I Love Lucy: The Untold Story (5 page)

Lucy and Desi’s agreement with CBS called for an audition program to be delivered to the network in less than six weeks, but we still had no series concept. We held brainstorming meetings at CBS Columbia Square, trying to come up with an acceptable premise for a TV series for Lucy and Desi. We were all asking ourselves, “What do you do with a comedienne and a Cuban orchestra leader?” And then one day I hit upon an idea that I thought might work. I turned to Harry Ackerman, who was seated next to me at the conference table, and I said “Why don’t we do a show about a middle-class working stiff who works very hard at his job as a bandleader, and likes nothing better than to come home at night and relax with his wife, who doesn’t like staying home and is dying to get into show business herself?” That was the nucleus.
CBS liked the idea, and, best of all, so did Lucy.

Bob and Madelyn cut short a European vacation to
come home and work on the pilot with me.
With only a few weeks to complete a script and put the whole production together, we decided to use a routine about wills that the three of us had written for
My Favorite Husband
.
That scene, plus about seven minutes of physical gags and dialogue from Lucy and Desi’s vaudeville act, formed the core of the audition program. In the show, Ricky has a TV audition for his band, and he sends Lucy to deliver the wills to a lawyer’s office downtown to get her out of the way. Lucy inadvertently learns of Ricky’s show
and unexpectedly shows up in it.

That was it. There was no time spent in testing the idea with the public. All we had to go on was that Lucille Ball had been playing a certain kind of character in radio, and the public liked her.

The only other characters in the show were Pepito the Clown, played by Pepito himself, and Ricky’s agent, Jerry, played by Jerry Hausner. When I called Jerry to offer him the part, he was so excited at the prospect of being a regular in a television series that he immediately called his father, told him the news, and offered to buy him his own television set.

Jerry’s father was an elderly Hungarian immigrant who lived alone in an apartment on Vine Street.
The only television he had ever seen was the one in the front window of Barker Brothers furniture store on Hollywood Boulevard, where every Friday night he stood outside and watched the wrestling matches. He couldn’t hear a thing through the thick plate glass, of course, but with wrestling that didn’t really matter. When Jerry offered to buy him a TV set, his father surprised him by declining the offer. But Jerry was even more surprised by the reason his father gave him. “Not yet,” he advised Jerry. “Just wait. Wait until they get
sound.
They’ll figure it out one of these days. You’ll see. Just like they did with the movies.”

Because of a scheduling change, we were now set to go before the TV cameras in CBS Studio A on Friday, March 2—Desi’s thirty-fourth birthday. To show the audition to potential sponsors, we would make a kinescope, which was a film taken off the closed-circuit TV tube.

I was beginning to get a little nervous about the timing.
Lucy was five months pregnant, and showing quite a bit. And we still lacked was a name for the show. The script on my desk simply said “So and so presents LUCY starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz,” but “Lucy” was just a working title. And Desi was still giving me a problem about the credits. He just couldn’t understand why we had Lucy’s
name ahead of his. Why couldn’t
he
be first? After about a week of going back and forth with him on this, I had finally managed to convince him on the basis that it was the “gallant” thing to do—to let the lady go first. But even then he had come back to me one more time, saying, “I tell you what, Jess, why don’t we make it alphabetical?”

Because we were doing a live show, the cards bearing the title and credits had to be made up in advance. All of us had contributed possible names for the program. I had the long list of suggestions in front of me. It was time to choose. As I sat at my desk reading it for the tenth or eleventh time, I kept coming back to the same title:
I Love Lucy.
That’s the one, I decided. That conveys the essential nature of the show—an examination of marriage between two people who truly love each other. As I thought more about my choice, I realized that I had just solved another problem as well. The “I” in
I Love Lucy
was Desi. I had given him first-place billing after all.

We needed a theme song. I immediately thought of my old friend Eliot Daniel, whose work included the Oscar-nominated song “Lavender Blue.”
I called Eliot at his office at Twentieth Century-Fox, explained that Lucy was doing a TV audition program, and asked him if he’d write a theme for us.

“Uh—I’ll do it for you, Jess,” he said, “but you’ll have to keep my name out of it.”

“Why?”

“Because my exclusive contract with Fox doesn’t run out until next year.”

“That’s no problem. Your name won’t appear anywhere.”

“Fine. When do you need it?”

“Friday.”

There was a second or two of silence.

“Okay. What’s the name of the show?”

“I Love Lucy.”

“I’ll get back to you in a day or two.”

A couple of days later, Eliot came over to the studio and he played the theme for me and Desi and a few others. We all loved it. He told us that he had been looking for an opening musical phrase that said
I Love Lucy,
and that as soon as he
settled on the first four notes, the rest of the song practically wrote itself.

Photo caption (next page):

Composer Eliot Daniel at the piano.

Friday, March 2, finally arrived. As I walked into my office that morning, a thought occurred to me. I’d been so busy putting the show together, I hadn’t even thought about the fact that I still hadn’t seen a draft of my contract for the TV series.
In fact, I hadn’t even discussed my percentage deal with anyone since that first conversation with Harry.

