Lucille Ball: A Biography

By Michael Karol

It's funny...I've written a biography of Lucille Ball -- though some refer to it as an encyclopedia, which, indeed, is part of its name -- and I've written three other books about the famous redhead, all somewhat biographical in nature. That is, if you read them, regardless of their format or main topic, you'll learn something about Lucy's life. But in all the years this web site's been up (since 1996, actually), I've never posted a bio here. I'm going to rectify that now, and since I can't do anything without investigating its full potential, I've added some information that's never, ever been seen or printed before, anywhere. So...a lot of what follows you'll know. But you'll still learn something. Enjoy!]

She’s the wackiest redhead we ever let into our living rooms. Her face, it’s been said, has been seen more times, by more people, than any other face in the history of the human race. She is one of those rare celebrities (well, super-mega-stars) identifiable by just her first name: Lucy. As with many comedians, her early life was not entirely a happy one.
      Born Lucille Desirée Ball in 1911, in Jamestown N.Y.—near Lake Erie in the western part of the state—Lucy’s first years saw her traveling with her impoverished mother Desiree (DeDe), and father, Henry, to wherever her father could find work. This included Montana and Michigan. The vagabond existence created in the young Lucille a strong desire to always have her family close to her, and ideally all in one house. This was a mission she wouldn’t be able to complete until after she’d become a minor success in Hollywood.
      Lucy’s dad died of typhoid fever when she was just 3, and her mother was pregnant with brother Fred. Perhaps as an escape from the dreary reality of her life, Lucy expressed an early love for putting on shows (she used to do so in her family’s living room) and being on the stage. Her grandfather, Fred Hunt, used to take her to see the vaudeville shows that passed through Jamestown, and it was said Lucy was particularly mesmerized by the monologists, like Harry E. Humphrey, and how they kept the audience glued to every word.
      Lucy acted in real plays, too, in elementary school, high school and throughout her little theater community in Jamestown and the region. Eventually, she got it in her head that she wanted to be on stage and command an audience like the vaudeville performers she’d loved. According to her brother, Fred, who spoke at one of the Lucy Jamestown festivals in 2005, “As a young girl she always on the go, always doing something, and kept every one of us busy worrying about her. Everything was a playhouse to her. Mom was supportive from day one…as long as Lucy was honest, and we were all honest with each other. We were all called on every day…” Called on to help with Lucy’s various productions…
      With mom DeDe’s blessing Lucy attended the John Murray Anderson School in New York City to learn about acting. The star pupil at the time was Bette Davis, and Lucy was intimidated by her; Lucy, however, needn’t have worried: She was told to go home—she was “wasting her mother’s money” as she “had no talent.”
      Lucy’s subsequent career is proof that there’s an actual reason not to take “No” for an answer. Within a year, circa 1927, Lucy was back in New York, getting modeling jobs (like billboard work as The Chesterfield Girl) and live gigs for designer Hattie Carnegie.
      She would have to bear several more personal tragedies as a youngster: the accidental shooting death of a Jamestown boy with a gun given to her brother, Fred, by her beloved Grandpa Hunt (after which trial the Hunts lost everything, and the family had to split up, Lucy’s worst nightmare); and a bout with rheumatoid arthritis, after which she needed to learn how to walk again.
      Being back in New York in the early thirties, unemployed during the Depression, was no fun—when she wasn’t looking for work, Lucy scoured diners to find leftover donuts; when she found one she ordered a cup of coffee—which was all she could afford—and sat down at the counter as if she belonged. That became lunch or dinner.
      Eventually, her perseverance, and modeling experience, paid off. It was just such experience in a gal that an agent was looking for one summer day, running into Lucy on the street. It was 1933. One of the girls going to Hollywood to test for Sam Goldwyn was pulled out of the running by her mother. Would Lucy be interested in taking the train trip west?
      Would she??!!!

On arrival in Hollywood, Lucy was christened a Goldwyn Girl and signed to a contract. She immediately sent for her family to come west and live with her. “She always had to have family around her,” brother Fred told me in 2005. “When she brought us all to Hollywood, that was the first time the family had gotten back together since splitting up in Jamestown. She also treated the people she worked with as family.” Fred ended up working for Lucy, then Lucy and Desi, in a variety of capacities. Eventually, Fred was put in charge of a lot of the accounting/financial operations. He set up the [Desilu] transportation dept, “from both ends—I would get it from the top and from the bottom.”
