compulsively Lucy : WHETHER MIXING A MARGARITA AT HOME, FIXING SOMEBODY’S KEY LIGHT ON THE SET OR ADDING A LINE OF DIALOGUE, SHE’S MOSTLY DEAD SERIOUS.

Lucille Ball was being ambivalent, for a change. “I don’t have a feeling yet one way or another,” she said in her applejack-brandy alto. The subject was her new series, “Life With Lucy,” a vehicle hastily conceived by producer Aaron Spelling as a star booster for the third-place ABC. “I never expected to turn the network into No. 1,” she maintained.

But Lucy was expected to become ABC’s answer to Cosby. A one-woman miracle drug. That kind of pressure is a burden, even for Lucille Ball. Even for Aaron Spelling. The show has not found a niche, with the critics or the Nielsens--the second and third episodes settled into the bottom-10 prime-time programs. And though Lucy refused to comment, Spelling did. “In the episodes we are now shooting,” said Spelling, “we have given the show a lot more reality and heart. Lucy does not have to fall down to be funny.”

Wednesday will mark the 35th anniversary of Lucy Ricardo as a TV fixture. If the new “Lucy” is off to a sleepy start, there are those who remind you that even “I Love Lucy” was a sleeper, not to mention “The Cosby Show,” at first. But when Lucy says, “I’m not funny, I’m brave,” you know how smart she really is. And how scared.

Right up close Lucille Ball is like a well-heeled pink-and-orange version of Willy Loman. Or Woody Allen. At 75 she still needs to make good . And even then she might not quite believe it. “Compulsion,” as her son Desi Arnaz Jr. wrote in 1971, “drives her to be doing things that right now are really unnecessary.”

Curled up on the floor of her Beverly Hills sun room, a drink in hand, Lucy was resting her back against a backgammon table. Resting was really the wrong word. Lucy doesn’t rest. A week of interviewing her at home, day after day at precisely 4 p.m., followed by a month of observing her at work, is enough evidence: Lucy is a complete contradiction from moment to moment. Except in one way: She never lets up--at anything.

Last month NBC Entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff told the Washington Post, about Lucy: “I hear there’s been a stamina problem.” Tartikoff may be this year’s heat in broadcasting, but he’s wrong about Lucy. There are all kinds of problems at “Life With Lucy” (just read the reviews), but stamina isn’t one of them. Nervousness, maybe, but Lucy can still climb up to a tree house countless times, or redo dance steps, or get lost in foam.

Tartikoff’s remark is revealing of how brutal TV really is. Not only does the competition want you to fail, it wants to predict your failure, and then embarrass you with it. From the time she was fired from the third road company of “Rio Rita” 55 years ago until last week--when Nielsen didn’t love Lucy--she has been a plugger.

If the history of stardom can be put into two words, uphill battle , then Lucy is a walking history. She has as much longevity as any woman in the business (including Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn). A Chesterfield poster girl in the ‘30s, the Queen of the B-minus movies in the ‘40s, the Queen of TV in the ‘50s--but those are highlights. It’s the battles that cling to Lucy like charms on a bracelet. It’s the battles that propel her and it’s the battles, inevitably, she wants to talk about.

“Don’t do that,” she said at the first of the sessions as the reporter moved next to her on a chintz sofa. Later she relented. It’s called propriety. Yes, she would rather be photographed flatteringly, and with fial approvals. But you don’t win uphill battles without acquiring scars. Actually, Lucy looks more interesting than the airbrushed photos would indicate; she looks like a complex yet determined redhead who was afraid of plastic surgery. When her mid-’60-ish husband, Gary Morton, enters a room she becomes sexual in a way not seen on screen. But the private Lucy knows the public Lucy. “I looked like an actress, but I played a housewife,” she said accurately. In the ‘50s, teaching students at her Desilu Workshop, she told them, “Let’s see ourselves as others see us.” The henna hair and pink-kewpie lips and turquoise shirts are garments, part of the imagery of a star groomed by RKO, a studio she would later own, and MGM. Others see her as a glamour clown, Lucy believes, not a hard-bitten ex-showgirl. “People shouldn’t have to think about Lucy getting old. In a still photo, they examine every tiny line.”

