CHAPTER ELEVEN
FILMING of the last Lucille Ball–Desi Arnaz show on March 2, 1960, coincided with Desi’s forty-third birthday. This time around, no one on the set expected a celebratory spirit, so none were disappointed—except for the program’s guest performers, Ernie Kovacs and his wife, Edie Adams. The comedian and the singer had just arrived in town and knew little of the impending divorce. They learned the hard way. Edgy and querulous, Lucy insisted that Kovacs, whose specialty was improvisation, read his lines exactly as written. She also demanded that Adams lose her pageboy hairstyle. No sooner had Adams complied than Lucy decided that the old look was better. “I just couldn’t seem to please her,” the singer remarked. “If I concentrated on learning my blocking, she’d say, ‘Stop! That’s no way to read that line!’ So, I’d do it full out as if I were on Broadway, and she’d say, ‘Stop! You’re not in your light!’ So it went, back and forth. And not just with me, but with all of the cast and crew.”
Desi had taken over direction of the show at the beginning of the 1959–1960 season, and he carried out his chores with a professional sangfroid as if to stay above the battle. Nonetheless, conceded Adams, long experience at watching others at the helm made Desi “a marvelous director because he knew what was funny and what was not.” Moreover, “he was a hands-on floor director, as opposed to someone who just sat up in the booth and talked over a microphone.” But Desi kept his hands off when dealing with Lucy. He addressed her through others—“Would you please tell Miss Ball to move over?” She responded in kind—“Will you tell Mr. Arnaz I can’t move over there?” The plot of the show concerned Ricky’s inability to find work as a bandleader. In order to get a gig for her husband, Lucy entices Kovacs to pay a visit to the house. Her plans are thwarted when Kovacs is charmed by the boy and decides to hire Little Ricky rather than the big one. Lucy refuses to give up. She pastes on a mustache and tries to worm her way into Kovacs’s confidence by disguising herself as his chauffeur, a masquerade foiled when Desi gets invited along for a ride.
Except when they acted, Vance and Frawley looked at the floor or the ceiling, loath to watch the pair uncoupling before them. Between takes Lucy went into her dressing room, emerging each time with wet eyes. The final lines had a subtext no one wanted to contemplate too closely:
LUCY
Honest, honey, I just wanted to help.
RICKY
From now on, you can help me by not trying to help me. But thanks, anyway.
The script called for a kiss and embrace, with Lucy removing her mustache at the last moment. “This was not just an ordinary kiss for a scene in a show,” Desi was to write. “It was a kiss that would wrap up twenty years of love and friendship, triumphs and failures, ecstasy and sex, jealousy and regrets, heartbreaks and laughter . . . and tears. The only thing we were not able to hide was the tears.
“After the kiss we just stood there looking at each other and licking the salt.
“Then Lucy said, ‘You’re supposed to say “Cut.” ’
“ ‘I know. Cut, goddamn it!’ ”
Those words seemed to draw a curtain down on the proceedings and the marriage and, quite possibly, the whole Desilu enterprise. Backstage, everyone choked back tears, including the curmudgeon Frawley. Not once, in all the years he worked for the Arnazes, had he been disabled by drink. True to the agreement he had made with Desi, he never missed a show or blew a line because of booze. But that night he went on a well-earned bender. In the past, his hands sometimes shook; from here on the tremor was so visible that whenever he acted he jammed them in his pockets, unless a scene called for gestures.
Right after the farewell Desi picked up his belongings from the house and departed for Las Vegas. The next day, March 3, 1960, outfitted in a modest black-and-white tweed silk suit, Lucy chatted with waiting reporters before entering a Santa Monica courtroom to file for divorce. Before Judge Orlando H. Rhodes she charged Desiderio Arnaz, her husband of nineteen years, with having caused her “grievous mental suffering,” and went on to lament Desi’s “Jekyll-and-Hyde” personality. When Hyde was in the ascendant, she said, there were “temper tantrums in front of the children; there was no discussing anything with him. . . . We could have no social life for the last three or four years.” Called on to corroborate her cousin’s testimony, Cleo stated that Desi did indeed exhibit “completely irrational behavior.” Desi made a brief denial through his lawyer, Milton A. “Mickey” Rudin. A little while later he admitted to the charges, but did so, maintained Rudin, to keep this an amicable divorce in accordance with promises made to the children. “Did you try to work things out?” Lucy was asked in the courtroom. “There’s no discussing anything with him,” she replied, Lucy Ricardo–style. “He doesn’t discuss very well.”
The San Francisco Chronicle headed its front-page story: LUCY—“I JUST CAN’T GO ON.” The Los Angeles Times went into detail—“Life With Volatile Cuban Was Nightmare, Court Told”—and reported on the agreement worked out by Rudin and Lucy’s counsel, Art Manella. Timesummed up the settlement: “For Lucy, their two children, half of their $20 million Desilu interests, the leaky mansion, two station wagons, a cemetery plot at Forest Lawn. For Desi: the other half of the $20 million, a golf cart, a membership in a Palm Springs Country Club, a truck, and several horses.” There were other considerations. Desi agreed to pay support of $450 a month for each child. The income from his 210-room Indian Wells Hotel would be divided between the exes— until 1966, when Lucy would buy out Desi and place the money in a trust fund for Lucie and Desi IV.
