Nobody likes a pie in the puss

You think Fred Mertz was cranky on I Love Lucy? The character had nothing on William Frawley, the actor who played Mertz on the iconic sitcom.

The actor was such a curmudgeon, coupled with a reputation as a prodigious drinker, that Frawley was having trouble landing roles before I Love Lucy came calling, according to the biography Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television. John Stevens, who worked with Frawley on My Three Sons, marveled at his ability to down three gin fizzes over breakfast, a couple of Bloody Marys before lunch, then pre-dinner martinis. “I’ve never in my life — and I’ve seen a lot of drinkers — known anyone who could drink as much as he could in a day,” Stevens said.

Arnaz agreed to hire Frawley under a very generous set of terms. If Arnaz had to work around the incapacitated actor once, he’d let it go. Twice would earn Frawley a warning. Three drunken episodes that left him unable to work? Frawley was out. “Okay, Cuban, we have a deal,” Frawley replied.

Frawley’s drinking didn’t get in the way of I Love Lucy production, but he still brought his grumpy attitude to work. He constantly fought with his on-screen wife, Vivian Vance, who didn’t appreciate being paired with such an old frump. “This put a certain amount of real feeling into their stage quarrels,” wrote Lucille Ball in her memoir, Love, Lucy.

“I loathed William Frawley, and the feeling was mutual,” Vance later remembered. “Whenever I received a new script, I raced through it, praying that there wouldn’t be a scene where we had to be in bed together.”

As for Vance? She was “one of the finest girls to come out of Kansas,” Frawley once remarked. “But I often wish she’d go back there.”

When Frawley wasn’t bickering with Vance, he was complaining about the indignities he suffered throughout the show’s run. “One day Lucille was supposed to toss a pie at me for some silly reason,” Frawley told the Modesto Bee, as reported by MeTV.  “Seven or eight pies were available, but Lucy wanted an extra one for rehearsal, to get her eye back. She got her eye back, alright, and splat, I got it right in the puss.”

A faceful of whipped cream wasn’t even the half of it. “If I didn’t have pie on my face, I had a helmet on, or chickens were getting in my way on the stage floor,” he complained.

That’s why he said he preferred his role as Uncle Bub on the 1960s sitcom My Three Sons, which never subjected him to pies in the face.

“The only thing I have to worry about is tripping over that silly dog,” he said. “Thank goodness, we have a little dignity on this series.”