“Lucy’s Summer Vacation”

(LDCH S2;E5 ~ June 8, 1959) Directed by Jerry Thorpe. Written by Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf. Script copyright May 5, 1959. Filmed at Desilu Studios, Culver City. 

Synopsis ~ Lucy and Ricky go on vacation to Vermont and end up sharing their cabin with Howard Duff and Ida Lupino.  When the girls feel they aren’t getting their husband’s full attention, Lucy takes drastic steps!

This was the final installment of the second season of “The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour,” then part of the “Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse.” This is the first complete episode filmed without a studio audience. 

It features guest stars (and real-life celebrity couple) Howard Duff and Ida Lupino playing themselves, although they behave a bit like the characters in their television show "Mr. Adams and Eve,” seen on CBS from 1957 to 1958.

This was the third of four times a real-life Hollywood husband and wife appeared on the “Comedy Hour,” the first being Fred MacMurray and June Haver in “Lucy Hunts Uranium”, the second Betty Grable and Harry James in “Lucy Wins a Racehorse,” and the fourth Ernie Kovacs and Edie Adams in “Lucy Meets the Mustache”. The ultimate in celebrity couples wouldn’t be seen until a 1970 episode of "Here’s Lucy” – Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton!

This episode’s lead-in was “The Ann Sothern Show” which was produced by Desi Arnaz. Sothern had guest-starred in the very first “Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour”.  This particular episode of “The Ann Sothern Show” featured Richard Reeves, who was seen on nine episodes of “I Love Lucy,” most memorably as jealous husband Bill Foster during season one. Four months later (October 1959), Lucille Ball will play Lucy Ricardo on an episode of “The Ann Sothern Show.”  

In the story, Lucy and Ricky have been invited by Ricky’s absent-minded friend Harry Bailey to spend a week at his lodge on (fictional) Lake Wotchasokapoo, Vermont. The show took the Ricardos out of their Connecticut home, but the scenes were not filmed on location in Vermont but inside Desilu Studios. There is one brief establishing shot of a lake. 

Interestingly, Lucille Ball’s paternal great-grandfather, Clinton Manross Ball, moved from the state of Vermont to Fredonia, just north of Jamestown in Chautauqua County, New York, in the mid-1800s.

The Ricardos soon find out that Harry has also loaned the remote cabin to Howard Duff and Ida Lupino for the same week! The girls quickly tire of the men going fishing everyday and playing cards every night, so they dress in their swankiest finery to woo the men for a romantic evening. When that fails, Lucy comes up with a scheme to keep them in the cabin and not on the lake.

Ida Lupino was born in 1918 into a theatrical family in London, England. Her uncle was Lupino Lane, the original Bill Snibson in Me and My Girl (1937) popularizing "The Lambeth Walk.” She came to Hollywood in the late 1930s where she described herself as “the poor man’s Bette Davis.” She appeared in 59 films, and directed seven others, becoming only the second female to be admitted to the Directors Guild of America. She was equally at home on television, earning three Emmy nominations. Her third and last husband was Howard Duff, whom she divorced in 1984. She died in August 1994 at the age of 77. 

Lupino was known to frequently call people “darling” just like Tallulah Bankhead, another “Comedy Hour” guest star. Like Bankhead, Lupino plays up her movie star persona for the camera.

Howard Duff (1913-90) met Ida Lupino while filming 1950’s Woman in Hiding. They were married the following year. As a couple they worked extensively together on television, even appearing as guest villains on TV’s "Batman” in 1968. Like Lucy, Duff was labeled a communist in the early 1950s, which nearly ruined his career. Many say his marriage to Lupino saved him from total blacklisting. Although he was equally at home on the small screen, he is perhaps best remembered as Dustin Hoffman’s attorney in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979).

According to some reports, tensions ran high during the filming. Lucy became angry when Desi began flirting with Lupino. Lucy also wasn’t getting along with director Jerry Thorpe. She was worried that Lupino wouldn’t be able to handle the comedy in the episode, and confidentially mentioned it to Thorpe, who then turned around and told Lupino of Lucy’s concerns. Allegedly, Lucy was angry about his betrayal of her confidence and walked off the set until Thorpe was replaced. Desi Arnaz ended up directing the remainder of the episode. 

In one scene, when the husbands kiss their wives goodnight, Ricky very clearly gives Lucy an “air kiss” while Duff gives Lupino a proper (and noisy) smooch. There is, however, a more heartfelt kiss between the Ricardos at the end of the episode.

Master of noir, cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, Ida Lupino’s director of photography on The Hitch-Hiker (1953) – which Lupino directed – was the cinematographer for this episode.

Desi Arnaz really enjoyed fishing and it was previously worked into the plot of “I Love Lucy” in “The Camping Trip” (ILL S2;E29). The Ricardos also went “Deep Sea Fishing” (ILL S6;E7) when visiting Miami Beach, Florida.

