Ball of Fire by Stefan Kanfer Page A

first women in Jamestown with the audacity to wear slacks outside the house.
    After her recovery Lucille used to speak about the nature of her affliction. Sometimes she referred to a mysterious automobile accident that had occurred in New York City—she had been thrown into a snowbank where she had suffered from frostbite. No record of a car crash involving Lucille Ball, or, for that matter, “Diane Belmont,” ever surfaced, but that did not keep early biographers from printing the story. Sometimes she spoke of a hard-won victory over rheumatoid arthritis. That was also untrue; Lucille did not suffer permanent muscle and nerve damage, almost always the case with rheumatoid cases. Kathleen Brady, Lucille’s investigative biographer, wonders if Lucille might have had a bout of rheumatic fever, cured, eventually, by a then experimental sulfa drug. It is not beyond possibility, given all that had gone before, that the failed actress and overstrained model suffered from a psychogenic illness only time would heal.
    In any event, once she was literally and emotionally back on her feet Lucille felt ready to give New York City one last try. She would have to find a different confidante—Marion Strong had eloped with her high school sweetheart and set up house in Jamestown. Never mind; Lucille was the one who had gone over the wall so often she had lost count, and for local girls who yearned for a bigger life she represented glamour and audacity. Years afterward, a young hairdresser named Gertrude Foote spoke ruefully about the day she decided to follow Lucille to Manhattan. Lucille dropped into the beauty parlor and announced an intention to quit Jamestown and head for Manhattan. The envious “Footie” hesitated a moment, then quixotically left the job and joined her friend on a new escapade.
    The romance of Depression New York failed to ignite Footie’s imagination. Lucille went right back to work as a model, but her friend had to scramble for low-paid work at a beauty parlor. Still, in the trough of the Depression they did well enough. Lucille cheerfully paid most of the rent at the Kimberly Hotel and picked up the bill whenever the roommates ate together. Lucille’s magnanimity was more than a way of caring for a pal without much money or ambition. The would-be actress had made few friends in Jamestown, and of those few only Footie had been bold enought to buy a ticket to New York. Buying dinners was Lucille’s way of saying thank-you without being maudlin.
    Nevertheless, there was no shortage of men who wanted to take Lucille out and show her the town—including several gang members. Indeed, she picked up the nickname “Two Gun” in the ensuing months when a mishap occurred in her bathroom at the Kimberly. As she explained it, “A gang war was going on around the corner. I didn’t hear the bullet whang into the tub, but the water began to disappear. I got out and tried to mop the floor. That’s all there is to the story.” Not everyone believed that explanation, and the nickname took her a while to shake off.
    Hard times intensified in the early 1930s, and even with two salaries Lucille and Gertrude sometimes had trouble making ends meet. There came a day when both paychecks were delayed, and all the young women had between them was twenty-five cents. They walked along in a melancholy state, Gertrude expressing the wish to get some food before she fainted dead away, Lucille wondering if there was any chance for her to get work in this unyielding town.
    Between them they had exactly twenty-five cents. A gardenia seller passed by, offering flowers for a quarter. Without hesitation Lucille bought the blossom. Even at that desperate juncture, she preferred to please the eye rather than the stomach.
    Yet flowers could do only so much. Lucille needed something more, something she had done without for too long: her family. There was no going back now; although Hattie Carnegie had let many models go, she had kept Lucille