Ball of Fire (11 page)

Adler and Frazier brought hundreds of new customers to La Conga. These ranged from out-of-town businessmen to society divas and their dates, all looking for someplace new to spend an evening. Between sets, Desi whiled away the hours with Brenda Frazier’s crowd, or hung around at Polly Adler’s. Working at night, sleeping most of the day, he lived an animal existence with no plan beyond the approaching meal and the next coition. When Rodgers and Hart dropped by his dressing room one night, he thought it was just another pair of Broadway celebrities making a pit stop. He had no idea his life was about to be changed forever.

Months before, Hart had seen Desi cavorting in the Miami club. Watching him on a New York stage, the lyricist saw new possibilities in the young Cuban. He might be right to play a Latin football player called Manuelito in the new Rodgers and Hart musical,
Too Many
Girls.
The trouble was, Desi had never played a part other than his ebullient self. Hart took him in hand, taught him the rudiments of auditioning, and slipped him a script—in direct violation of director George Abbott’s policy. Abbott liked actors to undergo cold readings so that he could evaluate their talents while they squirmed and struggled. Upon hearing Desi sing, Abbott gave Hart an instant evaluation: “Well, he’s loud enough.” Desi was then handed a script and ordered to read the part where a young Argentinian football player is recruited by an American college. The Latino agrees to go, provided the institution has a superabundance of senoritas.

“Oh,” says the talent scout. “You mean coeducational.”

“Tha’s it,” replies Manuelito. “Cooperational.”

Desi seemed ideal for the part, all right. A little too ideal. He read the rest of the lines flawlessly, and as Abbott and Rodgers exchanged looks Hart tiptoed up the aisle toward the exit.

“Larry!” Abbott called. “You gave him the script, didn’t you?”

Hart sputtered, “Who? Me? How? Why?”

“Because he hasn’t looked at one goddamned word of that scene. He did the whole thing like a big ham, emoting and waving all over the place. You taught him, didn’t you? And, I may add, you did a bad job of it.”

Hart broke down and confessed, and Desi sheepishly admitted his part in the plot. Abbott, less out of charity than out of a sense that Desi really was right for Manuelito, forgave the composer and the actor and signed up the man he addressed as “Dizzy” from then on. Desi did more than charm his director. The first-act finale, “Look Out,” was built on a shave-and-a-haircut tempo that mentioned the names of college football teams. Rodgers wrote it as a march, and Desi had trouble adapting to the four-quarter time. He kept imposing his own conga beat, to the conductor’s intense annoyance. In the middle of the rehearsal Rodgers came in and heard about the contretemps.

“What’s the matter with your guys?” he asked the musicians. “We’ll have the first chorus straight, and then when Desi starts the conga beat, we’ll change it to fit his thing. To tell you the truth, I like it better his way.”

Rodgers’s instinct for the
note juste
was infallible. During rehearsals Desi’s beat gradually took over the entire number, the young Cuban banging out the rhythm on his drum while Diosa Costello sang and wiggled on the beat as the chorus wove a serpentine line around the stage.
Too Many Girls
opened on October 14, 1939, at the Imperial Theatre. Desi had never attended a Broadway show. Now he was starring in one created by some of the most dazzling talents in the musical theater. In the end, it was naivete that kept him from being nervous. He recited his lines without error, ended the first act with that triumphant dance, and got a standing ovation for his efforts. The song he delivered with Costello was to take on another meaning in later years:

She could shake the maracas
He could play the guitar,
But he lived in Havana
And she down in Rio del Mar.
And she shook her maracas
In a Portuguese bar
While he strummed in Havana.
The distance between them was far.
By and by
He got a job with a band in Harlem.
She got a job with a band in Harlem.
Ay! Ay! Ay!
He said, “I’m the attraction!”
She said, “I am the star!”
But they finally married
And now see how happy they are.
So shake your maracas,
Play your guitar!

