Largely departing from its source material’s light-hearted tone, Being the Ricardos definitely wasn’t short on real-life drama. The film told the story of a whirlwind week for Desi Arnaz (Ricky) and Lucille Ball (Lucy). And in the midst of a dramatic Red Scare, Lucy found out about her second pregnancy, which disrupted their show’s production. Meanwhile, a story about Ricky came out in Confidential magazine, casting doubt on their marriage.
Although director Aaron Sorkin played fast and loose with the real-life timeline, most of the big events in the film were true. That, however, doesn’t mean that everything was entirely accurate. One of the biggest, not-so-secret secrets about I Love Lucy was the backstage bickering, specifically between Vivian Vance (Ethel) and William Frawley (Fred). But while Being the Ricardos incorporated some animosity between the two, all in all, it downplayed their feud.
The hostility between Vance and Frawley went all the way back to the beginning of production. Desi Arnaz cast Vance first, and when she found out that Frawley — known in Hollywood as a grouch and heavy drinker — would be her TV husband, she wasn’t pleased. That, combined with the fact that Frawley was 22 years her senior, had Vance making comments about no one believing she would be married to such an “old coot.” Naturally, Frawley caught wind of those comments, laying the roots for their bickering, hateful relationship.
In Being the Ricardos, their relationship came off as pretty playful, kind of like argumentative siblings. But, in reality, it was much worse than that. They clearly respected each other as actors, but the two couldn’t stand their TV spouses, and no one really ever tried to hide the animosity between the two. It was simply a fact of production that Arnaz and Ball ignored most of the time, leaving their directors to break up fights.
Sorkin’s film also changed the episode of I Love Lucy being filmed during that hellacious week, which helped downplay the usual, hateful tone between Vance and Frawley. In real life, the episode being filmed during Lucy’s Red Scare was called “The Girls Go Into Business,” but Sorkin changed it to Season 1’s “Fred and Ethel Fight.” That way, the bickering relationship between the two might be seen as only part of the fight-based script.
Vance and Frawley’s animosity carried on after I Love Lucy, as well. CBS offered them a chance to star in a spin-off about Fred and Ethel, but it never came to fruition. Frawley liked the idea, but Vance refused to ever work with him again. However, while she clearly didn’t care for Frawley as a person, she did value him as an actor. Their TV relationship was one of the best in television, and when Frawley died, Vance said, “There’s a great big amusing light gone out of this world.”
