Ball of Fire (28 page)

Yet she could often be enough of an irritant to drive her husband away. The script man Maury Thompson recounted Lucy’s aggressive behavior off the set: “She loves to hurt a man. She’s kicked Desi in the nuts several times. Just bowled him over. She laughed about it. If he’s stooped over, she’ll kick him in the butt, and she’ll aim low and she’ll hit him right in the balls.” On another occasion, Desi insisted on remaining at the country club to watch the Kentucky Derby. Lucy wanted to go home, and when he refused she got in a golf cart and furiously drove off. Thompson happened to be there that day as well, and she took him home to look after the children. He, Lucie, and Desi IV were in the swimming pool when Lucy joined them. “You’re the only one in the world I would ever show myself to in a swimming suit,” she told the guest. “Well, you look marvelous,” Thompson responded. “And she did. She was tight, thin, no stomach, long legs, just freckles on her legs. She got in the water, and she swam the breaststroke, always keeping her head above water. I treasure that moment. Because she was thoroughly relaxed and enjoying it. Then Desi got home, and she got mad again. There were only those few moments that there was no one to worry about.”

As the year drew on, Desi found it impossible to play the genial Latino around the office. His smile turned into an unconvincing rictus, and casual conversations took on a metallic edge. The higher he rose, the greater became his fear of falling. “Failure is the most terrible thing in our business,” he observed. “When we fail, the whole world knows it. When a Fuller Brush man fails, does the whole world know it? That’s why we break our ass not to.” Assurances from Lucy were not enough to put him at ease anymore. He lost his temper at home, often over trivial matters. “He stopped discussing any of our personal problems,” she was to say. “I had to dig and dig to discover what caused his rages, and generally it had nothing to do with anything I’d done. I wanted to help him, find out where I was at fault. But as soon as I started questioning, he’d stalk angrily out of the room. Or the house.”

Edgy and unwell, Desi consulted his physician. What Dr. Marcus Rabwin learned could hardly have been a surprise. The patient’s colon was full of diverticula, inflamed by continuous mental pressure and tension. Untreated or exacerbated, this was the kind of ailment that could kill. The doctor advised Desi to rent a house on the beach and get away from the studio the minute he finished filming. “Have somebody drive you to the beach and stay there until Monday morning,” he prescribed. “Have Lucy and the children join you there for Saturday and Sunday and don’t even think about the business. During the summer take six or eight weeks off, and even if they offer you the entire CBS network to come back to work during those weeks, tell them to stick it.”

Looking back, Desi agreed that this was “wonderful advice and it helped a lot, at least for a while.” A very short while. Then other panaceas took over: booze, women, and intense labor. You had to work pretty goddamn hard if you were going to be a Big Fish.

CHAPTER
TEN

“Why can’t I
be happy?”

MORE THAN one industrialist has acquired a movie studio in the hopes of diversifying his holdings and maybe meeting a few starlets along the way. Almost all have unloaded the investment within a few years, victimized by circumstance, bad timing, and the Hollywood operators who always manage to fleece “civilians”—their pejorative term for those outside of show business.

Howard Hughes was just such a civilian, entering major motion picture production with the purchase of RKO in 1948. At first he enjoyed the glamour; columnists coupled his name with actresses including Linda Darnell, Yvonne De Carlo, Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, and Terry Moore (who later claimed to have been secretly married to him). His reputation for eccentricity took another leap when he paid particular attention to Jane Russell’s
poitrine
during filming of
The Outlaw.
Noticing that the leading lady’s lavish bust rose and sagged unpredictably, he asked for a drawing board and a pencil. “This is really just a very simple engineering problem,” he told a designer. He sketched a brassiere that would stabilize the focal points of the picture and saw to it that it was manufactured and worn. Extensively hyped, the Western made Russell a star, and established the name of Hughes in Hollywood. Unfortunately for him, the rest of RKO’s movies could not be treated as engineering problems; what followed
The Outlaw
was a string of undistinguished failures.

By 1955 Hughes wanted out. He sold the studio to the General Tire & Rubber Company; that company had no more luck than he did, and two years later it put RKO on the block. General Tire’s intention was to take a loss, offsetting capital gains for the past fiscal year. For $6.5 million a buyer would get all assets of properties in Los Angeles and Culver City, including sets and office equipment. “Everything,” said the company representative when he waved the offer before Desi, “except unproduced scripts and stories and unfinished films.”

The sum was more than Desilu had, and perhaps more than it could borrow. Before Desi dismissed the idea out of hand, however, he called the Great Eccentric himself and told him about the prospective sale of his old studio’s properties.

“What do they want for them?” barked Howard Hughes.

Desi gave him the details.

“Grab it! Even if you tear them down and make them into parking lots, you’ve gotta make money.”

