by Lucille Ball
My writers on My Favorite Husband were Madelyn Pugh, Bob Carroll, Jr., and producer-director Jess Oppenheimer, a connection that would become particularly fruitful in years to come. Jess Oppenheimer had written for several radio stars, including Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, and Fanny Brice. He assured me that the audiences would laugh if I looked directly at them, rather than down at the words. I didn’t believe him until he sent me to see a Jack Benny show. For the first time, I realized how Jack could make a funny remark and then, simply by gazing deadpan at the audience, sustain the laughter another forty-five seconds. Our commercial sponsor, Jell-O, wanted me to do some funny nursery rhyme commercials at the end of the program, and taking my cue from Jack Benny, I began to mug, use my body, and turn directly to the audience. It worked.
In 1949, Desi and I instituted a “stay at home” policy. I was still childless, which caused me great heartache. Freddy and Cleo were both married and had kids of their own; I had dogs and cats. So one day, Desi and I sat in our cabbage-rose-papered living room and talked far into the night. We finally decided that Desi would give up his cross-country tours and only take local engagements with his band. We would both consult doctors to see why we did not have children.
And we would “kick out the bums.” Desi had many hangers-on at our ranch at this time. Drinking, brawling, constantly dropping in, they gave us no peace. We had to take over our own home again, losing the parasites for good.
I told Desi that I would try to be a better wife, more loving, more understanding. To prove that I really meant to make a major effort, I started taking instruction in the Catholic faith. I thought that because Desi and I had eloped and had been married by a judge, our marriage somehow lacked a certain sacred quality. So we were married again in 1949 in Our Lady of the Valley Church in Canoga Park. Groucho Marx couldn’t make the ceremony, but he wired: “What’s new?”
Desi and his band were appearing on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip the June day we remarried. He wore a white suit and I was in a blue satin wedding dress with a bridal bouquet. My mentor in comedy techniques, Ed Sedgwick, gave me away and Desi’s mother, Dolores, was matron of honor. I thought it would please her to have us married in the Church, and I promised to bring up any children we might have as Catholics.
It was a sentimental occasion, with our closest friends and family there, and a wedding reception afterward. It was a beautiful ceremony, and I believed in it. At the time, I seriously intended to become a Catholic. I took instruction for a long time, but lost the inspiration when I realized that Catholicism did not seem to help Desi in his life.
In 1949, I signed a contract with Columbia for one picture a year. Desi did a picture for Columbia that same year called Holiday in Havana, and was still Bob Hope’s musical director on his radio show. His band was now so successful that he was getting $12,000 a week for appearances, and I was very proud of him.
This year was the beginning of my great association with Bob Hope. We did Sorrowful Jones together, a remake of the Damon Runyon story Little Miss Marker which originally starred Shirley Temple. Going to Bob’s set every day was like going to a party; I couldn’t wait to get there. And I loved working with him.
Bob is predictable and never moody. He’s fun, sweet, kind, good; a gentleman and a trouper. I can bounce vitriolic remarks off his big chest and they come out funny, not like acid. Because he’s such a strong male figure, he makes me appear more feminine.
Like everything Damon Runyon wrote, Sorrowful Jones had pathos as well as comedy, and Bob at first was rather afraid of the straight scenes. “What if the audience laughs in the wrong place?” he worried. He was feeling his way, and so was I. And this was the first movie I’d ever made with Bob. But after a few days, when he still seemed a bit uneasy, I found the courage to take him aside and say, “Don’t be afraid to play it straight. If you believe in the scene, the audience will, too.”
We started shooting and everything went along great, except that a horse stepped on my foot during one scene and hurt my toes so badly I’ve been wearing open-toed shoes ever since.
In 1949, I also made Miss Grant Takes Richmond, with Bill Holden, and then, in August, a second film with Bob Hope, Fancy Pants. By this time I had “arrived” in Hollywood to the extent that directors and producers spoke of “a Lucille Ball–type role” when casting their pictures.
