Ball of Fire (46 page)

At day’s end, there came the wistful sentiments that customarily follow such memorials: final thoughts, a stressing of laughter over tears, and, inevitably, the pronouncing of the deceased as the last of her kind. It was, by general agreement, Lucille Ball’s final curtain, finis, fade out, credits on a crawl, the end. No one at the picnic, or outside it, realized that the lights were actually coming up.

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

A Marx
Sister

ON JULY 6, 1989, the Presidential Medal of Freedom was awarded to five Americans. General James H. Doolittle was heralded as “the trailblazer of modern aviation,” and Ambassador George F. Kennan as “a visionary who foresaw the future of Soviet-American relations.” Senator Margaret Chase Smith was “a bold achiever who stood alone against the tide of extremism,” Ambassador Clarence Douglas Dillon, “an unparalleled public servant who shaped American foreign and economic policy.” Among this highly placed group was an unexpected name: Lucille Ball, given the medal posthumously as “The First Lady of Television—one of America’s greatest comediennes.” The citation went on: “her face was seen by more people more often than the face of any human being who ever lived. Who can forget Lucy? She was like everyone’s next-door neighbor, only funnier. Lucille Ball was a national treasure who brought laughter to us all. Love Lucy? Sure. This nation is grateful to her, and we will miss her dearly.”

The following autumn, Jim Brochu published
Lucy in the Afternoon,
a sentimental memoir of his friend’s later years. On February 10, 1991, CBS broadcast a turgid biography,
Lucy & Desi: Before the Laughter.
Starring Frances Fisher as Lucy and Maurice Benard as Desi, the made-for-TV movie received the appraisals it deserved.
People:
“The acting (which consists primarily of vamping and exaggerated facial aerobics) is terrible. And the clumsy set pieces that make up the exposition are strident: Lucy explodes over Desi’s constant philandering; Desi fumes over a career going nowhere. The two scenes where they do comedy together are totally torturous.” Mocking Benard’s put-on Cuban accent, the review concluded: “If ju goan to do something so tacky, at least make it funny. Grade: C−.” Yet Lucy & Desi has a place in history alongside the Medal of Freedom and Brochu’s book. For these three projects marked the beginning of the apotheosis, a phenomenon that was to make Lucille Ball unique in the history of American show business.

After Lucy’s death, widower Gary Morton dated Eva Gabor for a short time; the couple broke up, the actress stated, because he was more dedicated to golf than he was to her. Gabor may have been correct: in 1994 Morton married golf pro Susie McCallister; the marriage lasted until his death from lung cancer in 1999. With Gary out of the family picture, the Arnaz children were exclusively in charge of their mother’s image, and in the early 1990s Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill hosted a CBS program in celebration of
I Love Lucy.
Later she and Desi Jr. would produce and direct
Lucy and Desi: A Home Movie,
with candid footage of the couple made during their years together.

In 1993 the book
Desilu,
by Coyne Steven Sanders and Tom Gilbert, affectionately detailed the history of the studio and its founders. In 1994 Kathleen Brady’s painstakingly researched
Lucille
covered new biographical details of her subject’s life. In 1996 came
Love, Lucy,
Lucille’s autobiography, made from tape recordings pieced together seven years after her death. When
TV Guide
selected the “50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time” in 1996, Lucy was Number One. Two years later
Time
magazine picked the dominant twenty artists and entertainers of the twentieth century, men and women “who enlightened and enlivened us.” There was Lucille Ball again, this time in company with such illustrious achievers as Pablo Picasso, Charlie Chaplin, Martha Graham, Coco Chanel, and Louis Armstrong. As the new century began, the United States Postal Service issued a thirty-four-cent stamp honoring Lucille Ball. In 1999, she and Desi had been featured on a thirty-three-cent stamp celebrating 1950s television. No other civilian had ever been honored twice in so brief a period. Shortly after the new millennium began, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) paid tribute to Lucille Ball by including her in “Finding Lucy,” an entry in its
AmericanMasters
series. In writer-producer Thomas Wagner’s judgment, “Lucy doesn’t date.” He added: “People who saw the show fifty years ago still remember magic moments, the way Lucy and her television family kept us laughing. But our seven-year-old watched a lot of
I Love
Lucy
for the first time when we were making this film and she got it all: the characters, the situation, and she couldn’t stop laughing either. Lucille Ball’s inspired lunacy will outlast almost everything that’s on television today.”

