Gwendolyn was slightly nervous when she walked onto the Desilu studio lot to pitch an idea that she hoped would appeal to the groundbreaker in her boss. She was keenly aware that Lucille Ball was proud to be producing the only talk show hosted by a woman, but would she go for Gwendolyn’s idea? It was hard to say.
For television’s most powerful woman, Lucille ran an unpretentious office with only two potted ferns and a small watercolor portrait of herself and Desi. The pastel green walls projected cool efficiency. The cover of Redbook magazine on the coffee table featured a shot of Grace Metalious at her famous writing desk, dressed in the usual dungarees and checked flannel shirt.
THE RETURN OF
GRACE METALIOUS:
WILL LIGHTNING STRIKE
PEYTON PLACE AGAIN?
CBS’s approval had been a foregone conclusion as soon as Grace had said those four magic words: Return to Peyton Place. And as predicted, when the episode aired, Stompanato had called the station to complain about being cut out. A couple of weeks and a carving knife later, the louse was bleeding to death on Lana’s carpet, so that was the end of that.
Gwendolyn’s only disappointment came when CBS had told Desilu that they wanted Brick by Brick for one afternoon a week.
“Don’t worry,” Lucille had reassured her. “They’re giving us Friday afternoons—that’s prime time for weekday programming. And they’re adding you to every CBS California affiliate. It’s a terrific start.”
Almost right away, Paramount had called about getting Kim Novak on the show. Vertigo hadn’t been doing great business and seeing as how Peyton Place had picked up after Lana’s appearance, they were hoping the same phenomenon might happen.
Peyton Place’s latent box office success was due almost entirely to the Stompanato stabbing, but Gwendolyn wasn’t about to turn down Kim Novak. Her episode had earned Brick by Brick its highest-ever ratings and after that, the show started gaining a reputation as an ideal stop on the publicity trail.
It had done so well that CBS added Brick by Brick to stations in Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico. Ratings climbed. Congratulatory memorandums arrived. And then the decision Gwendolyn and Lucille and Rex had been hoping for came down the pipeline: “You’re going to five days a week.” Desilu would still produce it, but now the show would be shot at CBS Television City rather than the older studios on Sunset.
“Miss Brick?” The receptionist canted her head toward the door that led to the boss’s office.
Lucille stood at the glass-topped credenza against the right-hand wall. “I’ve just gotten off a forty-five-minute call with Winchell,” she groaned. “That man is exhausting. The sooner ABC cancels The Walter Winchell File, the better.” She held out a white coffee percolator. “Care for a cup?”
Gwendolyn told her yes.
Lucille’s desk was impressively large, made of dark wood, and had a brass plaque sitting right in front: “VICE PRESIDENT.” Behind her, a row of gauzy curtains hung over the tall windows to soften the harsh summer sunlight outside.
“What can I do for you?”
“I’m here to pitch an idea and I want you to hear me out before you tell me what you think.” Lucille’s eyes dimmed slightly. Gwendolyn inched forward until she was poised on the edge of her chair. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong have collaborated on a new album of selected songs from Porgy and Bess.”
Interest glinted in Lucille’s face. “Have you heard it?”
One of Gwendolyn’s neighbors had a brother who was a sound engineer at Verve Records and had been playing a bootleg pressing for weeks. He shouldn’t have had it, but she was glad he did. “Yes. And it’s superb. So here’s my idea: I want to have Ella Fitzgerald on the show.”
“Ella—? On your—?”
“Only as a singing guest. Preferably performing ‘Summertime’ because her rendition is breathtaking.” Gwendolyn could see anxiety forming in Lucille’s eyes so she kept talking. “Wait till you hear it! It’s as though Gershwin wrote it just for her. It’ll cause a sensation—”
Lucille held her hands up. “Cool your tap shoes, Ann Miller.”
“I know it’s a bold idea—”
“It is. But it’s not—”
“I know what you’re thinking.” Cutting off a boss mid-sentence probably wasn’t the smartest strategy but Gwendolyn wanted to get her whole idea out before Lucille shot it down. “Colored performers can’t even use the front doors of the clubs they perform in. Oftentimes, they’re not even given a dressing room. But NBC gave Nat King Cole his own show. Doesn’t that demonstrate times are changing?”
