The Queen of Tuesday

by Darin Strauss

  Meanwhile, Desi is coming quick. He has seen Lucille, the closeness, the man’s fingers on her.

  Fred Trump, beginning his speech, raises a brick.

  “Gentlemen!” he says, and the fat microphone crackles. He is ignoring the light rain. “Thank you for coming. And ladies. Can’t forget them, they’re too expensive.” General laughter, except for Lucille. No, that’s what we are, she thinks, in this year of our grace 1949: expensive adornments, investments, showpieces. Forming the thought even as she orders herself to smile. Because men are where you sink your youth and hopes—with all their sturdiness, caution, their slowness to engage. They’re hard to motivate. Oxen. She’d like to broadcast something that gets this across. But also funny. How to make a man do what you want—and even when he sees your stratagem, and even if you give him the consolation prize of thinking you’re a fool, you’ve still got what you want.

  “We are here for an occasion,” Fred Trump says. After twenty-five years in construction, he has taken on the right-angled solidity of buildings. He has that air of self-reliance: a fifty-year-old structure, small with the sun on the façade, that would be surprisingly tough to knock down.

  “Let’s hear it for this wonderful beach,” he’s saying, “and the workingman’s sanctuary that it will become!” Thin applause.

  Trump is no magician of talk. Unlike his aide-de-camp, Joe Herzfeld, who can take any topic and hocus-pocus it so the listener smiles and even oohs his amazement. When a plainspoken guy like Fred Trump reaches in the hat, no entertainment comes out twitching its whiskers.

  Isidore, meanwhile, edges even nearer to Lucille. What would it be like to feel her hands on my body? And she is wondering the same.

  “Lucille!” This is Desi’s yelling voice. “Lucille!” A seeable muscle jolts in Desi’s neck.

  Trump’s saying, “I must thank Mayor O’Dwyer”—tapping the brick at his hip—“Governor Dewey, Senator Wagner, Councilor Lieuvain…”

  Trump is looking around for his man Joe. As Vespasian had Josephus in Rome, as Pharaoh had Joseph in Canaan, Fred Trump has Joe Herzfeld in Brooklyn. This is how Jews (men like Isidore’s father) got ahead in real estate: the trust that an at-hand Israelite might transfer a bit of those ancient desert smarts.

  “Who’s your friend, Lucille?” Desi cries now—he has come up very close. His sealskin-black eyebrows are twinkled with rain.

  Lucille in astonishment turns to him, appealing. “Dez.”

  “Who’s your friend who has his hand on your elbow?”

  “Shh!” Lucille says, meaning it’s obviously nothing. But of course this is why you don’t leave the side of your wife to flirt with another woman.

  The noise has gotten a few people to turn, but not many: It so happens Fred Trump is finding his voice.

  “To build new things, you have to break with old things,” Trump says, and fingers at his pencil mustache. “And building a new thing is why we are here. For tonight’s wonderf—”

  “You’re not going to make one of your scenes, Desi.”

  Desi stares with hot eyes at Lucille. Isidore, he won’t acknowledge. Desi is bouncing with excitement.

  “You seem like an actor, mister”—he addresses Isidore at last, still not troubling himself to move eyes from his wife. “Are you? I don’t know you, see.”

  “People claim I lack a feeling of artistic taste—recently said to be uncouth by the quote ‘newspaperman’ Meyer Berger,” Fred Trump says.

  “Not in show business,” Isidore tells Desi sotto voce. His throat feels two sizes smaller. He swallows. “Real estate.”

  “A bricklayer, too, eh?” says Desi. “A Property Man?” He chin-gestures at Trump. “You lay bricks and call it art. Like him.”

  “Nope. Wrong. I’m not like him.”

  Desi rounds his thick shoulders to Isidore; the taunt is in his face. “What are you like, then?”

  Fred Trump senses a slight commotion and speaks louder:

  “Meyer Berger has never built anything himself. And so he does not understand great places never come easy, never. Let’s say, for one famous example, that vital building project, the pyramids of Egypt—at least we never exploited the sweat of men against their will for our important projects.”

  “Stop! Not tonight, Dez!” Lucille says and sends a hand to her husband’s wrist.

  But Desi is bull-rushing at Isidore. “I’ll chin you right now!”

  “Shh!”

