Lucille Ball

Lucille Ball was the grande dame of American comedy. The famed star worked in modeling, radio and film, but she really made her mark in television, and her work set the standard for the TV sitcom.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So we
have a couple of housekeeping notes we do first, in

(00:22):
the interest of full disclosure, this episode is sponsored by CNN.
They have a new mini series coming up called The
History of Comedy, and they approached us and asked if
we would like to do an episode that might tie
into that. I love comedy and comedy history, and I
already had many people on my list. We we were like,
here's a giganto list of things that we have wanted

(00:43):
to talk about for a long time. Yes, So this
is a very easy kind of fit and it made
perfect sense. This is probably an episode that would have
happened regardless, but in this case it is sponsored by CNN.
We're going to talk about the grand Dame of American comedy,
Lucille Ball. She, you know, was incredibly famous. She worked
in modeling, radio and film, but of course really made

(01:05):
her mark in television and her work really set the
standard for the TV sitcom going forward. We also have
a little bit of a milestone on this one, it's
the npisode of this show. Yes, we haven't been on
all of those episodes, not remotely, and a very very
few of them, very tiny few, uh, from way back

(01:27):
into archive are reruns, but there's a lot. It's a
lot of It makes me realize that, you know, in
less than a year, we will be at a thousand
and we should plot something. I know as I have
now I've put that into the universe, and I'm gonna
feel stupid when we're in the studio and I go, oh, crap,

(01:48):
this is the thousandth one, isn't it? And I haven't
planned anything. Oh, but we're gonna. I put it in
the universe so I won't forget. Maybe after we record,
I should do a little math figure out exactly when
that's happening. Would be about a year from now minus
so weak right ish? Huh? Did you want to just
hop into Lucile ball story? Yes? Because I love her

(02:09):
me too. Lucile Desire Ball was the first child of
Henry Durell Ball, who went by Had and Desire hunt Ball.
When she was born on August six of nineteen eleven.
Her family was not wealthy, and had, who was an electrician,
moved them from place to place looking for work. When

(02:29):
Lucy was still a small child, he found a position
in Michigan working for Michigan Bell Company as aligneman. But
the stability that the job offered the family was really
short lived and completely undermined when Had died of typhoid
fever in February nineteen fifteen. This undoubtedly jarring event was

(02:50):
recalled by Lucile Ball later in life as her first memory,
and when she talked about it or wrote about it,
she would literally go into great detail about like the
thing that were on the wall and a bird that
was that she saw at the time, like she remembers
that moment so clearly or remembered I should say, uh.
And in addition to the loss of Had, Lucille's mother, Desiree,

(03:10):
was also dealing with the fact that she was pregnant
with the couple's second child, and she was facing a
really uncertain financial future, and she decided to move back
to Jamestown, New York, which was where the Balls had
been living when Lucille was born. After the birth of
Lucille's brother, Fred, desire started working in a factory to
try to make ends meet. She also met and started

(03:32):
dating a man named Ed Peterson. Peterson and desire got married,
but once again, what seemed like a situation that might
offer the family some stability instead ended up causing deeper
fractures in the family. So ed Uh did not want
to be burdened with children, and so he and Desiree
moved to Detroit without Lucille and Fred, and the children

(03:55):
didn't even get to stay together. Fred moved in with
his maternal grandparents, and Lucille moved in with Ed Peterson's parents,
who were basically strangers to her, and the Peterson's were very,
very poor, and they were really pretty strict with their
new step granddaughter. After several years of this arrangement, Desert
and Ed moved back to Jamestown once again, so the

(04:16):
children had their mother back, and Lucille really always wanted
to be in show business. I saw one thing, I
think it's part of the package of her Kennedy Center honors,
which we're going to talk about later, that said that
every springtime she tried to walk from their house to Broadway,

(04:36):
and of course didn't make it. But at the age
of fifteen, she left high school and she started drama
school in New York City at the John Murray Anderson
Robert Milton Dramatic School after begging her mother to consent
to let her do this. But though it's hard to
imagine the legendary redhead, which is not her natural color,
and we'll talk about that as well, struggling to stand out,

