Ball of Fire (12 page)

“Where?”

“In Connecticut.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, I’m not kidding. I want to marry you and I want to marry you tomorrow.”

“Why couldn’t we just live together?”

“No, I don’t want to just live together. I want to marry you and I want to have some children with you and I want to have a home. I am not like the image you have of me.”

The final sentence was his acknowledgment that there were two Desis: the handsome, inconstant Latin lover and the devoted family man. Yes, he had made many vows of love before only to go back on them, but this, he swore, was different. If a man was in love—truly in love—he could change, thoroughly, completely, forever. Of that Desi was certain. What better way to prove it than with a bout of intense lovemaking? But there was no time left—he had to race back to the Roxy to perform his fourth show of the day.

When Desi returned he found Lucy going over contracts with George Schaefer, the president of RKO. He was gratified to hear that they were discussing business, and not the impending nuptials; Desi wanted to break that news himself. As he made ready to speak, Schaeffer tried to attract his attention: Desi’s fly was open, and in his haste to dress he had forgotten to put on underwear.

Lucy caught the gesture and explained to Schaeffer, “He believes in advertising.”

Desi also believed—correctly, it turned out—that Lucy was about to change her mind. Her self-doubt expressed itself in hesitations and evasions, all of which Desi refused to acknowledge, talking fast and thinking later. Skating over thin ice, his safety was in his speed. He picked Lucy up the next morning at eight and headed for Greenwich, Connecticut, in a limousine driven by his business manager. The bride, still irresolute, still confused, wore black. A wool dress was all she had with her; the rest of her clothing had not yet been sent on from Milwaukee. Not that it mattered to Desi. As the car roared up the Merritt Parkway he smiled and necked with his intended, and when he came up for air, he serenaded her with songs in Spanish. She noticed the sheen of his dark eyes, and the adoring smile that softened his face. She also observed that the groom’s hands were trembling.

CHAPTER
FIVE

“The hair is
brown but the
soul is on fire”

IN HIS HASTE Desi had neglected a few items. Connecticut law required couples to observe a five-day waiting period before taking marriage vows. In order to get around the law, he and Lucy had to round up a judge to make an official exception. Once that was done, they still were short of a vital, if sentimental, item. Desi had neglected to purchase a wedding band. While the couple fretted, Desi’s manager ran into a local Woolworth’s and bought a brass ring from the costume jewelry counter. On November 30, 1940, Justice of the Peace John P. O’Brien agreed to conduct a ceremony at the Byram River Beagle Club. After that, the couple ate their wedding breakfast before the glowing fireplace in the club lounge, kissed each other, and then kissed the marriage certificate. (Decades later, when the paper had begun to show signs of age, Lucy’s lipstick still glowed red upon the surface.)

By now word had leaked out, and local reporters gathered in the lounge. Desi consulted his watch. It was nearly noon, and he was due to lead his band at the Roxy Theatre in midtown Manhattan. He made his way to a pay phone, called the theater manager, and identified himself.

“You’re on in five minutes,” came the annoyed reply.

“That’s what I called you about,” said Desi. “I’m in Connecticut.”

“You
can’t
be in Connecticut.”

“I know. But I am. I been marrying Lucy.”

On their way back to New York the couple heard a radio announcer read a bulletin: actress Lucille Ball and band leader Desi Arnaz had wed. DeDe, in California, received the news from the same coast-to-coast broadcast. A knot of boisterous fans waited outside the Roxy, greeting the new Arnazes with a clamorous ovation. Desi brought his bride onstage to another chorus of cheers. That night, calls to relatives and friends reassured Desi and Lucy. Everyone seemed ecstatic—with the sole exception of Harriet McCain. Lucy’s maid had never been certain about this Cuban courtier, and when Lucy phoned to ask about the wardrobe, Harriet inquired, “
Who
did we marry?”

It was a shrewder question than she knew. The charmer and devoted lover had many hidden traits that were to emerge in subsequent years. He turned out, for example, to be a possessive and dictatorial male in the much-caricatured Latin tradition. Desi was not as extreme as Fernando Lamas, who refused to see Esther Williams’s children because they were evidence that she had slept with another man. Yet Desi wasted no time staking out his territory and making his demands clear. On the wedding night, for example, he shook Lucy awake because he was thirsty. “I was out of bed and running the tap in the bathroom,” she remembered, “before I woke up sufficiently to wonder why in the hell he didn’t get it himself.” He also refused to let his wife ride in a taxi alone, because it would place her in close proximity to an unknown male. And it was his taste in food that determined what was on the menu (arroz con pollo, picadillo, rice and black beans) and not her meat-and-potatoes preferences. Nevertheless, Lucy warmed to the role of married woman. If marriage called for her to play a supporting role to the star, so be it.

