After he received it from the hands of Ingrid Bergman, James Baskette carried his statuette everywhere he went, in a black velvet bag that his wife made. At night he stood it on his bedroom mantelpiece with a tiny spotlight shining on it.
He was slated to play “De Lawd” in a Broadway revival of Green Pastures when he was taken critically ill. As he lay dying, his eyes returned time and again to Oscar. “No colored man ever got one before,” he said, “and I’m grateful, Lord.”
Nine
Our town worships success, the bitch goddess whose smile hides a taste for blood. She has a habit, before she destroys her worshipers, of turning them into spitting images of herself. She has an army of beauties in attendance at her shrine.
Not many survive the encounter with success. Wreathed in smiles, she kills them in cars, like Jimmy Dean; or with torment, like Marilyn Monroe; or with illness, like Jean Harlow. She turns them into drunkards, liars, or cheats who are as dishonest in business as in love. This is the story of four women and what success did to them.
One of them who escaped in a single piece is Lucille Ball. She grabbed the prizes of talent, fame, and money, and Lucy is only slightly battered as a consequence. She even survived after she gave Desi Arnaz, with whom she was madly in love, the shock of his life by divorcing him.
Lucille had the sense to quit as TV’s “Lucy” when she sat on top of the world. That show had an audience rating so high that America took time out for half an hour every Tuesday evening to look at that little black box. I remember that the 1952 inauguration party that Colonel Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune gave in Washington came to a temporary halt while everybody had to watch in silence. Lucy’s baby was being born on the program that night and Bertie wanted to see.
But the time came when Lucy told Desi: “I won’t do any more. The writers have run out of ideas, and I’m dead tired.” They sold out the series to CBS for reruns and on the proceeds bought the two RKO studios for $6,150,000. These studios had a certain sentimental appeal on top of their commercial value. Lucy and Desi first met at RKO in 1940 when they were filming Too Many Girls, a prophetic title. The former Earl Carroll chorus girl and the ex-bongo drummer from Cuba proceeded to spread themselves over a whole pile of enterprises that included a Palm Springs hotel, a golf course, and a $12,000,000 production contract for Westinghouse.
Desi took to putting a few drinks under his belt as a diet, and the fireworks started. They split up two or three times, but Lucy always forgave him and took him back. To save the marriage, as she hoped, she set up a trip to Europe for them both. “We’ll take the children along, too,” she said.