Ball of Fire (25 page)

“I was driving the 130 miles or so from Del Mar to the ranch,” Desi later wrote, “when it hit me that history was repeating itself in an ironic sort of way.” Twenty years before, in Cuba, “I had been playing poker when I got a phone call from my uncle, telling me that a bunch of Communists (Bolsheviks in those days) were on their way to ransack our house and asking me to get my mother the hell out of there.”

He arrived at the ranch at 2 a.m. to find Strickling and Morgan advising their confused and terrified client. Lucy was willing to do whatever they counseled. Strickling felt that the best policy was no policy: keep quiet and let the mini-scandal blow over. Morgan also saw no reason to call attention to the problem. Desi agreed. For several days the Arnazes walked on eggshells but saw no mention of Lucy’s past in the newspapers or on television.
I Love Lucy
continued to rehearse on schedule and everyone breathed a little easier.

Then came Black Friday. The Arnazes woke to find a reporter and a photographer camped in their front yard. At noon the
Herald Express
hit the stands with an extra. Some investigative reporter had done his job; the paper carried a four-inch banner: LUCILLE BALL A RED. Under it was a photostat of the 1936 card indicating Lucille Ball’s intention to vote the Communist Party ticket. Lucy began to cry and remained in tears for the most of the day. The feeding frenzy had begun.

On several occasions Desi had met J. Edgar Hoover at the Del Mar racetrack. Now Desi imposed on their acquaintanceship with a phone call. He explained the situation as best he could and asked if there were any other nasty surprises in Lucy’s FBI file. Hoover had already checked it. “Absolutely nothing!” he declared. “She’s one hundred percent clear as far as we are concerned.” With that assurance Desi felt free to call Frank Stanton, head of CBS in New York, warning that a scandal was about to break and that there was not a shred of truth in it. “I am so goddam mad, I’m going to fight this like I’ve never fought before,” Desi told him. “We are not going to get scared. What happened to Larry Parks is not going to happen to her.”

Desi was referring to the young actor who had mimed Al Jolson’s numbers in the 1946 blockbuster
The Jolson Story,
did it again three years later in
Jolson Sings Again,
rose to celebrity—and was then exposed as a former member of the Communist Party. Humiliation followed. Pressed by HUAC to give the names of the comrades in his cell, Parks resisted. “I am no longer fighting for myself, because I tell you frankly that I am probably the most completely ruined man that you have ever seen. I am fighting for a principle . . . I don’t think that this is fair play. . . . These are not people that are a danger to this country.” The committee was having no truck with the actor’s plea. “If you will just answer the question, please. . . . Who were the members of the Communist Party cell to which you belonged?”

Parks capitulated: “Well, Morris Carnovsky, Joe Bromberg, Sam Rossen, Anne Revere, Lee Cobb, Gale Sondergaard . . .”

The committee chairman, discomfited by this pocket theater of cruelty, let up on the witness now that he had abased himself. “You could get some comfort out of the fact that the people whose names have been mentioned have been subpoenaed, so that if they ever do appear here it won’t be as a result of anything that you have testified to.” True enough, but the testimony was enough to finish Parks in Hollywood, on the right because he had once been a Communist Party member, and on the left because he had given HUAC what it wanted. Desi vowed not allow such a catastrophe to happen to Lucy. He called the Philip Morris panjandrum Alfred Lyons and told him that he had talked to Hoover and Stanton, and that if his company wanted to back out, Desilu would sponsor the program itself. Desi treasured the harrumphing reply: “ ‘No, young man, I ain’t pulling out,’ said the nice old bastard. ‘Let’s go get some good headlines!’ ”

The phone rang nonstop that afternoon, and Desi was selective about whose calls he would take. Later he confided to Lucy that he had spoken to columnist Hedda Hopper. “I told her the only thing red about you is your hair, and even that is not legitimate.” “You ‘dint’!” said Lucy, and as soon as she made fun of his accent Desi knew she had regained enough humor and equilibrium for his next move.

Just before filming of the first show for the new season, Desi stepped before the audience and said: “Ladies and gentlemen, I know that you have read a lot of bad headlines about my wife. I came from Cuba, but during my years in the United States Army I became an American citizen, and one of the things I admire about this country is that you are considered innocent until you are proven guilty.” He told them that the full story would come out the next day, introduced Fred and Ethel, proclaimed Lucy as “American as J. Edgar Hoover and President Eisenhower,” and once again used the line about her hair being the only thing red about the star. The star of the show came on to a standing ovation and the continued shout “We love you, Lucy.”

