Ball of Fire (37 page)

Vivian Vance, whom Lucy regarded as a reliable script doctor as well as a friend, was not immune to harsh critiques from the boss. For “Lucy and Viv Play Softball,” the two actresses were to choose up sides with a bat. Lucy kept throwing the bat in a way that made it impossible for her partner to catch it cleanly. “I could catch it right if you threw it right,” was the very reasonable complaint. Lucy walked off the set and Vivian started to cry. When Lucy returned she simply said, “Now, where were we?” refusing to recognize that anything untoward had taken place.

Others came under fire and were not let off so easily. Lucy made a point of challenging authority figures who were working for her. Candy Moore thought it was “unprofessional for her to yell at people in front of others—particularly the director Jack Donohue. It undermined his authority.” But that was Lucy’s aim. After the first day on any episode, everyone knew who was in charge.

The only actor immune from Lucy’s barbs was Gale Gordon, her old companion from radio days, when he had played innumerable haughty, pompous bosses. Gordon was written into
The Lucy Show
during its second season, in order to supply Lucy with the foil she lacked in the first thirty-three episodes. For the next five seasons he played Theodore J. Mooney, manager of the local bank and trustee of Lucy’s money. In a better part, or with different direction, Gordon might have given the show some depth and satiric bite. The skilled farceur had learned his trade from the cradle onward, watching his father, an American vaudeville quick-change artist, and his mother, a British actress. Born with a cleft palate, Gordon had worked on his diction until it was perfect for radio, and on his appearance until it was ideal for television. Lucy’s affection and regard for him were absolute, so much so that she failed to see the shortcomings of the Mooney character—or of the character actor who portrayed him.

In the first place, Gordon was never encouraged to vary his interpretation. “When you are at full tilt right from the beginning,” noted Maury Thompson, “you have nowhere to build to—nowhere to go.” When Gordon consulted Thompson about his acting, the camera coordinator leveled with him. “He said, ‘You know, other people have told me that. But I can’t seem to help myself. I’ll try to temper it.’ But he couldn’t.” In the second place, through no fault of his own Gordon was incapable of filling the vacuum left when Desi departed. “A husband is a funny authority figure,” Bob Schiller pointed out. “A banker, although certainly an authority figure, doesn’t have any of the warmth, humor, or sex of a husband.”

Very occasionally that season, Lucy relaxed, allowing comedy to imitate life. In the
Lucille Ball Comedy Hour
special “Mr. and Mrs.,” she and Bob Hope played two actors hired for a job because the producer believes they’re married. When Lucy falls in love with another man, and Bob with another woman, they contrive to get a bogus divorce. There was enough similarity between the fiction and the Lucy-Desi story to make Lucy play the part convincingly. Decked out in Edith Head costumes, she looked elegant and surprisingly young. The years fell away—at least temporarily—thanks to makeup expert Hal King, who used surgical tape and elastic foundations to provide the effects of a face-lift without the anguish of surgery. In “Lucy Conducts the Symphony,” Jack Donohue relinquished his usual assignment as director in order to play a hapless orchestra conductor. When his percussionist comes down with stage fright, Lucy stands in, hilariously overriding the man on the podium. She was absolutely convincing in the role, and why not? Offscreen, she had been doing much the same thing to Donohue whenever he directed her.

The nadir of the season came in April 1964, with “Lucy Enters a Baking Contest.” The episode was written by her longtime favorites, Bob Carroll Jr. and Madelyn Pugh Martin. Desilu had made them affluent, and both wished to retire while they were on top. Lucy had coaxed them back, only to savage their work on the final show of the season. “What are you trying to do,” she demanded, “
ruin
my career?
” In a gesture she would come to regret, Lucy threw the script to the floor. The writers gathered up the papers and exited, speechless. To Lucy, this was outright insubordination; she assumed that they were walking out on the job, and more significantly, on her. Nobody walked out on Lucille Ball. The next morning, Bob and Madelyn found their possessions neatly boxed outside their office door. In another era Desi would have stepped in and broken the tension with a joke and a compliment and they all would have pretended nothing had happened. But there was no one capable of making peace, and the best writers Lucy would ever have took their leave of Desilu. It was as if she was trying, both consciously and unconsciously, to erase Desi’s fingerprints from every door and desk no matter what the personal cost.

