Ball of Fire

by Stefan Kanfer

  On an evening in 1944, one special version of the Game featured Lucy; her cousin Cleo and Cleo’s new husband, Ken Morgan; Keenan Wynn and his wife; the burly actor Laird Cregar, who had just made a name for himself as Jack the Ripper in The Lodger; and several other performers. The group laughed, drank, and played hard, and finished the evening by jumping into the pool en masse. The following day as Lucy drove to the studio she heard that Cregar had died of a massive heart attack that very evening—probably a few minutes after he got home. It was a long time before she could play Hollywood charades again.

  Card games were another matter. Lucy never stopped playing them, and revealing an unpleasant part of her nature in the process. Players who made mistakes were chewed out in public, and often reduced to tears. Lucy’s quick temper indicated more than an aggressive streak. The Arnazes had resumed their quarrels and jealousies, and she acted out her frustrations at the card table. From various clues and rumors Lucy knew that Desi was involved with other women; meanwhile, he convinced himself that she was being unfaithful. On weekends, for example, Clark Gable, still in mourning for Carole Lombard, would come by on his motorcycle, driving the Harley-Davidson recklessly, as if in search of an accident. There was a time when Lucy thought the actor “handsome but such a lump.” Now she spent hours encouraging him to talk out his sorrow, encouraging Gable to stay off the bike and come for a drive. Desi stayed behind, wondering whether Lucy was becoming more than a good listener.

  And matters were about to worsen on the professional front. Lucy’s and Desi’s recent movies were both box office smashes. Du Barry Was a Lady grossed almost $3.5 million, and Bataan, in addition to receiving good notices and big box office receipts, won Desi the Photoplay award for best performance of the month. (“It wasn’t the Academy Award,” he allowed, “but damn good enough for me.”) Yet this was to be his last big moment at MGM. Mayer had no plans to put the Latin fellow in any upcoming feature, whereas Lucy was already in rehearsal for Best Foot Forward, replacing the pregnant Lana Turner. That film about a fading star and a young cadet was of little moment—which was why the studio cast an actress who could neither sing nor dance in a musical. Still, Best Foot Forward kept Lucille Ball’s name before the public and gave her a chance to work with such promising newcomers as June Allyson and Gloria De Haven. As she worked, the distance between her and Desi widened. June Allyson paid Lucy a visit during this period and expressed envy at the house and garden, and all the other signs she mistook for happiness. Lucy let slip a remark about the situation: “We’re not ships that pass in the night so much as cars that pass in the morning. This is supposed to be married life?”

  The Arnazes’ troubles might have gone public had Lucy’s star continued to rise and had Desi continued to be a bandleader on the road to nowhere. But in May 1943, the draft notice finally arrived. Desi planned to enter the air force and with his flair for self-dramatization spoke about becoming a bombardier, making hazardous forays deep into enemy territory. The day before he was to report for duty, Desi joined a pickup team and played baseball at the Arlington Reception Center near Riverside, California. His first time up, he swung at a ball, missed, and tore the cartilage in his good knee. The other one bore the scars of operations done during his adolescence in Cuba, and this new accident put him out of commission. Desi spent weeks in a hospital, and when he was released doctors pronounced him unfit for bombardier school. He entered the infantry as a private. After basic training he was assigned to the Army Medical Corps, not as a technician but as an entertainer. Looking at the bright side, Desi saw himself entertaining the troops overseas. Then one evening Lucy received a call.

  “I’m going to be in Birmingham, honey,” declared her husband.

  “Gee, that’s great,” she responded. “I’m leaving for a bond tour in the East next week and I’ll come to Alabama to see you.”