“Do you know why his show went off the air?” Lucille asked. Gwendolyn shook her head. “NBC paid the initial production costs assuming that they would find a sponsor when everybody saw how classy it was. But the sort of companies who would normally underwrite a program like that didn’t want to upset the South, where their customers only want to see Negroes in subservient roles. The show never found a sponsor so Cole pulled the plug himself.”
“All I’m suggesting is to have one of America’s foremost vocalists come on our show and sing one song in one episode!”
Lucille crossed her legs and leaned back into her chair. “A few years ago, Desi and I built a weekender in Palm Springs. Do you know who we got to design it?”
Gwendolyn blinked, nonplussed, and shook her head.
“Paul Revere Williams. Do you who know he is?”
It was hard to live in Los Angeles and not know of the public reputation of one of the city’s most famous architects. But Lucille was making a point, and it wasn’t because Williams had helped design the Shrine Auditorium, the new Perino’s restaurant, the LA County Courthouse or even the Hollywood YMCA. Lucille was bringing up Williams because he was the only prominent LA architect who was Negro.
Gwendolyn nodded. “You’re not saying no because of the color of Ella’s and Louis’s skin.”
“Correct.”
“But because CBS won’t go for it.”
“Also correct.”
“I knew it’d be a tough sell when I came to you,” Gwendolyn admitted.
“So, what we need to do is come up with a strategy to sell the idea to the network stuffed shirts. Assuming of course that Ella and Louis are even up for taking on something like this.”
“I think they are—or at least I think Ella would be.”
“You sound pretty confident about that.”
“Did you know I used to own a boutique up on the Strip?”
“Chez Gwendolyn? That was you?” Lucille pitched forward, her bright blue eyes wide with surprise. “Well now, suddenly your exquisite dress style makes sense. No wonder you’re becoming a fashion trendsetter.”
“Ella used to be one of my clients.”
“Did she now?”
“Eartha Kitt, Dorothy Dandridge, Hattie McDaniel, Lena Horne—”
“They all came? To your store? On the Sunset Strip? In person? How brave of them. And how brave of you.”
“Any braver than you hiring a colored architect?”
Lucille’s mouth curved into a touché smirk; Gwendolyn knew she had convinced her—at least, enough to give her idea a try.
“What if I run this past Ella and see if she’s game? If she is, I’ll take it to CBS myself. You won’t even need to be there. It’ll all be on me.”
Lucille Ball lifted her coffee cup and took a sip. “From the first time I saw you on my TV, I could see you were a girl with gumption. I can’t tell you how it gladdens me to know that my instincts were on the mark about you. Win, lose, or draw on this idea of yours, I love that you feel strongly enough to come to me.”
A while back Gwendolyn had read in the Examiner about a woman named Rosa Parks who had refused to move to the back of a bus in Alabama. One of the final paragraphs mentioned that Parks was a seamstress, and this brave colored woman from the other side of the country had instantly become someone Gwendolyn could understand. She had tracked the unfolding developments of the resulting Montgomery bus boycott, and since then had made it her business to follow the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. and his call to bring an end to segregation. During this whole time, she had wondered if somehow she could play a part, no matter how small. But inspiration had failed her until it’d dawned on her that having a television show on a major network was a whole new ballgame.
Gwendolyn squared her shoulders. “Things don’t change on their own.”
Lucille picked up a pencil on her desk and jiggled it between her fingers. “Have you run this past your manager?”
“Oh yes!”
“What about Chesterfield?”
“Chuck and I decided the best course of action was to run it past you first, then CBS, and then Chesterfield.”
That had been Chuck’s idea. Chesterfield cigarettes were based in the South, where attitudes toward Negroes were exactly what Gwendolyn was trying to dislocate. If they could go to them and say, “Desilu and CBS are behind the idea . . .” maybe—just maybe—they might say yes.
“What do you think?” Gwendolyn prodded her.
“As a fellow member of the female persuasion who likes to think of herself as a trailblazer, I stand up and cheer you. But as a lone businesswoman in a man-heavy industry, I feel honor bound to warn you that men don’t like women who rock the boat. And boat-rockers usually end up at the bottom of the pond.”
“I’m not hearing ‘no,’” Gwendolyn said.
Lucille flipped the pencil into the air and caught it with one hand. “Give it your best shot.”
“So I have your blessing?”
“Nothing ventured and all that.”
One hurdle down, two to go.
Without the advantage of having Lucille Ball by her side, it took Gwendolyn a while to secure a meeting with the seven decision-makers whose authority she needed, but at least they looked happy to see her and not just because she was the caboose to Lucille Ball’s locomotive.