Hughes’s argument not only convinced Desi, it persuaded a lender; the Bank of America advanced $2 million after he negotiated the selling price down to $6.15 million. One key individual had been deliberately shut out of the bargaining—Lucy. Leery of her reaction, Desi asked his chief financial officer, Edwin E. Holly, to break the news. According to Holly, Desi “wasn’t going to go out and tell Lucy she was going to have to mortgage the house, the kids, and everything else. This was, in effect, putting everything they and the company had on the line.” Holly approached the
I Love Lucy
set with trepidation, keeping out of the star’s way while she filmed a scene with Vivian Vance. When the two women took a break he hustled Lucy into her dressing room, briskly went through highlights of the RKO acquisition, and waited for the explosion. “Is this your recommendation?” was her sole question. Holly nodded. “Then go do it,” Lucy told him. He responded with a mix of awe and dismay. Lucy “walked out of the dressing room right onstage with Vivian—she had just made the biggest decision she’d ever make in her lifetime from a business standpoint, and went right back into the routine they had been doing.”

To a degree, she was protecting herself. It was true that
I Love Lucy
was an autocracy. Desi liked to tell the writers that whenever there was a disagreement about stories or gags, there would be a simple vote: “We’ll do it democratically. Lucy wins.” To underline her value, when she tripped and fell over a cable, he ran over, ostentatiously helped her up, and said to the room, “Amigos, anything happens to her, we’re all in the shrimp business.”

Yet much of this deference was for display, and Lucy knew it. As Desilu’s vice president she had become little more than an ornament. Desi and his executives bought and developed the television programs going out under the company name; they were the ones who met the payroll and ran the day-to-day operations. It was an arrangement Lucy could live with; as an administrator Desi still had her full faith and credit. It was only as a husband that he had crucially diminished his wife’s trust.

For the 1956–1957 season, Lucy rubber-stamped a decision to relocate the Ricardos and the Mertzes. The quartet moved from New York City to suburban Connecticut in order to refresh the series and give the writers new plot lines, and Ricky moved up in his professional world—he was now the owner of his own nightclub, the Babalu.

The changes could be effective; a classic episode, “Lucy Does the Tango,” was produced during this period. The two couples decide to earn money by raising chickens in their backyards. When the hens fail to produce, Ricky threatens to sell the house and move back to the city. But now Lucy and Ethel have fallen in love with country life; retreat is unthinkable. To foil Desi they buy dozens of eggs, conceal them in their clothing, and proceed to the chicken house, where they plan to stuff the nests. Before they can get to their destination, however, Desi interrupts them. He needs Lucy right now, to go over a tango for an upcoming PTA fund-raiser. Lucy and Vivian deliberately rehearsed without eggs, and their reactions at show time were authentic and explosively funny. Indeed, the dodging and writhing, and the final crunching of eggs in her costume, brought Lucy a sustained sixty-fivesecond laugh—the longest of her career. “No matter what we wrote for the scene with the eggs,” recalled Robert Schiller, “Lucille did it better than we could have imagined it.” His partner Robert Weiskopf added: “And that bit where Frawley opens the door and hits Viv in the ass, cracking the eggs, was the topper.”

As usual, Desi struggled to maintain his composure when scenes like that were under way. Several weeks later—and for very different reasons—his façade broke down when he was one of the hosts at the Ninth Annual Emmy Awards. “Usually Arnaz, despite personal problems, was completely professional,” recalls Geoffrey Mark Fidelman in
The Lucy Book.
This evening, however, Desi’s manner was “forced and overdone.” It was the only time in Desi’s career when his drinking was detectable onscreen. Formally attired, sweating profusely, he kept telling bad jokes to an unresponsive audience, and weaving in and out of focus, flummoxing the cameramen.

During this period, no one knew which Arnaz would appear on the set or in the office, the high Desi and or the low one, the gregarious glad-hander or the irresponsible alcoholic, the great straight man or the distracted executive, the affectionate family man or the driven womanizer. Yet throughout it all, he remained one of the best talent scouts and developers in the business. One evening, as he and Lucy idly watched bandleader Horace Heidt on his NBC show, a five-year-old percussionist debuted. Billed as “the World’s Tiniest Drummer,” Keith Thibodeaux possessed stage presence, musical ability, and that great desideratum, a fleeting resemblance to Desi IV. Within days Desi Sr. signed the child and hired Keith’s father as a Desilu publicist, thereby assuring his loyalty. Under the name Richard Keith, the little musician appeared on
I Love Lucy
in the part of Little Ricky. The cast welcomed him aboard—with the exception of Frawley, who did his customary curmudgeon act. As the boy amused himself by drawing on a scratch pad during breaks, someone asked, “Richard, what are you doing?” From the sidelines, Frawley grumbled, “He’s writing me out.” To the Cuban community, as to many other Latinos, Thibodeaux actually served to widen the cultural separation between father and son. In
Life on the Hyphen,
a study of Hispanic-Americana, Gustavo Pérez Firmat observes: “[Little Ricky’s] appearances in the show make clear that, his father’s bedtime stories notwithstanding, the cultural identity is
papi
’s alone. Little Ricky couldn’t speak accented English even if he tried. There is a healthy continuity between father and son, but there is also a healthy distance. When Ricky gets old enough to play an instrument, he follows in his father’s steps by choosing drums. But instead of the Afro-Cuban
tumbadora,
little Ricky plays the American trap drums.”

