Ball of Fire (38 page)

Lucy’s mood was not improved by events at the 1966 stockholders’ meeting, held at Desilu’s Workshop Theater. As president of Desilu, she had to inform investors that after a long period of stability, Desilu’s net income had plummeted 42 percent from the previous year. There were compensating factors, she argued: her company was cutting back on expenses; it held valuable rental spaces, and other studios were using them as never before. This time the Ball glamour could not mask the distressing statistics. If Desilu was tightening its belt, asked one shareholder, then why did its president draw such a high fee for her work? (Lucy was getting $100,000 in executive salary and $130,172 in acting fees.) Another stockholder pointed out that Lucy’s income was just a little less than the company’s annual loss. Gary Morton intervened on his wife’s behalf, and board members attempted to defend the president: she was “about two hundred percent underpaid.”

Lucy, flustered, could only stammer that she was a fiscal conservative who made “honest reports,” and would stay in the job “as long as I can afford it.” She lit cigarette after cigarette as the meeting degenerated into accusations from the floor and posturing on the part of the executives. Lucy tried to leaven the proceedings with a little humor, offering free Bufferin and water to everyone, on the house. But by now the audience smelled blood, and an angry member spoke out. Why did Desilu’s top advisers get such big money and produce such meager dividends? Why weren’t they dollar-a-year men like the counselors in Washington? That way their salaries could be plowed back into the company coffers and stockholders could get a decent return for their money. Lucy’s exasperated response: “How long could I keep these valued advisers at a dollar a year? This isn’t
war—
it’s the
TV business.
” As the tumultuous meeting ended, one of the questioners shouted: “This has been a real show. Too bad it wasn’t shown on television. It might have increased our revenues.”

Lucy had been protected from the rough-and-tumble of finance for too many years. She had no way to handle this kind of criticism. It made her feel vulnerable and strangely isolated: a loyal husband, a phalanx of executives, a carapace of celebrity could not insulate her from attack. The past was of very little use in Hollywood—particularly in the severe world of television. It was the old case of “What have you done for me lately?” and clearly Desilu hadn’t done enough for its stockholders.

Wearing one of several hats, Lucy the performer dickered with CBS, as she usually did at the end of a season, claiming that she was tired of acting on television and ready to retire for good.
TV Guide,
a watcher of Lucille Ball since her earliest television days, called this “the Lucy Game.” It consisted, said the magazine, “of Lucy casually announcing she was tired of doing
The Lucy Show
and just might skip the whole thing in favor of ‘more time with Gary and the kids.’ When she did this, the whole CBS Television network shook. It could not afford to lose a show with the popularity of Madame President.” The result never varied. She was always “wooed back” with a large raise—in this case a $12 million package with a budget of $90,000 per half hour, two one-hour specials financed by the network, and a deal for future work. Once the Game was concluded, Mickey Rudin, the architect of Lucy’s contract, made an official, if disingenuous, statement: “I do not deny that Lucy’s contractual right to say yea or nay at any time has had certain business advantages. But I don’t think it’s what motivates Lucy. It is important to her to be reminded every year how much she is loved and wanted.”

When her CEO hat was on, however, Lucy showed quite a different negotiating technique. Actors who demanded top dollar from Desilu found her cold and unyielding. “They priced themselves out of the business,” she would explain to the press. “I was the first to say ‘I’m not worth it’ when my agents told me what they were asking for me.” And yet Lucy was ultimately the performers’ benefactress, backing shows that provided them with new opportunities. She not only encouraged films that emulated the Disney formula for its live-action movies— clean, sentimental stories aimed at a family audience—she also green-lighted two series quite unlike anything Desilu had ever underwritten,
Mission: Impossible
and
Star Trek.

During its development, the bracing half-hour adventure show called “Briggs Squad” had its name changed to “IMF” (for “Impossible Mission Force”) and finally pared down to
Mission: Impossible.
CBS was unimpressed by the initial pitch, and Desilu’s production chiefs appealed to Lucy: they needed funds to create a pilot to demonstrate what a dry presentation could not. The company had $600,000 in its development fund, but it was not earmarked. Lucy could easily have diverted the money elsewhere; it was hers to begin with. Instead, she read the script, agreed that
Mission: Impossible
needed to be seen, and allowed the money to be allocated for a pilot. It starred Steven Hill, one of the charter members of the Actors Studio, and Martin Landau, then beginning his career. “When I first became an actor,” Landau was to recall, “there were two young actors in New York: Marlon Brando and Steven Hill. A lot of people said that Steven would have been the one, not Marlon. He was legendary. Nuts, volatile, mad, and his work was exciting.” As repulsive as Lucy found the Method, she admired Hill’s work, and with good reason. The second time around, CBS bought the show.

