Ball of Fire (40 page)

Bluhdorn had great powers of persuasion, but these alone would not have won the day. The fact was that Lucy, owner of a paper fortune, was deeply in debt. She had managed to acquire another block of stock and now held 59 percent of Desilu. But those shares, valued at some $6 million, were held by the City National Bank of Beverly Hills. The stock was security for the loan she took out back in 1962 to buy out Desi. In order to get rid of the debt Lucy
had
to sell. And in order to enjoy a whopping profit, she had to sell to Bluhdorn. The clock began to tick down. Lucy cried one last time. Then she said yes.

And just like that, the long climb to the top was over. The years of struggle, the small victories, the big triumphs were in the record books. The minority stockholders agreed to go along with Lucy, and in February 1967, for the price of $17 million, Gulf + Western consumed Desilu. Of that sum, $10 million went to Lucille Ball as the principal stockholder. The day of the transaction, the rich retiree sat up in bed with her breakfast tray. When Lucie entered, Lucy informed her daughter unemotionally, “We sold the studio today,” as if she had just unloaded a burdensome country house. To be sure, she would stay on in some official capacity, but everyone knew this was largely a ceremonial assignment. When she finally met Bluhdorn, all Lucy could say afterward was: “He was charming. He travels fast, talks fast, and acts on impulse. I just hope he stays alive.” (He would survive for another sixteen years, then die as he had lived, in passionate overdrive, succumbing to a heart attack on his private plane at fifty-six, the same age that Lucy was when she sold Desilu.)

Once the sale was official, Lucy was free to put her feet up, relax, travel, do whatever struck her fancy. With a fortune in the bank, very little would have been out of reach. But if she had ever known how to take things easy, she had lost the knack long before the buyout. She peppered her speech with “kiddo,” like some survivor from vaudeville days; went around town in a gray Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce, her head held high like Norma Desmond in
Sunset Boulevard;
stuck notes to herself on the dashboard and steering wheel; bragged about her pets (one watchdog was so dedicated, she told Rex Reed, “I’ve seen her sit for seven hours guarding an avocado seed”). She also clucked about the moral backslide in America. She allowed Gary to show the James Bond thriller
Thunderball
on their home screen. “Well, the blood is spurting, the bullets are flying, the sharks are biting, and then this 007 guy climbs into bed with this dame,” Lucy remembered. “I yelled, ‘Stop the film! What the hell kind of picture is this?’ ” Lucie protested, “Oh Mother, my God—we’ve seen it three times.” At the next private screening Lucy opted for
Blow-Up.
The import had received good reviews—but it did not get one from Lucy, who labeled it “that awful Italian thing.” The only reliable genre was the Western. She acquired one. “And so help me they’re in the fort, see, with the Indians coming through the gate, and I’ll be damned if the girl doesn’t make the sign of the cross, rip her clothes off, and climb on top of this cowboy, and they’re crawling over each other in bed like there’s no tomorrow! Ugh! Everybody’s taking their clothes off but me. You’ll never catch me in the buff, kiddo.”

Where she would be caught was in a film she had wanted to do for years.
Full House,
the true-life account of a widow with eight children who married a widower with ten, had been acquired by Desilu seventeen years before. Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll had adapted the story for the screen, titled it “The Beardsley Story,” and tailored the lead roles for Lucy and Desi. Years later, Lucy vainly attempted to enlist Fred MacMurray as her costar, and when that fell through she approached James Stewart. Still later, Lucy bounced the Pugh-Carroll version and signed Leonard Spigelgass, scenarist of
The Big Street,
for a rewrite. After that she thought of John Wayne, Art Carney, and Jackie Gleason as possible members of the cast. Other actors were considered, other rewrites prepared. Finally, in 1967, Melville Shavelson, writer-director of Bob Hope movies (
Seven
Little Foys, Beau James
) and Mort Lachman, Bob Hope’s head writer, came up with a script that everyone liked. Shavelson agreed to direct Lucy, playing opposite her old costar Henry Fonda. Lucy had a last-minute request: she wanted Desi Jr. and Lucie to be cast as two of the couple’s eighteen offspring. Shavelson refused; the children were wrong for the roles. For a moment Lucy considered arguing with her director—who was paying for this film anyhow? The moment passed. What the hell, Lucie and Desi Jr. were under contract to her for her new TV show,
Here’s Lucy.
She could use them on that program. For all her display of temperament, Lucy was a realist. She knew she was not the “lu” of Desilu anymore; she was just a performer who needed to get laughs. Could she still provoke them on the little screen? The odds were good. But what about the big screen? Was there any heat left in the old Ball of Fire? She was afraid to find out, and more afraid not to.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