With everything so neatly buttoned up, Lucy professed herself astonished by the negative public reaction. Some eight thousand letters came in, urging her to reconsider: surely there was a way of patching things up. In the minds of Americans the Arnazes were the nation’s Ideal Married Couple. And besides, they had split in 1944, only to reconcile. Wasn’t a rerun possible, even now? Her monosyllabic answer, “Nope,” satisfied no one but the speaker. “Even when I was called a Communist,” she complained, “a few nuts called me terrible things, but in general everybody was so supportive. But when Desi and I got divorced, it was unbelievable. They called me everything in the book. Others just begged for us not to do it. Everybody asked us to think it over. I couldn’t believe that everybody in the United States had an opinion about our divorce.”
Desi put on his game face and went out in public, attempting to assure everyone that he had done the right thing. Those who knew him were unconvinced. During the hearing he sulked at the Desert Inn, drinking heavily and using such foul language that the management asked him to go someplace else. Returned to Los Angeles, he set up a dwelling at the Château Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. There he was more orderly, playing the host at parties and lavishly tipping the help. But he laughed a little too hard and drank a little too much, and he had trouble remembering little things and kept forgetting big ones. Disturbed and frightened, he checked into a Los Angeles hospital, where he dried out and followed a strict diet. Ten days later Desi checked himself out, determined to show everyone that the old spring was back in his step. When he returned to his office at Desilu, the vice presidents and assistants gratefully acknowledged that the boss did seem extraordinary cheerful and lucid. In the afternoons he was as sensible as he had been in the mornings, and on the golf links he shaved several strokes off his game. Moreover, he made a fresh start by moving to a forty-acre ranch in Corona.
In the coming months Desi would need to be in good shape; the company he headed was beginning to lose its place as a major factor in TV production. Warner Brothers, Columbia (Screen Gems), Four Star, and Revue had entered the race, and Desi, used to being numero uno, looked up to see Desilu outclassed, outspent, and outdistanced. Only The Untouchables remained in the Top Ten; Desilu’s new sitcoms Harriganand Son and Guestward Ho! would not make it past their first seasons, and even the once-popular Ann Sothern Show was beginning to falter. To be sure, the studio could make money by renting out space for such programs as The Jack Benny Show, Lassie, and The Barbara Stanwyck Show, but as a production house Desilu seemed to be losing its touch. To regain it, Desi went after big Hollywood names, hoping to star them in television vehicles: he had meetings with Burt Lancaster, Eva Gabor, Tony Curtis, Jane Wyman, John Wayne, and Mickey Rooney, among others. Nothing came to fruition.
As her ex-husband pushed on, Lucy made plans to trade the small screen for the big one, and the sound stage for the Broadway boards. The film was The Facts of Life, a comedy costarring Bob Hope. The theater piece was originally supposed to be an adaptation of “Big Blonde,” a Dorothy Parker short story to be produced by Kermit Bloomgarten and directed by Morton Da Costa. The script displeased her, however. While it was being rewritten, she turned to another project, Wildcat, a musical created by an extraordinary confluence of talents. The book was by N. Richard Nash, writer of the 1954 smash The Rainmaker. Music and lyrics were by the new young team of Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, who had written such Frank Sinatra favorites as “Witchcraft” and “The Best Is Yet to Come.” The director would be Michael Kidd, who had choreographed the megahits Guys and Dolls and Can-Can. Wildcat was being touted as the story of “the Annie Oakley of the Oil Fields,” and Lucy was reminded of another musical about another Annie Oakley. By playing the original Annie in Annie Get Your Gun, Ethel Merman became the biggest musical comedy star of the 1940s.
Coleman spoke about an early meeting with Lucy, a huge star who, he was dismayed to find, “sang like Jimmy Durante.” He said: “I had a lot of trouble writing the opening number. Finally, one day Carolyn said, ‘If it was for anybody who wasn’t as famous as Lucy, if it was just somebody who sang like her, what would you write?’ and I wrote ‘Hey, Look Me Over,’ right there.” The day came when Coleman and Leigh played and sang Lucy the full score. “She was as nervous as I was,” said a surprised Coleman. “In a strange way, we were auditioning for her, but she was auditioning for us. When we got to ‘Hey, Look Me Over,’ she jumped from her seat and said, ‘I can sing that!’ In our mutual fear we got into one of those eye locks, and through terror we got through the song for the first time. When she finally got through it, she said, ‘Let’s not do that again—my eyeballs hurt.’ ” Actually she did it again and again, and when she was certain that the notes were not out of her limited range, agreed to do the musical as soon as she finished her movie. Moreover, she promised to stay in the show for a minimum of a year and a half.
