Lucille Ball

• 1. Introduction

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  Lucille Ball was born on the 6th of August, 1911, at 69 Stewart Avenue in Jamestown, New York, and by the time she died on the 26th of April, 1989, she had appeared on 39 covers of TV Guide, more than any other person in history. TV Guide would eventually name her the Greatest TV Star of All Time. Time magazine placed her among the 100 Most Important People of the Century. But the real story of Lucille Ball is stranger and richer than any trophy can hold.

  She was told by her drama school instructors that she would never make it. She spent years being hired and then immediately fired. She was known in Hollywood as the Queen of the B-movies. And yet she built an empire from scratch, became the first woman to run a major television studio, and produced two of the most durable series in the history of American broadcasting.

  How did a girl from a summer resort village on Chautauqua Lake end up owning the studio lots where RKO Radio Pictures once stood? What drove someone told she had no talent to keep showing up, decade after decade? And what was the real story behind I Love Lucy, the show that earned 44 million viewers for a single episode and changed how television was made? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Childhood of Displacement

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  Henry Durrell Ball, a Bell Telephone lineman, died of typhoid fever on the 28th of February, 1915, in Wyandotte, Michigan. He was 27 years old. His daughter Lucille was three. The only thing she later said she remembered from that day was a bird getting trapped inside the house. That bird left her with a lifelong fear of birds, a condition called ornithophobia.

  After her father's death, her mother DeDe returned to New York, and the family settled in Celoron, a summer resort village on Chautauqua Lake. The house at 59 West 8th Street, later renamed Lucy Lane, held not just Lucille and her brother Fred but also her aunt and uncle, Lola and George Mandicos, and their daughter Cleo. Cleo would later work as a producer on several of Ball's radio and television programs.

  When DeDe married a second husband, Edward Peterson, Peterson's parents cared for Lucille and Fred while the couple looked for work. Peterson's parents were a puritanical Swedish couple who removed every mirror from the house except one above the bathroom sink. When Lucy was caught admiring herself in that mirror, she was harshly scolded for vanity. She later said the experience affected her deeply and lasted seven or eight years.

  At age 12, her stepfather suggested she audition for his Shriners organization, which needed chorus performers. Standing on that stage, she understood for the first time that performing was a way to earn approval. The desire to prove herself on a stage would drive nearly everything that came next.

• 3. Rejected, Repeatedly

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  In 1926, despite the family's limited finances, Ball's mother enrolled 14-year-old Lucille in the John Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts in New York City, where Bette Davis was a fellow student. The teachers there were blunt: they told Ball directly that she would not succeed in entertainment. Ball later described that period in her own words: "All I learned in drama school was how to be frightened."

  She came back to New York City in 1928 anyway, determined to prove her instructors wrong. She found work modeling for fashion designer Hattie Carnegie, who ordered her to bleach her brown hair blond. Ball obeyed. Of Carnegie's influence, she said: "Hattie taught me how to slouch properly in a $1,000 hand-sewn sequin dress and how to wear a $40,000 sable coat as casually as rabbit."

  Rheumatic fever interrupted her momentum and kept her out of work for two years. When she returned to New York in 1932, she tried Broadway under the stage name Diane Belmont. Theater impresario Earl Carroll hired her for his Vanities and then quickly fired her. Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. brought her into a touring company of Rio Rita and then let her go as well.

  In 1936, she landed a role that she hoped would lift her onto Broadway, in a Bartlett Cormack comedy called Hey Diddle Diddle. The play premiered in Princeton, New Jersey, on the 21st of January, 1937, with Ball as Julie Tucker. It closed after one week in Washington, D.C., when its ailing star Conway Tearle became gravely ill. The road to stardom kept closing in front of her.

• 4. Queen of the Bs

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  Hollywood in the 1930s slotted Lucille Ball into a specific category. She was a contract player at RKO Radio Pictures, cast as a chorus girl or in similar supporting parts. She appeared alongside the Three Stooges in a two-reel short called Three Little Pigskins in 1934, and with the Marx Brothers in Room Service in 1938. Her first credited role came in Chatterbox in 1936.