     Lucy was cast in her first movie, an Eddie Cantor vehicle called Roman Scandals (1933). Though it was little more than a glorified extra part, she straight away made herself stand out from the crowd of other girls by agreeing to take a pie in the face, or do whatever anyone asked of her…she didn’t care how her looks held up on camera, she just wanted the experience. Director Busby Berkeley noticed her and told Sam Goldwyn to watch out for “that one,” she’s going to be big.
     One of the other “girls” was blonde, beautiful Barbara Pepper. Lucy and Barbara became great friends, and when Pepper fell on hard times later in the 1940s and early 1950s, Lucy made sure she had work by casting her in I Love Lucy bit parts, six times between 1952 and 1955. Pepper, who also appeared in more than a hundred films, ended her career on a high note: as the gossipy Doris Ziffle on the TV hit Green Acres.
     Meanwhile, back in the thirties, Lucy racked up bit part after bit part, graduating to co-starring roles in unmemorable comedy shorts, and supporting roles in better pictures, like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ Follow the Fleet (1936). She was working steadily under contact at RKO, and finally made a real impression in the prestige pic Stage Door (1937) in which Lucy held her own against Katharine Hepburn, Rogers, and Eve Arden. After this film, Lucy would never be lower-billed than “co-star.”
      RKO gave her a two-film B series in which she played Annabel, an actress whose press agent has grand dreams for her. She made more of an impression in the low-budget but tense Five Came Back, 1939, as the proverbial hooker with a gold heart, who survives a nasty plane crash in south America and then has to survive the other survivors. The next year she filmed one of her best roles, as the cynical dancer/stripper Bubbles, in Dance, Girl, Dance, one of the few mainstream films to that time directed by a woman (Dorothy Arzner). RKO then cast her as the lead, a college cutie, in Too Many Girls (1940). Though the film is a decent enough college caper of its era, it’s more important for being the film on which Lucy met her future husband (and love of her life), Desi Arnaz, who played a supporting character in the movie (a Cuban college football star).
     The Cuban heartthrob, born in Santiago in 1917, had been forced to leave his native home in the thirties due to the Batista revolution (the Arnaz family was solidly part of the establishment). He graduated from cleaning birdcages in Miami while playing with local musicians, to branching out with Xavier Cougat, and finally popularizing the Conga nationwide leading his own band. He created his Girls role on Broadway and was the hit of the 1939 season, so it was a given he’d be asked to do the movie.
     Lucy and Desi fell immediately in love, and were married months after the movie was completed. After leads in several forgettable comedies, Lucy filmed one of her last RKO pictures, The Big Street, a 1942 Damon Runyon sudser co-starring Henry Fonda as a busboy in love with a hardened nightclub singer (Lucy). When her gangster lover cripples her, Fonda vows to give Lucy everything she wants. Brittle as cut glass and beautiful to boot, Lucy tore up the screen and finally proved to anyone who saw her that she could, indeed, act.
     As a result, she was offered a contract at MGM, then the Tiffany of movie studios, and she went there, following her pal Ann Sothern (who also toiled at RKO and then Columbia) and playing many of the same roles. In fact, Lucy’s first MGM role, as “herself” in Best Foot Forward, 1943, came about because Ann got pregnant and couldn’t do the film. This led to a series of Technicolor showcases for Lucy, including DuBarry Was a Lady (1943) and my favorite Lucy film of this era, Easy to Wed (1946). If you’ve ever wanted to see Lucy as a true drop-dead gorgeous movie star, those are the two pictures to see.
     In between she was loaned out occasionally (to do tight little films noir like The Dark Corner, 1946, and Lured, 1947), and filmed the occasional MGM prestige black-and-white pic (1945’s Without Love, which ostensibly starred haughty Kate Hepburn and lively Spencer Tracy but in reality showcased Lucy and Keenan Wynn, also her Easy to Wed co-star, who easily steal the picture). Bored with the choices of movies she was being given, Lucy took a big leap and signed to do a national stage tour of Dreamgirl, a comedy/fantasy in which her character was onstage and talking nearly 100 percent of the time. Dreamgirl was a smash all over during 1947, and reinforced the fact that Lucy was happiest when performing in front of a live audience.

