Known to billions worldwide simply as “Lucy”, the scatterbrained character she played variations of on four different television shows spanning the 1950s through the 1980s, the Lucille Ball behind the camera “had one focus: hard work” (Bloom & Vlastnik, 170). She channeled her hard work into comedy, and created a comic persona that is as much loved today as it was 60 years ago. Paradoxically, “as a sixty-foot image on the screen, the actress was only a journeywoman performer; as a sixteen-inch TV image, she turned into a superstar” (Kanfer, Preface, x). With the help of husband Desi Arnaz, Ball changed the face of broadcast television and pioneered the role of women in the entertainment industry. Her real-life accolades and triumphs aside, the actions of her TV characters, however zany and humorous, speak to the desire some women felt for liberation from the patriarchal society of postwar America. Her most famous incarnation, Lucy Ricardo on I Love Lucy, was particularly in tune with this idea, constantly struggling to break into husband Ricky’s nightclub act and form her own career in show business. Media critic Gerard Jones argues that “Lucy Ricardo was less a feminist than an argument for why women needed feminists. What she had was just an insane desire to be noticed. Lucy demonstrated how much energy, how much ambition was being wasted by the early fifties ethos that women should be in the kitchen” (Finding Lucy, CBS). Lucille Ball is both a cultural icon and a truly unique performer who continues to entertain us to this day.
Although television is where Lucille Ball struck gold, it was hardly her first attempt to find her acting identity. Indeed, she cycled through movies, theatre and radio before taking the small screen by storm in 1951. As biographer Kathleen Brady notes, “Television was her medium, and really nothing else was. It took television, which required all her talents, her wonderful expressions, her physical gifts, to really bring her to flower” (Finding Lucy). Before the advent of television, however, Ball tried her hardest to hone her skills in the movies, appearing in sixty-five films by 1948. Earning the unofficial title “Queen of the B Pictures”, Lucille played everything from chorus girl to romantic heroine, cycling through four major movie studios throughout the 1930s and 40s. Her best film appearances were those that showcased her comedic ability, such as The Fuller Brush Girl and Miss Grant Takes Richmond, but it was not enough to make her a major movie star. In those days, “the gospel according to Goldwyn was clear: funny women don’t sell tickets, beautiful women do” (Finding Lucy). Lucille had the good fortune to be both funny and beautiful, but the stringent rules of the Hollywood studio system did not make many allowances for such duplicity: glamour girls were supposed to be beautiful, not funny. As Lucille’s good friend and occasional guest star Carol Burnett put it, “She didn’t have that opportunity [to be funny]. They didn’t give it to her, so she went out and got it” (Finding Lucy). With the strong success of her CBS radio comedy My Favorite Husband from 1948 to 1951, plus the burgeoning medium of television, Lucille saw a golden opportunity not only get to work with her husband, Desi Arnaz, but also to take her comedic training to another level.
Lucille’s radio program was her first opportunity to hone her comedic timing in front of a live studio audience. Her longtime writer Madelyn Pugh Davis says that “Lucy learned to play to the audience; she was used to doing movies, so it was kind of a new experience for her to say the gag and look out at the audience”. Kathleen Brady elaborated by stating “she came alive before a live audience, and developed the expressions that she used on I Love Lucy while doing her radio show” (Finding Lucy). Sensing a hit for television, CBS wanted Lucille and her co-star, Richard Denning, to take the program to the small screen, but Lucy would only do so if her real favourite husband, Desi, could do the show with her instead. Ball explained that she was anxious to work with Arnaz, as he was constantly on the road with his band, and working together would allow them to stay together. The resulting deliberations became legendary, with CBS insisting that the public would not buy an all-American girl being married to a Cuban bandleader. Eventually the Arnazes won out because, as Robert Osbourne succinctly put it, CBS “needed her more than they didn’t want Desi” (Finding Lucy).
Already, Lucille was showing more determination and grit than most women in Hollywood, and her insisting that Desi do the show with her was one of the smartest moves she could have made. As stated by Lucille’s brother, Fred Ball, “Lucille would never have succeeded the way that she did without Desi…He put this thing together technically, financially, emotionally…he’s the guy that made it work” (Finding Lucy). Indeed, it was “The Bongo Player” who developed the three camera method of shooting in front of a live audience, knowing that Lucille needed an audience to perform to. The Arnazes soon proved to CBS how wrong they had been. With the ideal casting of Vivian Vance and William Frawley as the Ricardo’s neighbours and landlords, the Mertzes, the archetypical sitcom was underway. With each week of filming, the I Love Lucy team “invented from whole cloth the wheel of situation comedy…it was a format so successful it is still in use today” (Finding Lucy). More importantly, with each week of filming, Lucille Ball continued to nurture and perfect her comedic ability, unknowingly cementing her legacy on the entertainment world.
