Ball of Fire

by Stefan Kanfer

  When he was not working like everybody else, Desi went in avid pursuit of anything in skirts, a pastime that provoked comment even among such spirited seducers as Rooney. Word got back to Lucy, who hit the ceiling—and then persuaded herself that Desi was just reflecting the strain and craziness of the war, and his inability to catch on in Hollywood. The best thing to do in the interim was to keep busy. At this moment of great distress an unusual opportunity came her way.

  The film was The Big Street, based on a Damon Runyon story. Lucy had met Runyon at least twice, once when Walter Winchell introduced them, and again when the creator of Sky Masterson and Nicely-Nicely Johnson came to RKO as a producer. In the previous year Carole Lombard had recommended Lucy for the role of the mean, manipulative nightclub singer, Gloria, in a screen adaptation of Runyon’s short story “Little Pinks.” Runyon remembered the suggestion and sent Lucy a copy of the script.

  One reading convinced Lucy that Gloria was the part of a lifetime, “a girl with a foolish, unhealthy obsession which made her more ruthless than Scarlett O’Hara. It was anything but a sympathetic part, but it was exciting because it was so meaty—so rich in humor, pathos and tragedy.” Even so, she hesitated to sign the contract. “It was the only time,” Desi was to remark, “that I’d seen her afraid to tackle a role.” Lucy could hardly be blamed for her concern. Gloria is wheelchair-bound, thanks to a brutal attack by her ex-lover, and brimming with hostility to men. In her view, “Love gives you a one-room apartment, two chins, and a long wash line.” She vents her hostility on the one soul who truly loves her, a shy busboy called Little Pinks, to be played by Henry Fonda. Fonda had grown several cubits in stature as an actor since their date, and Lucy was edgy about working with a bona fide leading man—something she had never done before. Of greater concern were the disagreeable aspects of her on-screen character. She whispered her doubts to a respected acquaintance, Charles Laughton. Much to her astonishment, the English actor agreed to scan the scenario. That night he summoned the young woman to his house. His counsel was direct and highly professional. She was not to fall back on her familiar “drop-gag” persona. The role needed a vixen, not a pussycat.

  Easy for him to say; Lucy was not so sure. Only after heated discussion with friends and family did she agree to do the part as written, hoping that Fonda would help her delineate the character of Gloria. No such luck. This was the last RKO picture in Fonda’s contract, and as far as he was concerned it was good riddance to bad celluloid. He came to the set aloof, and remained so for the duration of the filming, totally absorbed in his own interpretation of Little Pinks. After the first day Lucy realized she was on her own, and made the best of it. Director Irving Reis professed delight in her performance. Runyon was so moved by Lucy’s interpretation that when the movie was completed he watched it in the privacy of a screening room, where he hoped no one would see him snuffling. He had forgotten about the projectionist.

  But the film seemed to sail under a curse. Just after The Big Street wrapped, Runyon left the studio, Reis joined the army and was thus unavailable for postproduction refinements, and the editor, William Hamilton, died of a heart attack while cutting the picture. With all this going against it, The Big Street had little chance at the box office, even though it earned the best notices Lucy had ever received. The New York Herald Tribune reviewer wrote: “Lucille Ball gives one of the best portrayals of her career as the ever-grasping, selfish Gloria who takes keen delight in kicking the hapless Pinks about.” Life magazine concurred: “Ball’s performance is superb—the girl can really act.” And in Time James Agee offered a review that was particularly gratifying because he detested Fonda’s work (to him Little Pinks possessed all “the dignity of a wax grape of wrath”), whereas “pretty Lucille Ball, who was born for the parts Ginger Rogers sweats over, tackles her ‘emotional’ role as if it were sirloin and she didn’t care who was looking.”

