Be honest: when you see or think of Lucille Ball, do you really have anything other than her comic antics as the star of the Classic TV sitcom I Love Lucy come to mind? It’s pretty much the way that most people view her, and yet her road to that iconic television series — and the character of zany redhead Lucy Ricardo — was a long one, spanning some 20 years, more than 70 movies and her own radio show. Quite the pre-Lucy life.
Chronicling all of it has been author Michael Karol, perhaps one of the foremost authorities on the actress, who has written the books Lucy A to Z: The Lucille Ball Encyclopedia, The Lucy Book of Lists, The Lucille Ball Quiz Book, Lucy in Print and The Comic DNA of Lucille Ball. His “in” to the subject came from the nanny that babysat him when he was a kid in the 1960s, and her penchant for the soap opera Edge of Night and reruns of I Love Lucy.
“Obviously great comedy just never goes out of style,” he offers in explanation of his fascination for the latter, “but it was Lucy and Ethel for me from the beginning; Lucy and Vivian Vance. Something about them was just magic.”
Lucy Meets World
Lucille Desiree Ball was born August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York to parents Henry Durrell and Desiree “DeDe” Evelyn Ball. As Michael explains it, “Lucy’s early life is very tragic, which I guess is true of many people who become very well-known comedians. Her father was a telephone lineman and he dragged the family out from New York to Montana and then to New Jersey for his job. He died when she was 3 years old, an event that really scarred and colored most of her life, because her mother had to take care of the family. It was kind of a hardscrabble existence, but by all accounts she was a very joyous child. Or as much as she could be.”
“From there,” says Michael, “she got a love for the idea of being on stage. She loved to do plays. She would perform in her house; they had a curtain set up that separated the living room from the hall where you walked in, and she would put on shows. Everything was okay for a while, until her brother Fred got a .22 caliber rifle from their beloved grandfather at a birthday party. He accidentally shot it at one of the other kids they were playing with and that kid ended up seriously injured. After that, the grandfather was run out of Jamestown, so that’s why they moved all around. Later she came back and attended Jamestown High School, where she hung around with kind of a rough crowd.”
The Start of Her Career
In 1925, when Lucy was just 14, part of that rough crowd she hung out with was 21-year-old Johnny DeVita, a local hood. Her mother was completely against the relationship and, after about a year, scraped together the money to send her to the John Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts in New York City, believing it would result in the end to the couple. She was right, though Lucy was far from encouraged by her instructors who felt she didn’t have the necessary talent. Needless to say, she tried to prove them wrong. In 1928, she returned to New York where she found work with fashion entrepreneur Hattie Carnegie as an in-house model, where she ended up dying her brown hair blonde. She was doing well for two years when she was sidelined by a bout of rheumatoid arthritis. “She was confined to a wheelchair,” Michael notes, “and had to learn to walk all over again, supposedly. And when she did, she went back to New York and tried to make it as a model.”
“The thing about Lucy,” he continues, “is that her personal quality enabled her to become a show business and, ultimately, world legend. That quality was perseverance, plus this never-say-die attitude and the desire to make something better of herself for her family so she could keep them together. From her father dying, she needed to have a family near her and not just her mother and brother, but her cousins and grandparents and whoever could be there. So that was a major impetus in her having a career, making money and keeping them together.”
Chesterfield Girl to Hollywood
In 1932 Lucy came back to New York where she tried to make it as an actress, working for Hattie Carnegie to make some money in the meantime, and finding herself on posters and billboards as one of the Chesterfield cigarette girls. “Lucy was down to almost nothing and living on — this is what she said — leftover New York diner coffee and donuts; she would wait for someone to leave and if they hadn’t finished their donuts, she would run over and grab it and pretend that she had left the tip. Or take the tip,” Michael notes. “What happened is that she ran into an agent on the street who spotted her and recognized her from the billboards and asked Lucy if she wanted to go to Hollywood. She did and started out as a bit player in dozens of movies. Usually her first movie is credited as 1933’s Roman Scandals, starring Eddie Cantor, but they’ve discovered earlier movies she had small parts in. She had no speaking parts in most of them and in others just a couple of lines. But she was always watching and learning from her fellow actors, from the crew, from the directors, the lighting people, the prop people and everyone else.”
A Pie in the Face Changes Everything
“The legend,” says Michael, “is that on Roman Scandals, one of the girls refused to take a mud pie in the face, fearing it would hide her beauty on screen. Well, Lucy stepped up and took her place. The director was Busby Berkeley who is said to have told Eddie Cantor to get that girl’s name; that she was the one who was going to make it. While you can’t deny that Lucy’s natural beauty at the time was her ace in the hole, Hollywood was, is and always will be filled with beauties ready for their close-ups. But Lucy was a comedian that combined looks and slapstick comedy so effectively. So her bit parts in movies turned into supporting parts and then starring roles in the late ’30s when she became known as the ‘Queen of the Bs.’ Along the way she began showing some real talent and eventually was signed with RKO.”
“Along the way,” he elaborates, “got what was going to be her own series of films playing a character named Annabel Allison, a dizzy actress whose press agent was always getting her into trouble. He was played by Jack Oakie, a friend of hers, who, after the second movie, which was a success in the late ’30s, apparently asked for a salary that was commensurate with the budget of the picture, because he was a better known star. So they couldn’t make any more, which was OK because, by then, Lucy was getting important parts in movies like Stage Door with Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers and Eve Arden — which was probably Lucy’s best early movie.”