When I made The Fuller Brush Girl, however, in March 1950, I began to wonder just how much I wanted to play that Ball role. We got great reviews and the bits were quite funny, but what I remember this movie for chiefly is the truly terrible migraine headaches I suffered making it. And no wonder! In filming all this wild slapstick, I sprained both wrists and displaced six vertebrae, then irritated my sciatic nerve by walking on the outside of my ankles for hours doing a drunk scene. I also suffered a two-day paralysis of the eyeball when talcum powder was accidentally blown into my eye by a wind machine. A three-day dunking in a wine vat gave me a severe cold, and I also was bruised by several tons of coffee beans. At any rate, at five o’clock on the last day of shooting, I was climbing into my car to drive directly home to bed, when I remembered that I had promised to pose for publicity shots for the local tuberculosis society.
So I drove to Hollywood and Vine. Coughing and sneezing, I stood in front of the free chest X-ray machine they had set up there. The technician developed the film in a couple of seconds. “Pardon me, Miss Ball,” he gasped, “but this X ray shows that you have some kind of pneumonia.”
“I do?” I said. “I thought I just had a cold.” I drove right to the hospital and spent the next nine days in the thermostatic pneumonia wagon.
* * *
One spring day in 1950, Desi and I decided that since nobody else seemed to have faith in us as a team, we’d form our own corporation to promote ourselves. We had our manager constitute our partnership legally. Desilu Productions, Inc., was launched.
It was important to find out how the public reacted to us together, so with the help of Pepito Pérez, the renowned Spanish clown, and my radio writers, we put together a Mr. and Mrs. Vaudeville act. Desi sang and played the bongo drums; I kept trying to butt into his nightclub act. I also did a baggy-pants routine with a cello loaded with a stool, a plunger, flowers, and other props, and flipped and barked like a seal. That hour-long act was a real potpourri of all our talents—like one of our Desilu goulash parties at the ranch.
We broke the act in around San Diego and San Francisco at various army camps. When word got around that we were liked, six months’ worth of theater contracts materialized throughout the U.S.A. and at the Palladium in London. During a miserably hot week in June 1950, we flew the troupe into Chicago. Desi and I spent the afternoon rehearsing and then went to dinner at the Pump Room, returning to our hotel room about midnight. As I climbed into bed, I noticed sleepily that some of the bureau drawers were half open and their contents were spilling out. “Why did Harriet leave everything in such a mess?” I wondered as I fell asleep.
At four a.m., I woke up, sat bolt upright in bed, and exclaimed, “Harriet would never do a thing like that!” I switched on the lights and cried out: “Desi, we’ve been robbed!”
All my jewelry was gone, including the forty-carat aquamarine engagement ring Desi had given me. Within a few minutes our bedroom was swarming with police checking and taking fingerprints.
In the middle of all the excitement I excused myself and upchucked in the bathroom. “Don’t be upset, Lucy darling,” Desi comforted me. “I’ll replace everything you lost.”
I was sad about losing my jewelry—none of it was ever recovered—but that wasn’t the half of it. I had been suffering from a nervous tummy in the morning for several weeks. That morning it occurred to me that I might be pregnant.
I was elated, nearly delirious, but I was also frightened. Now I was scared to do my act because it was so physically strenuous. In my seal act, I had to do a real belly whacker, flip over on my stomach three times, and slither offstage.
But I ha
d six months’ worth of contracts to fulfill. And I was so happy to be working with Desi again that I hated to call anything off until I was sure. I finished the week in Chicago and then we headed for the Roxy in New York. We arrived on a Friday and I immediately made arrangements for a pregnancy test, using my hairdresser’s name at the laboratory to avoid publicity. Walter Winchell had once told me that he had spies in every big medical center in New York who provided him with inside tips about celebrities.
Sunday night Desi and I were in our dressing rooms at the Roxy, waiting for our next show. We alternated with a two-hour movie from morning until midnight, doing six or seven shows a day. Desi was fast asleep and I was knitting, listening to the radio. Walter Winchell came on the air and announced: “After ten childless years of marriage, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz are infanticipating.” I dropped my knitting, ran into Desi’s dressing room, and woke him up. “We’re going to have a baby!”