  Isidore—nose-to-nose with Desi—feels the sweat ride down his back. Which wakes him deliciously up. Here, the only two men in the world.

  * * *

  —

  THE REST OF the assemblage have lifted their bricks on cue. “Okay,” Trump’s saying, looking at his pocket watch. “At the stroke of the hour!”

  “What do you suppose will happen,” Isidore says, “if you come any closer?”

  “I say two birds of a feather all smell the same,” Desi says. “You are just talk and a second-rate suit like all these real estate clowns.”

  “All right, guests!” Trump’s saying, just as Desi moves into Isidore, chest-first. “It’s nearly midnight!”

  Isidore has braced his whole body in opposition to Desi. Their bodies wrench and twang as they collide and collide.

  Trump: “Bricks ready!”

  Lucille pokes her own body between them. This should be on television, too. The sudden changes in mood, and now her absurd—if you stepped back from it—slapstick move. It is not easy to perform such a poke with nonchalance (fingers, wrist, elbow sandwiched amid jackets and hot breath). But with one turn, you could make it comedy, that sunny feel of no-one-can-really-get-hurt.

  “Plan,” Lucille says through her teeth. “The plan, Dez.”

  Immediately, Desi backs away. His demeanor suddenly is nonplussed. “Okay, Lucille. Have it your way.” Even his hair is nonplussed. For him, sociability is only that which interrupts periods of brawling.

  Isidore just stands there, breathing hard. He doesn’t know this man—not the way you would know a character on a program. How could he?

  “Ten,” Trump’s saying. “Nine.”

  Desi ignores this as he grins. “Here’s to long shots, Lucille.”

  “To long shots, Dez.”

  It appears nobody—except maybe a cigarette girl, a couple waiters, and some real estate boobs looking over their shoulders—has seen the shoving match. Lucille is thankful for that, at least; this is a private humiliation. But as an actress, she almost misses the end of the story, the nice working out of the plot.

  “Sorry, Hold-on”—the curtain-drop of her voice. “I’m a partner act.”

  * * *

  —

  “FIVE!” TRUMP’S SAYING. And everyone can sense it. The excitement. Every city-dweller crowded out by buildings is looking to see one come down. “Four, three…!” And here is the Pavilion of Fun—everything perfectly gleaming—the evening now purposefully about some lustrous thing.

  “Now!”

  A nervous moment. Uncertainty. The sound of the ocean. And then, a first brick is daringly thrown. One pane shatters. But now—tck-dsssh!—brick follows brick—tck-dsssh! tck-dsssh! tck-dsssh!—and the Pavilion of Fun spits all its glass.

  “That’s it!”

  “Throw!”

  And Isidore is in a trance, a cat by a rainy window.

  “Smash it!”

  Hold-on? he thinks. How wonderful! He does not know which movies he has seen Lucille in, but he knows he’s seen her somewhere in black-and-white. Another minute, and I would’ve slugged him, Isidore lies to himself.

  Isidore almost has the sense that his touch gave Lucille her color, that he is part of the glamour.

  Here’s that (tardy) applause and the kernel-pop of flashbulbs. A fancy building that lacks its windows is a queen standing with her teeth out
.

  Partygoers’ faces shine bone white, the outlines and differences blurred as the camera immortalizes them as a crowd.

  And Isidore waits before deciding what to do.

  Okay, he’s got to act now, or it never will happen.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I THINK MY GRANDFATHER was the person, other than my parents, whom I loved the most. My first memory is playing with a big balloon, that silvery, shining, crinkly helium kind you buy from a street vendor. It was a gift my grandfather had given to me. My dad and I were visiting him and a woman in Manhattan, a woman I didn’t know. She was not my grandmother. My grandmother was alive, then; she lived alone, not far from us in Long Island. But this was someone else—a brassy woman with dyed red hair who held my grandfather’s hand.

  NEITHER NEW YORK NOR LOS ANGELES, SUMMER 1950

  THE WOMAN IS on the run from forty, but middle age, evidently, has quit the chase.

  Thirty-nine years old and she looks good. But does that help?

  It does not help, much.

  How do you take defeat—the defeat of a life’s ambition? Say you’re a woman who’s kept loyal to a studio, and that studio balled up your career and tossed it in the commode. And it’s a world for men. And say you’ve been around a bit. How, in this world for men, does such a woman crab together a living?