To prove her point, she took on a weekly radio sitcom, My Favorite Husband, which ran for three successful years (1948-1951). Co-starring the likeable Richard Denning as her long-suffering spouse, it was here that Lucy began to fashion the character that would become the crowning achievement of her career: Lucy Ricardo. With the help of head writer Jess Oppenheimer (formerly of Fanny Brice’s Baby Snooks show), and writers Bob Carroll Jr. and Madelyn Pugh, Lucy and her fellow actors fashioned a weekly playlet involving the schemes of a slightly daffy housewife, who always wanted just a little more than she had. Sound familiar?
     All three scribes will follow Lucy from the radio show to television when CBS suggests the move.
     [Trivia Tidbit: Lucille Ball’s first appearance on television was as a panelist on the game show Pantomime Quiz in 1949. The show was later known as Stump the Stars.]
     At the same time, Lucy had been dabbling a bit more than usual in slapstick in her movies, such as The Fuller Brush Girl and Fancy Pants (both 1950), to great success.
     Lucy was insistent that Desi play her TV hubbie; she wanted to work with him side-by-side after nearly a decade of having separate (and often geographically distant) show-biz careers. CBS balks at first; who will believe, execs asked, that Lucy was married to a Cuban bandleader? “But I am!” Lucille insisted. Lucy and Desi took to the streets (actually, a series of movie theaters) with a vaudeville act to prove that audiences do accept them as a duo. It was a smash success.
     But one more thing was necessary in order to make it work: Desi wanted the series filmed, which would make it look a lot nicer and polished than the grainy, often lined kinescoped product most of the country saw (a show was normally at that time produced and then filmed or videotaped off a studio monitor; those copies were what the rest of the country saw). And Lucy needed to perform in front of a live audience. Film and a live audience meant more money (a studio with bleacher had to be built, for example). Lucy and Desi agreed to salary cuts with the stipulation that they owned the films. CBS agreed. When Lucy and Desi sold those films back to CBS for somewhere between $4-$5 million in the late 1950s, the rerun was born.
     A pilot version of I Love Lucy was filmed in 1950. Lucy and Desi played Lucy and Larry Lopez; the showbiz theme was very much in evidence, but the Mertzes were nowhere in sight. Perhaps that was because everyone assumed that sponsors could be sold solely on Lucy and Desi. They were right.
     [Ball and Arnaz together took home $4,000 a week that first season of I Love Lucy. By comparison, Roseanne Barr was taking home $30,000 an episode in the early 1990s, when she was put on the cover of TV Guide dolled up as Lucy Ricardo and the question was asked, “Is Roseanne the new Lucy?” We can now safely answer that with a big “No.”]
     I Love Lucy was sold, and casting commenced. First choices for the neighborly and co-meddling Mertzes were Lucy’s radio co-stars, Gale Gordon and Bea Benaderet, but both had already begun long runs on hit TV show, Gordon in Our Miss Brooks (1952-1956), Benaderet in The Burns & Allen Show (1950-1958). Every character actor and actress of a certain age was considered, including Oscar-nominee James Gleason (for 1941’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan), but it was said he demanded too much money.
     Barbara Pepper, Lucy’s Goldwyn Girl pal, desperately wanted to play Ethel Mertz, but Desi had already hired a known alcoholic (and suspected troublemaker) to play Fred Mertz: movie and stage veteran William Frawley. Desi made Frawley (right) promise that his drinking or offstage escapades would never affect the series, and they never did. But the thought was, why risk working with two drinkers? (Pepper had lost her husband several years before in a tragic accident, and her drinking had escalated.)
     Desi ended up hiring Vivian Vance after going to see her perform in San Diego as the sarcastic best friend, Olive Lashbrooke, in The Voice of the Turtle, at the suggestion of I Love Lucy’s first-year director Marc Daniels, a friend of Vance’s. Desi saw her and lit up, proclaiming, “That’s our Ethel!”