But of the 6,000 reasons for Lucy not to return to work--”More money than God,” “They’ll have to photograph her through gypsum”--Lucy had one overriding reason to come back, and it’s really very simple. Who wouldn’t want to wake up every morning, drive 20 minutes to an idealized softly lit living room, put on a jogging suit or a sequin gown and become who you were 25 years ago? Especially a wise and lighthearted version of who you were. Especially with the original “I Love Lucy” writers working to make you funny and audiences genuinely glad at the sight of you.

“Backgammon and travel and lunching are dandy,” said Lucy darkly, “if you’ve got nothing better to do.” So when Aaron Spelling asked Marvin Davis to ask Gary Morton if Lucille Ball would go back to work, the answer was very quickly a yes. With three conditions. Twenty-two shows guaranteed by ABC; episodes filmed with three cameras in front of live audiences, and no interference--from anyone. As Morton, the show’s co-executive producer, put it: “It’s very difficult to tell Lucy about comedy.”

“I’m wringing wet and I’m tired and I’m trying to get a dance right,” said Lucy on a recent Wednesday afternoon. She was wearing a white pantsuit and very high heels and again she looked more at ease in street clothes than she would in the Nolan Miller gold gown that she’d wear for the taping. Lucy and guest star Peter Graves had been rehearsing a version of “The Big Apple” for the third episode. “I’m not sure of the steps,” she said, cooling herself with a kind of bamboo fan one finds in Chinatown. During the day’s rehearsal the air conditioning would be turned on and off for Lucy (mostly according to the direction of Morton, who seems to have a sixth sense about what makes Lucy comfortable.)

Aside from air conditioning, however, Lucy is less pampered on a set than one would expect. She sits at the top of a staircase for what seems like a long wasted chunk of time, waiting like everyone else. When she finally says, “Hey! You left us waiting up here, and it’s hot, and there’s no place to sit,” she gets heard. One comes away with the sense that the Lucy antennae operate at higher frequency than any other antennae on the set. Between rehearsing bits of “The Big Apple,” for example, she simply sits by herself, and concentrates.

The show is filmed chronologically, and rehearsed in very small moments. This particular scene involves Graves picking up Lucy for a date, and meeting her family. No element--lines, laughs, blocking--escapes Lucy. Example: “Hey, who put that line back in?” she asked about a Gale Gordon line that would cut into her exit. “That line is hard to stage,” she tells director Marc Daniels, who tries to explain. “I know it’s a good line,” says Lucy, “but it’s screwing up every move we’ve blocked today. It’s funny but it doesn’t feel right. Peter feels he’s leaving me hanging there, and he’s right . . . Katy,” she nodded in the direction of script supervisor Katy Dowdalls Claver, “bring me the script!”

Line deleted, Lucy and Graves returned to the dance. “Lucy thinks she does it the same way every time,” said Morton, “but what’s fascinating is how she varies it. She can get three laughs on her way to sitting down at a table. Look at the classic Vitameatavegamin show for example,” Morton said, referring to the 1952 “I Love Lucy” episode in which Lucy gets bombed on health tonic. “After she does the first taste, she does this outrageous little body shake. You have to watch her work.”

What you see is Lucy putting her index finger to her cheek on one take, doing a chorus girl kick on another and then interrupting Graves in mid-sentence about a whole other matter. The Lucy Toughness could be read into such a gesture: She can and does talk over someone else, but nobody flinches because her points are usually common-sensical. Example: While dancing, she manages out of the corner of her eye to spot co-star Ann Dusenberry, and instruct her: “You’re supposed to be laughing, and in position!”

The scene is to end with Lucy and Graves leaving the living room, and Lucy is unhappy with the “good nights.” She enters and exits, to be sure of her point, then tells director Daniels, “We are talking over this line.” Daniels, who directed 38 “I Love Lucy” episodes, moves around the set with a legal pad on which he jots Lucy’s thoughts. Daniels, a veteran of “Alice” and “St. Elsewhere,” is obviously here because he understands the star’s temperament. (The late TV director Jerry Paris was set in 1970 to direct several “Here’s Lucys,” but left after one episode. His explanation: “Since Desi left, Lucy has had to be in charge both in front and back of the camera. It’s hard to see yourself correctly in both situations. She’s not used to good directors, so she didn’t recognize one when she got one.”)

