Ball of Fire (27 page)

“Vinnie Myers! My eighth-grade beau! . . . I whooped, then hugged and kissed him; Desi . . . shook his hand and slapped him on the back. ‘So you’re the one I’ve been jealous of all these years!’ It was quite the highlight of the trip.”

During all this career chaos, Lucy and Desi decided to give up their ranch and move closer to town. A number of incidents precipitated their decision. First were the long hours at Desilu that strained their marriage almost to the breaking point. Then there was the sudden change of sponsorship that threatened the business. Without warning, Philip Morris announced that it would not renew its sponsorship of
I
Love Lucy.
The tobacco company had long been criticized for sponsoring a family program, and this was its response. Never before had a sponsor walked away from a top-rated show. In time General Foods was persuaded to fill the gap—after all,
I Love Lucy
was still number one, with an audience of millions. But the mini-crisis precipitated by Philip Morris demonstrated that nothing in television could be taken for granted, especially the promises of businessmen. And then there was a rumor that someone was out to kidnap their children. Police came up with nothing. The gossip may have been started by a crank or a prankster, but the Arnazes were unwilling to take a chance. Indeed, the threat underlined feelings they had left unexpressed for too long. Over the past several years developers had built hundreds upon hundreds of new houses in the San Fernando Valley, bringing in strangers, changing the character of the neighborhood, and making longtime residents feel crowded and vulnerable in ways they had never anticipated. Finally, there were the stories in the likes of
Whisper
magazine and
Hollywood Confidential.

In another time Desi’s infidelities would have been labeled “bimbo eruptions” and dealt with by adroit publicists. Here they were called an outrage, detailed in scandal sheets, and denied by no one. One article stated that Desi had “sprinkled his affections all over Los Angeles for a number of years.” It went on to say that “quite a bit” of money had been bestowed on “vice dollies who were paid handsomely for loving Desi briefly but, presumably, as effectively as Lucy.” According to the publication, Arnaz had spent time with a prostitute at the Beverly Hills Hotel and shared her with an unnamed male relative because a man, married or single, “should have as many girls as he has hair on the head.” Desi’s tomcat proclivities had never been a secret to Lucy. (“I was always giving Desi a second chance, third chance, fourth chance, hundredth chance,” she was to recall.) This time, however, the secret was out in the open for all to read, and his denial—“a lot of baloney”— was as implausible as it was loud. The Arnazes had fights, some of them physical ones in which Desi was hit with a hammer and bopped with a bottle, and all of them bitter. A split was considered and rejected; there was too much at stake at Desilu and there were too many employees to put at risk.

But externally at least, conditions had to change. Lucy began to house-hunt in Beverly Hills, close to the action. As a real estate agent showed her around, Lucy’s eye was caught by a large white Williamsburg-style house at 1000 North Roxbury Drive, next door to Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone. The agent looked up the property. It was not on the market. No matter, Lucy decided. She rang the front doorbell and was instantly recognized by the owner, a Mrs. Bang. Lucy complimented the older woman on the place and made an offer then and there: $75,000. It happened that the Bangs had recently lost their son, and the once-happy home had turned into a storehouse of melancholy souvenirs. They were willing to sell—at a price $10,000 higher than Lucy’s initial offer. Fine with me, said the buyer, mentally eliminating the agent’s fee. Mrs. Bang and Mrs. Arnaz made a handshake deal on the spot; then Lucy drove home and presented Desi with the details. He accepted the deal without question. The couple peddled their house in the Valley to the aging former child star Jane Withers, and headed for the Hills.

In doing so they tried to find their bearings in an industry—and a society—that was redefining itself by the day. Nineteen fifty-six was one of those pivotal years that can only be understood in retrospect. Two hundred thousand Soviet troops and tanks crushed a Hungarian rebellion, and Premier Nikita Khruschev of the U.S.S.R. told Western ambassadors, “History is on our side. We will bury you!” newly alarming the Pentagon. As if to answer Khruschev, that year the Dow Jones Industrial Average marked a new high of 500 points, the Gross National Product reached a new high of $434 billion, and unemployment dipped to 4.2 percent. No one could be sure whether the Cold War would heat up again. The Korean War had ended in a truce in 1953. But what if fighting broke out in Western Europe? Would U.S. soldiers go forth in another battle? Was this to be a century of total war? Schoolchildren underwent air-raid drills, and their parents tossed in their beds at night, wondering about the country, about their jobs, and most of all about the Bomb. Many of them spent what they earned—what was the point of saving for tomorrows they might not be alive to see?

