Dreamers and Deceivers (20 page)

Of course, whenever Lucy called, which was frequently as his health declined, he picked up the phone. On their last wedding anniversary Desi sent her flowers, as he had done every year since their divorce.

Lucy, never one to play by the rules, was determined to see him. But, just as she had been warned, he wouldn’t let her into the bedroom. For a while, Lucy yelled at him through the door, but finally, after much insisting and complaining and refusing to leave, Desi relented. She stayed by his side talking to him for hours.

Lucy had come to gain a whole new appreciation for her ex-husband and the dream they had shared together. Speaking to ABC’s Barbara Walters in a voice that had deepened considerably over the years due to her smoking, Lucy had lamented. “We built up a lot of things. But while we were building, they would not believe that
he
was doing the building. He was doing the successful building of a very well-run empire.”

Returning to the car, Lucy was visibly shaken. As she had told Walters, “We certainly did have everything. Worked very hard to get it. Two beautiful children. What else could you ask for? And I think if Desi were here, he would agree that it was . . .” Her voice trailed off. Desi wasn’t there. Gambling, womanizing, and drinking had ruined him.

Now in her car, Lucy broke down, telling her friend, “That was the one love. . . .”

Desi Arnaz Residence

Del Mar, California

November 1986

Desi knew he didn’t have much time left. But he was determined to write one last script before he died. It was to be a tribute, a short one, and its subject was the love of his life. He had married again—his new wife looking strikingly like Lucy. But it was still always Lucy first. Now, as he lay in his home, nearly broke from gambling debts, and succumbing to an illness attributed to a lifetime of smoking, he thought of her again.

“Nurse,” he called from his deathbed, “I need a pen and paper.”

“But Mr. Arnaz,” said the nurse as she walked into his bedroom, “you are too weak to write.”

“I’ll talk,” said Desi. “You write.”

When his nurse returned, Desi lay silent for several minutes. He thought of the first time he’d seen Lucy, with her fake black eye and bedraggled clothes, on the set of
Too Many Girls.
He thought of all the classics Desilu had produced over the years:
Star Trek, The Danny Thomas Show, The Andy Griffith Show, The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible, Hogan’s Heroes, That Girl, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Gomer Pyle, I Spy,
and
My Three Sons
.

But, before long, his mind turned to his failures. As if the title of their first movie had been an omen, there had indeed been “too many girls.” There had been too much drinking as well. He had been careless with money. He had been hurtful to his family. And his recklessness had not just cost him a media empire; it had cost him a marriage.

Desi regretted that he would be leaving his children a home he had mortgaged to pay for his drinking and gambling debts. But his biggest regret of all was losing Lucy.

She was to be honored the following month at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. President Reagan would be there with the First Lady. So would a slew of television legends—some of whom Desilu’s Productions had made into stars.

The original plan for the ceremony had been for Desi to be a guest speaker. The show’s producers knew the ratings bonanza he would
bring. It would have been a very public, emotional reunion between two Hollywood legends. But Desi now understood he would never make it to Washington, even though he wanted to be there for Lucy. He felt like he was failing her—again.

Instead, Desi sent a message to be read at the Kennedy Center by Robert Stack, an actor who became famous playing Eliot Ness on Desilu’s
The Untouchables
. Stack was a close friend and a kind man, but for the ceremony, as in Lucy’s life, there was no good substitute for Desi Arnaz.

The question for Desi was what to say in a message that would likely be delivered after his death. He wanted to say “I’m sorry.” He wanted to say “I wish I could go back and do a thousand things differently.” He wanted to say that he wouldn’t drink, he wouldn’t cheat, and he wouldn’t let anything or anyone come between him and the shy actress with the big smile and the bright red hair.

But he knew he couldn’t write those words. He wasn’t going to make this a speech about him—about his failings and his regrets. The ceremony at the Kennedy Center was about Lucy. And his message would be as well.

“I love Lucy,” he said to the nurse, pausing just long enough for her to wonder whether Desi was making a declaration or dictating the beginning of the first sentence of his speech. “
I Love Lucy
had just one mission: to make people laugh.”