Lucille Ball was the first female comedianne to live up to the glory of her male predecessors. As Media Studies Professor Lori Landay notes, “There weren’t a lot of female role models for someone like Lucille Ball. She had to look to the male comics”(Finding Lucy), particularly the Marx Brothers, Red Skelton, Charlie Chaplain and Buster Keaton. It had been Keaton who had given her a great deal of comedic training, and taught her the importance of props. Kathleen Brady states that it was Keaton who taught Ball “ to take comedy seriously…that her props were her tools. She really had to treat them as treasures” (Finding Lucy). If that is so, then no prop was a greater treasure to Lucille than the Vitametavegamin bottle that appeared in I Love Lucy episode no. 30, Lucy Does a TV Commercial. In that particular episode, the brilliance of Ball’s ability plus the main crux of the series were never more well articulated.
The premise was simple: Lucy learns that Ricky is going to be hosting a television show, and becomes eager to get into the act. Ricky answers her with a resounding “no!” Determined to be involved, she quietly lets go of the girl Ricky hired to do the sponsor’s commercial and takes the job herself, not knowing that the product in question is a high-alcohol health tonic, Vitamegavegamin. After rehearsing the commercial several times, Lucy is soon too drunk to stand up straight but carries on pitching the product, and inadvertently bungles Ricky’s big evening. This episode has consistently been ranked the number one I Love Lucy episode for years, and is declared such in the 2001 50th anniversary special aired on CBS. Author Geoffrey Mark Fidelman speaks for most Lucy fans by saying that this “is the penultimate Lucille Ball performance…[she] is perfect; there is not a wasted gesture or inflection. With each line and movement, she keeps topping herself in a never-ending crescendo of comedy” (The Lucy Book, pp. 46). Ball herself later commented on the episode‘s popularity: “I think that Vitametavegamin bit is the best thing I ever did. And one of the hardest. God, I was nervous! It really gratifies me to know the audience loves it so much, generation after generation” (46). What makes the scene so enduring is Lucy’s honesty: she is not messing up because she is inefficient or stupid, but because she gets drunk rehearsing the commercial too many times. Each time the director asked her to drink, she did. The audience laughs not at her, but with her, as Lucy Ricardo is having just as much fun selling the tonic as the audience is watching her! When she interrupts Ricky during his solo, she is very tanked but still innocent and charming, and Ricky carrying her offstage while she screams out her lines is a brilliant coda. As Ricky would later tell Lucy four years later in the episode Return Home from Europe, “Being married to you isn’t easy, but it sure is a lot of fun”. The sentiment applies to Vitametavegamin as well as almost every episode of I Love Lucy.
The obvious love and affection between Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, not to mention Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, remains one of I Love Lucy’s most appealing aspects. By the mid-1950s, the couple had become so popular they even played variations of Lucy and Ricky on the big screen twice, in MGM’s The Long, Long Trailer and Forever, Darling. On another level, however, the series also set the standard for female friendship for every sitcom to come. The interplay between Lucille Ball and co-star Vivian Vance had a chemistry and ease that is nearly impossible to duplicate. Although the two actresses may not have seen eye to eye at first (“You don’t look like a landlady”, Lucille reportedly quipped. “I want a dumpy, fat woman in a chenille bathrobe and furry slippers with curlers in her hair” (Castellucio & Walker, 152) ), Lucille and Vivian eventually formed a sisterly bond and professional relationship that translated to the small screen beautifully. Writer Madelyn Pugh Davis recalls: “Vivian was a perfect foil for Lucy, they played together beautifully. They had a real friendship, and it made it so much funnier. They would get mad at each other or something, then they’d feel terrible and cry and make up” (Finding Lucy). Vance’s Ethel Mertz was the older, more disenchanted of the two women, and was often happy to join in Lucy’s scheming in search of a vicarious thrill. Over the course of 180 episodes (plus the 13 hour long specials aired between 1958-1960), Lucy and Ethel constantly frustrated their husbands by challenging their domesticity, and would continue to tread new ground in their later series, but it was Lucy acting as instigator who pushed the most cultural buttons.
