The Queen of Tuesday

by Darin Strauss

  Soon the director yells cut; Lucille with her shoulders careening forward goes to Archer: “Don’t you look romantic in uniform.”

  The most flirtatious she’s been. “I hope the camera will do you justice”—as if she doesn’t know cameras, their fickle magic, their strict justice. What’s most coquettish is the soft, Monroe-ish way she says it. A puff of words.

  How does a 1950s accomplished woman talk to a less-accomplished 1950s man?

  The day’s shoot is done. Now Archer sits with her, right outside the soundstage.

  A bit of tension clouds the space between them. Maybe it’s because they’re in the observable open air. She is anxious about even a semipublic appearance with a man. She gets to her feet, pacing—even without knowing that this is the one day Desi happens to have left work early. Which might really scotch her plans.

  It’s a sticky afternoon. She’s looking into Archer’s strong, wholesome face.

  “You were good today, John.”

  “Good in that turkey of a movie, you mean,” he says.

  And you know how it is when someone trashes himself in front of you:

  “Oh jeez-o-pete. You were good,” she says. I didn’t come to be nursemaid to his ego. But then why did I come? Extras in straw hats walk past, pretending not to notice her.

  “Is the film so bad?” Lucille says. “Who wrote the script?”

  “I’m not sure about the guy. Samuel Newman.”

  “He’s in television?”

  “He’s never here, is the thing,” says Archer. “I think possibly television, yeah. Working on five projects.”

  “Well, that’s what makes professionals,” she says. They keep up this conversation of stale air. “Don’t slight a TV man—working hard, doing the work.”

  With his quick eyes, Archer looks like he has more to say than he does—which may be a requirement for an actor.

  “Even in a squawker like this,” she adds.

  You can see Archer has an impulse to stand, to kiss her.

  In his gregarious, pleasant voice, he says: “Gobble gobble.” He doesn’t stand or kiss her, yet. The thick expressions of his face can be very handsome.

  “Yes,” she says, and comes to sit, “let’s talk turkey.” Archer watches every inch of her figure descend onto the bench.

  But if she’s the live audience he’s playing to, Archer won’t break the fourth wall—won’t crash through the wide, clouded atmosphere around her.

  “All righty,” she says, patting her hair.

  Still, they get closer; nearness transforms mood. It may just be the expression of compliance from Lucille’s body, I will let you kiss me, all right please kiss me. Even out here. And so that wide atmosphere widens to include him and is charged. But Archer still is unsure about making his move. A mosquito—people are wrong to think there are no mosquitoes in California; and this one has a cousin in Great Neck—has flown up, and it bops on the air, infatuated by Lucille. Merely the latest admirer. She swats at it.

  The aims of men and women in the 1950s can appear to be in clashing opposition. People are trained to think the man is always determining if he can—no other word for it—take what the woman hopes to guard. That’s not true in this case. Archer shakes his wrists free of their cuffs, futzes with his hands, where jitters are most conspicuous. From opposite angles, this man and this woman both silently ask, How little of what I want can I ask my behavior to reveal?

  This bench has been plopped down under a streetlight that burns all day. “All righty,” Archer says, too. Swat, swat at the mosquito. Then he gives her his smile. A lascivious one; Desi would recognize it. “Glad you came,” he says.

  Has Lucille heard this, though?

  She rises and tells Archer, well, maybe she’ll see him again. What? He tries to catch her eye, but she won’t look at him. An odd turn of events. What’s the point of this hope, why do I cover myself with it each day, so stubbornly? she wonders. It’s hard to talk now—her suddenly emotional throat. I do like the guy, she tells herself, walking across the lot. Then why has her optimism mutated in her chest, shaped (as she imagines it) like an upraised middle finger at him?

  I didn’t come to be nursemaid to the guy’s ego.

  Or is there another reason?

  Lucille owns and drives—as fewer women did in the 1950s—her own car. A white Crestline Sunliner. It may have been a gift from the Ford Motor Company, she thinks. Anyway, she’s driving alone now, gripping the wheel, seeing the countryside go brown as it pulls east. Do I like Archer?