  She appeared in the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films Roberta and Top Hat, both in 1935, and Follow the Fleet in 1936. In Stage Door in 1937, she played an aspiring actress alongside Ginger Rogers, who was a distant maternal cousin, and Katharine Hepburn. These were supporting roles, not starring ones.

  The label that stuck was Queen of the B-movies, a title previously associated with Fay Wray and later more closely linked to Ida Lupino and Marie Windsor. In the 1940s, silent film star Buster Keaton and director Edward Sedgwick became her friends and comedy mentors at MGM, sharing what they knew about physical comedy and prop work. She signed with MGM but never broke through to major stardom there.

  Radio offered a different path. In 1937, she appeared regularly on The Phil Baker Show. When it ended in 1938, she joined The Wonder Show starring Jack Haley. That show's announcer was Gale Gordon, and Ball's professional relationship with Gordon would last 50 years. In 1948, she was cast as Liz Cooper, a wacky wife, in My Favorite Husband on CBS Radio. That radio character would eventually become the foundation for the most watched show in American television history.

• 5. Building Desilu

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  CBS asked Ball to bring My Favorite Husband to television. She agreed, on one condition: her real-life husband, Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz, had to be cast opposite her. Network executives resisted. They did not believe the American public would accept an Anglo-American redhead and a Cuban as a married couple on screen. CBS was also unimpressed with the pilot.

  Ball and Arnaz took matters into their own hands. They put together a vaudeville act and took it on the road, with Ball playing a zany housewife trying to get into Arnaz's bandleader show. The tour was a hit, and CBS put I Love Lucy into their lineup. The show ran on CBS from the 15th of October, 1951, to the 6th of May, 1957.

  Filming the show required a technical negotiation that changed television production permanently. Ball and Arnaz wanted to stay in Los Angeles, but broadcasting live from California would have meant delivering a degraded kinescope image to most of the country. Their sponsor, Philip Morris, wanted the couple in New York. Instead, Arnaz and Ball offered to take a pay cut and finance the filming themselves on 35 mm film. In exchange, Desilu would retain the rights to each episode after it aired. CBS agreed, not imagining that reruns would ever be worth anything. Network reruns did not exist yet; the idea only became reality in the summer of 1952, when NBC aired repeats of Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life.

  Desi Arnaz understood what those rights would be worth as television spread across the country. In 1957, CBS bought the rights back for $1,000,000, which Ball and Arnaz used as a down payment to purchase the former RKO Radio Pictures studios, turning them into Desilu Studios. The show also pioneered filming before a live studio audience with multiple cameras and adjacent sets, a method still used in television production today.

  In 1962, after their divorce in 1960, Ball bought out Arnaz's share of Desilu and became its sole head, making her the first woman to run a major television studio. Under her leadership, Desilu produced Mission: Impossible and Star Trek, among other series. In 1967, she sold her shares to Gulf+Western for $17,000,000, and the company was renamed Paramount Television.

• 6. The Private Life Behind the Show

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  Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball eloped at the Byram River Beagle Club in Greenwich, Connecticut, on the 30th of November, 1940. On the evening of their wedding, Arnaz was scheduled for two shows at the Roxy Theater in Manhattan. He missed the first but made it back in time for the second.

  In 1941, the couple bought a five-acre ranch they called Desilu in Chatsworth, California. Ball suffered a miscarriage in 1942 and several more in the years that followed. She gave birth to daughter Lucie Arnaz on the 17th of July, 1951, a few weeks before her own 40th birthday. Desi Jr. followed a year and a half later.

