Who is Lucille Desiree Ball?

Imagine our hero, not as a great thinker, statesman or author, but as an absolutely zany woman with wacky ideas, putting herself and her friend, Ethel, in ridiculous situations, and having the entire nation love her for it!

She is our hero because she made us laugh louder and longer than anyone on television. She is great because she was an astute businesswoman who built a prominent production company-and you thought Oprah was the first!

When you think of genius, of greatness, remember Lucy stuffing candy into her uniform on the assembly line or advertising a mineral supplement (getting increasingly drunk with each retake of the commercial) or stomping grapes at a vineyard.

What made her the comedian?

Despite her public image as a screwball, Lucille Ball was a shrewd performer who knew exacdy what she wanted. She was a successful producer who, along with husband Desi Arnaz, formed Desilu Productions, one of the most profitable independent production companies in Hollywood history.

However, it was a long and often frustrating journey that led to the fame and notoriety that her comic skills merited. Ball was born on August 6,1911, in Jamestown, New York, to Henry Durrell Ball and Desieree DeDe Eve Hunt. She was always proud of her family background, which traced itself back to the earliest American colonists (through her father’s side, she was related to George Washington).

Ball’s father’s job as a telephone lineman sent the family to live all over the country. Henry Ball died in 1915 from typhoid fever and Ball and her brother Fred were raised by her working mother and grandparents. Her grandfather loved the theater and took the family to vaudeville shows. He saw how much the girl enjoyed them and encouraged her to get into performing.

During this period, Ball developed her reputation as a hard worker, helping to support the family while still finding time to perform in plays for the local Elks Club and her high school. She even staged her own production of Charley’s Aunt, Encouraged by her experiences and her grandfather, Ball, in 1926, enrolled at the John Murray Anderson American Academy of Dramatic Art in Manhattan.

“She was counseled not to continue with her acting career because of what her teachers perceived as a terminal case of shyness.”

Ball persevered in her dream by returning to New York and getting intermittent work as a chorus girl and model (at one point, she was the Chesterfield cigarette girl). After suffering a series of hirings and firings on Broadway, she got an uncredited role as one of the Goldwyn girls for movie producer Samuel Goldwyn. This led to her going out to Hollywood, where her first picture was Roman Scandals, co-starring Eddie Cantor.

Ball never made a big splash in the movies. She worked steadily in her early years at RKO Radio and Columbia Pictures,-appearing with the Marx Brothers and The Three Stooges. By 1938, she was achieving star billing in movies, but these were mostly B-films. In some cases, Ball was cast in the role only because an actress with a larger reputation did not want to play it. After RKO, she worked briefly at MGM studios (where she was dubbed the Technicolor girl because of her red hair and bright smile) then returned to RKO where it seemed her movie career might be finished.

While she was trying to establish herself as a movie actress, Ball fell in love with Cuban bandleader and actor Desi Arnaz. The two worked together in 1940 on the musical Two Many Girls and eloped soon after the film was over. Almost from the beginning, the marriage was troubled, with Arnaz openly unfaithful. The two separated and filed for divorce in 1944. However, before the divorce became final, Ball and Arnaz decided to give their marriage one more chance. Ball was now convinced that the best way to keep her husband from straying was to find projects they could both work on. Their first and only big project would revolutionize television comedy.

In 1948, Ball was cast as the wacky wife in the radio comedy Favorite Husband for CBS. The show was a hit and the network approached Ball to make a television version. Ball refused unless Arnaz was cast as the husband in what would become I Love Lucy. The pilot did not impress the CBS executives, so Ball and Arnaz toured in a vaudeville act based on the premise of the show. The act was a big success and CBS decided to add the show to its schedule in 1951.

Besides being the first television show to star a real-life husband and wife (and to have them be ethnically mixed), I Love Lucy was a pioneer in several production techniques. The show was filmed in front of a live audience. Up to then, almost all television shows were broadcast live or recorded on Kinescope. Ball and Arnaz wanted I Love Lucy to be shot on the much cleaner medium of film.

Arnaz hired legendary cinematographer Karl Freund to come up with a new way to shoot a half-hour television show on film. Freund created the three-camera technique, using one camera to film long shots, one for medium shots and the other to shoot close-ups. This technique is still being used in most television comedies today.

Ball and Arnaz formed Desilu Productions to manage the production and promotion of the show. Arnaz found he was a talented manager and Ball quickly got up-to-speed about the business. In addition to I Love Lucy, Desilu would produce such hit comedies as Make Room for Daddy, The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Andy Griffith Show, as well as highly regarded drama series such as The Untouchables, I Spy, Star Trek and Mission: Impossible.

I Love Lucy was a tremendous hit in its run from 1951 through 1957. One example of the blending of fact and fiction involved Ball’s pregnancy with her second child. Ball and Arnaz wanted to incorporate her real-life pregnancy into the show, but the network balked at showing a pregnant woman and even using the word pregnant. CBS finally relented on allowing Ball to appear pregnant, but the actors had to use the word expecting. The episode where she gave birth (coinciding with the real-life birth) is one of the highest-rated shows in television history.

From 1957 to I960, the show morphed into The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, retaining the original cast but moving the characters to the country. By this time, Ball and Arnaz’s marriage was over and after the show went off the air in I960, the couple divorced. A year later, Ball remarried comedian Gary Morton. Morton joined Desilu as a producer and was soon running many aspects of the company.

After a brief stint on Broadway and appearances in a couple of films, Ball returned to television in the successful The Lucy Show and later Here’s Lucy, which ran until 1974. Despite her reputation, Ball’s career went nowhere fast after she left television. A film version of the musical Mame was a flop, and her attempt at returning to television also ended in failure.

Ball made only a few personal appearances during her last years. She died from a ruptured aorta following open-heart surgery on April 26, 1989.

The Legacy of the Woman

During her heyday on television, Lucille Ball was called the queen of comedy, and few would dispute it. Her shows were undeniably hilarious. She proved almost single-handedly that women could be just as funny as men.

Ball also broke the gender barrier for women on the business side of Hollywood. After her divorce from Amaz, she ran Desilu Productions, later selling it to Gulf-Western for a very healthy profit.

This success was not without its price. Her marriage to Arnaz was never smooth. Her children said she was a cold and controlling mother who had few friends in show business. However, her audience cared little about this, and her lovable screwball in I Love Lucy is still seen every day on some television station or cable network.

Courtesy

You can find several DVD compilations oil Love Lucy, The Lucy Show and Here’s Lucy. Other information on Ball can be found on www.lucilleball.com.

Lucille Ball published an autobiography Love, Lucy, Berkeley, reissued 1997. Other books on Ball include Lucille: The Life of Lucille Ball, Watson-Guptill, 2001; Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball, Knopf, 2003; and Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball andDesi Arnaz, Harper Paperbacks, 1994.