Ball of Fire (15 page)

CHAPTER
SIX

“How can you
conceive on the
telephone?”

SERGEANT Desiderio Alberto Arnaz, U.S. Army 392-956-43, was discharged in November 1945, three months after V-J Day. During the war, film studios had come to a collective arrangement. Those in the service would not be paid salaries while they were away, but upon their return they would be granted one large raise. This was intended to acknowledge the periodic increases that would have accrued had they been working all along. Desi’s salary was $650 a week just before he was drafted; with the raise his weekly paycheck now came to $1,000.

Desi knew the MGM scuttlebutt about the beautiful swimmer Esther Williams (“Wet, she was a star”), but he also knew that she was a big box office attraction. When he heard that a Williams movie was in development at MGM, and that the script called for a Latin leading man, Desi went to the producer and offered himself for the role.

Jack Cummings was succinct: “I’ve already got someone else.”

Desi asked the name of this other Latin lover.

“Ricardo Montalban.”

“Ricardo who?”

“Montalban. A Mexican actor. He’s going to play the lead opposite Esther.”

“I have been in the army for two and a half years,” Desi reminded him. “This is a perfect part for me and you are going to give it to someone else who’s not even under contract to the studio?”

“It’s already done.”

With those three words Desi Arnaz’s film career effectively ended. Montalban was the new boy on the block, MGM’s official Latin stud— twenty-six years old, skilled in comedy and drama, unconventionally handsome. The spurned veteran tried to be philosophical, but his acrimony could not be masked: “I guess it was out of sight out of mind. I had been gone two and a half years and they had forgotten what they had hired me for.”

There was more bad news: Desi had been lax about various financial responsibilities before the war. The Internal Revenue Service calculated that he owed $30,000 in back taxes.

In the past, whenever Desi had experienced a reversal—professional, marital, emotional—he had turned to the one arena that had never let him down: music. In the 1930s he had observed Xavier Cugat closely, watched the way the Rhumba King managed musicians, bargained hard with nightclub owners, and squeezed profits out of short engagements as well as long ones. Now was the time to use what he had learned. Desi organized a group of instrumentalists and persuaded the manager of Ciro’s on Sunset Strip to book the Desi Arnaz Orchestra in the club’s first black-tie opening since the war. The leader played his specialties, featuring the bogus native incantation “Babalu”:

Jungle drums were madly beating
In the glare of eerie lights
While the natives kept repeating
Ancient jungle rites.
All at once the dusky warriors began to
Raise their arms to skies above
And a native then stepped forward to chant to
His Voodoo goddess of love

And the more genial “Cuban Pete”:

They call me Cuban Pete
I’m the King of the Rhumba beat.
When I play the maracas
I go chicky-chicky-boom
Chick-chicky-boom.
Si, Senorita, I know that you will like the chicky-boom-chick
’Cause it’s the dance of Latin romance.

A self-mockery attended these numbers; Desi became a caricature of the Latin fellow Louis B. Mayer had dismissed so airily. No matter; the smiling Cuban was willing to do whatever it took to reestablish his name. Mugging, rolling his eyes, and swaying with the music, he basked in applause and celebrity, paying conspicuous attention to the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn, who chatted with him between sets and stayed until the finale. Opening night was a grand success. But in that triumph were the seeds of more domestic misery.

Lucy was busy at MGM, working in comic trivia like
Abbott and
Costello in Hollywood
and
Easy to Wed
with Keenan Wynn, and then loaned out to Twentieth Century–Fox for the melodrama
The Dark
Corner,
with Mark Stevens as a detective and Lucy as his loyal, tough-minded secretary. Her scrapbook was getting fat with encomia. The
New York Times
verdict on
Without Love:
“Lucille Ball throws wise-cracks like baseballs.” The New York
Sun
on
Easy to Wed:
Wynn and Ball “make it clear that they are the funniest comic team on the screen just now—and by a big margin.” The Hollywood Press Club had named Danny Kaye the King of Comedy, and Lucy the Queen. This recognition provided meager compensation for a home life that, once again, was deteriorating.

