That forced the Arnazes to prove that Middle America would buy what they were selling. If we can show you that crowd accepts it, then you must…So, under the aegis of their new company, Desilu Productions (meaning, as Lucille saw it, she and Desi are the saps forking out the entire $20,000 for what amounts to a public audition), the Arnazes now tour what remains of the dying vaudeville theaters, covering the seaboard with pratfalls and puns. Also a bunch of the Midwest. Save the career and the marriage, that’s her thinking. Even the accountant says the tour will bankrupt them.
In this reckless and quip-filled junket, tonight’s performance was stop No. 4. Sixty-plus shows a month. Two a day, six on weekends. The loaded-cello routine. “Cuban Pete/Sally Sweet.” Domestic resentment turned into a somersault or a smile. All of it arguing: I’m white and he’s Latin, but see how you people don’t care? The only thing that transcends race, creed, and color? The happy performance of a difficult marriage. What can top that? (The accountant disagrees.)
Forearms heavy on the counter now, Desi licks his mouth. It’s the look of someone who isn’t used to being pensive. “Buffalo,” he says. “Christ.” He shakes his head. Narrows his eyes. The exaggerated gesture shows his esteem for thinkers and doubters. For the people whose depth, he suspects, replaces the optimism and constancy he takes for granted in himself.
“Look, we’re, er,” Desi says. “We’re bound to…” Maybe narrowed eyes are a kind of blinking red light, a warning that someone’s brain is in over its head.
I’m being cruel; he’s my husband, Lucille thinks.
“You’re right, lover,” she says. “We made the audience feel fine.”
Desi brightens. “Oh?”
The applause from the cheap radio speaker sounds like paper crinkling. “You know, he discovered Doris Day,” Lucille says. After Coney, she’d pined after Hold-on for a few weeks, then hardly ever.
Da-doo-da-dada. Kind of an annoying melody—childish. Lucille knows Les Brown, or at least she did, and Symphony Sid, too, that reefer-smoking hophead, and she knows everybody, and here she is. In Buffalo. Not far from Jamestown.
“Who discovered Doris?” Desi asks, but in a sighing voice.
I’m talking about Les Brown, Lucille would say if she weren’t so tired. Les Brown discovered Doris Day. It’s one A.M. A ceiling fan kneads the muggy air overhead. And thoughts of Hold-on sneak in.
If you are a New Yorker, your dial is set right close to the mighty eighty, WJZ, broadcasting at 770. Or nationwide on the ABC Radio Network.
Lucille looks to the soda jockey. A kid in a nincompoop’s white paper hat who can’t lift his shy eyes to return her gaze. Rubbing the counter, probably his thousandth swipe. Kid’s kept the place open just for us, Lucille thinks. Buffalo stardom, one more pissant triumph. The ceiling fan’s twisting cigarette smoke about its blades in white wisp tassels.
Desi yawns and keeps yawning. “I don’t know, I don’t know…”
A red-winged blackbird lands on the windowsill, barely visible out there in the dark. Lucille, hating birds, looks away.
Sit back and relax in the most fabulous city in the country. From Manhattan. This is! Symphony Sid!
No bird is going to be a bad omen tonight. Lucille slaps the counter, extravagantly casual. “Come on, Dez,” she says, “you old dust mop.”
When she winks, the other eye charmingly squints.
“We knocked ’em dead, Dez. We’ll knock ’em dead tomorrow, too, and we’ll be in Chicago by Memorial Day.”
“There you are!” Desi slaps the counter, too. “That’s the stuff.”
“Gonna be the high pillows. You and me.”
“The plan,” he says. And she says, “The plan.”
Together: “is working.”
Sure, okay. Yet anybody who saw Lucille now would say that principal photography has officially wrapped on her fame and success.
* * *
—
IF YOU WANT to know a person, learn what she keeps herself from remembering.
Images from her cutting-room floor: A steam train taking young Lucille from Michigan to Buffalo after her father’s funeral—that long, traumatic trip, those tears, geese that flashed up beside the rails. She was three and a half years old. Would Daddy be coming back home, too? No, dear—never. And then her aunt opened the kitchen window and a blackbird flew in. It crashed and broke a mirror. The next morning, Lucille’s mom, DeDe, said Lucille would live on her own with her great-grandmother for a while. What sticks in memory is the crashing blackbird—and that small, old-fashioned locomotive, No. 4, clanking, stumbling down from Selston, Michigan. Its screech and its smoke; its wheels and their thrusting forearms; geese flickering in the raw afternoon.
Jamestown, New York, where Lucille was miscast as a normal child, is about seventy miles from Buffalo. The cold and green stage on which she grew up—and from which she cut and ran.
Drop another coin in the slot, see another memory flicker and play.
Lucille Ball, 1918, now living with DeDe’s second husband’s parents. (It’s complicated. DeDe Ball, widowed at twenty-three, had relinquished her two children to her own grandparents, then to her sister, then to Lucille’s step-grandparents, the Petersons.) One day, six- or seven-year-old Lucille was hiding in Mrs. Peterson’s closet. Five unnoticed hours. Lucille transformed that tiny space—mothball smells and candlelight—into a theater. This was Jamestown to her: isolation, self-reliance, a non-home she lived in. And she, tiny, blond, and father-mourning.
Inside that makeshift theater, clothespin dolls were her costars—dolls more real, and charismatic, than kids she knew. You go over here, and you there, now all of you repeat after me. That was the start.
“Lucille, how special you are,” DeDe said, opening the closet door, applauding. “My love!” (DeDe had returned, in a way—visiting occasionally, looking more or less alive.) The mother had the prototype model of the daughter’s quill-feather eyebrows; their noses were almost touching now. “My sweetest.” (DeDe never believed she could be a mother, but really she did love me, Lucille always thought. Time would prove DeDe right.)
Two hours after the closet, DeDe sat next to her second husband and sniffed at Lucille: “Well, look, it’s the half-pint Sarah Bernhardt—or, rather, it very much is not.” Smoke from her bitter nostrils. This, a reaction to her husband’s having clapped enthusiastically. “Watch out everyone, here passes the thespian of Jamestown Elementary.”
DeDe laughed and Lucille’s step-grandfather laughed and this meant Lucille laughed, too, though she didn’t feel like laughing. “Go and play with your little dolls now, kiddo.” And five weeks later, DeDe was gone again….