Lori Landay feels that Lucille Ball and her writers found occasions “for laughter and pleasure by creating comedy out of the constraints of the postwar feminine mystique” (Kanfer, 315). The character of Ricky Ricardo is fully aware of his wife’s burning desires, and of her scatterbrained antics that often prevent her from succeeding, which may be his primary reason for trying to keep her at home: for her safety and others. This could be a clever mask for keeping the illusion of the husband’s power over his wife, but then again, the Lucy character would undoubtedly not be as inclined to act out against Ricky if he let her have her way more often. Even though “Lucy Ricardo was conniving, sneaky, and downright criminal at times, she was still an innocent at heart, usually wanting nothing more than a new dress, an opportunity to perform in her husband’s nightclub act, or a chance to pick a grapefruit from Richard Widmark’s tree” (Bloom & Vlastnik, 170). There is also, as Lori Landay points out, the ironic paradox of art being at odds with life:
"How seriously can we take Ricky’s injunctions that his wife can’t be on television when Ball and Arnaz are a husband and wife on television? On one level, the show does what on another level it says shouldn’t happen. This contradiction illustrates the gap between the social experience of the women who were working in the public sphere and the ideology that attempted to contain them within domesticity. The series itself is a kind of trick that encourages the audience to participate in the attractive image of the stars’ happy marriage, a fiction representative of postwar behaviour and attitudes that obscures asymmetry in the sex-gender system" (Kanfer, 315).
In this sense, I Love Lucy illustrates through humour that times were changing, by acknowledging the domestic ideology and deliberately going against it practically every week (it is also interesting to note that I Love Lucy director William Asher later helmed another groundbreaking sitcom with feminist undertones, Bewitched). Biographer Stefan Kanfer notes that “onscreen [Lucy] protested that her status was nothing to quo about, but that was only so that she could do her Sisyphus routine, making a grand effort - and then falling back to the starting point to begin again next week” (317). However, even if Lucy Ricardo never found a permanent escape from domesticity, during the nine years I Love Lucy was on the air she met more celebrities and experienced more exciting and daring situations than most people do in a lifetime. In the end, it was not her domestic confinement that mattered, it was her willingness to try anything that was the spirit of Lucy Ricardo; indeed, the same could be said for Lucille Ball.
In 1960, the Ball/Arnaz marriage finally ended, as did I Love Lucy. Even though they had started the show to keep their marriage together, the pressures of doing their own show and running their own studio ultimately drove them apart. Two years later, Ball once again was breaking new ground on network television, this time carrying on without Desi. She started another sitcom with co-star Vivian Vance, The Lucy Show, and succeeded Desi Arnaz as President of Desilu Productions, the first female studio head since Mary Pickford. In order to differentiate the new series from the old one, both Ball and Vance‘s characters were renamed and made single. As Ball told Look Magazine, “We have to be [single], with so many of our old shows around we’d look like bigamists” (The Lucy Show: Collector’s Edition, Linear Notes). Ball played the widowed Lucy Carmichael raising her two children, sharing a house with divorced friend Vivian Bagley and her son. Not only were two single women depicted living together in the same home, but Vivian Bagley was television’s first divorced female character. Once again, Ball was pushing the boundaries for women in entertainment.
Gerard Jones feels that Lucy “was wise to keep Vivian Vance around. In some ways, that relationship gets almost deeper in the second show with the absence of Ricky and Fred. You really see a years long female friendship with mutual understanding that you almost never see on TV” (Finding Lucy). Even though Vance left the series in 1965 to spend more time at home with her new husband, she continued to make frequent guest appearances on The Lucy Show and the subsequent Here’s Lucy, so that by the time of their last joint appearance together in 1977‘s Lucy Calls the President, she and Lucy had “completed a circle of friendship that stretched over 25 years and almost 300 television shows” (Finding Lucy).