The cost, it developed, would be prohibitive. Not long after the writers left, there came other crucial exits. Among those to leave were producer Cy Howard, who had created the long-running comedy
My
Friend Irma;
executive producer Elliott Lewis; and programming vice president Jerry Thorpe. Replacements were found—for example, network veteran Oscar Katz was hired away from CBS to replace Thorpe. But Desilu would never be the same, and other signs indicated that personal trouble lay ahead.

In May, Lucy, Gary, and the two children, Lucie and Desi IV—or, as he was now billed, Desi Jr.—performed together for the first time on the game show
Password.
It should have been a minor triumph. Lucy and Gary were predictably fluent and funny on the show. Desi Jr. was easy—a little too easy—before the cameras, saying, “This is one of my favorite experiences of all time.” Lucie, on the other hand, was hyper and self-conscious. “I can’t even watch the tapes of that show,” she was to tell Geoffrey Mark Fidelman, historian of the
Lucy
shows. “It makes me sick. I was trying to copy-cat comics. It’s sad. I was trying too hard. I want to go to that little girl to say, ‘You don’t have to do this!’ I wanted to be like Mom and Gary—snap my fingers to the music and have snappy patter.”

In the meantime, Vivian Vance let it be known that shuttling from Connecticut to Hollywood was getting to be more of a strain each time out. This was not a ploy; she planned to ask for half a million dollars to sign for another season. It was an unrealizable demand, and she knew it.

At the 1964 stockholders’ meeting Lucy was a little too ebullient when she discussed all the new series planned for Desilu—twenty-two in all. There would be programs for Ethel Merman, a hit when she appeared as herself on one of the
Lucy
episodes; for comedienne Dorothy Loudon; for Dan Rowan and his partner Dick Martin, who for a handful of episodes had played Lucy’s romantic interest; and for comedians-dancers Dan Dailey and Donald O’Connor. None of these would sell. Lucy could not know that another genre, drama, would be the company’s salvation, when MGM veteran Gene Roddenberry was signed to create and produce a military program,
The Lieutenant,
and a science fiction series he called
Star Trek.

While the company made its way into the 1960s, one exploitable commodity carried it through bad times and good: Lucy. Her various series, including the current highly rated one, were syndicated in forty-four countries and more than a dozen languages, and her name was as famous as the President’s. The public relations department saw to that, arranging a special “Lucy Day” to take place at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City. Accompanying her to the fair were the expected Gary and DeDe, and the unexpected Hedda Hopper, all flown out at the expense of General Foods, sponsor of the most recent Lucy shows. The columnist had been a protector and fan for decades, and in New York, while thousands of fans looked on, she knelt side by side with Lucy as they put their handprints in cement at the fair’s Hollywood Pavilion. With the most powerful gossip columnist in her corner, Lucy seemed ready for renewed popularity and a resurgent home life. Things did not work out in quite the way she intended.

Returned to home ground, Lucy agreed to take a step backward in her career. She would make regular broadcasts on the old medium of radio, starring in
Let’s Talk to Lucy.
Produced by Gary Morton, the ten-minute show would showcase guest performers and give Lucy a chance to get paid just for talking. According to authors Coyne Steven Sanders and Tom Gilbert, who kept the closest track of Desilu, Lucy told friends she took the job in order to give her husband “something to do.” Evidently he did not know how to do that something:
Let’s Talk
sputtered from the beginning, failed to attract sponsors, and was not renewed at the end of the season. Not that the misfire bothered Morton; it would give him more time on the golf course.

When Gary was at the links Lucy sat at home playing countless games of solitaire, a portrait of the poor little rich girl, except that she was neither little nor a girl. She was only rich. And money was not enough to keep the fashion police at bay. Earl Blackwell Jr., notorious for his bitchy evaluations of movie stars’ outfits, continually placed Lucy on his Worst Dressed list. One year he put her down in three sentences: “If you can’t wear it, carry it. Lucy buys her clothes without any planning, then lugs around most everything else she owns. Her appearance is absolute confusion.” Another time Blackwell wrote: “Despite her great comedy flair, offstage she is a clown caricaturing an actress who borrowed her wardrobe from the studio costume department.” Recently he had called her a “Halloween trick without the treat. Lucy, dear, shoulder pads went out with the black bottom.” It was not a good season for Lucy to be left alone, brooding about her image, or about life in general.

