The Lost Vivian Vance Hirschfeld!

The drawing above, by the master of the line and Broadway chronicler Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003) was done for a December 1941 issue of the New York Herald Tribune (Hirschfeld later drew for The New York Times, the paper with which he is perhaps best associated). Shown are Edith Meiser, Eve Arden, and Vivian Vance, as they appeared in the wartime musical Let's Face It. They played wives who missed their servicemen husbands' company, and contemplated having affairs.

The show opened on October 29, 1941, ran for 547 performances, and was Vance's biggest Broadway hit (she'd begun her stage career as an understudy to Ethel Merman in such musicals as Anything Goes (1934) and Red, Hot & Blue (1936). Eve Arden, of course, went on to movies, including her Oscar-nominated turn in Mildred Pierce (1945) and Our Miss Brooks on radio and television. Meiser eventually appeared several times on Vance's show I Love Lucy as Mrs. Littlefield, Ricky's boss's wife, most memorably in "Lucy's Schedule," in which Lucy and Ethel enlist her to help teach "the boys" a lesson.

Until I found this wonderful and historic drawing while researching at the New York Library of the Performing Arts, I could only document one drawing of Vance by Hirschfeld: a 1962/63 TV season promo done for CBS's The Lucy Show. This provides a nice bookend from another period in Vance's career, and raises the tantalizing question: how many more "lost" Hisrchfelds might exist... "out there"? I'll keep you posted.

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Text copyright © 2010 by Michael Karol; no text may be reprinted
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on any copyrights held by the creators. Drawing copyright ©estate of Al Hirschfeld.