The Facts of Life had a ten-week shooting schedule, Lucy told a TV Guide reporter. “Then I go to New York with the two children, my mother, and two maids. We have a seven-room apartment on Sixty-ninth Street at Lexington. I’ll start rehearsals right away for a Broadway show, Wildcat.” Her emotions seesawed as she discussed the project. “I’ve never been on the stage before, except in Dream Girl years ago. But we always filmed I Love Lucy before a live audience. I knew a long time ago that I was eventually going to go to Broadway and that’s one reason why we shot Lucythat way. But I’m still terrified. The contract for the play runs eighteen months. Maybe it will last that long. Maybe longer. And maybe it will last three days.” Lucy chain-smoked through the interview. “Nervous habit. I don’t inhale, never did. Just nerves,” a reaction from the divorce. She picked up a framed picture of Desi in her dressing room. “Look at him,” Lucy said in a throaty, wistful tone. “That’s the way he looked ten years ago. He doesn’t look like that now. He’ll never look like that again.”
Everything about the revised Facts of Life seemed to resonate with Lucy. The script not only gave her a chance to trade gags with Bob Hope, it recounted the sorrows and yearnings of middle age. In Hope’s quip, Facts was “the story of two handicapped people who fall in love. Their handicaps are his wife and her husband.” Supported by fine character actors (including Philip Ober, then in the process of getting divorced from Vivian Vance), Lucy played Kitty, the middle-aged wife of a genial bore, Jack Weaver (Don DeFore). Hope was Larry Gilbert, husband of the ennui-producing Mary, played by Ruth Hussey. Kitty and Larry enjoy each other’s company and make many adulterous plans, all of which go amusingly awry. “Am I really doing this?” Kitty asks herself en route to an assignation. “Me? Pasadena housewife, secretary of the PTA, den mother of the Cub Scouts. Have I really come to Monterey to spend a weekend with the husband of my best friend?” Their desires unconsummated, the frustrated and guilt-ridden lovers finally forsake their schemes and philosophically return to their respective spouses.
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.
For the most part, though, the yocks were hard to come by. Lucy got colds easily and couldn’t shake them off. The slightest difficulty drove her to tantrums and crying jags. She began, rather irrationally, to miss Desi, to wonder whether even now a reconciliation was possible. Evidently he felt the same way; there was a tentative proposal of remarriage. Her yearning intensified until a retired couple came backstage and introduced themselves. Instead of wanting an autograph, they had something to give Lucy. During a recent vacation in Hawaii they came across an object shining in the sand. “The lady opened her purse and pulled out a gold chain with a Saint Christopher medal and a wedding ring,” Lucy told a friend. “I looked at the ring and it read, ‘To Desi with love from Lucy.’ I thanked them, kissed them both, and then closed the door and wept. Just closed the door and wept. It’s funny, but it was then that I knew it was really over. Having that ring in my hands didn’t bring the good times back to me, it brought the terrible times back, and I knew it was right. I knew Desi and I could be friends, but that we shouldn’t be married.”
Early in February, Variety stated what the rest of Broadway already knew: Wildcat had to shut down for “an abrupt fortnight’s layoff to permit star Lucille Ball to take a Florida rest on the advice of her doctor. Miss Ball has been suffering from a virus and chronic fatigue.” Lucy returned to the show as promised, after appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show to sing Wildcat’s best number, “Hey, Look Me Over,” but she was not the same woman who opened the show a couple of months back. On Sundays, to bolster her flagging spirits, she attended services at Marble Collegiate Church. There the celebrity-hunting Norman Vincent Peale dispensed commonsense advice. Lucy supplemented it with readings from The Art of Selfishness, by the self-styled psychology writer David Seabury. Students of Ayn Rand would recognize the similarity to that author’s approach: “Here is a mysterious contradiction. Those who toil for the good of others often lose the respect of those for whom they sacrifice. As we change, under the stress of helping, others may blame us for the lessening of our strength, health, ability to cope and our charm.” For Lucy’s bruised ego, here was the perfect salve, the assurance that she had no reason to feel guilty about taking care of Number One. “This little book revolutionized my life,” she would maintain. “It taught me to worry less about all the outside factors in my life and take command of me. I learned to subject everything in my life to these questions: is this good for Lucy? Does it fill my needs? Is it good for my health, my peace of mind? Does my conscience agree, does it give me a spiritual life?” A paragraph in which “my” comes up seven times, “me” three times, and “Lucy” and “I” on each indicates that altruism was not very high on her agenda just then. Yet all this self-absorption did little to fend off the terrors of ill health, of encroaching age, of the feeling that she was losing her place on the board. In the past she had been bolstered by her Los Angeles circle. New York offered no such intimates; she had to make do with her mother and with members of the Wildcat cast. Keith Andes served as an escort for a brief time; the fling concluded as fast as it began. A more lasting relationship was forged with supporting actress Paula Stewart, who played Wildcat’s younger sister. Stewart thought about appropriate gentlemen for Lucy and struck oil the evening she and her fiancé, comedian Jack Carter, brought along their friend Gary Morton. Morton (né Morton Goldaper) was a well-built, genial third-tier comedian who had come up the traditional route. He began spouting one-liners in Brooklyn, where his father drove a truck, then graduated to the Borscht Belt and small nightclubs, and finally appeared in larger venues including the Palace and Radio City Music Hall, where he was then performing. Morton usually sported a tan and a toupee, and on this night he sat back smoking and watching his date with some amusement. In between postures she loudly advertised her fatigue. He thought she needed to be taken down a peg or two, and when Lucy tossed a cigarette in his direction and ordered, “Light me,” he threw the thing back in her direction and told her to light it herself. No one had spoken to Lucy like that in years. She laughed with a grudging admiration and asked how he earned his salary. “I’m a nightclub performer,” Morton said. “What’s your line?”
