Self-preservation was something Lucy had majored in all her life, but at that moment she could have used a little help. Character actress Mary Wickes tried to supply it. The I Love Lucy stalwart was acting in summer stock in 1979 when she persuaded Lucy to fly to San Francisco for a sentimental journey. Together the two old friends called on a bedridden Vivian Vance. Most of the stay was spent in happy reminiscence between Lucy and Vivian, with Mary off in a corner. The laughter lasted for two hours; afterward the visitors cried all the way to the airport. Vance died that August.
In the following year came an event that seemed a reproach—until Lucy realized how much it would change her daughter’s life for the better. In 1979 Lucie Arnaz had truly emerged from the family shadow to star in the Neil Simon–Marvin Hamlisch Broadway musical They’re Playing Our Song. Time enthusiastically noted that Lucie “hurdles the barricade of being the daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz by imitating neither, but she has inherited their incomparable comic timing.” Down the street, Laurence Luckinbill was making his own mark in another Simon production, the autobiographical comedy Chapter Two. The actors met at Joe Allen, a restaurant in the theater district, fell in love, and announced marriage plans. Not only had Luckinbill previously been married and fathered two sons, he was also seventeen years older than Lucie—a marked difference from Lucy, whose two husbands were each six years her junior. Desi had no trouble accepting his prospective son-in-law, and Lucy soon came around. (And wisely so: the Arnaz-Luckinbill marriage was to prove successful and durable, and made her the grandmother of two boys and a girl.) Both Lucy and Desi showed up for the wedding in upstate New York. Lucy surprised no one when she cried during the ceremony. Afterward her ex-husband, always a crowd-pleaser, sang the I Love Lucy theme.
Back in Hollywood, Lucy made only one significant comedy special in 1980: Lucy Moves to NBC. She had been with CBS for almost thirty years, and the broadcast signaled that her old network no longer needed or wanted her. In theory, Lucille Ball Productions would be creating comedies at her new home; in reality, very little would come from the association, and that little was not to be popular.
Discomfort seemed to follow Lucy these days. She hit the white wine bottle a little harder than usual, and sometimes the clear fluid in her water glass was vodka. Richard Schickel had written the narration for a special, High Hopes: The Capra Years, an homage to director Frank Capra. The critic-scenarist provided a picture of Lucy at that time when he journeyed out to her house one afternoon and found her “slightly in her cups.” He reported: “She was nice and slightly vague and uninterested in the niceties of the hostly prose I’d drafted for her to speak. On set, I noticed she was wearing those little weights behind her ears that older actresses sometimes use to pull the skin on their faces tighter. But basically she came, did her brief job, and departed. What she had to do with Capra I’ll never know. Probably just the network seeking stars—any stars—to perk up a show they eventually played just once (on Christmas Eve).”
That year was not a good one for her ex-husband, either. When Jimmy Durante died in 1980, his widow asked Desi to help with the funeral. According to comedian Jack Carter, “He was so out of it that he kept inviting people who were dead. He kept calling that old racetrack crowd, and they were all gone. He was thinking of people from thirty years ago when they were all kids. At the funeral Desi stood in the back, stammering. He didn’t know where he was. He was even bombed that day.”
In 1981, rehearsing for a Milton Berle special for HBO, Lucy saw Gary Morton attempting to provoke the host. “Hey, Uncle Miltie,” Morton asked loudly. “Why don’t you relax and let everyone do their jobs?” Berle rose to the bait: “And what did you ever direct, you son of a bitch, that your wife didn’t arrange for?” The seventy-year-old Lucy was clearly uncomfortable with the argument that followed, and with the resolution—sullen laughter on the part of both comedians. Two years later she and Gary took an apartment in Manhattan at 211 East Seventieth Street in order to spend more time with the grandchildren—Lucie and Laurence Luckinbill then lived across town. The place was decorated with much more formality than her California house, and the little Luckinbills sensed it. They were not comfortable there, nor was Lucy with them. Mainly, when she got the urge to see grandchildren, she went to their place. Lee Tannen, Gary Morton’s cousin, grew very close to Lucy in her last years. He observed that the family visits were infrequent and later wrote that he found the situation “sad, because it seemed to me like it was always such an obligation for Lucy to be with her children and now with her grandchildren as well.”
