Screwball: Review of Darin Strauss’ “The Queen of Tuesday”
/The Queen of Tuesday
by Darin Strauss
Random House, 2020
It’s easy to raise a skeptical brow—or two—at the thought of a novel that fictionalizes the life of Lucille Ball. Do we expect fan fiction, or perhaps another iteration of those fanciful books that enlist deceased cultural icons to solve crimes? Edith Wharton, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tallulah Bankhead, and Dorothy Parker have all been exhumed to play literary detective.
But The Queen of Tuesday is of an altogether different species; Darin Strauss has written estimable novels (Chang and Eng, More Than It Hurts You) and an award-winning memoir (Half a Life). And in this buoyant fictional biography he has provided a welcome reminder that Ball was far more than an adept comic famous for pulling faces and surreal physical stunts. In fact, she was one of the giants of 20th century American pop culture, who, with her Cuban-born husband, Desi Arnaz, broke societal norms (as the first interracial couple to be embraced by the masses) and brought long-lasting, widely imitated innovations to the early days of television (the ran from 1950-1957). Her comedic skills, apparent over 180 episodes, earned her favorable comparisons with Chaplin, Keaton, and Harpo Marx—and inspired generations of comic actresses. Not only was the show an instant ratings success, inspiring a flood of Lucy merchandise and magazine covers, but it managed the seemingly impossible coup of winning front-page coverage when the birth of the Arnaz’s second child coincided on the precise day that Lucy Ricardo gave birth to “Little Ricky.”
After the marriage—and the series—dissolved, Ball was the first woman to lead a huge studio, supplying TV screens with endless hours of product. In his “Instead of an Afterward,” Strauss calls her “the first powerful woman in Hollywood.” Surely the longevity and ubiquity of “I Love Lucy” reruns (not to mention the subsequent, lesser retreads of her persona in “Here’s Lucy” and “The Lucy Show”—still Lucy, but less agile and more strained) attest to her triumph over her contemporaries: Milton Berle, Red Skelton, Sid Caesar, Danny Thomas—all are virtual TV footnotes. And no female performer of the era came close. Sorry, Ann Sothern, Joan Davis, Imogene Coca, Nanette Fabray (who in an early memorable scene gets slapped—twice—by Strauss’s Lucille, for flirting with Desi.)
Full disclosure: I loved Lucy. Our entire family loved Lucy. She was a cultural bond nothing could rival. In the pre-VHS era it was not be missed, and was the best reason to be at home sick (or pretending to be), soothed by endless daytime reruns of the show well into the ‘60s and beyond. (And let’s not fexclude a deep bow to Vivian Vance’s Ethel, a lesser light, but no less accomplished a farceur—Laurel to her Hardy, vermouth to her gin.) Well past my 60s, I still love Lucy and Ethel who still can apply balm to a sin-sick soul that only happy childhood memories can provide.
But let’s not fool ourselves. Revisiting the Ricardos and the Mertzes today requires a fair amount of suffering through the show’s grim sexual politics. Lucy’s often infantile antics—almost all of them tacitly forbidden by her husband—are carried out under the threat of Ricky’s hotheaded Latin temper and predisposition to violence. And although he never actually strikes her, in at least two episodes he takes her over his knee and spanks her. Threatening women with corporal punishment was a mid-century meme: see among others Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden and his frequent watch-cry to his wife: “One of these days, Alice, POW! Right in the kisser!” (Hint to the uninitiated: He didn’t mean a peck on the lips.) Best in Lucy-viewing to fast forward past the misogyny to the grape stomping, the chocolate factory assembly line, the Vitameatavegemin commercial, the 25-pound cheese disguised as a baby. I could go on.
Strauss created this energetically quirky and entertaining novel from a nugget of his family lore: His grandfather Isadore, a successful Long Island real estate developer, and Lucille Ball—then a B-list actress approaching the age (38!) of Hollywood invisibility—attended the same 1949 party on Coney Island hosted by Fred Trump, Donald’s father. Knowing that Grandpa Izzy was known to stray from his marriage, Strauss the younger wondered if Izzy and Lucille may have met—and used that thread to weave a tapestry that includes a stolen kiss on that night, a subsequent dressing room quickie, and many years of lust in abeyance, frustration, romantic longing, and regret. When the two finally manage a rendezvous in Los Angeles, the interlude is erotic and deeply sad—and provides the book with Strauss’s most sensitive writing.
He bores deeply and with present-tense energy into the minds and spirits of both characters, seeing Isadore through the growth (and failure) of his business and the dissolution of his marriage, and Ball through her instant fame and wealth, the cruelty of her relationship with the ever-priapic and volatile Desi (although there’s no evidence that he ever struck his wife, there was an abundance of emotional abuse), her rise as a Hollywood tycoon, and even her near-brush with career disaster at the hands of HUAC. He puts us square in the middle of the show’s risky first episode, in a frame-by-frame depiction of Lucy and the cast turning awkward dross into audience-pleasing gold.
Strauss also manages to widen his lens to a full-blown portrait of the country’s mid-century mores and prejudices. Here is Strauss mind-melding with his subject on the social implications and risks of this first episode’s taping, a chapter she deems “beyond the last chance for her”:
Her image is going to be sent out via unfathomable technology—or maybe it is fathomable, but in the way prayer is fathomable—and aimed at the montage of between New York and Los Angeles where adults are judged to be too prissy to see a married couple in their marriage bed; the farm towns, sure, but mainly the hopeful and somehow still rural-in-feel urban centers of greater America, your Lansings, your Cheyennes, your Tulsas, pale towns—thataway, past Piscataway—where to hear Lucille tell it, neighbors provide a real community (it’s the sense of many hands giving you a boost), which can be lovely until one way or another you distinguish yourself. And the many hands slide up and seize your throat.
But as vividly as Strauss’s Lucille is portrayed, she does not eclipse Grandpa Strauss. In reality he led a rather sad life—a disappointing marriage and a betrayal by an embezzling brother; in the book he is limned as a decent, ordinary man whose yearning for Lucille gave him both comfort and hope. Darin Strauss is almost as distant from the truth about him as he is about Ball—both of whom he follows to their poignant last days.
Yet he has called on an impressive mixture of fact and guesswork and pure imagination: Ball was actually not the Queen of Tuesday; her shows ran for years on Mondays. She may never have even met Nanette Fabray, much less slapped her, twice. And so on. But whatever the source—the writer says the idea came to him from an “innocent dream”—the resulting novel brings together two unlikely souls for a cockeyed romance that is against all odds deeply satisfying.
—Michael Adams is a writer and editor living in New York City. He holds a PhD from Northwestern University in Performance Studies.