As the evening progressed, Lucy found herself intrigued more than attracted. “When I fell in love with Desi,” she was to recall, “it was at first sight—my love for Gary was slow growth. I liked him before I loved him.” They continued to see each other and to correspond in the winter of 1960–1961 without commitment on either side. Morton had out-of-town engagements, and Lucy continued to struggle in the role of Wildcat Jackson, unable to shake off exhaustion and various ailments. DeDe, who customarily kept her own counsel, felt obliged to speak out. “Lucille!” she advised her daughter. “The Man Upstairs is trying to tell you something!”
As usual, Lucy ignored the warning. She also paid no attention to another omen. In order to keep their star—and their show—going, the producers ordered an oxygen tank to be kept waiting in the wings. Lucy took hits from it between acts. Since she also took hits on cigarettes before, after, and sometimes during performances, however, any help she received was immediately neutralized. Hedda Hopper wrote about the night William Frawley attended a performance: “He created a minor sensation. ‘It’s Fred Mertz!’ they all said. I went backstage to see Lucille when Bill came in. When he saw how thin Lucy was there were tears in his eyes.”
On April 22, 1961, in the middle of a vigorous dance number called “Tippy Tippy Toes,” Lucy collapsed onstage. Dancer Edith King reached out to break Lucy’s fall—and fractured her own wrist in the process. From then on, every realist in the company of Wildcat knew that the end was near. Lucy’s understudy, Betty Jane Watson, finished out the week while the producers scrambled to find a replacement star. They approached Gwen Verdon, Mitzi Gaynor, even Ginger Rogers. The women gave a uniform response: “Follow Lucille Ball. Are you crazy?” On May 24, Lucy gave her final Broadway performance. The next day a press release went out, guaranteeing ticket buyers that the star would rest up for eight or nine weeks, then reenter Wildcat on August 7. Lucy’s return was crucial; at the time of the shutdown the advance sale was larger than it had been on opening day. Few personalities could have accomplished her feat: by dint of fame and grit she had made the critical barbs irrelevant; audiences came to the Alvin to see Lucille Ball, not Wildcat Jackson. For the first time, a television personality had proved to be an outsized box office draw.
B ut there would be no resumption. Lucy resigned in June, returning $165,000 of her own money to the box office. The sum would compensate for tickets that had been bought and would have to be returned. She had lost twenty-two pounds during the run and was now in a state of psychological depression and physical exhaustion. Upon hearing of Lucy’s situation, Hedda Hopper wrote: “Let’s hope Lucy stays in the hospital until she regains her health, strength, and peace of mind. Lucy’s one of the most vital girls I know but so weak now she can scarcely hold a teacup.”
Hedda was misinformed. Lucy was not in the hospital. She had settled on a new panacea. The way to escape trouble, she had concluded, was not merely to quit Hollywood or New York, but to leave the whole country behind her. She would set up residence in Switzerland, settle there for a while with the children. There was plenty of money in the bank. She was nearing the half-century mark. Who needed all this show business madness, this sickness of the body and soul? “I felt so awful,” Lucy wrote in her autobiography, “I honestly thought I was going to die. I flew to London and eventually to Capri and Rome, determined to die in a scenic atmosphere.”
She returned to Beverly Hills with DeDe and the children, slightly improved but still dispirited, determined to sell the houses and get the hell out of town. Somehow, though, she could not break away. Friendships were resumed, parties attended. And then there was Gary Morton, who showed up one day and settled into the guest house for several weeks. Lucy took him to a series of social gatherings where he said he felt like “some strange lamp” with people circling around and examining him from every angle. One of them was Desi himself, who annoyed his ex-wife by expressing approval of her new man. Other reports were not so favorable. Friends noted that, like Desi Arnaz, Gary Morton was younger than Lucy by six years; unlike Desi, however, he was very much a second banana who made a decent living but hardly the kind of income Lucy earned just by collecting dividends from Desilu. And he was Jewish; that would bring additional complications in the unlikely event that they married. It was widely assumed that this would be a short-lived affair, a rebound Lucy needed after the depressing divorce and the abrupt close of Wildcat.
Minds were changed after several weeks, when Lucy began to perk up and regain the weight she had lost—and even put on a few extra pounds. Clearly she was recovering, and Gary seemed to be the main cause of her happiness. His stay at the guest house lengthened. Speculation began. Lucy did a good job of pretending to be a truly independent soul, ordering friends not to mention the word “marriage” in her presence. A canny reporter heard the scuttlebutt and cornered her one day: “I’d like to bet that you will marry Gary Morton.” Lucy countered: “You’ll lose your money. Don’t bet. It’s nice this way.” Lucy was kidding the journalist, and herself. She dreaded the approach of fifty and of finishing her life, as she had once confided in cousin Cleo, “loaded and lonely.”
