Ball of Fire (4 page)

Along with Pauline and another pal, Violet Robbins, Lucille founded a musical group called the Gloom Chasers Union. Pauline conducted, Violet played the piano, and Lucille provided the rhythm on a set of borrowed drums. It was not a success. Egged on by their leader, the girls then recruited two more members and founded an acting company. Their most memorable production was a version of
Charley’s Aunt,
adapted and directed by Lucille. She not only gave the story another spin by starring as a man who impersonates a woman, she dragged furniture from her house to use as scenery, sold the homemade tickets for twenty-five cents apiece, put makeup on the cast, and persuaded the school principal, Mr. Drake, to let them have the gym for the evening. The prompter was DeDe, who got so caught up in the plot and gags that she kept laughing, applauding, and losing her place in the script.

Although tourism was off that summer, Celoron Park still needed extra help to get through July and August. Lucille talked her way into a job as short-order cook. “Look out! Look out!” went her spiel. “Don’t step there!” When the startled passerby stopped, one foot in the air as he stared worriedly at the ground, Lucille closed the sale: “Step over
here
and get yourself a delicious hamburger!” Off-hours were spent experimenting with makeup and fashion. Passing a shop window one day, she stopped to admire a leather hat in black and white. Over dinner she bargained with DeDe: the hat for hours and hours of extra work around the house. Her mother refused at first, then gave in to the entreaties. The delighted teenager wore the hat everywhere, including the kitchen as she washed and dried the dishes.

DeDe’s response was not so lenient after Lucille attended her first dance at the Celoron Pier Ballroom. For the occasion DeDe made a taffeta dress and trimmed the hem with real fur, prompting envious sighs when Lucille’s classmates first clapped eyes on it. At the end of the dance, a drably dressed classmate went out of her way to admire the outfit. The next day Lucille presented it to her. DeDe remonstrated when she learned about the gift. Her daughter’s explanation—the donee came from a poor family and had never owned a decent dress before—left her unmoved. Weeks went by before DeDe forgave Lucille.

The teenage Lucille was aware that women dressed to please the opposite sex, but she knew next to nothing about that sex. Because of her daughter’s innocence, DeDe allowed her only a few tentative experiments with lipstick and makeup. The colors widened Lucille’s mouth and accentuated her bright blue eyes so effectively that some laws had to be laid down. Lucille was strictly forbidden, for example, ever to go canoeing with any young male except her brother. Predictably, she could hardly wait to paddle around the shallows with a local boy. When he tried some amateurish overtures, however, she managed to tip the canoe, tossing them both overboard. “I got wet,” she recorded proudly, “but I was still virtuous!”

That state was not to last much longer. In time she bobbed her brown hair and shortened her skirts, thereby advertising an interest not only in fashion but in young men. Lucille was tall, willowy, physically mature, and emotionally undeveloped. “Maybe I was still searching for a father,” she was to speculate. There was no maybe about it. When the DeVita sisters introduced Lucille to their big brother Johnny at Celoron Park, she was instantly beguiled. A bit shorter than her five foot seven, much heavier than her weight of just under one hundred pounds, Johnny wore an unflattering moustache, and his hairline was already beginning to recede. But he had acquired a reputation as a local hood, someone who gambled, trafficked booze, and carried a gun. As if these enticements were not enough, he owned his own car and had a closetful of expensively tailored suits. Best of all, he was an adult. Johnny DeVita’s driver’s license offered proof: he had recently passed his twenty-first birthday. Lucille was fourteen.

CHAPTER
TWO

“This girl’s
fulla hell”

JOHNNY’S SWAGGER did not derive from movies or pulp fiction. He was the son of Louis DeVita, a nouveau riche who sold insurance and produce to Italian immigrants. On the side, it was rumored, he was involved with prohibited booze and illegal gambling. As Louis’s chauffeur and heir apparent Johnny had the use of several automobiles, not to mention a steady income and a status enjoyed by few men his age. He and his new romance became the object of lurid high school gossip, a situation that Lucille found immensely pleasing: once again she was on center stage. The adult response was not so pleasurable, particularly when it issued from DeDe. Lucille protested that her boyfriend was from an honest and caring family; she reminded her mother of all the times Louis had given her dishes of pasta and bags of vegetables to bring home. As for Johnny himself, she went on, her young man was not an irresponsible playboy; he was going to medical school in a year or two. DeDe bought none of this but did nothing, on the assumption that the affair would burn itself out in a few weeks. When the weeks turned into months she took Johnny aside and asked him to stay away from her daughter. He refused to do it. They were in love. What right had she to interfere?

After a year of soul-searching, and some painful ransacking of her bank account, DeDe saw a way out. Lucille liked to talk about the vaudeville acts Johnny took her to see at the local houses, Shea’s and the Palace. When she spoke of those evenings her voice thrummed and her eyes took on a glitter that Johnny himself could not evoke. Clearly she yearned to be in a real spotlight. And who could tell? With Lucille’s background in amateur theatrics, perhaps she had a chance to be a chorine or a soubrette. Everyone said she had talent—even Mr. Drake had proclaimed as much, on the night of
Charley’s Aunt.
Still, the fifteen-year-old needed professional instruction, and such lessons were not available in upstate New York. For those, Lucille would have to go to Manhattan, geographically six hundred miles and emotionally light-years away from the small-town life in Chautauqua County.

