Ball of Fire (39 page)

Customarily, several years after a divorce an emotional distance opens up between the former husband and wife. Lucy had convinced herself that she could be indifferent about Desi’s life and loves and vagaries, but the fact was that she could never turn her back on him. They had been too close in ways that neither of them fully understood. When she learned of Desi’s arrest, instead of shaking her head and responding with a wry smile, she managed to get hold of some blanks and had a chauffeur drive them over to Desi’s house in case the investigation continued—he could plant them as needed. Happily, the cops never returned. The incident made the papers, however, and the implication was that Lucy’s ex, rather than protecting two teenage girls, had simply been on yet another binge.

Each child had a way of dealing with this kind of stress. Lucie, who inherited her father’s exotic aura and her mother’s long silhouette, led an active social life and performed in school plays. Desi Jr. played rock music with two young friends from the neighborhood: Dean Martin Jr., son of the singer-actor, and Billy Hinsche, son of a prosperous real estate developer.

In the beginning the boys composed songs to amuse themselves. Their amateur status was not to last long. First, Lucy indulgently booked the trio to warm up her audience before the show went on. When they were sufficiently rehearsed and polished, Dean Martin invited to them to perform for one of his close friends. Frank Sinatra was no fan of rock ’n’ roll—he was subsequently to call it “the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.” In those days, though, he found himself amused by the style and rhythms of the group called “Dino, Desi & Billy.” Sinatra and Desi Sr. had long since reconciled, and as a lark he invited the trio to cut a disk for his label, Reprise Records. The mid-1960s was the time of global “youthquake,” when newcomers like the Beatles and the Byrds let their hair grow, radiated insouciance, and performed their own material. The harmonies and attitudes of these groups changed the course of popular music, and the directors of Reprise, anxious to tap into the youth market, arranged for a contract. At the age of twelve, a round-faced Desi, with his thinner thirteen-year-old pals, went on tour and composed two songs that made the Top Forty. The first had a pleasant melody and banal lyrics with a tincture of something less felt than seen:

You treat me just like dirt
You have all the fun
I stay home and hurt.

Other entries in their first album included an exuberant version of Willie Dixon’s “Seventh Son,” Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” and two songs written by the boys’ producer, Lee Hazelwood, “Not the Lovin’ Kind” and “Rebel Kind”—quite a statement for a group whose combined age was thirty-eight. Hazelwood was later to say that working with Dino, Desi, and Billy was “hell on this earth.” After one year he walked away from his contract because “I didn’t want those little leg biters around me anymore.”

Whatever their behavior in the studio, the trio were catnip to squealing groupies wherever they played. Lucy was heard to complain that she wanted Dino, Desi, and Billy on her show and was waiting for an appropriate script. “By the time it came along,” she later said, “I couldn’t afford them.” (Her budget only allowed $400, whereas Dean Martin paid $1,000 for a single appearance on his show.) During the group’s first flush of success, a journalist asked each member what he liked best about his sudden prominence. “The privilege to wear long hair,” stated Dino. “The travel,” was Billy’s favorite. “The money,” said Desi Jr. And therein lay much of the trouble.

Desi Jr. had never received a generous allowance from his mother. Now thousands of dollars were rolling in every month. On the cusp of adolescence he was not only getting rich, he was becoming famous. The proof was the adoration he received from the crowds wherever he went. He acted with such self-assurance that Lucie claimed her brother “had been thirty-four since we were kids.” In the next few years that assurance would become arrogance, and the appetite for applause would turn into a need for greater stimulation. If there is, as some researchers believe, a substance-abuse gene, he surely inherited it from Desi. The phrase “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” was to apply to his life and times for a longer, sadder period than anyone could possibly have predicted—least of all Desi Jr.

He was to remember experiments with marijuana, mescaline, quaaludes, cocaine, LSD, all the while questioning himself like someone in a song: “Is this all there is?” The query, he said, “terrified me. I told myself all I needed was something else—more money, another girl, a different kind of drug.” At the age of fifteen he was financially independent. Lucy’s criticism of his low grades had little effect, and her attempts to ground him went nowhere. “I felt indestructible,” her son remembered. Mother and son argued, and then, when the wounds were raw, went for days without speaking to each other. Desi sought refuge at his father’s place. Desi Sr. knew what Desi Jr. was doing to himself. He made some acid comments but generally refrained from confrontations. “His own drinking problem,” Desi Jr. observed, “prevented him from coming down too hard on me.”

