Ball of Fire

by Stefan Kanfer

  Back in Jamestown Lucille tried to put a good face on her failure by dismissing the New York City experience as a waste of time, resuming the romance with Johnny, and throwing herself back into high school activities with a will. She became a football cheerleader, played center on the girls’ basketball team, ice-skated in the winter, and rode horseback in the spring. Most of her classmates were unaware of her humiliation in drama school; they knew only that Lucille had dared to skip town on her own. Years afterward, when Lucille had become a global celebrity, she was topic A for her former high school classmates. They vied with each other for the clearest memory of the young, hyperkinetic adolescent who seemed in perpetual motion, pounding downstairs two at a time, flashing elegant legs as she whirled in her pleated skirt. At sixteen Lucille was back in good spirits, comely, and popular. By the time the school year ended she was having too good a time to obsess about cracking show business. The summer of 1927 looked to be the best of them all.

  In July 1927, Freddy Ball would turn twelve, and Grandpa Hunt thought the Glorious Fourth might be a perfect moment to salute the season, the nation, and the boy. The day before the national holiday he presented the boy with a long, thin, mysterious package. Freddy impatiently peeled off the brown wrapping paper and gave out whoops of delight. Grandpa let him carry on; not every lad got a .22 caliber rifle on his birthday. Yet when Freddy headed outdoors to shoot some crows, he was forbidden to use the firearm. “Tomorrow,” Grandpa promised, “I’ll show you how.”

  According to Lucille, July 4 dawned bright and hot, with the aroma of lilacs and clover wafting over the backyard. Rehired as a short-order cook at Celoron Park, Lucille was about to go off to work, but she lingered to watch Freddy’s shooting lesson. Before Grandpa Fred set up a tin can in the backyard he gave a brief lecture about guns and safety, emphasizing that behind the target were open fields with no houses or people. “Besides me,” Lucille was to write about this occasion, “there were Cleo and Johanna, a girl Freddy’s age who was visiting someone in the neighborhood.” The company also included an unexpected visitor. “There was an eight-year-old boy who lived at the corner whose name was Warner Erickson. Every once in a while you would hear his mother shriek, ‘War-ner! Get home!’ and Warner would streak for his yard since his mother spanked him for the slightest infraction. This Fourth of July weekend he had wandered into our yard and was peeking around the corner of our house watching the target practice.” At first no one noticed the boy; then Grandpa Hunt spotted Warner and ordered him to sit down and stay out of the way. From her back stoop, a safe distance away, Pauline Lopus watched the action unfold. Freddy took a number of shots at the tin can; then it was Johanna’s turn. She picked up the .22 and held it to her shoulder, one eye closed. At that very instant came the strident voice of Mrs. Erickson: “War-ner, get home this minute!” The boy rose and bolted in the direction of his home, crossing in front of the rifle just as Johanna pulled the trigger. The pressure of her finger was to change everything that Lucille knew and cherished. She watched in silent horror as Warner fell spreadeagled into a lilac bush.

  “I’m shot! I’m shot!” he screamed.

  Grandpa Hunt refused to believe what he had just witnessed. “No you’re not,” he insisted. “Get up.”

  Then, Lucille recalled, “we saw the spreading red stain on Warner’s shirt, right in the middle of his back. Cleo screamed, and I took her into my arms. The slam of a screen door told me that Pauline was running to tell her mother.” Grandpa Hunt lifted Warner and, accompanied by Lucille and Freddy and Cleo, carried him the hundred yards to his house as the boy murmured, “Mama, I am dying.” Before they could arrive, Warner’s mother burst out of the house shouting, “They’ve shot my son! They’ve shot my son!”

  They implied the entire group, but within an hour everyone knew that a child had done the shooting and that an adult had been responsible for the tragedy. On July 5, the Jamestown Post-Journal told the story: “Warner Erickson, eight years old, of Celoron, is still in critical condition at Jamestown General Hospital as a result of being shot in the back. The Erickson lad stepped out in the range as Johanna Ottinger, a young girl, fired at about the same time, the bullet entering the boy’s back and passing through his lungs, lodging in the chest. Mr. Hunt, grandfather of the Ball children, was watching the target practice.” In fact, the wound was even worse than originally reported. The slug had severed Warner’s spinal cord, paralyzing him below the waist.

