In the 1950s, I Love Lucy, more than any other show, demonstrated the drawing power of a funny leading lady, paving the way for most of the other sitcoms featured in this book. Because Lucy dominated the TV ratings for its entire prime time run, usually in the #1 spot, it popularized the domestic sitcom, filmed in front of an audience, a genre that the show’s producers and writers largely invented. Decades later, the show’s influence can be seen in practically every sitcom that has followed since.
Ironically, if CBS executives, and even the show’s own sponsor, had had their druthers back in 1951, none of this would have come to pass. What the network asked for was a TV adaptation of Lucille Ball’s radio sitcom My Favorite Husband, which had been playing to solid ratings since 1948. It was to co-star her radio leading man, actor Richard Denning, as her spouse, and be a live broadcast originating from New York. Lucy Ricardo had not yet been invented, and CBS certainly saw no future in starring Ball opposite her real-life husband, Latin American bandleader Desi Arnaz.
Luckily for Lucy aficionados, Ball was in a position to make certain demands. Although indications were that her film career had peaked, she was nonetheless one of the biggest stars to make herself available for a television series in 1951. Of the comedy shows then popular with TV audiences, which were still relatively few in number, most were adaptations of successful radio shows (i.e., The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, The Goldbergs), or starred performers just becoming known to mass audiences. Milton Berle, whose sketch comedy show was still pulling large audiences, had been no more than a moderate success in radio or film, and had little to lose by toplining a TV show in the infancy of the medium. But film stars, even second-tier ones like Ball then was, were strictly hands-off where TV series work was concerned.
If Ball was being a pioneer in the early 1950s, as she undoubtedly was, it was less a career move than an effort to save her decade-old marriage. Although the unparalleled success of I Love Lucy, and Ball’s insistence that her husband play the male lead, would ultimately only postpone the Arnazes’ apparently inevitable divorce, it would provide Ball with the most unforgettable role of her long career, and provide a model from which many, many other shows would follow.
Born in Jamestown, New York, on August 6, 1911, Ball came to television after a movie career that had spanned seventeen years and dozens of films, few of them memorable. Under contract at various times to MGM, RKO, and Columbia, none of them had really known quite what to do with her, and she had circled frustratingly around top stardom without ever quite nailing it. Although her flair for comedy should have been visible from the outset, it took producers and directors a surprisingly long time to figure out what she did best.
Her film debut had been a harbinger of things of come. Cast as a beautiful slave girl in MGM’s Roman Scandals (1933), she stood out from the crowd when she volunteered to do a bit the other pretty young actresses disdained—allow mud to be splattered on her face. The incident not only hinted at the gift for slapstick that would eventually be her stock in trade, but also showed something about Ball herself. Never one to think herself above most types of work, she would cheerfully star in mediocre B movies, pose for cheesecake photos, and generally consider herself lucky for whatever breaks she got in Hollywood.
Although it wouldn’t be until I Love Lucy that her comedic gifts would be given free rein, Ball would have the opportunity to work with several noteworthy comedians during those early years. In the 1934 Three Stooges short “Three Little Pigskins,” a young Ball found herself on the receiving end of a seltzer bottle wielded by Curly. A few years later, having worked her way up to larger roles, she played the ingénue in the Marx Brothers comedy Room Service (RKO, 1938), though her comedic flair wasn’t readily apparent to the acerbic Groucho—“I’ve never found Lucille Ball to be funny on her own,” he commented years later. “She’s always needed a script.”1
Off-camera, she befriended the legendary silent comedian Buster Keaton in the 1940s, when both were on the MGM payroll, he as a gag writer rather than a performer. She would later credit Keaton, and director Eddie Sedgwick, with teaching her some of the facility with props that later came in handy on her TV series. “Attention to detail, that’s what it’s all about,” Ball later explained. “If I had to work with grapes, a loaf of bread, a cup of coffee, whatever, I had to test them first to know what I was eating or drinking, how hot or cold it was, how it got there, how it would ride on the tray.”2
Her strong dramatic performance in RKO’s The Big Street (1942) was critically acclaimed, but didn’t lead to more roles of the same caliber. Under contract to MGM in the 1940s, she was given assignments in musical comedies like DuBarry Was a Lady (1942), and, for the first time, became a redhead. After freelancing for a period in the late 1940s, she signed a deal at Columbia Pictures, where she made comedies like Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949). Her comedic roles of this period opened some eyes as to her comedic gifts, but films would never exploit them as well as TV did.
One of the most influential films of Ball’s career, though not necessarily for career reasons, was RKO’s 1940 release Too Many Girls. Among her co-stars in this adaptation of a successful Broadway musical was Cuban-born singer Desi Arnaz. The attraction was instantaneous, and led to marriage on November 30, 1940.
Even when her career wasn’t at its peak, Ball loved show business with a fervor surpassed by few. During her tenure at RKO, according to Ball’s cousin Cleo, “She was always offering to get me this role or that role, and never could understand why I wasn’t interested. I could never make her understand that acting was not every girl’s heart’s desire. She knows, I guess, that some girls dream about other things, but I don’t think she quite believes it. To Lucy everybody has that same drive, energy, concentration, and sense of purpose.”3
By the mid–1940s, her film career still stuck in neutral, Ball was looking for other opportunities. She garnered good reviews for her supporting performance opposite Keenan Wynn in the Tracy-Hepburn comedy Without Love (MGM, 1945), enough so that there was interest in seeing them reunited. Variety reported that a Ball-Wynn radio comedy show, “The Magnificent Morgans,” was being pitched to sponsors in the summer of 1945, but there were no takers.
In 1948, however, Ball debuted on CBS radio in My Favorite Husband, where she began to perfect her role as a zany housewife. The radio series also introduced her to producer/head writer Jess Oppenheimer, and writers Bob Carroll, Jr., and Madelyn Pugh, who would be integral to her television career.
Lucy Ricardo in embryo: Lucille Ball with co-star Eddie Albert in The Fuller Brush Girl (Columbia, 1950), an early showcase for her slapstick gifts.
