“I was hoping.” Lucille patted her ’do. “For obvious reasons.”
“Though wasn’t she some dancer, though.”
“With those legs?”
“A dancer from the calves up,” Brade said.
“With those arms?”
Brade pulled back her bangs—“That’s the type of thing, I assume, your hair, you’re adjusting the color yourself?”—lifting the forehead, opening the face.
She gave him her grimacy look of Was Hollywood built in a day?
“I can see immediately, the camera has always loved you, though. Tonight will be a giant success.” He smiled. “I have a feeling we’re going to be old friends right off.”
“Giant, you think?” she was checking out her face at various slants. “You know, the Apaches were right about the camera,” she said.
“Takes your soul?”
“Worth trading for a bottle of whiskey.”
This was her program; there were examples to be set. A star of her own show cannot simply be friends with a makeup jock. Unless she can be. Maybe I just like Jews, she thought.
She allowed herself an inward chuckle. Jews. Like Pandro Berman, but people thought that had been because—well, let people think what they want. Berman ran the studio, but he was good, she thought. In the Desi vein, just not as handsome; sweeter to deal with. Ah, there was Hold-on, too. Nice and handsome, in that kink-haired way. Strong nostrils. What is love at first sight? Lust? Yes, lust—but not only. And love at first sight is not, lord knows, friendship. (Mack Gray had been a Jew, too, turned out. How long since I saw him—old Maxie Greenberg? Probably all of them communists. Well, I was a communist, too, for a time, she thought.) Friendship was too thin and runny a word for love at first sight. But love at first sight shares things with friendship. She thought, it’s kind of like when you meet another gal and think, This stranger and I will definitely be friends. Or like me and this makeup guy. Something trivial might start it. Some joke one of you tells. Someone has a handbag you like, any little thing. Sudden friendship happens, often between women—just takes you. But sudden romantic attachments? Well, there was that fella and me. Hold-on. Although the first time with Desi, too, it took me, she thought. At the RKO commissary. Desi had walked in; Maureen O’Hara said, “I hear he’s a real lady-killer,” and Lucille said, “Well, he’s about to meet his next victim.” And that was that. But what is love at first sight? An immediate belief in soul-similarity, soul-unison. This was all just a dim sense she had; she wouldn’t put it quite this way. Words didn’t get at it, anyhow. It was a kind of hunch of the body. Like with Ted Sward when he dropped the seventh-grade napkin. Or like kissing Hold-on, the desire to initiate the kiss—a hunch of the body that didn’t involve just the body.
“I do my best—Hal, is it?” She was leaning toward the mirror to ink-in the line of her cleavage with shadow.
“Hal Brade, yes,” the makeup man said. “Is Miss Ball happy though?”
Hold-on, a different kisser than Desi, kissing my neck, my ear. His warm cheek, that thorny hint of bristles. She told herself not to think about her suspicion that love at first sight had gotten her here, geographically speaking. Had she forced CBS to do the show in L.A. partly to get far away from the temptation of that guy?
Well, let’s not be overly dramatic, Lucille thought. She was not so delusional—so actressy—that she couldn’t acknowledge there were other reasons. More pressing reasons. She and Desi owned a roomy and cherished ranch in California. And New York is where she’d failed, and so to her, it stood for failure. (She’d never say that aloud.) Plus, some skies may change but some rains just keep squalling. Which is to say, had Lucille not wangled it so she and Desi could work together near home, her marriage would have been all downed trees and power lines, flooded streets. Because, offered distance and opportunity, Desi would cheat up a storm. The TV show was meant to be a kind of hurricane cellar. (“Who’m I going to believe, Dez,” she’d said, “you or my eyes?” Joking even then about his behavior.) And after so many years of having given up on being parents, Lucille and Desi now had a nine-week-old daughter. Lucie Désirée Arnaz. Their ambition and now the child had formed the scaffolding of their love.
Maybe a woman can love two people?
* * *
—
NOW, HOURS LATER, the character Lucy is trying to lift her neighbors’ unhappy romance a little, while the person Lucille stands before microphones and two hundred spectators, and, oh yes, possible millions at home, thinking, don’t squint in the lights, and facing three fearsome archangels, black and humpbacked: the 35 mm cameras that prowl the stage.
Lucy is scheming up an intrigue: It’s marriage as genial trickery. The story line scrapes ahead, barely.
“Marriage should include some nightlife,” Lucy/Lucille says. “But ever since ‘I do,’ there’s too much ‘we don’t.’ ”
Maybe the show is not a storm cellar. Maybe my marriage is already dead, she’s thinking. Maybe what the show is is an undertaker, dressing up the corpse, giving it a dignity it didn’t possess in life. Desi is almost seven years younger than Lucille: hard on any couple. But on a Hollywood couple? Yet as Desi and she left the ranch this morning, they passed a broken fence, and he said, “Ha! Remember?” and she said, “I was thinking of that, too.” And just last week, Desi went down to the basement on me, did it the French way, she thinks. But why have I put myself in that position, to never age, if I can help it; why did I choose a young skirt-chaser for a husband?