Mission
was to become one of the most successful programs in the Desilu stable—and one with more than its share of woes. Due to technical problems, the production schedule started to run late. Expenses quickly mounted. Recalled supporting actor Peter Lupus: “Those checks were amazing, thousands of dollars for going over. And we always went over.” As if this were not enough, Hill caused some new, and eventually insurmountable, difficulties. He had become an Orthodox Jew, and his contract specified that he would not work Friday nights or Saturdays. There was no doubt of his sincerity; Hill spent a good deal of time organizing prayer meetings for the Jews working at Desilu. But refusal to work on the Sabbath, coupled with spectacular outbursts of temperament, were more than the show could bear. In the second season, Steven Hill was unceremoniously replaced by Peter Graves. (For the next ten years, Hill abandoned acting and settled in an Orthodox community in Rockland County, New York. He was not to become a performer of note until his much-lauded appearance as a district attorney on
Law & Order
in 1990.)

It took a season for
Mission: Impossible
to catch on; not until its second year did the show develop a fanatical following.
Star Trek
was different in every respect. Its creator, Gene Roddenberry, had a philosophical turn of mind, as well as a skill for writing episodes of TV Westerns. He conceived of
Star Trek
as an intergalactic
Wagon Train
leading its cast to various exotic locales in space. Desilu executives found the idea intriguing but unaffordable; Ed Holly and W. Argyle Nelson recommended against development. Lucy overruled them, and Holly later allowed: “If it were not for Lucy there would be no
Star Trek
today.” In essence that would mean no first and second series, no animated version, no film versions—in other words, none of the billions of dollars generated in America and across the globe on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

In exerting her authority, Lucy made some enemies, and executives in and out of the company referred to her as “the lady who became a man.” Not so, Lucy said when she learned of the sobriquet. “If I was going to turn into a man, I would have done it a long time ago,” she told journalist Rex Reed. “I’ve been in awe of men most of my life. It never occurred to me how an executive should be. . . . The rules were here before I took over. I never wanted to be an executive, but when my marriage to Desi broke up after nineteen years I just couldn’t walk away from my obligations and say forget it. We were an institution. So I took on all the responsibilities.”

As influential as
Star Trek
and
Mission: Impossible
were to be, Desilu still revolved around the
Lucy
shows, and here the strategy went awry. With the great writing teams gone, Lucy hired Milt Josefsberg, Jack Benny’s head writer for many years. At the time, Josefsberg was the most experienced and competent sketch writer in the television business. The trouble was that Lucy was not a sketch performer. She needed credibility and a recognizably feminine persona to go along with her comedy. Josefsberg hired male writers who gave her gags— good gags, but not organic ones that rose out of her personality. As her assistant Thomas Watson noted, “these guys did not understand how to get a housewife into physical stunts, so, essentially, she stopped being a housewife.” Where Lucy Ricardo was a blithe and endearing schemer, the character on the
Lucy
shows of the late 1960s was unpleasant and argumentative, out to embarrass and humiliate Gale Gordon. The comment of former
I Love Lucy
writer Bob Weiskopf is germane: “I don’t want to sound mean, but where was Lucy in all this? Why didn’t she demand better writing for herself? She certainly was in charge. If Desi or Jess had been there, this would have been handled much more smoothly and with greater humor.”

To add to this unstable mix, the fifty-something Lucille Ball was taking visible losses in her battle against age and worry. A face-lift remained out of the question; her skin remained too sensitive to bear knifework. She did have her eyes tucked, and even that relatively minor operation took more than a year to heal. During the long period of recuperation, Hal King had to conceal the redness around her eyes with heavy pancake makeup. She edged toward the glamorous but unreal—a star, rather than the endearing zany that viewers had adored for the last fifteen years.

