Ball of Fire (20 page)

That left the part of Ethel Mertz to be filled. Desi had hired Marc Daniels, who had won awards for his use of multiple cameras in television drama, to direct the first season of
I Love Lucy.
Familiar with the work of a stage actress named Vivian Vance, Daniels pressed Desi and Jess Oppenheimer to catch her in a revival of John Van Druten’s
The
Voice of the Turtle
at the La Jolla Playouse. The star was the comelier Diana Lynn, but all three pairs of eyes were trained on Vance. She played a heart-of-gold whore who managed to be salty and touching at the same time. At the first-act intermission Desi turned to his colleagues and said, “I think we’ve found our Ethel.”

There could have been no greater contrast between second bananas.

At thirty-nine, Vance had been married three times, and her latest marriage, to actor Philip Ober, was heading toward the rocks. Abused as a child, she had suffered from psychosomatic illnesses and a nervous breakdown before undergoing intensive psychotherapy. Yet even in her early years Vivian Roberta Jones was marked as a girl with promise. More promise, said her neighbors in Cherryvale, Kansas, than her playmate Louise Brooks, the silent-film star. “I always thought Vivian was ten times the actress Louise ever was,” claimed one of them. There was no way to tell the accuracy of this appraisal; Brooks walked away from a film career at the age of thirty-two and thereafter became a symbol of the I-don’t-care flapper, tossing her Dutch bob and heading into the wind. The Jones family moved to Albuquerque, where Vivian, like Lucy, starred in high school productions. The teenager then went on to seek a theatrical career, over the vociferous objections of her Protestant fundamentalist parents. She married to get away from home, was divorced two years later at the age of twenty-one, and was attractive and talented enough to make the chorus line of the Jerome Kern musical
Music in the Air
at twenty-three. Parts offered to her grew larger, and she began to garner a reputation as “the little Albuquerque bombshell.” She also acquired a second husband, advanced to starring roles in straight plays, and eventually became, according to the New York critics, the onstage embodiment of a “hussy,” “blonde menace,” “alluring vixen,” and “other woman.” She took a lover during the second marriage, actor Philip Ober, who became husband number three after her divorce.

On the surface Vivian seemed a lighthearted, if fickle, personality. In fact she was continually hovering on the edge of emotional collapse, and finally she did suffer a nervous breakdown. It took years of therapy before she could acknowledge that from adolescence onward two opposing forces pulled her apart. As she came to understand, the first was “a compulsive, an irresistible urge to act. I could no more have fought it than I could have willed myself not to breathe.” The second was “the deep-set, unshakeable conviction on the part of my mother and father, splendid folk but tempered in inflexible religious and moral dogma, that the stage was a sinful business.”

During her slow recovery, the shaky actress appeared in several unmemorable films before returning, very tentatively, to the theater. It was in 1951 that she received a call from Mel Ferrer, who wanted her for the Van Druten drama. Five years before, in Chicago, she had played the same role and received rave reviews. She signed on, terrified but unwilling to relinquish her vocation. “In the wings,” she recalled, “a moment before the curtain rose, I nearly fainted. Then I spoke my first line, and knew I was all right.” Better than all right, Desi concluded. Informed of her problems, he pushed them aside. In his view, Vance, like Frawley, was worth the risk.

Meantime, Lucy had other things on her mind. The baby was two weeks overdue. She felt too bulky and uncomfortable to go down to the La Jolla Playhouse or to bother with any more hiring; all matters pertaining to the show were ceded to Desi. To her surprise, she would learn that the naming of the infant was also left to him. On July 17, 1951, twenty days before her fortieth birthday, Lucy went under anesthesia when doctors saw that she was about to have a breech birth. The parents had already agreed upon a name: Desi if the child was male, Susan if female. When Lucy awoke, she was informed that she had given birth to a girl. She demanded to see Susan. “You mean Lucie,” corrected the nurse. No, came the answer, “
I’m
Lucy.” She was shown the birth certificate. Desi had signed it while she was asleep, having decided that one Lucy in the family was not enough.