Ironically, as plans for Ball’s TV show were under discussion in the fall of 1950, Columbia released The Fuller Brush Girl, a raucous, high-energy comedy that came closer than most of Ball’s movie assignments to demonstrating what she did best. In the movie’s first ten minutes came the first of several inventive slapstick sequences—Ball’s character, working as a switchboard operator, sneezes a dust cloud of face powder all over herself, sets the switchboard on fire, douses her boss with water, and shatters the glass of the office door. The sequence would have been right at home in an episode of I Love Lucy.
Working from a script by Frank Tashlin, whose live-action comedies were almost as animated as the cartoons he’d previously made, Ball gave a lively performance that attracted some long overdue attention in Hollywood. “If ever there were any doubts as to Miss Ball’s forte,” Variety commented, “Fuller Brush dispels them. She is an excellent comedienne.”4
The star herself made note of how well she was suited to the physical comedy the role had required. “When I decided to become a real roughhouse comedienne,” she later said, “it was because I was feeling my way toward the right type of role for me. For years I had been making a big career mistake—I had faithfully followed Hollywood’s idea that I was a tough, brash showgirl type.
“I was always playing uppity actresses and musical-comedy queens—which I never felt like at all. I hated being a glamour girl with never a hair out of place. Most of all, I hated those brittle lines I spoke. I guess I was a frustrated housewife, which is why I enjoy what I am finally doing on television; but for years I wasn’t smart enough to do my own type-casting.”5
Of the actresses profiled in this book, only Gracie Allen was already the star of her own network sitcom when I Love Lucy was in development during early 1951. The success of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show may have reassured CBS executives that another half-hour comedy about a dizzy dame would be well-received by viewers. And in the early stages of developing Ball’s series, the writers may have looked to Burns and Allen as a model for their original concept of showcasing Ball and Arnaz as a successful show business couple.
The star balked, feeling that viewers would not identify with the problems (whatever they might be) of married entertainers. But looking back on her tenure in My Favorite Husband, Ball recognized that she had enjoyed playing a suburban housewife, a contrast to the more glamorous, snarkier characters she had played as a movie leading lady in the 1930s and 1940s. Working with Husband’s producer/head writer Jess Oppenheimer and writers Bob Carroll, Jr. and Madelyn Pugh, Ball and Arnaz eventually approved a storyline that again placed her in a middle-class milieu, though everyone agreed that he could not credibly play the Midwestern banker husband that Denning had essayed in the radio show.
Eventually, Oppenheimer paid one dollar to register with the Screen Writers’ Guild a brief synopsis of what would become I Love Lucy. Its chief characters, he wrote, “are happily married and very much in love. The only bone of contention between them is her desire to get into show business, and his equally strong desire to keep her out of it....”6 This clever premise would allow Arnaz to be spotlighted as a singer and bandleader, at which he then had considerably more experience than he did acting, while Ball could mine comedy from the frustration of a woman continually thwarted in achieving her own ambitions.
Lest anyone doubt who was considered the star attraction here, CBS proposed calling the series The Lucille Ball Show, which they were willing to follow with (in smaller type) “co-starring Desi Arnaz.” This no doubt struck them as a reasonable compromise, since they would have been happier with Arnaz out of the picture altogether. But Ball, aware of her husband’s ego, insisted that he share the star billing, and the show was developed to showcase both family members. What CBS envisioned as a star vehicle for Ball would ultimately be announced as “the Lucille Ball—Desi Arnaz show—I Love Lucy.” Even the “I” was intended to assuage any wounded pride on his part, as it was clearly a reference to his Ricky Ricardo character.
While trying to persuade CBS to give them a television series, Ball and Arnaz had gone on a vaudeville tour in 1950, cobbling together a well-received act that combined his singing and her clowning. Given the go-ahead on a month’s notice to put together a pilot episode for I Love Lucy, Oppenheimer and his writers prepared a script that drew heavily on the act Ball and Arnaz had done onstage. In March 1951, the pilot episode was kinescoped from a live performance. Unlike most of today’s TV pilots, the sample show was not necessarily intended to serve as the first episode of the regular series if it sold—instead, it was designed to show potential sponsors on Madison Avenue what I Love Lucy would be like. Believed lost for many years, a copy of the pilot episode surfaced decades later, and received its first television broadcast as a CBS special in 1990.
The pilot introduces us to what will later become some of the show’s regular elements. Lucy is, of course, vying to get a place in Ricky’s act, and salivates at the news that a possible TV sponsor is paying a visit to his nightclub. Ricky, setting up Oppenheimer’s original premise, balks at the idea of her pursing a career: “I want a wife who’s just a wife.” Later, though, when the clown scheduled to perform as part of Ricky’s show is injured, Lucy takes the opportunity to step in. In a dénouement that essentially contradicts much of what would take place in the regular series, Lucy’s antics result in the offer of a television contract from the sponsor, which she turns down in deference to Ricky’s wishes.
Although not everything about the pilot works well, Ball’s chemistry with her real-life husband is immediately apparent. Always at her best when allowed ample time to rehearse, Ball shines in the show-stopping “Professor” routine, which she had perfected through hundreds of live performances. Along the way, it’s obvious that she and Arnaz are struggling not to break up, especially during a moment when, as she would do in so many subsequent episodes, Ball playfully mocks her husband’s accent:
Ricky: Never mind making fun of my English.
Lucy: That’s English?
Watching the pilot, it’s clear that Ball wanted to share the spotlight with her husband, who receives ample screen time for his singing. Although she plays most of her scenes in bulky, layered clothing (due to her real-life pregnancy), Arnaz is presented so as to showcase not only his talent but his charisma and sex appeal—it’s unlikely that Richard Denning would have been directed to bare his chest in a bedroom scene, as Arnaz does in the pilot.
Some soon-to-be staples of the show surface: we hear snatches of Arnaz’s signature song, “Babalu,” and there’s already a joke about Lucy’s use of hair dye. The sets in the pilot episode bear little resemblance to the familiar Ricardo apartment seen in the series, though, and the characters of Fred and Ethel Mertz are not yet on the scene.