  “Birmingham, California,” he groaned. That Birmingham was less than five miles from the Desilu ranch. At a base hospital Desi worked with wounded soldiers returned from Corregidor, Tarawa, and, ironically enough, Bataan. He taught English to illiterate draftees, rounded up books and radios, ran films, acquired sports equipment. In his spare moments he put on one-man shows. Once in a while he brought in Lucy for some offhand comedy. Nevertheless, she was to note, it was obvious that Desi was restless and unhappy. “It galled him not to be overseas himself. He was allowed to leave the hospital every night and weekends, which turned out to be unfortunate. He was too close to Hollywood.” For in the early 1940s, the tone of Hollywood’s social life was set by the studio chiefs. Louis B. Mayer had just left his wife and moved into a mansion formerly occupied by Marion Davies. Once the town’s most powerful executive showed the way, many other middle-aged producers abandoned their spouses and, along with Mayer, took up yachting, horse breeding, gambling, and the pursuit of younger women. Parties went on every weekend, and Desi wangled invitations to most of them. All the while Lucy kept working in pictures, caroming from Meet the People, a musical starring Dick Powell, to As Thousands Cheer, a morale builder with MGM stars playing themselves in a show for GIs headed overseas.

  Lucy shied away from the parties, warning Desi that his pursuit of immediate gratification could be a costly error, and not only because of what it was doing to her: “No one approves of an actor enjoying wild parties and late nights; it’s too exhausting and shows up immediately in the face and the voice before a camera.” She repeatedly reminded her husband that his hosts were also his employers, “and they would have no respect for his ability and talents as an actor if all they ever saw was a charming irresponsible playboy.”

  He ignored the tocsins, and as a result Lucy spent many lonely weekends with no other company than her maid and confidante, Harriet McCain. One unhappy day she clipped a picture of a baby from a women’s magazine and pasted it in her scrapbook side by side with the movie reviews. Underneath she scrawled a caption in the infant’s imagined voice: “I don’t see any pictures of me in this book and this is your third year of marriage—quit kiddin.’ ”

  Early in January 1944, Lucy and Desi briefly appeared together to mourn the passing of Grandpa Fred Hunt, who died at the age of seventy-eight. “We never even considered burying him in Hollywood,” Lucy said. “He belonged next to Flora Belle in the elm-shaded Hunt family plot in Jamestown.”

  She took the body back and stayed in the old Jamestown Hotel alone, a visiting celebrity whose visit was heavily covered in the local press. It was no accident that the reporters turned out; MGM had sent a publicity man along to make sure everyone in town knew that Lucille Ball, screen star, was back. The adventurous adolescent turned Goldwyn Girl was now a bona fide movie personality, and wherever she went crowds followed her, from the hotel to the cemetery and back. She saw old girlfriends, reminisced about her favorite teachers, visited Johnny DeVita and his mother. Not an ember of the amour remained. Dutifully she stopped by the local defense plant and attended a bond rally. Then she was off on a train for Philadelphia to sell war bonds at yet another rally. Wrapped in silver fox, her red hair coiffed and her makeup, lipstick, and eyebrows artfully applied, the epitome of glamour looked back and waved to a fervent crowd. Jamestown receded into memory. The place seemed so small and irrelevant these days, as if what occurred in the 1920s had happened to someone else, someone in a forgotten bottom-of-the-bill movie released long, long ago.

  Lucy returned to Hollywood, where she took a small part in an overblown and inconsequential film, Ziegfeld Follies. That led to a major supporting role in Without Love, starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Wherever she went, reporters asked about Desi. The reply was always the same: everything was fine, rumors about their difficulties were pure fiction created by malicious columnists or jealous actresses. The only bad feature of 1944, she told a reporter, was: “I haven’t had Desi. I don’t begrudge him to the Service, but I miss him. When Desi comes back, I don’t believe there’s any doubt but that MGM will realize they have one of the biggest bets in the
business.” Unmentioned was the fact that in the summer of that year her husband stopped coming home altogether. The scurrilous Confidential magazine ran a feature about Desi’s Palm Springs weekend with another woman, and that story, along with Hollywood’s unending rumor machine, pushed Lucy over the edge.