All the while, Lucie and Desi Jr. had been nourishing a fantasy. Both had seen
The Parent Trap,
a Disney feature about children successfully reuniting their separated parents. It had become their favorite movie, and they insisted that Lucy see it. She saw it. Four times. The year before, Desi Jr. had even inquired, “Can’t you say you’re sorry and go back?” As gently as possible Lucy tried to convince them that the divorce was final, that Gary Morton was here to stay. “People change,” she kept repeating. It was an uphill struggle. Morton did what he could to win over Lucie and Desi Jr. Affable and low-key, he made a special effort to be friendly with their real father. Perhaps in addition, as Lucie Arnaz suggests, he wanted to learn about the television business from Desi. But that was not going to happen. Desi acted as a subversive influence; within the children’s hearing he kept referring to his replacement as “Barry Norton,” as if he couldn’t quite recall Morton’s name, and he shared nothing with him but an occasional handshake and small talk.

Then, in 1966, after blowing a good portion of his savings, Desi returned to the only arena that had given him satisfaction and recognition: television. What better place to work than Desilu, the company that still bore his name? Said an executive, “He was older, heavier, his hair had gone pretty gray, and if you looked at him in the wrong light he looked a hell of a lot older than a man in his fiftieth year.” There were intimations of mortality—Bill Frawley was the first of the great quartet to go, dead of a heart attack. “I’ve lost one of my dearest friends,” said Lucy when she heard the news. Desi did her one better, He took out an ad in the
Hollywood Reporter,
complete with a picture of the deceased and the exit line, “
Buenas
noches, amigo!
”

Even so, as old as Desi appeared when he was caught off-guard, another executive conceded, “when he checked into the studio at Culver he lost about a decade. His smile was wider and his gait was younger. He forgot about his troubles. He was home.” From that home he began to develop properties for Carol Channing, an extravagant Broadway entertainer who was hard to contain on the small screen, and for Western star Rory Calhoun, Eve Arden, and Kaye Ballard. The last two were the title characters of
The Mothers-in-Law,
a bright situation comedy written by the exiled Bob and Madelyn. Wary at first, Lucy came to regard her ex-husband as an office asset. The passions and resentments had diminished, if not dispersed, and the two were able to work together without arguing, Lucy turning thumbs up or down when certain performers were mentioned for shows, Desi advising her on scripts and creative people.

She would need all the help she could get. As Vivian Vance expected, her salary terms would not be met and she would be replaced for the upcoming season. After some soul-searching, Lucy placed a call to Connecticut: the program wouldn’t be the same without her old sidekick, she said. It might not even survive. “Lucille,” Vance said, “with your talent you mustn’t feel that way about anybody.” Yet, Vance wrote in a memoir, “I was sure she felt I was deserting her. She had a tremendous fear of rejection, and unless she thought it through, it could seem that I was rejecting her, giving her up after fourteen years of closeness and clowning, for a husband and a home I wanted to share with him. She and I would go on chatting together, seeing each other, staying friends, but the relationship inevitably changed.” What changed most was the two actresses’ attitude toward show business itself. Vance had seen too much of Lucy’s insecurity and took a jaundiced view of fame and its concomitants. She even tried to talk the mother of her onscreen son, Ralph Hart, into taking the boy out of show business altogether.

For Lucy, entertainment was the only way to go. It was all she knew and all she wanted to know. Marriage, motherhood, leisure—all were subordinated to the main concern of putting on a good show and turning a profit for the Desilu stockholders. Though she determined to get along without her feminine foil, Vivian’s departure did made an enormous difference, not only in the scripts but in Lucy’s outlook. In her view, she had been dropped twice, by her husband and by her closest professional friend. The moat around her grew wider and contained more alligators.

“On the set she could be a holy terror,” said one of the technicians who watched Lucy in action. She summarily fired a New York Method actor who mumbled his lines; intimidated directors and cameramen; and sought confrontations, even when the star was as big as she was. When she gave Danny Kaye instructions on how to do humor, he snapped, “Just who the hell do you think you are?” Lucy shot back, “You’re full of shit, that’s who I am.” She was not smiling. Joan Blondell, who had known Lucy since their starlet days in the 1930s, had become a first-class film and stage comedienne in middle age. Lucy booked her on the show, then expressed dissatisfaction with the way Blondell read her lines. After one take, her friend Herb Kenwith reported, the director yelled “Cut” and “Lucille pulled an imaginary chain . . . as if flushing an old-fashioned toilet.” Blondell turned away but caught the tailend of the gesture. “ ‘What does
that
mean,’ she demanded. Lucille said, ‘It means that stunk!’ Joan looked her right in the eye and said, ‘Fuck you, Lucille Ball!’ and left. The studio audience was stunned. You didn’t hear words like that in those days.” Kaye and Lucy were to make up their differences in later years. Blondell never came back.