insulted at being brought in like a common criminal.
The inspector apologizes humbly. But just as she’s about to sweep haughtily out, a cop enters and greets her casually, “Hello, Aggie.”
Her real identity uncovered, Aggie reverts to her real self. “So you think I’ll squeal,” she sneers, coming back to the police inspector’s desk. “Sure I’ll squeal—like hell!”
Well, that was pretty sensational in 1930, hearing a young girl come out with that. Gasps of horror, twitters, snickers; we really got ’em. It was funny to think how tongue-tied and awkward I’d been in dramatic school; here in my beloved Jamestown I didn’t have a shred of self-consciousness. Bill Bemus told me I exuded personality. “You’re better than the original Aggie on Broadway,” he told me. “You can do tragedy, comedy, anything.” Then the crowning glory: “You’re a professional.”
The Jamestown Journal called me “sensational, another Jeanne Eagels.” Eagels, of course, played the prostitute in Somerset Maugham’s Rain.
We took the play to the Chautauqua Institute and gave another highly successful performance there. My friend Marion Strong couldn’t get over how naturally I took to the stage. My poise was unshaken, even when a mouse ran across the stage in the middle of one of my big soliloquies. For the part of Aggie I dyed my hair dark, and just before the performance, Marion tinted it with “golden glint,” which gave it a reddish cast. For the first time I began to wonder if maybe I didn’t have a redheaded personality. But Broadway seemed as far off as ever.
In the summer of 1930 another tragedy befell our family. Aunt Lola had completed her nurse’s training and was then head of a psychiatric ward in a mental hospital in Long Island. Apparently, she had been bothered by stomach pains for some time, which she foolishly ignored; one night a patient kicked her in the stomach and she died that night of peritonitis. Almost immediately, Uncle George Mandicos appeared and took Cleo away with him to Buffalo.
My little cousin was only eleven when overnight she found herself in a motherless home, with a father she hardly knew, in a Greek community where everything was strange to her: the food, the customs, the language. It just about broke her heart, and DeDe’s too. The double loss of Lola and Cleo severely upset us all.
A few weeks after Cleo left, the pier ballroom at Celoron Amusement Park burned up in a spectacular blaze on a Sunday morning. Marion Strong and I had been dancing there the night before with our dates; we wondered whose carelessly dropped cigarettes had started the fire.
Marion and I stood by the lakeshore watching the towering flames devour the old ballroom. Steam billowed up from the cold lake as the burning timbers crashed down; the dense black smoke billowing into the summer sky could be seen for miles.
This was where I’d gone to my first dance, in my pussy willow taffeta dress with its band of real fur. This was where my first bittersweet crushes were born and died to the strains of “Margie” and “’S Wonderful.” I began to cry, and then I couldn’t stop.
All the ghosts in those crackling flames shooting into the sky. My wonderful, happy childhood in Celoron gone forever, and so tragically. My first picnics in the park, what exciting occasions they were, with Flora Belle in her Sunday best, the hamper full of goodies over her arm . . . and Grandfather Fred, so good-looking with his jaunty air, his straw boater cocked over his smiling blue eyes. And Lola, with her sunny ways, honeymooning with George, and Cleo, with her dimples. Marion was crying too, and we clung together, drowning in a sea of tears. Marion says that she never cried so much again in her whole life; I wish I could say the same.
It was the following spring that I persuaded Marion to go with me to New York to look for work. We each had twenty dollars in our handbags the day a friend drove us to the city. I knew enough free-lance illustrators to earn forty dollars a week posing for coffee and cigarette ads; Marion found a job in a Greenwich Village antique shop. At the Hotel Kimberly at Broadway and Seventy-fourth Street, we shared a room with twin beds and bath for eighteen dollars a week. We even shared one bureau.
Marion had a lot of stubborn Swede in her; I tried to organize her life too much, she complained. I felt protective toward her, but when I gave her too much advice, she got mad. We had some lulus of fights. Once I didn’t approve of some guy she was seeing and we argued half the night. The next morning, as I was hurrying to get ready for work, I remembered that it was Marion’s twentieth birthday. I ran out, bought some fresh spring daffodils, and jammed them into a water glass on the bureau. “Happy birthday, old scrap iron!” I scrawled on a note while she slept. Marion, bless her, still treasures that note.
Marion was timid about many things. I could never talk her into traveling underground on the subway. When we walked about New York, I ran at full tilt, dodging between people on the sidewalks. I seldom waited for a light to change, but was halfway across on the red while Marion quivered on the corner.
She got homesick for Jamestown after a few months and went back home; in a couple of years she was married and raising a family. I got a job modeling in a first-class clothing house owned by a wonderful couple named Jackson. Hattie Carnegie’s mink-lined establishmen
t made me uncomfortable, but the Jacksons’ was a fun place, full of warmth and laughter and a family feeling. The clothes were exquisite and expensive, but instead of bored socialites for customers, we had women department store buyers, full of talk and gossip, sharp as foxes.
