Ball of Fire (21 page)

Uncertain of just how the show would play, Desi tested “The Diet” in a movie theater in Riverside in Orange County, some forty miles from Los Angeles. There the episode provoked laughter so loud that it sometimes drowned out the dialogue. The theater reception did much to boost studio morale, but the second episode to be shot, “The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub,” was judged to be technically superior. It was the first “I Love Lucy” to reach the general public.

On October 15, 1951, 9 p.m. EST,
I Love Lucy
debuted on CBS, running against the highly rated dramatic program
Lights Out
on NBC, featuring such players as Boris Karloff, Billie Burke, and Yvonne De Carlo.
Curtain Up,
another dramatic series, ran on ABC, while the smaller Dumont network featured professional wrestling. Comedy was thought to play best at an earlier hour, and conventional wisdom held this to be another strike against Desilu.

Earlier in the day the cast had been working through the script for the seventh Lucy episode, “The Séance.” Its plot centered around Lucy and Ethel’s obsession with the occult, and their belief that Desi’s career depends on the stars. This is the day, predicts his horoscope, when he must answer “Yes” to every question. As the bandleader follows their instructions he is led deeper and deeper into comic catastrophe. The premise was weak, and required a great deal of rewriting, and the cast and writers became so intensely involved that they nearly forgot to watch the first episode. The Desliu studio was loaded with fancy technical equipment, but no one had thought to supply the place with a television set. It was thirty miles to the ranch; the Arnazes would have to break the speed limit to get there in time. Marc Daniels intervened. He invited everyone to his house in nearby Laurel Canyon. There was still time for a quick bite, the director reminded them. No one expressed any appetite for dinner.

One actor was missing from the company. William Frawley, blasé as always, had opted to go home and listen to the heavyweight fights on radio. The other principals watched intensely, without cracking a smile. The only sound of amusement came from Vance’s husband, Philip Ober. It was a mark of their deteriorating marriage that his loud, flat cackle seemed to annoy rather than please her. Lucy found him irritating as well: “He was a terrible man. Loved to embarrass her. He was nuts and he made her nuts. She was seeing all these shrinks. God, it was a mess. I told her to get rid of the guy, but if Vivian was one thing, it was loyal.” As the show rolled on, the viewers at Daniels’s house looked at each other in acute distress. An echo issued from the TV speaker, mangling the dialogue. Each CBS station had worked out a failsafe procedure: a 16mm backup print ran in synchronization with the pristine 35mm one. If anything went wrong, the station would simply make a switch. For reasons unknown, the Los Angeles outlet had inadvertently gone to the 16mm version while the preferred one was playing. To Oppenheimer, “with both sound tracks going at the same time, one playing three or four sprockets ahead of the other, the dialogue sounded as if it were being played over the public address system of Yankee stadium.”

Hysterical inquiries ensued. Desi and Lucy learned to their relief, and everyone else’s, that technical problems had occurred only on that one local station. Yet the next day, even though the 35mm print rolled without a hitch across the country, not all were pleased with what they saw. Perhaps the most discontented was the president of Philip Morris, one O. Parker McComas. After viewing the initial I Love Lucy he called the Biow agency to ask how much it would cost to cancel the show. The cigarette commercials came across well, he conceded, but as for the episode itself—in his view it was “unfunny, silly and totally boring.” The advertising executives asked him to reconsider. At least wait for next week’s show, they pleaded. McComas grudgingly told them he would go along, warning them that he spoke from experience. They were only putting off the inevitable.

CHAPTER
EIGHT

“Lucy Is
Enceinte”

THE NEXT morning the New York Times weighed in with some encouraging words:
“I
Love Lucy
has the promise of providing a refreshing half-hour of video entertainment.” Not all was well; the paper went on to pan the “poor second act” and to warn that Lucy’s farcical situations might easily get out of hand.
Variety,
like many another paper, preferred the on-camera personnel to their gags: “As storyline comedies go it is the better part of appreciation not to ask yourself too many questions and just go along with what transpires on your screen.”

By and large the viewers did exactly that, in increasing numbers as the weeks went on. By then the characters were firmly established, and Lucy and Ricky had worked out their marital and ethnic relationships. In “Be a Pal,” the third show to be broadcast, Lucy fears that the honeymoon is over and that Ricky is losing interest in her. Even when she gets herself up in alluring outfits, he pays no attention. She takes Ethel into her confidence, and the landlady theorizes that the Latino is out of his element in New York. “Surround him with things that remind him of his childhood.” In the next scene Lucy has filled the apartment with Latin American items, including two peons dressed in serapes and sombreros, plus a donkey and some fake palm trees. Lucy costumes herself in a hat full of fruit à la Carmen Miranda, and sings Miranda’s signature number, “
Mamae
Eu Quero.
” As she sings, five children appear—a reminder that Ricardo grew up in a large family. The bewildered Ricky demands to know what all this is about. Lucy explains, “I thought you were getting tired of me and if I reminded you of Cuba you might like me better.” His response sets the tone for all the episodes to come: “Lucy, honey, if I wanted things Cuban I’d have stayed in Havana. That’s the reason I married you, ’cause you’re so different from everyone I’d known before.” It was an endearing and valuable speech, but not so valuable as the time in which it was articulated.