  Unhappiness has seeped into her chest—the way a chill shows up in a house. Maybe in another life I could. It’s early for the sky to be going dark like this. A spiky heaviness there, in her every swallow. Why did I go to meet him? Any explanation for her behavior besides “I truly liked the guy’s personality” would divulge something to herself she’d rather not know about herself. Even if she’s partly doing it just to get back at Desi. She thinks of flipping on the wipers; it may be about to rain. I’m just a girl from Jamestown, New York.

  And now behind the wheel of the Sunliner, Lucille has put on her sunglasses, rain or no.

  Was he ever going to kiss me?

  What she really wants, what she’s always wanted, she tells herself, is Desi. His easy insensitivity (“Standing me up on New Year’s Eve, one of a hundred examples!” she thinks) and the lies—so many of those—and the gale-force humiliations (“It’s just what Ginger told me, ‘Ah, you married a man so much younger, what’d you expect?’ ”), and, yes, the risks to her career if she left him. But, for all that, she and Desi have made it big anyway. She wipes her wet cheeks with her sleeve. Bigger than anybody thought possible for us! A white woman and a Cuban. The success of it had been clear at the relaunch party for the show. Bubbles having foamed over Lucille’s glass onto her hand; her dress having made a kind of rain sound brushing against William Frawley’s suit; her licking the champagne from her sweetened wrist. The right-away conviction that the show would be a hit. And Desi’s touch on the pit of her spine. Well. What the problem might be is, maybe Desi found a talent for deception, for self-deception, in me, she thinks. I maybe want to be lied to.

  Her baby, Lucie—jeez-o-pete, ten months old already; God I should really…—I hope she doesn’t grow into a fool for men.

  Sometimes an actress walks from a battle scene smiling and feeling okay—until that evening’s bedtime when the bruises welt up and there’s no one to complain to. That reminds Lucille of an affair. You have them, you forget them? Not the way it is for me. I’m just a girl from Jamestown. There’s something she makes herself not think about.

  Pulling into the drive at the Ranch—ah right, Desi isn’t home yet, won’t be home for hours. (But, no, he’s on his way now.) Raindrops plonking on the windshield. Archer’s a handsome guy with his crinkly, kind-of-awed eyes. But he’s no actor, Lucille thinks. It’s not that his performance revealed this. Only the screen can tell you how that’ll turn out. It was his demeanor. Before filming, Archer’d joked: “What’s there to be worried about? It’s just a part.” When the cameras started rolling, however, Archer took gulpy swallows. Which is fine—everyone gets nervous. But the real actors get nervous before. “Action” is called, and real actors go tranquil, exultant, are transformed. Those able to metamorphose for others have first to metamorphose in themselves. That’s an actor.

  Maybe I’ll never see Archer again, she thinks, not knowing he is on his way here, too.

  The best actors don’t quite deliver memorized lines; they speak their own spontaneous thoughts that happen to have been written beforehand by someone else. That’s not skill. That’s not a technique, or even art, Lucille realizes. My brain just thinks exactly what the writers guessed the character would think. Only my brain thinks it more correctly, more fiercely. When the cameras go on, Lucille is the genuine thing the writers had been try
ing to simulate.

  You know who could’ve been an actor? she thinks—she lets herself think, at last. But the funny thing is, she won’t finish the thought, won’t even think the name of the kind man who exhibits that ugly-handsome mix. Maybe she doesn’t know herself what their time together has done to her. But no, she won’t, not even in her head, land on the man who looks “like a Jew Gregory Peck.”

  * * *

  —

  IT’S TWILIGHT NOW, there’s a western clarity to the blue air, and all through this arroyo, snakes sleep in the dirt. Then it happens. With stunning quickness: a surprise arrival, then another arrival. Then the dustup.

  Minutes after she aims her Ford up her ranch’s driveway, a tan Mayfair pulls in, behind the Crestline Sunliner. Did Desi get a new car—no, wait. Who is that? No. Lucille thinks, Oh, no.

  Archer, slamming his door too loudly, says, “I intend to fight for you”—trying to quell the chattering of his teeth.

