Lucille Ball (August 6, 1911–April 26,
1989) was an American comedienne, film, television, stage and radio
actress, model, film executive, and star of the landmark sitcoms I Love
Lucy, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy. Lucille
Ball was one of the most popular stars in America during her lifetime and
had one of Hollywood's longest careers. She was a movie star from the
1930s to the 1970s, and appeared on television for more than thirty years.
Ball received thirteen Emmy Award nominations and four wins. She was the
recipient of the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1979, the Lifetime
Achievement Award from the Kennedy Center Honors in 1986 and the Academy
of Television Arts & Sciences Governors Award in 1989.
In 1929, Ball landed work as a model and later began her performing career
on Broadway using the stage name "Diane Belmont". She appeared in many
small movie roles in the 1930s as a contract player for RKO Radio
Pictures. Ball was labeled as the "Queen of the Bs" (referring to her many
roles in B-films). In 1951, Ball was pivotal in the creation of the
television series I Love Lucy. The show co-starred her then husband, Desi
Arnaz as Ricky Ricardo and Vivian Vance and William Frawley as Ethel and
Fred Mertz, the Ricardos' lovable landlords. After the show ended in 1960,
Ball went on to star in two more successful television series: The Lucy
Show, which ran on CBS from 1962 to 1968, and Here's Lucy from 1968 to
1974. Her last attempt at a television series was a 1986 show called Life
With Lucy. The show proved to be a critical and commercial flop which was
canceled less than two months into its run by ABC.
Ball met and eloped with Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz in 1940. On July 17,
1951, Ball gave birth to their first child, Lucie Desiree Arnaz. A year
and a half later, Ball gave birth to their second child, Desiderio Alberto
Arnaz IV, known as Desi Arnaz, Jr.[6] Ball and Arnaz divorced on May 4,
1960. On April 26, 1989, Ball died of a dissecting aortic aneurysm at age
seventy-seven. At the time of her death, she had been married to her
second husband, standup comedian and business partner Gary Morton, for
twenty-eight years.
Lucille Désirée Ball was born to Henry
Durrell Ball (September 16, 1886 – February 19, 1915) and Desiree "DeDe"
Evelyn Hunt (September 21, 1892 –July 20, 1977) in Jamestown, New York,
and grew up in the adjacent small town of Celoron. Although Lucy was born
in Jamestown, she told many people that she was born in Butte, Montana.
Her family was Baptist; her father was of Scottish descent, whose mother
was Mary Ball. Her mother was of French, Irish and English descent. Her
genealogy can be traced back to the earliest settlers in the colonies.
Her father, a telephone lineman for Anaconda Copper, was frequently
transferred because of his occupation, and within three years of her
birth, Lucille had moved many times, from Jamestown to Anaconda, Montana,
and then to Wyandotte, Michigan. While DeDe Ball was pregnant with her
second child, Frederick, Henry Ball contracted typhoid fever and died in
February 1915. After her father died, Ball and her brother Fred were
raised by her mother and grandparents. Her grandfather, Fred C. Hunt, was
an eccentric socialist who also enjoyed the theater. He frequently took
the family to vaudeville shows and encouraged young Lucy to take part in
both her own and school plays.
In 1927, Ball dated a gangster's son by the name of Johnny DeVita. Because
of this relationship, her mother decided to ship Ball off to the John
Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts in New York City. There, Ball
attended with fellow actress, Bette Davis. Ball went home a few weeks
later when drama coaches told her that she "had no future at all as a
performer".
Ball was determined to prove her teachers wrong and returned to New York
City in 1929. She landed work as a fashion model. Her career was thriving,
when she became ill with rheumatoid arthritis and could not work for two
years. She moved back to New York City in 1932 to become an actress and
had some success as a fashion model for designer Hattie Carnegie and as
the Chesterfield girl. She began her performing career on Broadway using
the stage name "Diane Belmont" and was hired—but then quickly fired—by
theatre impresario Earl Carroll from his Vanities and by Florenz Ziegfeld
from a touring company of Rio Rita.
She was let go again from the Shubert brothers production of Stepping
Stones. After an uncredited stint as one of the Goldwyn Girls in Roman
Scandals (1933) she permanently moved to Hollywood to appear in films. She
appeared in many small movie roles in the 1930s as a contract player for
RKO Radio Pictures, including movies with the Marx Brothers and the Three
Stooges. She can also be seen as one of the featured models in the Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers film Roberta (1935), where she met her lifelong
friend, Ginger Rogers.[21] She and Rogers played aspiring actresses in the
hit film Stage Door (1937) co-starring Katharine Hepburn. Ball was signed
to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the 1940s, but she never achieved major stardom
from her appearance in those films.