Shown to potential sponsors in New York that spring, the show was not particularly quick to sell, despite Ball’s presence. Finally, a potential sponsor surfaced—Philip Morris. The cigarette manufacturer was willing to foot the bill for Ball’s sitcom, but insisted on a weekly show instead of the every other week that she and her agent had envisioned. Ball had envisioned that her TV work could be combined with other activities if she wasn’t on every week, perhaps allowing her to continue her motion picture career (as she had done during the run of My Favorite Husband). Nor could Arnaz continue to tour profitably as a bandleader if a weekly show was required. Rather than lose the deal, they signed on the dotted line to furnish I Love Lucy as a weekly entry on CBS’ Monday night schedule, to debut in October 1951.
It was a busy summer—in July, Ball gave birth to her first child, daughter Lucie, after eleven years of marriage. Nonetheless, plans for the regular series went forward, and Ball began rehearsals six weeks after Lucie was born. Although network executives and the sponsor had given in to Ball’s wish to co-star her husband, they made it plain that I Love Lucy was to be a comedy show, not a variety or musical program. Philip Morris made the point explicit by stipulating contractually that Arnaz was not to perform extraneous musical numbers in the show, singing only when it was a logical adjunct to the sitcom’s storyline. Even though Burns and Allen was still featuring dancing and singing interludes during each live broadcast (and would continue to do so until the show converted to film in 1952), I Love Lucy would not follow this model.
The haphazard combinations of expediency, luck, personal motives, and creative thinking ultimately gave birth to what would become TV’s premier sitcom of the 1950s. Much of this was due to Ball and her colleagues’ ability to think on their feet, and develop viable alternatives when problems arose. Deciding that the Ricardos needed next-door neighbors, a setup that had worked well on Ball’s radio show, Oppenheimer found that he was unable to obtain the services of well-known character actors Gale Gordon and Bea Benaderet to reprise their featured roles from My Favorite Husband. Gordon was committed to Our Miss Brooks, already a hit on radio and being eyed for a TV version, and Benaderet had already accepted a featured role on another popular CBS sitcom, Burns and Allen. Tackling what could have been another crisis for the burgeoning show, Oppenheimer and his stars agreed on film character actor William Frawley to play crotchety neighbor Fred Mertz, while Lucy’s original director Marc Daniels recommended his little-known actress friend Vivian Vance for the part of Ethel.
When Ball and Arnaz balked at relocating to New York, from which the sponsor wanted the show’s live broadcasts to originate, they and their colleagues stumbled into a genre never before attempted—the sitcom filmed in front of a live audience. Film allowed them to stay home in Hollywood (one of Ball’s main goals in doing the series at all), while everyone agreed that the presence of a live audience energized her performances in a way that nothing else could.
This method of making the show called for a number of technical innovations and decisions. While game shows like Truth or Consequences and Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life (NBC, 1950–61) were being shot on film with audiences present, they generally took place on one fixed set, without the complications that I Love Lucy would entail. During the spring and summer of 1951, Ball and company essentially invented the method by which any number of TV sitcoms would be shot for the next several decades.
Once recorded on film, the shows were also available for rebroadcast. As ingrained into the world of the TV sitcom as reruns now are, it may be hard to imagine that this was a novelty. At that time, sitcom episodes aired once, and the shows usually took summer hiatuses during which a replacement series aired. During the run of I Love Lucy, especially the period in which Ball’s real-life pregnancy curtailed her working hours, producer Oppenheimer would test the innovative practice of airing select episodes a second time. Surely none of those involved could have imagined how many replays I Love Lucy was ultimately destined to have.
By the time I Love Lucy premiered that fall, ironically, most of the resemblances to My Favorite Husband, aside from the presence of Ball herself, had fallen by the wayside. So little did it resemble the original product that CBS later launched a separate TV adaptation of Husband, without Ball, though it never approached the popularity of Lucy. Two capable leading ladies—first Joan Caulfield, later Vanessa Brown, tried in vain to make that show fly during its 1953–55 run.
Though not the first episode filmed, a segment called “The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub” was selected as Lucy’s premiere episode. The episode centered on a men-vs.-women quarrel over how to observe Fred and Ethel Mertz’s wedding anniversary, and culminated in a show-stopping scene in which Ball and Vance impersonate hillbilly blind dates for their husbands. The episode originally intended to be the series opener, “Lucy Thinks Ricky Is Trying to Murder Her,” which was not quite as slick and skillfully shot as the one substituted, would air a few weeks later.
In changing the sequence of shows aired, the show lost the opportunity to benefit from some of the exposition and background information that had been purposely written into the first episode, such as Ricky’s entrance carrying a Tropicana poster that allows him to brag about his act being held over there (an engagement that, as it turned out, would last for most of the show’s run). Still, the episode that aired first effectively introduced all four principal characters, and showed that the series had grown enormously more effective since the pilot was shot.
The show’s early episodes demonstrate that the producer and writers had not yet completely resolved the differences between sketch comedy and sitcom. The aptly titled “Lucy Thinks Ricky is Trying to Murder Her” asks us to believe that Lucy is genuinely afraid her husband has poisoned her, though this is blamed somewhat on her overactive imagination and professed fondness for murder mysteries. This plot would have been unlikely by the show’s second or third season, when the audience knew the characters better. In another first-season episode, “The Kleptomaniac” (4/14/52), Lucy somehow transports a circus elephant into the Ricardos’ bedroom, as the kicker to a joke she’s playing on Ricky.
Technically, the early shows owe something to the sketch comedy format, where believability was less important. As the action switches between rooms of the Ricardos’ apartment, director Marc Daniels’ cameras occasionally pan past the edges of set walls, allowing us to see where they come to an end downstage. In one early episode, the effects of a gun shot through a door are represented by a patently phony-looking hole cut into the door, pulled away with a wire when the pistol is fired.
My Favorite Husband had been a moderately successful show, but hardly one that took the world by storm. Ball’s most recent theatrical films had, likewise, been no more than qualified hits, and her last release under her Columbia contract, The Magic Carpet, which opened in the fall of 1951, had been a real stinker. Much as CBS might have hoped that I Love Lucy would catch on, they surely never expected the ratings phenomenon and cultural icon that it became within weeks of its premiere.
