The comedy scene was ‘not the way I had planned to go’

Look up any list of all-time funniest I Love Lucy scenes and there alongside Vitameatavegamin and the chocolate factory conveyor belt, you’ll find the bit where Lucy stomps grapes into wine on the Ricardos’ European vacation. “Now don’t you worry about it, Ricky,” says Ethel when the wacky redhead goes missing. “She just probably picked a few grapes, and she’s on her way home right now.”

Fat chance. Instead, Lucy got into an all-out brawl with a professional grape stomper. It’s a physical comedy tour de force, full of fruit-flinging and body slams in a precursor to today’s WWE cage matches. It’s a fight that also nearly killed Lucille Ball.

When she appeared on The Dick Cavett Show nearly 20 years later, the host asked about her favorite bits of all time. She simply said the word “grapes,” and the crowd burst into applause.

In the bit, tourist Lucy (thinking she was up for a showbiz part) stomps grapes to create some kind of delicious foot wine. Ball said the studio had trouble casting the part of the Italian woman with whom she’d be making the vino. “That’s very difficult to find the real peasant, short, stocky type of little Italian lady,” she revealed. “Most of them are very chic and very svelte.”

Ethnic stereotypes aside, the casting folks found their grape stomper, a woman who matched Ball’s description. She didn’t speak English, but an interpreter explained the bit and left. From that point on, the Italian was on her own — the scene’s director only spoke English. “I got in the vat,” said Ball. “She had been told that we would have a fight. It was a huge vat — it’s like being in a vat of eyeballs.”

To start the comic action, Ball pranced around on the grapes, making a dance scene of it. At one point, she slipped in the juice and accidentally hit the woman. “She took offense,” Ball explained, “and she hauled off and let me have it.”

That was actually in line with the planned scene but the punch was right to Ball’s breadbasket, knocking the wind out of her. The two were now grappling in the grapes, and the Italian woman had been told they were to wrestle around a bit, giving Ball a chance to get her legs up and into the camera’s view. An arm would follow and eventually Ball’s head would bob above the top of the vat.

“Well, my head never popped up,” Ball said. “She gets me down by the throat! I had grapes up my nose, in my ears, and she was choking me. I’m really beating her to get her off.” All of this fighting, by the way, was in front of a laughing live audience — but no one could see what was happening since the fighting was on the floor of the vat.

“She didn’t understand that she had to let me up once in a while,” Ball complained. “I was drowning in those grapes.”

In a sheer act of survival, Ball used her last gasp to grab the woman by the throat and throw her off. Ball reached the top of the vat and screamed for help, which the director and the audience thought was great comedy. “Down I went again. This woman spent so much time beating the hell out of me that we had to cut half of it.”

The ensuing scene became a Lucy classic, one that she remembered as a favorite despite her near-death experience. “To drown in a vat of grapes,” she confessed, “is not the way I had planned to go.”