I begged her not to. “If you’d just try it alone, the two of you,” I said. “Little Desi and Lucie are too young to enjoy a trip like that.”
But Lucy can be stubborn. “I won’t go without them,” she said. So she took a maid along to look after them. For the voyage, which she hoped would be a second honeymoon, she bought clothes by the trunkload; big picture hats that she never put on her head; a magnificent full-length sable coat. “But it’s May now, and you’ll be running into summer over there,” I said.
“I’ve bought it and I’m going to take it,” she said. “Besides, Desi hasn’t seen it.”
They sailed aboard the Liberté. “We are having a wonderful crossing—so far—weather perfect,” she wrote me. “Food divine—too divine. Eating ourselves out of shape. Everyone loves our kids—that makes us happy. They have even forgiven us our forty pieces of baggage and two trunks.”
Just how wonderful the trip was I heard when she got back, scarcely speaking to Desi. He had been weary, resenting the presence of their children, though he’s a loving father. He and Lucy collided head on in one quarrel after another. “What did he think about the sable coat?” I asked.
“Never saw it,” she said. “I used it on the ship as a blanket for the kids.”
The following Christmas, when the Westinghouse contract had three more months to run, she asked me to appear on a TV show on which she was making her bow as director; it included a dozen or more players she had been training in her school. Desi was just back from a solo trip to Europe, shooting a picture there.
On the set, Vivian Vance and Bill Frawley, veterans of happier “I Love Lucy” days, wanted to take cover along with me to shelter from the storms between Lucy and Desi. It was dreadful. “You can’t insult him before the entire company,” I warned her in her dressing room. “You’re partly responsible for this show, too, you know.”
It seemed we were doomed to have a flop on our hands. As director, Lucy was lost without a compass, too mad to see straight, and the show was going to pieces. In dress rehearsal Desi said mildly: “Lucy, dear, will you let me see if I can pull this thing together for you?”
“Okay, try it!” she snapped.