Lucy and Desi were no different from their countrymen, only richer and more unhappy with each other than most husbands and wives. They spent what they had, too.

Desi acquired additional acres in Palm Springs, facing the green swaths of the Thunderbird Country Club. No one had bothered to tell him that in addition to being one of the most beautiful clubs in the state, the Thunderbird was also one of the most biased. It did not admit Jews, Negroes, or Latinos. Desi may have been a celebrity of means, but he was barred from membership. In response he began construction on a luxury motel nearby. “We won’t discriminate against Gentiles, Jews, or Cubans,” he proudly informed reporters. (By the time all the additions were made he would spend close to $1 million on his forty-two-room hostelry—a price that worked out to $24,000 per rental unit.)

Lucy was no less manic and extravagant: “I ordered new contemporary living room and bedroom suites from—where else—Jamestown, New York. The order was flown to Los Angeles in a special chartered plane.” For the front hallway of her new home she chose a Japanese silk print that went for $90 a roll. Only after the wall covering was up did she notice the flaw: shadowy birds were a subtle part of its design. Lucy’s neurotic dread of feathered things, present since the death of her father four decades before, reasserted itself. There was a brief, unpleasant scene and the silk print came down. And then, for the sake of appearances, and for her own stability, life resumed, as if nothing untoward had happened.

When everything was finally installed to their liking, Lucy and Desi moved out of the Beverly Hills Hotel and prepared to take up residence at 1000 North Roxbury. Lucie, Desi IV, and DeDe, Lucy’s devoted mother, stood by beaming as Desi ceremoniously carried his wife across the threshold. Then there was a collective gasp. During the night, some water pipes in the eighteen-year-old house had burst. The thick white wall-to-wall carpet, Lucy recalled, was a stained, sodden mess and the newly plastered walls were disintegrating. “Desi really flipped. As the children huddled against me in terror, he ranted, raged, stormed, kicked the walls, and then began tearing them down with his bare hands.” DeDe gathered the children and took them outside: “Come, dears, your father is rehearsing.”

The leakage was stopped, the carpet replaced, the stains removed. Insurance covered a lot of the damage and the Arnazes made up the rest. It was only money, after all, and money was not the cause of Desi’s flare-up. Nor were the scandal sheets; he had too hard a carapace to be distracted by gossip. What pushed him to the edge was worry about the future—if indeed there was to be a future—and overwork at the office. In addition to
I Love Lucy,
Desilu owned and supervised half a dozen television shows. The Western series
Wyatt Earp
and the hillbilly comedy
The Real McCoys
were filmed on the studio lots; so were
December Bride
and the Danny Thomas, Eve Arden, and Red Skelton shows. Not so long before, Desilu had had a total of seven employees. Now it was a preeminent symbol of the American dream, with more than a thousand people on the payroll. Desi tried to keep on playing the part of
patrón,
a father figure who knew the name and needs of every man and woman at Desilu, but these days it was impossible. Success had taken away his favorite role. And then there was his self-image, something he rarely spoke about. As a producer, as the husband (and straight man) of a great television personality, Desi had been accepted rather than embraced by the Hollywood establishment. He sensed the difference: in the end they were Anglos and he was a Latino. There was no getting around it; his accent was a permanent reminder of his outsider status, a status, ironically, that made him a demigod in the barrios with which he had long ago lost touch.

In
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,
Oscar Hijuelos’s luminous novel of expatriate Cuban life, Desi and Lucy drop into a New York nightclub. The narrator speaks of a fictive evening when, chatting with the expatriate Cuban musicians, Desi seemed
all business, with the fatigue of responsibility showing on his face. Or perhaps he had an air of weariness and exhaustion about him that reminded Cesar and Nestor of their father, Don Pedro, down in Cuba. Perhaps he had sadly yawned and said, “Me siento cansado y tengo hambra”—“I am tired and hungry.” Whatever happened, he and his wife accompanied the brothers uptown to the house on La Salle Street.