(04:57):
she really did not farewell at drama school. She was
a little too nervous and really struggled to make a
name for herself. Later, she would describe this time of
her life saying, quote, all I learned in drama school
was how to be frightened. The school even wrote Desiree
to let her know that her daughter was really way
too shy for the stage. As a point of trivia,

(05:20):
Bettie Davis was at school at the same time. Yeah, yeah,
Lucile Ball was definitely in awe of her. So you
can imagine if you're already a little uncertain and then
you have Betty Davis, who was by all accounts of powerhouse,
you kind of probably don't feel like making a really
big move to try to stand out. Uh. But while

(05:40):
Lucille did leave drama school, she chose to stay in
New York and she adopted a new stage name, which
was Diane Belmont, and less than a year after her
failed started drama school, she was booking modeling jobs. She
modeled clothing for the Vienna born designer Hattie Carnegie, who
I would love to also do an episode on at
some point. Uh and later Chesterfield Cigarettes booked her for

(06:03):
modeling gigs, including rather large scale campaigns, which got the
attention of Hollywood producers. So after a few years working
as a model in New York, she decided to make
her way to Hollywood to transition into acting. She also
changed her hair from its natural chestnut brown blonde, just
as she had managed with her modeling career. After leaving

(06:24):
drama school, Ball began to book acting gigs rather quickly,
although many of them in her early career were uncredited.
Starting in nineteen thirty three, she worked at times as
a Goldwyn Girl, and this was a stock group of
young women who danced and entertained to appear in and
promote new films for Samuel Goldwyn. So in thirty three

(06:45):
that movie was Roman Scandals, which is a picture with
a plot about a young man from West Room, Oklahoma,
dreaming that he was in ancient Rome, and the Goldwyn
Girls in this particular film, were featured as Roman slave girls.
Other uncredited work included appearing as a show girl in
the ninety four Moulin Rouge, as a nurse and Carnival
in ninety five, and as an extra and the slapstick

(07:08):
version of The Three Musketeers starring the comedy team the
Ritz Brothers, and Lucy continued to take small parts. She
had a reputation for never saying no because she knew
she hadn't make ends meet, and she finally got a
more substantial part in nineteen thirty seven Stage Door, which
was a story about a group of aspiring actresses living
together in a boarding house. Also featured in that cast

(07:29):
where Katherine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers a couple of you
know people no one's heard of. No, they're not famous
at all. In nineteen forty, Lucy'll played the role of Bubbles,
third build after Maureen O'Hara and Louis Hayward in a
picture called Dance, Girl Dance. While the movie is far
from her most famous work, it did have a significant

(07:50):
impact on her life. The movie's story centered around a
troop of dancers, and while Judy played by Marin O'Hara
longed to become a ballerina. Bubble act was burlesque. The
two were also rivals in love, and the two actresses
enjoyed playing up their competitive but friendly relationship. Yeah when
it came time to film a fight scene between the

(08:12):
two characters, the production actually allowed an audience to attend,
and they charged admission, but they donated that money to charity,
and after the fight was over, the ladies went to
the studio commissary together for lunch because he really were friends,
and it was there that Lucy met Desiderio Alberto Arnez
Desi Arnez, and she would later say of their meeting,

(08:32):
it wasn't love at first sight. It took a full
five minutes. The actress and the Cuban band leader appeared together.
Involved next movie too many girls, and their time working
together on the picture sped their courtship along. Those who
were close to Lucy advised her to stay away from Desi.
Those pieces of advice were completely pointless. Arnez, who was

(08:54):
just twenty three at the time, had a reputation for
dating a string of ladies, but Desi Lucy fell in
love and got married within a year. Their wedding was
on November and it wasn't long after the marriage in
two that Lucille Ball dyed her hair. The signature read
that she would be known for the rest of her life,

(09:14):
having done so at the suggestion of movie Studio MGM
for her role in du Barry was a Lady. The shade, however,
would shift and not from that original red but to
a more apricot tone, though not for several years Before
we get to the next big step in Lucy's career,
went to pause for a word from a fantastic sponsor.