At the time, the Robert Minton–John Murray Anderson School of Drama on East Fifty-eighth Street in Manhattan was the most prominent institution of its kind, and one of the most demanding, financially as well as psychologically; in 1926 the tuition was $180 per five-month term for a playwriting course, $270 for scenic and costume design, $350 for drama lessons, $390 for musical comedy, and $500 for motion picture acting, a fee that included a screen test. The faculty and advisers included such luminaries as choreographer Martha Graham, composer Jerome Kern, actor Otis Skinner, writers Christopher Morley and Don Marquis—as well as the founders themselves. Anderson was a longtime producer of the hugely successful
Greenwich Village Follies,
and Minton had directed a number of breakthrough symbolic pieces, including the afterlife drama
Outward Bound
and the Russian allegory
He Who Gets Slapped.

DeDe cobbled together enough money for the first semester and persuaded some friends in Manhattan to board her daughter. This seemed too rare an opportunity to pass up. Lucille was to characterize herself at that time as “struck by the lightning of show business”—a flash that Johnny could not hope to outshine. He was philosophical about it; he drove his young inamorata to the station in Buffalo and saw her off on the train to New York. She carried a small valise full of clothing deemed proper for the city, $50 sewn into her underwear, and a passage she had copied from a Julius Tannen routine. The monologist had inspired her in upstate New York, and now he brought her luck in Manhattan. The other girls auditioned with stilted deliveries of Shakespearean verse. With her vaudeville turn, the fifteen-year-old from Jamestown gave the impression of originality and freshness. Alas, from that moment everything went downhill.

“Ridicule,” Lucille was to recall acrimoniously, “seemed to be part of the curriculum.” In an elocution class, Minton mocked his student for what he called her “midwestern” pronunciations of “wawter” and “hawrses.” She retreated into silence. Lucille hoped for a better time in dancing class, where she could let her legs do the talking. The pupil was promptly informed that she had “two left feet.” In another period the school might have carried her for a second term, until she acquired some polish and timing. But it was Lucille’s misfortune to be there at the same moment another young actress was making her mark. Bette Davis arrived as a powerhouse with more gifts than the rest of the pupils combined. Anderson questioned Lucille’s instructors, received negative reports from all of them, and sent a letter to DeDe informing her that she was only wasting her money. Little comfort came from the knowledge that her daughter was not alone: of an entering class of seventy, only twelve survived the first term. Lucille never forgave her teachers. “All I learned in drama school,” she claimed later, “was how to be frightened.”

Back in Jamestown Lucille tried to put a good face on her failure by dismissing the New York City experience as a waste of time, resuming the romance with Johnny, and throwing herself back into high school activities with a will. She became a football cheerleader, played center on the girls’ basketball team, ice-skated in the winter, and rode horseback in the spring. Most of her classmates were unaware of her humiliation in drama school; they knew only that Lucille had dared to skip town on her own. Years afterward, when Lucille had become a global celebrity, she was topic A for her former high school classmates. They vied with each other for the clearest memory of the young, hyperkinetic adolescent who seemed in perpetual motion, pounding downstairs two at a time, flashing elegant legs as she whirled in her pleated skirt. At sixteen Lucille was back in good spirits, comely, and popular. By the time the school year ended she was having too good a time to obsess about cracking show business. The summer of 1927 looked to be the best of them all.

In July 1927, Freddy Ball would turn twelve, and Grandpa Hunt thought the Glorious Fourth might be a perfect moment to salute the season, the nation, and the boy. The day before the national holiday he presented the boy with a long, thin, mysterious package. Freddy impatiently peeled off the brown wrapping paper and gave out whoops of delight. Grandpa let him carry on; not every lad got a .22 caliber rifle on his birthday. Yet when Freddy headed outdoors to shoot some crows, he was forbidden to use the firearm. “Tomorrow,” Grandpa promised, “I’ll show you how.”

According to Lucille, July 4 dawned bright and hot, with the aroma of lilacs and clover wafting over the backyard. Rehired as a short-order cook at Celoron Park, Lucille was about to go off to work, but she lingered to watch Freddy’s shooting lesson. Before Grandpa Fred set up a tin can in the backyard he gave a brief lecture about guns and safety, emphasizing that behind the target were open fields with no houses or people. “Besides me,” Lucille was to write about this occasion, “there were Cleo and Johanna, a girl Freddy’s age who was visiting someone in the neighborhood.” The company also included an unexpected visitor. “There was an eight-year-old boy who lived at the corner whose name was Warner Erickson. Every once in a while you would hear his mother shriek, ‘War-ner! Get home!’ and Warner would streak for his yard since his mother spanked him for the slightest infraction. This Fourth of July weekend he had wandered into our yard and was peeking around the corner of our house watching the target practice.” At first no one noticed the boy; then Grandpa Hunt spotted Warner and ordered him to sit down and stay out of the way. From her back stoop, a safe distance away, Pauline Lopus watched the action unfold. Freddy took a number of shots at the tin can; then it was Johanna’s turn. She picked up the .22 and held it to her shoulder, one eye closed. At that very instant came the strident voice of Mrs. Erickson: “War
-ner,
get home this minute!” The boy rose and bolted in the direction of his home, crossing in front of the rifle just as Johanna pulled the trigger. The pressure of her finger was to change everything that Lucille knew and cherished. She watched in silent horror as Warner fell spreadeagled into a lilac bush.