     Several problems: Vance had just completed small parts in two films and was optimistic about a film career. She’d starred on Broadway and toured in both plays and musicals. She wasn’t sure she wanted to do a television series. But she said yes, tentatively. A bigger problem: She and Lucy had never met; they did so several days before filming the first episode of I Love Lucy. Though Lucy initially thought Vance was too pretty and sophisticated looking to play frumpy Ethel, Vance convinced her that she “filmed frumpy.” That attitude, plus Vivian’s willingness to rehearse as much as was needed to perfect the comedy they performed, ultimately won Lucy over. (At left, Vance enthusiastically chats up the show to a reporter.)
     [Trivia Tidbit: Vance’s contract did not stipulate, as legend has it, that she remain 20 pounds overweight while playing Ethel. That urban legend is a result of a “gag contract” Lucy presented to Vance in the 1950s, which Vance brought out and read for an appearance with Lucy on Dinah! (April 1975).]
     When I Love Lucy debuted on October 15, 1951, it was an instant hit. Everything that Lucy and Desi had put together, from the cast to the innovative filming technique using three cameras (and Oscar-winning cinematographer William Freund) to the writing and direction clicked. Here’s what it was like, according to someone who there: Dann Cahn, the film editor for I Love Lucy during its entire run.
      Cahn got the job through Bill Asher. Asher was initially approached about it, but he’d already graduated to directing, and recommended Cahn for the position; they’d interned together in the production department at Universal.
     Cahn recalls, “The first half-hour show, we shot four cameras on it. After that show, we dispensed with the fourth camera and it became a three-camera show, because it suited our purposes to have one camera getting a master, or full shot, of the scene, and the other two cameras getting over-the-shoulder, or medium shots, and close-ups.” Cahn was the person who (along with assistant Bud Molin) edited the multiple camera scenes together on a unique moviola device created for Desilu, that Cahn jokingly referred to as the three-headed monster (it now rests in the Lucy-Desi Museum vaults in Jamestown). (That's Cahn below as he looks these days inset into a shot of the younger Cahn and the "three-headed monster.")
     Cahn believes, “The reason for my success in editing the show was getting a good handle on the three-camera editing technique, and quickly. As for Desi’s input, he and Jess [Oppenheimer was a producer as well as head writer] usually went over the scenes to determine the exact edits…with Desi and Lucy’s approval, of course.”
     The mood during the first executive screening was tense. A lot of money had been invested, and careers were on the line, says Cahn: “I remember sitting in the projection booth, and it was very quiet after we ran it, we had all these advertising people there, and all the CBS executives along with Jess Oppenheimer. No one said a word after we ran that first picture. Lucy broke the silence, and she said, ‘Danny, that’s a good first cut.’ Then everyone chimed in and said, ‘Yeah, the picture looked really great.’”
     When Dann realized he and Bud would need help to get a finished product filmed, edited, copied and distributed each week, he asked Desi to hire his friend Quinn Martin (who was later married to Lucy writer Madelyn Pugh) to be the sound editor. Desi joked to Cahn that his editing department would soon be as big as his band, but the joke became a prophecy one year later.

Asher came to the series in its second year; his first episode directing I Love Lucy was “Job Switching” (aka "The Candy Factory”), which is usually cited as the classic Lucy episode. Asher stayed on to direct another 105 episodes of the series. He helped launch Make Room for Daddy and The Whiting Girls for Desilu, and is perhaps best known as the creative force and director behind Bewitched (1964-1972; he was also married to the show’s star, Elizabeth Montgomery, at the time).
     I Love Lucy was a family affair; Lucy loved to put her family and people she’d worked with previously into positions at Desilu. Asher’s first wife, Danny Sue Nolan, played the MGM secretary in the famous William Holden episode. Asher himself had a walk-on in the Richard Widmark Hollywood episode.
     Still, families argue, and everyone found him or herself in the hot seat at one time or another.