Desi Jr.’s belongings, his instruments, his main emotional life were with Lucy, and it was to her house that he would return, only to have more fights about his indifference to school—and indeed to anything that didn’t feed his ego. A young actor, Robert Pine, was on the set of a
Lucy
show when a call came in from Desi Jr. Pine recalled: “He wanted to buy an expensive car. I think he was about to turn sixteen. She didn’t put it off on an aide or a maid. She took the call like any mother and said, ‘Goddamn it, I don’t want you doing this, so don’t do it.’ Then she turned to me and said, ‘Can you believe this kid?’ It was very human.” All too human, it seemed. Desi Jr. was, as he himself put it, “already independently wealthy from my work with Dino, Desi, and Billy.” He went on: “I wasn’t asking her permission; I just wanted an opinion about the car.”

Aware of his son’s emotional distress (and of his own inability to alleviate it by example), Desi offered guidance via mail. A sad irony attended this act. For the letter sent Desi Jr. was a copy of one Desi Sr. had received from his own father, back in 1933:

Well, pardner, you are now sixteen, and in my book you are no longer a child; you are a man. . . .

A note of warning about driving, particularly about driving on the road that lies before you—the one we all have to travel—the road of life.

It is very much like the road from Santiago to El Cobre. There are stretches that are so smooth and beautiful that they take your breath away, and there are others that are so ugly and rough that you wish you had never gotten on the damn thing, and you wonder if you will ever get through.

Somewhere along the way, you will get into a particularly bad spot that presents a very difficult problem, and you may not know exactly what to do. When that happens, I advise you not to do anything. Examine the situation first. Turn it upside down and sideways as many times as you have to. But then, when you have finally made up your mind, do not let anything or anybody stop you. If there is a mountain in your way, go through it.

Sometimes you will make it; sometimes you will not. But, if you are honest and thorough in your decision, you will learn something either way. We should learn as much from our mistakes as we do from our successes.

And when you do come up with a minus, try to convert it into a plus. You will be surprised how many times it will work. Use a setback as a stepping stone to better times ahead.

And don’t be afraid to make mistakes; we all do. Nobody bats five hundred. Even if you did, that means you were wrong half of the time. But don’t worry about it. Don’t be ashamed of it. Because that is the way it is. That is life.

Remember, good things do not come easy, and you will have your share of woe—the road is lined with pitfalls. But you will make it, if when you fail you try and try again. Persevere. Keep swinging. And don’t forget that the Man Upstairs is always there, and all of us need His help. And no matter how unworthy you think yourself of it, don’t be afraid to ask Him for it.

Good luck, son.

Love,
Dad

Each letter was assiduously read and preserved. Neither had the desired effect. Something in the blood, maybe.

Whatever the case, the conflict between Lucy and Desi Jr. could not long endure. It came to a head one day when the youth pulled up at the house at 6 a.m. His mother and stepfather were at the front door to greet him. The two had been up half the night; in the small hours Lucy had dialed the police asking them to search for her son. Desi Jr. got out of the car and tried to explain: he had been out with his latest girlfriend and they had completely lost track of time. “I’m in love,” was his lame excuse. Lucy exploded: “Don’t you see that your actions affect other people? How could you be so irresponsible?” When her temper had cooled, Lucy tried to have a conversation with Desi Jr., stressing duty and accountability. They were not concepts he wanted to hear, and she found herself laying down the law. It was one thing to go off early, as she did, seeking a career. It was another thing to hurt the family; young Lucille had never done that to
her
family. Quite the contrary, her grandparents and brother and mother and cousin had leaned on Lucille and she had not let them down. “You can either live here and follow the rules, or you can leave,” she concluded. “But if you go, you’re entirely on your own.”

Desi Jr. rose to the challenge: “I can take care of myself.” It was a poignant moment, and a deeply painful one for Lucy. At the time, her son embraced his freedom eagerly. Later he conceded: “A part of my life was ending. I already belonged to the adult world and I couldn’t go back to being a regular teenager. So although I was only sixteen, I chose to move into my own apartment. Over the years I drifted farther and farther away emotionally.”

