Ball of Fire (41 page)

Other episodes showed flashes of brilliance, and during this period several veteran comedians saluted Lucy’s way with a script. Norton, for example, called her “a walking, living authority on comedy,” and actor-director Charles Nelson Reilly remarked: “Lucille Ball taught me one of the most important things I’ve ever learned about comedy. We were sitting around the table, and she said, ‘Great joke—wrong place!’ I can’t tell you how many shows I’ve done that I have made better by remembering her wisdom.” And Tony Randall, who had vast experience in every medium from stage to film and TV, praised Lucy even as he acknowledged that many people found her difficult to work with. “She bossed everybody around and didn’t spare anybody’s feelings. But I didn’t mind that because she knew what she was doing. If someone just says ‘Do this!’ it’s awful if they are wrong. If they are right, it just saves a lot of time. And she was always right.”

About comedy, he might have added. Not necessarily about anything else. Show business aside, the years 1970 and 1971 would have to qualify as
anni horribiles
in the life of Lucille Ball. Desi showed up on the set from time to time, engaging in banter with his ex-wife. She kidded him along and stayed away from the obvious: he was a seamed and puffy figure who had already undergone a colostomy yet still struggled with alcohol and smoking addictions. Desi once said he looked forward to the end of his acting career because he could relax and get old and fat. He had done exactly that. These days he was just a well-off retiree in short sleeves, wearing thick-soled shoes to give himself stature. In the old days no one noticed how tall or short he was—as president of Desilu he had all the stature he needed. And when Desi looked at Lucy he saw a different woman from the one he had known so intimately; now she was a take-charge person who still smoked too much and who needed a lot of help from the makeup department. He noted, a little sadly and more than a little egocentrically: “She’d been boiled hard by the hatred of me. She needed the hatred yet.”

Actually, Lucy was fueled more by insecurity than by animosity. “With all her talent,” Bernie Weitzman testified, “she didn’t really believe she had that much talent.” The doubt caused her to observe, “When you’re Number One there’s only one place you can go.” She resolved that no one was going to push her downhill. In fighting to maintain her place she began to lose friends, or to distance herself from them. Jayne Meadows, whose husband, comedian Steve Allen, had always complimented Lucy on her style, was treated like a piece of furniture, and was made to pay for her own wardrobe when she appeared in a
Here’s Lucy
episode. “Lucy was
very
cheap,” Meadows said afterward. “She
was
what Jack Benny
played.
” And Jack Benny himself, a man who made a point of never criticizing anyone in the business, stated privately after an appearance on
Here’s Lucy
that the boss-lady was “tough,
very
tough,” and suggested that she ought to get herself to a good psychiatrist.

If Lucy knew about these opinions she refused to recognize them. She was too preoccupied by the inadequacies of her show, and by the problems of the next generation of Arnazes. Desi Jr. had begun to drink in secret at the age of eleven. From alcohol he had gone on to experiment with drugs, particularly when the trio Dino, Desi & Billy was on the road. The trio had run its course by 1970, but he was an addict at that point—a skilled one who hid his habit from public and family view. Lucy and her seventeen-year-old son had since reconciled, but a tension remained and it was impossible for either of them to break it. For Desi Jr., like Lucie, had been incorporated into
Here’s Lucy,
playing roles that featured them almost every week. So they were with their mother not only at home but on the set. Lucy, recalled Desi Jr., “would treat us—rightfully so—as cast members at work, but we would still take things personally that probably weren’t intended that way. When most people are hassled at work, they can blow off steam when they get home. But it didn’t work that way for us because we just continued the same arguments when we got home.”

At the age of eighteen, Lucie moved out of the house and got her own apartment, much to Lucy’s distress. The following year, 1970, she began dating Phil Vandervort, an actor-director, and she announced her intention to marry him. Lucy, who tended to characterize her daughter’s dates as “fishheads,” thought Lucie was too inexperienced— she needed to date other men, gain some knowledge of herself and the world. Still, Lucie’s problems paled besides Desi Jr.’s.