  About a fortnight later the invalid returned, permanently bound to a wheelchair. Almost every day Mrs. Erickson wheeled her son up and down the block, moving very slowly as she passed the Hunt house. The children were told to ignore her but Cleo kept peeking out and crying. Mrs. Erickson’s gesture was only the beginning. A lawsuit got under way, accusing Fred Hunt of Eighth Street, Celoron, New York, of negligence in the wounding and paralysis of the eight-year-old victim. The plaintiffs’ lawyers asked for $5,000 plus court costs and insisted that the sum was, if anything, too low to cover Warner’s medical expenses. (In this they were correct; the boy lived for six more years and needed care for the rest of his short life.) In any case, the sum represented more than Fred Hunt’s savings. He declared bankruptcy. The only asset left was the house, and he deeded that to his daughters. The plaintiffs sued once more, claiming that Hunt’s maneuver was “fraudulent, designed to delay and defraud his creditors.” Again the court agreed. The sheriff foreclosed on the house. Over the course of a year Fred Hunt lost everything. He was sixty-two, and, as Lucille observed, with the two court judgments “the heart went out of him.” Without a cent, bereft of a job and a place to call his own, he became totally dependent on DeDe. Distant relatives allowed him to board at their upstate farm, where he subsisted on a diet of their main crop: strawberries. This meant strawberries for breakfast, lunch, and supper. Lucille, Freddy, DeDe, and Ed moved into a bleak ground-floor apartment on East Fifth Street in Jamestown, and Lucille was transferred to Jamestown High School. There she was an unhappy stranger, outside of the cliques and clubs that had enlivened her days in Celoron. Lola abandoned any plans to reopen her beauty parlor and enrolled in a nursing program far from Jamestown. Cleo went to live with her father, George Mandicos. The family would never be whole again.

  After the “the Breakup,” as DeDe bitterly called it, long-dormant urges reawakened in Lucille. Upstate again came to represent mediocrity, and Broadway the main chance. No matter how devoted she was to Johnny, or how sorry she felt for Fred Hunt, she had to test herself in New York City, to prove John Murray Anderson wrong. To that end she would often leave school for a week or more without bothering to get permission from any authority other than DeDe. On the bus she would practice her locution and work out a plan of attack. Once in Manhattan she would head to a cheap rooming house on Columbus Circle, buy a copy of Variety, read the notices for open calls, and go to the auditions. Nineteen twenty-eight was not a bad time to be looking in the musical theater. In those flush times audiences paid top prices to see the Ziegfeld Follies, Earl Carroll’s Vanities, and whatever musicals the Shuberts were presenting in their theaters. All of these shows employed chorus lines made up of girls in feathers and furs. The trouble was, producers wanted dancers with experience, and Lucille was as green as the lawns of Jamestown.

  After a few weeks of total frustration, she presented them with an audacious new persona. Instead of encountering Lucille Ball of upstate New York, they saw a fresh-faced newcomer, “Diane Belmont” of Butte, Montana. (The surname was taken from a racetrack just outside New York City, and the locale was a bow to the place where Had and Desirée had once been young and happy.) To get her story straight, Lucille had written to the Montana chamber of commerce asking for literature. Poring over the booklets and brochures, she committed statistics to memory, in case producers inquired about her background. They rarely did, and once in a great while Miss Belmont from Butte actually landed in the third company of a revue.

  The assignment never lasted. For one thing, Lucille
met unexpected hostility from members of the chorus line. The Shubert girls, for example, turned out to be an insular, backbiting group that closed ranks against outsiders. For another, the seventeen-year-old lacked basic technique. The producer of the revue Stepping Stones kept her on for five weeks—a new record for Lucille. She was preparing to write home with the good news when late one night her benefactor told the cast: “We’re going to add some ballet, girls. Anybody who can’t do toe work is out of the show.” He made a point of addressing Lucille privately: “You’re a nice kid but you just don’t have it. Why don’t you go home to Montana and raise a big family?”