MGM required actresses to be at the studio hairdresser promptly at 6 a.m., and Desi’s schedule called for him to be at the club until the small hours of the morning. The couple would meet at the top of Coldwater Canyon as she was driving off to work and he was returning to the ranch for some sleep. On many mornings they merely waved as they passed. Sometimes they would park side by side and chat. If Desi was feeling especially amorous he would board Lucy’s car and neck with his wife before driving home. At the other end of the day the process reversed itself: she returned to bed as he headed off to work. On weekends Lucy would stop by Ciro’s, trying to rekindle what remained of their marriage.

Inevitably the group had to go on tour, and Lucy persuaded Desi to hire her brother Freddy as the band manager. But Freddy was a man who checked receipts, not beds; if she expected a report on Desi’s notorious prowling she was to be disappointed. One evening Lucy spent an entire phone call accusing her husband of disloyalty, and he yelled at her for being oversuspicious. She slammed down the phone. It rang in her room and she picked up the receiver, ready to resume her argument. The voice was not Desi’s; it was the operator’s. She had eavesdropped on the conversation. “Why haven’t you called him back?” she demanded. “I know he’s in his room feeling miserable, waiting for you to call him. He didn’t mean any of the things he said and I’m sure you didn’t either, so why don’t you call him back and make up with him? He’s just a baby.” Lucy laughed, melted, and did as asked. For that evening, at least, the conversation was filled with apologies and pledges of commitment.

After crossing the country in a series of split weeks and one-night stands, the Desi Arnaz Orchestra settled in for a long engagement at the Copacabana in New York City. Lucy took a few days off and flew into town. A visit to the club aroused new misgivings. On display were the Copa chorus girls, beautiful, highly publicized young women who embodied temptation. Lucy accused her husband of carrying on with the chorines. Desi protested that he never chased the women he worked with. She didn’t believe a word he said. In an interview with
Look
magazine, she attempted to adopt her husband’s cavalier manner. Desi’s macho style didn’t bother her in the least, said Lucy, and went on to boast, “I like to play games, too.” This was pure bravado, putting a good face on a melancholy situation. The journalist bought the line, but Lucy knew she was faking it.

The only thing the couple could agree upon was their unhappiness. She was running in place at MGM, as she had once done at RKO, even though the pay was better. Desi was improving as a musician; jazz historian Will Friedwald was to note, “Arnaz had virtually the only success story of any new band launched after the war.” Yet as a husband Desi was an abject failure and in low moments he acknowledged the fact.

As if to underline the speed of the passing years, MGM released Lucy in the summer of 1946. It was a good time for the studios: more people went out to the movies than ever before. The war was over; peace dividends included a renewed economy, veterans’ housing, and a great national hunger for entertainment. Lucy should have been part of it, but somehow her timing was off. She had been born too late or too soon, had passed through various phases at the studio—glamour girl, rising star, comedienne, second lead—without finding a screen identity. Audiences knew who she was and liked her, but without taking her to their hearts. Louis B. Mayer had had enough. Just as there were newer Latin actors to replace Desi, there were fresher talents to replace a thirty-six-year-old redhead.

During this period Lucy began to decline physically and emotionally. She actually began to stutter, something she had never done before, even in childhood. Lucy blamed some of the difficulties on her current agent, Arthur Lyons, and fired him. That left her without representation. On the other hand, she may have thought, what was left to represent?

During the weeks that Lucy was in mourning for her career an influential agent named Kurt Frings made a surprise visit to Chatsworth. He had heard about the trouble at MGM from a vigorously independent client, Olivia de Havilland, who had gone through her own battles with studios, sometimes refusing roles and going on suspension. The actress admired Lucy’s work, and when she heard about her travail, she pushed Frings to represent this gifted redhead. “I hardly knew Olivia except to say hello,” Lucy later wrote. “I was bowled over by her kindness.”