Six weeks after the delivery Lucy appeared at Stage 2 for the show’s first rehearsal, wearing dark glasses and seeming ill at ease. She greeted Frawley with warmth. He looked and sounded right, and if the old boy could stay off the sauce, she reflected, he could be a perfect foil. Lucy was less sure about Vance. She had expected a female version of Frawley; instead she confronted an attractive blonde, her junior, it was said, by almost a year. “She doesn’t look like a landlady,” Lucy whispered to Daniels. Vance overheard the complaint. “I photograph dumpy,” she assured them. In a disappointed voice Lucy blurted, “I expected you to look like Bill.” Frawley took his cue from Lucy. As the hammering and sawing of set construction echoed around him, he motioned toward Vance and asked Desi, “Where did you get this bitch?” Vance had her own view of Frawley, and she made sure that he overheard it: “How can anyone believe I’m married to that old coot?” The cast of
I Love Lucy
was off and running.

Complicating the technical problems was Desi’s dual role as actor and as president of Desilu Productions. During rehearsals, he would be approached in the middle of a comic scene and asked to make an executive decision. Having done so he was then required to dive back into the part of Ricky Ricardo with exactly the same brio as before. At the same time, Lucy was going into overdrive, puffing cigarette after cigarette, trying out props in a dozen different ways, badgering Al Simon, the production coordinator brought in from
Truth or Consequences,
a quiz show that utilized three cameras. (“You don’t know how much this means to me. Can you really do it?”) Lucy was operating at such a high tempo that at one point she enlisted the aid of Vance and some Bon Ami and cleaned the studio washrooms for want of something more creative to do. Annoyances cropped up in unexpected places: the letters I.L.L. on a script caused Lucy to explode: “I don’t want a show that’s ill.” Desi explained what the initials meant, but she would not be placated. Sighing, he sent out a memo announcing that the only proper abbreviation from now on was “LUCY.”

In the beginning Lucy had no feel for story lines. She concentrated instead on individual scenes, wringing every laugh she could out of objects, or being padded out to look twenty pounds overweight. Extra poundage was the essential gag in “The Diet,” one of the first scripts filmed, but the third to be broadcast. All the basic elements of the program were contained within its two acts: Lucy Ricardo has ballooned in weight because of an unchecked appetite. One of the chorus girls in her husband’s nightclub quits. Ever anxious to break into show business, Lucy auditions for the job. The casting director informs her that she can join the chorus—if she can shed the excess avoirdupois. How many pounds? Twelve. How long does she have? Four days. There follows a period of frantic exercise, but all she loses is a few ounces. Lucy presses on. At dinner, for example, she crunches a stalk of celery while Fred Mertz and Ricky enjoy a hearty meal, with second helpings. As the pounds begin to melt away, the diet begins to drive Lucy to distraction. She winds up stealing meat from the Mertzes’ dog. With just hours left in which to lose the last five pounds, Lucy buys a portable steam cabinet, sweats away the remaining weight, and hastens to the nightclub. There she belts out a song—and faints dead away from malnutrition.

In all, six episodes were shot before
I Love Lucy
went on the air, and the first one to be filmed became the fourth to be shown. “Lucy Thinks Ricky Is Trying to Murder Her” assumes that the protagonist is one of world’s most suggestible women. Having read the chilling
Mockingbird
Murder Mystery,
Lucy overhears Ricky talking to his agent about getting rid of a singer. She misinterprets the conversation and believes that Ricky wants to do away with his wife. Her feelings are intensified by the dire fortune-telling of Ethel. Some hysterical maneuvers result, among them Lucy’s strapping a skillet around her middle to shield her from bullets. Ricky, convinced that his wife has lost her reason, slips her a sleeping powder. Before Lucy can nod off, however, she barges into his nightclub, the Tropicana, where she intends to shoot him before he eliminates her—a plan foiled in the last five minutes when all becomes embarrassingly clear.

The episode was an audience-pleaser, an ideal way to display all the characters at high pitch. Lucy and Desi were as confident as possible under the circumstances—circumstances that included carpenters banging in the final nails; Desi’s band tuning up endlessly; CBS and Philip Morris executives standing around, looking imperious; a line of potential audience members on the sidewalk outside; overanxious ushers borrowed from CBS to seat all the people in the new bleachers; and a distracted Karl Freund, still uncertain that his cameras would work simultaneously. Backstage, the Arnazes were going over last-minute changes with Frawley and Vance when Desi was pulled aside by an inspector from the Los Angeles health department.

“I don’t think you can go on and do the show,” he said.

Desi’s blood froze. It wasn’t enough to have opening night jitters. Now this civil servant, this nit-picking creep . . .

