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I pointed out to him that under my contract I was to get a substantial percentage of any new radio or television show that I created for the network. Harry offered me 20 percent. I accepted.
    Lucy and Desi’s agreement with CBS called for an audition program to be delivered to the network in less than six weeks, but we still had no series concept. We held brainstorming meetings at CBS Columbia Square, trying to come up with an acceptable premise for a TV series for Lucy and Desi. We were all asking ourselves, “What do you do with a comedienne and a Cuban orchestra leader?” And then one day I hit upon an idea that I thought might work. I turned to Harry Ackerman, who was seated next to me at the conference table, and I said “Why don’t we do a show about a middle-class working stiff who works very hard at his job as a bandleader, and likes nothing better than to come home at night and relax with his wife, who doesn’t like staying home and is dying to get into show business herself?” That was the nucleus.CBS liked the idea, and, best of all, so did Lucy.
    Bob and Madelyn cut short a European vacation tocome home and work on the pilot with me.With only a few weeks to complete a script and put the whole production together, we decided to use a routine about wills that the three of us had written for My Favorite Husband .That scene, plus about seven minutes of physical gags and dialogue from Lucy and Desi’s vaudeville act, formed the core of the audition program. In the show, Ricky has a TV audition for his band, and he sends Lucy to deliver the wills to a lawyer’s office downtown to get her out of the way. Lucy inadvertently learns of Ricky’s showand unexpectedly shows up in it.
    That was it. There was no time spent in testing the idea with the public. All we had to go on was that Lucille Ball had been playing a certain kind of character in radio, and the public liked her.
    The only other characters in the show were Pepito the Clown, played by Pepito himself, and Ricky’s agent, Jerry, played by Jerry Hausner. When I called Jerry to offer him the part, he was so excited at the prospect of being a regular in a television series that he immediately called his father, told him the news, and offered to buy him his own television set.
    Jerry’s father was an elderly Hungarian immigrant who lived alone in an apartment on Vine Street.The only television he had ever seen was the one in the front window of Barker Brothers furniture store on Hollywood Boulevard, where every Friday night he stood outside and watched the wrestling matches. He couldn’t hear a thing through the thick plate glass, of course, but with wrestling that didn’t really matter. When Jerry offered to buy him a TV set, his father surprised him by declining the offer. But Jerry was even more surprised by the reason his father gave him. “Not yet,” he advised Jerry. “Just wait. Wait until they get sound. They’ll figure it out one of these days. You’ll see. Just like they did with the movies.”
    Because of a scheduling change, we were now set to go before the TV cameras in CBS Studio A on Friday, March 2—Desi’s thirty-fourth birthday. To show the audition to potential sponsors, we would make a kinescope, which was a film taken off the closed-circuit TV tube.
    I was beginning to get a little nervous about the timing.Lucy was five months pregnant, and showing quite a bit. And we still lacked was a name for the show. The script on my desk simply said “So and so presents LUCY starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz,” but “Lucy” was just a working title. And Desi was still giving me a problem about the credits. He just couldn’t understand why we had Lucy’sname ahead of his. Why couldn’t he be first? After about a week of going back and forth with him on this, I had finally managed to convince him on the basis that it was the “gallant” thing to do—to let the lady go first. But even then he had come back to me one more time,