It took a season for Mission: Impossible to catch on; not until its second year did the show develop a fanatical following. Star Trek was different in every respect. Its creator, Gene Roddenberry, had a philosophical turn of mind, as well as a skill for writing episodes of TV Westerns. He conceived of Star Trek as an intergalactic Wagon Train leading its cast to various exotic locales in space. Desilu executives found the idea intriguing but unaffordable; Ed Holly and W. Argyle Nelson recommended against development. Lucy overruled them, and Holly later allowed: “If it were not for Lucy there would be no Star Trek today.” In essence that would mean no first and second series, no animated version, no film versions—in other words, none of the billions of dollars generated in America and across the globe on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
In exerting her authority, Lucy made some enemies, and executives in and out of the company referred to her as “the lady who became a man.” Not so, Lucy said when she learned of the sobriquet. “If I was going to turn into a man, I would have done it a long time ago,” she told journalist Rex Reed. “I’ve been in awe of men most of my life. It never occurred to me how an executive should be. . . . The rules were here before I took over. I never wanted to be an executive, but when my marriage to Desi broke up after nineteen years I just couldn’t walk away from my obligations and say forget it. We were an institution. So I took on all the responsibilities.”
As influential as Star Trek and Mission: Impossible were to be, Desilu still revolved around the Lucy shows, and here the strategy went awry. With the great writing teams gone, Lucy hired Milt Josefsberg, Jack Benny’s head writer for many years. At the time, Josefsberg was the most experienced and competent sketch writer in the television business. The trouble was that Lucy was not a sketch performer. She needed credibility and a recognizably feminine persona to go along with her comedy. Josefsberg hired male writers who gave her gags— good gags, but not organic ones that rose out of her personality. As her assistant Thomas Watson noted, “these guys did not understand how to get a housewife into physical stunts, so, essentially, she stopped being a housewife.” Where Lucy Ricardo was a blithe and endearing schemer, the character on the Lucy shows of the late 1960s was unpleasant and argumentative, out to embarrass and humiliate Gale Gordon. The comment of former I Love Lucy writer Bob Weiskopf is germane: “I don’t want to sound mean, but where was Lucy in all this? Why didn’t she demand better writing for herself? She certainly was in charge. If Desi or Jess had been there, this would have been handled much more smoothly and with greater humor.”
To add to this unstable mix, the fifty-something Lucille Ball was taking visible losses in her battle against age and worry. A face-lift remained out of the question; her skin remained too sensitive to bear knifework. She did have her eyes tucked, and even that relatively minor operation took more than a year to heal. During the long period of recuperation, Hal King had to conceal the redness around her eyes with heavy pancake makeup. She edged toward the glamorous but unreal—a star, rather than the endearing zany that viewers had adored for the last fifteen years.
I Love Lucy had been syndicated in Europe for more than a decade. Lucy decided to try her luck overseas. Lucy in London, broadcast in the fall of 1966, did not receive the hoped-for response. “What had promised to be one of the season’s major specials,” said Variety, “turned out to be a major disappointment.”
While these distresses gathered, Lucy reached out for a confidant. Gary Morton was appointed to the role. He tried to be modest about it at first, quietly sitting in on meetings and deliberately playing down his significance. “Lucy can’t run a company by herself,” he said. “Maybe with me around, when she walks on the set, her mind is at peace. I pop in from time to time, on conferences, rehearsals. I can tell from her if things are going well, if the laughter is there.” As the months went on he insinuated himself into the corporate workings of Desilu. Agreeable as always, he tried to ingratiate himself with the higher-ups, who rarely responded in kind. Desilu program executive Herbert Solow regarded Lucy’s husband with a mixture of wariness and disdain. His view was, “Don’t take from your spouse and use that as your importance. Gary did that. Constantly.” Cousin Cleo felt that Morton gave in to his wife too easily, and that the deference reinforced her worst instincts. Desi, who put on a public show of friendship, resented his replacement and was especially irritated by Morton’s collection of expensive cars, obviously underwritten by Lucy. Others at Desilu felt that Morton was an embarrassment. “He tried to be Mr. Nice Guy,” said one staffer, “and in a way he was—always smiling, always trying to grasp what was going on. But he was resented and, to be perfectly frank, he wasn’t capable of taking over the company, which is clearly what he was aiming to do.” Bernard Weitzman, one of the top Desilu executives, agreed, saying that Gary “tried to be what Desi was, without having Desi’s authority.” Or, for that matter, his skills.
