Ball of Fire (23 page)

Wednesday afternoons, Karl Freund supervised a camera run-through, carefully measuring distances to get the most from each take. On Thursday mornings, Freund worked on the lighting for four sets: two for the interior of the Ricardo apartment, one for Ricky’s club, and one for all other scenes necessary to the plot. At noon the cast gathered and dress rehearsal commenced. Generally it lasted until 6 p.m. Friday there were final revisions, and at 8 p.m. filming took place before the live audience. Hardly had the cast and crew begun to relax when the whole process resumed.

As might be expected, the stress exacted the greatest price from Lucy. The get-along-and-go-along girl of film and radio had achieved something she had dreamed about for four decades, national renown. The trouble was, everything she had ever cherished—her father, her immediate family, the little triumphs of her early career, her marriage, even her health—had all been stolen from her or jeopardized in some drastic manner. There was no reason to believe that
I Love Lucy
couldn’t also be taken away, too. To guard against that possibility she became obsessive about story lines, technical details, personnel. More than ninety people were now involved in the production of the show, and she wanted every one of them to be super-efficient, loyal, and willing to work an eighty-hour week if that was what it took to keep the show number one.

But the person on whom she made the greatest demands was Lucille Ball herself. Nothing seemed to put her at ease anymore. Lucy consulted a psychiatrist, yet remained anxious and fearful—although she learned to present a different face to the world. The analyst, she later claimed, “only saw me for three weeks. Then she told me there was nothing psychologically wrong with me. I was just worn out from having a baby and a television show at the same time.” As a result of the therapy, Lucy learned only “how to rest in a roomful of people, to hold my emotions in, instead of talking about them. That’s why people sometimes complain that I’m staring at them deadpan. I’m trying to be deadpan inside, too, so that I won’t fly apart.”

Lucy would need all the centripetal force she could summon in the spring of 1952. First, she learned that investigators for the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) had unearthed a fact she had tried to forget: California voting records showed that a Lucille Ball had registered as a Communist back in 1936. This was no small item. In 1947, the Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters and one-time members of the Communist Party, had been blacklisted out of the business. At the urging of HUAC, studios initiated a campaign to rid themselves of all those with a radical past. The fear and intimidation soon spread to the broadcasting business.

In 1950, during the intense heat of the Korean War, a pamphlet entitled “Red Channels” landed on the desks of network officials. Privately printed, the pamphlet declared that “where there’s red smoke there’s usually Communist fire.” Accompanying that declaration was a list of performers and directors who had “leftist” associations. Some familiar names were on the roster: Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Leonard Bernstein. But there were many unfamiliar ones as well. Some of the people named were Communists, some fellow travelers, and some had merely signed a petition or attended a single meeting of a suspect organization. All were charged with subversion. General Foods bowed to pressure and fired an actress named Jean Muir from
The Aldrich Family
because one unnamed witness, cited in “Red Channels,” said she attended pro-Communist meetings. Irene Wicker, radio’s “Singing Lady,” was fired because “Red Channels” said she had sponsored the reelection of a Communist congressman. She protested that she had done nothing of the kind, that in fact she had allowed her only son to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air force in 1940, when Moscow was virulently antiwar. Eventually the publishers of “Red Channels” realized that they had made a false accusation, and they allowed Wicker to enter an anti-Communist statement in one of their other publications. But she was not rehired, after twenty-five years on the air. She had been at the center of controversy, and controversy now equaled sin.

Terrified of what might happen to their nascent television business, CBS instituted a loyalty oath “to make sure that the full confidence of our listeners is unimpaired.” From then on, a climate of fear overtook television. Blacklisting organizations were hired to check the background of anyone involved in performance or production. First check: five dollars per name. Additional research: two dollars.