It does seem as though Lucy is surrounded only by compatible types, instead of people who challenge her. For maybe that reason, it’s she, not the technical people, who notice mistakes. Example: “Oh, is that my cue?” she will ask, as she and Graves close the living room door. Then re-thinking, she adds: “It’s all wrong. The cue has to come long before that. We have to put the key in the door!” It’s basic film school (or high school) logic, and it was shocking that nobody but Lucy picked up on the error. But not shocking if Lucy (and not the director) is the muscle. Clearly, if anyone in TV should have become a director, it’s Lucy.

As Lucy was fingering a pinky ring on her left hand, she watched over a grouping of Ann Dusenberry and Gale Gordon and Larry Anderson (who plays her son-in-law). Lucy was not in the scene. “A group shot for one line?” she wondered aloud. “All Gale has to do is lean forward a little bit for a group shot.” The good-natured reference is, apparently, to Gordon’s heft. There is a camaraderie between the two veterans that is unfaked, unmistakable, and they make each other laugh. The duo goes all the way back to radio days, and it was Gordon who almost played Fred Mertz on “I Love Lucy.”

“Was that line just added to the script?” Lucy abruptly asked Gordon.

“Yes, by me,” he answered, in his best drop-dead delivery. At moments like this, one sees how much fun the early Lucy shows must have been to make.

Then a moment later: “You can’t use that shot. He talked as I was talking.” It’s Lucy looking out for Lucy. Her sense of how she will appear at any given moment is instinctive, and a quick definition of stardom. When she says things like “We should open with a long shot” or “That line is so radio,” it’s hard to dispute her. She masters 52-54 pages of dialogue in two days. Long ago Lucy invented what she calls “naturalizing,” and writers/producers Bob Carroll Jr. and Madelyn Davis began writing it into scripts. Example: There will be instructions in a script to “act like a cup of water” or “think like a spider.” It’s Lucy Shorthand.

A Lucy rehearsal is like a rehearsal for a musical comedy in one way: She hears lines as they should be said, and the precision is like that of a musician. But with each take she adds a dollop of something else--a stylish turn of the hip, a glance at one of the cameras, a delayed wince. She can make the company laugh, and does, but then Lucy exits. Laughs are necessarily fast on a four-day shooting schedule. When her stand-in Larri Thomas takes over, the energy on the set dissipates.

In the early ‘50s Lucy and Desi and Lucie and Desi Jr. moved overnight from Northridge to Beverly Hills after getting wind of a kidnap threat. Lucy has lived in the same white compound ever since. When gawkers are rude enough to come to the front door, they are usually told that Miss Ball is in Europe. But when Miss Ball is at home, she is really at home. On a tour of the house, Lucy is very domestic, pointing out the framed family photos, worrying about the clutter in a pool house, explaining the sensibility of having a mock-beauty salon at home.

One afternoon, while gathering items to go to her dressing room at Warner Hollywood, Lucy tackled the subject of movie stardom, and how it eluded her. In 1937 she joined a curious quartet of actresses in the now-classic “Stage Door.” What’s curious is that all are still functional--Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Ann Miller, Eve Arden and Lucy--and all are considered among show business’ wealthiest women.

“Stardom?” Lucy said the word like it was pastry and she dare not take a bite. “Ginger (Rogers) was a star. I never dared dream about stardom. In the movies, I was . . . atmosphere . I admired Ginger and Katharine (Hepburn) but I never thought I was in their league. For years I was watching these women, and being taught to dance and fence and not pester people too much. But stardom I didn’t think much about.”

A clue to understanding Lucy (and her eventual stardom) is to know that early on in Hollywood she took the jobs nobody wanted. “This is very important,” she said abruptly, lighting a cigarette. “In a career, it’s better to be a bad musician and a bad juggler and learn to play mouth organ--as I had to do just last week--than to just be good at one thing. As a kid I did ‘Charley’s Aunt’ in my dining room, playing every part. I sewed the curtain and printed up tickets and sold the tickets.”

In Hollywood she got one line in “Top Hat,” and almost got fired. “I had to say the line in Cockney, for Christ’s sakes!” Lucy said, in mock-Cockney. “And I couldn’t do Cockney! It took me all morning, and the producer wanted to get rid of me. The director, Mark Sandrich, kept me. Why I dunno. I think because I was so damn willing .”