After Vance’s departure, Lucy never again had a full-time female co-star out of loyalty to Vance, and relied mostly on famous guest stars to fill in the blanks, actors who only appeared on television because of Lucille. Her only remaining constant was character actor Gale Gordon, playing pompous, grouchy Mr. Mooney on The Lucy Show and pompous, grouchy Uncle Harry on Here’s Lucy. Ball, fiercely loyal to those she admired, adored Gordon, and their interplay as hot-headed boss vs. ditzy secretary is one of television’s most memorable friendly feuds. These later episodes often addressed the different views the characters held about money, as Mooney controlled Lucy’s trust fund while Uncle Harry paid her salary. This gave the Lucy character, like Lucy Ricardo, an undeniable dependence on a male superior. Lucy Carmichael (The Lucy Show) and Lucy Carter (Here‘s Lucy), however, had one thing Lucy Ricardo did not: a steady job. Although the character remained as scatterbrained as ever, Lucy’s shows did keep up with the times, and her character was now a single working woman, setting the scene for the upcoming That Girl and Mary Tyler Moore shows. By the end of Here’s Lucy in 1974, “Lucille Ball…existed in two time periods, in black-and-white and color, with Desi and without him - television’s first schizoid super-star” (Kanfer, 268). From 1951 to 1974, Lucille reigned as the First Lady of Television, a record she still holds.
All good things must eventually end, and while Lucy’s reruns could go on forever, Ball herself could not. She tried once more in 1986’s Life With Lucy at the age of 75. As Emily Daniels, wife of Life With Lucy director Marc Daniels recalls: “On the final series she was a grandmother, but she still had to behave the way she had when she was Lucy in the first year, and it just didn’t go…I just knew it was an omen of what was coming…which was the end of her career” (Finding Lucy). Physical comedy is difficult enough for young women, let alone those more than three-score and ten. Robert Osbourne shrewdly addressed the situation: “All she wanted to do was work as an actress, and all the public would ever buy her in was Lucy. And then it came that they wouldn’t buy her as Lucy, and then that was the tragedy of her life” (Finding Lucy). Although the public could no longer buy the present Lucy as “Lucy”, the “Lucy” still seen in reruns was as popular as ever. In 1989, shortly after Lucille‘s death, her legacy grew even stronger, and most amazingly of all, “each year she has grown in significance and popularity”, suffering no decline in reputation (Kanfer, Preface, ix). The apotheosis had begun, sealing Lucille’s unique fate on the impact of entertainment.
Lucille Ball’s career spanned every form of mass entertainment of her time, yet it was not in trusted, reliable mediums that she made her mark; it was in the brand new medium of television that she made her biggest impact, she and Desi Arnaz revolutionizing an entirely new way for audiences to look at commercial entertainment. Countless before and after her have come and gone, yet Lucy remains constant. Stefan Kanfer argues her longevity is due not just to her comedy, but being black-and-white: “There is something incompatible about humor and colour; the palette calls attention to itself, instead of to the jokes” (318). Lucille’s hair may have been flaming red, and was indeed visible to audiences on her later programs, but audiences do not need to see the colour of her hair to see the fiery spark present in Lucille Ball. Lucy Ricardo makes herself accessible to all because “her ability to create possibility where others would only recognize restraint, and her untiring optimism that this time her scheme will succeed, above all, keep [her]…alive and at the centre of our popular culture.” Feminist or not, Lucy speaks to the sense of adventure in all of us, the idea that if we take chances no matter what obstacles may be in our way, we just might have a chance to be in the show.
Works Cited
Bloom, Ken, and Frank Vlastnik. "I Love Lucy." Sitcoms: the 101 Greatest TV Comedies of All Time. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007. Print.
Castelluccio, Frank, and Alvin Walker. The Other Side of Ethel Mertz: the Life Story of Vivian Vance. Manchester, CT: Knowledge, Ideas & Trends, 1998. Print.
Daniels, Marc, dir. "Lucy Does a TV Commercial." I Love Lucy. CBS. 5 May 1952. Television.
Fidelman, Geoffrey Mark. The Lucy Book: a Complete Guide to Her Five Decades on Television. Los Angeles: Renaissance, 1999. Print.
Finding Lucy. Dir. Pamela Mason Wagner. CBS Paramount, 2001. Videocassette.
The Funny World of Lucy Volumes 1 & 2. Prod. Paul Harris and Sandy Oliveri. Goodtimes Home Video, 1993. DVD.
Kanfer, Stefan. Ball of Fire: the Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Print.
The Lucy Show: Collector's Edition. Dir. Jack Donohue. Perf. Lucille Ball, Vivian Vance, Gale Gordon. Columbia House, 1997. Videocassette.
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