As Desi spoke, the nurse wrote.

“Lucy gave it a rare quality,” Desi continued. “She could perform the wildest, even the messiest physical comedy without losing her feminine appeal.”

Desi paused. He had been bewitched by her feminine appeal for the past forty-six years.

“The
New York Times
asked me to divide the credit for success between the writers, the directors, and the cast,” said Desi, still dictating. “I told them, ‘Give Lucy ninety percent of the credit—divide the other ten percent among the rest of us.’ ” A tear came to his eye as he struggled to find the strength to say “Lucy . . . was . . . the show.”

As selfless and generous as his words were, they weren’t the whole truth. But precision wasn’t his goal. This was a love letter. And he knew just how to end it.

“P.S.,” he said, as tears trickled down his cheeks and memories of better days flooded his thoughts, “
I Love Lucy
was never just a title.”

EPILOGUE

New York City

September 20, 2012

Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference in New York, CBS Television president Leslie Moonves reflected back on the all but unbelievable success of one of its most beloved sitcoms. He stunned reporters by noting that even now, six decades after the show first aired, the Arnaz-Ball production was still a cash cow for the network.

By 2012, CBS, which had repurchased rights to
I Love Lucy
in 1994, was receiving $20 million a year in syndication revenue from the show. The sitcom was still being aired in seventy-seven countries around the world.

Desi Arnaz’s unorthodox decision to take ownership of his show not only netted Desilu Productions millions of dollars, it also set a precedent for the generations of comedians who’d follow. Taking a page from Arnaz,
Seinfeld
co-creators Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, for example, received around $400 million in syndication fees. And every major sitcom since
I Love Lucy
has seen new life in reruns—all thanks to the genius of Desi Arnaz, the inventor of the rerun.

In life, he “bestrode the flickering world of television like a colossus,” the
Los Angeles Times
recalled in his obituary. But today—in a world of syndication, iTunes, and Netflix—the legacy of the rerun’s inventor is bigger than ever. “It’s well to remember that every evening we spend watching television,” said the
Times
, “we are exposed to his influence.”

Boston, Massachusetts

August 23, 1927

12:20
A.M.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti entered the execution room calmly, though fear threatened to overwhelm him. His face was pale and drawn, a result of his six-year imprisonment.

Stemming back to colonial days, Massachusetts had been one of the first states to carry out executions. Hangings had once been common, but, since 1900, the electric chair had been the commonwealth’s primary means of judgment.

Five minutes earlier, Vanzetti had heard his lifelong friend Nicola Sacco scream “Long live anarchy!” as the prison guards strapped him to the electric chair. Then the lights flickered, the machine whirred, and his friend’s screams abruptly stopped.

Now it was Vanzetti’s turn.

Having refused the chaplain’s offer of a prayer and last rites, he walked up the steps to the chair and sat down. He watched as the guards tightened the leather straps around his ankles and wrists and
applied metal electrodes all over his body. Then, addressing his executioners, he said, “I wish to tell you that I am innocent, and that I never committed any crime but sometimes some sin. I am innocent of all crime, not only of this, but all.

“I am an innocent man.”

He looked at the executioner and gave a solemn nod. It was time.

Boston, Massachusetts

August 23, 1927

6:30
A.M.

Boston was a city that prided itself on tradition, yet reveled in the rebellion of the Boston Tea Party, the Boston Massacre, and the midnight ride of Paul Revere. It was a city of privilege for America’s first families, known as the Boston Brahmins, and a vibrant hub for tens of thousands of Irish and Italian immigrants who had fled despair and famine on the other side of the Atlantic. But, in the past few years, this once harmonious melting pot had become a cauldron of racial tension and anti-immigrant animosity.

At the center of the fray were two young Italians who had been convicted of armed robbery and murder. Their appeals had been going on for six years.

Their prosecutors claimed they were terrorists. Their defenders claimed they were scapegoats.

Their names were Sacco and Vanzetti.