As his sister declared her love for a disapproved man, the seventeen-year-old Desi Jr. began a romance with the twenty-three-year-old Patty Duke. The actress’s résumé read like something from a Zola novel. The child of alcoholics, Anna Marie Duke had been abused psychologically and sexually by her managers, a couple who lived off the earnings of their young client. At the age of sixteen, Anna (now called Patty) landed the part of the young Helen Keller in
The Miracle Worker
and won an Academy Award. She also married at that age, at least partly to get away from the people who were driving her to the brink of madness. Several years later the gifted actress was the centerpiece of
The
Patty Duke Show,
in which she played identical cousins. All the while, she drank and experimented with drugs. Currently she was separated from her husband but not divorced, a volatile young woman who squandered money, bit her fingernails down to the quick, had a history of suicide attempts, and was dependent on chemicals, alcohol, and tobacco—in short, a mother’s nightmare.

Lucy did what she could to break up the affair; as Duke noted in her memoir, Desi’s mother “felt she was in a crisis situation, and her attitude was efficient and cold, with barely a veneer of politeness.” The attitude had no effect. Late in the year Patty gave out the news that she was pregnant, and that Desi Jr. was the father. Desi Sr. was apparently unperturbed at the thought of becoming a grandfather; “boys will be boys” seemed to be his view of the matter. Lucy was not so sanguine. She said Duke was “living in some fantastic dreamworld, and we’re the victims of it. Desi being the tender age of seventeen when they met, she used him.”

Sean Duke was born in February 1971, and the tabloid press closed in. Lucy visited the infant, wearing a heavy veil so that reporters wouldn’t recognize her, but she refused to acknowledge the child as a blood relative. Thinking back to the beginnings of the romance, and noting Sean’s birthday, she said, “none of the dates made sense to me.” Her math was correct. Much later Duke admitted that the father was John Astin, a married actor who eventually left his wife in order to marry Patty. Desi Jr. promptly took up with Liza Minnelli, almost seven years his senior.

In the meantime, Lucie had gone against her mother’s wishes and wed Phil Vandervort. The marriage would be over in a year. After that she began to date Jim Bailey, a female impersonator and ex-boyfriend of Liza. Bailey was to tell Lucy biographer Charles Higham: “Lucy liked me very much. But when I started my involvement with her daughter she told me she used to lie awake nights trying to figure it all out. She kept asking herself, ‘Isn’t he? Is he? Is he gay? Isn’t he? If he wears a dress, which is he? How could he be having an affair with my daughter?” Some evenings, the obsession with her children’s affairs got completely out of hand. At a screening of Woody Allen’s cheeky
EverythingYou Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask,
Lucy did her Queen Canute act, erupting in fury: “Am I seeing a man making love to a
sheep
? Am I seeing a man who is married with children wearing a
gown
? Am I seeing a
breast
appearing over the horizon? Has civilization come to an end? Take this picture off! Now! Immediately! This is filth!” It was as if by an act of will she could push time backward, past the Vietnam War, the youthquake, the clanging music of the Doors, the lyrics of Bob Dylan warning his older listeners about what was blowing in the wind, the experiments with drugs, the sexual revolution, the bumper stickers reading QUESTION AUTHORITY—as if she could re-create 1952, when she and Desi ruled the airwaves and all things and all people were in their places and the music was good and the laughter did not come out of a can and the world was as stable as Twentieth Century–Fox.

There were times when Lucy must have wondered why fate had turned against her with such a will. Even in small matters she seemed to be rolling snake-eyes. Jess Oppenheimer, the father of
I Love Lucy
and in many ways a father figure for Lucille Ball, threatened a lawsuit. He charged that the character Lucy played in
The Lucy Show
and
Here’s Lucy
was basically Mrs. Ricky Ricardo. As such she derived her humor from his conception of a scheming, though genial, ditz. Lucy’s lawyers knew he had a case and advised her to settle out of court. She did, to the tune of $220,000, and avoided him thereafter. (Gary Morton quietly continued to play golf with Oppenheimer, without mentioning the fact to his wife.) The payout, and various wrangles with Desi Jr. and Lucie, coupled with reminders of advancing age, seemed to accentuate Lucy’s eccentricities. On cross-country flights she would suddenly unbuckle her seat belt and begin compulsively cleaning the floors and the toilets, distressing the stewardesses who recognized her and astonishing the passengers who didn’t. She raised hell in rehearsals when things went wrong, and anyone and anything that contradicted her anywhere got the full force of her wrath. Actress Kaye Ballard remembered biking alongside Lucy when a dog appeared from a yard and barked at them ferociously. “Get back in those bushes, you son of a bitch!” ordered Lucy. The dog turned tail and ran off. DeDe, vigorous in her eighties, warned director Herbert Kenwith that her daughter was the bitch everyone said. Lucy, who heard the remark, protested, “I am not! Only when I’m working.” Countered her mother reasonably, “But that is when people see you.”