Lucy’s point was about doing whatever had to be done. When asked to define her early Hollywood identity, she takes time to think about it. “Let’s just say I was a girl in the first line of the chorus who didn’t want to get moved to the second line.” She said the line slowly, so it would sink in. “I knew right away in show business there would always be another crop of girls along next year. I wanted to get myself a real job, not just a chorus job. So I went to Harry Cohn’s place, Columbia (Pictures). I had never seen $750, and now I was making that, a week. With overtime and weekend work. As a model, I made $125 a week.”

Lucy became the girl who couldn’t say no--to work. “In the ‘30s I did a bit in a movie about musketeers, with Walter Abel, shooting in Calabasas, and I looked like the top of a wedding cake. I don’t remember what movie. But I know I was wearing a hoop skirt with petticoats, and I had heat prostration, and I fell over in a pile like a pin cushion.”

“I remember somebody yelling ‘No concussions!’ but I’d almost lost consciousness. I know I lost a shoe. They were saying ‘Get back on your horse,’ and I did it. I always did it. I think that’s what separates you from the others. You just do it. Anyway, that picture led to another picture, ‘The Girl From Paris,’ which led to ‘Stage Door’ all because one casting director happened to be in Calabasas that day.’

Was it serendipity? “Not really,” Lucy answered dryly. Did the casting director think she was talented? “Probably not. I just happened to be what he was looking for that day. Casting directors used to say to me, ‘I didn’t forget you!’ And I’d think, ‘That’s funny. I don’t remember you!’ ” It’s the battle-ax theory: Just never give up. Lucy nodded at the notion.

“Exactly! You don’t give up, and you transcend your own ego. I was just taking whatever Ann Sothern was turning down, whatever she didn’t have time to do. I didn’t care if Ann Sothern was busy, and I was second choice. I built my whole career around Ann Sothern. . . .”

Was Lucy lucky? “Well, when Desi and I had our own show, it felt like we had everything.” Lucy on Desi today is like a testimonial. Mention his name, and she removes her dark glasses, she doesn’t shy off; all bitterness seemingly erased, Desi is back on a pedestal. Of all subjects, he’s her favorite. “With Desi nothing was impossible,” Lucy summed up. “He could do what hadn’t been done. (CBS founder) Bill Paley recently said to me ‘We learned together, us three,’ and he was right. But Desi and I had different ideas.”

As she explained: “I wrapped myself around the show and the children, and that was it. I didn’t have anything else. But Desi. . . .” Here the tears appeared real. “I am not kidding you when I say I was working days at MGM and he was working nights with the band--or whomever--and we would literally meet in the tunnel at Sepulveda Boulevard. At 6 in the morning! That’s the real reason behind ‘I Love Lucy.’ After nine years of marriage, I wanted my husband at home. I didn’t want to be a wife on the road, not that Desi ever asked me to be on the road. . . .”

Even if he had, it seemed impossible that Lucy would ever have dropped the career in Hollywood. She nodded in agreement at the idea: “It’s true, I always needed to work,” she confessed, adding that Desi’s infidelities didn’t add much to the Arnaz marriage.

“Did you know we filed for divorce twice?” Lucy asked abruptly one afternoon. “I had 19 years of marriage with Desi, but two divorces, and that first one was the low point--I mean low.” The Lucy alto became deeper than an Orson Welles profundo . “This was the mid-’40s. I was living in Northridge (at the ranch called Desilu) and miserable for a whole year. Lonely, no kids, just animals. Desi’s life was another story. There were no idle moments for Desi. He didn’t miss a trick.”

Desi Sr. did miss, for the most part, Lucy’s nervous breakdown. No it wasn’t filmed. It was a brief chunk of her life. Once she began to tell the story, she seemed to need to tell all, filling in details on subsequent days. “It was 1945, and I was doing a picture (“The Dark Corner”) with (director) Henry Hathaway. I guess it’s OK to say this since he’s dead, but he was not a nice man. Never in my life had I had trouble remembering lines, but one day I got stuck. I got a case of the nerves and I began to stutter. I got petrified, thinking what will happen to me if I stutter in front of everyone? I hadn’t been sleeping well, I was lonely, and it was not easy, by anyone’s standards. One day I guess Henry decided I would be his whipping boy.”