•  •  •

The man with an oversize head, strong Roman nose, and fair skin without a trace of facial hair strolled up Beacon Hill at sunrise and reflected on what had brought him to this crossroads of American history. Far from his normally youthful, boyish look, Upton Sinclair now had dark circles beneath his eyes, the result of marching all night with more than twenty-five thousand Italian-Americans and other protesters who had flocked to Boston over the news that Sacco and Vanzetti were about to be executed.

The so-called trial of the century in Boston had captured the imagination of the American public. During the trial and the appeals process, protesters gathered in picket lines outside the courthouse. “If these men are executed, justice is dead in Massachusetts,” one of their signs read. The plight of the two Italian anarchists had become a cause célèbre for many fellow intellectuals, socialists, and artists, from George Bernard Shaw and Albert Einstein to John Dos Passos and H. G. Wells.

Upton Sinclair was determined to outdo all of them. Never short on hyperbole, he dubbed the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti “the most shocking crime that has been committed in American history since the assassination of Lincoln.”

He was angry, and, as America’s foremost muckraking journalist, he was in a position to do something about it by writing the definitive account of their railroading due to political bias and anti-immigrant prejudice.

These anarchists, Sinclair believed, could be the face of the new American Revolution, one that would usher in a new era of socialism. While some saw anarchism as the antithesis of the top-down government control under socialism, Sinclair and other socialists around the world saw in Sacco and Vanzetti all the evidence they needed to prove the evilness and injustice of the capitalist system. “To the workers of the whole world,” Sinclair told his friends, “it is a warning to get organized and check the bloodlust of capitalism.”

But Sinclair thought some good might still come from the tragedy. In the two decades since the publication of his bestselling book,
The Jungle,
he had suffered a number of setbacks. He had been involved in various extramarital romances, survived a divorce from his wife, flirted with increasingly radical politics, and had built a utopian community in upstate New York called Helicon Hall. But he still had his pen and his zeal for justice. And he knew that was all he needed.

“What an ironic twist of fate,” Sinclair muttered to himself, “that these Italian seekers of liberty should have been convicted within sight of Plymouth Rock, and killed on ground over which Paul Revere had ridden.”

Now it was his personal mission to make sure their deaths were not
in vain. He had come to Boston sensing an opportunity to plunge a dagger into the heart of the miserable country he believed America had become—and that’s exactly what he intended to do.

26 Years Earlier

Leek Island

Ontario, Canada

June 30, 1901

“Uppie, sit down,” Meta Sinclair implored, sunlight shining through the window on her long dark hair. The tone of his wife’s voice was unmistakably grave, but her soft, gentle manner put young Upton Sinclair at ease.

Meta beckoned Sinclair to the side of the bed. Their home, a rustic cabin on a bend in the St. Lawrence River, was the young couple’s refuge from the world—and from their parents’ disapproval. Meta enjoyed getting lost in the woods; it was one of the few places where she could keep the voices in her head at bay. Upton found it a fine hideaway to do his writing. The words flowed easier when there were no distractions.

“I’m—” She paused, her voice trembling. She tried again. “I’m, pr—” She couldn’t get the word out. She didn’t have to. He knew. She broke down in tears. He couldn’t hold back his tears, either. This was what he had been dreading. Indeed, it was his fear of fathering a child that had led him to tell Meta that they should “live as brother and sister.” That hadn’t lasted long.

The idea of fatherhood had never appealed to Sinclair. His memories of his own father were vague. Time had blotted out much of the unpleasantness of the past. But he could still recall his teenage years living with his father, a penniless liquor and hat salesman, in New York City boardinghouses that reeked of booze and cheap perfume. Even when his dad hit rock bottom he still possessed the airs of the southern aristocracy to which he had been born: the sense of entitlement, the cold arrogance.

Upton couldn’t bear the thought of bringing a child of his own into this world, let alone into the United States. Turn-of-the-century
capitalist America, he believed, was a land of exploitation, brutality, and class warfare. Only when the masses woke up and turned their factory tools into weapons might there be a future fit for raising a child.