  The pregnancy with Desi Jr. became part of I Love Lucy's storyline. CBS insisted that a pregnant woman could not appear on television and that the word "pregnant" could not be spoken on air. After approval from several religious figures, the network permitted the storyline but required the word "expecting" to be used instead. Arnaz earned laughs by deliberately mispronouncing it as "spectin." The episode's official title borrowed the French word, "Lucy Is Enceinte"; episode titles never appeared on screen. On the 19th of January, 1953-44 million viewers watched Lucy Ricardo give birth to little Ricky, while in real life Ball delivered Desi Jr. that same day in Los Angeles. That birth appeared on the cover of the first issue of TV Guide.

  The marriage did not survive the pressures of running Desilu and Arnaz's infidelity. Ball filed for divorce in Santa Monica Superior Court on the 3rd of March, 1960, calling married life with Desi "a nightmare" and nothing like I Love Lucy. The divorce was finalized on the 4th of May, 1960. Despite the split, the two remained friends until Arnaz's death in 1986, and they often spoke fondly of each other.

  Ball married comedian Gary Morton on the 19th of November, 1961. Morton was 13 years her junior and had been introduced to her by former Broadway co-star Paula Stewart. Ball said Morton had never seen a single episode of I Love Lucy because of his hectic work schedule. She immediately brought him into Desilu and trained him in the television business.

• 7. The Communist Affiliation

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  When Ball registered to vote in 1936, she listed her party affiliation as Communist. Her brother and her mother did the same. That same year, she signed a certificate to sponsor the Communist Party's candidate for the California State Assembly's 57th District, and records from the Secretary of State of California showed the Communist Party of California had appointed her to the state's Central Committee.

  On the 22nd of July, 1940, Hollywood writer Rena Vale testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that she had attended a Communist Party new members' class at an address identified as Ball's home on North Ogden Drive. Two years later, Vale affirmed this in a sworn deposition, saying an elderly man at the door told attendees they were guests of Lucille Ball, that the home had been loaned for the class, and that he pointed to pictures and books to establish it as her residence.

  On the 4th of September, 1953, Ball met voluntarily with HUAC investigator William A. Wheeler in Hollywood and gave sealed testimony. She said she had registered Communist at the insistence of her socialist grandfather and stated she had never intended to vote as a Communist. Her testimony was forwarded to J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI memorandum noted that Ball did not know whether meetings had been held at her home and did not recall signing the document sponsoring a candidate. The review found no activity warranting her inclusion on the Security Index.

  Before filming episode 68 of I Love Lucy, Desi Arnaz skipped his usual audience warm-up and spoke to the studio audience about Lucy and her grandfather. He used a line he had already given to columnist Hedda Hopper: "The only thing red about Lucy is her hair, and even that is not legitimate."

• 8. Legacy and After

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  Ball's last public appearance came at the 1989 Academy Awards telecast, where she and presenter Bob Hope received a standing ovation from the audience. She had been hospitalized in May 1988 after a mild heart attack. On the 18th of April, 1989, she was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles with chest pains and was found to have a dissecting aortic aneurysm near her heart. A seven-hour surgery repaired her aorta and installed an aortic valve replacement.

  On Wednesday, the 26th of April, 1989, while still in the hospital, she woke with severe back pain, lost consciousness, and died at 5:47 a.m. PDT from a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm. She was 77. Doctors confirmed the abdominal tear was unrelated to the area operated on the previous week. Carol Burnett, who had been Ball's close friend since 1959, noted that Ball had died on Burnett's birthday. Ball had sent Burnett flowers every year on that date.

  After her death, the American Comedy Awards were officially renamed "The Lucy." She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously from President George H. W. Bush on the 6th of July, 1989. Ball appeared on 39 covers of TV Guide; the first, from the week of the 3rd-the 9th of April, 1953, featured her newborn son Desi Arnaz Jr. In 2008, TV Guide ranked I Love Lucy the second-best television program in American history. On the 6th of August, 2001, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring what would have been Ball's 90th birthday, as part of its Legends of Hollywood series. Her autobiography, compiled from interviews conducted with Betty Hannah Hoffman on advice from Norman Vincent Peale, was published by Berkley Publishing Group in 1997 and released on audio through Audible on the 9th of July, 2018, read by her daughter Lucie.