She seemed to take more solace in the handful of ceremonies arranged in her honor. One occurred in 1984, when at a televised All-StarParty for Lucille Ball, Sammy Davis Jr. gushed before a crowd of fellow performers: “God wanted the world to laugh, and He invented you. Many are called, but you were chosen.” Davis went on to analyze Lucy’s talent. “Clown you are not. All of the funny hats, the baggy pants, the moustaches and the wigs, the pratfalls and the blacked-out teeth—they didn’t fool us for one minute. We saw through the disguises, and what we found inside is more than we deserve.” More accolades came her way: the Television Hall of Fame made her the first female inductee in 1984, and the Museum of Broadcasting in New York staged an evening in her honor.
Grateful as Lucy was for such tributes, they gave her the feeling that she was being eulogized rather than saluted. The things that were said were the kind one said about the dear departed. And, indeed, it was not until 1985 that she was again welcomed back on television as an actress. At the age of seventy-three she appeared in Stone Pillow, playing a homeless crone wandering the cold Manhattan streets. Lucy was still a star, and certain script changes were made on her insistence. The protagonist’s name, for example, became Flora Belle, in honor of Lucy’s maternal grandmother. She also decided that the character would be a vegetarian—“because it’s healthier. I’d just need one carrot.” And she devised Flora Belle’s makeup and costume. What she did not choose was the weather—Stone Pillow was supposed to take place in February, but was shot in the middle of an unexpectedly sweltering New York spring. Suffering under layers of clothing, Lucy lost twenty-three pounds over the course of the six-week production. In addition, she suffered periodically from dehydration, and as if that were not enough, she tore a tendon during a rehearsed fight when an actress held on to her too long. All this failed to bank the fire of her performance. Lucy was tough on herself and tougher on the staff. Even a bunch of street rodents, trained for the purpose, were reviled for being too tame. “These are sissy rats,” she proclaimed. “I want real ones.” Stone Pillow’s scenarist and coproducer, Rose Leiman Goldemberg, was amused by Lucy’s confrontation with a supposedly stray canine: “The dog they hired didn’t want to come. In the final cut, she just grabbed that dog and pulled him down. She was gonna have him whether he wanted to come or not.”
Precious few pleasures could be derived from the making of the TV movie, but anonymity was one of them: Lucy liked to walk a few blocks in her costume, trying it out on the public to see if anyone would recognize her. No one ever realized that the hunched old woman was Lucille Ball. She related the experience to Katharine Hepburn, when they met on the East Side. Instead of being amused at the bag lady role, Hepburn warned, “You know, of course, darling, you’ll be inundated with those.” Hepburn was right: the only scripts that came Lucy’s way that summer were about pathetic old folk. Yet Lucy remained optimistic about the work; as she saw it, good reviews were just about guaranteed. Goldemberg’s spousal-abuse drama, The BurningBed, had impressed critics the year before, and the director would be George Schaefer, winner of numerous awards for his elegant Hall-markTelevision Playhouse productions.
If Lucy was impressed by these résumés, the critics were not. Their appraisals were almost uniformly negative. The New York Times was among the most lenient when its reviewer observed, “Anyone in search of biting, or even illuminating, social insights in Stone Pillow can look elsew
here, perhaps only as far as the streets outside the window.” The Boston Globe fumed: “At a recent press conference, Ball said she gave up on television comedy because it was all filth—‘sex, sex, sex.’ But there aren’t many situation comedies as obscene as a television movie that would exploit the plight of the homeless for the sake of the ratings envisioned from resurrecting a faded comedian’s career.” The WashingtonPost added: “What Ball does with the character of Flora the bag lady qualifies more as an appearance than an actual performance.”
Looking back, Lucie Arnaz remarked on just how difficult Stone Pillowhad been for her mother: “She wasn’t well. She kept getting these attacks where she got very hot and couldn’t work. She had a bad heart. It was in the middle of summer, and here she was dressed in these layers of clothes. She had always been claustrophobic anyway. And the script was not that strong. I think at this time in her life it was almost too much for her to learn a script and create a character that was different from ‘Lucy.’ She just wasn’t up to it physically.” Lucy took some comfort from the Nielsens: that season Stone Pillow earned the second-highest rating for TV films. But it was not enough to make her forget the situations of the two Desis.