  In Hollywood, then as now, reviews ran a far second to profits, and The Big Street barely broke even. In June 1942, less than a week after Lucy completed her last scene for the Runyon film, she was back in harness. The B musical Seven Days’ Leave costarred Victor Mature as a soldier who must marry an already engaged woman (Lucille Ball) in order to inherit a fortune. The movie featured a few good tunes by Frank Loesser and Jimmy McHugh, but the plot was banal and so was Mature, on loan from Twentieth Century–Fox and resenting every minute of it. At the time he was carrying on with Rita Hayworth and wanted her as his costar. Harry Cohn, boss of Columbia Pictures, refused to loan Hayworth out. Petulantly, Mature blamed it all on Lucille. He gave an even more subaqueous performance than usual, and during love scenes he held his costar painfully close. While he groped her he kept up a steady stream of invective just out of microphone range. Sometimes Lucille screamed at him; on other occasions she just ran to her dressing room and bawled.

  As shooting wound down, RKO’s new president summoned Lucy to his office and gave her the straight story. The studio brass no longer regarded the actress Lucille Ball as a comer. Good notices were all very well, but public response had never been impressive and now she was bumping her head on the ceiling. “For your own good,” Charles Koerner told Lucy, “you should get up the gumption to leave. A couple of other studios have been asking for you since The Big Street. I’ll share your contract with Metro or Paramount. Which do you want?”

  She chose Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, principally because it was considered the Cadillac of studios (her salary was increased to $2,000 a week), but also because it gave her a chance to rub shoulders and other parts with the most impressive names in the industry. In a sense, the jump was intimidating. She would have to compete with such established personalities as Irene Dunne, Greer Garson, and Margaret Sullavan, as well as with relative newcomers like Kathryn Grayson, Esther Williams, and the young Lana Turner, eleven years younger than the thirty-one-year-old Lucy. Yet it was also exhilarating: MGM’s leading men included Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Jimmy Stewart.

  If Lucy was not in their stratum, neither was she a cipher. Louis B. Mayer agreed to sign Lucille Ball because he knew her to be a thoroughgoing professional, able to deliver a comic line with flair, pretty enough to be in A pictures, and devoid of star temperament. He saw to it that she got the dressing room that had once been Norma Shearer’s in the grand old days when Shearer was married to MGM’s late production genius Irving Thalberg. And he made sure that Lucy would be tested for MGM’s flattering Technicolor process.

  She was preparing for that test when a momentous decision was made. It would enhance her professional life in more ways than she could count, though at the time she regarded the alteration as a nuisance. Sydney Guilaroff, Metro’s chief hair stylist, took a look at the newest addition to the stable and proclaimed, “The hair is brown but the soul is on fire.” Accordingly, he had Lucy’s hair dyed “Tango Red,” a shade between carrot and strawberry. Guilaroff, Lucy wrote, “also changed the style of my hair from long and loose and flowing to up and laquered, until I had to take the crust off it at night by cracking it with a brush.”

  Uncomfortably, gingerly, Lucy took a big step up. Her first project for MGM was a carefully scrubbed adaptation of Cole Porter’s risqué musical Du Barry Was a Lady, with a cast that included Red Skelton, as the comic lead; a young dancer named Gene Kelly; and comedian Zero Mostel, making his film debut.

  Events in Lucy’s private life did not correspond with those on her résumé. Grandpa Fred was obviously failing. Her brother Freddy seemed to be dogged with bad luck since the beginning of the war. He was hired on the night shift for Vega aircraft—and then dismissed without notice, coldly informed that he was not a good citizen. Freddy was no longer a wide-eyed innocent; he suspected that this was pay-back for registering as a Communist in that long-ago election. He assembled a sheaf of letters testifying to his good character. Employers nodded sympathetically but refused to hire him. He left Los Angeles and found work with airplane companies in Wichita, Kansas, where the tolerance for “security
risks” was evidently higher than on the Coast. But the stigma would not go away. Frederick Ball was drafted, only to be deferred—something in his background, Selective Service hinted, although its representatives would not be more precise. Returning to L.A., Freddy opened a roller-skating rink. When he was away from his place of business Lucy bought hundreds of admission tickets and gave them to her friends. Nothing helped; despite all this surreptitious aid the rink failed. “The only money it was taking in,” Lucy remarked, “was the money I was sending in.”