“I’m shot! I’m shot!” he screamed.

Grandpa Hunt refused to believe what he had just witnessed. “No you’re not,” he insisted. “Get up.”

Then, Lucille recalled, “we saw the spreading red stain on Warner’s shirt, right in the middle of his back. Cleo screamed, and I took her into my arms. The slam of a screen door told me that Pauline was running to tell her mother.” Grandpa Hunt lifted Warner and, accompanied by Lucille and Freddy and Cleo, carried him the hundred yards to his house as the boy murmured, “Mama, I am dying.” Before they could arrive, Warner’s mother burst out of the house shouting, “They’ve shot my son! They’ve shot my son!”

They
implied the entire group, but within an hour everyone knew that a child had done the shooting and that an adult had been responsible for the tragedy. On July 5, the Jamestown
Post-Journal
told the story: “Warner Erickson, eight years old, of Celoron, is still in critical condition at Jamestown General Hospital as a result of being shot in the back. The Erickson lad stepped out in the range as Johanna Ottinger, a young girl, fired at about the same time, the bullet entering the boy’s back and passing through his lungs, lodging in the chest. Mr. Hunt, grandfather of the Ball children, was watching the target practice.” In fact, the wound was even worse than originally reported. The slug had severed Warner’s spinal cord, paralyzing him below the waist.

About a fortnight later the invalid returned, permanently bound to a wheelchair. Almost every day Mrs. Erickson wheeled her son up and down the block, moving very slowly as she passed the Hunt house. The children were told to ignore her but Cleo kept peeking out and crying. Mrs. Erickson’s gesture was only the beginning. A lawsuit got under way, accusing Fred Hunt of Eighth Street, Celoron, New York, of negligence in the wounding and paralysis of the eight-year-old victim. The plaintiffs’ lawyers asked for $5,000 plus court costs and insisted that the sum was, if anything, too low to cover Warner’s medical expenses. (In this they were correct; the boy lived for six more years and needed care for the rest of his short life.) In any case, the sum represented more than Fred Hunt’s savings. He declared bankruptcy. The only asset left was the house, and he deeded that to his daughters. The plaintiffs sued once more, claiming that Hunt’s maneuver was “fraudulent, designed to delay and defraud his creditors.” Again the court agreed. The sheriff foreclosed on the house. Over the course of a year Fred Hunt lost everything. He was sixty-two, and, as Lucille observed, with the two court judgments “the heart went out of him.” Without a cent, bereft of a job and a place to call his own, he became totally dependent on DeDe. Distant relatives allowed him to board at their upstate farm, where he subsisted on a diet of their main crop: strawberries. This meant strawberries for breakfast, lunch, and supper. Lucille, Freddy, DeDe, and Ed moved into a bleak ground-floor apartment on East Fifth Street in Jamestown, and Lucille was transferred to Jamestown High School. There she was an unhappy stranger, outside of the cliques and clubs that had enlivened her days in Celoron. Lola abandoned any plans to reopen her beauty parlor and enrolled in a nursing program far from Jamestown. Cleo went to live with her father, George Mandicos. The family would never be whole again.

After the “the Breakup,” as DeDe bitterly called it, long-dormant urges reawakened in Lucille. Upstate again came to represent mediocrity, and Broadway the main chance. No matter how devoted she was to Johnny, or how sorry she felt for Fred Hunt, she had to test herself in New York City, to prove John Murray Anderson wrong. To that end she would often leave school for a week or more without bothering to get permission from any authority other than DeDe. On the bus she would practice her locution and work out a plan of attack. Once in Manhattan she would head to a cheap rooming house on Columbus Circle, buy a copy of
Variety,
read the notices for open calls, and go to the auditions. Nineteen twenty-eight was not a bad time to be looking in the musical theater. In those flush times audiences paid top prices to see the
Ziegfeld Follies,
Earl Carroll’s
Vanities,
and whatever musicals the Shuberts were presenting in their theaters. All of these shows employed chorus lines made up of girls in feathers and furs. The trouble was, producers wanted dancers with experience, and Lucille was as green as the lawns of Jamestown.

After a few weeks of total frustration, she presented them with an audacious new persona. Instead of encountering Lucille Ball of upstate New York, they saw a fresh-faced newcomer, “Diane Belmont” of Butte, Montana. (The surname was taken from a racetrack just outside New York City, and the locale was a bow to the place where Had and Desirée had once been young and happy.) To get her story straight, Lucille had written to the Montana chamber of commerce asking for literature. Poring over the booklets and brochures, she committed statistics to memory, in case producers inquired about her background. They rarely did, and once in a great while Miss Belmont from Butte actually landed in the third company of a revue.