“Miss Brick!” Herbert Underhill was the West Coast head of CBS and a couple of notches down from Farley. Like most career-corporate types, he had a well-greased manner, charming to all and offensive to none. He asked Gwendolyn to take a seat. “We’ve been reviewing your Nielsen ratings and I’m happy to report that yours climb week on week.”
Gwendolyn cast out the smile she’d used on every man-on-the-make she’d encountered since landing in California. “I thought the Kim Novak interview went beautifully.”
A gush of murmured agreement swept around the room. Underhill played with his wristwatch without looking at it. “You have an idea?”
Gwendolyn rose to her feet. She wouldn’t be given many opportunities like this so she needed to be razor-sharp, persuasive, appealing, brave, and bold. With the precisely timed pauses and improvised gestures in place, her rehearsed pitch lasted three minutes and twelve seconds. Dale Carnegie couldn’t have done a better job and the speech poured out of her exactly as planned.
But as she sprinted into the home stretch, she could see that she’d already lost a one-horse race. Resistance burnished their faces like sunburn but she persevered, concentrating her efforts on the one man in the room who was nodding. It wasn’t a conspicuous nod—his head was moving up and down barely half an inch—but his eyes whooped, “Yes. Yes! YES!”
She pressed her fingertips to the smooth top of the conference table. “And that, gentlemen,” she concluded, “is what I’d like to do on my show.”
When Underhill spoke, his tone held all the pomposity she expected.
“Miss Brick, I want to thank you for taking the time to come see us, but for someone like you to share the stage with someone like that—”
“I’m just talking about having her come on and sing ‘Summertime.’ At no time would we be on screen together.”
Underhill looked to the man on his right, who shook his head. “The Southern states would be up in arms.”
“We don’t even air in the South.”
Underhill folded his hands together. “True enough; however, we’ve been looking at the feasibility of rolling your show out across the country.”
Going national had always been in the “Maybe One Day but Don’t Hold Your Breath” drawer. Gwendolyn had assumed they were years away—if they’d get there at all.
Underhill took advantage of her momentary speechlessness. “We want to wrestle television production from the grips of New York. The talent is here, facilities are far greater, and there’s room for expansion. Miss Brick, we think you’re doing a wonderful job. But at the first sign of a colored woman on a white woman’s TV show, we’d have to put on a team of extra telephone operators to take the flood of protest calls. Not to mention the loss of advertising.”
“How’s this for a compromise?” Underhill’s right-hand man said. “Instead of Ella Fitzgerald, how about Leslie Caron? She could sing one of her songs from Gigi.”
Gwendolyn ignored him. “What if my sponsor was okay with this idea?”
“But that’s just it.” Underhill didn’t pat her on the wrist like a kindly uncle pacifying a difficult ten-year-old, but his tone sure did. “We’re not okay with it. The answer is no.”
Gwendolyn sat in her Studebaker and stared out across the CBS Television City parking lot, wondering why she’d thought that meeting would have resulted in anything but a “Thanks but no thanks.”
She heard a knuckle rap against her window and wished for the very first time that she wasn’t becoming a publicly recognizable face. People were starting to approach her regularly now. After years of watching movie stars deal with fans, it was still a kick to find it happening to her. But not at this moment. Her disappointment was still too acute.
The knuckle rapped again. She looked up. It was the sole nodder from the meeting.
She rolled down her window. “Thanks for your support in there.”
“Not that it did you much good.” He had a warm snaggletoothed smile.
“Underhill rules the roost. I get it. Still, it’s nice to know that the vote wasn’t six to zero.”
He peered back toward the main building. “When I saw you sitting here, I had to come over and tell you not to give up.”
“I appreciate that, but no means no, right?”
“Television is like any other business. The impossible is considered impossible until someone does it.” He crouched down so that he was level to her window. “Those Jim Crow laws can’t last much longer. And I don’t just mean changes for Negroes. Women, too. You see it everywhere—am I right?”
“Television should reflect what’s really going on.”
“Exactly.”
“What do you do at CBS?”
“I’m the guy that liaises with our affiliates up and down the Pacific.” He jutted his head toward the main building. “They sit in their offices, reading reports. They’re not talking to real people out in the field.” He suddenly grimaced. “I love what you were trying to do in there. But next time, do it the other way around.”
“What way is that?”
“It’s the sponsors who hold all the cards. Get them on board first.” He tipped his hat and headed back inside the citadel.