I Love Lucy
had been syndicated in Europe for more than a decade. Lucy decided to try her luck overseas.
Lucy in London,
broadcast in the fall of 1966, did not receive the hoped-for response. “What had promised to be one of the season’s major specials,” said
Variety,
“turned out to be a major disappointment.”

While these distresses gathered, Lucy reached out for a confidant. Gary Morton was appointed to the role. He tried to be modest about it at first, quietly sitting in on meetings and deliberately playing down his significance. “Lucy can’t run a company by herself,” he said. “Maybe with me around, when she walks on the set, her mind is at peace. I pop in from time to time, on conferences, rehearsals. I can tell from her if things are going well, if the laughter is there.” As the months went on he insinuated himself into the corporate workings of Desilu. Agreeable as always, he tried to ingratiate himself with the higher-ups, who rarely responded in kind. Desilu program executive Herbert Solow regarded Lucy’s husband with a mixture of wariness and disdain. His view was, “Don’t take from your spouse and use that as your importance. Gary did that. Constantly.” Cousin Cleo felt that Morton gave in to his wife too easily, and that the deference reinforced her worst instincts. Desi, who put on a public show of friendship, resented his replacement and was especially irritated by Morton’s collection of expensive cars, obviously underwritten by Lucy. Others at Desilu felt that Morton was an embarrassment. “He tried to be Mr. Nice Guy,” said one staffer, “and in a way he was—always smiling, always trying to grasp what was going on. But he was resented and, to be perfectly frank, he wasn’t capable of taking over the company, which is clearly what he was aiming to do.” Bernard Weitzman, one of the top Desilu executives, agreed, saying that Gary “tried to be what Desi was, without having Desi’s authority.” Or, for that matter, his skills.

There were times when Morton’s inadequacies were apparent to Lucy, and those occasions could be unpleasant for him and for onlookers. Geoffrey Mark Fidelman notes that during the filming of one episode Morton indicated some steps leading to a doorway. “Lucy doesn’t like them and she wants them out,” he instructed the director. Maury Thompson was surprised at the order; the steps had been there for several previous shows. “I tried to stall Gary,” he remembered, “telling him how much manpower and money it would take to redo the set.” As he was speaking Lucy entered and looked at the tableau. “What’s going on here?” she wondered. “Why is everybody standing around?” Thompson repeated what Morton had told him. “She looked at me,” he recalled, “then turned to Gary and said, ‘Gary, go buy a car, but get outta here.’ Gary just hung his head and left. She never asked any more questions; she knew what Gary had tried to do. Lucille wanted him to be another Desi, but he just couldn’t cut it.” (Thompson would go on to receive an Emmy nomination for his work on the
Lucy
shows—the only director so honored—but perhaps because he had seen too much, he was fired at the end of the season.)

In later years, Desi Jr. was fond of quoting fans who “thought I was Little Ricky.” But, he said, “I knew Fred and Ethel didn’t live next door—Jack Benny did.” That sentence encapsulates his childhood and adolescence. In an environment where most of the neighbors were famous and all of them were wealthy, a normal childhood would have been extremely difficult; for Desi Jr. and Lucie it was impossible. Not only were their parents celebrated, rich, and divorced, their father was an alcoholic and their mother a deeply conflicted figure whose treatment of the children alternated between discipline and indulgence. “You’re not special because you’re famous” was one of Lucy’s ongoing instructions to her son and daughter. Both had to make their beds and pick up their clothes; neither ever received an allowance that exceeded five dollars a week. Yet on one of Desi Jr.’s birthdays, a carnival was set up in the backyard, complete with Ferris wheel, clowns, and a live elephant. With mixed messages like these, confusion was bound to result, and it was exacerbated by their mother’s long workday and the resultant guilt for time spent away from them.

Their father was not much of a role model during this time. There was, for instance, the summer night in 1966 when fifteen-year-old Lucie and a friend were visiting Desi at his beach house in Del Mar. Late at night some youths began making noise and cursing within earshot. It happened that Desi owned a .38 revolver—and this one was not a cigarette lighter. He fired two shots into the sand. They only added to the noise. The next thing he knew, the Del Mar police had arrived, arrested him for assault, and hauled him off to the station. He claimed that he had only fired blanks, but when the cops dug in the sand they found no evidence of such shells. They released Desi after he posted $1,100 bail, and he went home to sleep off his drunkenness.