Mike Dann, a CBS program executive in the 1960s, was working at NBC when I Love Lucy premiered, and later remembered, “We had a show on the air [Mondays at 9 p.m.] called Lights Out, sponsored by Amident.... Both the show and the toothpaste were tremendously popular—everybody watched Lights Out.
“Then Desi and Lucy came on the air opposite that show, and Lights Out was canceled. We at NBC were just flabbergasted, we just couldn’t believe it. Here was this girl who wasn’t that famous, and this bongo player from Cuba—and it never lost its momentum. It was the first time we used the word ‘runaway’ to describe a show.”7
Critics and viewers alike were flabbergasted by the raw talent that Lucille Ball displayed in early episodes of I Love Lucy, as showcased by the carefully structured vehicle that Oppenheimer and his staff had developed for her. The visual slapstick that would become such an important element in the TV show had played no part, obviously, in her radio work, and audiences had rarely had a chance to savor her memorable facial expressions as a comedienne. Although The Fuller Brush Girl traded on her visual humor in a way that had largely been unseen in the dozens of films she’d made earlier, it was the combination of visual humor, strong characterization, and emotional appeal, along with the distinctive character of Lucy Ricardo that made I Love Lucy irresistible to viewers. Although Ball had had no assurance that a TV series would be a wise career move, she unexpectedly hit the peak of her stardom at the age of 40.
In the show’s first two years on CBS, Ball’s show would deliver many of the episodes that fans would later crown as classic Lucy. Among the first season’s highlights was “Lucy Does A TV Commercial” (5/5/52), in which Lucy had her tipsy encounter with Vitameatavegamin. The second season opener was the unforgettable “Job Switching” (9/15/52), culminating in Lucy and Ethel’s losing battle with the conveyor belt at Kramer’s Kandy Kitchen.
Ball embraced her sitcom work with fervor, enjoying it more than anything she had done previously. It even gave her the chance to play benefactor to friends like character actress Barbara Pepper, who turned up often on Lucy in minor roles. (The dedicated I Love Lucy watcher’s version of “Where’s Waldo?” is to spot either Pepper or Desi Arnaz’s friend Louis A. Nicoletti in one of their frequent walk-on appearances).
Although I Love Lucy has been extensively analyzed, reviewed, and discussed, it is worth another look in terms of how it shaped the future of the filmed TV sitcom. TV’s most popular comedy show in 1951 was still NBC’s Texaco Star Theatre, a wild, raucous showcase for the sketch comedy of Milton Berle. Also popular was another variety show, Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, which traded in a subtler brand of sketch humor. Throughout the early 1950s, sponsors brought comedians (mostly male) to TV in hour-long formats such as The Colgate Comedy Hour.
I Love Lucy was the first sitcom to bring a strong element of visual humor to the format. The Amos ’n’ Andy Show, another new sitcom on CBS’ fall 1951 schedule, relied more on verbal humor than slapstick, though the latter was not completely absent from the series’ scripts. Burns and Allen had a TV show not dissimilar from what had worked for them on radio, relying less than Lucy would on the visual possibilities of television.
And yet other comediennes would find that slapstick was only one element of what made I Love Lucy work. Joan Davis, a gifted performer who had always demonstrated a bent for physical comedy, would soon star in a show that, while it superficially resembled I Love Lucy in many ways (beginning with its title, I Married Joan), lacked some of the other elements that made Lucy take flight.
In fact, while the enormous popularity of I Love Lucy would inevitably foster imitation, some of the elements not quite as obvious as the physical comedy would be seldom duplicated. Because the show spotlighted Ball’s brilliance as a slapstick performer, some would-be imitators seemed not to notice that the audience also loved the characters on I Love Lucy, and rooted for them.
Lucy Ricardo, as created by Ball and her writers, was the embodiment of every audience member who longed to rebel against the mundane and ordinary in life. She has already been blessed with most of the things a woman in the 1950s was supposed to want—she had beauty, a handsome and successful husband, a happy home, good friends, and eventually a child. What Eve Arden’s Our Miss Brooks pined for (marriage, home, and children), Lucy had. So why was she so rebellious—and so appealing to audiences?
Unlike most shows of that era, I Love Lucy, in its own inimitable way, acknowledged that a bright, creative woman might want an outlet for her gifts. Few TV shows at the time acknowledged as openly as Lucy did that housework was no big thrill for an intelligent person, or that we all sometimes long for adventure in our lives. Lucy also took a humorous look, through the characters of Fred and Ethel Mertz, at what middle-aged spread and twenty-five years of a humdrum existence could do to a husband and wife.
Much of the appeal of Lucy’s character was to the side of us that yearns to deal with adult problems in a less-than-adult way. Can’t figure out how to balance your checkbook? Throw the bills up in the air, and pay only the ones that land face-up. Wishing for some quality time alone with your husband? Lock him up in your room, and give away the key.
As producer—head writer Oppenheimer astutely observed, “To me, Lucy Ricardo represents the childish factor still a part of every adult. Most people who get into a frustrating situation may have a flash thought of some impulsive act that would be a gratifying way of coping with the situation. But they quickly put it out of their minds, the way responsible, inhibited adults are supposed to. For Lucy Ricardo, however, the impulsive thought invariably becomes the course of action. In identifying with her, the audience can vicariously enjoy exercising their own childish impulses, petty curiosities, and foolhardy but self-gratifying escapades.”8
Along with the uniqueness of the character Oppenheimer and his colleagues created, perhaps it was the then-unusual presence of a woman writer, Madelyn Pugh (later Davis), that caused I Love Lucy to resonate with female viewers. Perhaps it was Desi Arnaz’s status as a foreigner, in a prejudiced age, or just his status as Ball’s real-life husband, that made it acceptable for Lucy to mock and defy her husband in a way that few 1950s sitcom women did. Although some of the elements of I Love Lucy seem dated today—the way that Lucy purports to kowtow to her husband’s authority, and is prone to call him “sir” when she’s in trouble—it was always pretty clear who really held the reins in that household. In “The Matchmaker” (10/25/54), after Lucy has once again dived into a situation against Ricky’s wishes, they have a typical Ricardo quarrel:
Lucy: Well, for once I decided not to do what you told me!
Ricky: For once! You never do what I tol’ you!
