Chapter Seventeen
A TROUBLED STATE
Despite the continuing inner turmoil that was a vestige from her nervous breakdown, Vivian Vance was able to maintain her high-spiritedness and sense of humor while on the I Love Lucy set.
Her quick wit was apparent to those with whom she worked. And her cracks could be quite risqué. “Viv had one of the great lines of all time,” notes scriptwriter Bob Schiller. “In those days, we both were in analysis and we used to share our stories. One day, she called me down to the set and she was laughing.”
Vance told Schiller, “I’m in that part of my analysis where I’m talking about my relationship with my father, and nudity, and all that kind of thing.” Then she added, “I was so ashamed of my body that I spent half my life hiding it under men.”
Even as she was smiling on the outside and cracking up America as she cavorted with Lucy and company, Vance was confronting her demons through psychoanalysis. Of her years playing Ethel Mertz, she reminisced, “I’d go from the couch to the studio every morning.” Yet her problems in no way impeded her performance. Whatever Vance may have been feeling on any given day, she kept those sentiments to herself and gave her all during the I Love Lucy rehearsals and filming.
At Christmas, 1953, Lucille Ball presented Vance with a special gift: an album of photos, programs, and press clippings, which Ball called This Is Your Life—Vivian Vance. “And when she presented it to me, before the whole company,” Vance dramatically noted, “whatever fears were still plaguing Vivian Vance were wiped away forever.”
* * *
Vance remained married to Phil Ober for the entire I Love Lucy run. By now he was well into his fifties, but he was no William Frawley. “He was a handsome man, kind of posh, you know,” recalls Bob Weiskopf. “He was an elegant fellow.” Sheila MacRae adds, “Phil Ober was a very presentable, nice-looking gentleman. Very well spoken, with this great voice and wonderful presence.”
Vance and Ober had what Jay Sandrich describes as a “nice home” in Pacific Palisades, a particularly lovely area of Los Angeles adjacent to the ocean and south of Malibu. When they were not working, the Obers retreated to their New Mexico ranch, where their neighbors were Mexicans and Laguna Indians rather than celebrated Los Angelenos. “We’re living two lives, Phil and I,” Vance explained during her lengthy I Love Lucy run. “When we work, we’re part of the pressure and speed and concentrated effort that goes with television and the stage. But we’re only a few hours away from our own large, generous slice of peace. I’ve found that if we have a decision to make, it usually becomes quite simple to make the right one if we just go to our desert home to think about it.”
On another occasion, Viv noted, “It’s a casual life. Everyone for miles around comes to our campfires … ranchers, cowboys, and Indians. It’s a wide place in the road and a place which draws us away from the city, and makes us appreciate our city home more when we return.”
The Obers also passed their time away from Los Angeles visiting Viv’s parents (who still resided in Albuquerque) and traveling. In February 1953, I Love Lucy went on hiatus after the birth of Desi Arnaz Jr. A chatty item in the Albuquerque Journal reported that “the Obers came to Albuquerque by way of Carmel, Cal., and Las Vegas, Nev. While in the Southwest, they will go shopping in Santa Fe for dining furniture for their California home. From Albuquerque the couple will continue their vacation in Rome, Italy.”
* * *
Apparently, Vance and Ober were not spending enough time away from the Hollywood rat race, or making the right decisions about their relationship. As the years passed, their marriage deteriorated. There always had been a competitive edge to their union. While Ober had been steadily employed on the stage—he was somewhat of a name on the Broadway boards—his New York fame meant nothing on the West Coast.
Just as his wife was beginning her run on I Love Lucy, Ober declared that he hoped to put his stage work behind him and continue his career in Hollywood. “You hear that remark about the stage being the only real medium,” he declared in 1951. “That’s just not true. In pictures, things can be done much better. When you have to do a love scene and you whisper, you can speak low and you’re heard. It’s the most honest medium.”
The fifty-something Ober, though, was fated to play few celluloid love scenes. While he began appearing regularly on-screen in the 1950s, he was quickly relegated to character/supporting roles and never won Hollywood stardom. Through the next two decades, he was cast in a couple dozen movies. They ranged in quality from highly prestigious—Come Back, Little Sheba (1952), North by Northwest (1959), and Elmer Gantry (1960)—to highly forgettable—The Girls of Pleasure Island (1953), Escapade in Japan (1957), and The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966).