  Out of luck and money, Lucille took any job she could find. (For a week she jerked sodas at a midtown fountain, only to be fired when her mind wandered and she forgot to put the banana in a banana split.) She began to patrol short-order joints, seeking a “one-doughnut man”—an individual who sat at a counter, ordered doughnuts and coffee, downed the cup, and left a nickel tip after eating only one doughnut. “I’d do a fast slide onto his stool,” she said, “yell for a cup of coffee, pay for it with his nickel, and eat the other doughnut.” Her finances touched bottom the day she reached into her purse and found four cents, one short of the subway fare. “So I panhandled for a penny. One well-dressed older man stopped to listen, then offered me a ten-dollar bill. ‘Listen, mister,’ I told him with a withering look, ‘all I want is one penny.’ ” Thoughts of suicide entered her head. “I thought, ‘I’ll get killed faster in Central Park because cars go faster there. But I want to get hit by a big car—with a handsome man in it.’ Then I had a flash of sanity. I said to myself, ‘If I’m thinking this way, maybe I don’t want to die.’ So I regrouped my forces.”

  The Sunday papers were full of want ads. Lucille chose one seeking attractive young women to model overcoats. If I’m good-looking enough to be a chorus girl, she reasoned, maybe I can at least be a clotheshorse. The stores and boutiques liked what they saw, and thus she began a freelance career. It was slow at first, but the other young models were a refreshing change from the Broadway felines. They told her which stores were hiring, arranged blind dates, and taught her a few tricks to use at restaurants. One evening, as the waiter moved away from the table, she watched a fellow mannequin put a linen table napkin into her handbag, followed by several buttered rolls, celery and olives, a large slice of roast beef, and a French pastry. Lucille followed suit. These cadged meals did not provide enough to get by, however, and she did some posing for photographers. These pictures she later came to regret: a topless shot was to remain in circulation for the next sixty years.

  Then, late in 1928, Lucille’s luck changed. At about the same time she started using her real name again, a cameraman passed the word that coat models were needed at Hattie Carnegie’s. Lucille dropped by the East Forty-ninth Street salon. The proprietress looked her over and noticed a fleeting resemblance between the newcomer’s willowy figure and that of Constance Bennett, second wife of the Marquis de la Falaise (his first was Gloria Swanson). The blonde celebrity had yet to make her mark as a light comedienne, but she was already famous as an international party girl and trend-setter. Lucille was ordered to drastically lighten her own brunette hair. She obediently showed up the next day as a peroxide blonde; no one ever said no to Hattie Carnegie.

  This was the first truly powerful woman Lucille had ever met. Born Henriette Kannengiser in Vienna, Hattie arrived in the United States in 1886 at the age of six. In 1904 she quit the Lower East Side ghetto and started working in overdrive, first as a messenger at Macy’s, and five years later as the owner and operator of a stylish Greenwich Village boutique. By this time she had taken the name of another immigrant who was not afraid to follow his dream: Andrew Carnegie. Her well-tailored merchandise attracted the attention of rich window-shoppers, including Mrs. Randolph Hearst. The publisher’s wife passed the word to friends, and by 1923 Hattie Carnegie was prosperous enough to move her salon to a town house, where she catered to duchesses, society folk, and film celebrities.

  “Hattie,” Lucille gratefully noted, “taught me how to slouch properly in a $1,000 hand-sewn sequin dress and how to wear a $40,000 sable coat as casually as rabbit.” A New Yorker profile described Miss Carnegie as a small, fashionably haggard boss-lady with hair rather more reddish-gold than her age would suggest, and possessing “the temper of a termagant.” Her youngest model readily endorsed that opinion. Soon after signing on, she found herself covered with bruises where Hattie had kicked her in the shins or pinched her in the ribs— reminders that a Carnegie model must watch her posture at all times. These souvenirs were invisible to customers; Lucille was always swathed in long-sleeved, sweeping gowns. Typically, she made twenty to thirty costume changes a day, hustling into the back room, kicking off whatever shoes went with the ensembles she was wearing, and cramming her feet into another pair to match the next outfit. By nightfall she was footsore and shopworn. She was also considerably richer: her salary was $35 a week, a very decent wage in 1929.