DeDe had very little use for men; one had died on her, the other had been a crank and a loser. Yet she knew Lucy was not quite her mother’s daughter: she needed a man around, a reliable one this time, someone whose ego could be subordinate to a star’s. No more famous men; no more egotists; no more boozers. Gary looked to be a viable candidate, and he might just be Lucy’s last, best chance. Here was a comedian who was neither a loser nor a headliner, who had never met a payroll, never run a studio, never dominated a scene. He had been peripatetic since early manhood; his sole attempt at marriage had lasted less than a year and ended in an annulment. He was not much of a drinker or seducer and had no particular interest in the business end of things. Amiable, honest, a good listener, and something of a recessive personality, Morton was, in essence, the anti-Desi. If only some way could be found to make certain that the suitor wasn’t a fortune hunter, he just might make a fine second husband for Lucille Ball.
The first time Gary brought up the idea of marriage Lucy deflected his proposal. DeDe surprised her by saying, “You shouldn’t let that guy get away.” The second time he proposed was on a plane headed to New York. Gary was booked to play the Copacabana, and Lucy planned to make her first TV appearance since Wildcat, doing a turn with Henry Fonda.
“Lucy, what are we waiting for?” Gary asked.
“Well, are you prepared for any swipes that they might take at you? What if they call you Mr. Ball?”
“Who are they?”
She sat silent. Perhaps “they” were just an insubstantial fear, like so many of her recent worries. Straightening up, she said in a determined voice: “All right. If Dr. Norman Vincent Peale is free to marry us this week, we’ll go ahead.”
The reverend was of course free, and on November 19, 1961, Lucille Ball and Gary Morton exchanged vows at Marble Collegiate Church in a ceremony attended by DeDe and the children, flown in for the occasion. Informed about the imminent nuptials, Desi IV asked, “Will Daddy like it?” Lucy answered truthfully, “He wouldn’t mind.” The couple who had brought Lucy and Gary together, Paula Stewart and Jack Carter, were matron of honor and best man. (DeDe’s concern about gold-digging was put to rest when Morton signed a prenuptial agreement and set up a separate bank account for his own expenses.)
Much symbolism, and not a little irony, attended the service. Lucy and Desi had also been married in November—twenty-one years before. When she and Gary applied for a license, Lucy wore the same outfit in which she had divorced Desi the previous year. She had done a little numerology when adding up the figures on her new marriage license and found that they equaled nineteen—“My lucky number!” she exclaimed to a reporter. It was not as lucky as she claimed; the nineteenth (and final) year of her first marriage had been one of unrelieved misery. She told other reporters, “I look forward to a nice, quiet life.” Leaving the church, she and Gary had to follow in the wake of a flying wedge of New York City policemen. The cops protected the couple from a crowd of fifteen hundred fans who wanted a glimpse, a touch, or a piece of clothing from their favorite.
The Mortons started out separately. He went off to Palm Springs, where he was booked to play a nightclub. Lucy stayed in New York to rehearse for The Good Years, a CBS special costarring her old colleagues Henry Fonda and Margaret Hamilton and featuring the new comedian Mort Sahl. Based on The Good Years: From 1900 to the First World War, the nostalgic history by Walter Lord, the program looked back with affection on silent-movie serials, prohibition, and vaudeville. In various sketches Lucy sang and danced with and without Fonda, and acted the part of a reprobate, hauled into court as a public nuisance.
The show aired on January 12, 1962. It was hardly her finest sixty minutes. Geoffrey Mark Fidelman speculates that Lucy was not producer Leland Hayward’s ideal: “It is most likely that Mary Martin was the first choice, as she had appeared in several of Hayward’s productions.” But Martin was doing eight shows a week as the centerpiece of The Sound of Music on Broadway, and Ball and Fonda were pals. (Fonda liked to joke that had the two Hollywood hopefuls gotten along back in the 1930s he could have co-owned a studio called Henrilu.) So Lucy was chosen, and she gamely went along with Franklin Shaffner’s direction. In the words of her hair stylist, Irma Kusely, “This was a dreadful show. Both Fonda and Lucille hated it. Lucille did not look well. She was still battling weight.” She was also fighting the clock, and makeup artists could hide only so much. Yet she stayed away from the route so many middle-aged film and television stars had chosen. “Few people know it,” Kusely added, “but she was not a candidate for plastic surgery due to her skin type. She literally had very thin skin which bruised easily. Surgery was out of the question.”
But no one seemed to care about Lucille Ball’s appearance or about the mediocrity of The Good Years. The news, as expressed on the cover of Life, said it all: LUCY’S BACK ON TV. Nothing else counted to the network or the viewers. Lucy wasn’t so easily impressed. After all, she had been here before. To a publicist who asked about her future on the tube she responded: “I will never do another TV series. It couldn’t top I Love Lucy, and I’d be foolish to try. In this business you have to know when to get off.”