I clowned around a lot and made them laugh; this didn’t hurt sales any. At that time, I lived in an East Side flat directly over an Italian restaurant reeking of garlic. I gave the buyers a demonstration of how I went stamping and banging and singing up the stairs when I got home at night to chase the rats and cockroaches away.
The designer was Rosie Roth, who had been Hattie Carnegie’s partner at the start of her meteoric career. The Jacksons paid her $25,000 a year—an unheard-of salary for a woman designer then—and sent her to Paris several times a year. Rosie brought back trunkloads of French silks and satins heavy enough to stand alone. Her creations were fitted individually to seven models; often I stood for three hours or so while she draped and tucked and pleated, her mouth full of pins. When I got bored, I’d camp—that’s a show business word for getting playful.
“This girl’s fullahell,” Rosie would complain, sticking me with a pin to make me behave. “You got flair, you got personality, a beautiful body you got,” she told me. “So why so aggravating? You make my ulcer ache.”
Sometimes she’d yell, “You’re fired!” I’d run out of the place gleefully, knowing that a phone call that evening would rehire me.
This was in the days before air-conditioning, and dresses weren’t lined. When the temperature stood at 100 in that stuffy little fitting room, the black fuzz from the long velvet gowns would stick to our bodies in the heat and stuff our pores. Whew! I can still feel it now.
No matter: I was happy there because the Jacksons treated their models like their own daughters. When I had dinner dates with nice young men, Mrs. Jackson often let me borrow one of Rosie’s glittering creations. Of course, I had to get it back early in the morning, before Rosie arrived for work. She objected to the models parading her originals around town, getting cigarette burns and gravy stains on them, but the Jacksons were most generous and understanding.
I was the “bride” who ended every fashion show. The tired dress buyers with their aching varicose veins would drop in just to see me whirl around in yards of white lace or organdy or satin. Some girls are perennial bridesmaids; I was the perennial bride: platinum-blond and blue-eyed, full of naive girlish dreams. And, as Rosie was always telling me, fullahell.
A movie scout saw me one night at a Silk Ball. He telephoned me the next day at work to suggest a movie test. This was the beginning of July, our busiest season, so I told him over the phone, “Well, thanks very much, but I couldn’t possibly. . . . All the buyers are in town and we’re showing our new line. . . . My outfits are made just for me, and nobody else can model them.”
I hung up and dismissed the whole thing from my mind. But my boss, Mr. Jackson, had overheard the conversation. He made me phone back.
“Paramount wants to test me every day this week!” I told him.
“Wonderful!” replied Mr. Jackson. “That’s more important than modeling a few clothes. Say you’ll go.”
That bighearted, wonderful man insisted that I take the tests, but they came to nothing. I still wasn’t photogenic, it seemed.
I continued working at the Jacksons’, and during these Depression years, DeDe separated from Ed. This upheaval, along with losing Cleo, gave her a bad time emotionally, so I suggested that she send Freddy to New York to live with me. He came and shared my dark little apartment over the Italian restaurant, and went to high school in New York until DeDe’s health improved. When she recovered her spirits, we all got an apartment together: me, DeDe, Daddy, and Freddy. My mother found a job as a saleslady at Stern’s on Forty-second Street. At night our bathroom looked like a Chinese laundry—Daddy even washed his own shirts—but at last we were together.
For Daddy, however, the move was a catastrophe. He was already in his late sixties. Too old to find a job during the Depression, he had nothing to do but brood alone in the apartment or walk the city streets. The filth and misery of New York City slums was worse than anything he had ever seen or imagined. He began to worry about the world and everyone in it.
To earn more money, I often posed at night and on weekends for commercial illustrators. A free-lance painter named Ratterman did an oil portrait of me in a flowing chiffon dress—something I’d borrowed overnight from Rosie. Later he added two gray Russian wolfhounds for a touch of class. To my great surprise, he sold the painting to Chesterfield cigarettes and overnight my face and figure were on billboards all over town. Russell Markert, director of the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, noticed the new Chesterfield Girl high over Times Square and recognized me. He’d met me briefly back in my days with Hattie. Sylvia Hahlo, a theatrical agent, noticed me too. She had her eyes open for young models who might profitably be exported to Hollywood, and she knew my face and name from many fashion shows.
The Jacksons’ wholesale house was at Thirty-ninth Street and Seventh Avenue; often on my lunch hour I’d walk the few blocks to Times Square and gaze wistfully at the photographs in the theater lobbies. One humid July day I was browsing in front of the Palace Theater, when I heard a woman’s voice at my elbow.
“Lucille Ball! Just the person I was looking for. How would you like to go to Hollywood?”
I turned and saw Sylvia Hahlo. “Who? Er . . . ah . . . what?”
