Free Ball of Fire by Stefan Kanfer

maybe they could nab some sort of assignment at one of the studios. Even if they couldn’t, she was making $150 a week. And once she got a screen credit, who knew how high her salary might go? Quite sensibly, DeDe asked where Lucille intended to put the family—surely not in her tiny apartment.
    Lucille’s answer came in the spring of 1934, when she took an expensive rental about half a mile from the studio. The financial aid came from Raft—money that would take six years to pay back. The new dwelling place at 1344 North Ogden Drive was little more than a bungalow, with three small bedrooms and a yard wide enough for a garden, but it was enough. Freddy was the first family member to come west, and he wasted no time landing a job as a page boy at the Trocadero supper club. One of Lucille’s colleagues, actress Ann Sothern, helped her decorate her place. When Lucille was satisfied with the look, she issued an invitation to DeDe and Grandpa Fred Hunt.
    While she was feeling energized, Lucille hammered away at Sam Goldwyn to let her do comedy. Beyond making a halfhearted move on her, Goldwyn had nothing to offer beyond another minuscule and unbilled part in
Kid Millions,
the new Eddie Cantor movie. Lucille accepted the role and promptly became a major pain on the set. The demanding Busby Berkeley was in charge again, and he gave the cast very short breaks. After each one, Lucille was the last to appear. Over the public address speakers would come the message: “Miss Ball . . . Miss Ball . . . On set, please.” The film’s second lead, George Murphy, whispered: “Honey, I don’t understand you. One of these days they’ll fire you.” Lucille conceded that he might be right. “But one thing you can be sure of,” she added. “They’ll know who I am.”
    A snappy comeback, Murphy had to admit, but not one likely to advance her career. Indeed, by the end of 1934 Lucille had appeared in ten films without acquiring a single screen credit. “It galled her that schleps with no talent were getting billing while she wasn’t,” recalled a colleague from those days. Manifestly she had to get out of the shadow of Goldwyn and United Artists. The trouble was, she had nothing to bargain with—no credits, no reputation, no friends, no luck. All that was to change late in 1934 when the comedy writers Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin learned that their agent, Bill Perlberg, had just been hired as casting director of Columbia Studios. He asked his former clients if they knew any performers he should look at. Both mentioned Lucille’s off-camera clowning on the set of
Roman Scandals.
“We didn’t mention her as an actress,” Perrin would recall, “because we knew her as a personality. We told him she was funny and amusing.”
    On the strength of their recommendation, Perlberg offered Lucille a contract at $75 a week, half what she had been making with Goldwyn. She sighed and she signed—anything for a crack at comedy. “I wanted to learn,” she was to write. “And my forte, I figured, was that. I didn’t know what I was getting into.”
    That was not quite true. Everyone in Hollywood knew about Columbia and its Neanderthal head of production, Harry Cohn. With his brother Jack, and Joel Brandt, a pal from New York, the high school dropout and former song-plugger had founded Cohn-Brandt-Cohn Film Sales in 1919. While Jack and Joel stayed in the East, Harry moved to Los Angeles. There he leased studio space for CBC on Gower Street, known to the movie colony as Poverty Row because it housed so many companies specializing in low-budget, “quickie” productions. Cohn-Brandt-Cohn was typical; it turned out so many cheap, slam-bang comedies that actors said “CBC” stood for Corned Beef and Cabbage—reason enough for Harry to change the name to Columbia Pictures.
    Beneath the new sign the Cohn philosophy remained the same: low budgets and fast schedules. A number of talented actors and directors chose to work with Columbia