I Love Lucy: The Untold Story (12 page)

A nice gesture by Desi.

The following Monday morning I came into my office to find a telephone message waiting for me.
It was from Eddie Feldman at the Biow Agency. I returned the call.

“Did you talk to anyone at the
Hollywood Reporter
about Desi becoming executive producer at the end of this month?” he asked.

“No, I didn’t.
Desi must have had Kenny put out a press release about it. Why? What does it say in the
Reporter?
”

“Take a look for yourself.
It’s on page 9, in Dan Jenkins’s column.”

Both trade papers were sitting on my desk.
I picked up the
Reporter,
flipped to the column, and started reading:

TAKE HAPPY NOTE,
gentlemen, of the five following facts about “I Love Lucy”:
(1) It tops the latest national Nielsen; (2) it tops the same Nielsen in the number of homes reached, a figure in excess of 9,500,000, which translates to something around 23,400,000 viewers; (3) it stars an established motion picture personality, Lucille Ball; (4) it originates in Hollywood; (5) it is on film. It is worth repeating: a Hollywood television film series, starring a motion picture personality, is as of this moment the No. 1 TV show in the nation. The credit goes to a lot of different people—to Don Sharpe for believing from the beginning (1949, that is) that Lucy and Desi could be starred together as husband and wife;
to Harry Ackerman for never once throwing cold water on Desi’s starry-eyed idea of not only filming the show but filming it before a live audience on a motion picture sound stage; to Jess Oppenheimer, the producer-writer who shared Sharpe’s faith when everyone else was telling Lucy and Desi they were headed for career suicide;
to Karl Freund, an Oscar-winning cameraman whose pioneering spirit plunged him happily and successfully into a new medium which, on form, he was supposed to sneer at
disdainfully; to a crew which honestly believes “Lucy” is the greatest show on earth and works accordingly, week in and week out;

And then I saw why Eddie had called me:

and above all to Desi Arnaz, the crazy Cuban whom Oppenheimer insists has been the real producer all along and who in two weeks reluctantly starts taking screen credit as executive producer.

I stormed into Desi’s office and confronted him with the column. “How can you quote me like that?” I demanded to know.

“Well, it’s like I told you, amigo,” Desi answered. “I need to build a rep as a producer.”

After an extended shouting match that got nowhere, I walked out. Angry as I was, I knew that there was nothing I could do about the publicity without seriously damaging both the series and Lucy’s precarious
marriage. And I would never do anything to hurt Lucy or the show. I was stuck, and Desi and I both knew it.

Desi’s habit of taking credit for other people’s accomplishments was a continuing source of friction between us, but each of us had such great respect for the other’s abilities that we never let it interfere with the show.
And in time, Desi became a fine producer and a very good director in his own right. And he did have his gracious moments.
Cosmopolitan
once ran a cover story which said, “Lucy’s antics can’t be underrated. But no show is better than its producer, and Desi Arnaz is the producer.” Desi actually wrote a letter to the editor, in which he pointed out the error. “I am flattered that you call me producer of ‘I Love Lucy,’” Desi’s letter said. “Actually, I am executive producer. Jess Oppenheimer is producer and also head writer, which means that he does most of the work.”

As producer and head writer of the hottest new series
on television, my name began appearing in newspapers and magazines on a regular basis, and I even started receiving some fan mail! And it was now much easier for me to get a good table at popular restaurants. But although my name appeared often in the newspapers, my picture did not, and so I still enjoyed relative anonymity in public. I considered this a blessing. Fans can sometimes act a little strangely when they encounter Hollywood celebrities, and I was just as happy to have such behavior directed at someone other than me.

Once I was walking along the street with Steve Allen, when a fan came up to us. The fellow pointed at Steve and said loudly, “I know you! You’re Steve Allen!”

“Yes, I am,” Steve politely replied.

“Do you know how I recognized you?” the man continued.

“No, how?” asked Steve.

Beaming, the man proudly answered, “By your
face!”

Having a well-known name without a recognizable face to go with it did present some problems. It was the height of the McCarthy era, and another Oppenheimer—Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man responsible for our country’s development of the A-bomb in World War II—was
suddenly
branded a communist by the government and suspended from atomic weapons research.
Los Angeles’s evening newspaper, the
Mirror,
ran a story about it, complete with a photo of Dr. Oppenheimer. Unfortunately, someone grabbed the wrong “Oppenheimer” photo, and they ran
my
picture with the story by mistake.

My photograph appeared only in the early edition. Luckily, someone at the newspaper caught the error. The correct photo was quickly substituted, and I got a sincere letter of apology from the embarrassed managing editor of the
Mirror,
who offered to print a retraction. But I decided against it, feeling that the retraction was bound to attract more attention than the original foul up. Besides, I figured, how many people could there be who would actually think that the same man had invented both the atomic bomb and Lucy Ricardo?

