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BALL OF FIRE:
The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball
By Stefan Kanfer
Knopf, $25.95, 342 pp
Maybe the show should have been called I Love Ricky. A central thread in Stefan Kanfer's Ball of Fire, and in Lucille Ball's life, is the one that tied her so desperately to Desi Arnaz, an emotional cord of dependence that she could not bring herself to cut even when faced with his flagrant, continuing infidelities, their rows, their professional breakup and their divorce.
Therein lies one of the two great ironies of Ball's life. For years she spent much time and energy trying to create an entertainment vehicle that would allow her and Desi to work together, and when it came in the form of the sitcom I Love Lucy, it proved to be the beginning of the end of their constantly wobbly domestic existence.
The other irony is Ball's anguish over her long childlessness. When Lucie Arnaz and Desi Jr. finally were born (Ball was 39 and 41, respectively), she proved to be a distant mother. Lucie laments that it was too bad her parents weren't more like the Ricardos, the couple they played on television.
Ball of Fire - an apt title because Ball was nothing if not energetic - is not the model of a celebrity biography that Kanfer produced with his previous book, Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx. But that isn't necessary; we have been well served by Kathleen Brady's thorough 1994 biography, Lucille: The Life of Lucille Ball, available in paperback.
Kanfer's account of Ball's sometimes rocky girlhood in Jamestown, N.Y., and her stints as a chorus girl and model in Manhattan is sketchy and heavily anecdotal. Some of the humorous anecdotes, in this section and later, have more than a whiff of apocrypha about them, such as the report that she once received radio messages through her teeth.
Ball's years in Hollywood, where she became "Queen of the B's" and met and married Desi, are more solidly documented, though this part of her career, too, gets a brief once-over. Two-thirds of the book are devoted to the development of I Love Lucy and to what came out of it, including the Desilu TV production empire.
Nevertheless, all nits aside, this is an informative and interpretive biography of a woman considered by many to be the best comedienne ever. Kanfer proffers the notion that unlike most personalities whose reputations decline after death, Ball was a star who shines perhaps more brightly than ever.
I Love Lucy grew out of a late 1940s radio program starring Ball (but not Desi) called My Favorite Husband. In 1951 Ball and Desi took this concept to CBS to try to create a TV program that would include Desi.
It was an enormous gamble. The couple had to overcome stiff opposition to the idea of a Hispanic as a sitcom husband. They increased their risk by insisting on filming the show - in the then-highly innovative three-camera process - rather than using the cheaper but unsatisfactory kinescope, and by hiring two second bananas with dubious personal backgrounds, Vivian Vance and William Frawley.
Generally known is the story of the monumental success of the program, which is still regularly shown on television around the world a half-century later. The details recounted in this book of the glitches and setbacks that befell the infant program are fascinating.
Equally fascinating, in a different way, is the deterioration of the couple's marriage as Ball and Desi's fortunes rose. Ball filed for divorce March 3, 1960, the day after filming the last Lucy show to star both.
Each remarried. Desi's lifelong drinking increased. Ball's popularity with the public remained high, but not with her co-workers, to whom she became increasingly querulous, demanding and imperious.
Kanfer wonders why Ball had much greater success on television than in movies. It was not just a matter of her talent and grit. She always had those things, even at RKO and MGM. Kanfer says some observers think it was because she was really a stage actor rather than a screen personality and blossomed in front of the studio audience. Desi's undoubted business and production gifts are cited by others, none more than Ball, who thought him a genius.
The question that defies a satisfactory answer is that strange emotional bond. It was not entirely one way: After their divorce, Desi remained Ball's friend, adviser and champion, and he felt a tug of reconciliation shortly before his death in 1986. Three years later, when Ball died, her second husband, Gary Morton, said, "I guess she's happy now. She's with Desi."
- Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer and reviewer in Milwaukee.