Lucy took it not like a man (the label her critics give her) but like a scared boy, or girl. To demonstrate, she let her hands shake, and her face go scared. Then she set the scene--every actor’s nightmare revisited. “I happened to be doing this romantic dramatic moment, when I was thrown completely off. This stutter thing started, and Henry said ‘Are you drunk or something?’ ”

Sick was the word. “I was taken home and didn’t leave the house for three months, literally. I didn’t speak for three months. Only an occasional stutter. I remember Eddie Robinson saying to me, ‘What are you trying to do, give yourself a permanent nervous breakdown? Just rest, for Chrissakes.’ ”

In the middle of the chaos Desi came home, “to get the divorce decree. In California at that time you had to live under the same roof, but it wasn’t a happy time.” Meaning the couple wasn’t communicating. It’s black comedy, of course, to suggest that even in the best of times Cuban Desi could barely understand All-American Lucy--or vice versa--and she laughed wryly at the thought. “But at this time I was barely talking, and under doctor’s care,” she added seriously.

“One day the doorbell rang,” Lucy continued, as if acting the scene out. “It was a man in a white suit whom I didn’t know. So I didn’t let him in. He said ‘Olivia De Havilland sent me.’ I didn’t know Olivia De Havilland, but I knew she was suing Warner Bros. (over the duration of actors’ contractual rights). So I stood there, nervously, and said, ‘I’m not suing anybody!’ I figured the man was a lawyer, and I didn’t need a lawyer. The man protested: ‘Miss De Havilland has something she wants me to tell you.’ ”

“But I never met Miss De Havilland!”

“Please.”

Lucy paused, shaking her head in disbelief. Apparently De Havilland had heard about Lucille Ball--”about my nervous breakdown”--and De Havilland had arranged for agent Kurt Frings to take Lucy to see director William Seiter (“Roberta”) who was casting a picture called “Lover Come Back.” (Not the Doris Day-Rock Hudson vehicle, but the 1946 version.)

At this point the redhead (somehow having finished the Hathaway picture) had barely left her Northridge ranch for months. “I told this director Seiter about the stutter--hell, he could tell himself. ‘Wha-wha-wha-what do you want me to do? Mr. Seiter,’ I asked him. And Seiter said ‘I need one week with you, hour after hour and day after day. I mean around the clock.’ I told him ‘No way.’ But he didn’t seem to care, or be bothered. I was terrified of directors because Hathaway had been so mean to me.

“In two weeks Bill Seiter had me working. Talking and walking and acting. He didn’t even know who I was, though I’d been a model in ‘Roberta,’ which he directed Ginger (Rogers) and Fred (Astaire) in. But he didn’t remember me. All these years later he said, ‘Who is she?’ I was already Lucille Ball ; I was not exactly unknown. But he was helping me without even knowing me.”

The man who had knocked on Lucy’s door, Kurt Frings, became her new agent, and friend, “and suddenly I had a job, out of the blue. I somehow drove myself to the studio each day. The breakdown cost me half a year of my life, my marriage was grounded, but Seiter took me under his wing. He told me to just talk to him, to talk and talk. So every day I went to talk and talk. He saved me, and so did (co-star) George Brent.”

Flash forward 30 years: “I was at a party, at (producer) Bill Goetz’s house, and I found myself dancing with George Brent. I said ‘George, I don’t know if you realize how kind you were when I was broken down!’ And he said, ‘What are you talking about? So I said ‘Lover Come Back.’ And he said, ‘Oh yeah, I remember. You were beautiful . . . I just wanted to help out.’ We never talked about it again.”

There is, inevitably, a Lucy punch line: “I never did meet Olivia De Havilland.” She said it like it was the mystery of her life. “And I never did understand that kindness. From nowhere. When she lived in Paris, years later, and I was there, I tried to track her down but couldn’t. But what a leg up she gave me!” What did Lucy learn from this lesson? “Help comes from out of the blue, kiddo. When you need it you get it. I also discovered I needed more of a family life. I was too much alone.”

In 1950, reconciled after the first separation, the Arnazes decided to stay home and aim for a family life. There had been multiple miscarriages. “For 3 1/2 years Desi was in the Army, and for five years he was on the road, and that’s out of a nine-year marriage,” Lucy recalled, cringing. “Romance is hard far away, and impossible over the phone. I really did try and so did he, but I really wanted children and so did he. Which is probably why I had five pregnancies.”