Frings told his new client that she was unlikely to land a long-term contract. Still, current conditions might work in her favor. Why not freelance, he suggested, go wherever the jobs were? As a matter of fact, there was a picture about to get under way at Universal,
Lover Come
Back,
costarring the suave Irish-American actor George Brent. Lucy would be ideal for the part of a comically jealous wife. “I can’t, I can’t,” Lucy responded. “All I can do is stut-stut-stutter.” Frings dismissed her fears; the actress was simply tired and out-of-sorts. What Lucy had to do was learn new lines instead of going over old grievances. She remained unconvinced until the director of the film, William Seiter, phoned with his encouragement: “You’re a great gal. We need you. Come over to Universal and go to work.”

She protested: “I c-c-can’t read a l-l-line.”

The director knew better: “Of course you can.”

For several days Lucy struggled with the role, stammering through rehearsal. By the fifth day she began to recover her normal rhythm and tone.
Lover Come Back
might more accurately have been called “Lucy Come Back.” The picture was universally panned, but the critics were kind to the female lead. “Our sympathy to Miss Ball, “who is fetching in Travis Banton’s gowns in spite of the plot’s ennui,” said the
New York
Herald Tribune.
The
New York Times
reviewer also preferred the apparel to the scenario: “Miss Ball wears a wardrobe of costumes and acts as if she really had a script. The poor lady is sadly deluded, she is completely without support.”

Poor as the film was, it saved Lucy and rescued her marriage in the process. She came back into play just as Desi began to prosper in New York. As the mobile one, she came to Manhattan, and the Arnazes took up residence in the Delmonico Hotel at Park Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street. To all appearances they were a happily reunited, hand-holding couple.

Gossip columnists suspected otherwise. Stories occasionally appeared about Desi’s wanderlust and Lucy’s accusations. Sheilah Graham paid particular attention. After a tip from a hotel employee, Graham wrote an item that riled Lucy’s mother in California. DeDe telephoned that night: “It says here you lock Desi out of the bedroom and he pounds on the door and shouts and hollers.” Lucy traced the columnist to her home and went on the attack. She had accidentally locked Desi
in
the bedroom, not out of it. And what business was it of Graham’s anyway? By now Lucy had worked herself into a rage. In a sudden flare-up she gave away more than she realized: “You’ve got two children and you don’t care. You say things like this about me and I will never have children!”

So there it was. She had withstood loneliness, Desi’s infidelities, being cut loose from MGM. From the age of three, when she lost her father, Lucy had idealized the notion of family. Nothing hurt so much as the feeling that biology had caught up with her, that she was on the cusp of a sterile middle age. Lucy was not one to keep her misery to herself, and when some of her listeners asked why she didn’t adopt a child she wailed, “I want Desi’s baby.”

At the end of the year Desi appeared in his last film for MGM,
Cuban Pete,
a hastily fabricated musical, capitalizing on the postwar craze for Latin music. The best notice came from
Variety,
and it was tepid: “Arnaz tries hard, and his songs and music are an aid.” From Hollywood he went back to bandleading as Lucy resumed her film work.

Now it was Desi’s turn to express jealousy as Lucy appeared with a series of attractive leading men. The Russian-English actor George Sanders, whose reputation as a seducer extended to two continents, played the romantic lead to Lucy’s taxi dancer in
Lured.
There were those, among them Zsa Zsa Gabor, later Sanders’ wife, who were convinced that George and Lucy had an affair during the filming. If they did, discretion marked their intimacy; the town’s most relentless gossip columnists could never find the incriminating evidence they needed for a scoop. So they switched direction and boosted the marriage. Louella Parsons went so far as to say Lucy was little more than a lovesick slave, wearing a bracelet that read, “My name is Lucille Ball. If lost, return me to my master, Desi Arnaz.” Hedda Hopper had a different take: “About once every six months someone notifies me that Lucy and Desi Arnaz are separating. I’ve learned to doubt the reports, but dutifully get on the phone; and we have a long amiable conversation. Doubtless they have their spats, as which couple doesn’t.” Hopper added inaccurately, “Lucille is Irish and Desi is Latin—a combination that occasionally makes for some spectacular fireworks; but it’s nothing serious.”