And so thoughts of Isidore come again, surprising, buoying, the whispering serpent in her ear.
* * *
—
THERE’D BEEN A surprising wickedness to Hold-on’s mouth in her Broadway dressing room that time. She remembered the fun as he’d unzipped her, goodbye to dress, goodbye to brassiere. She’d had a mind to stop and to voice some prudence, but her hips, on their own, had carried toward him….Now Ethel and Lucy are approaching their TV husbands under TV lights. They left the three-walled kitchen to try to “catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” in the three-walled den—female sensuality as nothing more than a means to something nonsensual, as a trick to get Ricky and Fred to take them dancing. Lucy sits on Ricky’s lap. Fred sits on Ethel’s lap. The audience laughs. And her hips really had pressed into Hold-on. And Hold-on had scooped Lucille’s breast into his mouth. In lowering his own head, he’d needed to crouch a little, which somehow had enhanced the tall mannishness of him. Hot breath, cold room, the slight tickle of teeth on the most responsive skin. Stay like that, Hold-on, she told him. She rested her backside against a table; on the table was Isidore’s wide-brimmed hat. The entirety of her body, cocked like a handgun. His blue tailored suit. One of his hands clasped strongly on Lucille’s hip. He lifted his memorizing eyes to her body. No smile, standing fully clothed, even his tie done up, the coat playing tight on his shoulders—and she felt her breastbone go chilly. The top of her dress now at her midriff. She reached behind her and put on Isidore’s hat. Prop comedy. She’d added the hat to feel less naked when subtracting her clothes. Isidore didn’t laugh but looked as if he were on fire. The practical mathematics of nudity. She bent and gyrated on one spot, trying to push down her underwear. Isidore with both hands grabbed her dress, a whispery noise—shoosh. I feel the open air on me down there, she’d thought. She’d thrashed her melting hips into his fingers. The TV audience keeps laughing now. TV’s Fred and Ricky don’t want to take TV’s Lucy and Ethel to the Copa—the characters say they want to go to the fights, alone—and it’s turned into a four-person argument. Ricky pleads Fred’s case and Lucy pleads Ethel’s case, friends as defense counsel. “If you’re going to act that way, then Ethel wants out of this marriage!” Lucy says, which makes Ethel shriek: “No I don’t!” [Laughter.] Lucy says: “Regardless, Ethel and I will find men who will take us,” and Ricky says: “In that case, me and Fred will find some ladies to entertain us!”
Then in the kitchen away from their husbands, Lucy says: “Ethel, I’ll bet we know a couple men who are handsome and unattached.” [A funny little pause.] “A couple men who are unattached?” [A pause that’s funnier because it’s long.] “A couple men.” [A pause that’s funniest because it’s short.] “Boy and his G.I. Joe doll?”
And Lucille doesn’t even hear herself, as Lucy, earn the audience’s laugh; she’s off to the next gag, and preoccupied anyway. But the tone of the evening is changing, warming. Hold-on, in pulling off his necktie, had chucked it onto the floor. Now his hands were on Lucille’s backside. He bent again, he licked her breast. The throb of her body. Small acts in quick succession: the lifting of one of her legs as she eased onto the table; the struggle for his zipper; two of his fingers skimming into the center of the throb. And the sort of gulping feeling of this in her, of her taking his fingers in. And that torpedoing boom of her nerve endings, and that wonderful liquid warmth. A quick gaspy breath. Her heart a paddleball going on a crazy elastic thwap thwap thwap—she was so wet, her legs were quivering. Reaching through the teeth of his fly, into his boxers. Ah, that slurpy sound of him going in. She had a sense of finally. And that melting candle feeling there. Her nose against his sweaty neck. She always gasped when a man pushed into her. Already, the table banged an ache into Lucille’s hip. She felt Isidore filling all that space—but why had she thought “finally”? How silly. The waterspout inside her had begun to spill. She started to breathe really fast. The black coiling fuzz on his chest. She gripped his hair, or thought she had; she’d gotten light-headed. I feel my body curling inward, she thought. Her muscles tightened. “Finally” what, though? She began to feel tiny mouths sucking inside her thighs, and sensed, too, the end coming from some ways off—the candle now heating like a furnace, that more more more sensation, the awareness of your body below the waist, the whole length of it, even that hair was tingling, and the invisible fingers running along her head.
