SYMHC Classics: Lucille Ball

This 2017 episode covers Lucille Ball, 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 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Lucille Ball got a name drop in our
Dorothy Arsner episode, so our episode on Lucille Ball is
today's Saturday classic. This episode, which I had no memory
of until re listening to it just now, also talks
a bit more about the movie Dance, Girl Dance, which
is the film that Arsner directed. This was a sponsored

(00:25):
episode when it first came out for CNN's documentary mini
series The History of Comedy. I don't know if that's
available to stream anymore, but there are clips of it
on the CNN website. At the beginning of this episode,
we also kind of muse over the fact that it
was our nine hundredth episode, and we talk about how
maybe we should figure out when our thousandth episode is

(00:47):
going to be and do something special. We did do that.
We had some sort of casual events online and on
our social media, and we also did a two part
episode on Satakos Sasaki's one thousandth Cranes. Those two parters
came out February twenty six and twenty eight, twenty eighteen,
So enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,

(01:12):
a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So we
have a couple of housekeeping notes we do first, in
the interest of full disclosure, this episode is sponsored by CNN.

(01:34):
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 were like,
here is a giganto list of things that we have
wanted to talk about for a long time. Yeah, so

(01:54):
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 are 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 her mark in television and her

(02:15):
work really set the standard for the TV sitcom going forward.
We also have a little bit of a milestone on
this one. Hmmm. It's the nine hundredth episode 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
from way back in the archive are reruns. But nine

(02:39):
hundred is a lot. There's a lot of episodes. 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 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, this is the thousandth one, isn't it,
And I haven't planned anything. Oh, we're gonna I put

(03:00):
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. It'll be about a year from
now minus a week, right ish? Uh huh? So do
you want to just hop into Lucille Ball's story? Yes,
because I love her me too. Luciale Desiree Ball was

(03:21):
the first child of Henry Durrell Ball, who went by
Had and Desiree Huntball. When she was born on August
sixth of nineteen eleven. Her family was not wealthy, and
had who was an electrician, moved them from place to
place looking for work. When Lucy was still a small child.
He found a position in Michigan working for Michigan Bell

(03:42):
Company as alignman, 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 recalled by Lucille later in life
as her first memory, and when she talked about it

(04:03):
or wrote about it, she would literally go into great
detail about like the things 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. And in addition to the loss of Had,
Lucille's mother, Desiree, 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

(04:27):
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, Desiree started working in
a factory to try to make ends meet. She also
met and started dating a man named Ed Peterson. Peterson
and Desiree got married, but once again, what seemed like
a situation that might offer the family some stability instead

(04:50):
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 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,

(05:13):
and the Petersons were very, very poor, and they were
really pretty strict with their new step granddaughter. After several
years of this arrangement, desire and Ed moved back to
Jamestown once again, so the 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

(05:35):
package of her Kennedy Center honors, which are going to
talk about later, that said that every springtime she tried
to walk from their house to Broadway, 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

(05:57):
do this. But though it's hard to imagine the ledg
dary redhead, which is not her natural color, and we'll
talk about that as well, struggling to stand out, 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

(06:17):
how to be frightened. The school even wrote to Desiree
to let her know that her daughter was really way
too shy for the stage. As a point of trivia,
Betty Davis was at school the same time. Yeah, yeah,
Lucille Ball was definitely in awe of her. So you
can imagine if you're already a little uncertain and then

(06:38):
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. But while 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
start at drama school, he was booking modeling jobs. She

(07:02):
modeled clothing for the Vienna Borne designer Hattie Carnegie, who
I would love to also do an episode on at
some point, and later Chesterfield Cigarettes booked her for 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

(07:22):
to Hollywood to transition into acting. She also changed her
hair from its natural chestnut brown to blonde, just as
she had managed with her modeling career. After leaving drama school,
Bob began to book acting gigs rather quickly, although many
of them in her early career were uncredited starring. In
nineteen thirty three she worked at times as a Goldwyn Girl,

(07:45):
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 that movie was
Roman Scandals, which is a picture with a plot about
a young man from Westroom, 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

(08:07):
included appearing as a showgirl in the nineteen thirty four
Moulin Rouge, as a nurse and Carnival in nineteen thirty five,
and as an extra and the slapstick 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 had to
make ends meet, and she finally got a more substantial

