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Lucy Clippings: 1940's

Luvsbway

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Lucy talked about pretty much being in a fog during this movie in her book.  She was close to a nervous breakdown and this director was not good at all to his actors.  Interesting to see a timely mention about this as well.

 

From Sheila Graham's column 5.19.46

 

5.19.46%20graham.png

Ooooooooooooooh, that was rare, her dissing someone in the industry.  Remember reading where she apologized to him decades later at some Hollywood affair.

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Luvsbway Newbie

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Radio Mirror 1949

 

BY: RICHARD DENNING

 

AFTER twenty weeks of playing "Mr." to Lucille Ball's "Mrs." on My Favorite Husband on CBS, I find that I have a favorite husband of my own. He's my wife's.

 

Now in case that first sentence confuses everyone else as much as it does me, I'll put it this way: I think Desi Amaz, Lucille's real husband, is great. I had never met either of the happy-wacky Arnazes before Lucille and I got together across a microphone and I didn't know what I'd been missing.

 

Until you get acquainted with Lucille and Desi on their own home grounds, you haven't lived. Soon after the show got rolling, Lucille asked me quite casually to bring Evelyn — Evelyn is Evelyn Ankers, my wife — out for a Saturday afternoon at their house.

 

"If Desi feels like cooking," she said tentatively, "you can stay for dinner." Their place is in Northridge — the swell-ranch community about twenty miles north of Hollywood.

 

We were a little late. For one thing, Northridge is one of those places people in Hollywood talk about as just over the hill, and it isn't. It's a lot farther than you think. And for another thing, Evelyn and I slowed down at every fancy ranch gate we saw after we turned onto Devonshire, which is the Amazes' street.

 

We were surprised when we came to a very simple wooden gate where there was no house visible at all, to find that the numbers on the mailbox matched the numbers on the map Lucille had drawn to show us the way. We drove in through a line of orange trees and there was a house — a lot of houses, in fact, low and scattered, somewhat as though they had been thrown there out of an airplane.

 

We rang the bell at the biggest one and Lucille popped it open. "We're sorry to be late ..." I began. "We thought it would be — "

 

"Don't say it," she said, "Everybody says it, and they sound so disappointed. 'Why, we thought you lived in that big place up the road.'

 

"We'll impress you yet," she added with a grin. " 'Desilou' is a lot bigger than it was when we moved in nine years ago. Come on in. Desi will be along in a minute. He's cooking."

 

We came into a room which was so riotous with color that Lucille's flaming hair seemed no longer particularly remarkable. Wallpaper on the walls, with big red flowers. Bright colors on the furniture, green, yellow, more red.

 

"We're going to do it all over," Lucille said, waving a stack of upholstery swatches. "Red carpets, blue upholstering, white curtains."

 

"White?" Evelyn said, and I knew the girls were off.

 

Evelyn and Lucille settled down to their swatches, and I looked around. The big fireplace with a fire all laid for the evening, stacks of clown pictures on the window seat — "Perry Charles did 'em," called out Lucille as I hovered over them — an empty antique picture frame with a scribbled message, "Sorry, we have nothing for this as yet."

 

At the dining end of the room — this big room is one of those living-dining combinations so popular in California ranch houses — I stopped to admire a wonderful old cranberry glass chandelier suspended over the big pine table.

 

Just then the door from the kitchen burst open and in came Desi, in a white apron and a cloud of flour. Indicating that he was glad to meet his wife's "husband," and his wife's husband's wife, Desi climbed out of the apron. There was nothing more to do in the kitchen for now, he said, and he would show us around the place.

 

"Wait," Lucille said suddenly, "I think I ought to warn you — about Desi. He has a hammer and nail complex. If he gets up in the morning with that hammer and nail look in his eye, I'm in trouble. I have to think of something I want built before he gets to the tool shed or anything could happen."

 

Thus warned, we wandered on out into the garden, in the middle of which was a rustic swimming pool, designed by Desi. We met, as we wandered, the Arnazes' family — Captain Dandy, Sir Thomas of Chatsworth, and Pinto the Great, the three cocker spaniels; Hi Ball, the fox terrier, who entertained us by diving into the swimming pool after a ball; Princess Lydia, the cat; Harold and Helen, the pair of friendly humming birds who came to Desilou on their honeymoon at the same time its owners did.