She had already been the undisputed First Lady of TV, and, for better or worse, a Broadway diva. She had even starred in radio. Only one medium remained for Lucy to dominate. She had never come close to the first rank of film stars, and it was much too late for ingenue parts. But there was still time for her to be a character lead, the comic equivalent of Bette Davis or Joan Crawford. Several ideas were batted around. Columbia offered a costarring role in The Great Sebastians, a Broadway hit when the Lunts appeared in it. An independent producer had the notion of casting Lucy as a congenital liar opposite James Cagney as her psychiatrist in the comedy Here Lies Ruthie Adams. Lucy’s favorites, Bob Carroll and Madelyn Pugh Martin, were preparing the script for Full House, concerning the romance of a widow with eight children and a widower with ten. And James Kirkwood’s There Must Be a Pony, a drama about his mother, a silent-movie actress, briefly exerted some appeal. Lucy considered all projects, then opted for a Bob Hope vehicle, Critic’s Choice. Ira Levin’s comedy was based loosely on the conflict of theater critic Walter Kerr and his wife, playwright Jean Kerr, who had written the vastly successful Mary, Mary—a play he was forced to review.
The decision did much to restore Lucy’s morale, as did her new husband. Gary Morton was assiduously attentive at home and at social events. At the same time, he tried to maintain a distance financially, playing club dates and feeding a personal bank account with his earnings. (That money, however, was soon supplemented by unsolicited contributions from a generous wife.) Though Gary settled into Lucy’s home and circle, he made a point of asserting his own style and personality, even imposing some of it on the household cuisine—Lucy was making the trip, said her friends, from Cuban to Reuben. In fact, this voyage was not as new as it seemed; in a strange way she had always been subject to Jewish influence. Way back in the Celoron days there were the owners of Lerner’s department store; in Manhattan there was Hattie Carnegie, née Henriette Kannengiser. In the early Hollywood days there was Eddie Cantor, then the studio heads like Sam Goldwyn and David Selznick whom she regarded as “papas.” In television there were Jess Oppenheimer and William Paley. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the provincial towns of upstate New York were not know for their philo-Semitism. Yet Lucy had never shown the slightest bias against any group, no matter what the feelings of her friends and neighbors. “My mother,” observed Lucie Arnaz, “was a rebel wherever she went, and if she sensed prejudice around her she always went the other way.” And then, of course, there was the example of Grandpa Fred. Lucy’s dissidence was a matter of both nature and nurture.
In this intricately structured household Morton would remain Jewish, Lucy would identify herself as Protestant, and Lucie and Desi IV would continue to be Catholic. The separation of church and family worked for the adults; for the children it was no guarantee of happiness. Lucy entered her younger child in St. John’s Military Academy in Los Angeles, only to find that the boy was totally out of his element. “He was having nightmares. He couldn’t sleep. I said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ And he said, ‘They gave me detention for tying a shoelace during drill when I was supposed to be at attention.” Lucy learned that “thirteen-year-old ‘generals’ were giving these bullying orders.” She took Desi IV out of yet another school and mentioned the move to reporters, exacerbating the situation. This was the time to address her son’s resentments, but other matters and other people had priority. In a way, Morton was Lucy’s newest child now. In the coming years he would receive more and more attention from her; his toys were the expensive watches (Rolex, Patek Philippe) and cars (Mercedes-Benz, Rolls-Royce) formerly out of his price range. But what did that matter, she responded when a critical friend pointed out the vast discrepancy between his finances and hers. Gary didn’t chase girls, didn’t booze, was unfailingly polite, a real gentleman. She had had the other kind, and enough was too much, thank you just the same.
Lucy’s high income was not guaranteed. As vice president of Desilu she did almost nothing. But she was kept abreast of the company’s fiscal condition, and in 1962 it was not exactly robust. The company had peaked in 1957, when its shows dominated the television schedule. Now Desilu had but one dominant series, The Untouchables, which had recently come under fire from parents for its graphic violence, and from Italian-American groups for its stereotypical Mafia villains. The Federation of Italian-American Democratic Organizations had boycotted the show’s sponsor, and eventually the Liggett & Meyers Tobacco Company succumbed to pressure and withdrew its sponsorship. After that, no less a personage than Frank Sinatra expressed his displeasure. In one of its let’s-you-and-him-fight pieces, Variety noted that Sinatra and Arnaz almost came to blows at Desi’s Indian Wells Hotel when Frank looked him up at midnight to discuss the depiction of Italians as ruthless mobsters on the Untouchables programs.