(09:38):
While Lucille Ball had been relatively successful in film, she
felt that her career wasn't really reaching the level that
she wanted. Her starring roles were mostly in B films
rather than big budget films, and so she expanded her
work into radio as well. She quickly landed a role
in the comedy My Favorite Husband, and it was that
work that led to CBS offering to develop a sear

(10:00):
ease along the same lines with her. That seemed like
great news, but things did not go well in negotiations.
Lucy wanted to develop to develop a show with Desi
starring alongside her, and CBS was not interested in him,
in part because of his accent, and the talks quickly ended.
But the couple's desire to create a husband wife show

(10:22):
together eventually developed by the two of them into the
form of a vaudeville act, and as they toured this
stage show, they garnered a lot of attention. It was
actually a huge hit. People found it so charming that
the two of them were singing and dancing together, and
they were very funny, and it was so huge a
hit that CBS wanted to talk to them again, and
this time because they had this reputation built around them

(10:44):
and the two of them as a pair working together,
Lucy and Desi were in a position to make some
demands and have those demands met. As I Love Lucy
was in development, the pair decided they did not want
to shoot the show in New York, in a move
that separated them from most other TV shows and this
still pretty young medium, they opted to set up production

(11:05):
in Hollywood. They also wanted to shoot on film, despite
protests from CBS that kinescope would be a lot more
cost effective, but they really wanted film, and they decided
that they would sacrifice some of their pay to get it,
and so they renegotiated their deal, and they also made
sure that they would retain rights of ownership of the
project and they formed Desolue Productions as the umbrella company

(11:28):
for it. Everything changed for Lucille Ball and her husband
in nineteen fifty one. They had their first child, Lucy,
in July of that year, and then I Love Lucy
debut on October. The show became a national success in
this mix of comedy and examination of common social issues
really struck a good note with the viewing audience. Yeah,

(11:51):
it blew my mind when I realized that she had
her kid while they were in development for a major
TV show like that just seems like a lot to
be juggleing. Uh, And yeah, it was just months from
from the time she had the baby to when they
went into like full production schedule. And Lucy was based
on anything you could ever possibly read or hear about
her from her colleagues, absolutely relentless in her pursuit of

(12:14):
creating the most perfect possible production. Her standards were incredibly high,
and she would rehearse even the most casual lines of
the show until she felt that they were the absolute
best they could be. She took comedy, very very seriously.
And it's one of those things where people always think
a lot of the show was ad libbed, but she
really rehearsed almost everything to the point that it was

(12:36):
just perfect and you could not tell that she was
not in the moment. Well. And another mark that it
paid off is that when you say to someone, oh,
we're working on show about Lucy ol Ball, often the
things that come spilling out of their mouth are all

(12:56):
kinds of lines from this TV show from literally more
than half of a century ago. Yeah. I mean it's
been it's been on in syndication forever, but it's people
still watch it and laugh. Yeah, it was the thing
that I watched. One of the things that I would
watch in the in the morning while I was getting
awake and ready to go to school, like my mom

(13:16):
would be making me breakfast. It would be on and
syndicated in the time slot before the morning news. Uh,
either that or the Into Gripic Show. Because this was
North Carolina, you gotta have some expectations. Um, I've probably
seen every episode of it. Anyway, I Love Lucy ran
for six years and lad all shows in the US

(13:38):
ratings for four of them. It would be broadcast in
seventy eight countries. When the show aired an episode in
which Lucy gave birth to little Ricky in ninety three,
which aired on the same day desiern As Junior was
born in real life thanks to a scheduled cesarean section.
It's set ratings records, surpassing audience numbers for the Eisenhower inauguration. Yeah,

(13:59):
it's the first instance where an actresses real life pregnancy
was part of their fictional story. And while it seemed
natural to write their real life pregnancy into the show
and their sponsor and this seems odd now, of course,
through the Modern Lens cigarette company Philip Morris was behind
the idea. The decision to do so really ran into

