You simply cannot think of the best of classic television without I Love Lucy topping the list, and you cannot consider I Love Lucy without the image of Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance — better known as Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz — coming to mind. They are, quite simply, the greatest TV comedy duo ever and an inspiration to generations who have followed in their creative footsteps. And the bottom line is, as brilliant as Lucille Ball was, that show simply would not have been the same without Vivian Vance.
She was born Vivian Roberta Jones on July 26, 1909 in Cherryvale, Kansas, moved to that state’s Independence when she was six and quickly discovered a love for acting that went directly against her mother’s religious beliefs — which is just the start of her story, as the following facts will detail.
1. Acting was equated to sin
Growing up as one of six children in an extremely religious household, Vivian Vance realized that she wanted to pursue acting while she was in high school, though strong opposition came from her mother, who, notes Theater Mania, “was dead-set against it. ‘You want to be an actress, trying to lead men into sin? You’re going to hell!'”
2. New Mexico became her salvation
Lou Ann Graham/Alburquerque Museum
Electing to ignore her mother, as a teenager Vance moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she began to perform at the Albuquerque Little Theater in 1930, appearing in a number of different shows. One of them was See Naples and Die in 1932. “It was Vivian Vance’s night,” reviewed the Albuquerque Journal at the time. “Her entrance was marked by applause. She was stunning.”
3. Broadway Bound
It wasn’t long before Vance found herself on Broadway, thanks to friends she’d made during her time performing. In 1932, the New York Daily News reported, “Vivian had played in the Little Theater for a couple of seasons for no salary, but the citizens decided she deserved fame and fortunate in New York. So they opened an ancient opera house and staged The Trial of Mary Dugan, with Vivian as Mary. Box office receipts went to Miss Vance and she came to Broadway.”
4. New York wasn’t easy at first
In 1942, Vivian Vance told The Herald-News of New Jersey of her trip to New York, explaining that breaking onto the Broadway stage was “no cinch.” Until she could, she danced in a few choruses and sang at some nightclubs. She credits her first break being the show Hooray for What, in which she was a singing chorus girl for which she was hired when the production found it literally had seven hours to fill the part.
“Then,” she said, “I got a legitimate role or two, notably in Skylark, where the critics liked me, and Out from Under.”
5. She was friends with Ethel Merman
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Pop culture historian Geoffrey Mark, who is also the author of The Lucy Book, explains that when casting was underway for the musical Anything Goes, written for the comedy team of Ethel Merman, Victor Moore and William Gaxton, Vance became Merman’s understudy. “Merman liked her so much,” he says, “that she considered Vivian to be a protege of hers. And in 1936, when she had red, Hot and Blue with Bob Hope, Vivian was again her understudy. The two of them became good buddies. This led to Vivian eventually becoming a star in her own right on the Broadway stage in musicals. Then she did a play where she was the bitch called The Voice of the Turtle. But while they were running that play, she had a nervous breakdown.”
6. Vivian was repressed by her father
According to Geoffrey Mark, the nervous breakdown of Vivian Vance was a result of her father’s repressive nature. He explains, “Her father made her afraid of men. This came from Vivian, and because of it, she only married gay men. She said, ‘I was so afraid of men, that I spent my life hiding underneath them.’ Because of her breakdown, she stopped performing and it wasn’t until 1950 that she started doing regional theater to get her feet we. She also had small parts in two Hollywood movies, The Secret Fury and The Blue Veil.”
7. ‘The Voice of the Turtle’ and ‘I Love Lucy’
Vivian Vance was starring in The Voice of the Turtle in La Jolla, California at the time casting was underway for the Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz series I Love Lucy. Arnaz and the show’s producer and director went to watch her perform and were so impressed, that the actress was signed to play Ethel Mertz — wife of Fred and landlords to Lucy and Ricky Ricardo — during the show’s intermission.
8. Vivian Vance and William Frawley
Probably not the best way to begin things took place on the first day of rehearsal for I Love Lucy. “She comes in, and Desi’s already there, Bill Frawley, who’s going to play Fred Merz is already there, and she says, ‘Who’s that old coot sitting over there?’ And Desi says, ‘That’s William Frawley, he’s going to play your husband, honey.’ And she said, ‘Husband? He could play my grandfather.’ Bill Frawley overheard this and absolutely hated her for the rest of his life. The funny thing is that the writers saw how much he disliked her and wrote it into the scripts.”
9. Lucille didn’t love Vivian at first
On the first day of rehearsal, Lucille Ball met Vivian Vance and upon learning she had been cast as Ethel Mertz, thought it was a terrible mistake. Says Geoffrey Mark, “Ms. Ball said, ‘You can’t play Ethel — you’re the same age I am, you have the same color hair, you have an attractive figure, you’re pretty.’ But Vivian was smart and said, ‘What does Ethel Mertz look like?’ Miss Ball says, ‘Oh, she’s overweight and she has bleached blonde hair with a frizzy permanent and dark roots and wears tacky clothes.’ She replied, ‘It’s Monday. I can’t give you that for Friday, but next Friday I can give you that.'” True to her word, by the following week she had transformed into what Lucille Ball had described.
10. ‘Ethel’ did Love ‘Lucy’
There’s no denying that the schedule for I Love Lucy during its six seasons was grueling, but Vivian Vance seemed to enjoy the challenge of it, telling the media at the time, “It’s an actor’s dream. You do the same character, but you don’t have the boredom of reading the same lines week after week, as on the stage. We also have what the movies lack: an audience to stimulate you.”
11. They still worked together… for a time
I Love Lucy came to an end in 1956, followed by 13 one-hour episodes of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour that aired between 1957 and 1960. Two years later, following her divorce from Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball launched The Lucy Show, in which she played Lucy Carmichael and Vivian portrayed Vivian Bagley. Notes Geoffrey Mark, “And she’s nothing like Ethel Merz. She’s much more secure, she’s more confident, she’s got a boyfriend, she’s much smarter, she’s nobody’s fool and she doesn’t suffer quite as much with Ms. Ball’s antics; she puts up more of a fight.”
And the actress was enthusiastic, as she expressed in 1962: “We’re a couple of good, honest performers and we work well together. That’s not being immodest; I like to watch us work together as a member of the audience. Television is like an X-ray; the audience gets the feeling we like each other.”
12. Vivian needed to leave ‘The Lucy Show’
A misunderstanding by the person handling contract negotiations led to Lucille Ball believing that Vivian Vance was insisting on outrageous demands to continue with the show and refused to negotiate, resulting in the latter departing. Geoffrey Mark, who points out that the show was still popular but, creatively, never the same, says, “It took about a year for the hurts to heal and Vivian came back as a guest star and continued to be a guest star on all the shows Lucille did over the years. The friendship survived, because they liked one another and I think they both realized, ‘We let these businessmen put a wedge between us that never should have been there.'”
13. Things slowed down for Vivian before the end
Although Vivian Vance made guest appearances on Lucille Ball’s third series, Here’s Lucy (which ran from 1968 to 1974), her career really came almost to a half after she was diagnosed in 1973 with breast cancer. She did guest-star on Rhoda and appeared in the TV movies The Front Page (1970) and Getting Away from It All (1972), and appeared with Ball in the CBS TV special Lucy Calls the President (1977), which was her final role.
Vivian Vance was married four times. She died on August 17, 1979 at age 70, leaving a classic TV legacy via I Love Lucy that will never be forgotten.
