Love, Lucy

by Lucille Ball

  I was one of the lucky ones. For a long time, people in Hollywood couldn’t get a job because of unfounded and vicious smear rumors. If news of my registration had been revealed during the worst witch-hunting days—between 1945 and 1950—my career probably would have been finished.

  Jack Gould later wrote about this incident in the New York Times: “For once the accusation and rebuttal became known simultaneously and the public had an opportunity to judge and act for itself. Did millions of viewers as one man swear to forgo Philip Morris cigarettes because seventeen years ago Miss Ball registered as a Communist voter? To the contrary, they deluged her with wires of support.”

  He added, “The courteous and fair treatment which she was accorded should not be unique but rather should become standard for cases of this kind. . . . Broadcasting should study Miss Ball’s case to see whether . . . it does not provide a formula for handling its loyalty problem with far more maturity and equity than previously have been displayed. The procedure that is available to the biggest star should also be available to the bit player in similar trouble.”

  * * *

  When I Love Lucy was in the middle of its third season, Desi and I decided to take a break and fly to New York for a few days’ rest. We knew that we were number one on TV, and we’d just been told that nobody went to the john during the half hour we were on Monday nights. But we hadn’t begun to realize the tremendous impact of television. We commuted between the ranch and the studio from Monday to Friday, and on weekends saw other show business people, just as we had in the old days. In Hollywood, you generally work and party with your colleagues. It makes for an isolated sort of life. As Frank Capra once said, “In Hollywood, we learn about life from each other’s pictures.”

  We knew that MGM had a few things lined up for us to promote The Long, Long Trailer, which was having its New York premiere, but mainly our idea was to have a short vacation from the daily grind. The trip started one Wednesday night in February 1954, with a tearful good-bye at the ranch to Lucie, age two and a half, and Desi, who was one. It was the first time we’d left them for more than a day or two.

  We flew through the night toward New York so fast that I never had time to get my girdle off. We sat up all night. The plane’s water pipes froze, making it impossible to freshen up before getting off. We landed at Idlewild at seven a.m. and were flabbergasted to be met by a huge crowd, a host of dignitaries, and a sixteen-piece German marching band. Desi and I mugged and hugged, then kissed and waved before sashaying down a red carpet stretching from the plane to the terminal.

  When you’re a movie star, your public image can still be vague because you look a little bit different in each picture. When you’re seen in public, people nudge each other and whisper, “Is that . . . ?” and generally come up with the wrong name. But we soon discovered that when you play a continuing character on television, even if they’ve only seen you on the screen once or twice, everyone on the street recognizes you instantly.

  Desi and I were bowled over by the number of people who stopped us on the streets in New York and the nice things they said. One afternoon we went down to the Seventh Avenue garment district to talk to the manufacturer of I Love Lucy dresses. It tickled me when a tousle-haired old woman threw open the window of her tenement apartment and called admiringly to us, “Say, Lucy, that guy of yours sure gives you hell!”

  Our first night in New York we made a personal appearance on the stage of Radio City Music Hall, the first time the management had ever allowed such a promotion for a picture. “We’ve had many wonderful thrills in our life, Lucy and I,” Desi told the audience, “but when we were sitting at home and got the phone call telling us that our first movie together was going to open at Radio City Music Hall . . . and that we were going to play the most famous theater in the world . . . together . . . we knew it was one of the greatest thrills we could ever have.”

  I wore a beautiful white chiffon gown with all my diamonds; Desi was in black tie. “I’ve always dreamed of walking across the stage of the Music Hall,” I told the audience, and did just that, from one end to the other.

  Back in our dressing rooms after our appearance, I felt an immense weariness. We’d been on the go for forty-eight hours, with only a brief hour’s catnap on the plane. But Desi wouldn’t hear of heading for bed. “Miss the chance to see our opening at the Music Hall? Are you crazy?” No promise of seeing the movie some other day would deter him, so we all headed for the loges.

  Milton Berle, a close friend, came to pay his respects after the picture. “You know that scene where the trailer almost went off the cliff?” he asked us. “Ten more feet and I’d have been number one!”