(14:19):
some hurdles at CBS. The network was first deeply uneasy
about the idea of showing a pregnant woman on TV.
They thought people might find it vulgar or distasteful. Though
CBS eventually did go along with the plan and they
consulted various experts and felt like, no, this would be okay.
They did forbid the use of the word pregnant on
the show, so they could never say Lucy was pregnant,

(14:42):
and they would say she was expecting instead, and there
were also titters about how Dasi pronounced the word yeah,
and they had they had to name it um Lucy
is pregnant, but they used the French word for pregnant,
so that even though the titles never appeared on the show. Uh.
That's one of my favorite episodes if you've never seen it.

(15:03):
The whole episode centers around Lucy trying to tell Ricky
that she is pregnant, and he's kind of dense and
not catching her hints for a long time, and everybody knows.
Fred and Ethel both know, like the whole everyone connected
to them already has it figured out, but he just
is not getting the message. And she does this. I
don't even want to give it away because it's so sweet. Uh.
The way that she eventually tells him in the end

(15:26):
is through his own song. He just doesn't know it's
happening to him initially, and it's lovely, making me tear
up a little bit me too. I love it so much.
During the run of the sitcom, Lucy's hair also hit
the shade that would become her trademark for the rest
of her career. According to hairstylist Irma Cousley, who worked
on numerous Desilie productions. Quote. Lucy's hair was a golden

(15:47):
apricot color and she used a Hannah rents to achieve it.
She met a very wealthy Shake who had heard about
her problem and getting the right coloring. He said that
he would send her a lifetime supply of Hannah, which
he did. We kept it in my garage, locked away
in a safe. Yeah, you'll sometimes hear that sort of
told as a slightly different story where her hair color

(16:10):
formula was secret and was kept in a safe. But
according to her stylists, no, it was just the boxes
or the whatever format, the tubes or whatever that the
Hannah was in. Uh. The other significant event of their
lives while I Love Lucy was running was a scandal
around Lucille's political history. The White House Un American Activities
Committee investigated Ball due to the fact that in ninety

(16:33):
six she had registered as a member of the Communist
Party and sworn testimony before the committee. Lucille Ball testified
that she had registered with the party in ninety six
at the request of her grandfather, Fred Hunt, and then
it was nothing more than a gesture to please the
elderly patriarch. Her mother and brother had apparently done the
same thing. Yeah, there was also there were also stories

(16:57):
that she had hosted some parties UH at her homes
and get togethers for people interested in communism, but she
claimed she did not realize that that's what they were doing.
She thought they were just like friends getting together uh.
And when she was asked by a member of the
press if she thought the matter would damage her career,
Lucy responded, I have more faith in the American people

(17:18):
than that. I think any time you give the American
people the truth, there with you. And in her case,
she was right. Her fans sent cards and telegrams of support,
and she and Desi told the press that they were
in fact happy to have the whole thing out in
the open. I Love Lucy ended in nineteen fifty seven,
but Lucy and Desi continued at the Helm of Desily Productions.

(17:39):
The Untouchables and Star Trek were produced there, but while
they were having commercial success, their marriage didn't thrive, and
they divorced in nineteen sixty. There had long been rumors
of infidelity and rocky times between the two of them,
but even after they called their marriage quits. They remained
friends and colleagues. They also made some movies together in
addition to the TV show Yeah, when she switched to TV.

