Ball of Fire (16 page)

The fact was, though, that the couple
had
blackslid on their promises and obligations. Lucy prevailed on Bob Hope to hire Desi as music director for his radio show; what caused the comedian to consent became a matter of salacious Hollywood speculation. Whatever the case, Desi got the job. A lot of good it did Lucy; when he was not on the radio bandstand he was touring the United States and Canada with scant attention paid to his wife—except for expressions of jealousy when she filmed
Her Husband’s Affairs,
opposite the dashing Franchot Tone. Edward Everett Horton, who supplied the comic relief for that movie, proclaimed that Lucy had “more talent than these people realize.” “These people” were the executives at Columbia. The picture did not thrive, and the studio offered her no other roles.

During an unhappy time Lucy played host to June Havoc, a serious actress with a long and famous background in entertainment—her older sister, Gypsy Rose Lee, had become the most celebrated striptease dancer in America. According to Lucy, Havoc suddenly announced: “I know you’re going stir-crazy! Why don’t you take a big chunk of time—now that Desi’s away and you’re free-lancing—and tour the country with a play?”

The whole encounter may well have been a setup, for shortly thereafter the men who ran the Princeton Drama Festival paid a call. Lucy allowed them to talk her into appearing in the title role of Elmer Rice’s
Dream Girl.
Almost a decade before, she had starred in
Hey Diddle
Diddle
at the same theater. Her memories of that occasion, if not of the end results, were happy ones. What she failed to take into account was the piece itself. Of all the legitimate theater works in 1947, this was far and away the most demanding. A modernist fantasy, it called for the central character, Georgina Allerton, to escape from her everyday existence in a bookshop to a universe of dreams. In separate episodes in her imagination she gives birth to twin babies and becomes a murderess, a Shakespearean heroine, and a suicidal prostitute before finding true love in the real world.

The part required Lucy to be onstage for almost the entire play, and the feat of memory was prodigious. She suffered an occasional lapse in rehearsals, and even on opening night, but she recovered quickly enough to impress her producers, the audience, and the critics. Rice later wrote that of all those who had portrayed Georgina—including the original Broadway performer, Betty Field—“the only actress whose performance really delighted me was Lucille Ball.” Lucy “lacked tender wistfulness, but her vivid personality and expert timing kept the play bright and alive.”

The reaction that gave her the biggest lift came from two authoritative figures who dropped backstage during the tour. They were familiar to Lucy; both were on the faculty of the Robert Minton–John Murray Anderson School of Drama. The pair oozed compliments, which she accepted with a polite curtsey. Lucy was kind enough not to remind them that the school had rejected her as unpromising.

Dream Girl
toured the Midwest and headed to California, pleasing audiences and critics wherever it went. Toward the end of the year, however, a virus began to work its way through the cast. By the time the show hit Los Angeles, Lucy was barely able to stand. Somehow she got through opening night. No one out front knew how sick she was; the Los Angeles critic went out of his way to praise her energy and skill: “Here is a young lady of the films who could, if she would, have a dazzling footlight career. And what is more—though this may be a brash statement to make—she is, in a sense, wasting her talents in pictures. Miss Ball is a striking presence in the footlight world. She has efficiency as a comedienne. She can tinge a scene delicately with pathos. She has special facility in dealing with sharp-edged repartee.” The review meant more to the entertainment industry than it did to Lucy. She went through one matinee with a fever of 102 degrees and ultimately had to be hospitalized. There was no understudy; after a week the show folded ingloriously.

At one point during this period, Harry Ackerman, a vice president of the Columbia Broadcasting System, was airborne, shuttling from New York to Los Angeles. In the 1940s coast-to-coast air travel could take more than ten hours, and on his flight Ackerman idly perused
Mr. and
Mrs. Cugat: The Record of a Happy Marriage.
Isabel Scott Rorick’s recently published novel centered on a young executive and the light-headed wife who kept placing him in awkward social situations, but who, in the end, proved to be as lovable as she was frenetic. Ackerman saw commercial possibilities in these characters. In Hollywood he met with Don Sharpe, an astute agent-packager in the Kurt Frings office. Sharpe had already designed radio shows featuring such film stars as Dick Powell (
Richard
Diamond, Private Eye
) and Cary Grant (
Mr.
Blandings Builds His Dream House
); he sparked to the property Ackerman had brought him. They began to develop
Mr. and Mrs. Cugat
as a radio comedy series, selling the idea to Hubbell Robinson, CBS vice president of programming. Robinson in turn brought it to Lucy.

