instigation, the callers did everything they could to break him up. “He shut his eyes as tightly as he could, trying to pretend we weren’t there, but it didn’t work. He bit his lip so hard it turned purple. He finally gave in, alternating screams of laughter with screams of pain. The nurse came running in like a sketch nurse in a vaudeville scene, and threw us all out on the spot. As I was leaving, Frank looked at me with the purplest face I’ve ever seen and said, ‘I never knew my eyelids were connected to my asshole.’ ”
By mid-1939 Lucille was forced to acknowledge what everyone else already knew: Ginger Rogers had risen to become RKO’s A-picture star, and Lucille Ball had fallen into the category of B-picture comedienne, a rut from which there seemed no exit. Given these conditions, she considered other career opportunities. Nostalgic for the energy that came across the footlights from a live audience, Lucille thought about doing a legitimate play or working in the dying medium of vaudeville and the immensely vigorous one of radio. “In pictures,” she noted, “by the time they get around to the close-up, the comedy is gone.” She heard that the Jack Haley and Phil Baker radio programs, both top-rated shows, were looking for actresses, and she auditioned for and won both jobs. She made the most of them. After one successful show
Variety
commented: “[Lucille Ball’s] material was only so-so, but her timing and knock ’em dead emphasis on the tags italicized the humor. Her withering style of always belittlin’ was particularly well suited to go with Baker’s fooling.”
This emphasis on humor came to overshadow every assignment and audition, no matter how serious the intent. During the season she was establishing herself as a foil, Lucille (like almost every other Hollywood actress under thirty not actively employed in a brothel) was asked to test for David O. Selznik. The producer was on a widely publicized search for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in his muchballyhooed production of
Gone With the Wind.
Lucille suspected that she was wrong for the role, but no performer ever refused a command from Mr. Selznick. And besides, stranger things had happened in Hollywood. Mindful that this could be a lifetime opportunity, Lucille bought a new outfit reminiscent of the Old South, complete with flower-printed wide skirt and matching broad-brimmed hat. Her plan was to approach the Selznik studio in a big convertible, passing through the gate like a superstar. En route an unpredicted downpour soaked Culver City. The convertible failed to convert, and by the time Lucille reached her destination she and the dress were waterlogged.
A sympathetic secretary told her that Selznik was running behind schedule. That gave the actress a chance to dry out in the boss’s office. “She took a decanter of brandy off his desk and offered me a glass,” Lucille remembered. “I was shaking so much and so chilled that I took it and downed it in one gulp. She offered me another, and I downed that, too. By the time Selznik came in, I was smashed.” He smiled reassurance and asked her to do the scene she had prepared. “I read Scarlett’s speech to Ashley, the one where they don’t see Rhett on the sofa, looking like I went over Niagara Falls in a barrel.” When she finished, the producer offered congratulations on her ingenuity; it was very daring to make such a choice. “I didn’t know what he was talking about. Selznik said, ‘To do the scene on your knees like that!’ I was kneeling the whole time, and never even knew it.”
While she strove for name recognition, Lucille kept earnest suitors at bay. As she saw it, her career progress had been slow enough without the encumbrance of marriage. When Alexander Hall came along, he provided an easy choice for a long-term, emotionally uninvolving liaison. Hall, a director best known for guiding Shirley Temple in
Little
Miss Marker,
had already been divorced twice
By mid-1939 Lucille was forced to acknowledge what everyone else already knew: Ginger Rogers had risen to become RKO’s A-picture star, and Lucille Ball had fallen into the category of B-picture comedienne, a rut from which there seemed no exit. Given these conditions, she considered other career opportunities. Nostalgic for the energy that came across the footlights from a live audience, Lucille thought about doing a legitimate play or working in the dying medium of vaudeville and the immensely vigorous one of radio. “In pictures,” she noted, “by the time they get around to the close-up, the comedy is gone.” She heard that the Jack Haley and Phil Baker radio programs, both top-rated shows, were looking for actresses, and she auditioned for and won both jobs. She made the most of them. After one successful show
Variety
commented: “[Lucille Ball’s] material was only so-so, but her timing and knock ’em dead emphasis on the tags italicized the humor. Her withering style of always belittlin’ was particularly well suited to go with Baker’s fooling.”
This emphasis on humor came to overshadow every assignment and audition, no matter how serious the intent. During the season she was establishing herself as a foil, Lucille (like almost every other Hollywood actress under thirty not actively employed in a brothel) was asked to test for David O. Selznik. The producer was on a widely publicized search for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in his muchballyhooed production of
Gone With the Wind.
Lucille suspected that she was wrong for the role, but no performer ever refused a command from Mr. Selznick. And besides, stranger things had happened in Hollywood. Mindful that this could be a lifetime opportunity, Lucille bought a new outfit reminiscent of the Old South, complete with flower-printed wide skirt and matching broad-brimmed hat. Her plan was to approach the Selznik studio in a big convertible, passing through the gate like a superstar. En route an unpredicted downpour soaked Culver City. The convertible failed to convert, and by the time Lucille reached her destination she and the dress were waterlogged.
A sympathetic secretary told her that Selznik was running behind schedule. That gave the actress a chance to dry out in the boss’s office. “She took a decanter of brandy off his desk and offered me a glass,” Lucille remembered. “I was shaking so much and so chilled that I took it and downed it in one gulp. She offered me another, and I downed that, too. By the time Selznik came in, I was smashed.” He smiled reassurance and asked her to do the scene she had prepared. “I read Scarlett’s speech to Ashley, the one where they don’t see Rhett on the sofa, looking like I went over Niagara Falls in a barrel.” When she finished, the producer offered congratulations on her ingenuity; it was very daring to make such a choice. “I didn’t know what he was talking about. Selznik said, ‘To do the scene on your knees like that!’ I was kneeling the whole time, and never even knew it.”
While she strove for name recognition, Lucille kept earnest suitors at bay. As she saw it, her career progress had been slow enough without the encumbrance of marriage. When Alexander Hall came along, he provided an easy choice for a long-term, emotionally uninvolving liaison. Hall, a director best known for guiding Shirley Temple in
Little
Miss Marker,
had already been divorced twice
Similar Books
