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saying, “I tell you what, Jess, why don’t we make it alphabetical?”
    Because we were doing a live show, the cards bearing the title and credits had to be made up in advance. All of us had contributed possible names for the program. I had the long list of suggestions in front of me. It was time to choose. As I sat at my desk reading it for the tenth or eleventh time, I kept coming back to the same title: I Love Lucy. That’s the one, I decided. That conveys the essential nature of the show—an examination of marriage between two people who truly love each other. As I thought more about my choice, I realized that I had just solved another problem as well. The “I” in I Love Lucy was Desi. I had given him first-place billing after all.
    We needed a theme song. I immediately thought of my old friend Eliot Daniel, whose work included the Oscar-nominated song “Lavender Blue.”I called Eliot at his office at Twentieth Century-Fox, explained that Lucy was doing a TV audition program, and asked him if he’d write a theme for us.
    “Uh—I’ll do it for you, Jess,” he said, “but you’ll have to keep my name out of it.”
    “Why?”
    “Because my exclusive contract with Fox doesn’t run out until next year.”
    “That’s no problem. Your name won’t appear anywhere.”
    “Fine. When do you need it?”
    “Friday.”
    There was a second or two of silence.
    “Okay. What’s the name of the show?”
    “I Love Lucy.”
    “I’ll get back to you in a day or two.”
    A couple of days later, Eliot came over to the studio and he played the theme for me and Desi and a few others. We all loved it. He told us that he had been looking for an opening musical phrase that said I Love Lucy, and that as soon as hesettled on the first four notes, the rest of the song practically wrote itself.

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    Photo caption (next page):
    Composer Eliot Daniel at the piano.

    Friday, March 2, finally arrived. As I walked into my office that morning, a thought occurred to me. I’d been so busy putting the show together, I hadn’t even thought about the fact that I still hadn’t seen a draft of my contract for the TV series.In fact, I hadn’t even discussed my percentage deal with anyone since that first conversation with Harry.
    I needed an insurance policy. I sat down and began to type:
     
I LOVE LUCY
    Created by Jess Oppenheimer
This is a title of an idea for a radio and/or television program, incorporating characters named Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. He is a Latin-American orchestra leader and singer. She is his wife. They are happily married and very much in love. The only bone of contention between them is her desire to get into show business, and his equally strong desire to keep her out of it. To Lucy, who was brought up in the humdrum sphere of a moderate, well-to-do middle western, mercantile family, show business is the most glamorous field in the world. But Ricky, who was raised in show business, sees none of its glamour, only its deficiencies, and yearns to be an ordinary citizen, keeping regular hours and living a normal life. As show business is the only way he knows to make   a living, and he makes a very good one, the closest he can get to this dream is having a wife who’s out of show business and devotes herself to keeping as nearly a normal life as possible for him.
    The first story concerns a TV audition for Ricky, where Pepito, the clown, due to an accident, fails to appear and Lucy takes his place for the show. Although she does a bang-up job, she foregoes the chance at a career that is offered to her in order to keep Ricky happy and closer to his dream of normalcy.
     
    I took the page out of the typewriter and drove over to the Screen Writers’ Guild Office on Sunset Boulevard, where I paid the one-dollar registration fee and was given a receipt and a stamped carbon copy of the typewritten page. When I got back to my office I put both items in my filing cabinetand hoped that I would never need to use