There is no question that Vivian Vance is an icon of classic television, and that’s largely because of her role of Ethel Mertz besides Lucille Ball’s Lucy Ricardo on I Love Lucy. Yet as beloved as she is for that 1950s sitcom, over the decades there have been a number of myths and legends that have sprung up regarding her private life, her relationship with Lucille Ball and her feelings about the show as well as her most famous character.
To debunk some of these myths, Woman’s World has turned to pop culture historian and human encyclopedia Geoffrey Mark, who is also the I Love Lucy biographer in that he has written The Lucy Book: A Complete Guide to Her Five Decades on Television.
Myth #1: Vivian Vance’s contract called for her to be overweight, dowdy and unattractive
GEOFFREY MARK: Vivian Vance, who was a very attractive woman and known for her sexiness, bleached her hair, leaving dark roots. She did not wear false eyelashes or any glamor makeup, and everything they bought for her was a size too small — her dresses, her bras, her panties, her stockings, even her shoes weren’t quite right so that Ethel Mertz would walk clunkily. But it was never in a contract and it was something she was happy to do, because that is what the part called for.
Myth #2: Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance did not get along and actually hated each other.
GEOFFREY MARK: The idea that they hated each other came from two things. One was three or four weeks in when one of the production assistants said to Ms. Vance, “Gee, she’s kind of hard to work with,” and she said, “If this thing is a success, I’m going to learn to love that b—h!” Which she did, because they did become close. And the other one was during one of the pregnancy episodes. Ms. Ball was given a temporary portable dressing room right on the stage so that she didn’t have to go to her regular dressing room and make costume changes and makeup changes, because she was pregnant. Well, for one cue Vivian showed up late and Ms. Ball kind of snapped at her and Vivian said to her, “I would tell you to go f–k yourself, but I see your husband’s already taken care of that.” Ms. Ball laughed; it was a joke, but those two things have been repeated over and over again and it got twisted into them hating each other, which just wasn’t true.
Myth #3: Lucille Ball never truly appreciated what Vivian Vance brought to the table creatively
GEOFFREY MARK: It took several months of filming for Ms. Ball to realize what she had with Vivian, which is why, as the show goes on, the Ethel Mertz character gets more and more prominent, because she realized that as well as she and Desi Arnaz worked together, actually the better team was Lucy and Ethel
Myth #4: Vivian Vance was a complete unknown when she was hired for I Love Lucy
GEOFFREY MARK: Hardly. Vivian Vance was doing professional show business as far back as the late 1920s. She was a nightclub singer, she made her mark on Broadway by being Ethel Merman’s understudy in two Cole Porter musicals, by the early 1940s she was starring on Broadway in musicals and plays. She was a very well known New York theater actress.
Myth #5: Vivian Vance’s marriages ended because she was mentally ill
GEOFFREY MARK: Her last marriage ended by death, but they others ended because she kept marrying bisexual men and sooner or later they strayed from her. They were men who were looking to trade in on her celebrity, her money and I don’t believe any of them were deeply romantically in love with her. These men broke her heart, because how would anyone feel that their spouse is coming home at 2:00 in the morning instead of being home with them and having a family?
Myth #6: Career pressures caused her to have a nervous breakdown
GEOFFREY MARK: By 1945, Vivian Vance had become a star of the stage in her own right. She was in The Voice of the Turtle, but while they were running that play, she had a nervous breakdown. But that nervous breakdown was a result of the cumulative effect of being repressed by her father. He made her afraid of men. This came from Vivian, so it is not me being witty, but she only married gay men. She said, “I was so afraid of men that I spent my life hiding underneath them.” She stopped performing because of her breakdown. It was in 1950 that she started to work again, doing regional theater to get her feet wet.
Myth #7: Vivian Vance spent the rest of her life trying to cash in on Ethel Mertz.
GEOFFREY MARK:
Completely untrue. People thought she was promoting Ethel Mertz all her life, but not at all. it took a great deal of butter to get her back into the frying pan to play Vivian Bagley on The Lucy Show; she didn’t want to do it. She was being interviewed by Hugh Downs once and when he introduced her, and she came out to very large applause, he said, “What would you have done if I introduced you as Ethel Mertz?” and she said, “I would’ve walked off the show. I’m not Ethel Mertz. I’m an actress named Vivian Vance. That’s one part of many that I’ve played in my life.” She did try for television stardom. There were pilots made that didn’t sell, she tried doing broadway without Ms Ball and it didn’t work, she tried making movies, she did The Great Race. It isn’t that she wasn’t good in it, but others would have been funnier.
The problem was that Vivian Vance was a sidekick. She was a star’s best friend or the woman trying to take the star’s husband away or something like that. For most of her life before I Love Lucy, she played the other woman parts. Post Lucy, it was hard for her.
Myth #8: Vivian Vance turned down the opportunity to become a recurring character on Rhoda
GEOFFREY MARK: She made a guest appearance on Rhoda in the episode “Friends and Mothers,” and it could have represented the start of a new chapter for her, because it didn’t have her being Ethel Mertz. She was damn funny, because she w==as standing up to Rhoda’s mother [Nancy Walker] on Rhoda’s behalf and it gave a whole new dimension to the show they could have gone places with, but Vivian was too sick. In the early ’70s, unfortunately, she was diagnosed with cancer, which she conquered for a while, but then she developed Bell’s palsy on her face.
Vivian Vance Fast Facts
- Vivian Vance was born Vivian Roberta Jones in Cherryvale, Kansas
- Her dramatic studies began at Independence High School
- Once she decided to seriously pursue acting, despite the fact it went against her mother’s religious beliefs, Vance moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she performed at the Albuquerque Little Theatre
- She was performing in a play called The Voice of the Turtle when she was asked to play Ethel Mertz on the American television series I Love Lucy, on which William Frawley would play her husband Fred, they would be collectively known as Fred and Ethel and history would be made.