  In the afternoon of the first day’s shooting on Without Love, she drove to Domestic Relations Court in Santa Monica and filed for divorce. The charge was mental cruelty. Even now, however, she refused to say anything specific about Desi’s extramarital capers. She told Judge Stanley Mosk that the Arnazes’ differences were mainly about money. “When we argued about it, he became angry and went away,” she claimed. “That was a habit of his—going away whenever we had an argument. He always ran out on me rather than stay to talk the matter out. It left me a nervous wreck. I got no rest at night at all.”

  Desi did not plan to contest the decree; he knew that Lucy had him dead to rights and that she could have gone into damaging detail if she chose to. But the evening before she was due to appear in court to sign the final papers, he took one last chance and dialed the number at Chatsworth.

  “What are you doing tonight?” he asked.

  “Nothing particular. You know I’m divorcing you tomorrow morning.”

  “Yeah, I know that. But what are you doing tonight?”

  “Nothing special.”

  “Well, would you like to have dinner with me?”

  Lucy sighed. “All right.”

  Desi wheedled a twenty-four-hour pass from his commanding officer, picked up his wife, and took her to a Beverly Hills restaurant. Afterward, they returned to an apartment Lucy had borrowed for the occasion. Desi wrote about the next few hours:

  “We had a beautiful night. At seven-thirty in the morning she got up and said, ‘Oh, my God, I’m late. I’ve got to go.’

  “ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Where are you going?’

  “ ‘I told you I’m divorcing you this morning.’

  “ ‘Yeah. I know you told me but you’re not going through with it now, are you?’

  “ ‘I gotta go through with it,’ she answered. ‘All the newspaper people are down there. I got a new suit and a new hat. I gotta go.’

  “She went to court, got the divorce, came right back and joined me in bed. This, of course, annulled the divorce immediately because in California in those days there was a one-year waiting period between the interlocutory and final decree, and if during that period the principals got together and had an affair, the divorce was automatically null and void.”

  Reconciled against all odds, the couple vowed to be different from now on. Desi and Lucy swore to work on the marriage: he would do no more straying, she would do no more complaining. Both would curb their tempers. In fact, neither did much in the way of adjustment. Desi’s concession to Lucy consisted in sleeping with the windows open because Lucy liked it that way, and occasionally joining her friends in a square dance instead of confining himself to Cuban music with his friends. As for Lucy, as she wrote later, “I closed my eyes, put blinders on, and ignored what was too painful to think about.” Since the divorce didn’t work out, marriage would have to. But it would not bear examining. Work was the main thing now; she would concentrate on that.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “How can you conceive on the telephone?”

  SERGEANT Desiderio Alberto Arnaz, U.S. Army 392-956-43, was discharged in November 1945, three months after V-J Day. During the war, film studios had come to a collective arrangement. Those in the service would not be paid salaries while they were away, but upon their return they would be granted one large raise. This was intended to acknowledge the periodic increases that would have accrued had they been working all along. Desi’s salary was $650 a week just before he was drafted; with the raise his weekly paycheck now came to $1,000.

  Desi knew the MGM scuttlebutt about the beautiful swimmer Esther Williams (“Wet, she was a star”), but he also knew that she was a big box office attraction. When he heard that a Williams movie was in development at MGM, and that the script called for a Latin leading man, Desi went to the producer and offered himself for the role.

  Jack Cummings was succinct: “I’ve already got someone else.”

  Desi asked the name of this other Latin lover.

  “Ricardo Montalban.”

  “Ricardo who?”

  “Montalban. A Mexican actor. He’s going to play the lead opposite Esther.”

  “I have been in the army for two and a half years,” Desi reminded him. “This is a perfect part for me and you are going to give it to someone else who’s not even under contract to the studio?”

  “It’s already done.”

  With those three words Desi Arnaz’s film career effectively ended. Montalban was the new boy on the block, MGM’s official Latin stud— twenty-six years old, skilled in comedy and drama, unconventionally handsome. The spurned veteran tried to be philosophical, but his acrimony could not be masked: “I guess it was out of sight out of mind. I had been gone two and a half years and they had forgotten what they had hired me for.”