  The night following our Music Hall appearance, Desi and I went to see Kind Sir, with Mary Martin and Charles Boyer. We arrived late at the theater, just as the first curtain was going up, and scurried to our seats as unobtrusively as possible. During the first intermission, Mary Martin sent us a note to please come to her dressing room; after a pleasant chat we returned to our seats while the houselights were still up.

  We sat there talking until we noticed a little hubbub of voices and the buzz-buzz of excited recognition. “Mrs. Roosevelt must be here,” I told Desi.

  We craned our necks toward the back of the theater and then we heard applause and saw people getting up. So we stood up too, clapping and looking around for the former First Lady. Then we realized the ovation was for us!

  Every time we tried to sit down, the applause grew louder. They had to hold the curtain. This was the shocker of all time, as far as Desi and I were concerned.

  The next night we had dinner with the Charles Ruggleses and then hurried late to the theater to see Teahouse of the August Moon. When the lights went up after the first act, there was a murmur of voices which grew into shouts and cheers. What with people hanging over the balcony yelling, “Hey, Ricky!” and, “Lucy, we love you!” and requesting autographs, they had to hold the second curtain a good long time. Then they brought the lights down dim and Davy Wayne, God bless him, came out in Japanese kimono and bowed and said, “We too rove Rucy.”

  The following night we had a dinner-and-theater date with June Havoc and her husband, Bill Spier. As we ate a quiet dinner in our hotel suite, Desi and I told them about our lampooning at the Circus Saints and Sinners luncheon at the Waldorf, and about the spontaneous ovations which had greeted us everywhere: at blasé “21,” at the Copacabana, and at every theater. June listened politely, if a bit wide-eyed, and said, “Well, I’m certainly looking forward to going to the theater with you two tonight. This is going to be pretty interesting.”

  Now of course, the minute she said that, I started thinking, “Oh God, what if it doesn’t happen tonight?” I mean, Desi and I had been bouncing around town for three days and the excitement was bound to die down. Desperate not to be embarrassed and humiliated, I started trying to analyze why and how we had gotten all those standing ovations, and decided it was because no one saw us until intermission, and all recognized us at the same time, which must have helped create all the extra excitement. So now I’m doing anything I can think of to delay our arrival until the lights are down. I’m pretending I can’t find my gloves, dropped an earring . . . Nothing works. We arrive a few minutes before curtain. The four of us walk through the lobby and down to our orchestra seats. Nothing.

  I’m desperate now. I can’t believe I did this, but I turned all the way around and nonchalantly looked up toward the balcony—the couple behind us smiled. I was afraid to even look at Havoc. When I sat down in my seat, she was still standing, just staring deadpan at me. Seconds later we were in tears, we laughed so hard. She’ll never let me forget it!

  You have to learn to live with recognition and fame, and more important, you have to realize why you’re famous. The I Love Lucy show was love personified. It was little domestic spats and upsets happily concluded, an exaggeration of American life that came out all right.

  The next morning we learned that The Long, Lo
ng Trailer was definitely a hit. The Radio City Music Hall had enjoyed the biggest Sunday and Washington’s Birthday in its entire history, with lines stretching from the theater clear to Fifth Avenue. Metro booked an additional $1.5 million of showings across the country following this news. I was particularly pleased to be able to be a moneymaker for Pandro Berman, the producer of the picture and my old boss at RKO. He must have been thinking to himself, “My God! She finally made it in pictures!”

  I did a lot of thinking during our warm and tumultuous New York welcome. “For ten hot minutes you’re such a great celebrity,” I told myself. “Ten minutes later you’re just another actress.” Hedda Hopper says that I am one of the few actresses in Hollywood who survived my encounter with success in a single piece, only slightly battered as a consequence. There are many days when I feel more than slightly battered.

  For there’s a lot of masochism in the acting profession. We’re willing to take a lot of punishment, but the minute we hit a little bit of success we are liable to run from it. We’re frightened of it and develop all kinds of phobias as a consequence. Outsiders who don’t understand think we have a chip on our shoulder, but it’s not that at all. We’re so used to failure, to being hurt and rebuffed, that we can easily come unhinged by success.

