LUCILLE WINS 10 YEAR FIGHT

July 15, 1943

By ERSKINE JOHNSON

It took Lucille Ball 10 years to travel five miles to stardom. 

There’s a smooth, concrete highway all the way with only an occasional boulevard stop.

“But its the toughest five miles,” Lucille said today, "that I’ve ever traveled in my life.” 

With, she added, plenty of stops and detours and barriers and tears. 

The story of Lucille Ball’s 10 year fight along those five miles – between the RKO studio in Hollywood and the MGM studio in Culver City – is the type of success story Hollywood doesn’t like to talk about. Sort of a skeleton in the closet. 

No overnight acclaim. No ballyhoo. Just hard work, determination and one disappointment after another. A talented actress fighting, a phantom which regularly would sneak up behind her and smite her down. 

Lucille was looking back at those 10 years in her dressing room at MGM, where she’s receiving the years greatest star buildup. In less than six months she’s been starred In three $1,000,000 pictures, "Du Barry Was a Lady, "Best Foot Forward” and "Meet the People.”

Looking back, Lucille said, without bitterness: “Those 10 years were good for me. A wonderful apprenticeship. But sometimes I wondered. 

Ten years ago Lucille Ball arrived in Hollywood as a chorus girl via Butte, Mont., where she was born, the John Murray Anderson dramatic school and modeling in New York. If you have a good memory, you’ll remember her film debut as a showgirl with Eddie Cantor in “Roman Scandals”, which won her a short-lived stock contract at Columbia studio. When Columbia’s stock company was dissolved, Lucille went to work as an extra. 

Then came a minor role In "Roberta,” a long term contract at RKO and Lucille began six of the dizziest years of her life at a studio where they turned out more executives than pictures. 

With every role at RKO, most of them small, Lucille’s performances drew more and more praise from the critics. The pictures were terrible, but Lucille was good. Studio executives were just about ready to elevate her to stardom, when the bankers in New York fired every executive on the lot. Lucille figured it was the end, but she was wrong. 

The new regime called me in and said “Miss Ball, you’re going places with us. Just give us time to get organized. A few weeks, perhaps. l have some wonderful ideas. And we’re raising your salary just to prove that we have faith in you.”

Lucille was walking on air. This was what she had been waiting for. She gladly played more unimportant roles in unimportant films but the few weeks dragged into months. Then, just as studio executives said they were ready to give her the kind of roles and films she deserved, the New York bankers again let the ax fall on RKO. All the studio executives were replaced. 

“The new regime called me in,” Lucille said, “and gave me the same routine and a raise in salary. Just give us time to get organized, they said. You’re going places with us." 

Well, after all, thought Lucille, this Is Hollywood. You have to expect such things. After all, she had another raise. Maybe this was it. Again she gladly played small roles and waited patiently for her new bosses to "get organized.” 

If the insane history of the RKO studio wasn’t a matter of record – six sets of executives in six years – we might have difficulty in believing Lucille’s story. Not once, not twice, but five times she was on the threshold of stardom when her studio bosses were ousted. And five times in six years Lucille was called to the front office, assured she was RKO’s most valuable property, given a raise and promised stardom just as soon as "we get organized.”

On her sixth visit to the RKO front office, the new boss behind the desk was Charles W. Koerner, who had come up from the RKO sales ranks. "I know what you’ve been going through, Lucille,” he said. “What do you want?" 

"I want to get the h— out of this studio!” Lucille said. Koerner understood. A few days later Lucille Ball signed a long term starring contract at MGM, just five miles across town from RKO. But as Lucille says, “It was the toughest five miles I’ve ever traveled!“