  Lucille’s sitting at a drugstore counter in Buffalo, New York, eating a butterscotch ice cream, and she wonders.

  How firmly those Coney Island TV execs had recited their expected lines! No, sorry, Mrs. Arnaz, just not for us. Okay then, fellas, but this is not goodbye; I promise we’ll show you….Yes, but pretty or not, she’s aware even now of the lines like tiny shark gills around her eyes.

  A radio’s going at the top of its lungs—da-doo-da-dada, Les Brown and His Band of Renown. On Symphony Sid’s nationally broadcast After-Hours Swing Session. Playing Birdland or maybe the Royal Roost. Da-doo-da-dada.

  Desi’s at her side, talking. “Tonight went good. Went well.” Dez’s a grammarian when anxious.

  “Mmm?”

  Lucille’s personal movie, her life film, sure doesn’t seem like a Capra. It seems like a Douglas Sirk, soggy plotline and all.

  “Come now, Red,” Desi’s saying. “You don’t think we made everybody feel fine?”

  Symphony Sid (she thinks): a particularly New York specimen, one of those Jewish men goofy for Black People Music.

  Jewish men.

  Hold-on had sauntered up to her again at the end of the Coney Island night—after she’d thought they’d said goodbye. And it had been lovely. On the beach near the city in the rain. That encounter had been just a trifle, however. Just something to make Desi jealous, she thinks, almost convincingly. The man’s strongly coiling black hair—thick, brilliantined. And his nose, its hourglass-shaped bridge. Certainly foreign, stirringly familiar. A Jew, all right. Tall and handsome, if memory could be trusted, and thrilling.

  Not because he in any way was unusual; because he wasn’t. Sometimes a woman just needed something different. A nice guy, human and refreshing and normal. But also trickily witty around the eyes. Hold-on looked to her like a man who ruffled life on the head.

  And a whole year has rolled by.

  Ah, enough inappropriate memory! “Sure, sweetie,” Lucille hears herself say.

  “Well, Red, so then our plan might finally work.” Desi swallows. But his smile is a guest who’s forgotten to leave. “Will it?”

  Lucille’s face tightens a little.

  “Why is ice cream so much better in places like this?” she says, kind of sharply.

  “Buffalo.” He nods and narrows his eyes in disbelief. “Buffalo.”

  * * *

  —

  THE PLAN, THE plan, the stupid plan.

  Months back, CBS, which hadn’t wanted to sacrifice any of its radio properties, had been interested in repurposing Lucille’s failed My Madcap Bride for TV. Maybe, that was the rumor, anyway. TV, the mongrel new medium. Well—count her in. Even that flickering appliance beats unemployment.

  But, of course, a problem. Bride’s husband had been played by Richard Denning (blond hair, Gerber cheeks, middling charisma). Lucille liked Denning. She’d also planned to replace him. Not that Lucille, at that career moment, had much power to issue ultimatums. But working with her husband was the only chance she’d have to dust off her marriage, get it back on its feet. The Arnazes were often apart, frosty, and thwarted. Desi’d cheat to his heart’s content were Lucille to go off and film a show without him. She thought up a scheme, then, to have him at her side all the time. But CBS didn’t think the public could—hell, CBS execs themselves didn’t—accept a redhead married to a Cuban.

  That forced the Arnazes to prove that Middle America would buy what they were selling. If we can show you that crowd accepts it, then you must…So, under the aegis of their new company, Desilu Productions (meaning, as Lucille saw it, she and Desi are the saps forking out the entire $20,000 for what amounts to a public audition), the Arnazes now tour what remains of the dying vaudeville theaters, covering the seaboard with pratfalls and puns. Also a bunch of the Midwest. Save the career and the marriage, that’s her thinking. Even the accountant says the tour will bankrupt them.

  In this reckless and quip-filled junket, tonight’s performance was stop No. 4. Sixty-plus shows a month. Two a day, six on weekends. The loaded-cello routine. “Cuban Pete/Sally Sweet.” Domestic resentment turned into a somersault or a smile. All of it arguing: I’m white and he’s Latin, but see how you people don’t care? The only thing that transcends race, creed, and color? The happy performance of a difficult marriage. What can top that? (The accountant disagrees.)

