I Love Lucy: The Untold Story (8 page)

When we cast Bill Frawley and Vivian Vance as the Mertzes, we knew only of Frawley’s work as a character actor in films, and of Vance’s fine performance in
Voice of the Turtle,
a straight drama. A few weeks after we started production, we had a story idea that depended on Bill and Vivian being able to sing and dance a little. I went down to the stage where they were rehearsing and sheepishly asked them if they thought they could handle it. With our luck, I shouldn’t have worried. To my delight, they informed me that they each had had an illustrious career in the musical theater. So a whole, unexpected, wonderful new area fell into our laps as a gift.

Another important stroke of luck for the show was Desi—Desi Arnaz. When we started
I Love Lucy,
I thought of Desi as a big question mark. Neither
he nor anyone else knew whether he could really do this kind of thing at all. But he was a quick study, and considerably brighter than many people gave him credit for. And he was conscientious and worked hard to prove his doubters wrong. And in the end, to everyone’s delight, Desi proved himself to be a skillful farceur and a fine actor, providing Lucy with a charming foil and giving the show an added dimension.

Desi was also a shrewd businessman, as he proved to CBS on more than one occasion. Technical matters, however, were not his strong point. One Tuesday morning he came into my office complaining we weren’t leaving enough blank space on the screen around the show’s credits, with the result that some of the names had one or two letters cut off.

“I didn’t notice anything wrong on last night’s show,” I told him. “Your new TV set must need adjusting.”

“No, there’s nothing wrong with my TV set,” Desi insisted. “I tell you it’s the prints that we’re sending to the network.”

Well, to calm him down, I finally had to promise him I would check with the film lab. But after he went back down to rehearsals, I asked one of our technicians to go out to Lucy and Desi’s ranch in Chatsworth and check out their brand-new TV. And sure enough, that’s where the problem was. The technician made a few simple adjustments and then returned to the studio. And Desi never even knew that he’d been there.

The following Tuesday morning, Desi was back in my office again. “I just wanted to let you know that the film lab fixed the problem,” he said, smiling. “The credits on last night’s show looked perfect.” And I told him I was glad the problem had been solved. And just as he was leaving, Desi turned back to me and said, “I told you there was nothing wrong with my TV set.”

Desi had a lot of obstacles to overcome. He was painfully aware that CBS hadn’t even wanted him on the show in the first place and had only agreed when it became clear that they might lose Lucy to another network.
And CBS
was not alone in its opinion of Desi. When the original pilot film was sent back to New York, Milton Biow screened it for his good friends Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. After the screening, Hammerstein reportedly turned to Biow and delivered a one-line assessment of the show: “Keep the redhead, ditch the Cuban.”

“He’s her husband,” Biow explained. “It’s a package deal. To get her, we have to take him.”

“Well, then for God’s sake don’t let him sing,” Hammerstein replied. “Because no one will understand him.”

So Biow added a clause to his contract with Desilu to insure that Desi’s vocals would be kept to a minimum. “It is agreed,” the clause declared, “that in each program the major emphasis shall be placed on the basic situations arising out of the fictional marriage of [Lucy and Ricky Ricardo], that the orchestra will furnish only incidental or background music except where an
occasional
script shall
require
a vocal number by Desi Arnaz
as part of the story line.”

Because of that clause, we made it a point during the first year to make any song by Desi an important part of the story. For example, Lucy would be trying to break into the act
during
the song. But after the show got to be number one, Desi demanded that the restriction be relaxed.
And by that time both Biow and Philip Morris wanted the show so badly that neither was about to buck him.

We took pains to humanize the character of Ricky Ricardo by bringing him down in earning power so the average person could identify with his problems. The “Tropicana” nightclub where Ricky worked, for example, was a far cry from the Copacabana. Instead, we made it kind of a middle-class tourist trap patronized mostly by out-of-towners and conventioneers.

There were actually a lot more jokes involving Ricky’s botched pronunciation than ended up on the screen. Seven or eight times a week he would say something during rehearsal that came out funny because of his accent, and the people on the set would throw it in. Desi was an awfully good
sport to go along with this, but I had to take most of them out. I felt the audience would get sick of “accent” jokes if we did them all the time.

Desi’s accent wasn’t the only aspect of his Cuban background that had an effect on the show. His Latin American upbringing influenced the story lines, as well. For instance, we could do stories all day long about Ricky being unfaithful to Lucy (or at least about her
thinking
that he was being unfaithful), but to do a story about
Lucy’s
infidelity was quite another thing altogether, because in the Cuban culture in which Desi had been raised, it was accepted that no woman would ever dare to be unfaithful to a man.

Desi and Lucy were diametrically different kinds of performers. Each Monday morning we would assemble for a first reading of that week’s script. This was usually the first time Lucy or anyone else in the cast had laid eyes on it. And Desi was always much better than Lucy at these first read-throughs.
He would understand the material as soon as he saw it, and give a good reading the first time through. Of course, his performance would be exactly the same, never any better or any worse, four days later.

Lucy, by contrast, was the kind of performer who needed a lot of rehearsal. If you sat in on one of our Monday morning sessions and then were asked for your opinion, you probably would have said, “The story is fine, the dialogue is excellent, most of the cast is great, but get rid of the redhead. She doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing.”