When you look stunned at Lucy, she looks stunned in return: “For a while there, if you looked at me sideways I got pregnant.” At 39, she gave birth to Lucie Arnaz, and four weeks later filmed the first episode of “I Love Lucy.” At 41, she gave birth to Desi Jr., and got more newsprint (and higher ratings) than the Eisenhower inaugural.

To be giving birth at 39 and 41 in the 1950s was freaky, if not fearsome. “I never thought about age, and that’s the truth,” she said easily. “See, what I did as a performer never depended on age. To begin with, I wasn’t stacked or beautiful or even that talented. I was just in show business. I was never the wrong age because I could play different ages. Nobody ever pounded on my door for my beauty or youth. And then by the ‘50s, TV came along, we had our own show and well. . . .”

One of Hollywood’s best-known legends is how Lucille Ball knows every camera angle, every piece of lighting equipment, every nuance of production. Later, upon observing her in rehearsal and production, one discovered what she really has on a set--common sense. But asking her about technical knowledge is like asking her to reveal her sex life. She damn near blushed.

“I knew my lights,” she said one afternoon, sipping a Margarita. “I always watched lights, but I couldn’t light a set myself. You know we got the cinematographer Papa (Karl) Freund out of retirement for ‘I Love Lucy.’ The man won an Oscar (for “The Good Earth”), and developed the process shot. So how could I not learn? I watched, that’s all. Audiences I knew from doing radio, which also taught me timing.”

By timing Lucy partly means use of time. “Years ago we got the filming regimen down to Monday-through-Thursday,” she explained. “And then on the weekend I just let go of the show completely.” Suddenly she began pacing the living room, as if she was angry at somebody. “I’m mad about this idea I’m a workaholic,” she complained. “Workaholic is not what people think. For God’s sake, I always took long vacations, eight weeks at a time in Europe, with the kids, and I always had three-day weekends. I thought that time away could save the marriage to Desi.”

It couldn’t. By 1960 Lucy had a divorce lawyer (“Desi and I shared one lawyer”) and an almost-ex husband who wanted to quit the business. “There was this legal paper we had signed,” said Lucy, sighing. “It specified that if either of us wanted out, the other had first refusal to buy Desilu.” (At the time of the divorce Desilu was producing roughly 20% of all prime-time network programming, including “The Untouchables.”) “I certainly had no interest in the business, “ continued Lucy. “My plan was to go to Broadway to do ‘Wildcat,’ then come back and close up the houses and move to Switzerland. But ‘Wildcat’ wore me out, so I came home to sit by the pool for a year.” Lucy took a deep drag on an umpteenth cigarette. “I just wanted a new life,” she said grimly. “Then suddenly I had to face this first-refusal thing.” She faced it by borrowing $3 million and buying out Desi.

Lucy, as critic James Agee once wrote of her, faces challenges like they’re sirloin and she’s very hungry. “Desilu was dwindling,” she said glumly, “and suddenly we didn’t have 16 shows anymore. (When told only recently that in the early ‘60s then-young producer Aaron Spelling had offered to run Desilu for a salary of $60,000 a year, and was turned down by the board, she cringed.) “The prospect of Desilu going out at a loss--just because the marriage dissolved--upset me.”

In that moment it became clear that there are various Lucys--not just the TV versions of Lucy--but in real life, too. Relaxed like this, she seemed ready to be asked the hard question--the one about Lucy the businesswoman. In the ‘60s she owned and operated Desilu’s three studios (RKO, the Selznick studio, and Desilu/Cahuenga)--without Desi. She also took on her own new series (“The Lucy Show”) in 1962--and at times oversaw as many as 12 other Desilu series in various stages of development. The word tough had to emerge.

“You mean like ogre?” Lucy shot back. As her daughter has put it, Lucy is not always tactful. But tough? “The people I work closely with don’t say it,” said Lucy. “When I had good people around me, I let them have their heads.” The photos of Lucy in those years, at stockholder meetings particularly, showed the beginnings of deep strain in her face, and she doesn’t deny it. “I hated those meetings and still don’t know why they existed. I did not want to crowd my head with business, and I couldn’t do everything. My show was the bulk of my empire. So I was very willing, grateful even, to delegate.”