     Asher, for example, found out on his first day of work that rumors of Lucy “testing” co-workers to see how much moxie they had were true. Asher remembers the encounter as Lucy giving him too much direction. “Lucy,” Asher recalled saying, “‘There’s one director here and that’s me, and you’re paying me to do it. If you want to direct, go ahead, and you won’t have to pay anyone!’ Lucy broke down in tears and ran off the set, and I retired to the men's room—I didn’t yet have an office! I finally returned to the set and met Desi, who starting yelling at me in Spanish, until I said, ‘Desi, give it to me in English, please.’ After hearing the story, Desi was very understanding, and agreed with me, but told me ‘to find Lucy in her dressing room and bring her back to the set.’ I did, she and I hugged and cried for a few minutes; then Lucy pulled herself together and went back to work. After that,” Asher concluded, “I never had another problem with Lucy.”
     One of Cahn’s most important bits of business was editing the episodes so they’d fit the required running time (about twenty-five minutes, plus commercials to fill a half hour, back then). The problem was, the show was too funny, and audience laughter and reaction would inevitably stretch it three or four minutes longer than it was supposed to be. Cahn needed to trim these laughs very carefully in order to preserve the momentum of the show. He was a success—CBS and the William Morris Agency both pegged Desilu for production responsibilities on their shows.
      “What stands out the most for me,” says Cahn, “is editing the I Love Lucy Movie. The success of the show inspired Desi to string three episodes together and release it as a feature film.” And Cahn, of course, was picked to edit it.
     Long thought lost, the movie was produced in 1953, at the height of I Love Lucy’s success, and was basically three season one episodes (“The Benefit,” “Breaking the Lease,” and “The Ballet”) put together with new connecting footage. The new footage was shot by Lucy’s longtime pal and director Ed Sedgwick (he directed her in perhaps her best MGM comedy showcase, 1946’s Easy to Wed). It was Sedgwick who suggested making the movie a “show within a show,” framing it around what it would be like to be in the I Love Lucy audience, so that the laughter and applause on a typical Lucy episode wouldn't seem out of place. The movie opens as the audience files in to see the show, and ends as they leave. At the start, Desi Arnaz is seen warming up the crowd, and introduces his three co-stars. At the end, the actors break character to take a bow. We follow a couple in the audience (Ann Doran and Benny Baker) as they watch the movie.
     Cahn, who introduced the movie for the first time in 50 years at the 2005 Jamestown, N.Y. Lucy Fest, remarked that he had searched long and hard (for five years!) to find a print of the movie, which even “insiders” like original I Love Lucy writers Carroll and Pugh, thought might not have ever existed. Dann finally found the print in a Paramount Studios vault, listed as a Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse production… It was lost all those years since no one would have thought to look for it in a Desilu series archive.
      And the real reason it was lost to begin with, said Cahn, was that “We’d previewed it before an audience in Bakersfield (California) including MGM production chief Dore Schary and producer Pandro Berman. They came to us afterward and noted they [MGM] were releasing The Long, Long Trailer next Valentine's Day (1954), and they’d appreciate it if our ‘little’ I Love Lucy Movie wasn’t competing with it.” Desilu graciously withdrew its planned release of the movie, and it was promptly shelved and forgotten...until Cann’s discovery. The 2005 Jamestown screening was only the second time in more than 50 years that the movie was shown before a live audience.”
     Cahn’s personal favorite of any Lucy scene is “…Vitameatavegamin. When she gets progressively drunk, I thought it was a memorable piece of acting above and beyond the pratfalls and the pies in the face and all the obvious things. Being onstage all by herself with no cards or anything, it stands out. I also loved the bread-making episode and the ones where we went cross-country, and they decided to open the show up, instead of just three walls, so we could go outside.”
     Asher said this about Lucy: “She was a great gal, and a great lady. As a comedian, she was a natural. Her instincts were sharp, and she loved to work. She worked to perfection in all she did.” That included once she found herself pregnant after the first season. According to Asher, “When you discover your leading lady was ‘in the family way’”—it became a juggling feat, once Desi fixed it so that the pregnancy could be part of the show, a first for a nationally broadcast series—to film as many episodes as possible before Lucy “showed” too much, and then film wrap-around scenes for a half-dozen or so flashbacks, essentially repeats that would be aired to give Lucy time off. “It was difficult for her, but she managed very well,” Asher recalled in Jamestown. “It was hard for her [as big as she got] to get around and make all the moves…but she did.”