The truth was a little more graphic and a lot more absurd. On an April evening in Palm Springs, Sinatra told friends, “I’m going to kill that Cuban prick.” With that aim in mind, according to his hostile biographer, Kitty Kelley, Sinatra drove to Indian Wells, accompanied by actress Dorothy Provine, composer Jimmy Van Heusen, and Van Heusen’s date. Desi, flanked by two large Italian-American bodyguards, entered the lounge. Obviously drunk, he spotted Sinatra and yelled, “Hi ya, dago.” Desi assumed that Sinatra was at the place to have a good time, and blithely wove his way to the table. Tight-jawed, Sinatra told Desi what he and his friends thought of The Untouchables and its ethnic bias. Desi exploded: “What do you want me to do— make them all Jews?” A muttered argument began. Sinatra admitted that he had never actually seen the program, but maintained that he was correct because, “I always know what I’m talking about. That’s how I got where I am.”
Desi gave a derisive laugh. The Cuban accent was more pronounced when he was liquored up. “Oh, yeah? Well, I remember when you couldn’t get a yob. Couldn’t get a yob. So why don’t you forget all this bullshit and just have your drinks and enjoy yourself. Stop getting your nose in where it doesn’t belong, you and your so-called friends.”
“Unruffled,” Kelley maintains, “Desi meandered back to the bar with the two bodyguards, leaving Frank full of unspent bluster. Obviously embarrassed, he looked around the table and said, ‘I couldn’t just hit him. We’ve been pals for too long.’ ” Sinatra eventually expressed his hostility in a nonviolent manner, relocating his production company from the Desilu lot to the Samuel Goldwyn studios.
In this fallow period Desilu’s real estate holdings seemed more valuable than the company’s television products—weary programs like The Texan and Guestward Ho! So it was not a surprise to see the former Arnazes in conference, not to discuss the sunny days of their marriage but to plan a new program using the talents of Lucille Ball. “They asked me to save the studio,” Lucy was to claim with permissible exaggeration. “I wondered if there was anything to save. The only salable product we had was Lucy.”
Desilu boasted quite a few assets besides its cofounder, but none with her universal appeal. Still, she could no longer represent herself as Mrs. Ricky Ricardo. How should she be made presentable to a public still unsettled by her divorce and remarriage? Many consultations later, it was announced that Lucille Ball would star in a new half-hour series, The Lucy Show. It would be based on Life without George, Irene Kampen’s novel woven around the life of a suburban divorcée. By the time the writers finished with it, Madelyn Pugh Martin and the three Bobs, Carroll, Schiller, and Weiskopf, had turned the star into a widow. The change of her status was vital; the public knew the fictive Lucy as a happily married woman. In real life the only way she could divest herself of Desi was to divorce him; in her screen life the only way to get rid of her husband was to bury him. Lucy retained her Christian name, but her surname was now Carmichael. “Lucille could be very superstitious,” said actress Carole Cook. “She liked the letters ‘ar’ together. That’s part of the reason for the name ‘Carmichael.’ . . . I reminded her once that she had done pretty well with the name Lucille Ball, but she said, ‘Yeah, but I didn’t do really well until my name was ARnaz and RicARdo.’ ”
Lucy’s Mrs. Carmichael is a somewhat ditsy inhabitant of West-chester, New York, who rents rooms to her friend, divorcée Vivian Bagley. (Vivian Vance, who had foresworn Hollywood upon marriage to her fourth, and much younger, husband, the editor–literary agent John Dodds, was enticed out of Connecticut retirement to play the part. William Frawley had left Desilu to appear as a regular in the sitcom My Three Sons.) Both women have children: Lucy a teenage daughter, Chris, and a younger son, Jerry. Vivian has a preteen son, Sherman.
In the first episode, broadcast October 1, 1962, Lucy bounces around on a trampoline. Subsequent adventures involve the widow Carmichael in her son’s school football game, acquiring a sheep to trim the lawn, attempting to become an astronaut, and climbing into a kangaroo outfit. The show had the female ingredients of I Love Lucy, but that was all it had. Audiences knew that Lucille Ball was not Lucy Carmichael. They were keenly aware that she was not a widow and that she was too old to be repeating 1950s shtick, mugging and flashing her innocent blue eyes whenever plans went awry. With each show Lucy’s worries intensified. Was she was on a fool’s errand, trying to induce lightning to strike twice at the same studio? Candy Moore, who played Chris, described her screen mother: “I would talk to her sometimes before the show. It was scary—she’d be looking at me, and she wouldn’t hear a word I said. She was tuned in to her own thoughts, and she’d be looking right through me.” The fear was infectious: “Vivian was a nervous wreck, too. They were buzzing on adrenaline, they were so scared.”
Given these terrors, the first batch of episodes proved to be much better than Lucy expected, although things went downhill rapidly from there. Broadcast the same night of the week as I Love Lucy (though a half hour earlier), The Lucy Show acquired an audience of nostalgia buffs and new viewers. Variety spoke for them: “Lucille Ball is back and welcome.” Playing the good sport, Desi placed an institutional ad in the show-business paper, using snippets of favorable reviews surrounding a caricature of himself making a mock complaint: “How do you like that—they didn’t even miss me!” The Hollywood Reporter spoke for the disappointed fans: “It’s going to take a lot of getting-used-to-Lucy without Desi.” His absence was being felt with every show, “tribute indeed to any comedian.” A vague attempt was made to replace Desi with Lucy Carmichael’s drop-in suitor, an affable, ineffectual airline pilot played by Dick Martin. It was not convincing. As the program went on, wisecracking insiders, noticing the lack of significant males, used The Dick Van Dyke Show as a reference. They called Lucy’s program the “Dyke Sans Dick Show” and, more explicitly, the “Dyke Show Sans Dicks.”
