Love, Lucy Read online

  The one and only autobiography by Lucille Ball . . . “The #1 Greatest TV Star of All Time”

  —TV Guide

  Love, Lucy is the valentine Lucille Ball left for her fans—a warm, wise, and witty memoir written by Lucy herself. The legendary star of the classic sitcom I Love Lucy was at the pinnacle of her success when she sat down to record the story of her life. No comedienne had made America laugh so hard, no television actress had made the leap from radio and B movies to become one of the world’s best-loved performers. This is her story—in her own words. The story of the ingenue from Jamestown, New York, determined to go to Broadway, destined to make a big splash, bound to marry her Valentino, Desi Arnaz. In her own inimitable style, she tells of their life together—both storybook and turbulent; intimate memories of their children and friends; wonderful backstage anecdotes; the empire they founded; the dissolution of their marriage. And, with a heartfelt happy ending, her enduring marriage to Gary Morton. Here is the lost manuscript that her fans and loved ones will treasure. Here is the laughter. Here is the life. Here’s Lucy . . .

  Love, Lucy

  BY LUCILLE BALL

  Foreword by Lucie Arnaz

  “We watched her, we loved her, now her daughter lets us read about her . . . Lucy fans will find the book fascinating.”

  —Detroit News

  “Her story is one of triumph . . . a winner.”

  —New York Newsday

  “An intensely moving autobiography . . . sparkles with Lucy’s wit and ever present vitality.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Indeed these are, really and truly, Lucille Ball’s memoirs . . . Lucy treats everything matter-of-factly, which seems to be how, in fact, she approached life . . . moving.”

  —New York Daily News

  “A warm, conversational memoir filled with light and laughter . . . Lucille Ball died in 1989, so it’s a shock to hear the gleeful, guileless voice of ‘America’s favorite redhead’ ring out with such vitality in an autobiography.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “It’s like reading a sincere letter from a likeable, ladylike college chum.”

  —USA Today

  “Seven and a half years after her death, Lucy finally tells her story . . . Love, Lucy is an unexpected gift.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Readers will have a Ball . . . Lucy takes a long, hard look at her past and tells her story with the insight and dry wit that endeared her to generations of fans . . . Love, Lucy is a terrific tale, a belated valentine from a great star of stage and screen. Filled with backstage stories and lavishly illustrated, one only wishes that, like Lucy’s immortal sitcoms, it would go on forever.”

  —Flint Journal

  “Lucy’s voice and inimitable timing come through loud and clear . . . Love, Lucy is a must-read for anyone enamored of the Lucy legend.”

  —The Virginian-Pilot

  “We love Lucy—and now her book . . . It is a delightful walk through Lucy’s memories from her childhood in Jamestown, N.Y., to her early years in New York, B movies in Hollywood, life with Desi, and finally life with Gary Morton, her husband for more than 20 years.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “A lively take on a funny star . . . fascinating.”

  —Atlanta Journal & Constitution

  “Breezy, well-written . . . Love, Lucy is packed with interesting anecdotes (did you know Vivian Vance saved Ball from drowning during the filming of a show?), recollections of Hollywood friendships and intimate stories of Ball’s family life. The writing flows so well you can almost hear Lucy’s voice confiding it all.”

  —The Forum

  “Entertaining . . . Lucille Ball’s newly released autobiography, Love, Lucy, is a happy surprise for her fans . . . The most fascinating element of this tome is that it is written in present tense in the early 1960’s.”

  —The Star-Ledger

  “An extremely interesting read . . . It’s a way to discover first hand what was most important to Lucy—like Desi, her mother, her family and kids, the career, her mentor Lela Rogers—and what was not. She was the genuine article. So is this book.”

  —ROBERT OSBORNE,

  The Hollywood Reporter

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 1996 by Desilu, Too L.L.C.

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-66708-8

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover edition / September 1996 Berkley Boulevard mass-market edition / October 1997 Berkley mass-market edition / July 2018

  Cover art: Portrait of Lucille Ball © CBS Photo Archive / Getty Images; I Love Lucy episode 74 (BC image) © CBS Photo Archive / Getty Images

  Cover design by Vikki Chu

  Book design by Casey Hampton

  Version_1

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Premissions

  Photo Insert

  Foreword

  One of my mother’s favorite things to do, when a small group of people were involved in some ordinary conversation, was to wait until one of them left the room and as soon as she returned, blurt out, convincingly, “Here she is now! Why don’tcha tell her to her face?!!” This was always followed by frozen silence, and then she’d howl (with that depth-of-the-sea laugh she had) to see the look on the poor soul’s face, who for one horrible moment thought someone had been saying terrible things about her while she was gone.

  I’m not sure why, but I keep thinking about that now as I sit down to introduce you to this treasure.

  * * *

  I lost my father at five minutes after midnight on December 2, 1986, and my mother at dawn, on April 26, 1989. For my brother, Desi, and me, it has been a difficult and complicated mourning period.