  There was more bad news: Desi had been lax about various financial responsibilities before the war. The Internal Revenue Service calculated that he owed $30,000 in back taxes.

  In the past, whenever Desi had experienced a reversal—professional, marital, emotional—he had turned to the one arena that had never let him down: music. In the 1930s he had observed Xavier Cugat closely, watched the way the Rhumba King managed musicians, bargained hard with nightclub owners, and squeezed profits out of short engagements as well as long ones. Now was the time to use what he had learned. Desi organized a group of instrumentalists and persuaded the manager of Ciro’s on Sunset Strip to book the Desi Arnaz Orchestra in the club’s first black-tie opening since the war. The leader played his specialties, featuring the bogus native incantation “Babalu”:

  Jungle drums were madly beating

  In the glare of eerie lights

  While the natives kept repeating

  Ancient jungle rites.

  All at once the dusky warriors began to

  Raise their arms to skies above

  And a native then stepped forward to chant to

  His Voodoo goddess of love

  And the more genial “Cuban Pete”:

  They call me Cuban Pete

  I’m the King of the Rhumba beat.

  When I play the maracas

  I go chicky-chicky-boom

  Chick-chicky-boom.

  Si, Senorita, I know that you will like the chicky-boom-chick

  ’Cause it’s the dance of Latin romance.

  A self-mockery attended these numbers; Desi became a caricature of the Latin fellow Louis B. Mayer had dismissed so airily. No matter; the smiling Cuban was willing to do whatever it took to reestablish his name. Mugging, rolling his eyes, and swaying with the music, he basked in applause and celebrity, paying conspicuous attention to the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn, who chatted with him between sets and stayed until the finale. Opening night was a grand success. But in that triumph were the seeds of more domestic misery.

  Lucy was busy at MGM, working in comic trivia like Abbott and Costello in Hollywood and Easy to Wed with Keenan Wynn, and then loaned out to Twentieth Century–Fox for the melodrama The Dark Corner, with Mark Stevens as a detective and Lucy as his loyal, tough-minded secretary. Her scrapbook was getting fat with encomia. The New York Times verdict on Without Love: “Lucille Ball throws wise-cracks like baseballs.” The New York Sun on Easy to Wed: Wynn and Ball “make it clear that they are the funniest comic team on the screen just now—and by a big margin.” The Hollywood Press Club had named Danny Kaye the King of Comedy, and Lucy the Queen. This recognition provided meager compensation for a home life that, once again, was deteriorating.

  MGM required actresses to be at the studio hairdresser promptly at 6 a.m., and Desi’s schedule called for him to be at the club until the small hours of the morning. The couple w
ould meet at the top of Coldwater Canyon as she was driving off to work and he was returning to the ranch for some sleep. On many mornings they merely waved as they passed. Sometimes they would park side by side and chat. If Desi was feeling especially amorous he would board Lucy’s car and neck with his wife before driving home. At the other end of the day the process reversed itself: she returned to bed as he headed off to work. On weekends Lucy would stop by Ciro’s, trying to rekindle what remained of their marriage.

  Inevitably the group had to go on tour, and Lucy persuaded Desi to hire her brother Freddy as the band manager. But Freddy was a man who checked receipts, not beds; if she expected a report on Desi’s notorious prowling she was to be disappointed. One evening Lucy spent an entire phone call accusing her husband of disloyalty, and he yelled at her for being oversuspicious. She slammed down the phone. It rang in her room and she picked up the receiver, ready to resume her argument. The voice was not Desi’s; it was the operator’s. She had eavesdropped on the conversation. “Why haven’t you called him back?” she demanded. “I know he’s in his room feeling miserable, waiting for you to call him. He didn’t mean any of the things he said and I’m sure you didn’t either, so why don’t you call him back and make up with him? He’s just a baby.” Lucy laughed, melted, and did as asked. For that evening, at least, the conversation was filled with apologies and pledges of commitment.