The Roxy engagement ended a week later, and the couple traveled home on the Super Chief to Los Angeles. Desi had arranged for adjoining bedrooms, opening the door between them to fashion a rolling honeymoon suite. Between passionate embraces he sat in a corner mumbling to himself while he strummed a guitar. Lucy wrote about her primal fear at the time: “My God, he’s already tired of me.” In fact, her new husband was simply composing a love song in her honor. When it was completed he serenaded the bride, playing it over and over for the rest of the journey:

When I looked into your eyes
And then you softly said “I do,”
I suddenly realized I had a new world
A world with you
A world where life is worth living
A world that is so new to me
A world of taking and giving
Like God meant the world to be
Where good times will find two to greet
Where hard times will find two to beat
I found my new world with you, darling
When you softly said “I do.”

Back in Los Angeles the Arnazes set up living quarters in Lucy’s apartment, each fully aware that this could be only a temporary arrangement. Each had grown up in a house; both wanted four walls and a patch of earth they could call their own. Lucy had been friends with Jack Oakie since their days on the
Annabel
films. Early one evening the comedian welcomed the couple to his house at Chatsworth in the San Fernando Valley. A local developer had built small ranch houses on five-acre plots surrounded by gently sloping mountains, and Oakie invited them to look around. Within an hour the Arnazes found a spread with a large grove of orange trees and a swimming pool. Negotiations got under way. The asking price was $14,500, to be paid up front. That was more than the Arnazes wanted to advance. There was a brief hesitation, then the developer relented. After all, the prospective buyers were recognizable Hollywood names; perhaps he could use their celebrity to attract others. Lucy and Desi were allowed to make the purchase for a minuscule down payment of $1,500 and a ten-year mortgage.

Friends showered them with presents and congratulatory dinners, topped by a champagne supper at Chasen’s given by Carole Lombard and her new superstar husband, Clark Gable. All that was missing was a name for the Arnaz property. “We had heard of Pickfair, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks’s elegant million-dollar estate, so why shouldn’t we have one?” Desi wrote. “Our place looked like a million to us. We tried Arnaball (no good), Ballarnaz (ugh), Lucy’s Des (no), Desi’s Ball (definitely not), Ludesi (not quite), Desilu—BINGO!” It was the first time he had received top billing over Lucy. She offered no objection; it was part of her role as second fiddle. Besides, they were both thrilled with Thornton Wilder’s judgment. The playwright and novelist was spending some time in town as a screenwriter; he heard of the name for their home and told them “Desilu” sounded like the past participle of a French verb.

F
or a short, delirious time, the bucolic appeal of Desilu helped to divert the newlyweds’ attention from Hollywood reality. The calf and the chickens they’d acquired, the orange grove, the vegetable garden gave the couple a strong sense of well-being. While Lucy was newly beguiled by the land, she remained enthralled with her husband. In
Collier’s
magazine, Kyle Crichton, biographer of the Marx Brothers, noted: “You start interviewing Miss Lucille Ball and then Mr. Desi Arnaz enters and Miss Ball leaves. It is not that she leaves in person, she merely leaves in spirit. Miss Lucille Ball looked at Mr. Desi Arnaz as if he were something that had floated down from above on a cloud.”

Yet the professional situation could not be ignored for much longer. Desi’s accent had slowed his rise in pictures. When RKO got around to offering him a part, it was the dual role of prince and commoner in the hack farce
Four Jacks and a Jill,
ineptly directed by former film editor Jack Hively. Desi labeled it a lesson in “how not to do comedy,” called the director a broken-down bum, threatened him with bodily harm, and predicted box office disaster. His prediction was accurate. Notwithstanding, the studio had no patience for Latin temperament. Desi was next assigned the very minor role of singing stowaway in
Father Takes a Wife,
with Adolphe Menjou and the faded star Gloria Swanson. As a crowning irony, Desi’s version of the song “Perfidia” was dubbed by an operatic tenor. Later, he observed, “I received letters from Latin America, Spain, and especially Cuba, asking me, ‘What the hell were you trying to do with “Perfidia” and where did you pick up that Italian accent?’ ”

Lucy’s career was nearly as uncertain. Rattled by several recent turkeys, RKO hired pollsters to question the public about the studio’s contract players. The results were not good news for Lucille Ball: only 58 percent of those questioned recognized her name, and she and Desi were among forty-five performers who were long shots to become box office draws. Still, she did appear irregularly on Rudy Vallee’s and Edgar Bergen’s radio programs, and that made her exploitable in the short term. Early in 1941 Lucy played Bergen’s love interest in
Look
Who’s Laughing,
a modest hit built around such radio personalities as Fibber McGee and Molly, and Harold Peary, better known to listeners as the Great Gildersleeve. That fall she was assigned to appear as a restaurant owner in a second-rate “oater” called
Valley of the Sun,
starring James Craig as a federal agent.

