Batty 'bout THE BAT: Battendum

I’d just written the last “Batty ‘bout THE BAT” post when I stumbled across this delightful remembrance by Jess Oppenheimer via his son, Gregg Oppenheimer.  I’ll let Gregg and Jess take it from here:

When my father was writing I LOVE LUCY, the question he got most often was, "Where do you get your ideas?" Some actually came from his own experiences. For example, "Ricky Thinks He's Getting Bald" grew out of Dad’s early experiments with baldness cures, including the mechanical "scalp agitator" that Lucy uses on Ricky. Dad even included a personal note about it in the script’s stage directions (see photo).

At a key moment in “Lucy and the Dummy," Lucy is unable to detach herself from a "Ricky" dummy during her performance at a studio party. This was inspired by something that happened to my father as a young stage actor in the 1930s. I'll let him tell the story:

"One of my most notable performances was in a play called 'The Bat,' in which I played the hero. In the last act I was revealed as a detective, and I was supposed to pull out a pair of handcuffs, snap them on the villain’s wrists, turn him over to a policeman to lead away, and proceed to carry on a torrid love scene with the leading lady, during which there were two full stage crosses. To add to the realism, we had borrowed a pair of real police handcuffs from the cop on the beat. I had them tucked into my trousers. When the fateful moment arrived, I revealed who I was, informed the other fellow that he was under arrest, snapped one of the cuffs on his wrist, and went to put the other on him. Some strange force was holding it back. The handcuff had somehow gotten locked around one of the belt loops on my trousers. The two of us, captive and captor, stood there vainly trying to get it off, pulling, tugging, trying to break the loop, but to no avail. After several minutes of this, the director stuck his head in through what was supposed to be a third-story attic window and growled, 'Get on with the play!'

"What followed was probably one of the strangest love scenes ever played. The only way the leading lady and I knew to play the scene was the way we had rehearsed it, but now here was this third party with his left hand attached to my trousers. If I crossed the stage, he crossed the stage. He did everything in his power to appear natural—ignoring us, looking around as though he were at a museum or about to measure the room for curtains. But when I took the leading lady in my arms, he was virtually between us. At the same time, the actor who played the policeman didn’t know what to do, because he had always made his exit early in the scene, with the criminal in tow. He couldn’t figure out a way to get offstage gracefully, so he stayed onstage, hoping he wouldn’t interfere with the action. Unfortunately, because he had always exited with the prisoner, he had never watched the rest of the scene being played. He inevitably managed to be standing just where we wanted to go. He spent the entire scene leaping out of our way.

"The scene was unbearably funny to the audience, particularly because we rose to the occasion, remembering all the good schooling and discipline our director had instilled in us, and played the scene exactly as rehearsed, ignoring with intense seriousness this human appendage we dragged through the love scene with us, to say nothing of the uniformed jumping jack. The director later told us that our discipline under fire had made him proud of us."

–from LAUGHS, LUCK...and LUCY, by Jess Oppenheimer

© Gregg Oppenheimer