Desi sat up, rubbing his eyes. “How d’ya know? We aren’t supposed to hear until tomorrow!”
I said, “Winchell just told me.”
“How d’ya like dat!” was my Cuban’s reaction.
Harriet, my hairdresser, Desi, and I did a jig of joy, shouting like Indians. I worked a few more weeks and then we canceled the rest of the bookings and flew home. Desi began adding a $23,000 nursery wing to our $17,000 house. It was two bedrooms and a shiny white tile room I called “the lab” with sterilizing, cooking, and laundry equipment. Desi even added an outside door at the far end of the playroom. “When our son’s a teenager, he’ll need a private entrance,” he explained.
I sat idly in the garden at the ranch with wonderful, happy plans spinning through my mind. But in my third month, I miscarried. They kept me in the hospital for a week, doped with sedatives. I cried and cried, but the doctors assured me that I still had a chance to become a mother.
In the next three months I made the six-thousand-mile round trip to New York six weekends straight for television shows; I continued with my weekly radio show, My Favorite Husband, and had a painful kidney stone removed. And I kept urging my radio-television agent, Don Sharpe: “Please find a way for Desi and me to do a television show together!”
In October, Cecil B. DeMille offered me an exciting part in the circus spectacle he was casting, The Greatest Show on Earth. I had never worked with DeMille before and I accepted immediately.
My contract with Columbia called for one picture a year, but the late Harry Cohn, then head of that studio, hadn’t come up with anything for me since The Fuller Brush Girl.
“Mr. Cohn,” I asked him, “please let me out of my contract so I can do a picture at Paramount.”
“What picture at Paramount?” he asked suspiciously.
“Mr. DeMille wants me for Greatest Show on Earth.”
“Nothing doing.” Mr. Cohn wouldn’t let me out of my Columbia contract, nor would he let me do the DeMille movie, which meant so much to me. Harry Cohn was a hard-driving type and a ruthless fighter. He accomplished much and if you didn’t expect the velvet glove treatment it was possible to get along with him. But this time, when he decided to get rough with me, I had had enough. I went right ahead with my costume fittings for DeMille’s picture. I didn’t know how I was going to outwit Harry Cohn in a legal way, but for once I was going to try.
A couple of weeks went by and Cohn sent me a script to read. It was a Sam Katzman production, or what is known in Hollywood as a lease breaker. Mr. Katzman’s pictures were strictly class E. Anyone of any stature was supposed to say, “Over my dead body! I’ll never do that!” and then Harry Cohn could cancel that player’s contract without paying them off.
I had never feuded with a studio before and I wasn’t about to earn the reputation of being difficult at this late date. I picked up the phone and called Harry Cohn. “I’ve just read the Sam Katzman script,” I crooned into his ear. “I think it’s marvelous! I’d be delighted to do it.”
“You would?” Mr. Cohn almost fell over backward and poor Sam Katzman just about had a coronary. Mr. Cohn’s plan had backfired. Under my contract I was to be paid $85,000 for my one remaining picture. My salary ate up half Katzman’s budget. Harry was stuck with me; his ruse hadn’t worked.
So I played an Arabian princess in Sam Katzman’s The Magic Carpet—a temptress “whose lips and temper are hotter than the desert sands,” as the promotion read. By the time I started Magic Carpet, five months after my miscarriage, I was pregnant again. It was fortunate that I wore voluminous belly dancer pants and cloaks, because I was getting fatter by the minute. It was important to keep this fact from Mr. Cohn, for then he could have canceled my contract immediately.
On the set, only Harriet knew my secret. Each night she let out the waist of my costume another notch or two. I collected eighty-five grand for a total of five days’ work and got out of my Columbia contract very nicely. Then I went to see Mr. DeMille along with Desi.
With tears in my eyes, I told the great impresario, “Mr. DeMille, I cannot do your picture, because I’m going to have a baby.”
