Ball of Fire (33 page)

To demonstrate that he harbored no hard feelings toward Lucy, Desi agreed to coproduce the United Artists movie along with Hope. The official production company was headed by writer Norman Panama and director Melvin Frank. On June 2, 1960, just before filming began, the studio hosted a luncheon for the press. The head of Desilu made an appearance, wished the project well, and planted a kiss on his ex-wife. She returned his smile to generous applause. An aura of good feeling enveloped the project. It was not to last.

On July 1, during a boating scene, Lucy lost her footing and fell hard. An ambulance whisked her to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital to be treated for disfiguring leg and facial bruises. Desi heard the news, sped to her room, and refused to leave until doctors assured him that Lucy’s injuries were not life-threatening. That evening he sent Hope a telegram: “I played straight man to her for nine years and never pushed her—why couldn’t you control yourself?” One day after Lucy’s accident, Melvin Frank broke his ankle during a golf tournament. A few weeks later, Don DeFore strained his back. Returned to work, Lucy complained about the crowded sound stage. “How do you get out of this firetrap?” she cracked. Several nights later the set went up in flames. Several more minor disasters occurred, including a hand injury to Hope. He concluded, “This film should have been shot at Cedars.” Nevertheless, disasters and all,
The Facts of Life
managed to conclude on schedule.

As soon as she shook off a case of pneumonia, Lucy headed east with Lucie and Desi IV. Whenever she appeared in public, reporters continued to ask personal questions, and she continued to resent them. A journalist who demanded to know whether she would marry again was met with a glare, a long pause, and a monosyllabic “No!” Another, who inquired whether she was happy, received a curt answer: “Not yet. I will be. I’ve been humiliated. That’s not easy for a woman.”

Yet the man who had humiliated her was also one of her bulwarks when the
Wildcat
team went looking for producers. One night, said Nash, Desi called from Los Angeles after reading the script: “ ‘I love
thees thin!
I want to produce it!’ It was all packaged and literally taken out of my hands. The final product had
nothing
to do with what my original intentions had been.”
Wildcat
had started out as the tale of a nineteen-year-old oil prospector, supported by her elder sister in a comic role. The day that director-choreographer Michael Kidd first brought up the name of Lucille Ball, Nash naturally assumed that she would play the smaller part. Desilu’s $400,000 altered conditions and forced the author back to his desk, where he made intensive rewrites, changing the focus and excising any references to age. The star playing Wildcat Jackson, a pretty oil speculator costumed in blue dungarees and bright red hair, would need a special kind of leading man. He must either be (A) famous enough to attract ticket buyers on his own, or (B) obscure enough to cede the marquee to Miss Ball. First the producers tried A, offering the role to Kirk Douglas, who was both too short and too expensive, and Gene Barry, who was committed to his hit TV series,
Bat Masterson.
Then they tried B, securing the services of a tall, good-looking song-and-dance man, Keith Andes. The actor had played opposite Marilyn Monroe in
Clash by Night,
but could hardly be considered a box office draw. Lucy, and Lucy alone, would have that distinction.

With everything bubbling along to her satisfaction, she settled into Imperial House on East Sixty-ninth Street with her son and daughter and their nanny, Willie Mae Barker. Lucy had the apartment decorated in vivid colors, California-style. She placed the children in private Catholic schools—Lucie in Marymount, Desi IV in St. David’s—and described them to the press as “happy, adjusted kids” grateful to be in New York. She went into rehearsals, “mad for everyone in the company of
Wildcat.
”

For Lucy to see the children in this light required an extraordinary amount of self-deception and denial. Of all people, the fatherless girl should have known the importance of paternal figures. She should also have known how vital it was to keep and maintain roots in a young child’s life. Instead, she thought mostly in terms of career rather than motherhood. She pulled Lucie and Desi IV along in her slipstream, scarcely considering what they might need or feel. In the ensuing months, Desi IV became the target of school bullies; neighbors could hear him in the evenings angrily banging away on his set of drums. Lucie was happier at Marymount, but described the experience of relocation as “very traumatic, leaving my friends, being ripped away from my father.” She noted: “I only remember those New York months as gray. The trees were gray, the sky was gray, the buildings were gray.”

