Quote of the day:

You are not judged by the height you have risen, but from the depth you have climbed.
—Frederick Douglass

Still reading Todd Purdum’s Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television.

Here’s the thing you need to understand about Desi Arnaz. He didn’t learn the English language until he was in his teens, and he always struggled with it. He never learned to read music. His guitar playing was only so-so, and his singing wasn’t much better. Remember when he performed a song on the I Love Lucy show? Did you ever think he was a brilliant vocalist? What he had going for him were his handsome face and his brilliant showmanship. He managed to put both of those to good use.

After his success at the Miami Beach La Conga club, he went to work in New York City at a club also called La Conga. However, Purdum’s book recounts several different versions of just how that came about. The version that I suspect might be closer to reality involves the comedienne Martha Raye and “the Latin Bombshell” Diosa Costello, who provided an oral history where she remembered Arnaz coming around with his guitar and asking for work. She went to Mario Tosatti, the proprietor of La Conga, and asked if he could give Desi a job. “What does he do?” asked Mario.

“And I said, ‘Well, he plays the guitar very bad. He doesn’t sing so good. He doesn’t play the conga so good, either. But look at him! He’s gorgeous! He’s gonna draw the women! What else? Who cares what else he does?’ ”

However he was hired, he became a phenomenon and soon Dorothy Kilgallen described Desi as “a black-eyed, slim-hipped rhythm conscious young Latin on the threshold of becoming a fad.”

Then one day Desi was told that Rodgers and Hart wanted to talk to him. “Who are they?” he asked, being presumably the only person in the city who didn’t know their names. They were looking a for a college age Latin to play a South American football hero in Too Many Girls. Lorenz Hart told Desi that he had seen him in Miami and asked if he could act. Desi wasn’t sure.

Hart didn’t want to leave anything to chance because he very badly wanted Desi to be in the play. Purdum discreetly mentions that some accounts suggest that Hart had a crush on Desi; I think that’s more than likely. In any case Hart and his friend “Doc” Bender took Desi through the part of Manuelito, so that he’d be prepared for his audition. 

The director George Abbott didn’t like actors to come prepared to their auditions, and when he realized that Desi had been coached, he was furious, but for some reason, he hired him anyway. Perhaps as a favor to Hart? Hmm.

To be clear, Hart’s partner, Richard Rodgers, was notorious for using the casting couch, usually for chorus girls but sometimes for leading ladies, so given that Doc Bender was “generally considered to be Hart’s procurer of men” according to Purdum, it’s not much of a stretch to suggest that Hart may have had similar motives for hiring Arnaz. There is no way of knowing whether anything actually came of it though.

During rehearsals the creators decided to add a conga to the show, so Rodgers transformed a march into a conga beat for the first act finale. The show was a hit with the conga always getting a big hand, and Desi was becoming noticed. Dorothy Kilgallen wrote, “It takes no well-oiled crystal ball to predict that the days when Desi may stroll down Broadway unmolested by feminine throngs are numbered. He is a lad destined to belong to the stage door Susies.” 

Soon RKO bought the film rights to Too Many Girls and hired George Abbott to direct it. Abbott brought Desi along to Hollywood as well as Van Johnson and Eddie Bracken from the original cast.

But there would be a new leading lady.

When Desi first glimpsed the actress, who came on the set fresh from filming a vicious catfight with Maureen O’Hara in a backstage melodrama in another movie, he was not impressed. She “sported a black eye, a bandaged leg, a clawed back, and a torn dress. She looked, Desi would recall, ‘like a two-dollar whore who had been badly beaten by her pimp.’” 

A few hours later the company reconvened for a musical rehearsal. Desi was at the piano, running through “She Could Shake the Maracas,” when a striking woman he did not recognize walked into the room in a snug pair of beige slacks and yellow sweater, with blond hair and huge, luminous blue eyes.

“Man, that is a hunk of a woman,” Desi told the accompanist.

“You met her today,” the piano player replied.

“I’ve never seen her before,” Desi answered.

“That’s Lucille Ball.”

Dashing Desi Dazzles Dorothy

I was going to make this a separate post but I already have a third Desi post in the queue, and I think three Desi’s are enough for any blog, so I’ll just tack it onto this one. 

Those quotes from Dorothy Kilgallen came from the Purdum book on Desi, but I realized that I could look them up in the the newspaper archive, and when I did, I discovered they were each culled from the same column of August 28, 1939. I found several examples of that column in various newspapers and learned that Kilgallen’s syndicated column was often sliced and diced in various ways, presumably to fit whatever space a local newspaper had available that day. Some papers ran a photo of Dorothy, some didn’t. Some even changed the name of her column from “The Voice of Broadway” to “The Big Town” or some such.

Anyway, here is Dorothy Kilgallen’s full column devoted to that “black-eyed, slim-hipped rhythm conscious young Latin” taken from The Times of Trenton, New Jersey. When Dorothy wrote this column, she was already engaged to Richard Kollmar, who was also in the cast of Too Many Girls; they married shortly thereafter, and remained wed until her death.

 

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