There was a long DeMille pause, a very dramatic pause. Mr. DeMille knew how much I loved the role and how important it was to me to appear in his picture. But he also knew I was almost forty years old; and he could hardly believe my news. Finally he turned to my husband and said, “Congratulations, Desi, you are the only person in the world to screw Harry Cohn, Columbia Pictures, Paramount, Cecil B. DeMille, and your wife, all at the same time.”
His remark set all Hollywood laughing. Everybody, that is, except Harry Cohn. I had embarrassed him and cost him $85,000 along the way.
This time I decided that nothing was going to endanger my becoming a mother. I canceled everything except my radio show and sat placidly at home, knitting and waiting. The best year of my marriage to Desi was just before and after the birth of our first child. We exchanged no harsh words and experienced no upsets of any kind. Desi hovered about me, attentive to every need. I was grateful to God and in a complete daze of happiness.
Desi had a yellow convertible he usually drove at seventy and eighty miles an hour. As soon as he learned I was expecting again, he began driving as conservatively as an old lady. He put up the convertible top and even rolled up all the windows to eliminate drafts and avoided every tiny bump in the road. The more conservative he became, the happier I grew. This was the way I’d always hoped our marriage would be.
When I was going into my fourth month of pregnancy, CBS suddenly gave Desi the green light: they would finance a pilot for a domestic television show featuring the two of us as a married couple. A show that might go on the air that fall.
“What show?” I asked our agent, Don Sharpe. “We don’t have a television show.”
“You’ve got a month to put one together,” he answered. “They want the pilot by February fifteenth.”
For ten years, Desi and I had been trying to become costars and parents; now our dearest goals were being realized much too fast. We suddenly felt unprepared for either and began to have second thoughts.
At that time, television was regarded as the enemy by Hollywood. So terrified was Hollywood of this medium, movie people were afraid to make even guest appearances. If I undertook a weekly television show and it flopped, I might never work in movies again.
It would mean each of us would have to give up our respective radio programs, and Desi would have to cancel all his band engagements. It was a tremendous gamble; it had to be an all-or-nothing commitment.
But this was the first real chance Desi and I would have to work together, something we’d both been longing for for years.
We continued to wrestle with the decision, trying to look at things from every angle. Then one night Carole Lombard appeared to me in a dream. She was wearing one of those slinky bias-cut gowns of the thirties, waving a long black cigarette holder in her hand. “Go on, kid,” she advised me airily. “Give it a whirl.”
The next day I told Don Sharpe, “We’ll do it. Desi and I want
to work together more than anything else in the world.”
We called my radio writers on My Favorite Husband and together dreamed up a set of television characters. Originally, we were Lucy and Larry López; it wasn’t until we started our first shows that we became the Ricardos. Desi would be a Cuban bandleader who worked in New York City; I would play a housewife with burning stage ambitions.
Because we had so little time, we adapted parts of our vaudeville act for the pilot. I did a baggy-pants clown bit with the cello. For the rest of the show I appeared in bathrobe and pajamas to conceal my obvious condition. Desi sang, played the drums, and exchanged patter with me; he was the perfect partner, capable and funny, and his great charm and vitality came shining through.
A week later our agent phoned to say, “Philip Morris wants to sponsor you!” We were on our way.
However, in the next few weeks the deal twisted and changed and almost blew up. The sponsor had a second demand: they not only wanted a weekly show, they also wanted it done live in New York. In 1951, a show done live on the West Coast appeared on the East Coast in fuzzy kinescope—with the image about as sharp as a piece of cheesecloth.
We refused to move to New York. Desi suggested that we film the show, live, in front of an audience. The network people screamed. A filmed show cost twice as much as a live one. The sponsor wouldn’t put up more money and neither would CBS. So Desi made a canny offer: In return for a $1,000 weekly salary cut for us, we were given complete ownership of the show; originally, CBS had owned half of it. CBS also agreed to advance the enormous sums of money needed to start film production, with Desi as producer.
All Desi had ever managed was a sixteen-piece Latin band. Now he had to rent a studio and equipment and find actors, cameramen, stagehands, cutters, film editors, writers, and scripts for thirty-nine weekly shows.