Work on
Wildcat
had scarcely begun when Lucy read a disturbing item in
Variety.
Martin Leeds, who had been the real force behind the daily operations at Desilu, was leaving the company. However unwittingly, Lucy had a hand in this breakup. During the first weeks of her New York sojourn Desi backslid to alcoholism. Leeds had complained via phone to Lucy, who agreed, “We’ve gotta do something about it.” The “something” was a de facto takeover, with Leeds going around Desi to make corporate and financial decisions. Lucy confided as much to friends who leaked like a colander, and word got back to Desi. He telephoned Leeds one morning at three, totally inebriated, and asked why the executive had reversed a decision Desi had made earlier in the week. “Because you were wrong,” came the irritable reply. “Then,” said Desi, “you’re fired.” Nothing further needed to be said; their business relationship was finished. Leeds had helped Desilu to its glory days, but that was when he esteemed his employer. Now he regarded him, with sorrow, as an irresponsible drunk. The vice president in charge of production had four years left on his contract. He took half of his entitlement—“I could never hurt this man,” Leeds said defensively—and never looked back.

But Lucy was too far away to have much influence on the company’s future, and she was too exhausted to spend much time worrying about it. Through the long run of
I Love Lucy
she had worked a four-day week; in New York she was on her feet—learning lines, lyrics, melodies, steps—six out of seven days, and sometimes Sundays as well. The demands of rehearsal are difficult enough for young Broadway gypsies; for a newcomer nearing fifty they were nearly insuperable. Kidd felt that for all of Lucy’s inexperience and flaws, she had “an amazing ability to know what was going on onstage at all times.” Lucy failed to return the compliment. The director, she was to say, “didn’t direct me into the show, he directed the show around me.” For other actresses this might have been a flattering idea; for Lucy it was disconcerting, and for
Wildcat,
destructive.

The Philadelphia tryout was met with tepid laughter and mild applause, except when Lucy stepped out of character and reverted to the Ricardo persona: on one occasion she asked a supporting player in funny costume, “Say, do you know a fellow named Fred Mertz?” Recalled the star, “The slightest bit of
Lucy
that I would throw in would get the reaction I was looking for.” But this triumph of personality came at a cost; the show’s “through line”—its plot and drive—were leached away. Lucy blamed Nash: “Nothing that man wrote got any laughs, and I was getting desperate and Kidd didn’t tell me not to, so I did.” The out-of-town
Variety
review helped to buck up her spirits: “Miss Ball sings acceptably, dances with spirit, shines as a comedienne, and even does a couple of dramatic scenes with ease and polish.” But Philadelphia was a long way from New York and there was much work to be done on the book and score.

Still under treatment for the contusions she had received on
The
Facts of Life,
Lucy remained on antibiotics. They depleted her physical and mental energies when she needed them most. Changes had to be memorized on a nightly basis, and as if these were not complicated enough, the choreography called for her to be vigorously whirled and tossed by Andes and members of the chorus. On more than one occasion the dizzy, disoriented star held up her hand and stopped in mid-performance to let the audience know she had lost her place in the dialogue or the lyrics, and needed to begin the scene again. Ironically, the one stalwart friend she had was Desi, who journeyed to Philadelphia, watched the show, and gave advice to Kidd and Nash. The writer reluctantly allowed that Desi “had good dramatic instincts.” On Thanksgiving Desi thrilled theatergoers by going to the apron of the stage and throwing Lucy an orchid as she took her curtain call. “The least you could have done was take the pins out!” she shouted, pleased with herself for the first time in weeks.

But Desi could not memorize Lucy’s new numbers or boost her flagging energies. Each night the exhaustion seemed to be getting harder and harder to shake off, and by the time the show was deemed ready for Broadway Lucy had grown impatient with almost everyone—especially members of the press. Don Ross, a reporter for the
New York
Herald Tribune,
considered her “hard-boiled” when the unsmiling actress showed up for his interview at the 1918 Restaurant on Chestnut Street. Under her mink coat Lucy wore a black jacket and pants, and the famous red hair was hidden beneath a blue kerchief. Hardly had she begun her chianti on the rocks when she complained to the management, “Goddam it, why don’t they make tables so you can put your legs under them?” Ross thought it “difficult to detect any spiritual qualities in the Ball public personality.” Happily, she had brought along DeDe and the children and mugged at them during the interview, forcing the concession that “when she looks at Lucie and Desi IV and listens to their gabble, her hard public face turns almost soft and misty.”

