Lucie Arnaz

            On Saturday morning before bed I put fresh double sided carpet tape around my mattress. I didn’t notice any bedbugs on me overnight and didn’t find many when I searched after yoga besides the ones that got stuck on the tape. 

            I published my translation of “L'enfance de bonnot” (Bonnot’s Childhood) on my Christian’s Translations blog without music, since no one has posted the audio online. 

            I worked out the chords for the chorus and part of the first verse of “Shylock” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I weighed 90.8 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Kramer during song practice for the last of two sessions and it stayed in tune most of the time. 

            Around midday I rode down to No Frills where there was only one bag of Canadian cherries left. I got that, a Canadian watermelon, a basket of Canadian peaches, a pack of Mexican raspberries, some bananas, a pack of five-year-old cheddar, a pack of chicken legs, a pack of two T-bone steaks, a jar of marinara, three bags of skim milk, a jug of orange juice, two containers of skyr, a bag of wedge fries, and a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips. 

            I weighed 91.45 kilos at 14:15. I had peanut butter and five-year-old cheddar on saltines with a glass of lemonade. 

            I took a siesta and got up too late to take a bike ride downtown. 

            I weighed 91.7 kilos at 17:25. 

            I was still about five days behind in my journal and worked on getting caught up. 

            I grilled eight souvlaki. I made pizza on a slice of Rudolph’s sandwich bread with the last of my rosée tomato sauce, tomato pesto, three sliced souvlaki, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of Creemore lager while watching a 1971 episode of The Dick Cavett Show with guests, Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, Lucy Arnaz, Carol Burnett, and Lucille Ball. 

            In his monologue Dick says he was distracted on his show last night partly because he was going to the Ali-Frasier fight after the show, but also because a guy in the audience kept shouting “Down in front!” “and he was talking to me!” Dick says hello to his orchestra leader and drummer Bobby Rosengarden. He says Robert does the audience warmup, which no one ever sees on TV. Dick says the fight was exciting. He went with his wife who does not like to go out in public with him because she hears too much of “Ooh it’s you!” But he says he can’t help it because when he sees a celebrity he always goes, “Ooh it’s you!” He says he doesn’t normally like going to sports events because he always gets glared at for not standing for the national anthem when he is standing. Ali and Frasier were paid $2.5 million each for the fight. That comes down to $926 a second. The Apollo 14 crew was at the fight. The news referred to them as “Our gutsy fly guys”, The New York Times called them “Lunar explorers”, but The Village Voice called them “Three who spaced out with a single capsule”. 

            Dick’s first guest is Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, Muhammed Ali’s personal physician. Dick asks if Ali had a broken jaw as everybody thought. Ferdie says he could see how people would think that since one side of his face was twice the size of the other. He says Ali was x-rayed and he had no fracture but just a collection of blood from the left hook that blew a blood vessel when it dropped him. He says he’ll be okay in five or six days. He says it was the best fight he’s ever seen in his 12 years of being a physician for boxers. It was an even fight until the knockout. Dick refers to Ali as Clay sometimes and Ferdie admits the name change is confusing. Dick asks about Ali’s diet and Ferdie says before a fight he’ll have a steak and a salad. Ferdie had to leave to be on Howard Cosell’s show. 

            Lucie Arnaz plays Lucille Ball’s daughter on Here’s Lucy and she is Lucille Ball’s daughter. Lucie comes out, shakes Dicks hand very quickly and sits down immediately. She says she didn’t want to stand next to him for too long, which is reference to the fact that she’s much taller than he is. She’s 1.75 meters tall while Dick is 1.69 meters tall. She says at 14 she was taller than the boys her age. Now at 19 she likes being tall because tall people can wear a wider variety of clothes than shorter people. 

            She says her time at Beverly Hills Catholic School was one of the worst times of her life. High school nuns are different than grammar school nuns because they are real people. but grammar school nuns are recruited from the army. They drag you by the ear, slap you around, and call you dirty names. She learned some terrific language from grammar school nuns. 

           She didn’t think of her parents as stars. But once she was thirteen she wanted them to introduce her to the stars but she never got to meet Paul Newman or Marlon Brando. She only met Wally Cox. She says she can’t really say what it’s like to be Lucille Ball’s daughter because she has nothing to compare it to. The president’s daughter can answer that question because she hasn’t always been the president’s daughter. 

            She says they had an extra garage that wasn’t being used and so she turned it into a theatre. Her mother had a guy from the studio come over and build a little stage for her and I assume her brother Desi. They had a microphone and a little box office. They put on Bye Bye Birdie when she was 11 and she played Ann-Margret’s character. Dick says Ann-Margret got mad at him when he had her as a guest. She was promoting C.C. and Company and showed a clip. Dick asked if a lot of money was riding on the picture. Ann said, “I’ve never seen you in a movie” and Dick responded “What a coincidence”. Lucy says, “I knew there was something I liked about you.” 

            Carol Burnett comes out. This is the first time she and Dick have met. Carol tells the story of how when she was a girl she pretended to be twins. There was a boy named Asher Washowski who lived in her building. Carol was 9 or 10. Asher used to sit in the lobby and read comic books. Carol lived in the apartment that was right off the lobby. Carol told Asher she was expecting her twin sister Karen from Canada. She told him she was going to the store but Karen would be coming in shortly and asked him to direct her to the apartment. He said he would and then Carol left the building, ran around and crawled into her apartment window, changed clothes, got a suitcase and crawled back out the window and walked in the lobby to say, “Hello, my name is Karen. Can you tell me where Carol Burnett lives?” Asher pointed and she knocked on the door. Her grandmother let her in, then Carol changed clothes again and crawled back out the window to come into the lobby and ask Asher if her sister had arrived yet. This went on for six days until she was exhausted. She suggests that it’s possible that Asher was putting her on and was just watching to see how long she could keep it up. Carol tells Dick that she’s actually triplets and she’s not actually Carol there tonight. 