There were times when Morton’s inadequacies were apparent to Lucy, and those occasions could be unpleasant for him and for onlookers. Geoffrey Mark Fidelman notes that during the filming of one episode Morton indicated some steps leading to a doorway. “Lucy doesn’t like them and she wants them out,” he instructed the director. Maury Thompson was surprised at the order; the steps had been there for several previous shows. “I tried to stall Gary,” he remembered, “telling him how much manpower and money it would take to redo the set.” As he was speaking Lucy entered and looked at the tableau. “What’s going on here?” she wondered. “Why is everybody standing around?” Thompson repeated what Morton had told him. “She looked at me,” he recalled, “then turned to Gary and said, ‘Gary, go buy a car, but get outta here.’ Gary just hung his head and left. She never asked any more questions; she knew what Gary had tried to do. Lucille wanted him to be another Desi, but he just couldn’t cut it.” (Thompson would go on to receive an Emmy nomination for his work on the Lucy shows—the only director so honored—but perhaps because he had seen too much, he was fired at the end of the season.)
In later years, Desi Jr. was fond of quoting fans who “thought I was Little Ricky.” But, he said, “I knew Fred and Ethel didn’t live next door—Jack Benny did.” That sentence encapsulates his childhood and adolescence. In an environment where most of the neighbors were famous and all of them were wealthy, a normal childhood would have been extremely difficult; for Desi Jr. and Lucie it was impossible. Not only were their parents celebrated, rich, and divorced, their father was an alcoholic and their mother a deeply conflicted figure whose treatment of the children alternated between discipline and indulgence. “You’re not special because you’re famous” was one of Lucy’s ongoing instructions to her son and daughter. Both had to make their beds and pick up their clothes; neither ever received an allowance that exceeded five dollars a week. Yet on one of Desi Jr.’s birthdays, a carnival was set up in the backyard, complete with Ferris wheel, clowns, and a live elephant. With mixed messages like these, confusion was bound to result, and it was exacerbated by their mother’s long workday and the resultant guilt for time spent away from them.
Their father was not much of a role model during this time. There was, for instance, the summer night in 1966 when fifteen-year-old Lucie and a friend were visiting Desi at his beach house in Del Mar. Late at night some youths began making noise and cursing within earshot. It happened that Desi owned a .38 revolver—and this one was not a cigarette lighter. He fired two shots into the sand. They only added to the noise. The next thing he knew, the Del Mar police had arrived, arrested him for assault, and hauled him off to the station. He claimed that he had only fired blanks, but when the cops dug in the sand they found no evidence of such shells. They released Desi after he posted $1,100 bail, and he went home to sleep off his drunkenness.
Customarily, several years after a divorce an emotional distance opens up between the former husband and wife. Lucy had convinced herself that she could be indifferent about Desi’s life and loves and vagaries, but the fact was that
she could never turn her back on him. They had been too close in ways that neither of them fully understood. When she learned of Desi’s arrest, instead of shaking her head and responding with a wry smile, she managed to get hold of some blanks and had a chauffeur drive them over to Desi’s house in case the investigation continued—he could plant them as needed. Happily, the cops never returned. The incident made the papers, however, and the implication was that Lucy’s ex, rather than protecting two teenage girls, had simply been on yet another binge.