Offscreen, young Thibodeaux played another kind of role as he quickly became absorbed into the Arnaz family. “It was as if we had three children instead of two,” Desi wrote proudly. The truth was not quite so benign. Although Keith was two years older than Desi IV, the boys did become fast friends, and under Desi’s tutelage they learned how to swim, fish, and ride horses. From the outside, it seemed an idyll—a little boy turned into a TV star, and enjoying the benefits of two happy families. In reality, Keith’s father and mother later divorced, and the elder Thibodeaux married a Desilu secretary. Chez Arnaz, Keith remembered, “Desi was a really great guy when he wasn’t drinking.” Unhappily, those occasions grew more infrequent as the seasons went by: “As kids, we’d definitely stay away from him when he was drunk.” One evening when Keith was sleeping over, the boys were awakened by a ruckus outside the bedroom. Desi had heard that his son’s tutor had called Desi IV “spoiled” and later, Keith recalled, “caught the guy talking to a girl in the living room and just beat him badly. Desi IV and I hid in the maid’s quarters.”

Marcella Rabwin, wife of Dr. Marcus Rabwin, Desi’s physician, recollected the Low Desi. When he imbibed heavily, “there wasn’t a personality change, but an intensification of all the worst things about him—the swearing got much worse. His language was always offensive. He used the worst language I’ve ever heard. It would get even worse when he got drunk. But it took a lot of liquor to make him drunk—he drank all evening long.”

At the same time, the High Desi operated his business with an amalgam of luck, instinct, and acuity. It was he who saw dollar signs upon reading
The Untouchables
by retired G-man Eliot Ness, leader of the group that nailed Al Capone. Warner Brothers had taken an option on the book, but never got around to developing it. Desi ordered his legal department to stay on the qui vive: the day Warner dropped its option they were to grab the project for Desilu. Warner let the contract lapse, and Desilu acquired
The Untouchables.
Desi assigned a writer, Paul Monash, bounced the first draft, got the cops-and-robbers scenario he wanted, and made plans for a two-part series bankrolled at a half-million dollars. His top executives were against this extravagance, but the matter was settled with a Lucy-style vote: the opposition made their case and Desi overruled them.

There were more obstacles. Desi’s childhood friend, Sonny Capone, called when he learned of the undertaking. “Why you? Why did you have to do it?” he demanded. Desi gave his standard rationale: “If I don’t do it somebody else is going to do it, and maybe it’s better that I’m going to do it.” Sonny replied with a million-dollar nuisance lawsuit claiming defamation of character.

And that was the least of the worries. Desi entertained a brief fantasy about playing Eliot Ness himself, but his first serious choice of leading man was Van Heflin. When that actor turned it down, Desi went to another Van, Johnson, who readily agreed to do the pilot film for $10,000. Desilu proceeded with arrangements, ordering sets to be built, contracting for cameras, crews, and the requisite technicians. Less than forty-eight hours before the shooting was to begin, Evie Johnson phoned. Speaking in the dual role of Van’s wife and his manager, she demanded a 100 percent salary increase. After all, Evie reminded Desi,
The Untouchables
program was going to be in two parts. Upon reflection she’d decided the right price would be $10,000 per episode.

“It was Saturday night,” Desi rancorously noted. On Monday morning the first scene to be filmed “was the one in which Eliot Ness took a truck, busted into a brewery with his men, and proceeded to tear it apart. We had about 150 union people—and you can’t cancel a call on a weekend.

“Evie knew this, so she was putting a gun in my back. ‘Either give him $20,000,’ she said, ‘or he won’t be there Monday morning.’ ”

Desi slammed down the phone and called his chief of production. The advice: pay the $20,000. “It’s going to cost you $150,000 if you don’t shoot on Monday.”

“Maybe it will,” replied the boss, “but I am not going to kiss this lady’s ass.” So saying, Desi began to comb through the Academy Directory. He settled on the name and image of Robert Stack. The former juvenile lead was best known for having given Deanna Durbin her first kiss more than ten years before; nevertheless, at that moment Desi professed to see in him an “Alan Ladd kind of quality and the same even-toned performance.” Operating on adrenaline and coffee, he tracked the actor down at Chasen’s on Saturday night, made an offer via phone: $10,000 for the two-part
Untouchables,
with a guarantee of $7,500 per episode plus 15 percent of the profits if the show became a weekly series. By the time Stack got home, a script was waiting for him. He read it and before dawn agreed to the conditions without a written contract—Desi’s word was good enough.