Desi Jr. had married an aspiring actress, Linda Purl, in 1979. She had appeared with him on a couple of TV movies, and Lucy had come to accept her as a daughter-in-law. At times she appeared to think that Linda might be marrying beneath herself, if only because she seemed so organized. “If there’s anyone in the world who isn’t organized, it’s my son,” said Lucy to a People magazine reporter. “I hope she rubs off on him and he doesn’t rub off on her.” Neither rubbing occurred; a year later Desi Jr. and Linda divorced, and several columnists hinted that the cause of the split was the young man’s problems with substance abuse.
Desi Sr. continued to have his own bouts with alcoholism, spurning friends who refused to give him a drink, and sinking deeper into despair, intensified by the news that his second wife, Edie, was dying of cancer. Then, through an act of will and the counsel of the family physician, Marcus Rabwin, Desi Jr. checked into the recovery center at Scripps Memorial Hospital, determined to overcome his addictions. When he walked out he was clean, and he stayed that way. Convinced that he could serve as an example to others, Desi Jr. persuaded his father to come to the recovery center. There the gray-haired, sallow figure stood next to his son and daughter, who came along for moral support, and in the time-worn manner addressed the assembled addicts: “I’m Desi and I’m an alcoholic.” For two months the stoicism worked— then the backsliding began. Desi Sr. missed meetings, stayed home, and finally drugged himself with painkillers. In the year of Stone Pillow Edie passed away, and Desi moved into a small house in Del Mar with his old and ailing mother. The money, once so plentiful, was ebbing along with his health. Conditions were to get worse. In 1986 his persistent cough was diagnosed: he had lung cancer.
The encroachments and reminders of age were too painful for Lucy to contemplate, and too close to ignore. The only salvation was work. But who would have her? She had already been rejected by CBS, and the arrangement with NBC had not been satisfactory. Of the big networks, only ABC was left. It was all she needed. Executives at the American Broadcasting Company were impressed with the ratings of Stone Pillow, and they convinced themselves that Lucy’s celebrity was still viable.
Their belief was born out of desperation. At the National Broadcasting Company, comedian Bill Cosby had broken racial barriers with his family-centered Cosby Show, and a new comedy series about older women, The Golden Girls, was reinforcing NBC’s reputation as the network to watch. As ABC programmers saw it, Lucille Ball’s credentials would make her the ideal candidate for a rival sitcom—after all, the woman had made her fortune with family comedy, and she certainly qualified as a golden-ager. So anxious was the network for her services that Lucy was given full creative control over her new series. With the writers and producers, she decided to build it around an ornery widow who had inherited one-half of a hardware store. Gale Gordon would be her disputatious partner. Together the two would display their familiar knack for getting into, and out of, comic catastrophes.
Gary Morton was listed as executive producer along with Aaron Spelling, but it was the latter who would do the heavy lifting. Spelling had a unique history with Lucy. Close watchers of I Love Lucy reruns could spot him as the young performer who played the foil to “Tennessee Ernie” Ford when the singer made guest appearances. Spelling had forsaken his acting career to become a producer—one of the most successful in television history. He was the creative force behind Charlie’sAngels, Dynasty, The Love Boat, and other hit series, and when he signed on to produce Life with Lucy ABC confidently booked the series for Saturday nights. It was expected to dominate the evening.
The show was bought without a pilot. Network programmers assumed that Lucy knew all there was to know about making a Lucille Ball comedy—what was the point in wasting money on a tryout? Lucy began on a note of triumph. From his bedside, Desi cheered her on: “What took you so long to get back to work?” Buoyed by his spirit and by happy memories of the old days, she hired Bob and Madelyn. Gale Gordon happily clambered aboard. “He’d try anything,” she remarked to her friend Jim Brochu with admiration. “Do anything we asked him to. He was always taking chances. He was eighty years old, and he could still turn a cartwheel.”