When the curtain came down Desi walked to La Conga and did the midnight show as if nothing unusual had occurred. The last set ended at 4 a.m. At last he could cool down and chat with Richard and Dorothy Rodgers, George Abbott, and Larry Hart. “About half an hour later,” Desi ecstatically wrote, “I saw Polly Adler heading for our table. She had all the newspapers in her hands, and as she approached she hollered in that big, deep voice of hers, ‘Cuban, you are the biggest fucking hit in town!’ ” Within a few weeks Walter Winchell had dubbed the conga line “the Desi Chain,” and young Arnaz became a New York fixture whose celebrity seemed to increase with each performance. There were offers to appear in other shows, other nightclubs, films.

Only one faux pas was committed in this period, and that was made not by Desi but by his mother, Lolita. At a party at Desi’s new apartment, a duplex overlooking Central Park, Larry Hart’s mother was enthusing about her son. Suddenly Lolita reached out and sat Larry on her lap. Hart was something of a faun in appearance, five feet tall and excruciatingly self-conscious about his diminutive height and build. Lolita held the lyricist in place, laughing uproariously as he attempted to shake loose from her maternal grasp. Helpless and humiliated, he started to cry.

Desi was to remember 1939 as one of the most triumphant years imaginable—but also as one of the saddest. For during that year his father filed for divorce, a rare event for Catholic Cubans, and unthinkable when it involved two people who had seemed so devoted to each other. When Desiderio II called his son to explain the situation, Desi hung up on him. The two were not to reconcile for many years, and during that time Desi assumed the role of guardian for Lolita, a dispirited woman exhibiting some unattractive aspects of middle age.

While his father moved in with a younger woman, Desi and Lolita lived in Desi’s duplex, an ideal bachelor pad before the bad news arrived, but now an unnaturally quiet place. Desi thought his mother needed an attentive listener, and he curtailed his tomcat prowls. But this devotion only served to increase Lolita’s dependence on her only child. She spent most evenings at La Conga, beaming at her son from a front table. It was all too much for the young, charged-up performer, and he sought the classic exit from a suffocating family arrangement: marriage. Most recently he had been seeing Renée de Marco, and together they made the necessary arrangements. Desi would accept a Hollywood offer to appear in the film version of
Too Many Girls,
driving cross-country and meeting Renée on the Coast as soon as she received her divorce. Everything went according to plan—until that fateful evening when the “honk of woman” entered Desi’s orbit. From that moment, all bets were off.

Desi started calling his new flame Lucy a day after they met. The reason was less aesthetic than proprietary. “I didn’t like the name Lucille,” he commented. “That name had been used by other men. ‘Lucy’ was mine alone.”

Hollywood is a town that runs on rumor, and the Desi-Lucy romance had barely begun when studio gossips started odds-making. Unsolicited advice issued from Lucy’s friends and acquaintances: “He’s flashy and egotistical.” “He’s Catholic and you’re Protestant.” “He’s immature—almost six years younger than you are.” “He dumped Renée de Marco without a backward glance. You’ll be the next.” And indeed, apart from the obvious physical attraction they felt for each other, there seemed no reason to believe the affair would be any more than a brief, passionate fling destined to burn itself out, as studio Cassandras forecast, in six months. Even in little matters Desi’s impulsive character seemed at odds with Lucy’s calculating one. He would take her for rides in his Buick Roadmaster convertible, pushing down on the gas pedal until they reached a speed of a hundred miles an hour on the straightaway. At one point Lucy began to scream uncontrollably.

“What’s wrong?” Desi shouted.

Nothing, she claimed; she had been instructed to lower her voice an octave or two, and Katharine Hepburn said that screaming was the best way.

“Okay,” Desi replied. “You scream and I’ll drive.”

On the set of
Too Many Girls,
Lucy paid close attention to the advice of director George Abbott. In contrast, according to Garson Kanin, who was assisting Abbott, “Desi came on strong, bossy, and a pain in the ass.” The Arnaz charm went a very short way, not only with Kanin but with many other Anglos of the period, men and women. A few years prior to Desi’s first Hollywood role, Helen Lawrenson had written a widely quoted article that appeared in
Esquire,
“Latins Are Lousy Lovers.” Many a jealous suitor and disappointed paramour could recite passages by heart, particularly the one about Cubans: “God knows, the Cuban man spends enough time on the subject of sex. He devotes his life to it. He talks of it, dreams it, reads it, sings it, dances it, eats it, sleeps it—does everything but do it. That last is not literally true, but it is a fact that they spend far more time in words than in action. . . . According to them, they always had their first affair at the age of two. This may account for their being worn out at twenty-three.”