The production values were not all they could have been, either. The camera work was professional enough, as were the backgrounds and costumes, most of which not only flattered a heavily made-up Lucy but allowed Vivian to exhibit a little glamour of her own. The chief difficulty lay in Desilu’s (i.e., Desi’s) shortsightedness. In Desi’s opinion, comedy was “all black or all white” anyway: “It’s either funny or it’s not.” Why would an audience laugh any harder because a show was in shades of yellow, red, and blue? Like many others in the industry, he failed to realize that after Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color debuted in the fall of 1961, a revolution was under way. Fortune magazine predicted that one in three homes (18 million viewers) would soon own a color set, and the year Lucy came back to prime time, RCA’s board chairman predicted that “it won’t be very long before color television will be a mass item of commerce.” Yet at a Desilu stockholders’ meeting in 1962, Desi informed investors that he had no intention of filming The Lucy Show in color. In his opinion, “she’s just as funny in black-and-white.”
In point of fact, he was correct. As we will see, Desi’s commercial misjudgment turned out to be the ultimate making of Lucille Ball. But he could not know that; at the time, his statement seemed symptomatic of a general picture of inattention, for once again drinking had taken over his life. In Desilu, their detailed history of the company, Coyne Steven Sanders and Tom Gilbert cite several occasions on which Desi couldn’t control his behavior, even with the children. “At Del Mar, he was teaching little Desi how to shoot a gun. The poor kid wasn’t doing it right. His dad just lit into him, yelling, ‘You motherfucker, can’t you do anything?’ ” And Lucie remembered the times when her father “wouldn’t understand things clearly. He would misunderstand situations. He would think people were talking about him. He would hear something and think he heard something else. When it was at its worst, he would blow up. If the TV was on too late, and it was bedtime, instead of saying, ‘It’s bedtime,’ doors would crash. It was awful. It was terrible. Then he’d be terrifically sorry and feel awful. After I got a little older, I stopped going down there.”
In a complicated chicken-and-egg situation, it was impossible to tell whether Desi drank because his company was faltering, or whether Desilu was in a slump because its president was an alcoholic. All that was certain was that something had to change.
Newton Minow, appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission by President John F. Kennedy, had warned that U.S. viewers were facing “a vast wasteland” every night. Even so, he had to concede, “When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better.” The early 1960s offered an opening for creative producers to flourish in the week-wide desert of The Jetsons, I’ve Got a Secret, I’m Dickens—He’s Fenster, Dennis the Menace, Laramie, and Sing Along with Mitch. Many of them did, but not Desi, who had lost his focus and attention to detail. He was ill and burned out, an old man at forty-five. He had a last hurrah, billboarding his plans for the upcoming 1963–1964 season. Desilu would produce a game show; a TV series based on Cecil B. DeMille’s all-star circus spectacular, The Greatest Show on Earth; spin-offs of The Untouchables;and more situation comedies starring the likes of Ethel Merman and Glynis Johns.
That was the reason why an announcement from Desilu on Friday, November 9, 1962, shocked the industry. Desi was abruptly leaving the company he had founded, selling out to his ex-wife and heading for retirement. Insiders knew that the drama could have ended no other way. The stock had fallen from a high of $20 per share to $7. The company was in debt, and in a literal and figurative sense Desi no longer had the stomach to engineer a turnaround. In point of fact, he was responsible for the current status of Desilu Productions. When the company went public in December 1958, the Arnazes had signed an agreement. Should the time come when either wanted to quit, one partner would have the right buy the other out. Desi, embittered but weary, and in a much steeper decline than Desilu, was ready to go. But he needed money to live in style once his regular income was gone. With the help of Mickey Rudin, Lucy, the vice president, borrowed $3 million from City National Bank and bought the president’s shares— 52 percent of the total outstanding stock. Depressed as it was, Lucy’s advisers believed she was still getting a bargain.
Desi insisted that he had been planning on early retirement all along, and he posed for the press wearing a tight smile. All feeling seemed to have vanished from his face and from his outlook. And, indeed, when he left the company for the last time he paused only long enough to take a picture cube with photos of Lucie and Desi IV from his desk. Everything else was left in place. He wanted no part of the studio anymore. But Lucy still felt sentimental; she couldn’t bear to think of Desilu without him. She worked out a rationale for the press. “Desi has wanted to sell out for five years,” she claimed, “and I had first refusal on the stock. It’s a big and wonderful company—the real estate alone is worth six million—and I didn’t want to close up shop and hand over my shares to a stranger.” Besides, she added, “if I get in a jam I can always call up Desi and ask him what he’d do.” Even now, remarried and resettled, the first woman to head a major Hollywood studio since Mary Pickford produced her own pictures in the silent era, Lucy could not cut the cord.