“You’re the latest Chesterfield Girl, aren’t you?” Sylvia continued. “Well, Sam Goldwyn, the producer, needs a dozen well-known poster girls for a new Eddie Cantor movie, Roman Scandals. He had twelve all picked, but one just backed out, and they’re scheduled to leave for Hollywood in three days and—”
“Who do I see?” I interrupted. “Where do I go?”
Sylvia nodded over my shoulder. “Right up those stairs by the Palace Theater. Second floor. Jim Mulvey—he’s Mr. Goldwyn’s New York agent.”
“Thanks,” I yelled over my shoulder, in a dead run.
“Don’t forget my ten percent,” Sylvia called after me.
This was on a Wednesday. Fortunately, there was no time for a screen test, or I might never have been accepted. Jim Mulvey liked my enthusiasm and signed me on the spot. I had a guarantee of $125 a week for six weeks, plus free transportation. The Jacksons gave me a leave of absence with their blessings—even though it just about ruined their fall show. So on Saturday, just three days after my fateful brush with Sylvia Hahlo, DeDe and Daddy saw me off on the Super Chief for Hollywood.
Everything happened so fast that I had no chance to realize that this was my first major break, a marvelous stroke of good luck. And of course, I expected to be back in New York before the maple leaves flamed in Central Park.
DeDe had a story she used to tell us about Hollywood when we were small that we loved hearing over and over. When she went out there following the death of my father, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were America’s sweethearts. DeDe had the good fortune to be on the same train with Mr. Fairbanks. As it drew into Los Angeles, the acrobatic actor jumped from the train and vaulted a low barrier by the tracks into the arms of the golden Miss Pickford, who was waiting for him in a baby-blue convertible. Here were all the ingredients of the Hollywood Dream: sex, glamour, money, a handsome young couple, adored by millions and adoring each other.
In my wildest dreams, I never expected to get to Hollywood, yet here I was, riding into the same station I’d heard DeDe describe so often, with a movie contract in my pocketbook, already creased with wrinkles from having been read so often.
Hollywood in 1933 was a busy, bustling place, full of men-about-town and producers chasing would-be starlets around that famous piece of furniture, the casting couch. But not Lucy. I was one of the lucky few to arrive in movieland with a contract. I was already under a studio’s protective wing. In those days that was a blessed way to begin.
There was a big hoopla when we arrived at the
Pasadena station, with a crush of photographers, press agents, and studio people. I was wearing a black silk dress with a demure white collar, an outfit Constance Bennett made famous. The Hattie Carnegie dress was five years old, but I felt like a queen in it.
We drove from Pasadena to Hollywood. Hollywood looked like a sleepy little village completely ringed by hills, a place of wondrous beauty after the dirt and grime of New York.
I just sat back in my cushioned limousine seat and drank it all in: the olive and lemon and orange trees, the strange and exotic flowers, the chorus of birds. And over everything, the clearest, purest air . . . You felt you could reach out and touch a mountain twenty miles away. Nobody thought of smog in those days; like TV, it didn’t exist.
We were taken to the Roosevelt Hotel for my first press interview, where I was dumb enough to tell reporters my right age: twenty-one. We met Sam Goldwyn and other studio executives, who asked us where we wanted to live. I decided on a one-room Murphy-bed apartment on Formosa Street, about three blocks from the United Artists studio where Roman Scandals was to be filmed.
Finally it was time to report for work. I try to learn from past experiences, and my miserable failure as a dramatic student still rankled. I vowed that I wasn’t going to muff this unique opportunity by being tongue-tied and stiff and self-conscious. By this time, too—after my happy years at the Jacksons’ modeling—I liked myself better.
The next morning at the studio we were handed skimpy jersey bathing suits and told to line up. Chiefly, that’s what we did—for months: line up and wait. I weighed only 111 pounds and the other girls were sort of voluptuous, so while we waited, I padded myself with gloves or paper or old banana peels, anything I could find just to make fun.
When Eddie Cantor walked down the line to give each Goldwyn Girl the once-over, I made a special effort. I remembered a trick I’d seen Dorothy Gish do at Belmont racetrack. She and her sister Lillian were sitting in a box with two gentlemen when the Hattie Carnegie models were ushered into seats right behind them. After a while, Lillian went off with the gentlemen. Dorothy was just sitting there, tearing off little pieces of paper from her bright red program. Then she turned around, and I saw that she had stuck them like measles spots all over her face. Well, I thought this was about the funniest thing I’d ever seen. So as Eddie Cantor started down the line, I tore up some little pieces of red crepe paper, wet them with my tongue, and stuck them all over my bare arms and chest and face. When Mr. Cantor got to me, his jaw dropped, his big eyes popped, and then he roared with laughter. He asked me my name. He told everyone about “that Ball dame—she’s a riot.” I was in heaven.