 

"I'm sorry we can't show you the Duchess of Devonshire," regretted Desi. The Duchess, Lucille explained, was their cow. "She was just wonderful, until she fell in love with Desi and tried to climb in our bedroom window. We found her a husband, and took her away."

 

Since our family is fairly small — just Evelyn and me and Deedee (for DianaDenning) our four-year-old daughter — we were impressed, and said so. "What?" said Desi, "no humming birds?"

 

And Lucille, serious for a minute, said "We'd rather have a Diana." A second later, she was off to the bath house, calling over her shoulder to us to get into our bathing suits. We swam, and chased the water ball with Hi for a while, and wound up in the play-room for some cool drinks. Evelyn found one of Desi's Egyptian drums, Desi picked up a Cuban one, and things began to happen.

 

"That's enough pure percussion," Lucille said after a while, and handing me a pair of mysterious looking gourds, she sat down at the piano. We had an orchestra.

 

Desi was magnificent. The drums, guitar, piano — he dazzled us with them all. He even made up a song on the spur of the moment — something about his wife's husband and his wife's husband's wife.

 

It was always like this, with Desi around, Lucille said. On her birthday, for a surprise, she told us, Desi had filled the place with musicians — his whole band — and a chorus of wonderful singers, the Guadalajara boys. There were brand new songs about everybody. And nobody went home.

 

"And he cooks too," sighed Evelyn, I'm afraid a little wistfully. "I suppose he has his faults," Lucille put in quickly. "He never answers a wire or a letter or a phone call unless at the point of a gun."

 

SUDDENLY it was eight o'clock and Desi was calling us to dinner. He stood in the doorway beaming. Back of him, on a table beautifully set with Lucille's best blue and white china and cranberry glass goblets, candles were burning.

 

"Everything ready except Cuban Pete," said Lucille, going to a cupboard. She came back with a colorful little figurine of a Cuban boy, carrying two bulging fruit baskets. "Desi gets Cuban Pete for a centerpiece whenever he gets dinner all by himself," she explained.

 

Dinner, naturally you will say by this time, was sensational. Arroz con Polio, a wonderful chicken and rice thing with saffron, fried green bananas, hot French bread, an avocado salad, and a bottle of authoritative red wine. For dessert, guava jelly and cream cheese with toasted crackers, and black, steaming coffee.

 

We were all in a delicious coma when we collapsed around the roaring wood fire after dinner. Lucille and Evelyn managed a little lazy girl talk, but I was content just to lie back and muse about my good fortune in meeting up with the husband of my wife.

 

I guess most of the girls in the world dream of finding a husband like that. But my radio "wife" got him.

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This article is full of good stuff.  I had always wondered why Desi and Fred battled a rain storm to get a flight to Detroit to see Lucy in Dream Girl.  Also why is her brother coming along on what I thought was just a romantic rendezvous.  Turns out it was her opening in Dream Girl.   

 

I highlighted some other things of note.

 

By DESIREE BALL

 

This portrait is proof enough that Lucille inherited a fair share of her mother's good looks.

Says Lucille Ball to her mother: "You made me what I am today, I hope you're satisfied! " Mother is all of that ... and then some I've been asked, as I suppose nearly every actress's mother is, how Lucille ever got into show business. The answer to that is easy — you find it in our early home life, in the way Lucille was brought up. "If," I tell them, "you'd seen our house in the old days, with play-acting all over the place, day and night, you'd know it would have been a minor miracle if Lucille Ball turned out to be anything but an actress!"

 

Lucille says the same thing. "You made me what I am today," she'll tell me, lifting the words out of one of the old ballads that used to make our little white house in Jamestown, New York, shake in its rafters.

 

We had a good time — a wonderful time. There wasn't a lot of money, and the house certainly wasn't anything like the showplace Lucille lives in now, and Lucille and the other children didn't have lovely clothes and big cars and all the trimmings that they've managed to acquire since they've grown. But we had the best thing in the world, the one that money can't buy, that all the riches in the world won't make up for, if you lack it. We were happy. We had such a good time!

