COVER GIRL ‘47

January 5, 1947

On January 5, 1947, film star Lucille Ball was the cover girl of the Picture Section of the Chicago Sunday Tribune. 

During Lucille Ball’s pre-television career, she continued to say that she was born in Butte, Montana, instead of Jamestown, New York. In fact, her family did spend a short time living outside Butte as part of her father’s job as a lineman for Bell Telephone.  That didn’t seem eye-catching enough for a young Lucy, who made Butte her hometown and insisted her father was a mining tycoon!  Another fallacy in her early bios is that she ‘made a place for herself on Broadway.’ In fact, her Broadway bound play Hey Diddle Diddle closed out of town and never reached the Great White Way. Lucy wouldn’t conquer Broadway until 1960 with Wildcat.  

On the same date in another newspaper, Ball’s film Two Smart People (released June 1946) was trashed in a capsule review!  Ouch! 

Also making news on January 5, 1947, was a lawsuit filed by Lucille Ball against RCA Victor for prominently billing name on her husband’s record “Carnival in Rio”.  Ball performed a short tongue-twister on the album, but insisted it did not reflect her true artistic abilities and sued for $100,000.  She dropped the lawsuit in March 1947 after setting for ‘satisfactory’ compensation. Future releases of the record credited “Desi Arnaz and Friend.”  33 years later Ball would be under contract to NBC, a company owned by RCA.  

Summing up 1946 and looking forward to 1947, columnist Jimmie Fidler saw Lucille Ball as Hollywood’s number one comedienne!  This was a year before her radio show “My Favorite Husband” and more than four years prior to “I Love Lucy.” Fidler was spot on! 

Less accurate, Erskine Johnson announced that Lucille Ball would be featured in the film version of The Hucksters. When the project started filming a few weeks later, Lucille Ball was not among the cast, which included Clark Gable and Ava Gardner, who played the role Erskine insisted would be taken by Ball.  The MGM film was released in July 1947. Instead, Lucy filmed Her Husband’s Affairs for Columbia Pictures. It was released in November 1947.