  Lucille lowers her chin and looks at him through her lashes. “You do,” she says, “and I’ll kill you.”

  Clara, the maid, walks out next to Lucille on the porch. “Who is it?”

  “It’s okay,” says Lucille; her tone means go inside. Bossiness has become one more diamond she wears, extracted from the mines of other people’s servility.

  “Hello,” Desi says, seconds later, once his concise red convertible has pulled up. He crosses the front yard quickly—right to Archer. Handsome-in-a-dumb-way Archer.

  Desi says, “Don’t think I know you, friend.”

  “You don’t, friend.”

  Archer adjusts his posture as if he’s got a cramp of the shoulders. And then he steps to Desi. He has to pass Lucille and won’t return her look. Please don’t, her face says—and if a face offers a message alone in the forest, does anyone hear it?

  It’s now Desi’s turn to speak. He doesn’t. Instead, he squares his jaw in the fakely confident swagger of men facing what he thought he was facing.

  “Dez,” Lucille pleads.

  The blood thumps in her ears. And, after telling herself not to swallow, she swallows.

  “This is John Archer. He knows Ann, he’s a friend of Ann’s,” she says. “Ann Sothern.”

  “You’re an actor?” Desi says. “You look like an actor.”

  Is it an insult? It’s a strange insult, coming from an actor. It sounds like an insult.

  “Mr. Archer is someone I’ve been—giving advice to,” Lucille says. Perhaps the “mister” in “Mr. Archer” was too much.

  “You having trouble in your career?” Desi asks.

  Because, Lucille thinks, it’s not untrue, what I said. Nothing has happened with me and Archer.

  “No trouble, friend,” Archer says. “I’m doing a movie now, a war picture.” And then, as if passing a spiky gallstone: “But I could always use some—advice.”

  “You’d like to get on our show?” Desi asks, in something almost like a friendly voice. Offering help to a man in a lesser position.

  “If I wanted on your show,” Archer says, unable to hold his tone, “I’d go through William Morris.”

  Desi flares—his eyes, his skin. “ ’Zat right?” he says, crunching forward on the darkening drive.

  And now comes more of Desi’s spitting anger, sudden boorish slurs; but right off, he falters. He hears the rudeness in his own voice—because maybe he’s wrong, maybe Archer hadn’t spoken with the daring of the adulterer. Desi doesn’t want to hear that particular news.

  People say I fly off the handle, Desi thinks, and is that good for a mogul to do? Plus can he really see himself cuckolded? A man like me? For a half second, he looks down.

  And Lucille in this little intermission does the strangest, cleverest, the best-acted thing.

  She walks to Desi, stretching out an arm. A saint gesturing to farthest, unseeable heaven. She talks to herself—Come on, Lucille—as if kissing a lucky rabbit’s foot. This has to be good.

  She rests a hand over Desi’s shoulder. Her skirt, she is aware, italicizes the surge of her hips, her tapering waist. She does not need The Method. She can act using her body, her voice, her resolve. She with happy eyes leans into her husband, auditioning: Okay, imagine you’re a very dutiful bride at some altar somewhere in the sex-deprived heartland and the crowd is silently crying because they know no one besides that groom on your arm will ever see you naked. Go!

  “Desi.” She sighs. “Dez. Let’s talk about something important.”

  He is startled. Archer is startled. Lucille is nuzzling into her husband’s neck. “But, I’ve gotta ask,” Lucille says. “Why’re you arguing with our guest?” To come off as natural, the great ones match every movement of their body or voice to the intent of the story.

  She scratches the back of Desi’s hair.

  Desi squints like a cowboy trying to see an Iroquois across the MGM prairie. His tantrum fizzled, he says, “Okay, long day,” and smiles at Archer—then at his wife, whose hip he warms with a pat. “Let’s give the man advice.” And the look that Lucille gives him conceals both her pity and her fear about what it means that she’s pulled this off.

  ACT THREE

  “So much of love is love of love.”