  Normally, I would think, when an adult child loses her first parent, there’s a parent’s spouse there to take over; to handle the technical decisions, to bury and bequeath. My parents were divorced in the late fifties and both were married to others for more than twenty years. My father’s wife, Edie, died of cancer the year before he did, so we were his only heirs. And after my mother’s death, her husband of twenty-seven years, and our stepfather, Gary Morton, learned from her executors that he had been very lovingly and carefully provided for, but that she had placed Desi and me in charge of her estate.

  For any children, tending to an estate is an unwelcome and painful process, no matter when the loss comes. Being the one responsible for making all the important “final” decisions can be a great burden and an instant maturing process all at the same time.

  The organizing alone is overwhelming . . . from ridiculous details like who gets the gr
avy boat to selling the house, to where are you going to put all the stuff you simply aren’t ready to part with, to choosing what kind of service you think your parent would want (without ever having talked with her about it).

  Well, we did it, not once, but twice, within three years, and these were not ordinary parents. An old hat box with a rusted zipper, filled with graying white gloves, without fingertips, which you’d assume was “toss it” material, hardly worthy of the thrift-shop pile, becomes a priceless museum piece when you realize that those gloves were worn by the “Professor” character my mother immortalized on the I Love Lucy show. Every gown or pocketbook, every seemingly trivial possession that happened to be engraved, became instant “memorabilia.” We had to think twice before putting it anywhere.

  My brother, Desi, and I debated the importance of preserving those things, and (considering the frame of mind we were in at the time) the process often turned into hours of discussions about human destiny and the twisted priorities of would-be scavengers, often either reducing us both to tears of longing and numbness, or giving way to hysterical fantasies of building life-size sculptures of Vitameata-vegamin with all the leftover henna rinse. (After watching what happened to the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis estate, I wish we had sold it by the ounce and donated the proceeds to AIDS research!)

  Oddly, in some ways, after all these years, life goes on as if they were still here; simply off somewhere, on location perhaps, and unable to get to a phone. If you go by the daily requests for their services, they’d both be happy to know, I’m sure, that they’re almost busier now than when they were alive! On any given day we field dozens of requests for film clips, memorial awards, memorabilia for charities, documentaries, television specials, movie deals, and countless licenses to merchandise rights . . . which we try to guide gracefully. Unfortunately, some of it translates into bizarre situations that neither Desi nor I enjoy dealing with very much.

  I really hate coming into my office in the morning and finding a full set of tiny bobbing-head dolls on my desk that look like some Hitchcock interpretation of Lucy Ricardo, with makeup by Salvador Dali. It’s a lot to take in before you’ve had your coffee.

  Sometimes you want to get on with your own life and not be forced to spend such enormous amounts of time talking about your deceased parents; to be continually liable for making responsible decisions on their behalf; to have to learn how to listen and decode all of the “shyster-meisters” who spend endless amounts of otherwise useful energy weaving weirder and weirder ways to snag their own personal piece of the “Lucy” legend.

  And so many times you wish they were still here, even if for a few moments, just so you could turn around and ask, “Is this okay? Do you mind if they do this?” But you quickly realize that the voices that once could both calm your fears and drive you so crazy are truly silent forever. Until . . .

  One day, while trying to sort out some of the complicated legalities of running the estates, Desi and I asked our mother’s former attorney, Ed Perlstein, to sift through some of his old file boxes in search of some contracts we needed, and something remarkable happened!

  There, in a dusty box of envelopes and tapes, he uncovered what turned out to be a never-before-published autobiographical work of our mother’s. The package, postmarked 1966 from Betty Hannah Hoffman, Los Altos, California, simply said, LUCY. The manuscript was written in the first person, and seemed to span Mom’s entire life up to 1964.

  I was stunned. When I read it I cried. So many people, including myself, had tried to tell this story, but up until that moment I never knew that my mother had written about her own life. When my brother, Desi, read the manuscript he was overcome with emotions. He said, “I loved it. I loved reading it! There’s wonderful energy that comes through . . . a fire in her belly, as a young kid, a sense of adventure. Like, ‘I wanna make some noise.’ Her connections from past to present . . . I salute her for her ability to think in terms of ‘what did I learn from the past?’ And there’s some great straight-from-the-heart advice. I love the way she wrote about her feelings for Dad. It was very powerful for me to hear about when she first met him. Some people prolong their unhappiness by dramatizing it, which, as Vernon Howard used to tell me, was ‘like expecting applause for having a headache.’ Mom does not do this. Instead of overdramatizing what happened in her life, she seems to be trying to understand what her life is all about, to learn to love in a new way. That’s what I found most endearing about this autobiography—the way she looked at life.”