There were poetic tributes as well. Poets Nick Carbó and Denise Duhamel, who are married, each acknowledged the universality of the Lucy image. Carbó, a Filipino-American, describes a cousin:

She showed up on the doorstep of my apartment
in Albuquerque just after the blizzard
of
’85
in a fluffy tan fake-fur coat, an elevated
I Love Lucy
hairdo, and a twelve-year-old son.

Duhamel looks back at the immigrant experience:

Please know that your would-be American girlfriend
Still pines for you, José, somewhere in Nebraska or North Dakota.
She has a slew of kids now and her red dress is in storage.
She cries when she watches reruns of
I Love Lucy.

In the
Journal of Popular Culture,
Louis Phillips remembered Lucy with the poem “A Summer Spent Watching Lucille Ball Perform”:

Philosophers insist
No one laughs at a sunset,
But nothing in my heart is breaking
(Old bones do not heal so fast),
As Lucy mugs & grimaces,
Pro that she is,
Dives into a vat of grapes
With fractured Italian
(substituted on the TV screen).
What is comedy
Philosophers ask,
But grass does not laugh
Nor the trees
Still, I am only human,
Broken hip & all.
In the sunset everything seems funny.

Simultaneously, a blending of comedy and commerce got under way. Jamestown, New York, determined to treat its first daughter with the utmost respect. Drivers entering the town of 36,000 were presented with green road signs honoring Lucille Ball and another celebrity born there, the artist and naturalist Roger Tory Peterson. Lucy received top billing. The signs are there today. The Lucy-Desi Museum, supervised by the Arnaz family, has been set up as a pop shrine. At the lilac-painted installation on Pine Street, presentations take no note of any past unpleasantness; it is as if Dwight D. Eisenhower were still in the White House and Lucy and Ricky Ricardo were still in love and living with their landlords, the inimitable Fred and Ethel Mertz. More than eighty thousand tourists from thirty-six countries have paid homage since the museum was founded in 1996, gawking at costumes, merchandise, correspondence, and family photographs. In 2002, the living-room set from
I Love Lucy
was added. Those who want to take home a souvenir—and that includes almost all who sign the guest book—drop in at the Museum Shop on Third Street. There they can purchase games, shower curtains, dolls, T-shirts, and a vast selection of other Lucy-centered merchandise to show the folks back in their own home-town, a locale that may be in America, Europe, Asia, or Africa— anyplace where
I Love Lucy
has been broadcast.

Each summer, the museum schedules events for Lucille Ball’s loyal fans. In August 2002, for example, there were such activities as a “Vintage Memorabilia Collectors’ Show,” featuring movie posters, comic books, magazines, and a “Memorabilia Auction,” with more than one hundred vintage properties for sale. These were supplemented with the kind of boosterish, small-town events Lucy had sentimentalized in later life—and from which she had fled three generations before. (“Jamestown is only a place to be
from.
To be from
only.
”) Included was a musical tribute to the First Couple of Comedy by the Jamestown Suzuki Strings Students and Middle School and High School orchestras, and a candy-wrapping competition with three-person teams re-creating Lucy’s chocolate-factory routine.

With gratitude and affection for this outpouring of regard, the Arnaz children announced plans to transfer their mother’s remains, and those of their grandmother DeDe Hunt Ball, from Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood hills to a modest, tree-shaded family plot in Jamestown. Lucie also attempted to purchase the home in which Lucy grew up, but she was outbid by one Elaine Thoni of Cooper City, Florida, who apparently bought the place as an investment. “I have a few Lucy curios,” Thoni told
TV Guide,
“but I plan to get more. Before this I was more of an Elvis fan.”