  While we were at the peak of our popularity with I Love Lucy, I continued to feel guilt-ridden and anxious. “I don’t deserve all this love and adulation,” I said to myself. I couldn’t believe my two beautiful, healthy babies were really mine; I kept half expecting some terrible tragedy to happen to them.

  I’ll always be grateful to Mrs. Charles Ruggles for taking me to hear Dr. Norman Vincent Peale for the first time during our big New York welcome. Listening to the doctor speak in his Marble Collegiate Church, I was moved to tears. Here was a man who spoke my language, who offered me a practical, everyday kind of religion. We have kept in close touch ever since that first meeting. Whenever problems pile up on me, I take them to Dr. Peale, and he always comes up with an answer that works for me.

  Dr. Peale helped me realize that our professional achievements are secondary; the important thing in life is our relationship with other human beings. It’s not what we set out to get, but how we go about the daily task of living.

  Dr. Peale advised me to stop feeling guilty. “Is it right for you to worry about your children? You wouldn’t have them if God didn’t want you to and if He didn’t feel you deserved them.” He gave me many steadying words to think about when we returned to Hollywood.

  That New York trip in the winter of 1954 marked a real turning point in our lives. Before this, we had lived very simply. Whenever the upholstery or the wallpaper needed replacing, I picked the material and patterns as before. Our little ranch house was still a riot of cabbage-rose wallpaper and trailing ivy and petitpoint embroidery.

  But we were working so many long hours that the twenty-five-mile commute to the valley was a real problem. So we sold the ranch to Jane Withers and bought a white Georgian brick house next to Jack Benny’s on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills. Desi also acquired some acres facing the Thunderbird Country Club fairway in Palm Springs, with an uninterrupted view of dazzling green turf and snowcapped Mount San Jacinto. There we built a low, one-story contemporary beige stone house with six bedrooms and six baths, a swimming pool, gardens, and tropical plantings both indoors and out.

  We soon found out that although it was one of the most beautiful golf courses in Palm Springs, Thunderbird was also one of the most prejudiced. Not only did it refuse to admit Jews, but, celebrity and property owner or not, Desi was not invited to join either. So Desi, always a frustrated architect at heart, also began building a lavish motel in Palm Springs next to the Indian Wells Country Club. “We won’t discriminate against Gentiles, Jews, or Cubans,” Desi airily told the press.

  Desi sank a million dollars into our Western Hills Motel. It has only forty-two lavish bedrooms, which works out to an investment of about $24,000 per rental unit. The main dining room has a sunken bar which features drinks from Desi’s personal Cuban recipes. The architect tested the drinks first and decided to make the bar sunken so customers wouldn’t have so far to fall. The house orchestra for a long time was the band Desi toured the country with from 1945 to 1950.

  Even though I knew it made sense, it upset me terribly to leave the ranch. I refused to go near the place while everything was being packed. Most of the furniture we gave away, although I still have a few Victorian chairs and beds in my guesthouse in Beverly Hills. I ordered new contemporary living room and bedroom suites from—where else?—Jamestown, New York. The order was flown to Los Angeles in a special chartered airplane.

  For the front hallway, I chose a beautiful Japanese silk print that cost ninety dollars a roll—a hideous extravagance, I thought, but Desi kept assuring me that we could afford it. As soon as it was hung, I realized something I hadn’t noticed before—it had shadowy birds all over it. The wallpaper came down the next day.

  We spent six months remodeling the Beverly Hills place before we moved in. Finally we had five bedrooms and five baths.

  We lived at the Beverly Hills Hotel while the work was being done, and Desi drove himself mercilessly. For years Hollywood had regarded him as just another “hotcha Latin charm boy.” They never thought he had the brains or savvy to become a big business tycoon. As a matter of fact, his business acumen amazed me, too. As writer-producer Cy Howard says, “Desi built a television image with tremendous theatrical flair and courage. He was also the shrewdest businessman I ever knew. Unlike most Hollywood tycoons, he could make million-dollar decisions without welshing and without fear.”