He points to 1940’s Dance, Girl, Dance as another example of her onscreen evolution. In it, Maureen O’Hara plays a dancer who wants to do ballet and Lucy’s character is a stripper named Bubbles. “It’s these two women who want to be dancers, but Lucy’s character basically just wants money. In the end, Bubbles ends up more famous as a stripper after she leaves the group they were a part of and Maureen O’Hara ends up being her stooge on stage in Vaudeville. It’s like she would come out and try and do ballet and the audience would laugh at her. Then Lucy would come out an do a strip and they’d start applauding. A very interesting script for 1940, directed by the first female director in Hollywood, Dorothy Arzner, and starring these two strong women. It was put in the National Registry of Film, so it’s considered an important movie.”
Another significant role was 1942’s The Big Street, which paired Lucy up with Henry Fonda. Describes Michael, “A hokey tale, but it got her a lot of notice and good reviews. MGM noticed and signed her in 1942 and for her first or second movie there, they changed her hair color. The guy who was the hair stylist at MGM, Sydney Guilaroff, was the first hairdresser to get screen credit. He is responsible for a lot of the famous women whose hair you may know from the ’40s, including Lucy. He said something like, ‘Her hair may be brown, but her spirit’s on fire.”
‘Technicolor Tessie’
Continues Michael, “So the idea is, ‘Let’s make her a redhead,’ and he came up with some crazy combination that resulted in a blazing red. The first couple of movies she made at MGM were both musicals and in 1943’s Best Foot Forward, she replaced a pregnant Lana Turner in what was a cute little movie. Lucy looked beautiful and was in color. In fact, that year she was nicknamed by the Hollywood crews ‘Technicolor Tessie,’ because she photographed so well. Unfortunately, MGM didn’t really know what to do with her either, a beautiful woman who was very funny. She ended up sitting around a lot waiting for the next picture. The only good thing that came out of that was that people like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd were also sitting around doing nothing. Buster Keaton, for example, schooled her on using props and Harold Lloyd, one of the greatest comedy directors in the world at the time, I’m sure gave her a ton of tips about being in front of the camera. The important thing is that no matter how bad the film was, Lucy always rose above the script.”
‘Dream Girl’
Significant in Lucy’s career is that in 1947, after she had left MGM, she went on a national tour of a play called Dream Girl, which, opines Michael, was tailor-made for the actress: “It was about a woman who fantasizes about her life and what it could be. So it’s a lot of vignettes and scenes in which this character fantasizes about these wacky situations. And it was a hit. But more importantly, it made Lucy realize that she responded best in front of a live audience. The feedback she got — the laughter, the applause — she liked much better than making movies.”
‘My Favorite Husband’
Following Dream Girl, Lucy found herself starring, from 1948 to 1951, on the radio show My Favorite Husband, in many ways an inspiration for I Love Lucy. It was billed as being about two people — a married couple — who live together and like it. “It ran for three years,” points out Michael, “and, of course, CBS wanted to take it to that new-fangled medium of television. Lucy was OK with that; she’d appeared as a guest star on TV in the late ’40s/early ’50s, but she insisted that her husband, Desi Arnaz, play her husband, even though he hadn’t on the radio show. What was happening is that she was in Hollywood while he was touring with his band all over the place. He had a reputation, as you may know, for catting around, and it was true, and Lucy wanted him home with her in Hollywood. As she put it, ‘You can’t have a baby over the phone; you can’t make a family over the phone.’ So that’s why she really wanted Desi tied down to this project. And CBS wasn’t sure that the public would accept Lucy, this all-American redheaded girl, as the wife of a Cuban guy. But both Lucy and Desi responded, ‘We’re married in real life, you know. So it does work.’”
Lucy & Desi
Pardon us while we do a kind of flashback within the flashback, in this case to 1940 and the movie Too Many Girls, which was the first time that Lucy and Desi actually met and worked together. “Actually,” Michael clarifies, “they met briefly before that in the RKO commissary. Maureen O’Hara wrote in her autobiography that she was having lunch with Lucy. They had just filmed a big fight scene between the two girls, and Lucy was made up with a black eye and all kinds of stuff. Desi Arnaz walked by and didn’t think much of her. But then, when he saw her all made up for her next picture, in which he costarred with her, called Too Many Girls, he was, like, ‘Wow, what a hunka woman!’ In any case, they got married soon after that, in November or December of 1940.”
“But they had problems from the beginning,” he adds. “Like I said, Desi was apart from Lucy a lot of times because of his band that traveled so much. Plus the drinking and the women and the jealousy and the arguments. They would argue, then make up and argue and then make up. It was an endless cycle. In fact, they had filed for divorce in 1944, but vacated the divorce decree by sleeping together. They were really, heavily, totally attracted to each other.”
‘I Love Lucy’
So with CBS wanting to turn My Favorite Husband into a TV sitcom, but not wanting Desi as the husband, he and Lucy came up with a pretty radical plan. Michael details, “They took it upon themselves to tour in a Vaudeville-type of show, which would be performed in front of audiences on stage before movies would start. This was just to prove how popular they were as a duo, and that’s where they worked out a lot of the routines that ended up being used on the first couple of seasons of I Love Lucy. So, yes, they were a success and CBS said, ‘Okay, Desi, you can play the part.’ It went on the air, was a huge hit almost from the get-go and the rest … is history.”
