VOGUE: $54,000,000 BONANZA

May 18, 1968

Lucille Ball was photographed by Alexis Waldeck for the May 1968 issue of Vogue (vol. 51, no. 9, whole no. 2199).  The two-page spread (with unique upside-down orientation) also included text about Ball’s wealth. 

“Always the cause of catastrophe, Lucille Ball, the only 100-carat woman comedian, swings between disaster and destruction on some Lucy program at least once a day. The recipient of a billion laughs since 1951, she has been paid about $54,000,000 for them. Her hair the color of pale candied carrots, her figure a size eight, she knows every nuance of her trade and she goes about it, with a team, as though she were sticking on a Band-Aid, when actually every low-down pratfall is calculated as an aorta replacement.  A beautiful woman, she thinks nothing of screwing up her hair, sticking on shapeless shoes, a cleaning woman’s slobbery clothes for a show. When she left Jamestown, New York, she began working as a model for Hattie Carnegie, got $35 a week. As a Goldwyn Girl, a top show girl in the Eddie Cantor movie Roman Scandals, she got five times as much; but when she moved to the RKO lot she got $50 and in six years rose to $3,500. Good but not spectacular.”

(On radio she worked and learned from every fine comedian.) Although her television take is enormous, she likes to think of herself as a wife and mother who works rather than a product or a tycoon. As a tycoon, she sold the first I Love Lucy for about $6,000,000, the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse specials for about $12,000,000, the Lucy Desi specials for about $1,000,000, The Lucy Show for $10,000,000, Desilu Productions and studios last summer for $17,000,000, and for a couple more million the television agony The Untouchables, in which she did not appear, added a few odd million here and there for a bonanza of $54,000,000.  Now she has a new production, this time with her seventeen-year-old daughter, Lucie, and her fifteen-year-old son, Desi Arnaz, in another Lucy situation comedy; in this one the plot has the family traveling around the United States – not a travelogue – actually using a custom-built truck costing about $250,000. But who counts? (*)

* Apparently by May 1968 the concept for what was to become “Here’s Lucy” had not been fully realized.  Ball opened season two of the show with episodes on location. Perhaps these were intended to be a blue print for the entire series? 

Waldeck’s photographs are even more stunning in color. 

Footage from the shoot was used for the opening credit sequence of “Here’s Lucy”.  

The cover of this issue features Katharine Ross, star of The Graduate. 

The day after this issue was dated, Lucille Ball won her fourth (and final) competitive Emmy Award on a show broadcast on NBC from The Hollywood Palladium.  “The Lucy Show” lost to “Get Smart,” which also earned its star Don Adams an Emmy.