Perhaps his most familiar role came in From Here to Eternity (1953), in which he played Deborah Kerr’s coldhearted spouse, who is more concerned with winning a military boxing championship than with offering his wife the affection she craves. Nonetheless, thinking of the Fred Zinnemann-directed Oscar-winner, one recalls Kerr, Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, Montgomery Clift, Donna Reed, Ernest Borgnine—but not Phil Ober.
Ober also appeared on I Love Lucy, playing various roles. On one episode, “The Quiz Show”—the fifth I Love Lucy to be aired during its first season (1951–52)—he was Lucy’s bogus long-lost first husband. In another, “Don Juan Is Shelved,” broadcast in 1955, he was cast as then MGM studio boss Dore Schary (who was supposed to appear as himself, but backed out before the episode was filmed). Yet here Ober was just one of dozens of mostly anonymous actors who played parts on the show.
Throughout the 1950s, Phil made non–I Love Lucy TV guest appearances. Yet here, too, his roles were unmemorable. A typical Ober television part was on a Ford Theater episode titled “Sheila,” which aired in May 1956. Ober plays Kirk Adams, a widower who is clueless as to how to give his wayward adolescent daughter Laura (Stephanie Griffin) his understanding and love. Laura attends a boarding school run by the title character (Irene Dunne), while Elinor Donahue plays Sheila’s well-adjusted offspring. The show’s opening credits may have read, “Irene Dunne in ‘Sheila’ with Philip Ober and Elinor Donahue,” but it was Dunne, Donahue, and Griffin—without Ober—who were featured in the show’s promotional clip.
When “Sheila” aired, Vance had long been recognized by millions as Ethel Mertz. What’s more, there she was winning Emmy Award nominations and performing on national television in front of the President of the United States. The culmination was that Ober felt professionally resentful of his wife, to an obsessive degree. Reportedly, he even refused to allow Vance to display her Emmy Award in their home.
Marjorie Lord remembers that Vance’s fame “was hard on Phil. He was a rather important leading man in New York, and I think that Vivian’s tremendous success was a bit [too much for him]. He never quite equaled it in pictures although he worked a lot, he worked all the time. But she became extremely famous. Everybody knew her, but wouldn’t know him, necessarily.”
Sheila MacRae concurs with Lord. “[Phil] used to be as important, or more important [than Vivian],” she says. “Perhaps her fame was too hard for him to take. If they were in different businesses, perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered.”
“He was very possessive,” notes Irma Kusely, the I Love Lucy hairdresser, “and also kind of a womanizer. He also seemed to be very jealous of her friends. I know that I [would go out to] their house in Pacific Palisades, and he wondered what the heck we were doing and what was going on and why was I there. I sensed that he just wanted her not to have a lot of friends.
“She was just really a great gal,” Kusely adds. “I think a man should have been very proud to have her as a friend, [much less] a wife. She was just wonderful. She was capable of doing a lot of things that most people in the business weren’t. She was a very good cook, and a good entertainer. She was just a regular gal. She had no illusions of grandeur about herself at all.”
Film editor Dann Cahn knew Ober well and recalls, “Phil used to come to the [filming of the I Love Lucy] shows and he’d roar, in the beginning. I’m talking about the first couple of years. Whatever happened happened, and then he didn’t come anymore.”
* * *
Vance and Ober were separated in February 1958 and were divorced fourteen months later. Their split reportedly was encouraged by Lucille Ball, who was then ending her own turbulent marriage to Desi Arnaz. It is no secret that Desi was cheating on Lucy, and that he shared with Bill Frawley a fondness for alcohol.
At this point in time, the off-set tensions were becoming apparent to those on the inside. “There were not a lot of laughs around,” remembers Jay Sandrich. “I do shows where we laugh all day at rehearsals. But here, there wasn’t a lot of laughter.”