Lucy: Then why don’t you quit tol-in’ me?
My Little Margie, which came along in the flood of new sitcoms that Lucy inevitably spawned, transferred much of the defiance that Lucy showed her husband to Margie’s father. Even Margie, though, never went as far as Lucy did—Lucy, who mimicked her husband’s accent to his face, and, when competing with him for attention in front of a movie camera, reaches out and yanks his pants down.
Far from having their sensibilities affronted by this uncharacteristic husband-and-wife relationship, though, viewers ate it up. Somehow, thanks to the show’s strong writing and the chemistry of its stars, Lucy and Ricky could yell at each other, make fun of each other, throw pails of water or pies in the other’s face, and viewers never for a minute doubted their sincere love and affection.
Ball and Arnaz also exhibited a rapport that few other TV couples could match. For all that Ball’s inimitable clowning is what most viewers most associate with the show, I Love Lucy, more than most sitcoms of its day, also delved into the ups and downs of married life. Though Ball’s series is rarely praised as a model of reality, the scripts in fact had much to say about the day-to-day frustrations and challenges of husbands and wives, as well as the ways that women and men related to each other. In the show’s first aired episode, when Lucy complains, “Ever since we said ‘I do,’ there are so many things we don’t,” the audience not only laughed but acknowledged the truthfulness behind the joke.
Although TV censorship codes were strict in the 1950s, I Love Lucy presented a married couple that, in the middle of the show’s most absurd moments, had a natural intimacy to their interplay that could not have been achieved solely through acting, no matter how skilled. While Lucy and Ricky, like other TV couples of the day, were generally forbidden to share a bed, scenes often took place in their bedroom, and occasionally even in their bathroom, a rarity for the 1950s.
Although many TV historians credit The Dick Van Dyke Show (CBS, 1961–66) with breaking new ground in depicting the sexual and romantic chemistry of Rob and Laura Petrie (Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore), I Love Lucy was ahead of its time in depicting a married couple whose attraction was tangible—as the results would soon be, when the star’s real-life pregnancy was, despite CBS’ fear of offending viewers with this frankness, written into the scripts during the show’s second season.
Probably because its stars were a real-life couple, Lucy was occasionally permitted moments that might have been found risqué in another show. In “The Amateur Hour” (1/14/52), Ricky makes fun of Lucy’s oft-repeated complaint that she doesn’t own enough clothes by pretending to head out for work in his underwear, sardonically telling her, “I haven’t a thing to wear!” Though Arnaz’ costuming in baggy, polka-dot boxers keeps the moment seeming innocent enough, especially by today’s TV standards, it’s hard to envision this scene appearing in most other husband-wife sitcoms of the day.
Nor did most other shows derive so many plots from the heroine’s fears that her husband might be sexually attracted to other women. From the very first episode aired, “The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub,” the idea of Ricky’s possible infidelity is a recurrent theme in the show (though he is in fact unfailingly faithful to Lucy). Although this particular issue had been a long-standing concern in Ball’s own marriage, she apparently never took exception to its use as a plot point on I Love Lucy. Episodes such as “Don Juan and the Starlets” (2/14/55), in which Lucy wrongly believes that her husband stayed out all night with a group of beautiful models, made light of the subject while acknowledging a marital problem much less frequently discussed in other 1950s sitcoms. Did June Cleaver (Leave it to Beaver) or Margaret Anderson (Father Knows Best) ever worry that their men had wandering eyes?
The fine art of marital negotiation: the Ricardos of I Love Lucy.
One other unique aspect of the show received surprisingly little comment, and seemingly stirred no particular controversy with viewers—the fact that it depicted sitcom’s first interracial marriage (at least by the standards of the 1950s, if not universally regarded as such today). Almost 25 years later, CBS would be extremely nervous about this aspect of two supporting roles on The Jeffersons—Caucasian Tom Willis and his African-American wife Helen. Series executive producer Norman Lear battled with network executives over a kiss between the two actors in the pilot episode.
Dubious as CBS was about the prospect of allowing Ball to co-star opposite her Latino husband, had Arnaz been Asian-American, or African-American, the idea would surely have been considered out of the question altogether. Because Arnaz was a relatively light-skinned Hispanic, and fit somewhat into the “Latin lover” stereotype that Hollywood had embraced in the 1940s, his casting was reluctantly approved in the face of Ball’s insistence. Once that decision was made, Lucy’s writers played up his appeal to female viewers, presenting him as exotic and charming. The show would ultimately make him what scholar Steven Bender recently described as “arguably the most prominent media Latina/o of the last century,” noting that his character was depicted as “entrepreneurial and upwardly mobile and as possessing an urban and urbane intelligence and character.”9
Whether intentionally or not, I Love Lucy seemed to put much of its stars private lives on display, and viewers grew attached to Ball and her TV character to a degree that would seldom, if ever, be matched. Her real-life pregnancy was depicted in seven of the show’s second-season episodes, a rarity in an era when that condition was usually represented onscreen, if at all, by the placement of a small pillow under the costume of a non-pregnant actress. Ball was visibly, unquestionably pregnant, and, far from being offended, viewers were thrilled for her. The actress and her husband, who had been childless for the first decade of their marriage, grew noticeably emotional during an I Love Lucy scene where Lucy tells Ricky they’re “expecting” (“Lucy is Enceinte,” 12/8/52), and audiences knew they were watching more than just a skilled performance. Ball would be pictured with her new baby on the cover of TV Guide’s first national issue, and public excitement over the event ran high in the weeks before Desi Junior’s birth in January 1953.
Perfectly as Ball and Arnaz seemed to be matched onscreen, there were other elements of their real lives that peeked through as well. “Many times on the Lucy show,” she said years later, “the script was very close to reality. In real life Desi and I had separated and reconciled many times, and the public knew this. So our writers did a script about Lucy and Ricky quarreling and separating [seemingly a reference to the “Matchmaker” episode].