The solution, in 1967, was Charles Bluhdorn, the acquisitive chairman of Gulf & Western, who’d recently bought Paramount Pictures. The late tycoon made Lucy an offer then sent her, alone, on a plane to Miami. There she decided on an hour’s notice to agree to the buy-out that would eventually bring her $17 million in Gulf & Western stock for Desilu’s 36 sound stages and 62 acres. “I’m happy to say I’ve held on to my stock,3 she said grinning.

“I missed out on a childhood,” Lucy said one afternoon when almost everything else in her life had been touched upon. Her Jamestown, N.Y., childhood is spelled out (somewhat luridly) in Charles Higham’s “The Real Life of Lucille Ball,” an unauthorized treatment of the star’s life. “I have six books upstairs like that,” said Lucy, “one by two men named Joe Morella and Edward Epstein (“Lucy, the Bittersweet Life of Lucille Ball,” 1973), and others. One said I was a hooker, based on the fact that my mother let me go to New York at 15 for acting classes. Me a hooker?”

Lucy hooted while Gary fumed: “This Higham book,” Morton said, “has data about her childhood, details about her father’s death, that are beyond belief. Lucy was 3 when her father died. How does a 3-year-old possibly remember her father foaming at the mouth?”

What Lucy does remember is how her career was shaped: One afternoon she sashayed around her sun room not to show off, but to show how a showgirl walked. “The modeling gave me the walk,” she said matter of factly. “Here I was at 17 modeling for Hattie Carnegie, the dressmaker, not as myself but as the mannequin for Constance and Joan Bennett. I was the same size they were and so she fit all their clothes on me.” The physical Lucy, in sashaying, developed what every true clotheshorse knows: It’s all in the attitude. Lucy’s attitude, while working even today, is that of a glamour girl.

At 17, while modeling, she learned the walk of a showgirl, and the perils. “One day I was walking down the runway and my legs collapsed,” Lucy said without emotion. “I fell to the floor, it was a Wednesday in July, and it was hot. I felt like a knife cut my legs in half. I remember Hattie--who was nice but not particularly personal about it--saying ‘Get her a doctor.’ I was nobody special there. But I was shivering. And I had $85 to my name.”

No money, no hospital. So Lucy was sent to a charity clinic in Upstate New York. “ ‘Go see this man,’ I was told. I told the doctor at the clinic I had no money. I remember him injecting me with something. And saying the symptoms were not good. He took my case because it was unusual, and he developed a serum from the urine of pregnant horses which is still registered at his clinic with my name on it. It’s a variation of rheumatoid arthritis. I had crutches and a cane and weights to lift, but from 17 to 20 I basically couldn’t walk.”

Is that why she later ran so fast, from Manhattan to Hollywood, from chorus lines to movies to TV? “I hadn’t thought about it, but a lot of what people think of as my drive came from that period. From 17 to 20 if you miss proms and dates, and I missed out completely, it changes you forever. No dances, no boyfriends. I’ll tell you what that does,” said Lucy soberly. “It makes you pretty serious. About everything.”

Even Damon Runyon wouldn’t write the next step of this saga with a poker face. Upon recovering, Lucy became Diane Belmont, model and poster girl, and on another hot July Wednesday found herself approached. “It was some lady I knew from Seventh Avenue named Rose,” said Lucy offhandedly. “It was the lunch hour, and I had pancake makeup on, and she walked up to me and said ‘What are you doing in the city?’ I thought that question was so ridiculous. What else are you doing in Manhattan in midsummer but working? This Rose was a casting director for the Sam Goldwyn office, and she’d seen me around. She said I was the type they were looking for. They were minus one for a revue coming to California. ‘It’s six week’s work and you start Saturday.’ I took everything with me, and I never came back and what I got was a wonderful welcome to Hollywood.”

Again the question--was Lucy lucky? She waited a moment to think about that. “What’s luck?” she asked aloud. “I wasn’t a great beauty, I wasn’t a flirt, I wasn’t a great anything. But I watched other girls. Some showgirls came out here with sugar daddies, some girls had drinking problems. But I knew enough to know you don’t do that. You don’t get yourself in trouble. Being a Goldwyn girl was the nicest introduction to Hollywood, so how can I complain? Or say how hard this town is? The industry welcomed me, and all I had to do was not do anything wrong. The grass was never greener anywhere else. . . .”

“I’m giving you a kiss for good luck in this scene,” said Gary Morton, moments before a recent taping.

“Never mind that now,” replied Lucy. “What about retakes?”