(08:29):
part in nineteen thirty seven's Stage Door, which was a
story about a group of aspiring actresses living together in
a boarding house. Also featured in that cast were Catherine
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, Lucio played the role of Bubbles, third
build after Maureen O'Hara and Lewis Hayward in a picture

(08:52):
called Dance, Girl Dance. While the movie is far from
her most famous work, it did have a significant impact
on her life. The movie's story centered around a troop
of dancers, and while Judy, played by marine O'Hara, longed
to become a ballerina Bubble's act was burlesque. The two
were also rivals in love, and the two actresses enjoyed

(09:14):
playing up their competitive but friendly relationship. Yeah when it
came time to film a fight scene between the 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 they really were friends,
and it was there that Lucy met Desiderio Alberto Arnez

(09:37):
Desi Arnez, and she would later say of their meeting,
it wasn't love at first sight. It took a full
five minutes. The actress and the Cuban band leader appeared
together in Ball's 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,

(10:02):
who was just twenty three at the time, had a
reputation for dating a string of ladies, But Daisy and
Lucy fell in love and got married within a year.
Their wedding was on November thirtieth, nineteen forty, and it
wasn't long after the marriage in nineteen forty two that
Lucille Ball dyed her hair. The signature read that she
would be known for the rest of her life, having

(10:23):
done so at the suggestion of movie studio MGM for
her role in Duberry Was a Lady. The shade, however,
would shift and not from that original read, 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.

(10:47):
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 series

(11:10):
along the same lines with her. That seemed like great news,
but things did not go well in negotiations. Lucy wanted
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

(11:30):
desire to create a husband wife show 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

(11:52):
had this reputation built around them, and the two of
them as a pair working together, Lucy and DESI were
in a position to make some demand and have those
demands meant. 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 in this still pretty young medium,

(12:13):
They opted to set up production 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

(12:35):
formed Desilu Productions as the umbrella company 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 debuted on October fifteenth, nineteen
fifty one. The show became a national success in this
mix of comedy and examination of common social issues really

(12:57):
struck a good note with the viewing audience. Yeah, 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 juggling.
And yeah, it was just months from the time she
had the baby to when they went into full production schedule.
And Lucy was based on anything you could ever possibly

(13:19):
read or hear about her from her colleagues. Absolutely relentless
in her pursuit of 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

(13:40):
was ad libbed, but she really rehearsed almost everything to
the point that it was 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 a show
about Lucy ol Ball, often the things that come spilling

(14:05):
out of their mouth are all 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,

(14:26):
like my mom would be making me breakfast. It would
be on syndicated in the time slot before the morning news,
either that or the Indie Griffith Show. Because this was
North Carolina, you gotta have some expectations. I've probably seen
every episode of it. Anyway. I Love Lucy ran for
six years and led all shows in the US ratings

(14:48):
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 nineteen fifty three,
which aired on the same day Desi Ernz Junior was
born or An in real life, thanks to a scheduled
cesarean section, it set ratings records, surpassing audience numbers for
the Eisenhower inauguration. Yeah, it's the first instance where an

(15:10):
actress's 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 some hurdles at CBS. The network

(15:32):
was first deeply uneasy about the idea of showing a
pregnant woman on TV. They thought people might find it
vulgar or distasteful. Those 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 and they would say she was

(15:52):
expecting instead, And there were also titters about how Dosy
pronounced the word yeah, and they had to name it
Lucy is Pregnant, but they used the French word for pregnant,
so that even though the titles never appeared on the show.
That's one of my favorite episodes if you've never seen it.

(16:13):
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 wrong time. I love it,
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. The way that she eventually tells

(16:34):
him in the end 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 Dazil productions, quote, Lucy's

(16:56):
hair was a golden Apricot color and she used a
Hannah rense to achieve it. She met a very wealthy
sheik who had heard about her problem in 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

(17:18):
story where her hair color 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. The other
significant event of their lives while I Love Lucy was
running was a scandal around Lucille's political history. The White
House Unamerican Activities Committee investigated Ball due to the fact

(17:42):
that in nineteen thirty 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 nineteen thirty six at the request of her grandfather,
Fred Hunt, and then it was nothing more than a
gesture to please the elderly patriot. Her mother and brother
had apparently done the same thing. Yeah, there was also