For CBS had given Desilu the greatest gift of all: Monday nights. On television, Tuesdays were dominated by Milton Berle, “Uncle Milty” to the millions who watched his famously gross comic movements. Manic, tasteless, unsubtle, irrepressible, Berle was fond of appearing in drag, heavily lipsticked and girdled, or playing a grand piano until fireworks shot out from the instrument, or interfering with guest performers and unsettling the singers and dancers. Most viewers had never been exposed to the Borscht Belt from which Berle originated and thought of him as an exotic. They made his show number one throughout the country. Wednesdays belonged to
Your Show of
Shows,
a variety program starring Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, and Carl Reiner in brilliant freewheeling skits that parodied foreign films, sent up domestic crises, and regarded all human misbehavior as fair game. Mondays from 8 to 9 p.m. EST were the property of
Arthur Godfrey’s
Talent Scouts.
The show had been a hit on radio and transferred easily to TV, hosted by an easygoing freckle-faced redhead. (It would take years for audiences to realize that Godfrey’s folksy manner hid an imperious and deeply self-involved personality.) Allegedly,
Talent
Scouts
featured amateur performers looking for a show-business break. Actually, most of them were professionals on their way up. But this deception served the audience well; the level of performance was high, and the host was wise enough to let more talented people consume a goodly portion of time and space.
Talent Scouts
provided
Lucy
with the ideal lead-in. There were no remotes in 1951; in order to change the channel it was necessary to get out of the easy chair or couch, walk to the set, and turn a knob. Out of a mixture of indolence and curiosity the viewers stayed put as Godfrey’s show gently led them to
I Love
Lucy.
Once they got a glimpse of the Ricardos and their comic problems, they stayed to see how things worked out.

As the show established itself, Jess Oppenheimer discovered just how different Lucy and Desi were as performers and as individuals. Desi was painfully aware that CBS regarded him, in the words of one executive, as the Cuban caboose on Lucy’s Twentieth Century train. He worked overtime to show that he was an intelligent, focused player as well as a responsible leader. Thus, on Monday mornings when the cast assembled to look over the new script, Desi made sure to absorb the material as soon as he read it, and he always delivered a solid reading the first time through. In contrast, Lucy needed many rehearsals to get the comedy right. Wrote Oppenheimer: “Lucy didn’t know what she was doing—at the first reading. But after stumbling through, she would take the material to the mat. She fought with it, examined it, internalized it, and when it reappeared, she
owned
it.” Those efforts came at a price. Lucy was querulous and demanding on the set, hardest of all on her fellow performers. The star’s makeup man, Hal King, was appalled when Lucy “went over to Vivian Vance and pulled off Vivian’s false eyelashes. Lucy said, ‘Nobody wears false eyelashes on this show but
me.
’ ” In the beginning, before they got to know each other, recalled script clerk Maury Thompson, “Lucille gave Vivian a hard time. I mean a
really
hard time. One day I pulled Viv aside and I said, ‘What are you going to do about her?’ Vivian was very smart. She said, ‘Maury, if by any chance this thing actually becomes a hit and goes anywhere, I’m gonna learn to love that bitch.’ ”

Desi tried to adjust his schedule to Lucy’s, but that proved impossible. As the weeks went on he was forced to split his time between acting and making decisions for Desilu, leaving the set to sign papers or participate in meetings. As he prepared to depart Lucy would invariably beseech him, “But Desi, we need the rehearsal!” His answer remained the same: “What are you talking about? We know the words.” In Oppenheimer’s view, Desi “never could quite understand what was going on inside of Lucy’s head”—a disability apparent to anyone who knew the Arnazes’ calendar. With all of the efforts to create a nuclear family, Lucy spent much of the week alone with the baby, while Desi went to his thirty-eight-foot power cruiser
Desilu
and joined the roistering buddies who had been banished from the ranch. The growing popularity of
I Love Lucy
seemed to push the couple apart even as it increased their influence. “Lucy needed to be dominated,” Oppenheimer observed, “and Desi wasn’t happy in a relationship where his wife had a more powerful reputation than he did. He was deeply hurt by all the publicity that said that the success of the show was entirely due to her artistry.”

The fact is, though, that it was
mainly
due to Lucy. As the producer himself admitted, “Remove any other actor from the project and it would be diminished. Take away Lucille Ball, and it would be demolished.” All the upstate eccentrics Lucy had known in Jamestown and Celoron, all the society ladies she had observed in the months she had modeled for Hattie Carnegie, all the timing she had picked up from her stage work, all the tricks she had learned from the film farces and dramas, from radio shows, from Damon Runyon, Buster Keaton, and Jack Benny, were used to forge the character of Lucy Ricardo. The writers created the situations, and Lucy embodied them. If she schemed to get around Ricky and he discovered the plot, she spoke the lie but expressed the truth in fluent body language. No comic situation fazed her or appeared too extreme for her abilities. In the first series she does variety turns, sings, gets herself twisted during a ballet sequence, and, most memorably, auditions for the part of television saleswoman, extolling the benefits of Vitameatavegamin, a tonic whose principal ingredient is grain alcohol. Sampling a spoonful or two with each take, she is soon unable to stand up straight, but not too sloshed to keep pitching the product. Lucy later said, “While this may not be my favorite episode per se, I think that Vitameatavegamin bit is the best thing I ever did.” It was unquestionably the funniest; even Desi had to chew the inside of his cheeks to keep from laughing while she performed.

