Ball of Fire by Stefan Kanfer Page B

on, paying her a salary no upstate employer could match. The solution was to send for Jamestown. Separated from Ed Peterson, DeDe was only too glad to accept the invitation. “My friends in Jamestown thought I was crazy to move there,” DeDe said later. “But we all wanted to be with Lucy. We sold my father’s house, and he came too—he and Freddy and Cleo. I worked as a buyer for Stern Brothers’ store. Lucy modeled, and Fred and Cleo went to school. Our bathroom looked like a Chinese laundry every night—Freddy even washed and ironed his own shirts. But the main thing was that we were together. I didn’t realize how briefly.” Only Grandpa had trouble adjusting to the new situation. Too old to find a job, he wandered the slums for hours at a time. He had never witnessed such massive desperation and he began wondering aloud whether America could survive the economic crisis without radical alterations.
    In the meantime, Lucille gave the lie to all that Fred Hunt had witnessed. After living on the margin she suddenly found herself in demand for freelance assignments and showroom work. By the spring of 1933 she was grossing $100 a week. Breadlines stretched for blocks, one-third of the nation was ill-clothed, ill-housed, and ill-fed, but for Lucille, Recovery was well under way. The only real drawback to her life in Manhattan was Manhattan. She had never been comfortable there. “New York City,” she was to write, “scared me to death. It had something to do with all that cold concrete and steel instead of grass and trees.”
    That place of concrete and steel was all the more forbidding in the summer of that year. In the times before air-conditioning, the city baked and shimmered in the heat. The air felt heavy and dirty; the sun’s glare bounced off store windows and hurt the eyes; asphalt stuck to women’s high heels when they crossed the streets. On her lunch break Lucille walked to midtown, looking for a brief change of scene— as well as a glimpse of herself enlarged to giant size.
    A few weeks earlier she had been freelancing in the showroom of Mrs. E. A. Jackson, whose principal designer was Rosie Roth, a former associate of Hattie Carnegie. Roth was fond of her best model, but hated to show it. While she draped and tucked and pleated, Lucille made faces, bent herself out of shape, and produced funny noises. Roth rose to the bait. “This girl’s fulla hell,” the designer complained, turning on the model. “You got flair, you got personality, a beautiful body you got. So why so aggravating? You make my ulcer ache. You’re fired.” That night she called Lucille and rehired her, throwing in an offer to let her borrow whatever gown she liked. Several days later Lucille did indeed wear one of Roth’s dresses when she posed for a Liggett & Myers ad. Dressed in a flowing chiffon number, flanked by Russian wolfhounds and holding a Chesterfield cigarette in slim fingers, she seemed the epitome of sophistication. Within weeks her picture was everywhere, including a large billboard at Times Square. On that epochal summer afternoon Lucille was looking up at herself, comparing the immense image with the smaller, far more important ones of real actors in the Palace Theatre lobby. A voice interrupted her reverie.
    “Lucille Ball! What are you doing in New York in July?” The speaker was Sylvia Hahlo, a theatrical agent who had a nodding acquaintance with leading models. Lucille responded quite logically by reminding her that New York was where the jobs were. Not true, Hahlo said. “How’d you like to go to California?”
    Forget it, Lucille said. “What would I do in California?”
    “You’re the Chesterfield Girl, aren’t you? Well, Sam Goldwyn needs a dozen well-known poster girls for a new Eddie Cantor movie. He had all twelve picked. But one just backed out.’ ”
    Hahlo told her to see Jim Mulvey, Goldwyn’s New York agent. His office was right here, in the Palace Theatre building. What the hell—