Free Ball of Fire by Stefan Kanfer Page A

anyway. The reason was as basic as Cohn himself. Although he refused to underwrite expensive sets or locations, he respected established talents and gave them the freedom they required. Director Frank Capra was one of those who stayed with Columbia despite offers from bigger studios, and when Lucille entered the place, Carole Lombard and John Barrymore were busy on the same lot. The difference was that Lombard and Barrymore were cast in
Twentieth Century
while Lucille was capering with the Three Stooges. Cohn had decreed that his new contract player would be perfect as the dumb blonde foil in Larry, Moe, and Curly’s latest effort,
Three Little
Pigskins.
The farce about college football used her mainly as a target. Again she maintained, “I didn’t know what I was getting into,” and again this was not quite accurate. The Stooges’ pratfall reputation preceded them, and not a soul in Hollywood expected them to be anything short of gross. Lucille dutifully allowed them to pelt her with lemon meringue and squirt soda in her face. All she learned from the trio, she insisted, was that “seltzer up the nose really hurts.” But all affronts to her dignity vanished when she was rewarded with something money could not buy: a screen credit. Lucille Ball was no longer an elevated extra, a supernumerary glamour girl. Heartened by the prospect of more film comedies, she wired money for the rest of the family to take the Super Chief to L.A. The reunion was only days away.
    It was during those days that Harry Cohn made one of his periodic slashes of the Columbia budget. More than a dozen performers were summarily fired. Lucille remembered the collective feelings of shock and fear. “One night at six o’clock,
Boom!
We were on the streets, going, ‘What
happened?
’ Nobody knew. They just—got rid of everybody. ” Lucille had a date that night with Dick Green, brother of Johnny Green, a studio musician and composer of such hits as “Body and Soul” and “Out of Nowhere.” He took note of the glum face. “Lost my job,” Lucille snuffled: Dede and her brother and grandfather were coming to stay at the house in Gower. But now—
    He cut her off. It so happened that there
was
an opportunity. Why, this very evening RKO had an open call for showgirls.
    Lucille put her tongue in her cheek.
    No, Green insisted: this new Astaire-Rogers film really needed chorines.
    They’re auditioning them after dark? she demanded.
    Yes, she was assured, in the p.m.
    Lucille showed up for the casting call, invented a long history of modeling for Bergdorf Goodman in New York, and was offered a job. The salary seemed insultingly low, as if she was backsliding rather than rising in Hollywood—$50 a week. She signed immediately.
    Informed that she was going by bus to meet her mother and grandfather at the railroad station, George Raft was appalled. That was no way to greet the family. He advanced Lucille $65 and gave her the use of his limousine for the day so that she could arrive in style. As soon as DeDe laid eyes on the house on North Ogden she started to cry, moved by her daughter’s success. What seemed a striver’s dwelling to Lucille was paradise to her mother.
    DeDe kept weeping at intervals throughout the day. In the evening the two went for a drive around town. They parked at the top of Mulholland Drive, the local lovers’lane. Lights from the San Fernando Valley and the Los Angeles basin twinkled below them. The sentimental DeDe began to cry again and Lucille put her arm around her mother. “We sat there for a few minutes,” Lucille would recall, “when all of a sudden there was a cop next to us. He banged his nightstick against the running board and said, ‘Okay, you dames. None of that stuff up here. Run along, butch.’ I don’t think my mother had ever heard the word ‘lesbian’ and when I told her what it meant and that the cop thought we were necking, she cried all the way home.”
    Grandpa Fred worked hard at adjusting