Nevertheless, Sandrich emphasizes that, despite the upheavals in the personal lives of Lucy, Desi, and Viv, “The shows always were hilarious.”
“There we were,” Vance remembered a half decade later, “two miserable women, commiserating, even crying together, then bucking up to go in front of the cameras and make the whole country laugh.”
To Sheila MacRae’s way of thinking, however, any conversations between Vance and Ball regarding marital woes had to have been one-sided. “All of that stuff I don’t think [Lucy] ever shared with Vivian,” says MacRae. “You see, she couldn’t. It was different.” For after all, Vance still was an employee. Ball was her boss. And Ball’s marital difficulties were with Vance’s other boss. Ball did confide her problems to MacRae, who understood all too well what she was going through because—as MacRae readily admits—she was experiencing similar difficulties with her own husband then.
“My husband liked to dominate and discipline me,” was how Vance once described her trouble with Ober. “I kept trying to please him, but nothing I did was right.” Rumors even circulated that Ober would hit her and that, on one occasion, she arrived on the I Love Lucy set with a black eye. He also allegedly humiliated Viv by scolding her for acting touchy-feely with Ball, as though they were a pair of lesbians.
Yet it was Ober who sued Vance for divorce, claiming cruelty. In her response, she declared that she and Ober “could never agree on how to handle my success,” that Ober was jealous of her fame, and that he insisted they fritter away her earnings.
“He seemed to have a compulsion for high living and often told me about the futility of saving money,” Vance declared. She added that she readily would have quit I Love Lucy in order to save her marriage, but that Ober forbid her to do so.
All of this was told to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Burnett Wolfson on April 24, 1959, at their divorce hearing. Wolfson granted her a default divorce while observing, “Damon Runyon used to say that ‘they never had to hold a benefit for a man who saved his money’—Mr. Ober might well hark those words.” Judge Wolfson also noted, “It might be that I am very naive, but if there ever was a case of killing the goose that laid the golden egg, this is it.”
In order to be rid of Ober, Vance—on the advice of her attorney, Payson Wolff—waived her right to alimony and gave him one-half of their community property, valued at $160,000, while maintaining their Pacific Palisades home. When asked by Judge Wolfson if she thought this fair, she responded, “No, sir, I think the terms are pretty liberal. After all, I made and saved all this money.”
Ober was not present during the proceedings. His lawyer, Milton M. Golden, was, and he declared, “My client is not a super fool or a plain fool. It was his astuteness in buying stocks which contributed to the community property.”
Whatever the facts, one thing was certain: the Ober-Vance divorce was anything but amicable. “It was a shame that [their marriage] didn’t last throughout her lifetime,” declares Marjorie Lord, who was on the scene when the pair first met and fell in love.
Eventually, Ober married Jane Westmore, an NBC press agent. He left performing and settled in the beach resort of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where he acted as emergency United States representative for the American consul. “I visited him in Mexico,” notes Dann Cahn. “He had a house down there near the Burtons [Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton]. We spent a wonderful evening together. He’d become kind of the unofficial mayor of Puerto Vallarta. He’d get American kids who’d gotten in trouble, out of trouble.”
Ober eventually returned to the United States. He died in Santa Monica of a heart attack in 1982, at age eighty. He was survived by his wife, Jane.
* * *
As the close-to-eighteen-year marriage of Vance and Ober crumbled, so did the almost twenty-year union of Ball and Arnaz. On March 2, 1960, Ball filed divorce papers, professing that her off-camera life with Arnaz had become a “nightmare.” She submitted the petition one day after completing filming of “Lucy Meets the Moustache,” the very last episode of The Lucille Ball–Desi Arnaz Show, which featured comedian Ernie Kovacs and his wife, Edie Adams, as guest stars. The episode ended with the Ricardos sharing a final kiss. From now on, and forever more, the Ricardos and Mertzes would appear on television screens only in rerun.
Eight and a half long years had come and gone since the launching of I Love Lucy, and so much had happened to its four principal actors. The circumstances of their lives, both personal and professional, now were so different. From here on in, each would go on to other projects and savor other accomplishments. Yet one thing was certain: The thrill of the making of I Love Lucy never, ever could be duplicated.