I needed an insurance policy. I sat down and began to type:

I LOVE LUCY

Created by Jess Oppenheimer

This is a title of an idea for a radio and/or television program, incorporating characters named Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. He is a Latin-American orchestra leader and singer. She is his wife. They are happily married and very much in love. The only bone of contention between them is her desire to get into show business, and his equally strong desire to keep her out of it. To Lucy, who was brought up in the humdrum sphere of a moderate, well-to-do middle western, mercantile
family, show business is the most glamorous field in the world. But Ricky, who was raised in show business, sees none of its glamour, only its deficiencies, and yearns to be an ordinary citizen, keeping regular hours and living a normal life. As show business is the only way he knows to make   a living, and he makes a very good one, the closest he can get to this dream is having a wife who’s out of show business and devotes herself to keeping as nearly a normal life as possible for him.

The first story concerns a TV audition for Ricky, where Pepito, the clown, due to an accident, fails to appear and Lucy takes his place for the show. Although she does a bang-up job, she foregoes the chance at a career that is offered to her in order to keep Ricky happy and closer to his dream of normalcy.

I took the page out of the typewriter and drove over to the Screen Writers’ Guild Office on Sunset Boulevard, where I paid the one-dollar registration fee and was given a receipt and a stamped carbon copy of the typewritten page. When I got back to my office I put both items in my filing cabinet
and hoped that I would never need to use them.

I wasn’t the only one working without a contract that day.
The lawyers, agents and businessmen had been trying since December to get
CBS’s deal with Lucy and Desi down on paper, but the contract was still unsigned as the actors took their places in Studio A on that evening.
Lucy was already onstage, waiting for the curtain to rise, but Desi and Hal Hudson from CBS were still arguing over contract terms. With only moments until curtain, Hal finally gave Desi an ultimatum: “Sign the contract right now, as is, or the show will not go on.”

Desi was furious. “How much does the kinescope cost to shoot?” he demanded to know.

Hal consulted some papers he was holding. “Nineteen thousand dollars.”

“Okay,” Desi yelled at him. “I’ll pay for it myself, and it will belong to us.”

With his bluff called, Hal immediately backed down. “No no no, that’s all right, Desi. We’ll go ahead and shoot it now and thrash out the contract details later.”

•   •   •

Photo caption (next page):

Lucy and Desi rehearse the opening scene of the
I Love Lucy
audition. Lucy was five months pregnant and showing quite a lot, even after we camouflaged her in baggy pajamas and a big bathrobe.

The following Wednesday, Don Sharpe boarded a plane for New York, carrying a completed kinescope of
I Love Lucy,
and we all anxiously waited and hoped it would sell. In the meantime we had another episode of
My Favorite Husband
to rehearse and tape by Friday.

I arrived late at the office that Friday morning. As I walked into my office, the telephone on my desk was ringing. It was the head of programming at CBS in New York. He later remembeedr things a little
differently, claiming that he loved
I Love Lucy
from the moment he first saw it. But on that Friday morning he wasn’t bearing such glad tidings.

“What are you sending me, Jess?” he said. “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. How can I possibly sell this?”

It wasn’t exactly the reaction I had been hoping for.

Two weeks later we taped the final episode of
My Favorite Husband.
There was still no buyer for the TV show, and none of us knew what we would be doing come fall. At the close of the program Lucy came on gave a little speech:

 
MUSIC. (My Favorite Husband Theme.
)

LEMOND. You have been listening to
My Favorite Husband,
starring Lucille Ball with Richard Denning. Lucille—did you want to say something?

LUCY. Yes, Bob. Sad things are best said simply, so I’ll just say, tonight is our last show. It’s been a wonderful two and a half years, and I hope we’ll all be able to come back on the air in the not-too-distant future. But now I’d like to thank everyone connected with the show: General Foods and Jell-O for being such
wonderful
sponsors; Richard Denning, my favorite radio husband; Bea Benaderet, and Gale Gordon, Ruth Perrott, and all the others who have acted with us. And of course, our director…
(Starts to break down.)
Jess Oppenheimer.
(Little sob.) (Regains composure.)
And Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll Jr. who wrote the scripts with him. Marlin Skiles, who wrote the music; Wilbur Hatch, who conducted it so beautifully; Lucien Davis, our assistant director; Ray Lithgow, our engineer; Dave Light, our sound effects man; Adele Sliff, our secretary; and thanks to you, Bob LeMond.

LEMOND. Thank you, Lucille. 

LUCY. Good night.

 
(Applause.)

Exactly one month after Lucy’s emotional farewell, we got
the news that we had all been waiting for. Don Sharpe had succeeded in selling the show to The Milton Biow Agency for Philip Morris cigarettes. And Biow sent word that he was on his way to Europe, and he would contact us on his return.

In the meantime, Bob and Madelyn and I rethought the pilot and realized that we had written it for Lucy and Desi only, omitting anyone for our stars to speak to, plot with, as we had had in the radio show. At first we toyed with the idea of having a lot of interaction between Lucy and Ricky and his nightclub boss. But that would mean the situations would revolve more around Ricky’s job than domestic life. And
that
was definitely out.

We finally decided to add an older couple, Fred and Ethel Mertz, whose only asset was the apartment building that the Ricardos lived in. We would reverse the roles from the radio show—in this case the
younger
couple would be better off financially. Just as on
My Favorite Husband,
we figured we could pursue the examination of marriage from these two different age levels and economic levels. We’d be able to pair them off as couple against couple, women against men, or haves against have-nots, all setups that had worked for us on the radio series.