  Added to these difficulties was the unending problem of Desi. Interludes of domesticity were broken by his tours, and these always seemed to lead to more womanizing. When he did get a break, it revealed the ugly underside of casting. Since the early days, Latin leading men—Ramón Navarro, Gilbert Roland, Cesar Romero—had found a place in Hollywood, but that place was precarious. In his description of a Latin band, Raymond Chandler caught the attitude of the time: “Whatever they play, it all sounds the same. They always sing the same song, and it always has nice open vowels and a drawn-out sugary lilt, and the guy who sings it always strums on a guitar and has a lot to say about amor, mi corazón, and a lady who is ‘linda,’ but very hard to convince, and he always has too long and too oily hair and when he isn’t making with the love stuff he looks as if his knife work in an alley would be efficient and economical.”

  That viewpoint was much in evidence when Louis B. Mayer caught Desi’s act at a live show in Hollywood, Ken Murray’s Blackouts. The executive asked the singer to drop by sometime. Thrilled, Desi showed up the next day. “You remind me of Busher,” Mayer informed him. Busher was the top racehorse in Mayer’s stable, and Desi took this as a compliment until the studio chief elaborated: “Busher looks very common when he’s around the barn, but when they put a saddle on him, and he goes around the track, you know he’s a champion. The same thing happens to you when you hang that drum around your shoulder. Up to that point you’re just another Mexican.”

  “Not Mexican, sir. Cuban.”

  “Well, one of those Latin fellows.”

  Mayer’s verbal affront was followed by a financial one. Desi did something he had never done before. He swallowed the insults, humbly signing with MGM for $650 a week, less than half what Lucy was making. Now he had two choices: he could play househusband— gardening, straightening up, waiting each day for Lucy to come home from work—or he could go back on the road raising money for the USO. As Lucy expected, he signed up for the next available trip. In what amounted to a challenge, she went out on her own brief USO journey, flying cross-country even though she had been terrified of planes since the death of Carole Lombard. Her Hollywood group included Betty Grable, Marie “the Body” McDonald, Ann Sheridan, and the vaudeville and theater performer Frank Fay. “Fay lusted after Marie McDonald like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Lucy later recounted. “But he went about it in the most disgusting ways possible. He would back her into a corner and say, ‘I’m going to fuck you.’ Or he’d call her hotel room in the middle of the night and say, ‘I’d love to see the back of your belly.’ ”

  As the plane circled the field one evening, Fay sat across the aisle from McDonald, lasciviously appraising her bodice. “Suddenly,” Lucy went on, “we hit the worst turbulence I ever felt in my life, and the plane was all over the sky. Up and down. Up and down. I was sure we were going to crash. All I could think about was Carole. I looked over at Marie bouncing around in her seat and everybody’s screaming except Frank Fay, who can’t get his eyes off Marie’s tits. She was clutching the armrest, and her face was white as a sheet. She looked over at Frank and said, ‘So you want to fuck me?’ Frank shook his head yes. McDonald grabbed him and said, ‘Okay . . . NOW!’ ”

  With Desi away so much of the time, Lucy threw herself into the making of Du Barry Was a Lady. Her voice was deemed inadequate, and a singer was hired to do the songs while the redhead mouthed them. Lucy had trouble with her footwork, but this inadequacy was addressed by dance director Charles Walters, who spent weeks getting the steps right, and by Robert Alton, who oversaw the musical portions and the lip-synching. In addition, Buster Keaton, the old silent farceur, was on the set to give pointers about physical comedy.

  The plot of Du Barry revolved around Red Skelton as a coat-checker yearning for a nightclub singer, played by Lucille Ball. Someone slips him a Mickey Finn and his fevered brain propels him back to the eighteenth century. He becomes Louis XIV and Lucy metamorphoses into Madame Du Barry. Their wooing comes to involve lords and ladies-in-waiting, servants and jesters, as well as the entire Tommy Dorsey band. With most of the racier material excised, the humor was labored and obvious, save for a bit with a celery stalk conceived by Keaton.

  Even though Skelton and Ball knew their way around a funny line, the two stars never enjoyed a close rapport. The comedian tried for big moments; the comedienne shrank from them. On the set, nothing seemed to work in her favor. Hours spent rehearsing on a trampoline made her seasick. Her newly tinted hair was buried beneath mounds of white wigs, and her figure obscured by vast, unflattering hoopskirts. She disliked the exaggerated mouth movements she had to make while pretending to sing, and, burdened by heavy costumes in every scene, she found the Technicolor lighting hot, harsh, and intimidating. But the experience was not a total waste. When Lucy saw the dailies, she was dazzled by the way everyone looked. The German cameraman Karl Freund had found a way to make the cast—especially Lucy—blithe and glamorous. She remembered his name above all the other technicians and actors; clearly, this was a man to cultivate.