Gordon proved to be the show’s only asset. Lucy had trouble memorizing lines and depended heavily on cue cards. These completely threw off her comic timing. Moreover, no makeup could disguise the fact that she was more than threescore and ten, and her physical bits caused anxiety rather than amusement. The first episode pulled well; ratings went precipitously downhill from there. As Steve Allen saw it, “Lucy’s comedy did not age well, meaning the things she did weren’t as funny as she got into her late sixties and seventies. She couldn’t handle the physicality or pull off being so cutesy.” Allen found himself agreeing with Pauline Kael: “Like most attractive women in show business, Lucy eventually wound up looking a little like a drag queen.”
The critics closed in. Lucy tried to harden herself against negative reviews, but the appraisals of Life with Lucy were more than pans, they were condemnations. In Channels magazine, William A. Henry III summed up the general feeling of hostile disappointment: “That wasn’t Lucy up on the screen. It was some elderly imposter. Caked with makeup, she looked mummified.” The article went on to describe the protagonist’s voice as akin to “a bullfrog’s in agony,” and added: “She gamely attempted her old style of slapstick but her impeccable timing had fled. Worse, what used to be cute and girlish in a younger woman, and in a male chauvinist era, turned out to be embarrassing in a senior citizen. . . . Her new impossible dream of agelessness only saddened audiences with its intimations of mortality.”
Lucy appealed to Desi for counsel; he was too ill to help, and in any case Life with Lucy was already on life support. When the Nielsens listed it in seventy-first place, ABC pulled the very expensive plug. In all, thirteen episodes were filmed and eight were aired. However, the network had agreed up front to fund all twenty-two, and it paid in full. Each segment was worth $150,000 to Lucy, $100,000 to her husband, and $25,000 to Gordon.
The money, good as it was, did not assuage Lucy’s misery. Whatever her experiences in film and theater, she had always been able to dominate the electronic media. This was the first time she had ever failed on television, and the flop was a very public one. Ann Sothern remembered the phone call from her old friend: “She said, ‘Ann, I’ve been fired. ABC’s let me go. They don’t want to see an old grandma. They want to see me as the Lucy I was.” Alas, that lady was available only on reruns.
Illness had weakened Desi severely. He never would get around to writing volume two of his autobiography, provisionally entitled Another Book. But in his decline he found several moments of grace: Lucie had grown close to her father in his last years. Her children were to remember the old man in the baseball cap, hobbling down the inc
lined walkway in Del Mar and leaning on their station wagon for support as he kissed them good-bye. Desi had lost much of his hair because of the radiation treatments, and he had lost a good deal of weight. His son and daughter and their spouses and grandchildren were all welcome. But he had no wish for Lucy to see him in such a reduced state. Lucie persuaded him to change his mind, and she brought her parents together in Desi’s final months.
On the first occasion he was in parlous shape and the visit was brief and inconclusive. On the second he was vigorous but edgy, until Lucie ran some videotapes of I Love Lucy. She left her mother and father chatting and laughing like kids, she said, on their first date. As Lucy got up to leave, Desi asked, “Where are you going?” She told him, “I’m going home.” “You are home,” he replied. It was Lucy’s most difficult exit.
Later Lucy and Desi Jr. and Lucie walked on the beach, reminiscing. Lucy was to speak to her ex one more time, on November 30, 1986, repeating the words “I love you, I love you, Desi, I love you” on the phone. He assured her that he loved her, too. Had they stayed together, it would have been their forty-sixth anniversary. Two days later he died in his daughter’s arms.
The news went out over the radio that morning. Lucy heard it on the set of the quiz show Super Password and turned to the other guest. Actress Betty White recalled the moment: “She turned to me and said, ‘You know, it’s the damnedest thing. Goddamn it, I didn’t think I’d get this upset. There he goes.’ It was a funny feeling, kind of a lovely private moment.” Lucy issued a statement to the press, carefully scrubbed of references to their marriage: “Our relationship has remained very close, very amiable over the years, and now I’m grateful to God that Desi’s suffering is over.” Like Willie Loman, Desi had expected his funeral to be well attended by members of his own profession. In fact, except for Lucy and Danny Thomas, who gave the eulogy, there was no one from the television business Desi had so powerfully influenced.
Ball of Fire Page 36