“Tough,
very tough”

AFTER
I Love Lucy
went off the air in 1957, Lucille Ball was never again to glow with such intensity—save on one occasion. In
Yours, Mine and Ours,
she played opposite Henry Fonda on the big screen for the first time in twenty-five years. As Helen North, a middle-aged widow with a large family, Lucy develops a crush on Frank Beardsley, a similarly burdened widower. The career naval officer is intrigued with her; his ten children are not. At a crucial moment the youngsters try to sabotage the romance, spiking Mrs. North’s mild drink with heavy doses of vodka, gin, and scotch. At the dinner table she becomes cockeyed drunk, uncoordinated, batting her false eyelashes, spilling food, laughing raucously at the wrong moments.

The scene was not a simple replay of the “Vitameatavegamin” routine. In that episode, as in all of Lucy Ricardo’s classic moments, there was never really anything at stake. The audience knew that no matter how the TV heroine was embarrassed, she would always extricate herself and be forgiven by Desi—even if she had some “’splainin’ ” to do. In
Yours, Mine and Ours
the future of North, Beardsley, and their eighteen children depends on her stability, and her inebriation is nearly fatal to the relationship. Many comedians could do impersonations of sots—indeed, two celebrated performers, Jack Norton and Foster Brooks, rarely played anything else. But as Lucy goes through her pivotal scene, Helen is not merely falling-down funny, she is deeply poignant—at first amused, then bewildered, and finally appalled by her own behavior. To be simultaneously attractive, hilarious, and melancholy is a gift given to few, and Lucy was probably the only actress of her generation who could have played Helen North with such conviction. It was as if she were finally able to shake loose from the past and become a grand dame of American cinema, fit company, at last, for Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford.

Shooting the film had been difficult for Lucy and formidable for Melville Shavelson, who impatiently battled his star’s attempts to control the lighting, the camera work, the tempo of dialogue. Toward the close of filming the director pointedly informed Lucy that it was the first time he ever directed
nineteen
children—a comment that caused her to cry and afterward to cut him dead. Six months later the hostility ended when
Yours, Mine and Ours
was released to extraordinary critical and popular acclaim. In its customary jargon,
Variety
said what other papers expressed more traditionally: “Socko family entertainment. Based on actual characters, the film is marked by uniform excellence. Literate scripting, excellent performances, and superior direction are underscored by top-notch production.” Made for less than $2 million, the movie grossed $25 million in 1968, one-quarter of which went to the female star. Lucy had almost forgotten what raves could do to restore the spirit. She could hardly be blamed for mistaking the dusk for the dawn.

Setting up as president of a smaller operation, Lucille Ball Productions, Lucy installed Gary Morton as vice president and went to work in a space provided by Paramount. The relationship with Paramount did not endure. Bluhdorn’s emblematic phrase was, “Well, what is the bottom line?” and he turned out to be as bad as his word. Within a few months he saw to it that much of Lucy’s old staff was dismissed or phased out. Callers to Desilu’s phone number were greeted by operators chirping, “Paramount Gower.” Perhaps fancifully, Lucy complained that when she called the office and asked for herself she received the answer, “Lucy
who
?”

It was not a question that the public ever put to her. CBS had been running the old
I Love Lucy
shows during the daytime, and when CBS news director Fred Friendly wanted to use the time slot to show a Senate committee hearing on U.S. Vietnam policy, he was overruled. His superiors at the network opted to stay with an
I Love Lucy
rerun instead. “It was not a matter of deciding between two broadcasts,” Friendly was to write in his memoirs, “but a choice between interrupting the morning run of the profit machine—whose admitted function was to purvey six one-minute commercials every half hour—or electing to make the audience privy to an event of overriding importance.” Friendly was advised that “housewives weren’t much interested in Vietnam,” and he resigned over the controversy. He was backed by an unexpected ally: Lucille Ball. The newsman had a legitimate gripe against the network, she said. “They throw in the old
I Love Lucy
s instead of something vital.”