  Forearms heavy on the counter now, Desi licks his mouth. It’s the look of someone who isn’t used to being pensive. “Buffalo,” he says. “Christ.” He shakes his head. Narrows his eyes. The exaggerated gesture shows his esteem for thinkers and doubters. For the people whose depth, he suspects, replaces the optimism and constancy he takes for granted in himself.

  “Look, we’re, er,” Desi says. “We’re bound to…” Maybe narrowed eyes are a kind of blinking red light, a warning that someone’s brain is in over its head.

  I’m being cruel; he’s my husband, Lucille thinks.

  “You’re right, lover,” she says. “We made the audience feel fine.”

  Desi brightens. “Oh?”

  The applause from the cheap radio speaker sounds like paper crinkling. “You know, he discovered Doris Day,” Lucille says. After Coney, she’d pined after Hold-on for a few weeks, then hardly ever.

  Da-doo-da-dada. Kind of an annoying melody—childish. Lucille knows Les Brown, or at least she did, and Symphony Sid, too, that reefer-smoking hophead, and she knows everybody, and here she is. In Buffalo. Not far from Jamestown.

  “Who discovered Doris?” Desi asks, but in a sighing voice.

  I’m talking about Les Brown, Lucille would say if she weren’t so tired. Les Brown discovered Doris Day. It’s one A.M. A ceiling fan kneads the muggy air overhead. And thoughts of Hold-on sneak in.

  If you are a New Yorker, your dial is set right close to the mighty eighty, WJZ, broadcasting at 770. Or nationwide on the ABC Radio Network.

  Lucille looks to the soda jockey. A kid in a nincompoop’s white paper hat who can’t lift his shy eyes to return her gaze. Rubbing the counter, probably his thousandth swipe. Kid’s kept the place open just for us, Lucille thinks. Buffalo stardom, one more pissant triumph. The ceiling fan’s twisting cigarette smoke about its blades in white wisp tassels.

  Desi yawns and keeps yawning. “I don’t know, I don’t know…”

  A red-winged blackbird lands on the windowsill, barely visible out there in the dark. Lucille, hating birds, looks away.

  Sit back and relax in the most fabulous city in the country. From Manhattan. This is! Symphony
Sid!

  No bird is going to be a bad omen tonight. Lucille slaps the counter, extravagantly casual. “Come on, Dez,” she says, “you old dust mop.”

  When she winks, the other eye charmingly squints.

  “We knocked ’em dead, Dez. We’ll knock ’em dead tomorrow, too, and we’ll be in Chicago by Memorial Day.”

  “There you are!” Desi slaps the counter, too. “That’s the stuff.”

  “Gonna be the high pillows. You and me.”

  “The plan,” he says. And she says, “The plan.”

  Together: “is working.”

  Sure, okay. Yet anybody who saw Lucille now would say that principal photography has officially wrapped on her fame and success.

  * * *

  —

  IF YOU WANT to know a person, learn what she keeps herself from remembering.

  Images from her cutting-room floor: A steam train taking young Lucille from Michigan to Buffalo after her father’s funeral—that long, traumatic trip, those tears, geese that flashed up beside the rails. She was three and a half years old. Would Daddy be coming back home, too? No, dear—never. And then her aunt opened the kitchen window and a blackbird flew in. It crashed and broke a mirror. The next morning, Lucille’s mom, DeDe, said Lucille would live on her own with her great-grandmother for a while. What sticks in memory is the crashing blackbird—and that small, old-fashioned locomotive, No. 4, clanking, stumbling down from Selston, Michigan. Its screech and its smoke; its wheels and their thrusting forearms; geese flickering in the raw afternoon.

  Jamestown, New York, where Lucille was miscast as a normal child, is about seventy miles from Buffalo. The cold and green stage on which she grew up—and from which she cut and ran.

  Drop another coin in the slot, see another memory flicker and play.

  Lucille Ball, 1918, now living with DeDe’s second husband’s parents. (It’s complicated. DeDe Ball, widowed at twenty-three, had relinquished her two children to her own grandparents, then to her sister, then to Lucille’s step-grandparents, the Petersons.) One day, six- or seven-year-old Lucille was hiding in Mrs. Peterson’s closet. Five unnoticed hours. Lucille transformed that tiny space—mothball smells and candlelight—into a theater. This was Jamestown to her: isolation, self-reliance, a non-home she lived in. And she, tiny, blond, and father-mourning.