(18:03):
When they switched to TV, it wasn't as though she
stopped doing movies altogether. She did them on and off
throughout her career when when good projects came up. And
Uh she also did theater, which is how she met
her second husband. Uh. She remarried Gary Morton not long
after her split from Desi. She had at the time
been in New York to start in the Broadway show Wildcat,
which ran at the Alvin Theater, and that was when

(18:25):
she met the comedian and they were married on November
nineteenth of nineteen sixty one, so just a little more
than a year after the divorce. In nineteen sixty two,
Lucille Ball bought out Desi Arneza's interest in Desilu Productions.
After running the company for six years, she sold it
in nineteen sixty seven for seventeen million dollars. The person
company Gulf Western, which also owned Paramount Pictures, renamed the

(18:48):
studio Paramount Television. Lucy founded a new production company, smaller
and scale than Desilu, called Lucille Ball Productions. While she
was done with running her big production company, Lucy certainly
wasn't done with comedy. That's why she started her her second,
smaller production company. She started two series in the nineteen sixties.
The Lucy Show ran on CBS from nineteen sixty two

(19:10):
to nineteen sixty eight, and it featured Lucille Ball as
a widow living with her divorced best friend and the
two women's children. Vivian Vance, who had played Ethel on
I Love You Lucy, as well as several writers from
I Love Lucy, also joined the production. After The Lucy
Show ran for sixty years, Lucille moved on to another
sitcom titled Here's Lucy in nineteen sixty eight. She was

(19:32):
once again playing a widow, but this time her two
sitcom children were played by her actual children, Lucy and
Desie Jr. Here's Lucy continued until nineteen seventy three. Lucy's
last two projects were in nineteen eighty five and nineteen
eighty six, So in eighty five she took a role
that was a significant departure from the comedy that had
really made her career. She started a TV movie which

(19:55):
was titled Stone Pillow, in which she played a homeless woman.
And after that, while while she got good reviews for
her work on that, it wasn't a particularly successful film. Uh,
And she once again moved into sitcoms because that is
really what people wanted of her. So she worked with
CBS one more time, and she premiered Life with Lucy

(20:16):
in nineteen six, but unlike her previous three sitcoms, it
was a flop and only lasted for eight episodes. In
April nine, she underwent an eight hour open heart surgery
at Cedar sign A Medical Center after experiencing chest pains
and being diagnosed with an aortic aneurysm. After the procedure,

(20:36):
she initially appeared to be recovering well, but then she
experienced another aortic rapture which claimed her life. She died
on April nine. And next up, we're going to talk
a little bit about Lucy's legacy, but before we do,
we're going to take a quick break in here again
from a fantastic sponsor. So over the course of her career,

(21:04):
Lucille Ball was honored with many awards. We could never
list them all, but we will talk about some of them.
For one thing, She won four Emmy Awards, Best Comedian
in nineteen fifty two, Best Actress in a Continuing Performance
for I Love Lucy in nineteen fifty five, an Outstanding
Continuing Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in
a Comedy Series, which is a mouthful of a category

(21:26):
for The Lucy Show. In both nineteen sixty seven and
nineteen sixty eight, she was given two different stars on
the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for her work in
film and the other for her work in television. And
while Here's Lucy was on the air, Ball received the
International Radio and Television Society's Gold Medal in nineteen seventy
one that made her the first woman to be honored

(21:48):
with that award. In nineteen seventy eight, she was honored
with the Hollywood Foreign Press Associations Cecil B. Demill Aboard
Lucy was honored by the Kennedy Center on December seven six.
It was a bittersweet event because Desi had died just
five days before. During the ceremony, actor Robert Stack, who
had starred in the Desilu show The Untouchables, read remark

(22:12):
that Desi had written I Love Lucy had just one
mission to make people laugh. Lucy gave it a rare quality.
She can perform the wildest, even the messiest, physical comedy
without losing her her feminine appeal. The New York Times
asked me to divide the credit for its success between
the writers, directors, and the cast. I told them, give

(22:34):
Lucy of the credit, divide the other ten percent among
the rest of us. DESI concluded Lucy was the show.
Viv Fred and I were just props. Sdam good props,
but props. Nevertheless, PS, I Love Lucy was never just
the title. After her death in nine she was posthumously

(22:54):
awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in two thousand one,
Newsweek named her the top female entertain nor of the
twentieth century. If that were not for Lucile balls incredibly
skilled and dedicated comedic work on I Love Lucy, we
might never have had other women led comedy shows like
The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Laverne and Shirley, the