“Ricky Ricardo moved out of the apartment and I was supposed to walk around the living room set, forlorn, touching each piece of furniture wistfully. To our writers’ amazement, people in the studio audience took out their handkerchiefs and started weeping. Then when Lucy and Ricky were reconciled a few minutes later, in what was supposed to be a hilarious scene, nobody laughed. They were too happy and relieved to see us together again.”10
Done as skillfully as this show did them, those elements were understandably harder for Lucy’s competitors to mimic. Even Ball herself, when surrounded by less inspired colleagues, would find I Love Lucy’s success impossible to replicate, though she would continue to be a top-rated TV star into the early 1970s with her vehicles The Lucy Show (CBS, 1962–68) and Here’s Lucy (CBS, 1968–74).
Ball loved the opportunities for play that I Love Lucy gave her, and threw herself wholeheartedly into the show. Ironically, as joyous as the work was for her, it came during a period in her life when her own circumstances were often grimmer.
A 1953 brush with the House Un-American Activities Committee, following up on Ball’s registration as a potential Communist Party voter almost twenty years earlier, threatened briefly to topple the Desilu empire. And by midway through the show’s six-year run, it was becoming increasingly apparent that, for everything else I Love Lucy had achieved, it was not producing the desired marital harmony for Ball. An article in the January 1955 issue of the scurrilous gossip magazine Confidential purported to detail Desi Arnaz’s frequent dalliances with other women of dubious virtue, not all of them in the distant past. The publicity embarrassed Ball, and made her realize that her husband’s behavior might preclude the happy outcome she had envisioned for them as spouses and co-stars.
Ironically, the show that Ball had intended to solidify her personal life seems to have had quite the opposite effect. The longer I Love Lucy ran, and the more her marriage seemed to unravel, the more important her career became to her, and the greater her focus on work at the expense of her home life. Eventually the I Love Lucy set, or any set where she was being allowed to do the work she loved, became a safe haven that brought her more satisfaction than most other aspects of her life.
Although the three-camera method of sitcom filming was developed and perfected on I Love Lucy, few of the shows that followed would look as fresh and spontaneous as this one did. While later sitcoms would compile each episode from assembling the best takes from two different live performances, with the increasing sophistication of film or videotape editing allowing every blemish to be trimmed, Lucy maintains the feeling of a stage play. Not in the sense of playing up to the studio audience, which was perhaps most blatant in 1970s sitcoms like The Jeffersons, but in the choice to let slight imperfections remain in the finished product. If the Lucy actors occasionally stumbled slightly over a line, or reacted to something unexpected, the moment was rarely re-shot, or deleted. Though the actors never broke character, or were seen on air in the type of flubs that would be fodder for blooper shows in the 1980s, their performances gave the show a strikingly natural feel that few others replicated. Conversely, the show was never disrupted with moments such as the whoops of audience joy that eventually greeted the first entrance of almost every actor on later episodes of Happy Days (ABC, 1974–84). Few if any performers have ever matched Ball’s ability to bring off a perfectly timed performance that looks so spontaneous—and is anything but. A fanatic about rehearsals, Ball practiced her scenes over and over each week before she was ready to face the studio audience.
By the latter half of its first season, I Love Lucy was setting ratings records, becoming the first TV show seen by ten million viewers with a May 1952 telecast, “The Marriage License.” Not ranked as the #1 show that season, it would attain that status in 1952-53, and hold its place until it was briefly dethroned during the 1955 mania for The $64,000 Question and other big-money quiz shows. By the end of its run, the TV viewing audience had increased enormously, and Lucy was reaching more than 40 million households.
Critical attention accompanied the ratings success, and Ball would win her first Emmy for the role in 1953. Vance would take home a Best Supporting Actress trophy a year later, though Arnaz and Frawley would never be so honored.
The popularity of I Love Lucy even made Ball a hot ticket for movie roles again, after an absence of several years from the silver screen. In 1954, MGM released The Long, Long Trailer, a hit comedy that paired Ball and Arnaz as newlyweds who take a chaotic trip in their newly purchased camper. A less successful follow-up, Forever, Darling, was released in 1956.
One of the reasons that Ball’s show stayed high in the ratings for six years was producer Oppenheimer’s innovative decision to bring new story elements into the show that kept it fresh. The first of these was a happy accident, when Ball’s real-life pregnancy dictated a change of course for the show’s second season. That development came along just as the writers were beginning to run low on stories about Lucy trying to break into Ricky’s act, and added a human element to the show that only increased its appeal to viewers.
Sometime during the 1954-55 season, with 100 episodes under their belts, he and his writers acknowledged that the show was in danger of growing stale, and brainstormed ideas for new directions. Out of that came the decision to do an ongoing story about Lucy and Ricky’s trip to Hollywood, where he will star in a motion picture. The move re-energized the show, and led to some of its most memorable episodes, such as “L.A. at Last” (2/7/55), in which Lucy famously causes a tray of desserts to splatter on her idol William Holden. The gimmick worked so well that it was repeated the following season with a trip to Europe, which was slightly less effective, though giving the writers possibilities for new stories. During that season, the last of the show’s true classic episodes, “Lucy’s Italian Movie” (4/16/56), detailed her escapades stomping grapes in hopes of landing a film role.
Over the course of the show’s run, the adventures of Lucy and Ricky in many ways mirrored the lives of the viewers who faithfully watched the show. Lucy’s writers found humor in Ricky’s efforts at career advancement, the birth of the Ricardos’ first child, the experience of sharing a vacation with friends, and ultimately, in 1957, their decision to leave New York City and relocate to the suburbs.
If I Love Lucy’s last season, 1956-57, was its least effective (though still top-rated), that can be attributed to several factors, one of them being the departure of producer/creator Jess Oppenheimer. Although the early episodes of Lucy attempted to raise Desi Arnaz’s profile as an actor and singer, the show’s success in fact allowed him to emerge in a completely different and unexpected role—as a studio mogul. The popularity of I Love Lucy inevitably led to its makers being invited to supply the networks with other shows, and by the mid–1950s Arnaz and Ball owned one of the most successful independent production companies in Hollywood. Once Ball had demonstrated that television was a viable option for a comic actress, her friends Eve Arden and Ann Sothern followed in her footsteps, turning to Desilu to further their sitcom careers.