Altruism is always laudable. Nevertheless, the profit-motivated network sensed something Lucy did not: a revolution in popular culture. Even the greatest pictures were revived only after long intervals, or at festivals confined to universities and clubs. Television was different. In the 1960s the business of reruns started in earnest. TV became a repository of popular culture, the storehouse of national memory. From its very beginnings,
I Love Lucy
had been designed as a family show. Thus adults could enjoy a half hour of nostalgia as they watched the old images of Lucy capering on the little screen. The children looked on, introduced to the woman they had only heard about from their parents. Lucille Ball now existed in two time periods, in black-and-white and color, with Desi and without him—television’s first schizoid superstar.

Lucy was grateful for her unique position but wary of becoming an antique in the public mind. She opted to look through the windshield rather than at the rearview mirror.
The Lucy Show
was renamed
Here’s
Lucy,
and it took off without Desi or the Mertzes. With an eye to the ratings, the producers did invite Vivian Vance to appear on one of the early programs, but Lucy pointedly stayed away from references to the original series.
I Love Lucy,
she said, was from “another era,” and Lucille Ball was going to be as relevant as the 11 p.m. news.

She was also going to be totally in charge of her life and art. Accordingly, she bided her time, then abruptly moved her outfit off the Paramount lot—“Eat
that,
Charlie Bluhdorn,” cheered a colleague—and went with Universal, where she had the respect of studio head Lew Wasserman. (She also had the backing of Bernard Weitzman, the former Desilu executive, who had moved to Universal months before.) Universal set her down in a place dubbed “Lucy Lane” with a private dressing room for herself and a public dressing room for tourists to visit. Performers who worked with Lucy during this period saw a newly confident persona—perhaps a little too confident. Booked onto
The
Lucy Show,
Joan Crawford, always a formidable personality, showed up late for a rehearsal. Lucy telephoned her ultimatum: “If you’re not here tomorrow morning at ten on the nose, you’re fired. You get that? Fired!” Next day Joan Crawford came in on time—and promptly regretted it when Lucy made her go through a dance number again and again, faulting her rhythm and tempo. When it was all over, an exhausted Crawford allowed that Lucy could “outbitch” her any day of the week. As a lark Lucy appeared in a minor role on
The Untouchables.
There she tried to tell Robert Stack how to play his part—and would have taken over the program had Stack not politely reminded his boss that he had played Eliot Ness longer than she had played Lucy McGillicuddy, the name of her character on
The Lucy Show.
And then came the Burtons.

In 1970, Welsh superstar Richard Burton and the former child actress Elizabeth Taylor, sometimes referred to by her sobriquet “violet eyes to die for,” were the most famous couple in the world. Eight years before, they had been cast in
Cleopatra.
While filming it, the two began an epic affair that crowded other news from the papers and eventually led to two divorces, Burton’s from the former Sibyl Williams, and Taylor’s from singer Eddie Fisher. The publicity continued as the lovers battled openly, split up, came together again, and then married in 1964. Burton was famous not only for his histrionics but also for his fondness for alcohol, and Taylor for her beauty and her affection for the mirror. Anyone could have predicted the couple would bring trouble with them, but Lucy was hell-bent on having Liz and Dick appear on her program. At that point she was up against the NBC show
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,
and the younger, hipper rival had become a ratings front-runner. Lucy needed some punch, and for that reason she had made peace and rehired Bob Carroll and the recently remarried Madelyn Davis (formerly Madelyn Pugh Martin). The Burtons, never averse to publicity or a big payoff, agreed to appear in the opening show of the 1970–1971 season.