(18:05):
there were also stories that she had hosted some parties
at her home, some 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. 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

(18:28):
American people than that. I think any time you give
the American people the truth, they're with you. And in
her case, she was right. Her fans sent cards and
telegrams of support, and she and Dezi 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 Dezi continued at the
Helm of Dezi Lee Productions. The Untouchables and Star Trek

(18:50):
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,

(19:10):
when she switched to TV. 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 good
projects came up, and she also did theater, which is
how she met her second husband. She remarried Gary Morton
not long after her split from Desi. She had at
the time been in New York to star in the

(19:31):
Broadway show Wildcat, which ran at the Alvin Theater, and
that was when 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 Ballt bought out Desi Arnezza's interest
in Desi Leap Productions. After running the company for six years,
she sold it in nineteen sixty seven for seventeen million dollars.

(19:53):
The person company Gulf Western, which also owned Paramount Pictures,
renamed the 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 second, smaller production company. She starred in two series

(20:16):
in the nineteen sixties. The Lucy Show ran on CBS
from nineteen sixty two to nineteen sixty eight, and it
featured lucial 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 Lucy, as well as
several writers from I Love Lucy, also joined the production.
After The Lucy Show ran for sixty years, Lucille moved

(20:37):
on to another sitcom titled Here's Lucy in nineteen sixty eight.
She was once again playing a widow, but this time
her two sitcom children were played by her actual children,
Lucy and Desi Junior. 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

(20:58):
role that was a significant depart from the comedy that
had really made her career. She started in a TV
movie which was titled Stone Pillow, in which she played
a homeless woman. And after that, while she got good
reviews for her work on that, it wasn't a particularly
successful film, and she once again moved into sitcoms because

(21:19):
that is really what people wanted of her. So she
worked with CBS one more time and she premiered Life
with Lucy in nineteen eighty six, but unlike her previous
three sitcoms, it was a flop. It only lasted for
eight episodes. In April nineteen eighty nine, she underwent an
eight hour open heart surgery at Cedar sign A Medical
Center after experiencing chest pains and being diagnosed with an

(21:43):
aortic aneurism. After the procedure, she initially appeared to be
recovering well, but then she experienced another aortic rapture which
claimed her life. She died on April twenty sixth of
nineteen eighty nine. And next up, we're going to talk
a little little bit about Lucy's legacy. But before we do,
we're going to take a quick break and here again

(22:04):
from a fantastic sponsor. So over the course of her career,
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

(22:28):
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
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

(22:49):
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 with
that award. In nineteen seventy eight, she was honored with
the Hollywood Foreign Press Association cecilby de Mill Award. Lucy
was honored by the Kennedy Center on December seventh, nineteen

(23:11):
eighty 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 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,

(23:34):
physical comedy without losing 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 Lucy ninety percent 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

(23:55):
Sam good props, but props. Nevertheless, ps I Love Lucy
was an just the title. After her death in nineteen
eighty nine, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
and in two thousand and one, Newsweek named her the
top female entertainer of the twentieth century. If that were
not for Lucy Elleball's incredibly skilled and dedicated comedic work

(24:18):
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 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

(24:39):
really spearheaded this 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 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

(24:59):
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 for 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

(25:20):
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 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

(25:43):
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 once gave
him the following advice about working in Hollywood, although I
think it is pretty good advice for almost anything in life.

(26:06):
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 so hear her saying it fantastic. I
know it's very subtle, but I'm a lucial ballfan. Yeah,
I love the long, long trailer. It is both the

(26:29):
movie starring Lucille Ball and Dozy Arnett and they might
be giant song called everything Right Is Wrong Again. I
really love de Berry was a lady, and I will
say this, I have one beef with the I Love
Lucy show. Oh yeah, it's so specific and nerdy and
dorky and weird to dressmakers. There was an episode where

(26:53):
she was trying to make her own dress, huh, and
she The gag was that she accidentally she had it
laid out on the floor, and that she accidentally cut
out the carpet along with the fabric, which one, if
you've ever cut out fabric, you know that would be
hard to do. But two, when they lifted it up,
it was for sight gag appeal, but it looked like

(27:14):
the outline of address. It didn't actually look like a
piece of address 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, both a child seamstress and a childish seamstress
later in life. Yeah, thanks so much for joining us

(27:39):
on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note,
our email addresses History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.