  Desi was by nature an easygoing, music-loving Latin who, left to his own devices, would sleep every day until noon. He learned to be tough but he didn’t really enjoy it. Since Desilu was his baby, he felt he had to be on top of every deal. His eighteen-hour days were filled with big business squabbles, clashing personalities, and long hours of rehearsals. Business meetings went on far into the night, and he was generally up and on the telephone with New York by six or seven a.m.

  When enough aggravation accumulated, he’d blow his stack at home. At Desilu, he was the kindest, most considerate boss who ever lived. He agreed with me that creative people should be given a lot of leeway and shouldn’t have to account for every minute of their time. If a talented writer seldom showed up before two in the afternoon, that was all right with Desi, providing he got his scripts done. But at home, one button off a shirt could make Desi go to pieces.

  Finally, on May 5, 1955, our new home was ready for us. Little Lucie and Desi looked forward with glee to all their new playmates in the neighborhood: Dean Martin’s seven kids, Jeanne Crain Brinkman’s six, and five little Ferrers at Rosemary Clooney’s.

  Desi carried me over the threshold of our new home with a flourish—then stopped and gasped. During the night, the water pipes in the eighteen-year-old house had burst. The thick white wall-to-wall carpet was a stained, sodden mess; the wallpaper was streaked, the newly plastered walls were disintegrating. Desi really flipped. As the children huddled against me in terror, he ranted, raged, stormed, kicked the walls, and then began tearing them down with his bare hands. “Come, dears,” DeDe told the babies, “your father is rehearsing,” and she bundled them out of the place.

  I had never seen Desi in such a state. I was terrified he was going to seriously hurt himself. I realized for the first time how the strain of our snowballing empire was eating away at him.

  A month or two later we finished our fourth season of I Love Lucy and immediately began making a movie together, Forever Darling.

  I haven’t been in many flops in my life, but this one was pretty bad. Desi played a scientist working on a new insecticide; I was his screwball wife who went along on a field trip to help. The picture was made hastily with a poor script; both critics and public panned it.

  But at least it inspired a beautiful song and wonderful homecoming to Jamestown, where the world pre
miere was held early in February 1956. We arrived during a blinding rainstorm, in a helicopter from Buffalo. As I excitedly pointed out the landmarks to Desi, our little whirlybird slowly circled the town, then landed at the high school football field.

  Twenty-five thousand people were waiting on the sidewalks to see us. They shouted enthusiastically in the cold, driving rain: mothers with babies, women in sodden fur coats, young and old. DeDe and I were thunderstruck. It was even more exciting to me than our New York reception two years before. Desi was so touched that he left the limousine and rode on top of the fire truck in the parade. He took his hat off to wave and smile, arriving at the hotel drenched and shivering but with the whole city in the palm of his hand. He was absolutely marvelous for the whole three days and charmed everyone.

  The most sentimental occasion for me was the party I’d arranged for my Celoron classmates and our beloved principal, Bernard Drake. They came from hundreds of miles away. Some of them I hadn’t seen for twenty years. “Now don’t tell me your name . . .” I told them, circling the room. I was eager to make my old classmates feel comfortable. Fame can be a tremendous barrier, one I hoped to break down.

  I couldn’t remember all their names, but in most cases I could remember some specific thing about them: “Your mother kept a red bowl on the sideboard,” or, “You had a green bicycle.” The last person in line was a short, bald, sweet-faced man. He looked up shyly while Pauline Lopus smiled impishly at my side. I kept looking at this stranger, totally mystified. At last Pauline burst out, “That’s Vinnie.”

  Vinnie Myers! My eighth-grade beau! Here I had begged Pauline to make certain he’d be there and I didn’t even recognize him! Well, I whooped, then hugged and kissed him; Desi came over and shook his hand and slapped him on the back. “So you’re the one I’ve been jealous of all these years!” It was quite the highlight of the trip.