—And after that, Hold-on wanted me to call him, she thinks. Then I had my baby.
On the show, the characters of Lucy and Ethel have disguised themselves as homely bumpkins. They trick their husbands into taking less-attractive women to the fights. That is to say, unwittingly taking them, their own wives, in ugly hick disguise, and, okay, maybe the script doesn’t make lots of sense. It doesn’t matter, Lucille realizes. This world has its own rules, its own ordering logic. Arrivals that surprise, departures, kicks in the narrative teeth. As long as it’s funny.
The middle camera rides closer; microphones lower at Lucille.
“Oh, relax, Ethel,” Lucy says, mocking Ethel’s doubt. “Wait till you hear the plan to end all plans.”
The distraction of Isidore, the serpent of the thought, withdraws.
Lucy: “Lemme tell you how we trick ’em.”
She whispers the idea into Ethel’s ear. Ethel makes a face. The laughter stretches, and it’s loud. Louder even than in the barnstorming tour. Maybe it’s thanks to those cameras; maybe it’s bound up with them—with the audience’s knowledge that they’re aiding in something their neighbors will see.
“Hello, hello, hello,” Lucy says, hidden behind a closed door and knocking. “Might you go by ’a name a’ Ricky?”
And when Desi as Ricky answers, Lucille as Lucy pops into frame wearing a tatty, black hillbilly wig. Eyes comically wide, slouchy, her front teeth painted black. Now in a loose, deep voice, her accent is from nowhere yet spells rural stupidity. Hello hello hello, pronounced: ’a-lo, ’lo ’lo. And yet her prettiness is evident too—italicized, even, by a low-collared, roomy, lumberjack-ish shirt.
“We be huntin’ down a pair a’ buckaroos, name a’ Ric-arr-doo-ie and Mertz?” She is carrying an actual moonshine jar, marked XXX; nothing is subtle here. “Be you the buckaroos?”
Lucille’s commitment to the part is absolute. “Let’s smooch!” Already Lucy is chasing a frightened Ricky around the living room of pasteboard and furniture painted gray for the cameras.
Desi obviously is a good comic actor, acting quite well; Vivian Vance obviously is, too, as is William Frawley as Fred. Not Lucille. Lucille has fully relaxed into—has converted to flesh—these gags. She is not acting, obviously or otherwise; she’s giving all. The difference between talent and genius, right there.
“We be your paramours for the evening, Señor Ric-arr-doo-ie!”
She’s never felt this easy, this wanton, at-home, funny, this herself. No one on television has. Never in real life has she felt it, either.
Why? What makes tonight different from all other nights?
Pride seems to squeeze the back of her neck; the chin makes its way up a few more stairs of glamour. Under the kliegs, Lucille’s eyes go bright with fire.
“I’m going to smooch this slickster over here,” Lucy says. “And tha’ one you can have your way with, Mommy.”
Ricky, whimpering: “Uh, oops, there. You must have me mixed up with someone else. We’re expecting two cousins of Isabelle Smith.”
“That’s us’n!” Lucy says. “I’m Sue-Ann, ’n’ right here’s my mom, Sue-Ann the first.”
An entire televisual medium attaining its potential—a woman attaining her potential by scooping up all the jacks of her past. Supporting movie actress, put-upon wife, showgirl, B-movie queen, small-town kid, glamour-puss, it’s all there, to help the world believe in a shaky new enterprise.
“Come on! Gimme a peck, dagnabbit.”
It’s half theater, half film, and that’s probably the secret. Broadway’s flagrant stagecraft, plus the winning glitz of Hollywood. Early TV has been an embarrassment of homogenized radio gags and maudlin romances. I Love Lucy is in its way total art: the outlandish hijinks, real-seeming marriage, no condescension, and what’s still noticeable is how unaffected it is. And the laughs come easy now.
It seems so easily replicable—the key that disappears the lock.
“Well, break into some soft-shoe hoofin’, señor,” Lucy says, “if a song-and-dance man you be.”
“Dance?” Ricky says. “I couldn’t.”
(But, no. This comedy isn’t easily replicable.)
“Then let’s kiss.”
[He starts tap-dancing manically.]
Next, a minimum of stage business with Ricky’s guitar; who knew a guitar was there? “Okay ma’am, how ’bout ‘Begin the Beguine’?”
“Yes!” she says. “After.”
The audience is panting heavily, all laughed out, ready to sit or fetch at her next command.
But it’s more than the audience. Lucille feels a wobble and jump of the lower belly.
It’s like what a woman feels when, having checked her reflection in a limousine’s dark window, she can sense, without really seeing anything definite behind the reflection, that there are people sitting inside the car; and, though the people aren’t visible—she can’t really discern their figures—the woman knows they’re there, and it changes the way she sees herself; being watched invisibly gives her image in the glass significance. The concealed figures behind the studio audience are the home viewers.