 

My children and I made our home with my parents, in a rambling two-story frame house — the old-fashioned kind with a living room and a parlor, and huge sliding doors in between. We'd come to Jamestown from Wyandotte, Michigan, when Lucille was four, right after her father died and just before her brother, Fred, was bom. Later on, when my sister passed away, her little girl, Cleo, came to join us. With Grandma and Grandpa, we had one of the first requisites for a happy — and noisy — home: lots of people, plenty of children.

 

Almost from the first day we moved to Jamestown we were mixed up in amateur theatricals in one way or another. We were especially proud of the family orchestra which we organized a little later on, when Fred and Cleo were old enough to play. It was the nucleus around which we built our productions. Lucille played the saxophone and drums, Fred played the cello, and little Cleo — she's four years younger than Fred — sawed away on the violin.

 

"And Mother played the piano and Grandpa gnashed his teeth," is the way Lucille always finishes the description of our family circle in those days.

 

Besides her work in the orchestra, Lucille also did specialties during intermission— dances, songs, imitations — in the entrance hall we made believe was a stage. The hall had a staircase that was grand for making dramatic entrances, and the red and green velvet portieres that divided the hall from the parlor were perfect for the curtain.

 

The family parlor wasn't the only scene of our activities, though. In those days I directed school plays in the village — PTA projects, they were. Very often Lucille played the lead.

 

We put everything we had into those plays — including most of our furniture. Father would come home in the evening and find the parlor stripped bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard. The parlor furniture was made of wicker, and it was just right for use in stage settings. We saw no harm in it, but the poor family had to use the living room, supposed to be kept for special occasions. No wonder Grandpa gnashed his teeth!

 

It was in her first operetta (during her freshman year in high school) that Lucille wore the red wig that was her big discovery. She brought the wig home and showed it to the family.

 

"Isn't it beautiful? This is it," she raved, dancing around the dining-room table. And it became as soon as she could wangle it. (Lucille's hair is really a dark brown. I now she doesn't mind my telling, even though her red hair is practically a trademark.)

 

I was working as an assistant buyer in a local department store then, and by the time she was eleven Lucille had assumed the responsibility of looking after the younger children and cooking for the family. She was a good cook, even at that age, although I will admit that nothing ever tasted exactly the same twice. She couldn't seem to resist ad libbing with the ingredients. But we all liked it better that way, so it was just as well.

 

Nowadays, whenever Lucille flies off somewhere to be with her husband, Desi Arnaz, while he's doing personal appearances, she always tries to find an apartment instead of going to a hotel, so she can cook.

 

The only fault I ever found with her cooking in those starting days — if you could call it a fault — were the guests who came to dinner.

 

Lucille also loves to give things away. I'll never forget the time her best pussy-willow brown taffeta dress disappeared. We had a good dressmaker come to the house twice a year to sew for us and that taffeta dress (trimmed around the bottom with beaver fur) was the last word. I hung it in the closet (I thought) waiting for a special occasion. But when the special occasion, a school dance, arrived, Lucille said she didn't feel like going. A strange attitude for her to take, I thought. After a little probing she finally confessed.

 

"I lent the dress to Aggie," she told me. Aggie was a schoolmate.

"Why in the world did you do that?" I demanded.

"She asked for it," was her simple explanation.

 

I sent her after the brown dress, pronto. It turned out, however, that Lucille's "loan" had really been an out- and-out gift. When she tried to get it back, Aggie only cried "Indian giver" and slammed the door in her face. She never did get the dress back, and I refused to get her another party dress that winter. It hurt me terribly to see her go without, but I thought she needed to be taught a lesson.

 

The discipline didn't take too well, I'm afraid. To this day she's generous to a fault. All you have to do is admire something and it's yours. Even if she needs it and uses it all the time. The other day she called me, in a dither. "Mom, I can't find my electric mixer."

 

"You gave it to me," I told her, acting surprised. I wasn't really surprised. I've learned to put "gifts" like that away for safekeeping, knowing she'll need them back.

 

Of course, I'm writing now about the things she parts with when she gets carried away and acts on impulse. Her talent for unusual and surprising gifts is another story.  