Lucy was familiar with all the objections and well aware that Desi was not winning friends and influencing people at the studio. She was too smitten to care. For the first time since her arrival in town, she dated at the end of a workday, and on weekends she and Desi escaped the heat by motoring to Palm Springs. Saturdays and Sundays brimmed with passionate declarations, but very heat of their affair made meltdowns inevitable. Almost every Sunday night ended with a furious argument about each other’s intentions and infidelities. By nightfall Desi would drop Lucy off at the apartment she kept on North Laurel Avenue and announce hotly that he was going home to look after his mother. Lucy would plead for him not to go so soon—there was still so much left unsaid. It happened that two of the town’s greatest magpies witnessed many of the quarrels. F. Scott Fitzgerald and his inamorata, columnist Sheilah Graham, used to watch the spats from Fitzgerald’s balcony. “She always seemed to be asking him not to drive away,” Graham wrote. “We couldn’t understand his reluctance and sometimes made bets on the outcome. No matter which of us lost, we were both pleased when Lucille won.”

Sexual jealousy was omnipresent. When the two were on the road, Desi plugging
Too Many Girls
and Lucy publicizing
Dance, Girl,
Dance,
they kept in touch by phone. He tended to open the conversation with tart demands, like “Where were you when I called you last time? Who the hell were you having dinner with?” With that as an opener, the colloquy could only go downhill. Desi remembered one particular call from Lucy. Before he could get settled in his chair, she shouted, “You Cuban sonofabitch, where were you all last night? What are you trying to do, lay every goddamned one of those chorus girls in
Too Many Girls
? No wonder they picked you for the show.”

As a matter of fact, Desi was trying to do exactly that, and he felt that his best defense was a counteraccusation. When he saw a newspaper picture of a young, good-looking Milwaukee politician, he decided that Lucy was in that city for one purpose only. “I know why you’re staying there,” he yelled. “You’re screwing the Mayor.” Desi later commented, “How the hell we survived this period and still had the guts to marry I’ll never understand.”

Everyone else was similarly puzzled, with the exception of Desi’s mother, who spoke no English and smiled upon Lucy because of her kind face and good manners, and Lucy’s family, who welcomed Desi because he was what Lucy wanted. Whatever her cousin desired, Cleo maintained, “was accepted by one and all. We knew why she liked him. He was adorable looking. Lucy was a mature person. I suppose DeDe was delighted she had fallen head over heels and was confident she could handle it.” “Daddy,” as usual, was something of an exception. Fred Hunt whispered to Lucy that Desi “seems a nice fellow, but he doesn’t speak so good and he’s a little dark, isn’t he?” These objections did not stop Hunt from propagandizing his granddaughter’s newest beau. “Couldn’t get in the door without his reading all those
People’s
World
editorials,” Desi would write. The Cuban needed no advice about revolutions; he had seen one at close range. “I told Fred Hunt to cut it out or I’d teach him to rhumba.”

Published more than thirty-five years later, Desi’s memoir states that he was in Manhattan in November 1940 when Lucy “finally finished her Milwaukee deal and came to New York. I was wrong about her screwing the Mayor—I think—and I was madly in love with her, and I knew she was in love with me.” He was doing five shows a day at the Roxy, and between appearances he made a few out-of-town phone calls, then taxied over to the Hotel Pierre, where Lucy had a suite. He found her in the middle of an interview with a magazine writer. The journalist had provisionally titled her article “Why Lucille Ball Prefers to Remain a Bachelor Girl,” and Lucy was enumerating the reasons for staying single. The questioner had just moved to the subject of Desi. As he listened, Lucy assured the journalist that while the couple would see each other in New York—after all, he was here right now—marriage was out of the question. There were too many cultural, professional, and emotional barriers between them. Even the geography made no sense. Desi was committed to a life on the road, a life of nightclubs and theater work; she was rooted in Hollywood. With growing impatience, Desi sat and twitched until the interviewer departed.

“This girl is going to have a hell of a time with that story,” he predicted.

Really, Lucy remarked. And why was that?

“Because I have everything arranged to marry you tomorrow morning, if you would like to marry me.”