Each child had a way of dealing with this kind of stress. Lucie, who inherited her father’s exotic aura and her mother’s long silhouette, led an active social life and performed in school plays. Desi Jr. played rock music with two young friends from the neighborhood: Dean Martin Jr., son of the singer-actor, and Billy Hinsche, son of a prosperous real estate developer.
In the beginning the boys composed songs to amuse themselves. Their amateur status was not to last long. First, Lucy indulgently booked the trio to warm up her audience before the show went on. When they were sufficiently rehearsed and polished, Dean Martin invited to them to perform for one of his close friends. Frank Sinatra was no fan of rock ’n’ roll—he was subsequently to call it “the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.” In those days, though, he found himself amused by the style and rhythms of the group called “Dino, Desi & Billy.” Sinatra and Desi Sr. had long since reconciled, and as a lark he invited the trio to cut a disk for his label, Reprise Records. The mid-1960s was the time of global “youthquake,” when newcomers like the Beatles and the Byrds let their hair grow, radiated insouciance, and performed their own material. The harmonies and attitudes of these groups changed the course of popular music, and the directors of Reprise, anxious to tap into the youth market, arranged for a contract. At the age of twelve, a round-faced Desi, with his thinner thirteen-year-old pals, went on tour and composed two songs that made the Top Forty. The first had a pleasant melody and banal lyrics with a tincture of something less felt than seen:
You treat me just like dirt You have all the fun I stay home and hurt.
Other entries in their first album included an exuberant version of Willie Dixon’s “Seventh Son,” Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” and two songs written by the boys’ producer, Lee Hazelwood, “Not the Lovin’ Kind” and “Rebel Kind”—quite a statement for a group whose combined age was thirty-eight. Hazelwood was later to say that working with Dino, Desi, and Billy was “hell on this earth.” After one year he walked away from his contract because “I didn’t want those little leg biters around me anymore.”
Whatever their behavior in the studio, the trio were catnip to squealing groupies wherever they played. Lucy was heard to complain that she wanted Dino, Desi, and Billy on her show and was waiting for an appropriate script. “By the time it came along,” she later said, “I couldn’t afford them.” (Her budget only allowed $400, whereas Dean Martin paid $1,000 for a single appearance on his show.) During the group’s first flush of success, a journalist asked each member what he liked best about his sudden prominence. “The privilege to wear long hair,” stated Dino. “The travel,” was Billy’s favorite. “The money,” said Desi Jr. And therein lay much of the trouble.
Desi Jr. had never received a generous allowance from his mother. Now thousands of dollars were rolling in every month. On the cusp of adolescence he was not only getting rich, he was becoming famous. The proof was the adoration he received from the crowds wherever he went. He acted with such self-assurance that Lucie claimed her brother “had been thirty-four since we were kids.” In the next few years that assurance would become arrogance, and the appetite for applause would turn into a need for greater stimulation. If there is, as some researchers believe, a substance-abuse gene, he surely inherited it from Desi. The phrase “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” was to apply to his life and times for a longer, sadder period than anyone could possibly have predicted—least of all Desi Jr.
He was to remember experiments with marijuana, mescaline, quaaludes, cocaine, LSD, all the while questioning himself like someone in a song: “Is this all there is?” The query, he said, “terrified me. I told myself all I needed was something else—more money, another girl, a different kind of drug.” At the age of fifteen he was financially independent. Lucy’s criticism of his low grades had little effect, and her attempts to ground him went nowhere. “I felt indestructible,” her son remembered. Mother and son argued, and then, when the wounds were raw, went for days without speaking to each other. Desi sought refuge at his father’s place. Desi Sr. knew what Desi Jr. was doing to himself. He made some acid comments but generally refrained from confrontations. “His own drinking problem,” Desi Jr. observed, “prevented him from coming down too hard on me.”