The only pleasant news—or so it seemed at the time—was Lucy’s continuing popular appeal. Jerry Herman’s arch, campy musical
Mame
opened on Broadway 1966 and ran for 1,508 performances. Two years later Warner–Seven Arts bought the film rights for $3 million plus a percentage of the remaining theatrical grosses. Several high-powered actresses were rumored to be up for the role, including Elizabeth Taylor, and also Angela Lansbury, who had played the original Mame Dennis onstage and who made the mistake of saying, “If they’re going to do my
Mame,
then I’ll have to do the film.” Lucy got the part.

All these years, Lucy had relied on Desi’s advice, but this time when he told her to pass on the role she ignored him. Author Patrick Dennis had made a fortune when he introduced the world to his quotable aunt—“Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death”—in the 1955 best-seller. Rosalind Russell took the title role in the 1958 film,
Auntie Mame;
she got fine notices and for most moviegoers became the definitive Mame. Lucy thought she could top Roz; playing the extravagant Mame Dennis would be the capstone of her career and no one was going to talk her out of it.

As usual, Desi’s instincts were on the money. It was not only a question of age—for much of the play and film Auntie Mame is supposed to be a woman in her forties, as indeed Angela Lansbury was when she played her in New York. Lucy was also an inappropriate choice because her comic persona was that of a naïf, a sweet conspirator undone by her own strategies. Mame Dennis was a sharp-tongued, sophisticated
professoressa
in the school of life.

The film was still in the planning stage when Lucy took a break and traveled to Snowmass, Colorado. She had found a new retreat in the white-capped mountains, where she bought three condominiums, one on top of the other, for herself, the children, and any visitors who might drop in. Gary had no use for cold weather; golf was his game, not skiing. Lucy sometimes went there on her own, happy for a little solitude after so much family tsuris. However, in an extended celebration of the Christmas season, Gary was there early in January 1972, as were DeDe, Lucie, and Desi Jr. and Liza Minnelli. Lucy had begun to take up skiing. She had mastered stilts when one of the
Lucy
shows called for her to walk on them, and done somersaults on a wire in her fifties. To a natural athlete, what was the big deal about going downhill on a couple of boards? So what if she was sixty years old? In hindsight, Lucy’s insouciance seemed to have tempted fate, for as she was standing and talking, a female skier lost control and collided with her. There was the confusing sound of a snap, much louder to Lucy than to the onlookers, and she collapsed in agony. Her right leg had been broken in four places.

Medical help arrived almost immediately, and Desi Jr., Liza, and Lucie followed the ambulance to the local hospital. Lucie remembered her mother screaming, “not from the pain, but because of the hundreds of people she thought would be thrown out of work because of her condition. She thought it was over.” “It” was not only
Mame
but
Here’s Lucy
and Lucille Ball Productions. Almost as soon as Lucy came out from under the anesthetic, depression set in. “I’ll never work again,” she was heard to say. “To hell with it. To hell with it all.” A few days later she changed her mind, ripping off the leg-length cast twice before she got something that allowed her more freedom of movement. “It was hell,” she remembered. Then she added philosophically: “Of course, things always happen to me like this. All my life it’s been arms legs arms legs arms legs.” Flown to Palm Springs for convalescence, she received Robert Fryer, producer of
Mame.
He guaranteed that she would not be replaced; preproduction of the movie would stop in its tracks until she had made a total recovery.

Here’s Lucy
employees were astonished and gratified to find their president back in the saddle less than a month after the accident, filming the next episode. “For Mom,” Lucie said, “it was like doing
Whose
Life Is It Anyway?
” That play concerned a paraplegic whose only moving part was his face. Lucy was luckier; the scripts, rewritten to accommodate her disability, put her in bed or in a wheelchair, where she could at least use her torso. As Geoffrey Mark Fidelman remarks in
The Lucy Book,
the accident turned out to be a plus for the series. It provided a continuity and focus previously absent from the program. Because Lucy was in a wheelchair or leg cast it would have been unseemly for her boss to yell at her, so the writers gave Gale Gordon a more agreeable persona. The former antagonists became emotional equals rather than simply boss and employee, and the Lucy character, at long last, was allowed to grow older. No one referred to her as a young lady anymore.