She was known in many Hollywood circles
as "Queen of the B's"—a title previously held by Fay Wray—starring in a
number of B-movies, such as 1939's Five Came Back. Like many budding
starlets Ball picked up radio work to earn side income as well as gain
exposure. In 1937 she appeared as a regular on the Phil Baker show. When
that completed its run in 1938, Ball joined the cast of the Wonder Show
starring future Wizard of Oz tin man Jack Haley. It was on this show that
she began her fifty year professional relationship with Gale Gordon who
served as the show's announcer. The Wonder show only lasted one season
with the final episode airing in April 7, 1939.
In 1940, Ball met Cuban-born bandleader Desi Arnaz while filming the film
version of the Rodgers and Hart stage hit Too Many Girls. Ball and Arnaz
connected immediately and eloped the same year, garnering much press
attention. Arnaz and Ball frequently argued, especially over his
indiscretions with other women, but they always made up in the end.
Arnaz was drafted to the United States Army in 1942. He ended up being
classified for limited service due to a knee injury. As a result, Arnaz
stayed in Los Angeles, organizing and performing USO shows for wounded GIs
being brought back from the Pacific. That same year, Lucy appeared
opposite Henry Fonda in The Big Street, an uneven film but a strong
personal performance. In this film she plays a tough nightclub singer
whose legs become paralyzed. Fonda plays a busboy who cares for her.
Ball filed for a divorce in 1944. Shortly after Ball obtained an
interlocutory decree, however, she reconciled with Arnaz again.[26]
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were only six years apart in age but
apparently believed that it was less socially acceptable for an older
woman to marry a younger man, and hence split the difference in their
ages, both claiming a 1914 birth date.
I Love Lucy and Desilu
Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance from I Love Lucy.
In 1948, Ball was cast as Liz Cugat
(later "Cooper"), a wacky wife, in My Favorite Husband, a radio program
for CBS Radio. The program was successful, and CBS asked her to develop it
for television. She agreed, but insisted on working with
Desi Arnaz. CBS
executives were reluctant, thinking the public would not accept an
All-American redhead and a Cuban as a couple. CBS was initially not
impressed with the pilot episode produced by the couple's Desilu
Productions company, so the couple toured the road in a vaudeville act
with Lucy as the zany housewife wanting to get in Arnaz's show. The tour
was a smash, and CBS put I Love Lucy on their lineup. The I Love Lucy show
was not only a star vehicle for Lucille Ball, but a way for her to try to
salvage her marriage to Desi Arnaz, which had become badly strained, in
part by the fact that each had a hectic performing schedule which often
kept them apart.
Along the way, she created a television dynasty and reached several
"firsts". Ball was the first woman in television to be head of a
production company: Desilu, the company that she and Arnaz formed. After
buying out her by-then ex-husband's share of the studio, Ball functioned
as a very active studio head. Desilu and I Love Lucy pioneered a number of
methods still in use in television production today. During this time Ball
taught a thirty-two week comedy workshop at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute.
Ball is quoted as saying, "You cannot teach someone comedy, either they
have it or they don't."
When the show premiered, most shows were aired live from New York City
studios to Eastern and Central Time Zone audiences, and captured by
kinescope for broadcast later to the West Coast. The kinescope picture was
inferior to film, and as a result the West Coast broadcasts were inferior
to those seen elsewhere in the country. Ball and Arnaz wanted to remain in
their Los Angeles home, but the time zone logistics made that broadcast
norm impossible. Prime time in L.A. was too late at night on the East
Coast to air a major network series, meaning the majority of the TV
audience would be seeing not only the inferior picture of kinescopes but
seeing them at least a day later.
Sponsor Philip Morris did not want to show day-old kinescopes to the major
markets on the East Coast, yet neither did they want to pay for the extra
cost filming, processing and editing would require, pressuring Ball and
Arnaz to relocate to New York City. Ball and Arnaz offered to take a pay
cut to finance filming, on the condition that their company, Desilu, would
retain the rights to that film once it was aired. CBS relinquished the
show rights back to Desilu after initial broadcast, not realizing they
were giving away a valuable and durable asset. Desilu made many millions
of dollars on I Love Lucy rebroadcasts through syndication and became a
textbook example of how a show can be profitable in second-run
syndication. In television's infancy, the concept of the rerun hadn't yet
formed, and many in the industry wondered who would want to see a program
a second time. In fact, while other celebrated shows of the period exist
only in incomplete sets of kinescopes too degraded to show to subsequent
generations of television viewers, I Love Lucy has virtually never gone
out of syndication since it began, seen by hundreds of millions of people
around the world over the past half century. The success of Ball and
Arnaz's gamble was instrumental in drawing television production from New
York to Hollywood for the next several decades.