And Lucy
didn’t
know what the hell she was doing—at the first reading. But after stumbling through that first read-through, she would take the material to the mat. She fought with it, examined it, internalized it, and when it reappeared, she
owned
it. Her performance would improve more and more as each day went by. And if she got enough rehearsal time there just were no heights she couldn’t reach.

As running Desilu started to take more of Desi’s time, he would continually be leaving rehearsals to go to meetings. Many times Lucy would see him starting to leave and protest, “Desi, Desi—we need the rehearsal!” And Desi would look at her with a puzzled expression and say, “What are you talking about? We know the words!” He never could quite understand what was going on inside of Lucy’s head.

For Lucy, who was basically unhappy, the only release she had was in her work. That was the only time I ever saw her really enjoy herself. Except at parties. She was a great partygoer. Lucy liked nothing better than to be at a party, playing a game of some kind. But she had an unhappy home life with Desi. She was anxious to get away from it.
She would come in and would want to work, work, work, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, day in and day out. This helped the show tremendously, but it was a tragic situation for her personally.

The signs of the eventual bust-up of their marriage were visible even in the early days of
I Love Lucy.
It was clear that something was wrong. Desi had his 38-foot power cruiser, which Lucy didn’t like at all. After we would finish
filming a show, Desi would go down to his boat at Corona del Mar with his drinking, card-playing buddies, and Lucy would go back to the ranch. Unless they had something to do together for publicity, they wouldn’t see each other again until the following week when they both arrived on the set for the first read-through.

Their marital problems were already there before
I Love Lucy,
of course, but they just increased geometrically with the tremendous success and popularity of the show. It would have been tough enough for Lucy and Desi to adjust to all of the sudden money and acclaim even if they had nothing else bothering them. But with all these other things on their minds it placed an incredible strain on their marriage.

It was just destined not to work. Lucy needed to be dominated, and Desi wasn’t happy in a relationship where his wife had a more powerful reputation than he did. He was deeply hurt by all the publicity that said the success of the show was entirely due to her artistry.

A couple of months after
I Love Lucy
went on the air, Lucy came storming into my office. “That’s it!” she yelled. “That's it. The series is
over.
Desi can go to hell. I’m
not
going to work with him anymore.”

It took me a long time to calm her down. At least one source of the problems between them was easy to understand. Lucy had always been a bigger star than Desi, but at least they had been in different parts of the entertainment industry. But now they were both in the same show. With Lucy getting all of the acting acclaim and the production credit going to me, he really didn’t have much to hang on to. And Lucy’s relationship with him was suffering as a result. I managed to quietly patch things up between them, but it was clear to me that the problem was not going to go away.

Lucy, in interviews, had long been giving Desi as much credit as she could for the success of the show. Now she decided to take more concrete steps to balance their relative standing in the public eye.
At rehearsal one day she took Al Simon aside and asked him to do her a personal favor. “Al,” she said, “I would appreciate it if you would suggest to Desi that he be executive producer of
I Love Lucy
.”

Not long after that, Desi came to see me in my office. “Jess,” he
said, “you and I know that after this show goes off the air I’m not going to get a lot of other acting jobs. What I really want to do is produce, but I need to build a reputation as a producer. How would you feel about letting me take ‘executive producer’ credit on the show?”

Now, up to that point all of the important decisions on the show had been reached by consensus, after extensive consultations with Desi and everyone else concerned. But I had made it clear from the outset that if I was going to be the producer, I would have to have ultimate control of all of the show’s creative elements. My contract spelled that out. Even Desi couldn’t override my decisions—only Lucy had that kind of veto power. But if Desi took the title of “executive producer,” I wondered, wouldn’t that cause confusion about my authority as producer of the show?

And Desi was not the only one wanting to build a reputation as a TV producer. This was
my
first producing venture in the new medium. Now, so far it was quite successful. I was concerned that adding an “Executive Producer” credit might convey the impression that Desi, rather than I, had overall control of the show’s artistic elements.

I suggested naming Desi as “Executive in Charge of
Production” or “Co-Producer,” but neither of those titles interested him. After a long discussion without reaching any acceptable arrangement, we finally
agreed to discuss it again after we had both had a little more time to think it over.

•   •   •

A few days later, a friend introduced me to someone as the producer of
I Love Lucy.
After telling me how much she enjoyed the show, she asked me a question: “
I Love Lucy
is only a half hour a week,” she said. “What do you do during the rest of the week?”

I had no trouble at all finding things to do during “the rest of the week.” I once figured out that I was always working on something like thirteen episodes at a time. In addition to the one we were rehearsing, there would be the show the three of us would start writing that week, the show that was already in rewrite, another show that had been shot the week before, another one in mimeograph, another one in the first editing stages, still another in final stages, and so on. And for the upcoming shows I held production meetings casting, costumes, sets, props. On shows that had already been filmed there were meetings on editing, music, dubbing, publicity, you name it. Right on through to the answer print, people were continually coming to me and asking me detailed questions about this show or that. “In the rough cut of show number seventeen, in the opening scene,” somebody would say, “there’s a close-up of Desi at the telephone, and you told me you wanted to use a two-shot of Lucy and Desi, but we can’t use that angle because the boom wasn’t clear.” Now, somehow, I would always know exactly what they were talking about. Through some
quirk of my brain, I could remember every bit of the footage on all of the shows. Automatically. That part was easy.
The hard part was being responsible for actually putting all of these shows together, and for coming up with a new story with Bob and Madelyn every single week.