By the time the crowd settled down, almost everyone in the place was snuffling, including many of the reporters seated in the front rows. The troupe went on with the episode, “Ricky’s Life Story,” with Lucy flawlessly executing a dance number and playing with Little Ricky (impersonated by twin child actors, Joseph and Michael Mayer), and earning, once again, resounding applause and cheers. The following day, newspapers ran Lucille Ball’s exculpatory testimony before the committee and quoted HUAC chairman Jackson, “We love Lucy, too.”

To emphasize Lucy’s rehabilitation, Desi arranged a press conference on Sunday around the Arnaz swimming pool. Amid the beer and the ham-and-cheese sandwiches, Luci and Desi chatted up a group of invited journalists. In case anyone was unkind enough to mention Lucy’s ancient interest in the Committee for the First Amendment, four press agents stood by to parry: Morgan and Strickling had been joined by PR men from CBS and Philip Morris.

During the conference, the doorbell rang. Desi excused himself, went inside, and attended to the latecomer. It was Larry Parks, holding a bunch of flowers. Desi thanked him profusely, and, he confessed later, “told him to get lost.” Desi wrote: “I explained it wouldn’t do him or Lucy any good to have a story about Larry Parks bringing Lucy red roses at that particular ‘period of time.’ Some sonofabitch would accuse them of belonging to the same cell. Larry, who had suffered enough from some of this same bad publicity and who had always been a perfect gentleman, understood. I really felt like a shit but I didn’t care to take the chance.” Returning to his guests, Desi used the illegitimate red hair gag yet again and got laughs with it. The atmosphere of strained levity could not hide the fact that the conference was a miniature version of the committee, with witnesses called upon to debase themselves. It remained for the host to encapsulate the moment. The late Fred Hunt, Desi said, was “a wonderful guy, a loveable guy—the kind of guy who wanted everybody in the world to be happy and have more money. In 1936 it was a kind of a joke, a kind of a light thing. If Grandpa was alive today, we might have to lock him in a back room.”

That sufficed for the Hollywood press, a group who genuinely liked Lucy and found Desi an amusing and generous chap. They dispersed, and then wrote flattering items about the Arnazes and dismissed the notion that Lucille Ball was anything but a patriot.

Not so the reactionary press. The charge was led by Westbrook Pegler, a Hearst columnist notorious for his invective, for his loathing of the Roosevelts, Franklin and Eleanor, and for his withering appraisal of anything to his left. Lucille Ball, he wrote, had not “come clean” at all. She had to be “tracked down and exposed” before confessing her past politics. “The proposition that she was only 24 years old and that her grandfather was a family tyrant, a Socialist who made her do this, has no value at all with me. This Ball woman knew what she was doing when she registered with the Communists. . . . Socialist grandfather! That is a new variant on the whine of the crooked White Sox player who did it for the wife and kiddies.” Pegler was gratified to find a warm response from devotees. His fellow Hearst columnist Lee Mortimer messaged: “Re Lucille Ball, as usual you’re on the beam. It was wonderful. If she’s OK they should clear all of the Hollywood commies and let [Alger] Hiss out of jail.” One reader sent in a limerick:

How touching to hear Lucille bawl
“Grandpa was the cause of it all,”
When she was caught
In the Communist plot
Designed for Uncle Sam’s downfall.

Others wrote more conventional letters: “If Lucille Ball at 24 years of age didn’t know what Communism was she was not sufficiently educated to vote.” “Will you
please
keep after this case and do your very best to keep that hard, cold-blooded communist off the TV.” “Congratulations on today’s article re Lucille Ball. I was a former fan of hers but when things like these are proven I no longer patronize these individuals.”

Hedda Hopper, who had been one of Lucy’s staunch defenders, was unprepared for the small firestorm of protest from her own readers. A Gold Star Mother reminded the columnist, “My son didn’t vote red to please his grandpa—but he did die in Korea for his Uncle Sam.” This angry sentiment was echoed by like-minded readers. “So the only thing RED about Miss Ball is her hair, eh?” one demanded. “Hedda, how can you be so taken in—or are you TOO all part of this publicity stunt? Certainly convenient to have a dead grandpa, isn’t it?” In Indianapolis, a group of World War II veterans signed a petition stating that they would stop smoking Philip Morris cigarettes until Lucy was taken off the air. “We intend to use our memberships in veterans’ organizations,” they warned, “to combat the appearance, on TV, stage or screen, of anyone supporting or belonging to any party supervised by the Soviets.”