With talent so cheaply valued, all those who had attended meetings or signed petitions, no matter how long ago or under what circumstances, waited for the ax to fall. If it had fallen earlier, when Lucy appeared on
My Favorite Husband,
she might have been forced out of radio. But by the time HUAC caught up with her in April 1952,
I Love
Lucy
was too big to suffer a frontal assault. Every courtesy was afforded the reigning star of situation comedy. She testified in secret, explaining her background as directly as possible: Grandpa Fred Hunt— “Daddy”—was an eccentric populist, a union organizer but hardly a Muscovite radical. And besides, Lucy and her brother had registered as Communists only to keep the old man from having a stroke. They had never actually
voted
in that long-ago election. The congressmen seemed satisfied with this family history and Lucy was excused without prejudice. No reporters were privy to the meeting, no stories appeared in the papers the next day. Lucy got the impression that HUAC had bigger flesh to fry.

Hardly had that crisis passed when a new one arose. On one hand, this was a happy problem; on the other hand, it could lead to the demise of
I Love Lucy
just when it was destined to dominate television for the season of 1952–1953. At the age of forty-one, the star was pregnant again. An interesting bit of dialogue occurred when Desi conveyed the news to Jess Oppenheimer.

“Oh, my God,” exclaimed the producer. “What are we going to do?”

Desi laughed. “What do you mean, what are we going to do? She’s going to have a baby. Whatever there was to be done about it, Lucy and I have already done it.”

“Yeah, but what about the show? You know how big she gets. There’s no way we can hide it for more than a couple of months at the most.”

“I know. So how about Lucy Ricardo having a baby as part of our shows this year?”

Bearing in mind the current network restrictions—no sexually suggestive language of any kind, no double beds for couples to sleep in, not even the use of the word “pregnant”—Oppenheimer warned the prospective father, “They’ll never let you do that.”

“Why won’t they? And who are ‘they’?”

“The sponsor, the network, the advertising agency.”

“Lucy and Rick are married,” Desi declared impatiently. “She’s pregnant. There is no way we can hide that fact from the audience. We have already signed the contracts.”

Oppenheimer was pensive. Then he brightened. “It’d be a hell of a gimmick.”

So it would, but CBS wanted no part of the scheme. Nor did the sponsor, Philip Morris. Company executives insisted that the show go on without a mention of Lucy’s condition. “Can’t you hide her behind chairs or something?” became their favorite question. Desi refused. Finally they asked, “Can you just do one or two shows about it?” Again he said no. One show was to be devoted to Lucy’s springing the news to Ricky. And then at least eight had to be devoted to the last six months of her pregnancy, with all the appropriate sentiment and humor.

No one bought his argument. Agitated beyond measure, Desi decided on one last effort before he gave up. He and Lucy had met Alfred Lyons, the British chairman of the board of Philip Morris. The old man had been extremely courteous and willing to entertain other points of view at the time. Perhaps he would listen to Desi’s side of the debate. A letter—very sincere, but perhaps not in the most felicitous English—was airmailed to London, quite literally over the heads of the big shots in New York. After explaining the situation, Desi left the decision up to Lyons.

You are the man who is paying the money for this show and I guess we will have to do whatever you decide. There’s only one thing I want to make certain that you understand. We have given you the number-one show in the country and, up till now, the creative decisions have been in our hands. Your people are now telling us we cannot do this, so the only thing I want from you, if you agree with them, is that you must inform them that we will not accept them telling us what not to do unless, in the future, you will also tell us what to do. At that point, and if this is your decision, we will cease to be responsible to you for the show being the number-one show on television, and you will have to look to your people, to the network, and to the Biow agency for that responsibility.

Thank you very much for all you have done for us in the past.

Within a fortnight the negative comments had stopped. Desi heard no more objections to Lucy’s onscreen pregnancy, and no one, at either the network or the agency, insisted that the shows about her condition be limited to one or two. If Desi wanted eight or nine or more, that was his business, not theirs. Only later did he learn that the letter to Alfred Lyons had borne fruit. The Philip Morris president had sent a private memo to certain key employees. It read, in its entirety, “To whom it may concern: Don’t fuck around with the Cuban! A. L.”

Powerful as Lyons’s words were, they could not alter the network’s rigid internal law. Lucy could be “expecting” or “with child,” but the word “pregnant” could not be uttered in prime time. After a series of unpleasant meetings Oppenheimer arrived at a solution. A priest, a rabbi, and a minister would vet each of the “baby show” scripts, and attend each of the screenings. If a phrase, a sequence, or even a word was found offensive it would be excised. “Everyone,” he was pleased to report, “was enthusiastic about the idea of having the baby shows ‘blessed’ by local clergymen. The network executives were finally starting to get comfortable with what we had been telling them all along— we could deal humorously with pregnancy on a television show and at the same time keep the program on a high moral plane.”

