$50 to $1,500. The movie was Roman Scandals, starring Eddie Cantor, and it was six months instead of six weeks in the making. Lucille was grimly determined to keep her foot in the Hollywood door. She got a succession of bit parts in such movies as Moulin Rouge and The Affairs of Cellini, worked for three months with the roughhouse comics known as The Three Stooges ("It was one continuous bath of Vichy water and lemon meringue pie").
When RKO picked up her contract, she gradually emerged as a queen of B pictures, then began making program movies
with Comics Jack Oakie, Joe Penner and
the Marx Brothers (Room Service). Her
salary rose from $50 a week to $1,500, and
her hair, already turned blonde from its
original brown, now became a brilliant but
indescribable shade that has been variously called "shocking pink" and "strawberry orange." While she was in Dance, Girl, Dance, and being hailed by Director Erich Pommer as a new "find" (by then,
she had been playing in movies for six years), she met a rash, boyish young Cuban named Desi Arnaz.
Gold Initials. Desi had come to Hollywood to make the movie version of the Broadway hit, Too Many Girls. Taking one look at luscious (5 ft. 7 in., 130 lbs.) Lucille, who was wearing a sweater and skirt, he cried: "Thass a honk o' woman! " and asked: "How would you like to learn the rumba, baby?" He took her for a ride in his blue convertible, with the gold initials on the door, and she shudderingly recalls that the only time the speedometer dipped below 100 m.p.h. was when he rounded a curve. On the way home, Desi hit a bump and, as Lucille tells it, a fender flew off. He simply flicked the ash from his Cuban cigarillo and sped on.
Lucille was as dazzled by his full name (Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y De Acha III) as by his history. The only child of a prosperous Cuban politician who had been mayor of Santiago and a member of the Cuban Senate, Desi had fled to Miami with his mother during the revolution of 1933. His father, a supporter of President Machado, was put in jail, and the Arnaz possessions disappeared in the revolution.
After six months, Desi's father was released from jail and rejoined his family in Miami, where he went into the export business. Desi, who was 16, enrolled in St. Patrick's High School (his closest friend was Al Capone's son Albert), and got a part-time job cleaning canary cages for a firm which sold birds to local drugstores. He soon found steadier work as a guitarist in a four-piece band incongruously called the Siboney, Sextette. The critics agreed on Desi's meager musical gifts. "He was always off-beat," says Theater Owner Carlos Montalban. "But he's awfully nice guy--a clean-cut Latin."
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LUCILLE BALL
May 26, 1952
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