Everybody — we mean everybody — knows I Love Lucy, but how many people really know its spinoff, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour or, as it was originally called, The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show? Well, those 13 one-hour episodes, serving as a continuation of sorts to I Love Lucy and bringing along series stars Ball, Arnaz, Vivian Vance, William Frawley and Keith Thibodeaux as Little Ricky, exist, though they are admittedly tough to find.
Airing sporadically between 1957 and 1960, the extension series was born out of the desire that Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had for the show to come to an end following the conclusion of its sixth season in 1957. “They thought they were a little played out,” offers pop culture historian and The Lucy Book author Geoffrey Mark, “Bill Frawley was getting older, Vivian Vance was having marital problems and Lucille and Desi were beginning to have some marital problems of their own.
“On top of that,” he continues, “Mr. Arnaz wanted to retire, basically. His view was, ‘Hey, we’ve got this money, we’ve got this fame. We’ve got these two children. Let’s enjoy all of that.’ But Ms. Ball said, ‘I want to work,’ because that’s who she was. It’s not a bad thing or a good thing. It’s just who she was, so he said, ‘Well, we either retire or we get bigger.’”
So the decision was made not to do I Love Lucy every week so that Desi could really focus on running Desilu Studios without having to show up to focus on the show every day, thus allowing them to find ways to expand. But in the meantime, there was the Comedy Show.
“Since I Love Lucy was the biggest show on television, one would have imagined an hour-long version every month or so would have had the sponsors screaming, ‘Choose me, choose me!’” says Mark, “but the only sponsor Desi could find was the Ford Motor Company and they would only do five of them.”
‘Lucy Takes a Cruise to Havana’
The first episode, “Lucy Takes a Cruise to Havana,” features Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper, who inquires on how Lucy and Ricky first met, which leads to a flashback in which Lucy McGillicuddy and friend Susie MacNamara (Ann Sothern, bringing her character from the Desilu show Private Secretary over here) taking a cruise to Havana, where their tour guides are Ricky Ricardo and Carlos Garcia (guest star Cesar Romero). Conveniently, Fred and Ethel Mertz are enjoying a second honeymoon on the same cruise and singer Rudy Vallee is there as well.
Geoffrey Mark says, “So this is how Lucy and Ricky meet and the scenes are actually quite splendid. The romance scenes are both very funny and kind of sweet and you watch them fall in love for the first time — and you see him reacting to her singing for the first time.”
Also of note is that when it first aired, “Lucy Takes a Cruise to Havana” was 75-minutes in length, making it the only regularly scheduled show of that length in TV history.
‘The Celebrity Next Door’: The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour
Hollywood veteran Tallulah Bankhead becomes a next door neighbor to the Ricardos in Connecticut and Lucy attempts to become friends with her by throwing a fancy dinner party in episode two. “It was originally written for Bette Davis, but unbeknownst to the public, she had fallen and broken her back,” says Mark. “There was nothing in the news about that; Bette Davis was afraid if people found out, she’d never work again, so they quietly replaced her with Tallulah Bankhead, which was a natural since on two different episodes of I Love Lucy, Lucy Ricardo did a Tallulah Bankhead impersonation.“That was a terrible week,” he continues. “Tallulah had a thing when she was going to appear with another woman even close to equal stature where she would pretend to be drunk and not know her lines. She would also pretend not to know her blocking. She would pretend to be confused. But in the final performance, she’d be letter perfect. Meanwhile, the woman she’s doing this to is all worn out from fighting with her all week and from being worried the show won’t come off well, so Tallulah threw Lucille Ball off, which was not easy to do. To the point where filming had to be stopped, because Ms. Ball didn’t know her next line, which had never happened before. There was a lot made of it in the press. Even in publicizing the episode, TV Guide interviewed Tallulah and her excuse was, ‘I had triple pneumonia in all three lungs.’ Really, Tallulah? But the episode is hysterical.”
It’s also the last one, he points out, where Lucille Ball wears her hair with the “button back” look. Ann Sothern had given her the advice to start wearing wigs, thus pulling her own hair back and providing something of an “instant facelift. From that point on in Ms. Ball’s entire career, unless she was doing something where wearing a wig would just make it impossible for her and she’d wear her own hair, 98% of the time, from the third episode of these hour-long shows forward, Ms. Ball was always in a wig, because it was her way of doing a facelift.”
Send in the Stars: The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour
One of the really popular storylines on I Love Lucy was when things shifted to Hollywood for seasons 4 and 5 and the characters interacted with various celebrities. Well, the guest stars took a central role in these hour-long episodes, some — particularly Geoffrey Mark — would say to the detriment to the overall concept
The first group of episodes rounded up with “Lucy Hunts Uranium” (guest starring Fred MacMurray, soon to feature in My Three Sons), “Lucy Wins a Racehorse” (Betty Grable as the guest star) and “Lucy Goes to Sun Valley” (featuring Fernando Lamas).
In year two, Ford was out and Desi Arnaz convinced Westinghouse to sponsor the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, an anthology series (which he hosted) that would feature the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Comedy Show once a month.
Season two consisted of “Lucy Goes to Mexico,” guest starring Maurice Chevalier, which sees Lucy in a bullfight; as well as a real highlight of the entire run, “Lucy Makes Room for Danny,” which brings over the cast of The Danny Thomas Show.
Opines Geoffrey Mark, “The Lucy writers went out of their way to be true to the Danny Thomas Show characters. All of the characters — even the children — had moments of mirth that were true to their individual canons. Lucille, Desi, Bill, Vivian, Danny, Marjorie, Keith, Rusty and Angela were all in top form. And Gale Gordon was the cherry on top. A brilliantly written, brilliantly acted hour of comedy.”
“By the last season,” points out Geoffrey Mark, “it isn’t that the shows were terrible, but everyone was slowing down and getting older. The original cast looks like it’s gained 10 years. There was no longer any continuity and whatever was needed to make that week’s plot work was used. Towards the end, there wasn’t even a studio audience, so that made it less funny. They didn’t say, ‘Here’s a great plot, what guest star could we get for it?’ It was, ‘What guest star can we get? Let’s make a plot to attach to it,’ and that’s backwards. When he was producer and headwriter, Jess Oppenheimer always started with the plot first and then he figured out what shenanigans Lucy could get into because of the plot or who a good guest star might be. It’s like the James Bond films that would start with the stunts and write a plot around them.
“So, over the three seasons,” he adds, “you just watch this incredible, amazing thing — with these incredible, amazing people — start to lose quality. The actors were getting older, Ms. Ball was approaching 50, Ms. Vance was in her early 50s, Bill Frawley was 70, Desi was having his own problems and struggling with alcoholism, which is a devastating disease that he conquered in later years. The last episode is with Edie Adams and Ernie Kovacs and it’s almost difficult to watch. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz have almost no lines together and their characters don’t even talk to each other much.
“They already knew the divorce was happening, they just waited for that last episode to air. After it did, they filed for divorce. They just didn’t want to squash ratings or hurt the characters of Lucy and Ricky. But at that point it was over. All of it.”