To dispense with the rest of the regular cast while the Ricardos and Duffs play out their farcical vacation, Little Ricky (Keith Thibodeaux) is sent off to Scout Camp while Fred and Ethel (Vivian Vance and William Frawley) are going to Atlantic City. 

One of Ricky’s Tropicana shows was set in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the Gay ‘90s. In “Breaking the Lease” (ILL S1;E18), Lucy finds a sentimental photo of the Ricardos and Mertzes in Atlantic City. 

Little Ricky appears in all but one of the “Lucy-Desi Comedy Hours”.  He was never credited by his birth name or his stage name (Richard Keith) but simply as “Little Ricky.” 

Naturally, the Ricardos have the latest two-toned Westinghouse refrigerator.

At the start of the episode Lucy is in her kitchen listening to a (fictional) radio soap opera called “Hope Springs Eternal,” complete with dramatic organ music. The announcer is voiced by Carlton Young, who starred in real-life radio dramas including "Our Gal Sunday,” "Portia Faces Life,” and "Stella Dallas.” Young and Lucille Ball had both appeared in 1942’s Valley of the Sun.   

The cabin – the calm before the chaos begins!  

On the cabin’s kitchen windowsill is a deft-style blue and white ceramic canister set. It is a German ceramic canister by Inge with a Dutch windmill design.  The full set included five 8” canisters consisting of the  tea, coffee, sugar, oatmeal and barley plus three smaller canisters consisting of  pepper, ginger, and cloves. 

While Lucy and Ricky are taking a moonlit stroll, Howard Duff gets into the cabin through an unlocked window, a trick he says he learned while playing Sam Spade. Duff played Dashiell Hammett’s famous private eye on radio from 1946 to 1950. Duff and Lupino claim to have been on a personal appearance tour before arriving at the cabin.

Harry Bailey sends the local general store owner (William Fawcett) to tell the couples about the double booking. He recognizes Ricky Ricardo from a $2 bus tour he and his wife took of New York City. He says that she liked the way Ricky sang “Baby-loo.” The moment is reminiscent of when the locksmith from Yonkers, trying to unlock “The Handcuffs” (ILL S2;E2), recognizes Ricky and also comments on his “Bobalink” number. 

William Fawcett had appeared with Lucy in the 1951 film The Magic Carpet and had played the grizzled old prospector in “Lucy Hunts Uranium,” a season one “Comedy Hour” episode. 

IDA: “I’d have had a better time at the Fulton Fish Market.”

The Fulton Fish Market was the most important wholesale East Coast fish market in the United States. Opened in 1822, it was the destination of fishing boats from across the Atlantic Ocean. By the 1950s, most of the Market’s fish were trucked in rather than offloaded from the docks. In 2005, after 193 years, the Market relocated to a new facility in the Bronx, leaving its historic location near the Brooklyn Bridge in Lower Manhattan.

When Lucy expresses frustration at not being able to reach an island by boat, Lupino says “How do you expect us to get over there, have Alec Guinness build us a bridge?” 

This is a reference to the 1958 Academy Award-winning film The Bridge On the River Kwai that starred Guinness and William Holden, the first celebrity Lucy encountered in Hollywood.

When Lucy wants to take a moonlit stroll along the lake, Ricky quips that they should have vacationed at Cape Canaveral. Although it was not then the center of the space program it is today, and the moon landing was more than ten years in the future, in 1958 the government relocated staff and resources devoted to unmanned missions. 

This was the second time “Cielito Lindo” was performed on the “Comedy Hour,” having already been heard in “Lucy Takes a Cruise to Havana” (1957).  It was sung a total of five times on "I Love Lucy” more than any other song except "Babalu.”

The show also includes a rousing round of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” an English nursery rhyme and children’s song first published in 1852.

This was the lowest-rated “Comedy Hour” episode to date. Variety called it "the least rewarding” of the specials thus far, and noted that “this one falls flat most of the way.”

Westinghouse introduced a new product during this episode, the Dog-o-matic, which cooked six hot dogs in 90 seconds. It sold for ten dollars. 

In front of the show curtain at the end of the episode, Desi Arnaz starts to tell the audience about next week’s show, only to be interrupted by the Fred and Ethel, taking their old refrigerator to a Westinghouse dealer. This led to a commercial for “Westinghouse Opportunity Days” starring Betty Furness. 

FAST FORWARD!

The Summer of 1959 the Ricardos weren’t the only ones escaping to a cabin in the woods. In 2018 “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (set in 1959) also took a summer vacation!  To revisit the remarkable similarities, click here!  

A leaky boat on a lake also plagued Lucy Carmichael and Viv Bagley on a 1963 episode of “The Lucy Show.” 

While at a lakeside cabin with her son, Lucy Carmichael decides to join in the card game in “Lucy Becomes a Father” (TLS S3;E9).