Desilu also hired legendary German cameraman Karl Freund as their director
of photography. Freund had worked for F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, shot
part of Metropolis (1927) and had directed a number of Hollywood films
himself. Freund used a three-camera setup, which became the standard way
of filming situation comedies. Shooting long shots, medium shots, and
close-ups on a comedy in front of a live audience demanded discipline,
technique, and close choreography. Among other non-standard techniques
used in filming the show, cans of paint (in shades ranging from white to
medium gray) were kept on set to "paint out" inappropriate shadows and
disguise lighting flaws.
I Love Lucy dominated the weekly TV ratings in the United States for most
of its run. In the scene where Lucy and Ricky are practicing the tango in
the episode "Lucy Does The Tango", the longest recorded studio audience
laugh in the history of the show was produced. It was so long, in fact,
that the sound editor had to cut that particular part of the soundtrack in
half. The strenuous rehearsals and demands of Desilu studio kept the
Arnazes too busy to comprehend the show's success. During the show's
hiatus, they starred together in feature films: Vincente Minnelli's
The
Long, Long Trailer (1954) and Alexander Hall's Forever, Darling
(1956).
Testimony Before the House Committee
on Un-American Activities
In 1953, Ball was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American
Activities because she had registered to vote in the Communist party
primary election in 1936 at her socialist grandfather's insistence (per
FBI FOIA-released documents in a declassified FBI file). Immediately
before the filming of episode 68 ("The Girls Go Into Business") of I Love
Lucy, Desi Arnaz, instead of his usual audience warm-up, told the audience
about Lucy and her grandfather. Arnaz quipped: "The only thing red about
Lucy is her hair, and even that's not legitimate." Then, he presented his
wife and she received a standing ovation from the audience.
Children and divorce
On July 17, 1951, just one month before her fortieth birthday and after
several miscarriages, Ball gave birth to her first child, Lucie Desiree
Arnaz.[5] A year and a half later, Ball gave birth to her second child,
Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV, known as Desi Arnaz, Jr. When he was born, I
Love Lucy was a solid ratings hit, and Ball and Arnaz wrote the pregnancy
into the show (indeed, Ball gave birth in real life on the same day that
her Lucy Ricardo character gave birth).There were several challenges from
CBS, insisting that a pregnant woman could not be shown on television, nor
could the word "pregnant" be spoken on-air. After approval from several
religious figures the network allowed the pregnancy storyline, but
insisted that the word "expecting" be used instead of "pregnant". (Arnaz
garnered laughs when he deliberately mispronounced it as "'spectin'").The
episode's official title was "Lucy Is Enceinte," borrowing the French word
for pregnant. The birth made the first cover of TV Guide in January 1953.
Ball's instincts with business were often astonishingly sharp, and her
love for Arnaz was passionate, but her relationships with her children
were sometimes strained. Lucie Arnaz, her daughter, spoke of her mother's
"controlling" nature. Ball was very outspoken against the relationship
that Desi Jr. had with Liza Minnelli. She was quoted as saying, "I miss
Liza, but you cannot domesticate Liza." She had a few very good friends in
the business: Ginger Rogers, Mary Wickes and Vivian Vance. All were
childless; Wickes never married.
In October 1956, Ball, Vivian Vance, Desi Arnaz, and William Frawley all
appeared on a Bob
Hope special on NBC, including a spoof of I Love of Lucy, the only
time all four stars were together on a color telecast. Fortunately, at
least part of the program has been preserved in a rare color kinescope.
By the end of the 1950s, Desilu had become a large company, causing a good
deal of stress for both Ball and Arnaz; his increased drinking further
compounded matters. On May 4, 1960, just two months after filming the
final episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, the couple divorced. Until his
death in 1986, however, Arnaz and Ball remained friends and often spoke
very fondly of each other. Indeed, both Arnaz and Ball spoke lovingly of
each other after the breakup. Her real-life divorce indirectly found its
way into her later television series, as she was always cast as a single
woman.
The following year, Ball did a musical on Broadway, Wildcat, co-starring
Paula Stewart. It was Stewart who introduced her to her next husband Gary
Morton, a Borscht Belt stand-up comic who was thirteen years her junior.
Morton claimed he had never seen an episode of "I Love Lucy" due to his
hectic work schedule. That marked the beginning of a thirty-year
friendship between Lucy and Paula. Ball immediately installed Morton in
her production company, teaching him the television business and
eventually promoting him to producer. Morton also played occasional bit
parts on Ball's various series.