Lucy and Desi made no more public statements, going about their business as if nothing had happened, resentful of fair-weather friends and acquaintances who made themselves scarce, and grateful to the handful who went out of their way to express their support. First to pay a call was comedian Lou Costello. Lucy thought of him as an acquaintance more than a pal; she had only been on his radio show a few times. But there he was sitting in the garden, and when Lucy asked him why he was in evidence Costello replied: “You just go about your business. I’m just hanging out here for the day. I just thought you might need a friend about now.” Jack Oakie, Lucy’s costar in the old days, also showed up; so did Lionel Barrymore, crippled by arthritis, who visited in a wheelchair.

During the next week thousands of letters came in. Almost all of them spoke of their love for, and their belief in, Lucy. Syndicated columnist Royce Brier took on Pegler: “Surely every middle-aged citizen of this country (Miss Ball is 42) is not under moral obligation to arise publicly and confess his or her manifestations of immaturity or ignorance at 25.” Ed Sullivan, the New York
Daily News
columnist who loathed Winchell, added his own message: “It’s a singularly fortunate thing for Lucille Ball that she’s been a weekly visitor to millions of American living rooms. In those Monday night visits, people have come to know her well. TV cameras being as revealing as they are, the Jury of Public Opinion is an informed jury as it renders its verdict on a silly thing she did 17 years ago.” Pegler’s own home paper, the
New York
Journal–American,
conceded in an editorial, “We wish Miss Ball had not done those foolish things long ago, but we don’t wish it one millionth as much as Miss Ball. Folly is regrettable, but none of us is immune to it, and let’s distinguish between folly and real treacherous conspiracy.” In the
New York Times,
Jack Gould added: “For once the accusation and the rebuttal became known simultaneously and the public had an opportunity to judge and act for itself.” Walter Winchell was forced to go into reverse, changing his tune to Yankee-Doodle: “Donald Jackson of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and all its members, cleared Lucy 100%, and so did J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, plus every newspaper in America and, tonight, Mr. Lincoln is drying his tears for making her go through this.” Unmentioned was the fact that “this” had been ignited by Winchell himself.

There was one more hurdle to clear: the ratings. It was all very well for journalists to withdraw from the attack, and for more than two thousand fan letters to arrive in support of Lucy—as opposed to two dozen negative ones. It was quite another to expect the country at large to stay tuned to the show. The Neilsen and Trendex polls would reveal more about the political climate than any columnist or mailbag. And so on a Monday night an apprehensive Desi and Lucy awaited “overnights”—the fast reading of what viewers had watched between 9:00 and 9:30 EST. Four men were just as tense: William S. Paley, chairman of CBS; Alfred Lyons of Philip Morris; adman Milton Biow; and Louis B. Mayer of MGM, producer of
The Long, Long Trailer.
Shortly after midnight the results came in.
I Love Lucy
remained number one, a fact noted in a
Los Angeles Times
headline the next day: EVERYBODY STILL LOVES LUCY. The heartening results spilled over into other arenas. B’nai B’rith, acutely sensitive to the vagaries of American politics, gave its Woman of the Year award to Lucy because of her willingness to appear at charity benefits. Of greater consequence was the fact that the Arnazes, along with William Frawley and Vivian Vance, were summoned to the White House by special invitation. The troupe performed to more than polite applause, and then President Eisenhower summoned Desi and Lucy to his table. “So you’re the young man that knocked me off the front pages,” said Ike. Flustered, Desi could only babble, “They said a foreigner with an accent wouldn’t be believable playing an average American husband.” The chief executive put him at his ease: “Out in Kansas they said I’d never be president. You know what we are? A couple of walking miracles!”

Lucy could not be included in that category. Her escape from history was not a matter of miracle but an accident of timing. “I was one of the lucky ones,” she was to realize later on. “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 would probably have been finished.” As it was, she could and did go on. Lucy and Desi never mentioned HUAC again in public. No less than the president of the United States had given her a clean bill of political health, yet Lucy would remain scarred and insecure. She could never quite relax after her experience with the congressmen and the fallout that came from their investigation. A signature on an old piece of paper had been enough to justify her most pathological fears: one’s livelihood and social position could indeed vanish overnight, and in the end neither money nor love nor public relations would be powerful enough to keep the jackals away.