I FEEL GREAT!

August 4, 1957

HOLLYWOOD – “I feel great. Everybody’s asking me how feel, and I have to tell ‘em I feel great because I do,“ says the world’s highest paid comedienne. 

Lucille Ball is probably the only TV comic who can make that statement today and mean it. She and husband Desi Arnaz have consistently grabbed off the No. 1 rating in the TV surveys for six consecutive seasons.

Now they are busy rehearsing for a filming of their first hour-long Lucy show. They will do five of these for next season and a leading automobile sponsor is shelling out $500,000 to sponsor each one on CBS-TV. This first show is scheduled for airing sometime in November. (1)

Giving up the weekly Lucy series is tantamount to Lucy’s retiring as the undefeated champ. She and Desi both wanted to do this a couple of years ago but with the No. 1 rated show they were under pressure from both CBS and their sponsors to stay with it. (2)

Lucy and Desi wanted to quit while they were ahead. Last month they sold the 180 Lucy episodes to CBS for a price in the juicy neighborhood of $5,000,000. If this doesn’t keep the wolf from nagging their heels they can fall back on a half-dozen or more TV film shows being produced under their Desilu banner.

Another reason for quitting the weekly grind came from Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll, the writers who have been with Lucy and Desi from the beginning. 

180 Story Lines 

"We had to tell them,” says Bob, “that after 180 story lines there wasn’t much more we could do." 

Bob and Madelyn are working on the hour shows which incidentally cannot be called ‘I Love Lucy’ because CBS now owns that title with the half-hour episodes. Lucy and Desi even had to get CBS’ permission to use their character names, the Ricardos and the Mertzes. Vivian Vance and Bill Frawley will be playing the latter couple in the 60-minute shows, too. 

When the first of the big shows is filmed, it will be done in front of a 300-seat audience at Desilu Studios in Hollywood in the same way Lucy and Desi have always filmed. 

"It’s goin’ to be real fancy for the audience though,” says Desi, who still cultivates his Cuban accent. “There’ll be an intermission and we’ll serve everybody sandwiches and thin’s." 

Ann Sothern, Cesar Romero, Rudy Vallee and Hedda Hopper have been cast in this first film. Lucy and Ann take one of those vacation cruises to Havana and that’s where Lucy meets her dream man (Desi). 

Lucy and Desi already are beginning to sit around and reminisce over their six hectic years as TV’s No. 1 entertainers. "Remember what Hubbell Robinson (CBS program v.p.) said when we first tried to sell the idea?” Desi asks Lucy.

“Yeah, he said ‘Who will believe that Lucy is married to a Cuban bandleader?’ Then I said ‘They gotta believe it because I am married to this Cuban bandleader,” Lucy recalls with a loud guffaw.

Then there was the second season when Lucy was actually going to have a baby and they decided to work the story right into the scripts. 

“But the sponsor wasn’t too sure this was a good idea, and we had an awful time convincin’ them. We went to a priest, a rabbi, and a minister, and finally got the sponsor’s okeh” says Desi.

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FOOTNOTES FROM THE FUTURE

(1) The first episode, unusually, was actually 75 minutes long. Desi insisted the material could not be cut, and fifteen minutes was borrowed from “The United States Steel Hour”.  After the first airing, however, the show was cut to an hour, using voice-over narration by Desi to fill in the gaps.  For the first season, “The Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz Show” (as it was then called) was sponsored by Ford Motor Company.  Seasons two and three were sponsored by Westinghouse. “Lucy Takes A Cruise To Havana” aired on November 6, 1957. 

(2) “I Love Lucy” was scheduled to end after season five, with the Ricardos and Mertzes return from Europe.  The network requested a sixth season, and Lucy and Desi agreed.