To be sure, there were a number of places outside of Desilu where both my name and my face were well-known. One such place was Nickodell’s Restaurant, where I ate lunch at least twice a week. One waitress in particular, an attractive young woman named Shirley, knew exactly who I was, and always seemed especially anxious to please. I was not particularly surprised, therefore, when Shirley finally informed me that she was really an aspiring actress.

I don’t know whether she ever made it in show business, but it was clear to me that waitressing was not this young lady’s strong point. Shirley was always getting my orders mixed up. Whenever I called this to her attention she was crestfallen—so much so that finally I stopped telling her about her mistakes. But even that couldn’t relieve her suffering. One day at lunch, as Shirley came to the table to take my order, I could see she was terribly distressed about something.

“Oh, Mr. Oppenheime!” she said. “Oh, I was sound asleep last night, when at around 3 a.m. I woke up in a cold sweat, my heart pounding like crazy!”

“What was the matter?” I asked her.

“I suddenly remembered that on Tuesday I forgot to bring you mashed potatoes instead of french fries, like you asked!”

From then on, whenever Shirley was my waitress, I made it a point just to order the daily special.

ONE AFTERNOON IN MAY, 1952, we were about to begin rehearsals for one of the last shows of the season, when I saw Desi enter the soundstage. Without saying a word, he came over, put his arm around my shoulder, and walked me off the set and over to my office so we could be alone. I could see from his expression that whatever the news, it could only be bad.

Swallowing hard, Desi said, “We just came from the doctor. Lucy is going to have a baby.” Pleased as he and Lucy were about having another child, both of them were certain that it meant that
I Love Lucy
would have to go off the air. The cardinal rule of those who controlled the new medium of television was not to present anything that might offend anyone. The CBS censor had a list of words that could never be uttered on the air, and “pregnant” was one of them. Of course, today we can not only say the word “pregnant” on TV, we can also make graphic reference to all the various organs, equipment, and procedures that contribute to that condition. It’s hard to imagine that simply putting a pregnant woman on television could ever have been considered daring. But in the early 1950s, the very thought of a television show dealing with as real an idea as having a baby was simply unheard of. To Lucy and Desi, it looked as though they would have to quit TV just as they reached the top.

 “What can we do, Jess?” Desi asked me. “How long will we have to be off the air?”

Without thinking twice, I grabbed his hand and shook it. I said, “Congratulations. It’s wonderful! It’s just what we need to give us excitement in our second season. Lucy Ricardo will have a baby, too!”

Desi was incredulous. “We can’t do that on television!” he declared. “The network, the sponsor—they’ll never let us get away with that.”

“Sure they will, if we present it properly,” I told him. “What better thing is there for married couples in the audience to identify with than having a baby?”

Desi finally agreed that it was worth a try, and ran off to tell Lucy the news that she was going to have
two
babies. But as soon as the door closed behind him, I started wondering if I shouldn’t have thought twice before making that decision. The responsibility of doing a series of shows on such a delicate theme, in such an intimate medium, with a star who was actually pregnant, was staggering. And maybe Desi was right about the sponsor and the network. After all, they’d already made it clear to us that the Ricardos, though married, were not allowed to share a double bed!

I quickly called a conference with Bob and Madelyn. The three of us sat in my office for hours, discussing every angle of the problem. We finally decided that although it had never been done before, we were prepared to tackle it. We felt certain that we could extract all the inherent humor from the situation while staying well within the bounds of good taste.

The network and the sponsor, however, quickly reached the opposite conclusion. Both CBS and the Biow Agency were adamant: “You cannot show a pregnant woman on television!” Our arguments with them went on for weeks.
Finally, the Biow Agency and Philip Morris offered a compromise: they would let us do one or two episodes about Lucy’s pregnancy, but no more. Desi and I found this unacceptable.

Desi sat down and fired off a letter to Alfred E. Lyons, chairman of the board of the Philip Morris Company. In it he pointed out that until then, with the creative decisions in our hands, we had managed to give Philip Morris the number one show in the country. If Lyons agreed with the people at Philip Morris who were telling us what
not
to do, Desi told him, then Philip Morris also must take responsibility from then on for telling us
what
to do—and for whatever consequences that might have on our ratings.

The objections from Philip Morris suddenly ceased. But we still had CBS to deal with. The network had already issued a firm edict that we could not use the word “pregnant” on the show. We could say she was “expecting.” She could be “with child.” But never “pregnant.” They were still deathly afraid that some segment of the public would find something offensive in our pregnancy shows.

Photo caption (next page):

Alfred Lyons,
left
, and Milton Biow,
far right,
made a special trip to Hollywood in March 1952 to give us the good news that the sponsor was picking up our option for a second year. Standing between Biow and me is our director, Marc Daniels.