REMINISCING

August 14, 1977

By Frank Swertlow, Chicago Daily News 

BEVERLY HILLS – During the first years of television, Ed Wynn, the radio and stage comic, was trying to break into television with a half-hour comedy on CBS. (1)

One night, he invited a couple of second echelon performers to make an appearance: a comedienne, known as “Technicolor Tessie” for her blazing red hair, and a song-and-dance man, best remembered for hollering “babalu.”

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were the couple, and they, like Wynn, were sampling the waters of the new medium. CBS had asked Miss Ball and her conga-drum pounding husband to develop a comedy show for television. Later, after months of thought and testing their ideas on the vaudeville circuit, the couple came up with “I Love Lucy,” the misadventures of Lucy and Ricky Riccardo. (2)

It made its debut on CBS in October 1951. More than a quarter of a century afterwards, “I Love Lucy” easily can vie for the honor of television’s most successful show. It was the archtype [sp] domestic comedy, the bumbling husband and his daffy wife. It gave birth to two other Lucy shows, a host of specials and a giant production company, Desilu. 

“We spent months thinking about what we should do,” Miss Ball recalled. “We didn’t want to be the average Hollywood couple. Nobody would think you had any problems if you had a car and swimming pool and a nice house. 

"Ultimately, we wanted a show in which people could identify with us. Everybody could understand what it was like to struggle for a buck. I was an ordinary, everyday, middle class housewife. I wore the same dress often. My husband worked and tolerated my mistakes. It was something that everyone could identify with." 

With the debut of the TV series, Lucille Ball, the former Goldwyn girl who started her film career in the 1930s, had a new career. 

"I never expected the show to go more than a year,” said Miss Ball. “I wanted to do the show on film so I could use them as home movies. Who knew about television then? It was a no-no to do TV work. The movie studios were against it." 

To Miss Ball, who was not a new face to the public, the impact of her show was incredible. "We went to New York on a trip once and we were unprepared for what happened. People rushed up and wanted to touch you. They knew you, and called you by your first name. I had been in pictures for years, and most of the time I was never identified." 

If the movers and shakers of the film industry who gave Miss Ball her start during the 1930s were alive, they would have been shocked. To them, simply and kindly, Lucille Ball was a B-movie queen, one of the many second-line actresses who never attained star billing, but who was an important ingredient to the motion picture industry. 

Unlike many performers who labored under the cruel studio system, Miss Ball fondly remembered her early years in Hollywood. "It was nice to be under the umbrella of a studio. You always had a poppa. I loved it. I loved being part of the business. I would have swept floors just to be in it." 

Miss Ball, however, did not forget the tactics of the brutal and disgusting lords of movieland. Harry "King” Cohn, the ruler of Columbia Pictures, stood out. “He made the biggest dent in everybody. He was ruthless. He always had to take a devious route.” (3)

Miss Ball, who is not exactly a pushover, laughingly recalled the time she outwitted the sly Cohn. 

Miss Ball had received an offer to work in a Cecil B. DeMille film, but Cohn refused to loan her to the producer. He was being mean. Then, Cohn decided to drop her contract. To do it, he sent the actress a horrible script something that the trade called a lease breaker. “Oh, everybody was dying to play opposite John Agar and Raymond Burr,” she recalled jokingly. “I was going to be a harum [sp] girl.” Naturally, Cohn expected her to refuse and it would be the end of her contract. (4)

The savvy Miss Ball decided to do the film and collect her check. When she made this announcement there was an uproar. She coyly told her bosses: “Oh, I want to do the film. It’s a wonderful film." 

Meanwhile, Miss Ball, who had been trying to get pregnant for years, found out she was going to have a baby. Now, she was in trouble. If Cohn found out, he would break her contract. "I only told my mother and my husband I was pregnant." 

Keeping her lips sealed, she went ahead with Cohn’s film. "The wardrobe girl kept looking at me in my harum [sp] girl costume and saying, ‘What’s wrong with you, you are getting so big.’ "So, I told her, ‘Don’t worry, I ate a big meal last night. Just put a little more taffeta on my dress.’ Well, I finished the film and I collected my $85,000." 

"Then I had to go to Mr. DeMille and tell him I couldn’t do his film. I was pregnant. ‘What,’ he said. And I replied. ‘I’m going to have a baby. ‘Get rid of it,’ he said. And he was serious.’ She declined. (5)

While Miss Ball’s career as a TV star is secure (she still has a contract with CBS) (6) she is not so certain about the state of the industry. Today, unlike when she started on the air, shows are yanked off the screen within a couple of weeks. This, she said, destroys performers. 

"If a show is canceled, the actor takes the blame. He or she suffers for it. They suffer inside. The rejection – they failed. (7)

"I would fail. You can’t protect yourself. It’s out of your hands. It’s always Lucy failed or Rhoda failed or Farrah Sauset Fawcett Sauset, whatever her name is, failed. It’s rough.” (8)

Even so, Lucille Ball, the red-haired girl from Jamestown, N.Y., would still be on top.

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FOOTNOTES FROM THE FUTURE

(1) Ed Wynn (1886-1966) was a vaudevillian who hosted “The Ed Wynn Show” on television from 1949 to 1950.  Lucy and Desi guest-starred on the show.  

(2) ‘Riccardo’ is probably a misspelling of ‘Ricardo’, but it was also the way their surname was spelled on “I Love Lucy” in early episodes!  

(3) Harry Cohn (1891-1958) was a much-despised executive at Columbia Studios.  Lucille Ball once facetiously told Louella Parsons that she liked Harry Cohn too much to ever sign a contract with him. What Lucille meant is that  Cohn had a reputation for being difficult.  Despite that fact, a casting draught forced her to sign with Columbia in 1949. 

(4) Lucille Ball had often complained to Cohn about the quality of the pictures she had been doing at Columbia. At the time The Magic Carpet was made, Ball was only obligated to Columbia for one more film, and Cohn had producer Sam Katzman, who turned out most of Columbia’s low-budget “B” pictures, concoct a cheap Arabian Nights fantasy as a punishment to Ball for her constantly challenging him. More salacious writers insist that Cohn’s frustration with Ball was due to the fact that she would not submit to him sexually. 

(5) The DeMille film in question was The Greatest Show on Earth, a movie set at the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey circus. Lucille was set to play the elephant trainer, a role that went to Gloria Graham. It was a film Lucille really wanted to do – but she wanted a baby more.  Later in life, Desilu created a TV version of the film.  Lucille also guest-starred as the ringmaster on “Circus of the Stars II” in which Lucie Arnaz was featured as…. the elephant trainer!  

(6) Lucille Ball had started working at CBS on radio and was considered their premiere star. In 1980, after her television shows had ended, she signed with NBC, a partnership that yielded very little except that Ball was obliged to appear on Bob Hope’s many specials, something she frequently did anyway.  Both CBS and NBC declined her final series “Life With Lucy” which producer Aaron Spelling finally convinced ABC to air. 

(7) Although this article was written ten years before “Life With Lucy”, Lucille could very well be describing her own devastation when the series was cancelled even before all the initial episodes aired. She was widely criticized and the series often turned up on “worst show” lists.  

(8) Rhoda refers to a character on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” that was played by Valerie Harper, a performer that appeared on Broadway with Lucille. In 1974, the character was spun off into its own eponymous sitcom which aired for four seasons. 

Farrah Fawcett-Majors was a beautiful blonde actress and poster girl that burst onto the TV scene in the mid-1970s. A year after this interview, she was in the hit series “Charlie’s Angels” entering American iconography for her feathered hair and curvaceous figure the same way Betty Grable had in the 1940s.