  She also got to go to significant places and meet important people. In addition to Constance Bennett and her sister Joan, Lucille showed Carnegie styles to Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson, and the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton; paraded before debutantes at the Plaza and Pierre Hotel fashion shows; and went out to horse shows on Long Island to model the latest Carnegie garments. It was at one of those affairs that she saw the Gish sisters, Lillian and Dorothy, sitting in a box with their dates. Presently Lillian went off with both gentlemen, leaving Dorothy to amuse herself. She did exactly that, tearing tiny bits off her bright red program. When the trio returned, they saw that Dorothy had stuck the particles to her face like measles spots. All four dissolved in laughter, and Lucille made a mental note to try the Gish trick sometime.

  Not every outing was a triumph or a learning experience. Once, Lucille wore a disastrously tight Paris import to an outdoor show on Long Island. The dress was made of organza with a hand-painted fishscale design. A sudden squall ruined the afternoon, and rain made the scales slip from the textile and onto Lucille’s skin. She spent the rest of the day trying not to look like a drowned mermaid. And then there was the persistent clannishness of the other models—an echo of that other closed society, the chorines of Broadway. The Carnegie mannequins deliberately froze Lucille out, speaking an unintelligible jargon to one another and discomfiting the new employee.

  She dated from time to time, but none of the young men seemed as exciting or, in a curious way, as comfortable as Johnny, and none of the restaurant meals seemed as restorative as the ones DeDe prepared. Homesickness kept eating away at her, and early in 1929 she said a reluctant good-bye to Hattie, put her modeling career on hold, and returned to the compensations of home and family. Almost overnight Lucille went from the high glamour of Manhattan to the backwater milieu of upstate New York, from imitating Constance Bennett to aping the styles of the other girls in Jamestown High School. The brown roots of her hair grew longer. She resumed the pleated skirts and inane chatter of adolescence. It had all come to nothing.

  Lucille made only one good friend in high school, Marion Strong, who envied her air of self-reliance. Many years later Marion remembered the months when she and Lucille were inseparable, attending double features, looking up at the screen with wide eyes, then fantasizing endlessly about life’s possibilities at the local teen hangout. Many times the search was for gainful employment. Even before the Depression hit with full force, the Ball and Hunt families barely got by. Lucille never asked for money; she just went out and took whatever job was available for as long as it lasted. She sold cosmetics, concocted malteds at the Walgreens soda fountain, ran an elevator at Lerner’s department store. Together she and Marion adopted a terrier puppy, named it Whoopee after a new film starring an ex-vaudevillian, Eddie Cantor, and presented it to Mrs. Peterson, the grandmother Lucille wasn’t afraid of anymore.

  The two girls watched firemen battle the blaze that took down the old Celoron Pier Ballroom, and subsequently
went to the Jamestown Players Club, where a director was auditioning candidates for the featured role of Aggie Lynch in Bayard Veiller’s melodrama Within the Law. The play about a wronged woman’s revenge had already been given the silent-movie treatment, most recently in 1923 with Norma Talmadge in the starring role. It was now in the repertory of theater groups throughout the country. A well-connected attorney’s wife had nailed down the Talmadge part and sought a supporting cast of at least minimal professionalism. She inquired into the background of this brash young brunette, and when she learned that Lucille had washed out of drama school—a school in Manhattan, however—she felt safe enough to secure her the part of a tough-talking, gold-hearted thief. Miss Ball might be just good enough to remember her lines, but she would offer no threat to the female lead.

  After a one-shot performance at the Nordic Temple in Jamestown, the production moved on to the Chautauqua Institution’s Norton Auditorium. Lucille had done well enough in her debut, but this time she ran off with the show, ringing every laugh out of lines like “I only said a few words in passin’ to my brother Jim. And he ain’t no common pickpocket. Hully Gee! He’s the best dip in the business!” The Jamestown Morning Post praised Lucille’s comic relief, “so necessary in the play of the intensity of Within the Law.” And the Chautauqua Daily was rhapsodic: Miss Ball, said the critic, “lived the part of the underworld girl with as much realism as if it were her regular existence. It was her sparkling action and lines that brought continued applause from her audience.” At the finale of Within the Law, continued the review, she “played with even more enthusiasm than before and put her part across to the audience in the best manner of the evening. In a role that required action, and a good deal of it, she exhibited remarkable maturity and poise.”