In other situation comedies (most of them employing a single camera), scenes with the same backdrop were filmed together, often out of sequence, over a three-day period. If someone came up with a new idea it was impossible to rework the script—too many key exchanges of dialogue had already been shot.
I Love Lucy
was different. Its complicated three-camera work allowed each episode to be filmed in sequence at the end of the week. The delay allowed the writers, and the star herself, to incorporate bits that had occurred to them during the week. Lucy took advantage of the flexibility, sometimes at high, if hilarious, cost. Two sequences illustrate the consequences of the program’s extempore farce. For a candy-dipping sequence, Desi hired the real thing after he saw Amanda Milligan working at the farmers’ market on Fairfax Avenue. He thought the professional’s deadpan movements would make her an ideal straight lady for Lucy’s antics, and he hired Miss Milligan on the spot. As Lucy remembered it, “The only thing that this woman ever did her whole life was dip candy. I don’t think she ever watched television, and she didn’t have the faintest idea who the hell I was. We explained the scene to her a couple of times, and she thought we were all crazy. She never cracked a smile once. We began to think, ‘Is this funny or isn’t it?’ ” They rehearsed the sequence several times without chocolate in their hands, miming the movements. Lucy hit Amanda, but Amanda just tapped her in return. “She wouldn’t give me the whack I needed to get the laugh. We hoped for the best when we filmed. We started the scene, and there was Amanda dipping the chocolate the way she had for the last thirty years. Well, it came time for me to hit her, which I did, and then for her to hit me, which she did! Bam! She gave me such a shot. I thought she had broken my nose. I almost called for a cut, and then I thought, no, we’d have to do it again, so I kept on going. But Lord, she really did bust me in the face. After the show, I said, ‘Boy you really did hit me,’ and she looked at me deadpan as ever and said, ‘That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’ ”

Similarly, in the spirit of Sid Caesar and company,
I Love Lucy
did a parody of
neorealismo
Italian movies. In the episode Lucy is recruited by a foreign director, who intends her for the part of an American tourist. She mistakenly believes he wants to feature her as a grape stomper, producing juice for wine. By the early 1950s most California wineries were mechanized, but there were a few holdouts, and Desi managed to find one of the last remaining stompers. Her name was Teresa and she had no English, so a translator was brought on the set to convey the director’s wishes. The amateur seemed to understand. “The time came for us to get in the vat, which was full of real grapes,” Lucy remembered. “God, it was like stepping on eyeballs. We started stomping on the grapes, and I made a dance out of it, and then I slipped.” As she did, she accidentally hit Teresa, a large woman, who believed that the sock was intentional and replied in kind, bopping Lucy on the cranium. “Down I went, with Teresa on top of me. My head was supposed to pop up and then my arm and then my leg, and nothing popped up. She just held me down, hitting me. I thought she was trying to kill me. I had grapes up my nose, up my ears. She was choking me. The audience thought it was part of the show, and they were hysterical. I started banging her back to get her off of me. Finally, I gave her one good shove and threw her off and yelled ‘Cut.’ I had to catch my breath. The director came over and calmed Teresa down and then calmed me down, and said we had to continue with the fight. The translator came over and explained it all again, and I thought it was okay. As soon as he yelled ‘Action,’ the fight was on again. I thought it was my last moment on earth.”

Lucy’s willingness to turn herself inside out for a laugh was almost—but not quite—enough to make her show a phenomenon. For that, she needed an exceptional cast and a series of fortunate circumstances. The most fortunate was public knowledge that Lucy and Ricky Ricardo were husband and wife in real life. Other real-life couples made radio or TV comedy their specialty, but none offered the strong contrast of a WASP wife with a Latino husband whose excited accent ran against her chirpy, uninflected speech. In the beginning, Ricky’s botched pronunciations were mocked by other members of the troupe, but the jokes went over poorly with audiences. Soon, only Lucy was allowed to make fun of her husband, because the mockery was done with affection, especially when his malapropisms went over the top: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him a drink.” “I’ll cross that bridge when I burn it.” Added to those by-plays were little angry looks, furtive exchanges, swallowed smiles that no script-writer or director could have supplied. Moreover, Ricky Ricardo brought a touch of salsa to the bland fare of prime-time television. As a husband he was only a well-meaning greenhorn, barely able to understand (and head off) Lucy’s grandiose and loony plans. But at the Tropicana Club he was shown as an impresario, a Cuban bandleader with ambition and authority. Watching him operate in situ, viewers understood what had attracted Lucille Ball to Desi Arnaz in real life.