“I was interested,” she was to recall, “especially if Desi could co-star.” Even though the fictive couple’s name suggested Xavier Cugat’s, and thus an indeterminate Hispanic background, Robinson thought Desi was hardly the type to play the part of a typical American spouse. “But he
is
my husband,” Lucy insisted, “and I think it helps make a domestic comedy more believable when the audience knows the couple are actually married.” She added that the demands of radio broadcasting were much less intrusive than those of every other entertainment medium, “a fact borne out by the experiences of such happily married radio greats as Mary Livingstone and Jack Benny, Fred Allen and Portland Hoffa, Gracie Allen and George Burns, and Harriet and Ozzie Nelson.” CBS turned her down cold. She would play opposite a man of their choice or she could forget about a radio series; it was as simple as that. Lucy gave way.

Originally the experienced stage and radio actor Lee Bowman was slated to be Mr. Cugat, but CBS delayed the opening when sponsorship failed to materialize. By the time the network agreed to back the program with its own funds, Bowman had signed for another show. Another well-known actor, Richard Denning, took his place. The ingratiating star of B pictures had a resonant voice capable of conveying Mr. Cugat’s stuffiness without making him unsympathetic. The next change was in the name of the characters: Mr. and Mrs. Cugat metamorphosed into the unambiguously WASP Liz and George Cooper, and the title changed to
My Favorite Husband.

With everything and everyone in place, CBS still hesitated to go on the air; the dialogue was judged to be insufficiently funny and credible. Comedian Steve Allen learned of the difficulties—and so did his writers. Two of them, Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll Jr., were in their twenties and restless. They submitted a script, received an offer within days, and traded the security of an established program for the challenges of an untried one. Carroll was a bearded, Mephistophelian character who had learned how to construct situations and gags, and Pugh was a pert brunette who knew how to make feminine characters credible. They were novices, however, and Lucy rode all over their work. The smiling lady, so amiable when they first met, proved to be a tyrant in script conferences. Carroll was confused by Lucy’s tempests, and now and then Pugh was reduced to tears. The CBS brass liked their ideas, but it was clear that a firmer presence had to be added to the mix. A veteran comedy writer and producer was brought in.

At the age of thirty-five, Jess Oppenheimer had already written for Fred Astaire, Edgar Bergen, and, most significantly, Fanny Brice. One of the most skilled dialect comedians in America, Brice had headlined in vaudeville and the
Ziegfeld Follies,
and, after some false starts, found a home in radio as the voice of “Baby Snooks.” Oppenheimer wrote that show, taking advantage of Brice’s hilarious yammer, but always eschewing cheap gags for a credible relationship of father and child. In a typical episode, Snooks misbehaves and Daddy (Hanley Stafford) administers a spanking. The brat speaks up:

SNOOKS

I don’t want you to be my father no more.

DADDY

What kind of talk is that?

SNOOKS

You hate me.

DADDY

Nonsense. I spanked you this morning because I love you.

SNOOKS

You got a funny way of showing it.

DADDY

If I had hated you, you know what I would have done?

SNOOKS

Yeah. You would have killed me.

DADDY

No. I would have left you alone to grow up into a selfish, greedy girl who always has to have her own way. How would you like that?

SNOOKS

(Wisely)
I’d like it.

DADDY

Oh, what’s the use? Will you at least talk to me?

SNOOKS

No. You spanked me, and I’m sore at you.

DADDY

Look, Snooks, I spanked you, in the first place, for your own good. And in the second place, you’re not “sore.” You’re angry. Do you understand?

SNOOKS

Yeah, I’m angry in the second place.

DADDY

Right. Now come over and sit down.

SNOOKS

No.

DADDY

Why not?

SNOOKS

’Cause I’m sore in the first place!

Carroll and Pugh had followed the outline of
Mr. and Mrs. Cugat.
In their introduction, George Cooper was portrayed as a man of substance in his thirties, newly married to “the socially prominent Elizabeth.” After the honeymoon, “George sold his polo pony, bought a stylish suburban home, took the first job that came along—fifth vice president of a bank—and now they’re just George and Liz, two people who live together and like it.” Audiences had no problem with wealthy protagonists: during the 1930s Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had become Hollywood royalty by dancing their way through the Depression in dinner jackets and gowns. The 1940s called for some changes in approach and personality. In a memoir Oppenheimer said, “I decided to make Liz a little bit less sophisticated, a little bit more childish and impulsive, than the character who appeared in the first few shows—in short, more like Baby Snooks. She would be a stagestruck schemer with an overactive imagination that got her into embarrassing situations. This would give me an excuse to engage Lucy in some broad slapstick comedy.”