  A crew from Life came to the filming; a story in the magazine showed Lucy on the trampoline and, recalling her performance in The Big Street, called her “almost a Damon Runyon character.” It continued: “She is ambitious, hard, flamboyant and luxury-loving. Yet paradoxically, she is generous, funny and extremely sensitive.”

  Lucy’s teeth, apparently, were among her most sensitive parts. A few days after a dentist put in some temporary fillings she heard music inside her convertible. She swiveled the dial on the car radio, then realized that the sound was not issuing from the loudspeaker. It was coming from inside her mouth: the fillings were picking up a broadcast from a local station. Some days later, an odd rhythm sounded in her molars again. No music this time—it seemed to be Morse code. She reported the incident to MGM’s security officers, and they dutifully passed the word to the FBI. To the studio’s astonishment, investigators canvassed the area and discovered an underground radio station run by a Japanese gardener. Lucy dined out on the story for months. She related the incident to Ethel Merman—the stage Du Barry—and Merman passed it on to Cole Porter. It became part of the plot of his next Broadway show, Something for the Boys.

  Desi had gone missing for several days—no word, no wire, no telephone call. Frantic, Lucy traced him with the help of Pentagon officials. They located her husband on tour in St. Thomas, part of the American Virgin Islands. He was about to go on at a hotel when she had him paged. He ran to the phone convinced that something terrible had happened.

  “Lucy, don’t tell me,” he shouted. “You’re dead.”

  “Can’t you hear me?” she yelled back. “I’m alive!”

  “Mother is dead.”

  Lucy told him Lolita Arnaz was still among the living.

  “Your mother is dead. The house burned down!”

  “Just listen—”

  “You may not be dead, but if you found me here, you must be dying!”

  “None of those things. Get your ass back here. You’re wanted to star in Bataan!”

  Louis B. Mayer had found a part in MGM’s big war movie of 1943, a role the chief thought would make Desi more than “just another Mexican.” He was to play Felix Ramirez, a Hispanic GI condemned to die in defense of a bridge. Robert Taylor led the cast, perishing heroically in the last scene. Others to be killed by enemy fire included George Murphy, Lloyd Nolan, Thomas Mitchell, and Robert Walker. Desi’s finish was nowhere near as dramatic. Ramirez was to pe
rish of malaria, vibrating with fever. It was not the way Desi preferred to go but he seized the opportunity with both hands, arguing that the mosquito net would be in the way of his big scene, and that Ramirez would not speak English. He would go back to his childhood and dramatically recite the Act of Contrition in Latin, as Desi had done in Jesuit school.

  Garnett thought it over. The suggestions seemed reasonable enough; if the star agreed he would go along. Taylor offered no objection and the scene was played as proposed. An unexpected change came over Desi. Now that he had been in an A picture and had even improved his role, Lucy’s higher salary struck him as irrelevant. After he completed work on Bataan, Desi threw himself into domesticity. He and Lucy acquired five dogs and innumerable cats, raised egg-laying hens, nurtured a much-beloved cow and a pig with the idea of providing meat at a time of rationing. When slaughter time came around, though, the gentleman farmer and his lady didn’t have the heart to kill either mammal; both the cow and the pig died later of natural causes. The couple produced home movies of themselves in casual clothes, Lucy pretending to be Scarlett O’Hara, Desi posing as the lord of the manor, gesturing toward his swimming pool; his garden of corn, artichokes, and strawberries; his bright red convertible. The family came around: Fred Hunt, enfeebled but still capable of wandering the estate with cranky awe along with DeDe and Freddy; Lolita Arnaz, proud of her son but intimidated by his surroundings. Friends dropped in— Desi’s pals played Cuban melodies, Lucy’s colleagues stepped to the music of the square dance, and the two genres never quite met. Lucy’s friends, most of them in show business, vied with each other in Monopoly, Scrabble, and the Game, a fierce version of charades.