LUCY vs TIME

June 22, 1973

The publicity photos, from the movie set of Mame were unrecognizable. Unrecognizable! Why, they were unbelievable. Either somebody had shot them through six layers of soft-focus gauze – or a time machine. 

Who was this frisky redhead hoofer kicking up her heels on the distant reaches of some resplendent soundstage, cannily avoiding a camera close-up?

Who was this svelte eyed lady fluttering from beneath a fringed rug of false lashes, not a wrinkle, sag or bag, not to mention even an expression line, sporting her famous face?

Well, clearly the lady was a star. And as star of Warner Brothers’ new $8 million musical version of Mame, Lucille Ball had veto rights over all still photographs.

The trouble was that obviously nobody had had the nerve to tell her that if she could order reality rubbed out of a picture with a wave of the retoucher’s brush, she couldn’t pull the gauze over the eyes of an interviewer ushered into the Mame set to confront the living flesh, unretouched. 

Time has not been unkind to Lucille Ball. No, beneath a billowing wine velvet and cream satin lounge suit, the svelte one-time chorus-girl’s curves are still obvious. Despite a badly broken right leg from a skiing accident that had left the shooting of Mame stalled and the star in a cast for nearly a year, the shapely former showgirl’s gams had now already carried her through a dozen dance routines up on top of pianos and down banisters that would have taxed a tap-dancer half her age. 

At 61, Lucille Ball could pass for a dozen years younger. But only a dozen years. 

The outrageous, outsize eyelashes now stick like pine spikes out of a swamp of tucks, puckers and bags etched around her shrewd big baby-blues. Her plastic face is a relief map of over-made-up wrinkles, the big bright red Cupid’s-bow mouth lipsticked in a smile outside her own spidery upline. 

But you don’t survive 22 years on TV in the top ratings, get renewed once again this season when all about Bridgets and Bernies and Dean Martins (1) are falling to the network’s chop, practically bear a baby and outlast a broken real-life marriage on the TV tube, take over a foundering corporation and build it into the single most powerful independent TV production house, without it showing in your face. 

One look at Lucille Ball’s face and you don’t doubt it for a minute when Hal, her make-up man for 32 years, says she used to limp on to the Mame set in excruciating pain. Then, the minute the cameras clicked on, burst into a dazzling and seemingly effortless song-and-dance. 

Not that the lady would admit it for a minute. “It was excruciating pain,” she dismisses the subject airily. 

But then these days she’s not admitting much. It was a lesson learned the hard way. One recent fateful February day, over perhaps one too many Pouilly-Fuisses on the rocks, she was admitting so much so freely to the New York Times that the story read like a Hedda Hopper monologue. 

On Desi Arnaz Sr., the Cuban bongo (2) player-bandleader she met and married out of a chorus line in 1940 and divorced 22 years later after a marriage that was even stormier off -screen than on: “He drank too much and he couldn’t stand success.”

On Desi Arnaz Jr., their 20-year-old son and his much-publicized romance with actress Patty Duke: “I had my doubts if the baby was Desi’s at all. I said to him, "You feel responsible? Boy, you’re all of 16 ½ years old and you want to spend the rest of your life with this neurotic person?’" 

On Liza Minnelli, then Desi’s current fiancée: "They took her for over a million and a quarter more than her mother’s debt. Just for beginners…" 

One mention of the story now is enough to send sparks flying. "Why, that man should be…” she sputters over the reporter, “…spanked!" 

It’s a first burst of spontaneity from a lady who, once burned, is now so careful that she sounds at times as if he’s dictating to the Library of Congress. 

"I never thought I’d get this far, do so much, have such beautiful children,” she says, chain-smoking in her dressing-room, all the wide-eyed telephone lineman’s daughter from upstate New York. She knocks on wood. 

“All I ever wanted was to get to vaudeville and I never made it." 

When she hit New York to take acting classes at 16, the school sent back her mother’s money, saying. "No talent.” And now, refund in hand, 81-year-old DeeDee Ball, as the whole family calls her, sits in a front-row seat for every “Here’s Lucy” show, just as she has done non-stop for the last 22 years. 

Still it wasn’t till 1951, when the Amazes dreamed up the “I Love Lucy” show, patterned after their own lives, as a way of keeping their marriage together and bandleader Desi home from the road, that success came. 

But when it came, it was she who stole the show. 

By two years later, 68 per cent of TV viewers in America were tuned in to see her show-by-show birth to Desi Arnaz Jr., whose arrival vied with the U.S. presidential election results for front-page space under the headline, “Lucy’s $50 million baby." 