Unfortunately, Arnaz’s emerging power as Desilu president led him into conflict with Oppenheimer, who was (in today’s sitcom terminology) the “show runner” of I Love Lucy (the executive primarily responsible for its production and creative content). The ego clash between the two men eventually resulted in Oppenheimer’s decision to accept a job as a network programming executive, leaving Arnaz to produce the show’s sixth season solo.
By 1957, Ball and Arnaz would make the difficult decision to end I Love Lucy as a weekly series, though they signed a deal to continue with occasional hour-long specials. CBS offered a record-breaking license fee for another year’s worth of episodes, as the show was still firmly entrenched at the top of the ratings, but the stars were tired, and the show was exhibiting signs of age as well.
As both Ball and her husband realized, they were at a crossroads in their career. The money they had earned via Lucy made it entirely possible for them to walk away from the stressful business, and settle into a comfortable retirement. Arnaz later recalled that the only options available to Desilu by the mid–1950s were to wind down, or to grow into a full-fledged studio that would compete on equal footing with other major players in the television industry.
Ball, who had found her TV series more artistically satisfying and rewarding than anything else she had tried in her 25-year acting career, wasn’t ready to walk away, in large part because her personal life was notably less successful.
“Desi wanted to sell everything and retire,” she told her biographer Jim Brochu. “Just the word alone sent chills through my body. I loved working. I didn’t want to retire ever. I told him that. I felt I didn’t have a marriage anymore. Desi wasn’t about to give up booze and broads, so I didn’t see any reason to give up my work.”11
During the 1957-58 season, I Love Lucy morphed into an occasional series of one-hour specials, aired under the title The Ford Lucille Ball–Desi Arnaz Show. Generously budgeted, the shows typically featured Ball and her co-stars interacting with a celebrity guest, and often a musical or dance number. Unfortunately for the sponsor, the product they were using the expensive shows to promote was the notorious Edsel, something not even Lucy and Ricky’s vast audience numbers could help.
The following year, when Ford withdrew from sponsorship, Arnaz was able to incorporate the specials into a new weekly anthology series, Desilu Playhouse, which would last until 1960. The thirteen hour-long shows, featuring guests such as Fred MacMurray, Milton Berle, and, in the best outing, Tallulah Bankhead, were later syndicated as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour.
By the late 1950s, it was increasingly clear that Ball’s marriage was on its last legs. By then far more attached professionally than they were personally, Mr. and Mrs. Arnaz were playing one of TV’s most contented couples in a way they were no longer able to emulate off-camera. In the spring of 1960, faced with falling ratings for Desilu Playhouse and the need to separate herself professionally from Arnaz, Ball completed her contractual commitment to the show and then promptly filed for divorce. Viewers who felt they’d spent the better part of a decade peeking behind the curtain of the stars’ real-life marriage were shocked by the news, though hints of marital problems for the Arnazes had begun to appear in print with some regularity by the late 1950s.
In 1960, television comedy was at a low ebb, and there were fewer series leads for funny women than there had been for years. Gale Storm’s sitcom career wound down with the cancellation of The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna after four years, and The Ann Sothern Show would be on the critical list by the end of the year. The failure of The Eve Arden Show (1957-58) had caused CBS to lose some of its faith in one of its most popular sitcom stars of the decade, and Betty White had fared no better with her first network sitcom, Date with the Angels (ABC, 1957-58). Only The Donna Reed Show, which presented its star in a more typical housewife role, was still going strong on ABC, holding fast against the array of Westerns that were filling prime time TV schedules. With the retirement of Gracie Allen in 1958, followed by the death of Joan Davis in 1961, it was as if an era in the history of television comedy was winding down with the decade.
For the moment, Ball retreated from television. She found a temporary reprieve from her troubles playing opposite Bob Hope in the United Artists film comedy, The Facts of Life, followed by her starring role in a mediocre stage musical, Wildcat, which opened on Broadway in December 1960. The show itself was forgettable, but the chance to see Lucy in person kept ticket sales brisk until illness forced Ball to close the show several months later. Although she had originally welcomed the idea of playing a fresh character, the deficiencies of Wildcat’s script soon became apparent to the star, and she filled the void at later performances by edging closer to her TV characterization, revamping the story of Wildy Jackson into something akin to “Lucy Ricardo Goes West.” Ad-libbed in-jokes like a reference to “a fellow named Fred Mertz” drew laughs during the show’s lulls.
Lucy the mogul: Desilu vice-president Lucille Ball pictured in 1960 with former I Love Lucy producer Jess Oppenheimer (at left) and actors Darryl Hickman, Marshall Thompson, and Annie Fargé, promoting the CBS sitcom Angel.
The longest-lasting impact of her Broadway run came when the newly single Ball was introduced to comedian Gary Morton in December 1960. Their romance flourished, and culminated in Ball’s second marriage the following November. She would remain married to Morton until her death in 1989, while eventually achieving a warm friendship with ex-husband Desi Arnaz.
If Ball’s television career was stalled, Desilu’s fortunes were also dicey by the early 1960s. The company’s magic touch with sitcoms couldn’t save shows like ABC’s Harrigan and Son (1960-61) from a quick extinction. It was largely the popularity of the gangster melodrama The Untouchables (ABC, 1959–63) that was keeping the company afloat, and there had been signs that the show’s violence and ethnic stereotyping might preclude a long TV run, despite its current high ratings. Meanwhile, Lucy co-creators Carroll and Martin, surely among TV’s most in-demand sitcom writers, launched a CBS series called The Tom Ewell Show, but were unable to repeat the phenomenal success they had enjoyed with Ball. Former Lucy writer-producer Jess Oppenheimer would have no better luck with his show, Angel (CBS, 1960-61), in which the comedy centered on a young, Lucy-ish French-born wife.
Meanwhile, though Ball had taken a hiatus from television work, she was still readily visible thanks to CBS’ frequent and lucrative reruns of I Love Lucy. Having purchased rights to the series from Desilu in 1956, for the relatively meager price of $4.5 million, CBS opted not to put the show into syndication at the outset. Instead, repeat episodes played in prime time intermittently until 1961, and would be a staple of the network’s daytime schedule well into the 1960s.
