Quote of the day:

There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.
—Alfred Hitchcock

Todd Purdum’s book on Desi Arnaz reminded me that years ago I had read another book that covered some of the same material.

It was Jess Oppenheimer’s memoir Laughs, Luck…and Lucy: How I Came to Create the Most Popular Sitcom of All Time.

Oppenheimer was the head writer and producer of the I Love Lucy series, and his memoir was published well after he died. His son gathered together the unfinished manuscript and notes that his father had left behind and cobbled it together. 

The result is a string of hilarious anecdotes, one right after another.

For example he tells this story about Arnold MacGuire, a writer, actor, and newscaster that Oppenheimer knew during his radio days.

Mac was also responsible for one of radio’s most unintelligible moments. It wasn’t Christmas, but New Year’s Day. He was set to read the morning news, but he had been out making the evening’s news, and he had come directly to the studio without a moment’s rest or recuperation. He was many sheets to the wind, but assumed an air of ultrasophistication and exaggerated control in an attempt to hide his intoxicated condition. He sat in the studio and read the copy he was going to deliver, dutifully looking up the hard-to-pronounce foreign names and places in the newscasters’ reference books. Suddenly, with only forty-five seconds to go until airtime, he became violently ill. He had no choice but to dash for the men’s room, hoping he could empty his stomach and get back to the mike in time.

Off he ran to the privy, where he fell to his knees on the tile floor and delivered his goods in record time. He sped back to the studio, coming to a brake-screeching, cartoon-type halt at the microphone, with just enough time to compose himself, pick up his script with exaggerated aplomb, and look over at the engineer, who raised his hand, finger extended, and lowered it to point at Mac.

Those who had the privilege of hearing the beginning of that newscast will never know what words Mac’s brain instructed his mouth to articulate. What came out is difficult to describe. It was definitely human, yet it had a strange, moist, muffled quality, as though the words, if words they were, were riding in a bubble making its way to the top of a container of bottled water.

What had happened was that along with his undigested stomach contents, Mac had unknowingly deposited his full set of dentures into the toilet bowl. The harder he tried to articulate meticulously, the more slobbery the sound came out. It sounded like a man whose lips have suddenly turned into noodles. The engineer grabbed the first person he saw, who happened to be Harry, the janitor, and had him read the rest of the news. Phrasing and pronunciation suffered a bit, but at least one could recognize the words.

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