Everybody, it seemed, loved Lucy except perhaps Desi Arnaz. Despite her insistence that "the series was happy there was no fighting. It was the greatest time of my life,” she admits, “the trouble came much later. Only the last five years were hard." 

Which means that the greatest time of her life lasted only a scant six years. When their marriage broke up officially in 1962 (3), friends introduced her to a stand-up comic named Gary Morton, now her producer, vice-president of Lucille Ball Productions, Inc., official show warm-up man and for 11 years now, Mr. Lucille Ball. 

As her daughter Lucie, 22, and still a performer on the show, puts it. "She may be the king of stage 12, but at home she’s queen Gary’s the king!" 

She indulges his passion for golf and a garage full of classic cars, but with the warning: "If he ever looks at another woman, I’ll kill him.”

She says she never makes a business move without him, but when she was left to head up the giant Desilu Corporation after her marriage break-up, it was she who was known as the woman shrewd enough to snap up “Mannix”, “Mission Impossible” and “Star Trek” when they were apparently doomed pilots, a comedienne who was not so comical in the executive suite. 

But as for her much-vaunted business acumen, she is all denials and femininity. 

“Me? No way. Desi did the whole thing. He was a fantastic businessman. I only took it over to build it up and sell it. I mean, there was a certain amount of building up to do." 

When she took it over from Arnaz in 1961, Desilu had lost over $600,000. When she sold it seven years later, for $17 million in Gulf and Western stock, making her the conglomerate’s largest stockholder and, some say, the wealthiest woman in Hollywood, the company had grossed $30-million and made a profit of ever $800,000. 

"But everyone in the know knew I wasn’t tough,” she says. “No, the men I surrounded myself with were." 

Still there a flinty glint behind the false lashes, a shrewd imperious purse to the painted lips, a ring to the wise-cracking whisky voice that’s used to being heard. She moves around the Mame soundstage in queenly command, dispensing Norman Vincent Peal-doms, part star, part super-mother. 

When it comes time for a scene featuring co-star Bea Arthur, she practically takes over directing from Gene Saks, Miss Arthur’s husband. "Now did you tell her what side of the camera to be on?” she asks Saks, who looks like he might explode. “Now honey, toe your mark,” she fusses over Bea, who grows quiet, explaining later: 

“Lucy’s really a dear. But sometimes it can get a little overpowering." 

She doesn’t talk to people without picking lint off their clothes, and straightening their collars, a habit that comes naturally enough to a woman who has her whole retinue, hairdresser, secretary, make-up man and driver of the last two decades – even her little picket-fenced French-provincial dressing-room trailer, with its false shutters and plastic ivy – picked up and transplanted wherever she strays from Lucy Lane where she presides at Universal Studios, year after year.

With her kids, she was, as daughter Lucie says, "Strict – and you want to believe it. We were the only kids we knew who had to work around the house for whatever money we’d get.” Lucie still gets paid only scale for her mother’s show. 

But Desi Jr. wasn’t exactly a natural. “He’d be asleep on the sidelines and I’d be ready to smack him,” Lucy says, “When he said he was interested in serious acting, I said, ‘Oh, really?’ But he got out and worked. He surprised me. He surprised everybody. He even surprised himself." 

Still, for all her talk about the joys of getting away to her Colorado ski lodge where she does "the cooking, the washing, the socks, the things I miss – not to mention the leg breaking – there’s not much chance that Lucille Ball is going to be sitting the next round out, wallowing in domesticity, In the old rocking chair. 

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FOOTNOTES FROM THE FUTURE

(1) “Bridget Loves Bernie” was a 1972 sitcom about a mixed marriage between a Jewish man and a Catholic woman. Like Lucy and Desi, stars Meredith Baxter and David Birney were also married in real life.  Despite excellent ratings (it was the highest-rated new show of the 1972-73 season) the show was cancelled after only one season. The official reason for its cancellation was that it was scheduled between two mega-hits, “All in the Family” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”, and its ratings weren’t strong enough considering its choice position in the line-up.  

Also, that same season, the long-running “The Dean Martin Show” (1965-1974) was cancelled. Lucille Ball had made three appearances on the show, and he also appeared on hers.  

(2) Conga drums, not bongos. It is slightly dismissive to call Desi Arnaz a bongo player. 

(3) The editor makes the error of assuming that Lucy divorced Desi and Married Gary Morton the same year. She divorced Desi in April 1960, and married Gary in November 1961, a year and a half later. 

This article was published in the Leisure section of The Vancouver (BC) Sun on June 22, 1973.  The article was written by Marci McDonald and illustrated by David Annesley.