During the last months of 1948, as the scripts went in for revisions, Lucy began working on a new film with Bob Hope,
Sorrowful Jones,
based on yet another Damon Runyon tale. Filming during the day and rehearsing at night frazzled her nerves and upset her judgment. As one deadline approached, the story line was still in trouble. “Bob and Madelyn and I worked practically all night,” Oppenheimer wrote. “We were confident that we had saved the script. We weren’t too proud of the very last line, but the rest of it was good, and we had all day to work on that one last line.” At daybreak Lucy and Don Sharpe arrived. She sank into an overstuffed chair and went through the script, laughing at regular intervals as she turned the pages. According to Oppenheimer, “I thought we were home free, until she came to that last line. Well, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were identical twins compared to the transformation Lucy served up.” She arose, threw the script across the room, and yelled, “I won’t do this shit!” Oppenheimer waited for her to finish. Then he responded: “I thought we had a team effort going here. We’re happy to stay up all night or all week, and break our butts to make the script right for you. But not if you’re going to ignore a major rewrite, which you loved, and crucify us over one little line, which can easily be fixed. We need quite a bit more respect than that.” He took Lucy’s hand and shook it. “I can’t say that it’s been a pleasant experience working for you, but at least it’s over.”

Oppenheimer left the building. About halfway down the block he heard the clatter of rapid footsteps. Don Sharpe caught up with him and made a short-winded appeal: “She’s crying and hysterical. She knows she was wrong. She agrees with you and wants to apologize.” They went back into the building and Lucy said and did all the right things, which included making a small act of contrition for Carroll and Pugh, who had not seen her Jekyll-and-Hyde act. “I’ve been a shit,” she told them. After Lucy had walked away Pugh asked, “What the hell was that all about?” It was about establishing modes of behavior and regard, and about understanding that Lucy’s outbursts were signs not of certainty but of an insecurity that had been with her since childhood. Oppenheimer, Pugh, and Carroll would have to bear that in mind from now on.

Within weeks Oppenheimer wrought other changes in the scripts. He used the technique of the long-running Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse play
Life with Father,
wherein Mother Day (Vinnie) uses her ditsy feminine arithmetic on Father:

FATHER

Vinnie, whatever happened to that six dollars?

VINNIE

What six dollars?

FATHER

I gave you six dollars to buy a new coffeepot and now I find that you apparently got one at Lewis & Conger’s and charged it. Here’s their bill: “One coffeepot—five dollars.”

VINNIE

So you owe me a dollar and you can hand it right over.

In
My Favorite Husband,
Oppenheimer slyly modernized and reworked the dialogue:

LIZ

You should be glad I bought that dress, George. I made twenty dollars by doing it.

GEORGE

You made twenty dollars?

LIZ

Absolutely. I bought the dress on sale at Cramer’s for thirty-nine dollars and the identical dress is selling for fifty-nine fifty—so I made twenty dollars!

GEORGE

But you don’t have that twenty dollars.

LIZ

I
know I don’t. I spent it on a hat to go with the dress!

Oppenheimer also made two emendations that were to have profound impact on the history of situation comedy. He felt that Lucille Ball and Richard Denning could not support a thirty-minute show by themselves. They needed comic support, and early in 1949 he supplied it by bringing on another, older couple. These were the Atterburys— Rudolph, George’s boss at the bank (Gale Gordon), and his scatter-brained wife, Iris (Bea Benaderet). Both actors were seasoned radio farceurs, and a few weeks after they were introduced on the air their presence allowed scripts to develop in new directions. Gordon’s Rudolph came across as a decent but hopelessly pompous banker, thereby humanizing George; Benaderet’s Iris supplied a partner for all of Liz’s harmless, funny schemes, usually in contrivances that pitted the wives against their husbands. Even with all this backup Lucy was having trouble making the comedy work to its full potential. Oppenheimer brought in a live audience to laugh at the jokes, and that helped somewhat. Still, he felt that something else was needed. During one rehearsal he handed Lucy tickets to Jack Benny’s radio show.