Desi was winning no medals as husband, but he shines as a director and producer. In ten minutes he had that Christmas program ticking like a clock. The New Year hadn’t yet come around the corner before Lucy wanted to sue him for divorce, which was something Desi had been convinced she would never do.
“You can’t,” I told her. “You and Desi both signed the Westinghouse contract as partners. If you walk out, they could cancel and sue you.”
She had to listen to the same tune from me every week. She was itching to dump Desi and so desperate to leave Hollywood that she’d have played Uncle Tom’s Cabin if it would take her to Broadway. Instead she took on the next best thing—a musical called Wildcat, on which she staked money and her reputation.
Lucy hasn’t many illusions about herself. “I’m not beautiful, not sexy, and I don’t have a good figure,” she says. She knows she can’t sing and she admits that too many years have flowed under the bridge for her to dance like Cyd Charisse. But for Wildcat she had to sing, dance, and hold the show together. She tried to inject some sparkle by ad-libbing wisecracks à la Lucy. The author, instead of being grateful, was fit to be tied.
After a lot of her cash had vanished and she’d collapsed two or three times on stage, she returned to Hollywood. She licked her wounds and, with Desi down on his ranch breeding horses, earned fresh medals as a businesswoman by helping to put Desilu back on its feet.
In November 1961, I went to the wedding of Lucy and Gary Morton, a young man she met on a blind date while she was playing in Wildcat and he was telling jokes at the Copacabana. He makes her happy, and she told me that he’d be able to spend the summer at home while she started a new television series. No, Gary would not co-star.
* * * * *
Joan Crawford has been a priestess at the shrine of success since she was a hoofer named Lucille Le Sueur. She’s been put to the sacrificial flames more than once, but has always risen like Lazarus and lived to burn another day.
She’s cool, courageous, and thinks like a man. She labors twenty-four hours a day to keep her name in the pupil of the public eye. She’ll time her arrival at a theater seconds before the curtain goes up and make such an entrance that the audience sees only her through act one, scene one. The actors on stage may hate it, but she’s having a ball. If she has a surviving fan club in any city she’s visiting, she’ll carefully supply its president in advance with a complete schedule for the day, detailed to the minute, and collect such crowds that by evening there’ll be a mob hundreds strong escorting her.
She was called box-office poison and couldn’t get a job for years after her Metro contract ended. Out of money, she continued to play the star and hold her head high, and she had the town’s sympathy. Mildred Pierce put her back in pictures and won her an Oscar, as much for bravery under fire as for her acting. The same gutsy quality showed when her husband, Al Steele, died and she took on a job as traveling ambassador for his company, Pepsi-Cola. Just before that, he’d arranged for her to visit the Strategic Air Command base at Omaha, Nebraska. Typically, she went through with the visit alone. Going on from there to Hollywood, she told me about it over dinner at the home of Billy Haines, once a picture star, now a top decorator with Joan among his customers.