Later career
The 1960 Broadway musical Wildcat was a successful sell-out that ended its
run early when Ball became too ill to continue in the show. The show was
the source of the song she made famous, "Hey, Look Me Over", which she
performed with Paula Stewart on The Ed Sullivan Show. She made a few more
movies including Yours, Mine, and Ours (1968), and the musical Mame
(1974), and two more successful long-running sitcoms for CBS:
The Lucy
Show (1962–68), which costarred Vance and Gale Gordon, and
Here's Lucy
(1968–74), which also featured Gordon, as well Lucy's real life children,
Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz, Jr. Ball appeared on the
Dick Cavett show and spoke of her history and life with Arnaz. She
insisted that Mame was by far one of her most favorite "family" movies she
had ever done. During that interview, Ball revealed how she felt about
other actors and actresses as well as her love for Arnaz. She continued by
telling Dick that the success to her life was, getting rid of what was
wrong and replacing it with what is right. (Talking about her divorce from
Arnaz and marriage to Morton) Lucy also reveals in this interview that the
strangest thing to ever happen to her was after she had some dental work
completed and after placing lead fillings in her teeth, she started
hearing radio stations in her head. She explained coming home one night
from the studio and as she passed one area, she heard what she thought was
morse code or a "tapping." She stated that "As I backed up it got
stronger. The next morning, I reported it to the authorities and upon
investigation, they found a Japanese radio transmitter that had been
buried and was actively transmitting codes back to the Japanese."
Ball was originally considered by
Frank
Sinatra for the role of Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate.
Director/producer John Frankenheimer, however, had worked with
Angela Lansbury in a mother role in another film and insisted on
having her for the part.
During the mid-1980s, she attempted to
resurrect her television career. In 1982, Ball hosted a two-part Three's
Company retrospective, showing clips from the show's first five seasons,
summarizing memorable plotlines, and commenting on her love of the show. A
1985 dramatic made-for-TV film about an elderly homeless woman, Stone
Pillow, received mixed reviews. Her 1986 sitcom comeback Life With Lucy,
costarring her longtime foil Gale Gordon and co-produced by Ball, Gary
Morton, and former actor Aaron Spelling, was a critical and commercial
flop which was canceled less than two months into its run by ABC. The
failure of this series was said to have sent Ball into a serious
depression, and other than a few miscellaneous awards show appearances,
she was absent from the public eye for the last several years of her life.
Her last public appearance, just one month before her death, was at the
1989 Academy Awards telecast in which she and fellow presenter, Bob Hope,
were given a standing ovation.
Ball at her last public appearance at the 61st Academy Awards in 1989 just
four weeks before her death.
Death
On April 18, 1989, Ball complained of chest pains and was rushed to the
emergency room of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She was diagnosed as having
a dissecting aortic aneurysm and underwent heart surgery for nearly eight
hours. The surgery was successful, and Ball was recovering; she was
walking around her room with little assistance. On April 26, shortly after
dawn, Ball awoke with severe back pains. Her aorta had ruptured in a
second location and Ball quickly lost consciousness. All attempts to
revive her proved unsuccessful and at approximately 05:47 PST, Lucille
Ball died at the age of 77.She was initially interred in Forest Lawn –
Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, but in 2002 her children moved
her ashes to the family plot at Lake View Cemetery in Jamestown, New York,
where Ball's mother, father, brother, and grandparents are buried.Legacy
and posthumous recognition
News Report From Day of Lucy's Death
Legacy and posthumous recognition
Ball has received many prestigious awards throughout her career including
some that she received posthumously such as the Presidential Medal of
Freedom by President George H. W. Bush on July 6, 1989. The Women's
International Center's Living Legacy Award. There is a Lucille Ball-Desi
Arnaz Center museum in Jamestown, NY. The Little Theatre in Jamestown, New
York, was renamed the Lucille Ball Little Theatre in her honor. Ball was
among Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the Century.
On August 6, 2001, on what would have been her ninetieth birthday, the
United States Postal Service honored her with a commemorative postage
stamp as part of its Legends of Hollywood series. Ball appeared on the
cover of TV Guide more than any other person; she appeared on thirty-nine
covers, including the very first cover in 1953, with her baby son Desi
Arnaz, Jr. TV Guide voted Lucille Ball as the Greatest TV Star of All Time
and later it commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of I Love Lucy with
eight collector covers celebrating memorable scenes from the show and in
another instance they named I Love Lucy the second most influential
television program in American history. Because of her liberated mindset
and approval of the women's movement, Ball was inducted into the National
Women's Hall of Fame.
Finally, she was awarded the Legacy of Laughter award at the fifth Annual
TV Land Awards in 2007. and I Love Lucy was named the Greatest TV Series
by Hall of Fame Magazine. In November of that year, Lucille Ball was
chosen as the second out of the 50 Greatest TV Icons, after Johnny Carson.
In a poll done by the public, however, they chose her as the greatest
icon.
Home
Articles
Images
Forum
Search
Shopping
TV Trivia
Watch TV
Wallpaper