(23:15):
many shows that make me ask why are we still
talking about whether women are funny? But her influence goes
a lot deeper than that. She really spearheaded the style
of comedy. As we said at the top, of the
show that developed into the sitcom, and that's a format
that continues to be a TV standard today. I Love

(23:37):
Lucy was also the first show to use three cameras
in production, rather than just one stationary camera, and that
was a major innovation at the time. As the head
of Desilu Productions, Lucy became the first woman to run
a major Hollywood studio, so she was not only a
trailblazer as a funny woman, but also as an executive
and a savvy businesswoman. She was employed in Hollywood from

(24:00):
more than fifty years continuously, something that not many people
can boast. She once said that she wasn't funny, she
was brave, and while she had started her career as
a model and was in fact a great beauty, she
set herself apart through her willingness to do crazy stunts
and look foolish. Being pretty, it seems, was not as
important to her as being funny. She was willing to

(24:22):
do broad physical comedy at a time that it was
still considered the territory only of men, and in doing so,
she opened up the door for women who came after her. Also,
during her Kennedy Center Honors presentation, Robert Stack said, quote,
it will always be remembered that you established a place
in television for women. And to bring up kind of
an interesting source. According to Arnold Schwarzenegger, writing in his autobiography, Lucy,

(24:47):
Lucy once gave him the following advice about working in Hollywood,
although I think it is pretty good advice for almost
anything in life. Quote when they say no, you hear yes,
someone says we can't do this movie, hug them and
say thank you for believing in me. I love that
so much and I can still hear her saying it. Fantastic.

(25:09):
I know it's very subtle, but I'm a Lucile Ball fan. Yeah.
I love the long, long trailer. It is the movie
starring Lucile Ball and Daisy RNs. And they might be
giant song called everything Right Is Wrong Again. I really
love Uh. Barry was a lady, and I will say this.

(25:31):
I have one beef with the I Love Lucy show.
It's so specific and nerdy and dorky and weird to dressmakers.
There was an episode where she was trying to make
her own dress huh and she The gag was that
she accidentally said it laid out on the floor and
that she accidentally cut out the carpet along with the fabric,

(25:54):
which one. If you've ever cut out fabric, you know
that would be hard to do. But to when they
lifted it up, it was first sight gag appeal, but
it looked like the outline of a dress. It didn't
actually look like a piece of a dress pattern. And
I remember as a kid seeing that and being like,
that's not how you make a dress. So that was
my pedantic moment as a childish seamstress. Uh, both a

(26:18):
child seamstress and a childish seamstress later in life. Yeah. Hey,
we just wanted to add a quick little note at
the end of this one since we did reference Mary
Tyler Moore at the end of the episode. We recorded
this before her passing, Uh, so we just wanted to
acknowledge and thank her for the laughs. Do you have
a listener mail? Yes, I do, and it's pretty light.

(26:39):
I have two postcards. Uh. The first one is from
Ashley and Gin and they say, when clothing in history
come together, I can think I'm no other person than you. Uh.
They sent a lovely postcard from the Charleston Museum and
it's a nineteen fifties jade green chiffon evening dress. It
seemed kind of a good match for Lucy Ball episode
because I could see her wearing something lovely like that.

(27:00):
At UH, they also say Charleston is lovely in so
many ways in each street tells a story. Wishing you
all the best in the new year. Fantastic. We also
got a postcard from Stephanie that she sent from overseas.
She says, Dear Tracy and Holly, thank you for all
your hard work. Your podcast brings me so much joy.
My husband and I honeymoon in Iceland over Christmas, and

(27:20):
I wouldn't shut up about the Cod Wars and the
Yule Lads, both of which I know about because of
you wonderful ladies. Thank you, Uh. Congratulations on your nuptials, Stephanie. Yeah,
and hooray for having a similar trip to Tracy in
your honeymoon. I love it. UH. If you would like
to write to us, you can do so at History
Podcast at house stuff Works dot com. We are also

(27:42):
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(28:03):
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You're gonna churn up a lot of results that are
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(28:23):
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