Ball Lucille - Ball of fire : the tumultuous life and comic art of Lucille Ball

Table of Contents

For Bip

Caritas omnia potest

Acclaim for Stefan Kanfers

BALL OF FIRE

Sprightly, affectionate... lushly detailed.... With a sharp sense of pace, and a storytellers sense of character and drama [Kanfer] weaves a history not just about one brilliantly talented woman, but also about the remarkable and strangely enduring love affair between Lucy and Desi Arnaz, and especially about the raw and unformed medium of television that the two of them did so much to shape and create.

TheWall Street Journal

Liberally sprinkled with interesting tidbits.... What makes Ball ofFire an unexpected pleasureand a rarity among Hollywood biographiesis Kanfers almost novelistic appreciation of how Ball evolved emotionally through her seventy-seven years.... Were projected back into the stars personal world, and its as human as our own.

People

An informative and interpretive biography.... The details recounted here are fascinating.

ChicagoSun-Times

A crisp writing style, an abundance of anecdotes... [and] fresh insights.... A sympathetic but clear-eyed [portrait].

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Captivating.... The final third of the book is pure Hollywood tragedy.

LosAngeles magazine

Ballof Fire is a memorable portrait of its subject in all her gifted weirdness.

TheWashington Post Book World

While paying close mind to the details of an astonishing career, Kanfer also illuminates [its] inner turmoil.... [He] gently conveys how great [Lucy] was and how small she could be.

Daily News

Ballof Fire does convey a vivid sense of [Lucys] fearlessness. Stefan Kanfer has the whole heroic story.

TheNew York Times Book Review

Preface: Why Lucy? Why Now?

LUCILLE BALL made her final exit more than a decade ago. In 2001, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the I Love Lucy debut, cable and network stations ran several documentaries concerned with her life and career. Videotapes of her best films, and almost all of the Lucy episodes, are available. Internet surfers can carom from site to site devoted to Lucille Ball. There is a posthumous autobiography introduced by her daughter. There are numerous authorized and unauthorized accounts of her life; her husband Desi Arnazs candid view of their marriage and intertwined careers; and several volumes about her company, Desilu Productions. Yet despite this wealth of material, the Lucille Ball story is far from complete.

For one thing, almost all personalities suffer a decline in reputation after death. Not Ball. Each year she has grown in significance and popularity. Some of this increase is prompted by the longing for a simpler time, an epoch when television and politics were presented in unsubtle shades of black and white. That desire became more pronounced after the atrocities of September 11, 2001. The sudden vulnerability of the United States sharpened viewers appetite for a secure past, and ILove Lucy reruns earned extraordinarily high ratings on such cable channels as Nickelodeon and TV Land.

But there is more to the phenomenon than nostalgia for the commercial and moral certainties of the Eisenhower era. Lucille Ball was the first woman with major economic power in postwar Hollywood. (Mary Pickford, who rose from star performer to cofounder of United Artists, preceded her in the silent era.) As president of Desilu, Ball took on the new identity of feminist icon. It was a role she abjured; she liked to say she was too busy succeeding to think of joining womens lib. That response hides more than it reveals. She knew her own history very well and, as we will see, was keenly aware that she had spent much of her life showing deference to men. Thus the garment of feminism was uncomfortable, and she refused to wear it.

Still, some part of Lucille Ball was always independent. It was this component that kept her going from a difficult childhood to the day the middle-aged divorce found herself CEO of Hollywoods most important television studio. Here, as with so many challenges in her life and career, she had to change or go under. In this she was rather like Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, who took control of a communications empire upon the death of her husband, Philip. Mrs. Graham had always been in his shadow, and a weaker soul might have collapsed under the pressure, sold the paper, and retired in comfort. Instead, the newly widowed, middle-aged woman forced herself to master the newspaper business. She hired the right editors, learned how to use or delegate authority, and in time became a prominent, respected, and, on occasion, feared publisher. Similarly, Mrs. Arnaz, who had left the biggest financial decisions to Desi, made herself into a powerful, esteemed, and, on occasion, feared personage in a harsh and unforgiving trade. Up to now this aspect of her life has not received enough commentary and analysis.

In addition to the other facets there is Lucille Balls burgeoning reputation as a comic influence. She was funny as a girl, funnier as a young stage actress and as a Hollywood starlet. She was professionally hilarious in films, yet never achieved iconic status until she was reduced in size. As a sixty-foot image on the screen, the actress was only a journeywoman performer; as a sixteen-inch TV image, she turned into a superstar. This paradox has also needed examination.

In tracing the long arc of her life and career, I found that people tended to see Lucille Ball in terms of their own lives, their marriages, and their occupations. A toy collector I spoke with is typical; he views her as a matryoshkaone of those Russian dolls concealing a person inside a person inside a person, and so on. I suppose I tend to view her that way, too, envisioning Lucille Ball as a woman who was a novelist manqu. She was the subject of her own unwritten book. It featured a central character who began in an orderly fashion and then ran away with the story, as colorful personalities frequently do in defiance of those who invent them. In this nonfiction novel, the protagonist starts as one kind of individual and grows, in and on stages, to end as a pantheon figure and an enduring influencea status she never envisioned. It is the object of this book to tell her extraordinary story, begun in 1911 and, to use the Hollywood phrase, still in development after all these years.

Introduction

EVEN BY Beltway standards the entire weekend had been bizarre. The six winners of the 1986 Kennedy Center Awards were treated to brunch at the Jockey Club, where their aggressively genial host was John Coleman, owner of the Ritz-Carlton. That hotel was about to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. At a more formal occasion the six honorees were saluted by a beaming secretary of state. George Schultz made no mention of the just-unearthed Washington scandalU.S. arms for Iran had been illegally diverted to the contras in Nicaragua. In November, in response to journalistic and popular outcry, President Ronald Reagans national security adviser, Admiral John M. Poindexter, had resigned, and Poindexters aide, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, had been fired. Now, in the second week of December, aftershocks still reverberated along the Potomac.