     Lucy had her own beliefs as to the initial and continuing success (in reruns) of her show. She had wanted to create a female lead character the audiences could identify with, someone who wasn’t out of reach of Mr. and Mrs. America, but could have lived next door. Thus, Ricky Ricardo was always just thisclose to immense fame. The things that Lucy wanted (a new hat, dress, dishwasher, or furniture) were extremely akin to what audiences of the fifties and beyond also desired. But mostly, she told TV Guide in 1959, “It’s so important to have what I like to call the enchanted sense of play. Many, many times you should think and react as a child in doing comedy. All the inhibitions and embarrassments disappear. We did some pretty crazy things in I Love Lucy, but we believed every minute of them. It’s like getting drunk without taking a drink.”
     The pregnancy episodes (late 1952-early 1953) brought Lucy (and Desilu) to new heights of success and viewership (44 million viewers, or 71 percent of the viewing population, watched Lucy Ricardo ‘give birth’ to Little Ricky). As Desilu expanded, Cahn found himself doing more than just editing. “I came across country when they went to Hollywood, and I drove that Pontiac with a crew (for the episodes in which the Ricardos and the Mertzes traveled to Hollywood)…and then there was another trip to Florida for the episode in which Elsa Lanchester guest-starred. Desi and Jess had me go on all those excursions with second-unit camera-people and doubles (for the actors), and it was a lot of fun.
      “Everyone had their own personal triumphs; mine was when I shot the second unit of the helicopter landing on the U.S.S. Constitution in New York harbor (for the “Bon Voyage” episode) And I actually went to New York and did it [a friend of his wife Judy doubled for Lucy when Lucy Ricardo was dangling from the helicopter]. Also, I was sent to Havana, Cuba, to pick up location shots for the debut of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, ‘Lucy Takes a Cruise to Havana,’ and I got there at the right time because Castro was busting out big time and Desi was screaming at me over the phone, ‘Get the film and get back home!’ That Havana trip, getting involved with the mob and Castro making I Love Lucy, was my personal highlight of the 10 years I was there.”
     Regarding the personalities involved in I Love Lucy, Cahn had this to say: “Lucy was as demanding a perfectionist as we’ve heard. Desi was more laid back…except when he got mad, his eyes popped out and he could be a terror. Vivian and Bill had their differences. The feud with her and Frawley is overblown. She was about the same age as Lucy, and Viv didn’t like the image of being a stuffy old lady. In the next series [The Lucy Show], which I wasn’t involved with, Viv got to slim down and wear different kinds of clothes, and she felt better about it, but we (laughing) usually had her looking like the sloppy wife of Bill Frawley. She didn’t love doing that, but she did it.”
     [Trivia Tidbit: Vance in fact hated working with Frawley so much that she refused to consider the idea of a Mertz spin-off, which no doubt could’ve run for years and brought her enough money so that she’d never have to work again. Her turning it down was the final break in the relationship between her and Frawley.]
     Lucy and Desi had bought the former RKO Studios (where both had worked in B movies early in their careers) for a bargain $6 million in 1957, to expand the Desilu facilities. By 1960, Desilu was grossing more than $20 a year, more than some of Hollywood’s big movie studios. Desilu produced more than 30 series in its heyday, including Our Miss Brooks, December Bride, all the Lucy series up through The Lucy Show, and the controversial, violent success, The Untouchables (1959-1963). When Robert Stack (who played Elliott Ness) won an Emmy for Best Series Lead in 1960, producer Arnaz had a $12,000 Mercedes Benz waiting for Stack in the parking lot, claiming it was his win or lose, according to The Big Book of Show Business Awards, 1997. The TV Guide TV Book (1992) offers this roster of leading men who were offered the Elliott Ness part before Stack, proving that there is no such thing as mercurial in show business as casting: Van Heflin, Van Johnson, Fred MacMurray, Jack Lord, and Cliff Robertson.