  I have personally read hundreds of accounts of my mother’s life over the years and thought I knew it all. But there were so many more details in this, especially regarding her earlier memories and what happened during her most formative years that contributed to the kind of woman, actress, and mother she became. I only wished I had had access to all of this priceless information in 1993, when I was making Lucy and Desi: A Home Movie, as it would have saved me a lot of time in research, and would have given me a much deeper understanding of the pain she had to assimilate as a child, and the depth of her struggle to achieve the kind of success she eventually did. Now, along with A Book, our father’s fascinating, fact-filled reminiscence of his life, written in 1976, my brother and I and our children, along with the whole Ball-Arnaz clan, have one of the most remarkable, comprehensive family histories ever documented.

  Another wonderful discovery was that Mrs. Hoffman had taped all her interviews with Mom, so although this is an “as told to” autobiography, unlike some others I have read, I could hear my mother’s voice in the phrasing. Later, when I had the chance to listen to the twenty-some hours of original interviews, I realized that was because, for once in her life, my mother was quoted accurately!

  I, of course, was tempted every now and then while editing to insert the note “See my father’s book for his version of this same story”! But even then it was comforting to remember that there are always two sides to every story, and to take everyone’s account of what happened to them with a grain of salsa!

  So what happened, way back then, that put this book in that box?

  I called Mom’s longtime secretary, Wanda Clark, to see if she had any recollection of having worked on something like this, but Wanda was as shocked as I. The manuscript must have been tucked away shortly before she came to work for Mom.

  I called my Aunt Cleo, who had been producing my mother’s radio shows around that same time, and who, at first, was as puzzled as Wanda had been, but who eventually said, “You know, I do have this memory of your mother talking into a tape recorder a lot.” I called my stepfather, Gary, my mother’s brother, Fred Ball, and longtime family friends like Marcella Rabwin, but no one knew anything about it. So I sent them all copies to help judge the manuscript’s legitimacy and accuracy.

  Even though they had known her longer than almost anyone, each in his or her own way found her autobiography “fascinating,” “intriguing,” and “illuminating,” and marveled at her vivid recollections and the wealth of detail. And every one of them said something like, “Boy, you can really hear her voice in it!”

  Finally, after many weeks of sleuthing, we were able to contact Mrs. Hoffman, now in her seventies and living in northern California, and as we tried to piece together the hows, wheres, and whens, we discovered some of the whys.

  Apparently, in the early 1960s, not long after my mother had married Gary Morton, her dear friend and mentor, the late Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, encouraged her to record her thoughts about her dramatic and challenging life. But, knowing that she was starring in a television series, running a studio, and trying to raise two high-voltage teenagers at the same time, and would probably be unable to complete the task herself, he suggested she work with someone and do an “as told to”-type autobiography. I’m sure he must have convinced her that it would be historical and healing.

  Mrs. Hoffman worked with my mother for about two years, taping and transcribing interview sessions. In addition to these sessions, she traveled to
Mom’s hometown of Jamestown, New York, interviewed her childhood friends, and then gave shape and order to the information.

  Once given Mrs. Hoffman’s name, people in my mother’s circle began to recall the work’s having taken place and remembered it as a difficult process. Aunt Cleo told me of one episode in particular. “I remember Betty used to come to me for help in figuring out ways to loosen your mother up and get her to tell the truth.” I’m sure that one of my mother’s motives for writing this was to set the record straight. Even by 1964, much had been written about her and my father that wasn’t true. But I think in the beginning she was afraid that all Mrs. Hoffman would want to do was dwell on the “D” words (the drinking, the dames, and the divorce), and Mom was deeply concerned about hurting certain people who were still alive, especially my father, whom she still cared for very much. Aunt Cleo remembered that whenever Betty tried to get a more in-depth response, Mom would say, “Hell, if I talk about all that, I’ll lose my General Foods image!” and Betty’s smart retort, “Your ‘General Foods image’ is Jell-O, and I’m not writin’ Jell-O!”

  Betty was right. This ain’t Jell-O. I was riveted. So why write something this good and then not let people read it?

  My stepfather, Gary, remembers my mother’s turning to him in bed one night to say that the book she was doing was upsetting her, that she “just couldn’t finish it right now” because “it might hurt Desi.”

  Robert Osborne of the Hollywood Reporter worked with my mother in the Desilu Workshop and recently told me that he did remember when she was working on the book. He recalls she was uncomfortable with writing an “autobiography” so soon because it made her feel as if the rest of her life wouldn’t seem as important.

  Whatever her reasons, all parties remember that the project was shelved with the understanding that everybody just forget about it, which is apparently what most people did.

  Even in early April 1989, when my husband, Laurence Luckinbill, and I and our three children spent that Easter vacation with Mom and Gary in Palm Springs, she was telling us how she had “finally” agreed to begin work on an “as told to” autobiography for Putnam with her friend, and respected journalist, Bob Thomas. Either she had forgotten about the three-hundred-page “head start” she had lying around somewhere or she figured it would be easier to just start from scratch with someone entirely new. We’ll never know, but I do remember how much she was dreading the April 1 deadline to start working with Bob.