Desi briefly visited the set in New Mexico before setting off to promote his own film, back on the road with a band—no “Mr. Ball” for him, he indignantly proclaimed. Following the Western fiasco (
Variety
labeled her as “low-voltage marquee strength”), Lucy was told to report for work as the second lead in
Strictly Dynamite.
She declined to play in Betty Grable’s shadow—and immediately went on suspension. “This shows how her career was being handled,” observed a prominent agent. “Her studio wasn’t interested in building her into a long-range star. They were content to make a quick buck on a loan-out, even though it would have been bad for her career.”

As the Arnazes’ marriage approached the one-year mark it became distinguished not by the annealing passion Desi had promised but by the separations he had chosen. Their relationship was largely maintained via telephone. In those days, Lucy said, “We spent a lot of money on the word ‘what.’ When Desi was calling me or I was calling him, the connection was always so bad we couldn’t hear each other. That’s why ‘what’ was so expensive.” A week after their first anniversary Desi and his band were booked into New York. For once he would be in a large city for at least a fortnight. Lucy flew to his side. “I knew he was fooling around with somebody,” she grumbled, “and I couldn’t do anything about it long distance. Also I knew I couldn’t get pregnant over the telephone.” In New York all sexual and professional skirmishes seemed to dissipate in the crisp December air. A friend loaned them his apartment, and one Sunday the Arnazes took over the place, enjoying brunch in bed, kissing and embracing as they listened to a football game. Early in the afternoon a terse announcement put an end to the fun and games: Japanese planes had attacked Pearl Harbor. New York suddenly seemed like alien territory, an arena of bad news. The Arnazes left for their ranch the next morning.

Conscription touched the lives of nearly everyone around Lucy and Desi—at the studio, in the stores, on the street. Lucy miscarried early in her first pregnancy, but there was no point in feeling sorry for themselves; many of their friends and acquaintances had suffered much more painful losses. During a war bond drive in January 1942, Lucy’s pal and mentor, Carole Lombard, perished in a plane crash outside Las Vegas. And all around the Arnazes were reminders of the war: the dispiriting headlines, the lonely wives, the men in uniform getting ready for combat duty overseas. At twenty-five Desi was within draft age; the Selective Service notice was due to arrive any day. He wanted to go on the road to take his mind off the situation—and, Lucy suspected, to prove his masculinity and professional viability. She tried to talk him out of it, but in the spring of 1942 he signed on to the Victory Caravan, effectively removing himself from the Hollywood scene without really leaving it. This group of fund-raisers for army and navy relief included Bob Hope, James Cagney, Mickey Rooney, and Olivia de Havilland; along with some eighteen others, they acted, sang, joked, and gave speeches as they traversed the country in a railroad car. As Robert S. Sennett details in Hollywood Hoopla, the stars of the Caravan “may have been genuinely interested in helping the war effort, but they were flushed out of their private hiding places by necessity. The war had destroyed the foreign market for films, and domestic sales needed tremendous boosting. Glittering premieres with fancy cars and floodlights were disallowed. There was nothing for the stars to do but roll up their sleeves and go to work like everybody else.”

When he was not working like everybody else, Desi went in avid pursuit of anything in skirts, a pastime that provoked comment even among such spirited seducers as Rooney. Word got back to Lucy, who hit the ceiling—and then persuaded herself that Desi was just reflecting the strain and craziness of the war, and his inability to catch on in Hollywood. The best thing to do in the interim was to keep busy. At this moment of great distress an unusual opportunity came her way.

The film was
The Big Street,
based on a Damon Runyon story. Lucy had met Runyon at least twice, once when Walter Winchell introduced them, and again when the creator of Sky Masterson and Nicely-Nicely Johnson came to RKO as a producer. In the previous year Carole Lombard had recommended Lucy for the role of the mean, manipulative nightclub singer, Gloria, in a screen adaptation of Runyon’s short story “Little Pinks.” Runyon remembered the suggestion and sent Lucy a copy of the script.