      Sadly, also in 1960, Lucy and Desi finally divorced, after 20 tumultuous years. Oh, they still loved each other, all right, they just couldn’t live together. Each picked a less fiery, more domestic-type partner within several years: Lucy chose Catskills comic Gary Morton, Desi another vibrant redhead named Edie Hirsch.
     After divorcing Desi, Lucy made it a total break and took the kids to New York, planning to star in her first Broadway musical, Wildcat. Though she worked her butt off, and got wonderful personal reviews, the book of the musical was savaged by critics. (One of the show’s hit songs, “Hey, Look Me Over,” became forever associated with Lucy.) Even though Wildcat’s story was weak, as long as Lucy starred in it, it made money. But she overestimated her own energy, and her emotional state, which led to a physical collapse. When Lucy left the show, Wildcat closed.
     Once recuperated, Lucy decided to return to what she did best: TV. She insisted she wouldn’t come back without her pal and sidekick, Vivian Vance, and after months of cajoling, Vance was convinced to do the show. In it, her character would be called Vivian and she’d get to wear nice clothes. This was a big plus for her, a step away from Ethel Mertz. In the two years since finishing The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, Vance had returned to her first love, the stage, had a facelift, and remarried. She and book-editor husband John Dodds lived in Connecticut, so Vance commuted every week to do The Lucy Show, starting in the fall of 1962.
     Though basically I Love Lucy without the men, The Lucy Show was an immediate hit, like its predecessor, and ran for six years. The first two seasons, in glorious black-and-white, showcase some of the best Ball/ Vance slapstick ever, as they acted like kids (right), attempted to install a TV antenna, fix a broken shower, find a lost contact lens in cake batter, and sleep in bunk beds with the use of stilts. The Lucy Show was in the top five shows for four of those years, and finished its run in 1968 at number two. By then, Vance had left, tired of commuting, and was only an occasional guest. Lucy, who realized she could not replace her comedy pal, survived on guest stars for the rest of the series’ run, and expanded the role of blustery banker Gale Gordon (left).
     In 1966 her I Love Lucy co-star William Frawley died; ironically, his final TV appearance was a cameo on The Lucy Show. Frawley had gone from The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour to a supporting role in the Fred MacMurray hit My Three Sons (1960-1972). Frawley stayed as long as he could be insured (1965), and was then forced to leave. At his passing, Desi took out a full-page ad in the trade paper Variety that showed a picture of Frawley and said underneath, "Buenos Noches, Amigo" ("Goodnight, my Friend").
     In 1962, Lucy had bought out Desi’s share of Desilu (spending more than $2.5 million for 300,350 shares of stock), becoming the first woman to head a major Hollywood Studio and the highest-ranking TV executive in the world. She often complained about running the business end, and eventually sold it to Paramount in 1967 for a then-hefty $17 million. Two of her final acts at Desilu were giving the go-ahead for pilots called Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. Some have surmised that since The Lucy Show was a Desilu Production (its final one) Lucy ended it and changed formats in 1968 to avoid paying any money to her old studio.
     In any case, she set up Lucille Ball Productions and went ahead with Here’s Lucy, her third sitcom hit, in which her kids, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Jr., played major supporting roles (along with Gale Gordon, this time playing “Uncle Harry”). Desi left after three seasons to pursue a movie career, and Lucy and the rest held out for three more years, by which time the show had sunk from a high of being the number three program on the air (the 1970-71 season) to dropping out of the Top 25 by its final season (1973-74).
     Desi Sr., meanwhile, had formed his own company, Desi Arnaz Productions, and had a minor hit in The Mothers-in-Law (1967-1969), which starred Eve Arden and Kaye Ballard. It was the only pilot he produced that went on to become a series. He made the occasional guest appearance (hosting Saturday Night Live in 1976) and movie, and wrote a best-selling autobiography (A Book), but mostly seemed happy out of the public eye. Eventually, he and Lucy warmed up and bonded all over again with their grandchildren, from Lucie Arnaz’s marriage to actor Laurence Luckinbill.