What Ross did not know, and did not care to investigate, was Lucy’s backstage personality. The cast of
Wildcat
saw an entirely different side of Lucille Ball, a woman who never pulled rank, and who cared extravagantly for her coworkers in the theater, as she had for her Desilu family. Television star Valerie Harper, starting out as a chorus girl in the musical, remembered the day that Lucy checked out the dressing rooms for the lesser players. “She said, ‘Oh my God, what a dungeon! This is terrible! We gotta fix up the chorus dressing room.’ ” And when Lucy said “we” she included herself. “She had the place painted. She fought it through. She was very direct, very warm, very giving.”

The critics felt that warmth on opening night, December 16, 1960, and almost to a man they showed affection and respect for the star. And almost to a man they held the show at arm’s length. “As one who has loved Lucy even before she was Lucy,” wrote Walter Kerr in the
Herald Tribune,
“—back in the days when she looked like a raffish but elegant sea horse in many an RKO picture—I’m deeply, deeply confused. Is it simply the unsmiling libretto of N. Richard Nash? Can it be that director Michael Kidd hasn’t been able to find a big enough outlet for Miss Ball’s zanier talents? There’s a moment in which we catch a glimpse of the pop-eyed clown we know best: a moment in which she takes a big slug of tea and comes out of it with the spoon in her mouth. But these cartoon-like goodies are few. . . . It’s the time, it’s the place, where’s the girl?” In the
Times,
Howard Taubman complained of a “tame
Wildcat,
” noted the boisterous enthusiasm of Lucy fans in the opening-night audience, praised the song “Hey, Look Me Over,” and then excoriated what he had just seen: “
Wildcat
went prospecting for Broadway oil but drilled a dry hole.” At the end Taubman went soft, as if he needed to reassure the poor woman who played Wildcat Jackson: “Don’t you care, Miss Ball. They all still love Lucy—and you, too.”
Variety
called the show a “failure” and predicted that its duration depended entirely on “how long Miss Ball and the advance sale can keep
Wildcat
running at the Alvin.”
Variety
’s reviewer also threw a bouquet to accompany his brickbats: “One further word about Lucille Ball: she should come again another time.”

Desi answered the critics in the revered Broadway tradition: he ran a full-page ad in
Variety
using unattributed quotes (“Hoopla and boffola to satisfy the millions who love Lucy.” “
Wildcat
proves a gusher!”) along with a photograph of avid patrons waiting in line to buy tickets. The promotion worked. After nearly every show hundreds of fans waited for Lucy to show up. She never disappointed them; their collective energy and affection kept her engine running. Indeed, they may have caused her to go into overdrive. She stayed up for hours after every performance, unable to relax. On Wednesdays, instead of taking a break between matinee and evening performances, she went out to cocktail parties and dinner. Nothing seemed to calm her down. Was the script still inadequate? Did Nash let her down by failing to supply enough gags? Well, then, Bob and Madelyn could fix it. She brought them in with Nash’s permission. “Anything to keep Lucy happy,” he said. “I know she is up there suffering.” Madelyn Pugh Martin and Bob Carroll Jr. came to town and supplied a dozen opening jokes. “She had the most appalling experience,” Nash recalled, not without some satisfaction. “Not one of the lines got a laugh.” He and Michael Kidd went backstage to inform her: “It’s a different medium, Lucy. It’s early in the show, they can hardly hear you, they haven’t accustomed themselves to the acoustics of the theater, to your voice coming over the orchestra.” Nash observed: “She took out the lines instantly. That was a bad shock for her. In television, those lines had worked.”

Other new lines did work, however, especially when she ad-libbed them. The show had one nonhuman actor, a Yorkshire terrier named Mousy. During a matinee, Mousy lost control onstage. Mops and brooms happened to be featured in that number, so Lucy kept singing and dancing as she acted the part of pooper-scooper. “It’s in the small print in my contract,” she told the audience in her best Lucy Ricardo mode. “I have to clean up the dog shit!” The explosions of laughter were like the ones she used to get on
Lucy.