"Fame, if you win it
Comes and goes in a minute...
Where's the real stuff in life to cling to?"

So go the lyrics from the wonderful song "Make Someone Happy" written by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Styne.  This was Lucille Ball's favorite song.  

Lucy, the first lady of comedy, the indomitable clown princess, the face seen by more people, more often than the face of any human being who ever lived!  Lucy, who knew how to make everyone happy!  And yet at the end of her life, the person she found most difficult to make happy was herself!

I know, because I was with Lucy for much of the last ten years of her life.  And I know I came into her life and she came into mine with the sole purpose of making each other happy! With so many areas of her life well supported, still Lucy was missing an important part of her Personal Safety Net: she didn't have a friend to keep HER laughing.

Let me back up a decade of so.  I was distantly related to Lucy through her second husband Gary Morton.  To be precise I was Gary Morton's sister's husband's first cousin's second son.  You see, what I mean-distantly related.  But when I met Lucy in 1980 at her home in Beverly Hills it was love at first sight and the distance between us melted away in minutes!

Although almost forty years separated us, we became the nearest and dearest of friends. Soon we became like mother and son, without all the mother and son "baggage."  It was a unique love affair that would last a decade until her death in 1989 at the age of seventy-seven.

So why was Lucy unhappy in the last years of her life?  You'd think she'd have every reason in the world for happiness.  She had fame-she won that along with our hearts decades ago as the zany Lucy Ricardo.  She had all the money she'd need for three lifetimes, and she had the respect of her children and the love of Gary who cared deeply and remained faithful until the end of her life.

Yes, an icon, yes, a legend, yes, a genius but like you and me Lucy was merely mortal.  At the end of her life Lucy was plagued with demons and delusions about her own self-worth that afflict most of us at some point in our lives.

Lucy was a great believer and proselytizer of Norman Vincent Peale's "The Power of Positive Thinking" (Peale married Gary and Lucy) and yet in the last decade of her life she felt increasingly unable to put that power to work in her own life. After she stopped working, she began drowning in a sea of self-doubt and low self-esteem.  She needed a new hand to hold an important corner of her personal safety net to pull her safely to shore.

And that's where I came in.  There was no way I was going to let her go under.  Not the lady who made the world laugh like it had never laughed before.  So despite my own career, a partner, and two adorable shih tzus, I spent as much time with Lucy in the last ten years of her life as I could, doing what she liked to do best-playing games.  She wasn't much for small talk, but she was big with games-scrambling five letter words, card games like Casino and Crazy Eights and when she discovered backgammon, it was like she had found a new television series:  Lucille Ball-Backgammon, with special houseguest star, Lee Tannen, me!  

We played and played and played all day every day and into the night until our hands couldn't roll the dice out anymore from the cup.  And I made her tell me stories about movie stars she loved and movie stars she loathed, the Presidents she met, the loved ones left behind and the seventy-six movies she made before television was even invented!  

Yes, she found in me, I am proud to say, the person to hold that unsupported corner of her personal safety net-her lifeline that brought her back to life, for the last ten years of her life. And I'd like to think, twenty years after her death, that with her personal safety net, she also found the one thing money and fame couldn't buy-happiness!

Editor's Note:  In 2001, Lee Tannen (Bronx born and longtime friend of our Managing Director) wrote the memoir I LOVED LUCY about his relationship to Lucille Ball in the last decade of her life; the "lost Lucy years," spent mostly out of the spotlight and believe it or not, for Lucy, mostly around a backgammon table. Lee's book was published by St. Martin's Press in hardcover and became an immediate best-seller, going into four printings, and was then published in paperback. In 2008 Lee adapted the memoir into a play--naturally enough, called I LOVED LUCY. It's had highly successful readings in New York and Los Angeles, and beginning in 2010 will be produced regionally throughout the country, (and hopefully, in Seattle too) with the plan to open in New York City just in time for the 100th Anniversary of Lucy's birth, August 6, 2011.
Photo credit: Tom Wells