Morton was telling the Lucy audience how jealous he was about Lucy kissing Peter Graves. He was teasing, and repeated the kiss. Lucy also repeated her line: “I said never mind. What about retakes?”

Anyone who lived through the ‘50s remembers Lucy Ricardo’s high pitch. Anyone who’s been around Lucy Morton in the last 20 years has heard the alto. In the course of this evening, a taping session that would go three hours, both voices come and go. The deep voice is the most appropriate symbol for the Lucy Toughness.

“I’ve never been emasculated in 25 years of marriage, if that’s what you’re getting at,” responded Gary Morton early on the taping day. “The impact of her stardom never hit me until our wedding day. Norman Vincent Peale married us at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York. That morning, Lucy said, ‘Don’t you think we should consider security?’ I’d been on the road for 900 years, and hadn’t really known the impact of ‘I Love Lucy.’ But that morning at the church, I knew the impact. There were 8,000 people.”

A lot of people in Hollywood lost money betting against the Lucy-Gary marriage. Twenty-five years after the nay-sayers said nay, the couple is still together. Morton would seem to be the most logical person to ask how the private Lucy differs from the public Lucy. Certainly this star, working or otherwise, is the opposite of a Bob Hope or a George Burns. She’s both a hurrier and a worrier. But is she surprising in any other way? “She forgets fast,” confided Morton. “Lucy takes everything seriously. But then she forgives and forgets. Completely. It’s a survival tactic. . . . Me, I never forget.”

Back at the taping Morton, the former stand-up comic who played a thinly veiled Milton Berle in Bob Fosse’s “Lenny,” was doing the warm-up. “Lucy will be 40 years old soon,” he told the crowd in the bleachers with a straight face. The Thursday “Lucy” tapings at Warner-Hollywood Studios have become hot tickets, in and out of the industry. People want to see Lucy work.

“Show business is my wife,” Morton told the crowd; his warm-up is the glue that keeps the audience in their seats for the two or three hours it takes to do setups, retakes and the three-camera filming. “These episodes,” he tells the Lucy fanatics, “cost roughly $650,000 each versus $18,000 for each ‘I Love Lucy’. . . . You know, years ago Desilu was doing a show called ‘Mission: Impossible.’ I was playing golf one day at the Riviera Country Club, and I noticed this handsome super guy. And he wound up coming in for the third season of ‘Mission Impossible.’ A super, super actor. Ladies and gentlemen, Peter Graves.”

Graves entered to applause and, under his breath muttered, “Second season.”

Meanwhile, the questions about Lucy from the audience go on eerily: Does she wear wigs? (Sometimes.) What kind of food does she eat? (Honey baked ham.) Ad nauseam.

Just into the taping of the first scene, Lucy stuck her head out of the door. The alto took over: “Katy,” she said to the script girl, “will you bring your script here?” Script change made, Lucy had bigger problems to face. A pertinent, private moment on camera--a scene of Lucy looking into a hand mirror and saying, “I’ve still got it”--got lost. The first take had been perfect, with laughter and genuine applause. But there had been a technical problem.

“On all three cameras?” Lucy wanted to know, seemingly as stricken as a 5-year-old lost at the circus. This is the woman who helped invent the three-camera system of filming TV comedy. Now all three cameras disappointed her.

“That’s sabotage! They won’t laugh at that again!” she said. But she got them to, and the method was ingenious. She wooed the audience back by mentioning her real-life grandchildren, imitating granddaughter Katie on the phone: “ ‘Wa-wa-wa-wa’. . . . And she goes on like that forever! But my grandson Simon just says ‘Nana, I gotta go. I got a girlfriend here!’ ”

Once again, she was Our Lucy. The audience responded warmly, and the mirror scene was ready to be reshot. The alto voice came back. “Now fellows,” said Lucy to the cameramen, “let’s get together on this. No conspiracy, OK? Don’t just drop out together.” The scene was done in one take, and Lucy got her laughs and applause.

Then it was over.

“There’s a certain high you get after a taping,” said Morton. “I understand that about Lucy. And she understands me, and my golf. I come home high from golf, and she’s Mrs. Morton.’ And I’ll tell you something else. I now play golf three or four times a week. If this show doesn’t go, you know what? I’ll play five or six times a week. We have nothing to prove.”

The Mortons then slipped into the gold Mercedes and headed for home.