  —V. S. Pritchett

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AT MY HIP, I clutched a sheaf of notes about Lucille Ball. A twenty-five-ish assistant (quiet skirt, glossy hair) walked me to the bigwig’s door, then withdrew—the Cerberus to the secretary’s Kharon. I also held my grandfather’s film treatment. “But I said on the phone, it wasn’t necessary, you coming in,” the secretary said. I asked her name. “Okay, thank you, Catherine. Is it all right if I sit for a little, Catherine?”

  Fine, if you want to sit, whatever. William Morris dominated the wall in chrome letters behind her head. Make sure it doesn’t seem communist, read a mystery scribble written on my grandfather’s notes, in a female hand. My leg wouldn’t stop bouncing. This made a thin nervous sound hitting the leather couch—a conductor’s baton on a lectern. Can’t afford even a hint of commie sympathies now, the note read. A shiny door opened to the bigwig’s office. And in front of me, there, not quite filling the doorframe: the (little) bigwig. Agent Suzanne Gluck, five foot two of rude health, mahogany brown hair cut and polished prettily, a striking face. “Hello,” I said. And Suzanne Gluck swiveled that face downward at me with all the interest of a barcode scanner.

  “So I’m here,” I began to recite my line. It was the 1990s: Modems behind me tore up their throats yelling. Each screech like a thrown splat. “I’m here to show you something amazing. Hi,” I said.

  DESILU RANCH, CHATSWORTH, CALIFORNIA/TWA FLIGHT 103, MAIN CABIN, TWENTY THOUSAND FEET OVER AMERICA, NOVEMBER 1953

  BECAUSE SHE’D BEEN abandoned by her mother, even if for a short time. Because she’d been naïve. Because her grandfather had always been kind to her. Because she hadn’t realized times would change. Because she actually cared about poor people. Because she’s a woman. Because now times have changed. Because nobody believes a woman deserves success. Because people now cry traitor! at the littlest things. Because her grandfather (rest in peace) was a fucking idiot. Because, in fact, she’d been a poor person herself once. Because having your body on crummy lighted screens all over America means time and again you must endure seeing your body on a crummy screen. Because that screen may as well be the wicked mirror in a fairy tale, and your face hovers there daring people to find the more beautiful options at the ball. Or because universal worship is now just the preface to universal scorn. That’s why.

  As if coming up with an explanation will change a thing.

  “Maybe I like trouble,” Lucille says over and over. She’s a parrot in an embroidered blouse—“Maybe I like it”—an unthinking voice, an almost lullabied refrain. “I must like trouble.”

  Desilu Ranch is short but it sprawls. C
himneys, weather vanes, a portico that unspools along the entire façade. Inside it, Lucille is speaking to no one. “Why else would I make it so hard on myself? I must like…”

  The fear gets her under the arms. She touches the window (needs a dusting) and waits for the strange men to arrive. Behind her, sedate shelves of tall books she’ll never read. Oh, Grandpa, why did I have to be nice to you that time?

  It has all gathered force and like an avalanche come rolling down on her—all the whispering, gossip, all the slander. If you live big, you fail big.

  When Desi left home an hour ago, he’d said, “Pretend you like the dog. To the men.”

  “What? I don’t dislike Pinta.”

  “It worked for Nixon with Checkers,” he said.

  All across California, there was a drought on; the heat, however, wasn’t what had sucked the color from Desi’s face.

  “Bring Pinta to the news conference is what I am telling you,” he said. “Put her on your lap.”

  And then he turned to leave. “Jesus Christ”—closing the door behind him—“it’s so fucking hot out.” And then, gone. Away to motor off his nervous energy before the strange men came.

  For most of the morning, the normally happy California has refused to smile; its face now is covered by beards of haze.

  LOS ANGELES TIMES

  NOVEMBER 11, 1953, PAGE 1, NON-BYLINE

  REGISTERED RED IN ’36: LUCILLE

  Star Denies She Voted Commie, Blames Grandfather

  [The body of the article was too painful to read and is not reproduced here.]

  * * *

  —

  IT REMAINS AN odd thrill, in 1953, to find yourself at twenty thousand feet, beckoning with the lift and tilt of an empty glass, ah hello young stewardess, another Beaujolais, that’s right. This is crazy, this is absolutely crazy, Isidore thinks.