 

For example, we're still talking about the wedding she gave not so long ago at the ranch for her brother Fred and his bride, Phyllis Brier, a girl from Jamestown. Lucille had converted her ivy-covered tea house into a wedding chapel, and in one corner she banked white flowers, stocks and gladioli, four feet high all along the wall. She had white altar candles there to shed a glow over the place and rolled out a white carpet for the kids to say their vows on. Afterwards the birds in the trees joined in with the organ music. (Lucille had even thought to bring in an organ.)

 

Another high in gift-giving was the time she opened in "Dream Girl," her hit play, in Detroit. She called me long distance (I was here in Hollywood) and said, "Mom, I want you here for my opening. I've already bought your plane ticket and you've got to come. Don't disappoint me, darling."

 

I assured her that I was packed and had been packed for a week.

 

"Don't let me down. Mom," she insisted.

 

As though all the king's horses could keep me away!

 

Lucille knew very well that I wasn't likely to miss her opening. All that fuss about not disappointing her turned out to be just a smoke screen for the surprise she had up her sleeve When I arrived in Detroit and checked into my hotel, who should be there too but Grace Munson, an old friend from Jamestown. Lucille had asked Grace to come out, so I wouldn't get lonesome in Detroit while she was busy with interviews and rehearsals and such. That was one of the loveliest surprises I have ever received from anyone.

 

Lucille started up a little theater group in Jamestown when she was fifteen. In one of the plays, "Within the Law," she played a tough girl part that made a big hit with the local drama critic. He went overboard in his column.

 

"Lucille Ball is a potential Jeanne Eagels," he wrote. That did it. My heart did nip-ups at the thought of my little girl all alone in New York, naturally. But I wasn't surprised when Lucille came to me and said that she'd like to go to New York to study at the John Murray Anderson Dramatic School.

 

"We'll see," I said, and we began figuring ways and means.

 

It wasn't very long before we made the trip to New York. I saw that she got safely settled in a conservative second-class hotel and briefed her on the perils of life in the Big City. Then I returned to Jamestown.

 

I had the feeling from the beginning that she wasn't doing too well at dramatic school. She was always crying into the phone that she was homesick and wanted to come home. But I kept encouraging her to stick it out. Frankly, I couldn't understand why she wasn't making the grade. She'd shown promise back home and gotten enough recognition to make us think she had what it took to make good.

 

It wasn't until I visited her in New York that I saw what was happening. Lucille, left to her own devices, had fallen into a rut of hamburgers and Cokes, a diet that told on her badly. She was terribly run down. Besides that, she was going through a stage where she thought she was getting too tall (she's five-six) , and no matter how I insisted that she'd be glad someday she was tall, she went in for slouching. That didn't fool anybody about her height and only hid her natural poise.

 

Those things, plus the fact that she couldn't lose her Western twang, got her off to a bad start. At the end of her first year Robert Milton, director of the school, told her, as gently as he could, "Your mother is wasting her money." She took the hint and left.

 

More long-distance calls. "Mom, I'm homesick," she'd cry, and "Keep trying," I'd tell her. We were especially glad she stuck to eading stores evit, the night that Robert Milton called backstage to congratulate her after seeing "Dream Girl," some years later.

 

"I'm the one you told to quit acting, remember?" Lucille let him have it. The director was happy to admit his mistake. But not half as happy as we were, you can be sure.

 

When Lucille landed a chorus job in the third road company of "Rio Rita" it looked as though the tide was beginning to turn for her. But after five weeks of rehearsal — for free — she was out. In those days the performers didn't get paid for rehearsals and it wasn't unheard of for a show to fold up after weeks and weeks of rehearsing without pay. It was terribly hard on the actors. After four such ill-fated attempts to arrive on Broadway, it dawned on her that she could probably get there faster some other way. So she became a model in one of New York's wholesale dress houses.

 

By that time long-distance telephone tolls had gotten me down. I packed up and took the other children to New York so we could all be together. I got a job at Stern's on 42nd Street and we took up where we'd left off in Jamestown.

 

The cloak-and-suit job brought Lucille to the attention of Hattie Carnegie. Soon she went to work in the Carnegie Salon on Fifth Avenue as a model, and shortly after that she became the "Chesterfield Girl" on billboards. Next thing we knew she was "discovered" by Hollywood.