By late 1961, having tried her hand at movies and stage work, Ball was coming to the realization that no other medium suited her as well as the TV sitcom. She allowed her ex-husband, still at the helm of Desilu, to persuade her to tackle something she had initially disavowed—a second television series. Knowing Ball’s hatred of change, he did everything possible to assemble a product that would be comfortingly familiar not only to viewers, but also to his jittery star, who had reason to doubt that lightning could strike twice.
I Love Lucy writers Bob Carroll, Jr., Madelyn Pugh (then Martin), Bob Schiller, and Bob Weiskopf were signed to write the new show, and many of the same crew members were recruited as well. Perhaps most importantly to Ball, since Arnaz would not appear in the show, and William Frawley was already committed to ABC’s My Three Sons, Vivian Vance was persuaded, with a hefty salary, to sign on as Ball’s co-star.
Not part of the mix, unfortunately, was Jess Oppenheimer, who had been so instrumental to the success of I Love Lucy. After departing Desilu in 1956, he had gone on to a lackluster career as a network executive and television producer. Not only did Oppenheimer’s clashes with studio president Desi Arnaz preclude his involvement with what would become The Lucy Show, he would receive no credit for the Lucy Ricardo characterization that Ball would essentially reprise in her second series (and, to some degree, in all her subsequent sitcom work). Eventually, the former producer/head writer of I Love Lucy would sue Desilu, after the company professed that The Lucy Show was based on humorist Irene Kampen’s book Life without George, and no other source.
Slotted on CBS’ Monday night schedule, where I Love Lucy had reigned for six years, The Lucy Show was another hit for Ball, and would enjoy a six-year run. She took on additional responsibility a few months after its premiere, when she invoked a buy-sell agreement that ended her ex-husband’s tenure at Desilu. Made unreliable by his worsening alcoholism, Arnaz disappeared from the scene for several years, and Ball was suddenly a working executive as well as the star of her own series.
During the run of The Lucy Show, however, many of the people both in front of and behind the camera who had been Desilu stalwarts drifted away. After the departure of Arnaz, Ball had a falling-out with her longtime writers in the spring of 1964, and replaced them with a revolving door of freelancers, supervised by Jack Benny’s longtime writer Milt Josefsberg, for The Lucy Show’s subsequent seasons. In 1965, Vivian Vance, who had remarried a few years earlier, decided to bow out of the show, preferring to live on the East Coast full-time, and the last major holdover from I Love Lucy was gone.
Although Ball would continue to star in a weekly series until 1974, and would enjoy high ratings and even another Emmy victory during those years, her later work is held in significantly less esteem than I Love Lucy, and understandably so. By the late 1960s, Ball’s TV episodes were often openly derivative of the original series, recycling plotlines, stunts, and scenarios that had been done better the first time around. Gimmicks such as the use of celebrity guests, which had been done sparingly and with skill on I Love Lucy, were repeated far too many times, while little or nothing that was fresh and new emerged.
The hours she spent as a studio executive cut into her rehearsal time, always a vital component in polishing her performances. Sensitive about her appearance as she headed into her late fifties, Ball would no longer allow herself to be filmed in close-up, and was more hesitant to engage in the facial gestures that had evoked so many laughs on I Love Lucy. Reluctant to compete with viewers’ memories of Lucy and Ricky, she would play an unattached woman in all her subsequent series work, depriving the shows of the husband-wife interplay that had been so effective in the original show. Vance’s absence was felt strongly as well.
Just as significantly, the departure of her original writers loosened the show’s grip on what made Ball’s own persona work. In the later episodes of The Lucy Show, and subsequently in Here’s Lucy, the writers took a character originally limned as zany and impulsive, and gradually reinterpreted that to “stupid.” While Ball herself functioned as the head of a major corporation, she spent her days playing a woman unable to grasp the complexities of routine clerical work, one who, in the absence of strong motivation in the scripts, increasingly came across as tiresomely inane and annoying.
Publicity photo for Life with Lucy, Lucille Ball’s ill-fated 1986 ABC sitcom.
Nonetheless, audiences’ loyalty to the star, and to the ingrained Monday-night habit of watching Lucy, persisted until the early 1970s. By then, Ball, weary of the responsibility of running Desilu Productions, had sold the company to Paramount Television in a lucrative deal. Here’s Lucy was issued under the auspices of Lucille Ball Productions, a smaller company that functioned solely to produce the star’s weekly sitcom, with Ball credited as “Executive in Charge of Production.”
By 1974, the changing face of television comedy (as personified by CBS’ hits All in the Family, Maude, etc.) began to make Ball’s shows look hopelessly passé. The show no longer in the Top Twenty-Five, Ball brought Here’s Lucy to a stop at the age of sixty-three. Replacing it on CBS’ Monday schedule that fall was Beatrice Arthur’s Maude, the swap representing a blatant changing of the guard that some viewers cheered as laudatory and forward-thinking, and others just found sad. Ironically, Maude star Arthur had supported Ball in her last film role, the critically panned Mame (United Artists, 1974).
Aside from occasional specials, Ball would do little television work in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Unwisely, she allowed second husband Gary Morton and successful TV producer Aaron Spelling to persuade her to attempt a series comeback for ABC in 1986. Life with Lucy, launched when its star was 75 years old, was an embarrassing retread of her earlier shows. Initial audience tune-in was enormous, attesting to Ball’s undiminished popularity, but the show seemed to sadden viewers, whose early curiosity didn’t translate into ongoing success. For the first and only time in her TV career, a Ball series was cancelled due to low ratings, in late 1986.
Mostly inactive professionally after the Life with Lucy debacle, Ball died on April 26, 1989, at the age of 77. After decades of throwing a nearly inexhaustible supply of energy into her career, she was ill-suited for retirement, and some friends thought she was suffering from depression once she could no longer look forward to regular work. Television critic Cecil Smith, who developed a personal acquaintance with Ball during his marriage to her beloved cousin Cleo, summed her up thusly:
“To become a major star a person has to have a single purpose. Lucy’s never happy unless she’s working. She expends all that fantastic energy four days a week, filming her show, and comes home bruised from head to toe from pratt falls [sic] ... I say you’ve got to want your goal awfully bad to endure punishment like that. It’s got to be your life.”12