            Her grandmother used to make capes and masks out of pillowcases and dye them black for Carol and her girlfriend. Then they would hang around the Bank of America looking for robbers. Carol used to go see the Nyoka Queen of the Jungle serials. She loved Flash Gordon and wanted to be an astronaut. Then she wanted to be a journalist and be Brenda Starr and fall in love with a man who had a patch over his eye. Carol says the other day her 4 year old daughter Jodie told the plumber that her mother was Juliet Prouse and she was married to Ray Charles. Carol says there was a hill where they’d play jungle and they’d mark off where the quicksand was and they’d have ropes to swing over it but if you touched it you had to pretend you were sinking and you’d die for that afternoon. Dick says he wishes he’d known her as a kid. 

            She tells the story of her benefactor who leant her the $1000 to go to New York. She said she wasn’t the only one he’d helped and it wasn’t only show business people. Dick tells Carol he finds her terribly attractive. She waves her hand in his face to check his vision. 

            Lucille Ball took over a television studio in a year when it lost over $65,000. Six years later she sold it for $17 million. 

            Dick asks her to recount how she was fired by Ziegfeld. She says she’s never told the story before. When she came to New York at 16 all she wanted to do was get into vaudeville. She never got an agent or got near any building that had anything to do with vaudeville. Then she ran into some girls who were going to a cattle call at the Ziegfeld Theatre for a third road show of Rio Rita. Lucy got the job and kept it for five days of rehearsal until they culled her and several other girls out. She had already written home and told everybody that she was a Ziegfeld Girl. She was crying outside the theatre after all the other girls had left. Henry Sharp, Ziegfeld’s right hand man came out and told her it was ridiculous to cry because there are other jobs. Then he left and she followed him for two blocks while still sobbing. He told her to stop following him because she might get him arrested. So she walked away and thought that she had to kill herself. She saw a big limousine and thought getting hit by it would be a classy way to die so she tried to throw herself in front of it. But it stopped, so she got up and went home. Dick says, “If that car had been going faster I’d be talking to an empty chair.” Lucie says, “Two empty chairs!” Dick asks, “Were you Lucille Ball then?” “You don’t think I’d choose that name! After that I changed my name to Diane Belmont. But when she used to play act as a girl she was Madeline from The Light of the Western Stars by Zane Gray. 

            Lucy went to the John Murray Anderson Robert Milton Dramatic School in New York. Bette Davis was a star pupil there. They wrote Lucy’s mother a letter and told her she was wasting her money. So Lucy went back to Jamestown, New York. Once she ran away without permission and three blocks away her mother showed up with a packed lunch and an umbrella for her. Lucy couldn’t find a way in to show business and so finally she became a model and a good one. But sometimes she still had to go into coffee shops and find a booth where someone had left a half a donut and nickel tip. She’d steal the nickel to buy a coffee to have with the donut. 

            She once read a script where it said they were looking for a “Lucille Ball type”. She said that was a thrill and she didn’t even care if she got the part. 

           Dick asks if she’s ever wanted to do drama and she says no but her daughter points out that she was in The Big Street with Henry Fonda. Carol says she’s never wanted to do drama but she did later on. 

            Lucille says any woman who works has guilt about not being with her family. When she started I Love Lucy she was six months pregnant with Lucie. Carol says she spends more time at home than she does working. The earliest she has to be in is 11:00 but that’s only on taping day. She usually reports in at 13:00 but gets there earlier to do her exercise class with a group at CBS. She home every day by 17:30 with the exception of orchestra rehearsal. She has weekends and summers off and another week off every fourth or fifth week. 

            Dick asks Lucie if she wants to marry someone in show business. She says she’s engaged to someone who’s producing and she thinks it’s great because you’re both doing something you both understand. 

            Dick gives his guests a chance to ask him anything they want. Carol asks him his measurements. Lucie asks if he can cook and Dick says he made a stew once that would knock her hat off. Lucie says it’s a real turn on when a man can cook. 

            Dick says that Sigmund Freud said that in his 60 years of study he still doesn’t understand women. Carol says Sig was mixed up. Dick asks if she was acquainted with him. She says, “No but he tried”. 

            Dick says he was mentioned in the book The Sensuous Man (In it Terry Garret lists Dick as one of the top 10 sexy men). They ask for Dick’s middle name and he’s embarrassed to say but finally tells them it’s Alva. 

            Dick asks Lucille if she’d change anything about herself if she could. She says she’d like her hair to be naturally red and not mousy brown. 

            The three women agree on being attracted to Paul Newman and they says it’s those blue eyes.

            Carol tells Lucille that she’d love for her three girls to grow up like Lucie. Lucille tells Dick she thinks her son could take a few lessons from him. 

            It was Desi Arnaz who wanted their daughter to be named Lucie. She made her professional acting debut at the age of 12 on an episode of The Lucy Show. She made her film debut in 1977 in Billie Jack Goes to Washington. She made her Broadway debut in 1979 in They’re Playing Our Song. Lucie Arnaz co-starred in the 1980 adaptation of The Jazz Singer starring Neil Diamond (for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award). She co-starred in 119 episodes of Here’s Lucy. She starred in the short-lived sitcom The Lucie Arnaz Show, based on the British sitcom Agony. She later said it was a depressing experience. She starred in Second Thoughts, Smoking Non Smoking. She won an Emmy Award in 1993 for her documentary Lucy and Desi: a Home Movie. She and her brother only own the rights to Here’s Lucy of all their mother’s shows.