As busy and conflicted as she was, Lucy found time to act in Gene Kelly’s film
A Guide for the Married Man,
a cheerful, flawed compilation of sketches about adultery in the 1960s. Several TV celebrities starred in the movie, including Sid Caesar, Jack Benny, and Art Carney, who appeared in the skit with Lucy. Playing an aggressive male anxious to go out on the town, Carney engendered fewer laughs than he did on
The Honeymooners.
Lucy wasn’t funny at all. Her takes were obvious, her upswept hairdo was unflattering, and her pancake makeup was heavy and obvious. She was fifty-six, and for the first time in her life truly looked her age.

The reasons were manifold and complicated. The unhappy upstate girl had invented herself over and over again; she had built several careers, reconstructed her family and created a second one. The walk-on had become a superstar; the nobody, a mogul; the childless woman, a mother. In other arenas, this would have been a recipe for satisfaction; in the great tradition of Hollywood, it was a prescription for misery. The children were going their own ways more rapidly than she had anticipated, the
Lucy
show was nowhere near as funny as it should have been, and as a result the president of Desilu was walking around with an abstracted air, unable to focus on the company. According to one of the company’s key executives, Herbert Solow, Desilu was “a dying studio.” He would recall: “Lucy was still puttering away, doing the same thing over and over again. I explained at a meeting that I wanted to get some new things going.” He sent a copy of a modernized Desilu logo for her approval. “As usual, I never heard from her.”

Ever since the day Desi left, rumors had circulated about Desilu: a consortium of investors wanted to buy Lucy out; Paramount, recently swallowed up by Gulf + Western, had its eye on the company; Desilu’s top executives wanted to pool their resources and take over. After a few years the fuss died down, only to be revived shortly after the 1966 stockholders’ meeting, when investors were informed that for the first time ever, the company was declaring a 5 percent dividend, due to some adroit accounting. All well and good, but the gross revenue announced at that meeting had told the real story. In 1965, Desilu had brought in $18,997,163. In 1966 the figure was $18,797,502, and much of the income was due to sales of
I Love Lucy
to forty-eight countries overseas. According to Solow, “The professional Desilu was awful. Because it had nothing. It was all
Lucy.
Everyone loved to watch
Lucy.
” Many of the old programs were thriving, but Desilu had lost the ability to develop new ones—the lifeblood of dominant studios.

Otto von Bismarck once remarked that he never believed anything until he heard the official denial, and this time out, the Hollywood smart money all seemed to have studied the Iron Chancellor. No sale, Lucy kept assuring the press. Meantime, reliable insiders spoke of her wavering in Miami, where she had gone to consult with Jackie Gleason about a movie—or so she claimed. He would play Diamond Jim Brady, she said; she would be Lillian Russell. The real reason she had gone south was to avoid the calls of her lawyer, Mickey Rudin, who was anxious to close a deal with Charles Bluhdorn.

Through a combination of drive, avarice, and cunning, Viennese immigrant Bluhdorn had made an art of acquisitions, takeovers, and mergers. He was currently chairman of Gulf + Western, a conglomerate whose competitors called it “Engulf and Devour,” and one of his prize acquisitions was Paramount Pictures. Frank Yablans, who was to become the head of Paramount, once characterized his boss as “an uncivilized pig.” As if to live up to his billing, Bluhdorn announced that he wanted Desilu as another trophy and he wanted it
now.
No stalling or the deal was off.

Rudin flew down to Florida and confronted Lucy at her hotel. Bluhdorn needed an answer in twenty-four hours. Would she sell, or would she stay in a company that offered her only headaches and overwork? The era of independent production was drawing to a close, couldn’t she see that? The big companies, the networks, were taking over. What chance would she have swimming with sharks? Lucy’s reaction to a crisis remained the same from childhood to adolescence to maturity, from actress to comedienne to powerhouse—she cried. She mentioned the head of Gulf + Western: “Do you know, Mickey, I haven’t even
seen
this man?” Rudin offered to make a call. She refused. “I like to see a man’s eyes, shake his hand.” She settled for a phone conversation. Bluhdorn turned on the charm: “Miss Ball, one of the things I am prepared to like about you is that you care.” Lucy cried again.