And so, with the editorial assistance of Monsignor Joseph Devlin, head of the Catholic Legion of Decency; Rabbi Alfred Wolf of the Wilshire Temple, and Reverend Clifton Moore of the Hollywood Presbyterian Church,
I Love Lucy
tiptoed into its second season. Because the baby would be born, like Lucie, by cesarean section, there was no mystery about the date of birth. Obstetricians scheduled the event for January 19, 1953. The shows dealing with Lucy’s pregnancy could thus be counted backward, and begun on December 8, 1952. Before that historic episode, the show went on as if nothing untoward was about to occur. By now Lucy’s expressions were so familiar that the writers referred to them in a kind of shorthand. “Puddling Up” meant a pause, watery eyes, followed by a loud wail. “Light Bulb” referred to a sudden (and ultimately disastrous) idea crossing her mind. “Credentials” signified righteous indignation.

The main difference from the first season—discernible to the cast and crew but not to the public—was a change in directors. The restless Marc Daniels had moved on, in part because, as
Variety
reported, Desilu “refused to meet his demands for upped coin.” Daniels’s place was taken by William Asher, the director who had brought Eve Arden’s radio show,
Our Miss Brooks,
to television. Things did not begin well. Early on, Asher left the set to deal with some technical difficulties. Lucy and the cast went off by themselves. When they resumed the rehearsal, according to Asher, “everything was different and it was obvious that Lucy had redirected everything.” He called her aside and firmly advised: “There can only one director, and that’s me. If you want to direct, send me home and save yourself some money.” Surprised by his own outburst, Asher took a half-hour break, which he spent in the men’s room composing himself, talking to mirrors, and throwing wadded-up papers into wastebaskets. He returned to the stage to find Desi pacing furiously. “After I explained to him what had happened,” Asher said, “he agreed I was right. He spoke to Lucy, and then brought me back into her dressing room.” There followed the standard confrontation and retreat, familiar to those who knew Lucy’s history with men she perceived as father figures. “She was crying, I was crying, and I said, ‘Why don’t we get back to work?’ She agreed, and we never had another problem like this again.”

The opening show, “Job Switching,” was the fixture as before. In the continuing battle of the sexes, Desi and Fred complain about women’s inability to stay within the budget. Lucy and Ethel decide to show their husbands how hard housewives really work. For a week the men are to stay home and do the chores while the women go out to jobs as candy dippers. Lucy finds herself unable to keep up with the assembly line and, as the intimidating supervisor enters, crams the extra chocolates in her mouth, in her cap, and down her neckline in a wild, dialogue-free routine worthy of Chaplin. “Job Switching” met with overnight approval. Jack Gould, the influential television critic of the
New York
Times,
praised Lucy’s “comic artistry” and continued: “Perhaps her greatest asset is one of those sublime senses of timing that are instinctive rather than acquired. Whether it is a gesture, a change of expression or delivery of a line, she performs with the split-second assurance that is the heart of real comedy.”

Another pre-pregnancy program centers on Lucy’s attempts to enter show business, this time by trying to play the saxophone in Ricky’s band—a move that, predictably, infuriates him. As a high school student Lucy once did try to play the saxophone, and she enjoyed fooling around with the instrument on the set. Soon, camera coordinator Maury Thompson reported, “she couldn’t leave it alone. Every day, when we weren’t rehearsing the actual script, Lucille was blowing that damn saxophone. She was such a perfectionist, trying to play that thing, that she almost ruined the bit by becoming too good.” Other segments included a witty operetta, with lyrics by Carroll, Pugh, and Oppenheimer; a furious argument between the Ricardos and the Mertzes during which Fred kicks in his neighbors’ picture tube; and an episode featuring Ricky with laryngitis and Lucy seizing her big break in show business, ineptly staging a show at the Tropicana.