The premise of the show was simple: Burton gets mobbed at his hotel and dodges the fans by donning Sam the Plumber’s overalls. Lucy mistakes him for a real plumber and hires him to take care of the office plumbing. He does the job while reciting Shakespeare. When he leaves, Lucy discovers a large diamond ring in his abandoned overalls. She tries it on, and can’t get it off—just as the press arrives to examine the jewel. Taylor appears and Lucy hides behind a curtain near her, thrusting out her hand as if it were Liz’s.

Filming was hell from day one. Amid all sorts of publicity, Burton had presented his wife with that now-notorious ring. It held a diamond of 69.42 carats, ostentation incarnate. Wherever Elizabeth appeared, the insurance company was sure to follow, and the premiums were gigantic. Richard insisted that if Lucy wanted the Burtons (and, of course, the Ring), she would have to pay not only for the team, but for their jewelry insurance. Lucy agreed.

Perhaps to gall his employer, Burton kept mumbling in rehearsal. Taylor followed suit. “Richard kept throwing away comedy lines in that British ‘drawing room’ way of his,” Lucy claimed. She counted six big laughs he was failing to get, drew his attention to them, and forced him to change his timing and diction. “He didn’t take too kindly to it,” she went on, “but after the filming he came over to me and said, ‘There were eight!’ ” Privately the actor was not so conciliatory. His diaries speak to the situation: “Those who had told us that Lucille Ball was ‘very wearing’ were not exaggerating. . . . She lives entirely on that weekly show which she has been doing and successfully doing for nineteen years. Nineteen solid years of double-takes and pratfalls and desperate upstaging and nervously watching the ‘ratings’ as she does so.”

In
Richard Burton: A Life,
the actor’s sympathetic biographer, Melvyn Bragg, theorizes that the Burton and Ball were programmed for a collision course. Richard “waited for his gift to materialize: if it did not, he was helpless. Lucille Ball worked on her talent like an engineer, forever shaping and restructuring, driving the machine of her shows to performance
whatever.
” Vastly experienced in stage and film, Burton had never been cast in a situation comedy before. He was totally unprepared for the schedule and the pace, and grew more impatient by the hour. His discomfort, writes Bragg, may well have been fueled by guilt. “Why, after all, was he doing it? For exposure? (Did he fear he might need it?) For money? (Surely not. He was very wealthy by now.) For fun? That is most likely. In which case it back-fired badly.” Days of discomfort preceded Burton’s final appraisal of Lucy, written just before shooting wrapped up: “I loathe her today but now I also pity her. After tonight I shall make a point of never seeing her again. . . . She can thank her lucky stars that I am not drinking. There is a chance that I might have killed her.”

Burton found it fascinating to watch Lucy’s reaction to his wife. Lucy sent Elizabeth a dozen roses a week before rehearsals began. Elizabeth returned the compliment by sending Lucy eighteen roses. Lucy replied with a gift of two dozen. The one-upwomanship continued until both dressing rooms looked like flower shops. Burton was amused to find Lucy calling Liz “for the most part Mrs. Burton or Miss Taylor and occasionally Elizabeth but [she] corrects it to the more formal immediately.” (Taylor, whose tendency toward the scatological was kept from the public, returned the favor by referring to Lucy as “Miss Cunt.”) Burton himself was addressed in the third person as His Highness, Mr. Burton, or sometimes Mia. “This is a joke that E. made on the first day when she, E., said that I had become so thin—I am now about 160 lbs—that sleeping with me was like sleeping with Mia Farrow, who is first cousin to a matchstick.”

Actually Burton, appalled as he was by Lucy’s insistence on giving him line readings, acted like a gentleman for most of the week. He complimented Gale Gordon and expressed sympathy for the second banana, Cliff Norton. That comedian was indignant because Gary Morton had tried to cut his salary—the Burtons had consumed too much of the budget, he said. Only once did Burton become irascible, and then he did it privately, advising director Jerry Paris to warn Lucy that if she tried to pull any rank on Elizabeth “she would see, in person, what a Thousand Megaton Hydrogen Bomb does when the warhead is attached and exploded.” The detonation never took place, and for all the little insults Lucy had no reason to regret booking Liz and Dick— “Lucy Meets the Burtons” pulled the highest ratings
Here’s Lucy
ever received.