This has the strangest effect on her. A sense of unfamiliar millions thinking her more than she is, and so soon. It’s a thrill she’d never had making movies, and it’s very odd that it’s also kind of terrifying.
Lucille does remember to recite the next line: “Let’s smooch, smoochie, smoochie, here, smoochie, smoochie.”
Her image will replace her forever, that’s what’s terrifying. She wags her head to concentrate, to stop herself from thinking.
Ricky, saying: “I— I would like to take a bathroom break, please.”
And, like that, she’s about to lose the character. The way Desi/Ricky said it, that uncharacteristic comic falter in his voice, it’s subverted and usurped her timing. Has the director noticed; will he stop filming? Because she can’t laugh. Laughs will break the sce
ne. Which will ruin everything. Stopping, resetting, a kind of death for audience morale. And if she loses the audience she will lose the feeling, the bright magnification feeling. And that feeling may be all that keeps her tethered to her ambitions.
Ricky: “Hey, Fred? Join me.”
Fred: “What’s wrong, pal? Can’t, uh, do your business in there by yourself?”
Lucille tries not to break. This is the devil’s last stand.
Because the question for Lucille Ball, entertainer, has always been: What does she have to offer? What, exactly, is her talent?
After DeDe had come back from Michigan, she’d squeezed young Lucille’s hand through two-comedies-plus-a-feature at the Shepherd-Meadows Movie Palace, where silent, monochromatic men flouted danger by sallying into a threat tranquilly, obliviously, hilariously: a narcoleptic on roller skates pirouetting at some canyon’s edge (tourists shouting, pointing, fainting), or, in the next reel, a hiker deciding to rest and dawdle in the very spot, at the very moment, that a collapsing barn fell whomp into its collapse. But there was more. Right as that skater flung out into the great startling void (and as young Lucille gobbled up her popcorn), a lucky twirl brought safe passage under his wheels. Or gosh if that hiker—who just happened to’ve positioned himself exactly under the barn’s open window—that hiker didn’t fail to notice as everything around him came to crash and smoke. And she knew (audiences always knew) our hero would end up unhurt. This happy knowledge is like everyone you’ve ever wronged turning the other cheek. But now—in Lucille’s klieg-lit, adult here and now—what does she have in her performer’s tool bag? Who is she? (On the dolly nearest her, the big camera is pulling back. She feels her heart go panicked.) Who can she be? Lucille Ball had dangled from a comical telephone pole in The Fuller Brush Girl, but she is no Harold Lloyd. Lucille Ball looked sexy in Thousands Cheer, but she is no Lana Turner. Lucille Ball danced the soft-shoe in Meet the People, but she is no Ginger Rogers. Lucille Ball acted with assurance and passion in Five Came Back, but she is no Katharine Hepburn. Or Bette Davis. Or Olivia de Havilland….Lucille Ball was handy with a joke in Stage Door, but she is no Groucho Marx. Lucille Ball hula’d her hips in Dance, Girl, Dance, but she is no Carmen Miranda. Lucille Ball held a tune in Hey Diddle Diddle, but is she an Ethel Merman? No, she is not an Ethel Merman. Can Lucille swim? Not really; not like Esther Williams. Lucille Ball was forgettable in Too Many Girls, Chatterbox, Winterset, forgettable in Don’t Tell the Wife. Lucille Ball was forgettable in So and Sew, Nana, Fugitive Lady, Carnival, and Panama Lady. Lucille Ball was forgettable in Jealousy, Roman Scandals, Dummy Ache, Lured, and A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob. She’d been pretty good in The Big Street. (If Lucille’s heart has gone terrified now, facing this live studio audience, it’s because she—like that camera on its dolly—feels herself backing away from this comic moment, withdrawing; she feels wholly Lucille and has lost all of Lucy. It’s awful.) But what if she could be something utterly new? Maybe? If she could glide through the middle-class experience like that skater on that canyon’s edge. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? If she were to sail unaffected past the steep bluffs of ego and unrelatability—isn’t there a chance the world might be flattered and fall in with her and transform itself into a heap of blessings? Maybe it’s good she hasn’t lost the baby weight. Maybe she can be the audience, only funnier and a little prettier. Perry Como isn’t, Sid Caesar isn’t, Ed Sullivan isn’t them; urbane, distant, Jewish Milton Berle isn’t able to unite with them in their entirety, in partnership, a giant comedy-family, all shared affinities. It strikes her: She can conquer the world with realness. Maybe that’s what she’s been doing tonight, up till now. Yes, the studio audience felt it and she felt it.
The Queen of Tuesday Page 9