The year 2001 marked the fiftieth anniversary of
I Love Lucy
’s debut. In response there were farcical events (in Jerry Zucker’s film
Rat Race,
for example, Cuba Gooding Jr. gets trapped on a tour bus with more than a dozen Lucille Ball imitators), as well as carefully calculated salutes from TV Land, national cable home to the show’s reruns. Later came Lucie and Desi Jr.’s two-hour documentary. Predictably, the program was freighted with sound bites from enthusiasts and film clips from the best-known episodes, including the Vitameatavegamin drunk scene, the grape-stomping battle, and the pregnancy announcement. Of greater interest was a recollection of Orson Welles, who did a guest shot in the 1950s. During rehearsals he had sat in the wings staring at the star. Asked what he was doing, Welles, enchanted with Lucy’s skills since the 1940s, explained, “I am watching the world’s greatest actress.” In the
Washington Post,
the beguiled TV critic Tom Shales observed: “As the camera zooms in on the two principals for the closing shot, Lucy drops presents that have been piled into her arms and puts those arms around her husband. At any given moment, it is stated on the special, people somewhere in the world are watching an
I Love Lucy
episode, and what they’re watching is more than high jinks, more than slapstick and wacky routines and clowning around. They are peering into a time capsule at another world that tempts and beckons. And they are also getting a look at the operation of that most intricate and delicate of all complex mechanisms, the human heart.”
USA Today
took a second look at the series and concluded: “Ricky symbolized how the world was supposed to run. Lucy was that absurdist factor of modern American humor—the irrational force which cannot be anticipated.”

The anniversary prompted encomia from unexpected sources. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jane Smiley remembered a childhood of reruns that entered her house in the morning: “I associate it with the feeling of being pleasantly not at school. Perhaps I saw the small screen (which did not seem at all small to me, since I was sitting cross-legged right in front of it) as a window through which I could look at what people did ‘at work,’ where my mother was.” The show made her uneasy, because “Lucy never seemed to learn from one episode to the next how not to get into trouble, and since I didn’t understand comedy, I never laughed at the incongruity of the situations.” Still the little girl watched intently, “no doubt because I identified Lucy not only as my mother, but also as myself. Could I really get into that chocolate fix? That wine vat mess? Why not? It was a frightening possibility.” When she got older, however, she “discovered Lucille Ball, Lucy’s better half, a woman of talent and ambition who had been around and knew how to make something of her talents. Lucille Ball—now there was someone to pay attention to. I knew nothing of her personal life, only that her demeanor in real life was utterly different from Lucy’s, and that was enough to say all there is to know about the difference between life and art.”

Historian Dan Wakefield, author of
New York in the Fifties,
asked, “Why is Lucy so loved?” and offered two theories. “Maybe because she was the first good-looking actress to throw her body around with abandon in the cause of comedy; compare her rubbery torso flings to Mae West’s statue-like stance as she shot one-liners from the side of her mouth.” Or “maybe she’s loved so long and well because her problems were as sunny as funny, unlike the darker shades of
The Honeymooners.
” Jackie Gleason’s domestic comedy, Wakefield went on, “gained its faithful following later, when the dark side was more admitted in a world become conscious of its own subconscious.”

National Public Radio correspondent Susan Stamberg took a contrarian view. She found Lucy: “Hilarious, of course. A brilliant comedienne. Physically fearless, slapstick silly. Impeccable timing. A direct descendant of Charlie Chaplin and Harpo Marx. I love her eyelashes and her big bright mouth. I also love Ricky’s theme song. And the neighbors.

“But as for loving
I Love Lucy,
no. Because certain behaviors, funny as they were, were troubling to me, coming of age in the 50s. . . . On television, Lucy was no Good Girl, and I liked her for it—her spirit and her gumption. But I didn’t like what she did to get what she wanted.”

Social critic Susan Sontag thought she knew the reasons for the durability of
I Love Lucy.
The program invited its audience “to observe Desi’s exasperated mutterings or Lucy’s whines with an amused sense of superiority. This sanctioned voyeurism couldn’t help but flatter the viewer it entertained.