The inspector continued frostily: “According to our regulations, you have to have two bathrooms, one for ladies and another for men, within a certain prescribed distance from where the audience is sitting. You have one for the men within that distance, but none for the ladies. I cannot allow that audience in unless you have both.”

A quick huddle occurred. Oppenheimer got wind of it and exploded, “We’re about to go on and do our first show and you’re looking for a
bathroom
?”

That they were, and the only one within the proper distance was the private john in Lucy’s dressing room. She spoke up: “Tell the ladies to be my guests.”

Desi turned to the inspector.
Now
would it be all right to let the audience into the theater? It would. But the delay had led to a new problem. The spectators were beginning to sound restive after their unscheduled half-hour wait. Oppenheimer pointed out: “We sure as hell don’t want a grouchy, unhappy audience. They won’t react well to our jokes.” He appealed to Desi. “Why don’t you go out there and warm them up?”

“What the hell does that mean, warm them up?”

“Oh, for Crissake, go out there, welcome them, make them feel at home, tell them about the technique we’re using to film our shows, then tell them a few jokes to get them in the mood to laugh. After that, introduce the cast and we’ll start filming.”

Desi obeyed, welcoming the strangers and informing them that they were going to see a kind of stage play for television. He also warned them that there might be a moment or two when the cameras interfered with their line of vision. Then he hit a light note: “I was told to tell you a few funny stories to get you in the mood to laugh. I don’t know many funny stories but there was an old vaudevillian with us for several weeks on our first theater tour. I heard this one so many times that I think I know it pretty good.”

He told them about a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl who was innocently swimming in a lake when she heard a voice appealing to her. She saw no one but a little turtle on a rock.

“The young, beautiful girl said to the turtle, ‘Are you the one who was calling me?’

“ ‘Yes, I was.’

“ ‘How come? You are a turtle and you can talk?’

“ ‘I was not always a turtle. I used to be an army sergeant, but some witch put a curse on me and turned me into a turtle. The reason I called you over here is because you can help me.’

“The girl asked, ‘How can I help you?’

“ ‘If you take me home with you and let me sleep in your bed under your pillow, by tomorrow morning I’ll be an army sergeant again.’

“ ‘I don’t think I can do that.’

“ ‘Oh, please, you have to. I am so tired of being a turtle. I just have to get back into the army.’

“ ‘All right,’ the young, beautiful girl said, ‘I’ll help you.’ She took the little turtle home with her, took it to bed with her, and let it stay there for the night.

“The next morning her mother came into the room. The young girl was late getting up to go to school. And there in the bed, lying right next to her daughter, was this very handsome six-foot-two army sergeant.

“And do you know, to this very day that little girl’s mother doesn’t believe the story about the turtle?”

Desi got the desired response, and when the laughter died down introduced the cast. First came Frawley and Vance as the Mertzes, then he added with great fanfare: “Here’s my favorite wife, the mother of my child, the vice president of Desilu, my favorite redhead, the girl who plays Lucy, Lucille Ball!” The power passed to Lucy as she embraced the supporting players and yelled at Desi, “How ya doing, you gorgeous Cuban?” She drew attention to the fact that her mother and Desi’s were in the audience, blew kisses to everyone in sight, and created what Desi was to remember as “a happy, carnival type of feeling.”

From the booth Daniels’s voice broke into that carnival: “Please take your places for the first scene. Cameras get ready. Roll the sound. Roll the film. Now go on and do a good show for us tonight. Action!” They did do a good show. The cameras rolled noiselessly on the new floor, the audience chortled in the right places and the pacing seldom faltered. But what the audience saw as a miniplay was quite a different comedy on film. Observed in a screening room, many of the shots seemed mismatched, and the “flat” lighting that Freund had arranged so that all cameras were set to the same exposure caused harsher contrasts than expected. A specially designed Movieola editing machine held multiple reels of film from three cameras, while a fourth component dealt with the sound. This contraption, dubbed “Desilu’s Four-headed Monster,” allowed the editors to mix and match as they pleased. Even so, it took nearly a month to pare the first episode to the requisite twenty-two minutes, and meanwhile others were being written, rehearsed, and filmed. By now, the costs had gone over budget by almost $250,000, and CBS executives were betting that
I Love Lucy
would lose more than half a million dollars in its first year. The idea of a second year was beyond their most malicious imaginations. William S. Paley, president of the network, heard about the wagers and fretted in his corner office.