Desi ignores this as he grins. “Here’s to long shots, Lucille.”
“To long shots, Dez.”
It appears nobody—except maybe a cigarette girl, a couple waiters, and some real estate boobs looking over their shoulders—has seen the shoving match. Lucille is thankful for that, at least; this is a private humiliation. But as an actress, she almost misses the end of the story, the nice working out of the plot.
“Sorry, Hold-on”—the curtain-drop of her voice. “I’m a partner act.”
* * *
—
“FIVE!” TRUMP’S SAYING. And everyone can sense it. The excitement. Every city-dweller crowded out by buildings is looking to see one come down. “Four, three…!” And here is the Pavilion of Fun—everything perfectly gleaming—the evening now purposefully about some lustrous thing.
“Now!”
A nervous moment. Uncertainty. The sound of the ocean. And then, a first brick is daringly thrown. One pane shatters. But now—tck-dsssh!—brick follows brick—tck-dsssh! tck-dsssh! tck-dsssh!—and the Pavilion of Fun spits all its glass.
“That’s it!”
“Throw!”
And Isidore is in a trance, a cat by a rainy window.
“Smash it!”
Hold-on? he thinks. How wonderful! He does not know which movies he has seen Lucille in, but he knows he’s seen her somewhere in black-and-white. Another minute, and I would’ve slugged him, Isidore lies to himself.
Isidore almost has the sense that his touch gave Lucille her color, that he is part of the glamour.
Here’s that (tardy) applause and the kernel-pop of flashbulbs. A fancy building that lacks its windows is a queen standing with her teeth out.
Partygoers’ faces shine bone white, the outlines and differences blurred as the camera immortalizes them as a crowd.
And Isidore waits before deciding what to do.
Okay, he’s got to act now, or it never will happen.
CHAPTER TWO
I THINK MY GRANDFATHER was the person, other than my parents, whom I loved the most. My first memory is playing with a big balloon, that silvery, shining, crinkly helium kind you buy from a street vendor. It was a gift my grandfather had given to me. My dad and I were visiting him and a woman in Manhattan, a woman I didn’t know. She was not my grandmother. My grandmother was alive, then; she lived alone, not far from us in Long Island. But this was someone else—a brassy woman with dyed red hair who held my grandfather’s hand.
NEITHER NEW YORK NOR LOS ANGELES, SUMMER 1950
THE WOMAN IS on the run from forty, but middle age, evidently, has quit the chase.
Thirty-nine years old and she looks good. But does that help?
It does not help, much.
How do you take defeat—the defeat of a life’s ambition? Say you’re a woman who’s kept loyal to a studio, and that studio balled up your career and tossed it in the commode. And it’s a world for men. And say you’ve been around a bit. How, in this world for men, does such a woman crab together a living?
Lucille’s sitting at a drugstore counter in Buffalo, New York, eating a butterscotch ice cream, and she wonders.
How firmly those Coney Island TV execs had recited their expected lines! No, sorry, Mrs. Arnaz, just not for us. Okay then, fellas, but this is not goodbye; I promise we’ll show you….Yes, but pretty or not, she’s aware even now of the lines like tiny shark gills around her eyes.
A radio’s going at the top of its lungs—da-doo-da-dada, Les Brown and His Band of Renown. On Symphony Sid’s nationally broadcast After-Hours Swing Session. Playing Birdland or maybe the Royal Roost. Da-doo-da-dada.
Desi’s at her side, talking. “Tonight went good. Went well.” Dez’s a grammarian when anxious.
“Mmm?”
Lucille’s personal movie, her life film, sure doesn’t seem like a Capra. It seems like a Douglas Sirk, soggy plotline and all.
“Come now, Red,” Desi’s saying. “You don’t think we made everybody feel fine?”
Symphony Sid (she thinks): a particularly New York specimen, one of those Jewish men goofy for Black People Music.
Jewish men.
Hold-on had sauntered up to her again at the end of the Coney Island night—after she’d thought they’d said goodbye. And it had been lovely. On the beach near the city in the rain. That encounter had been just a trifle, however. Just something to make Desi jealous, she thinks, almost convincingly. The man’s strongly coiling black hair—thick, brilliantined. And his nose, its hourglass-shaped bridge. Certainly foreign, stirringly familiar. A Jew, all right. Tall and handsome, if memory could be trusted, and thrilling.
Not because he in any way was unusual; because he wasn’t. Sometimes a woman just needed something different. A nice guy, human and refreshing and normal. But also trickily witty around the eyes. Hold-on looked to her like a man who ruffled life on the head.
And a whole year has rolled by.
Ah, enough inappropriate memory! “Sure, sweetie,” Lucille hears herself say.
“Well, Red, so then our plan might finally work.” Desi swallows. But his smile is a guest who’s forgotten to leave. “Will it?”
Lucille’s face tightens a little.
“Why is ice cream so much better in places like this?” she says, kind of sharply.
“Buffalo.” He nods and narrows his eyes in disbelief. “Buffalo.”
* * *
—
THE PLAN, THE plan, the stupid plan.
Months back, CBS, which hadn’t wanted to sacrifice any of its radio properties, had been interested in repurposing Lucille’s failed My Madcap Bride for TV. Maybe, that was the rumor, anyway. TV, the mongrel new medium. Well—count her in. Even that flickering appliance beats unemployment.
But, of course, a problem. Bride’s husband had been played by Richard Denning (blond hair, Gerber cheeks, middling charisma). Lucille liked Denning. She’d also planned to replace him. Not that Lucille, at that career moment, had much power to issue ultimatums. But working with her husband was the only chance she’d have to dust off her marriage, get it back on its feet. The Arnazes were often apart, frosty, and thwarted. Desi’d cheat to his heart’s content were Lucille to go off and film a show without him. She thought up a scheme, then, to have him at her side all the time. But CBS didn’t think the public could—hell, CBS execs themselves didn’t—accept a redhead married to a Cuban.