 

Were we ever excited the day Lucille took off for Hollywood! As we said good-bye she promised to send for us as soon as she made good and before long I received a call, long-distance.

 

Lucille was thrilled to pieces. "I've just signed a contract! Columbia Pictures! Come right away!" The words poured out breathlessly.

 

We packed that very night, but before we had a chance to buy the tickets we had further word from Lucille. Columbia Pictures had decided just that moment to dissolve its stock company.

 

Her contract was just a pretty piece of paper. She said, "Come anyway." When we arrived, Lucille was working as an extra.

 

Thank goodness, that was the end of the setbacks. From then on Lucille went right up. RKO. MGM Technicolor musicals. Co-starring with Bob Hope at Paramount. And now her own radio show (and very soon television).

 

Am I proud of Lucille's success? You bet I am. I visit her occasionally at the studios when she's making a picture, and I've only missed one broadcast since the program's been on the air.

 

The show's a lot of fun to watch. Instead of just reading the script, Lucille and the other actors try to make it visual. Sometimes she uses props, like eating real crackers the time the script called for eating crackers in bed and she'll munch on toast or dress up as an old lady and wear a shawl.

 

Sometimes her realism bounces back at her. For example, the time when Liz was supposed to be getting back at George for growing a mustache. Lucille went out and had the make-up people glue a gray mustache and goatee on her face, for laughs. The laugh was on her when she couldn't get them off. She struggled for hours.

 

She thinks that radio sound men know their business and that they contribute a lot to a show. But when it comes to things like kisses, she believes in the real thing. So if the script starts out with a kiss between Lucille and her Favorite Husband, Richard Denning, it's a real kiss that you hear, and not a sound effect!

 

My Favorite Husband has some of the longest rehearsals in radio, simply because Lucille likes to spend half her time clowning for the orchestra and cast. (Shades of Jamestown!)

 

She brings some of her personal life into her radio characterization. When she and Desi were married they made it a rule never to go to bed on a quarrel. You'll notice that neither do Liz and George on the radio.

 

The reason why My Favorite Husband is a successful show, if you want my opinion, is that the people in it are real people. There are no melodramatic situations. She has budget troubles and does foolish things that any woman might do. George is always the stronger (people seem to like that), but in the end she's the one who straightens things out.

 

Lucille made a lot of radio appearances before she got the show, as many movie personalities do. But this is the first time in her career that she's been starred in a series like this. The break wasn't anything she sought. As a matter of fact, it came to her quite by happenstance.

 

Lucille's agent, Don Sharpe, owned the My Favorite Husband idea (package, they call it) . Don needed a good record to play for the radio people and he asked Lucille to cut a record for him, to put the character over. CBS heard the record and liked it. They decided to put it on the air one time, to test the audience reaction. They liked that first try so well they decided to make it a steady thing and it's been on the air now ever since a year ago last July.

 

It's wonderful being the mother of a radio star like Lucille. Most any day you'll find me weeding my garden in Canoga Park, a tiny country town six miles away from where Lucille and Desi have their ranch in Chatsworth.

 

Fred built the house when he started up in the construction business. It was originally supposed to be sold in the usual manner, to whoever showed up first with the necessary down payment. Lucille decided that Fred had put too much of himself into this first venture for it to go to a stranger, so she bought it for me and here I am in Canoga Park, growing radishes, planting trees and square dancing. I'm having the time of my life.

 

Lucille planted most of the trees on her own place herself and wants me to have the fun of watching mine grow, too. Whenever I get impatient I take a run over to her house and look at their home movies. She and Desi have kept a movie record of the ranch from the time they bought it eight years ago.

 

"It's good luck," she says.  Like most people in show business she's superstitious. She was thrilled when she discovered a cricket on the hearth one day. Desi was all for getting rid of the noisy creature but she wouldn't hear of it. "Don't spoil our good luck," she warned.

 

The next thing they knew they were knocking on my door and asking if they could spend the night. All of a sudden their house had turned thick with crickets and they were forced to call in a fumigating crew who sealed the place up while the poor crickets were being purged!

 

That's my favorite radio star for you.

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