Desi Jr.’s belongings, his instruments, his main emotional life were with Lucy, and it was to her house that he would return, only to have more fights about his indifference to school—and indeed to anything that didn’t feed his ego. A young actor, Robert Pine, was on the set of a Lucy show when a call came in from Desi Jr. Pine recalled: “He wanted to buy an expensive car. I think he was about to turn sixteen. She didn’t put it off on an aide or a maid. She took the call like any mother and said, ‘Goddamn it, I don’t want you doing this, so don’t do it.’ Then she turned to me and said, ‘Can you believe this kid?’ It was very human.” All too human, it seemed. Desi Jr. was, as he himself put it, “already independently wealthy from my work with Dino, Desi, and Billy.” He went on: “I wasn’t asking her permission; I just wanted an opinion about the car.”
Aware of his son’s emotional distress (and of his own inability to alleviate it by example), Desi offered guidance via mail. A sad irony attended this act. For the letter sent Desi Jr. was a copy of one Desi Sr. had received from his own father, back in 1933:
Well, pardner, you are now sixteen, and in my book you are no longer a child; you are a man. . . .
A note of warning about driving, particularly about driving on the road that lies before you—the one we all have to travel—the road of life.
It is very much like the road from Santiago to El Cobre. There are stretches that are so smooth and beautiful that they take your breath away, and there are others that are so ugly and rough that you wish you had never gotten on the damn thing, and you wonder if you will ever get through.
Somewhere along the way, you will get into a particularly bad spot that presents a very difficult problem, and you may not know exactly what to do. When that happens, I advise you not to do anything. Examine the situation first. Turn it upside down and sideways as many times as you have to. But then, when you have finally made up your mind, do not let anything or anybody stop you. If there is a mountain in your way, go through it.
Sometimes you will make it; sometimes you will not. But, if you are honest and thorough in your decision, you will learn something either way. We should learn as much from our mistakes as we do from our successes.
And when you do come up with a minus, try to convert it into a plus. You will be surprised how many times it will work. Use a setback as a stepping stone to better times ahead.
And don’t be afraid to make mistakes; we all do. Nobody bats five hundred. Even if you did, that means you were wrong half of the time. But don’t worry about it. Don’t be ashamed of it. Because that is the way it is. That is life.
Remember, good things do not come easy, and you will have your share of woe—the road is lined with pitfalls. But you will make it, if when you fail you try and try again. Persevere. Keep swinging. And don’t forget that the Man Upstairs is always there, and all of us need His help. And no matter how unworthy you think yourself of it, don’t be afraid to ask Him for it.
Good luck, son.
Love,
Dad
Each letter was assiduously read and preserved. Neither had the desired effect. Something in the blood, maybe.
Whate
ver the case, the conflict between Lucy and Desi Jr. could not long endure. It came to a head one day when the youth pulled up at the house at 6 a.m. His mother and stepfather were at the front door to greet him. The two had been up half the night; in the small hours Lucy had dialed the police asking them to search for her son. Desi Jr. got out of the car and tried to explain: he had been out with his latest girlfriend and they had completely lost track of time. “I’m in love,” was his lame excuse. Lucy exploded: “Don’t you see that your actions affect other people? How could you be so irresponsible?” When her temper had cooled, Lucy tried to have a conversation with Desi Jr., stressing duty and accountability. They were not concepts he wanted to hear, and she found herself laying down the law. It was one thing to go off early, as she did, seeking a career. It was another thing to hurt the family; young Lucille had never done that to her family. Quite the contrary, her grandparents and brother and mother and cousin had leaned on Lucille and she had not let them down. “You can either live here and follow the rules, or you can leave,” she concluded. “But if you go, you’re entirely on your own.”
Desi Jr. rose to the challenge: “I can take care of myself.” It was a poignant moment, and a deeply painful one for Lucy. At the time, her son embraced his freedom eagerly. Later he conceded: “A part of my life was ending. I already belonged to the adult world and I couldn’t go back to being a regular teenager. So although I was only sixteen, I chose to move into my own apartment. Over the years I drifted farther and farther away emotionally.”
Ball of Fire Page 32