From that visit comes an invitation for the musicians to make a guest appearance on
I Love Lucy.
It is the zenith of their lives—the greatest Cuban of their time bestowing a favor they can never pay back. Desi’s affect and the powerful iconography of his program are so strong that years later the nephew of one musician has a dream of his uncle’s funeral, the deceased’s
heart swelling to the size of the satin heart on the I Love Lucy show, and floating free from his chest over the rooftops of La Salle. . . . the organist starts to play, except, out of each key, instead of pipe-organ music, instead of Bach, what sounds is a mambo trumpet, a piano chord, a conga, and suddenly it’s as if there’s a whole mambo band in the choir stall, and so when I look, there is a full-blown mambo orchestra straight out of 1952 playing a languid bolero, and yet I can hear the oceanic scratching, the way you do with old records. Then the place is very sad, as they start carrying out the coffin, and once it’s outside, another satin heart escapes, rising out of the wood, and goes higher and higher, expanding as it reaches toward the sky, floating away, behind the other.

In Hollywood, the place where those symbols had been manufactured, Desi was not so highly regarded. Every day new demands were made on his already jammed schedule, and at the same time his support system began to give way. After the 1956 season two faces would vanish from the Desilu crowd, and they were among the most important of all. First, NBC made Jess Oppenheimer an offer he could hardly wait to accept; after the years of wrangling with Desi he was leaving to develop new shows for the network. At the farewell party, Desi tried to put a good face on the defection: “We’re not losing a producer, we’re gaining a parking space.” But he and everyone else knew what industry watchers were predicting:
I Love Lucy
could not run without its mainspring. Oppenheimer retained a percentage of the show, so he had mixed feelings about it now that he was going. As Bob Schiller put it, “He was hoping that
Lucy
would fall on its ass, and yet he stood to make a lot of money if it didn’t.” Karl Freund was also calling it quits; the old pro had worked longer and harder than he had ever expected to, and this seemed the right time to say farewell. More dire predictions were heard around Hollywood.

With the stalwarts gone or going, the average age of the Desilu employees was thirty-two, and Desi had trouble remembering all their names. He continued to do his gung ho act at company picnics and trips to Disneyland, but there was something sad about his bonhomie, something that seemed to suggest another farewell in the offing.

It was time to clear the air with Lucy, to speak about their marriage and their future. “We have two alternatives,” Desi told her. “Now that we have two wonderful children, after waiting all these years, it’d be a shame not to be able to spend more time with them, enjoy watching them grow. Desi will be two and a half and Lucie four this summer. We could teach them to fish, ride a horse, and I could take all of you to Cuba to meet your thousands of relatives. What do you think?”

“You said we had two alternatives. What is the other one?”

To stay as they were, in Desi’s view, was to drown. Therefore, if he and Lucy were not to get out they had to grow. They had won awards, made money, achieved national recognition. Yet he could not let go of the idea that the town still considered him a pushy Cuban, a bonito swimming with the sharks. In
A Book,
his candid memoir, Desi recalls his feelings, summarized in a warning to Lucy: “Unfortunately there is no such thing as a nice little company surviving anymore. You don’t see many individually owned grocery stores or the little drugstore on the corner. They’re all gone. Big Fish eats them all up.”

Lucy’s rhetorical question said it all: “How do you quit a number-one show?”

There was more to her decision than staying at the top of the heap. To retire meant that she and Desi would be forced to share each other’s company day in and day out, month in and month out. Something of the fantasist lingered in Lucy; on rare occasions she caught herself wishing for an intimate and comfortable middle age with her husband, shuttling casually between Palm Springs and Los Angeles, visiting Europe when the spirit moved them, watching the children grow and learn. But the realist in her knew better than to batten on a dream. “I still preferred to spend my weekends resting, playing cards, and sitting on the floor with the kids,” she was to write. Sad to say, Desi was “too keyed up and restless for such pleasures.” Typically, after the last business was completed on Friday night, chauffeurs drove the Arnazes home in a limousine and station wagon. Once Lucy and the children were settled in, Desi would take off. “It was go, go, go, all the time,” she added resentfully, “to the golf links, to his new motel, the gambling tables, or his yacht.”