     Once Lucy stopped filming a weekly series—March 21, 1974 was the date the final new episode of Here’s Lucy aired—she settled for a series of specials and the rare TV-movie (1985’s The Stone Pillow, in which she played way against type as a homeless bag lady). During this period she lost two people who were very important to her personally and professionally: her mother, DeDe (in 1977) and her comic partner, Vivian Vance (in 1979). Her mom had sat in the audience of every show Lucy had ever done, except her final one, Lucy Calls the President. (Ball and Vance last appeared together on that 1977 special.) It is said Ball broke up and couldn’t go on for a while when she realized that, for the first time, her mother was not out there cheering her on.

Vance, meanwhile, having done sporadic TV work in the seventies but mostly performing on stage, had found happiness (via residuals) as Maxine, the Maxwell House Coffee spokesperson, in a series of TV commercials. She’d already suffered a stroke by 1977, and was fighting breast and bone cancer on top of it. Lucy and fellow comedienne (and friend) Mary Wickes trekked to San Francisco, where Vance was living with her husband, for one final, bittersweet goodbye to the woman who defined the TV sitcom’s nosy but lovable neighbor.
     Ball found she missed working, and grew tired of just showing up to accept awards and honors. When the opportunity to star in weekly sitcom came up, courtesy of Aaron Spelling (who, as an actor, had a bit part on an episode of I Love Lucy), Lucy grabbed it. Unfortunately, audiences did not want to see Lucy as a frisky grandmother in Life with Lucy, and the writing and format were stuck back in the seventies, the last time she was on a weekly series.
      For the first time since she’d appeared on TV, reviews were horrific for Lucy personally, and the ratings dropped precipitously after the first airing. Though guest star Audrey Meadows and Lucy had real chemistry when Meadows played her sister in one episode, by then it was too late. The series was yanked in the fall of 1986 after airing only eight episodes; the rest remain with the entire series stored at the Lucy-Desi Museum in Jamestown, N.Y. (they were donated by Spelling) to be shown sometime in the future at one of the Museum’s Lucy festivals.
      On December 22, 1986 Lucy was honored with the Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award, which must have helped ease the pain of the cancellation of her final series, but couldn’t have helped much to console the loss of her first husband, and the true love of her life, Desi Arnaz, who’d died of lung cancer earlier in December. After I Love Lucy, Ball never hesitated to give the lion’s share of credit for the show’s success to Arnaz, something Hollywood only did after his death: “At his death,” Cahn recalls, “there were only a handful of us that went down to the funeral from Hollywood [to scatter his ashes]…the two writers, Bob and Madelyn, Danny Thomas, Bill Asher and myself. Very few people [in the Hollywood community] acknowledged their respect for Desi at the time.”
      Desi’s remembrances of Lucy for the Kennedy Center tribute—read by Desilu star Robert Stack (The Untouchables)—were particularly touching, especially his noting that “I Love Lucy” was "never just a title." Arnaz and the show itself were posthumously enshrined in the Television Academy Hall of Fame, several years after Lucy herself was similarly honored as one of the first inductees (1984).
      After the Kennedy Center, Lucy would make public appearances mostly to accept awards, honor other performers, or for charity. Her last public appearance, fittingly with longtime co-star (four movies, lots of TV) and pal Bob Hope, was at the 1989 Academy Awards. Looking positively radiant in a gown with the dress slit up to her thigh showing off her still-shapely gams, Lucy and Bob bantered and presented the “stars of the future.” It’s unlikely any of them will ever have the impact Ball or Hope has had.
      Lucy was rushed to Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles several weeks later, and died a week after that, on April 26, of a ruptured aorta. Her condition was reported to have been improving, so Lucy’s death was a shock to the world. And the world mourned her for weeks as it might mourn a beloved president or head of state.
      The honors and tributes continued on a multiple basis, year after year, and still come. For, in truth, who has given the world more laughter than Lucille Ball? Who has made people forget their troubles and smile in the worst of situations more than Lucy and company? And who is needed, perhaps more than ever, to shine an uplifting light on all of us? In a world where we deal with death and destruction and poverty and sadness on an hourly basis, we can say of Lucy, “She made us laugh.” She still does. And that’s all she needed to do.

[Author pic with Lucy, Desi and Vivian
taken at The Lucy-Desi Museum, Jamestown, NY.]

The End

Text ©2006 by Michael Karol; all pics copyright their respective owners.
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