June 16, 1983

By Lynne Hirschberg, Rolling Stone Magazine. Reprinted in the Dayton (OH) Journal-Herald

Lucille Ball is not Lucille Ball. She is Lucy. 

In Los Angeles, everyone knows where Lucy lives. The mansion is a big, white affair in Beverly Hills. Fans pose for photos in front of it, and they dig up Lucy’s front lawn. 

Inside the mansion, the visitor is led through a series of spacious rooms to what appears to be a large den. The predominant color is orange. Dark-green carpeting with upholstered , orange chairs. Lots of orange and lots of plants. One wall is completely glass and overlooks a large yard, also filled with plants. Lucy, you are told, loves to garden. 

Lucy enters from the yard. She has just taken a singing lesson. She is wearing big pastel sunglasses, a black V-neck sweater and matching slacks. Her hair is a strange shade of reddish pink. She adjusts her sunglasses. Takes them off and cleans them. Her eyes are very blue. She puts her glasses back on and extends her hand. “I’m glad to meet you,” Lucy says. “My name Is Lucille Ball." 

As we speak, she begins to smoke, and smoke. "I smoke a lot,” she says, “but I never inhale." 

The smoking seems to elicit questions. Lucille Ball likes to ask questions. She likes an honest response. She asks questions like, "Do you ever dye your hair? Do you believe in astrology? Do you want a grilled cheese sandwich?” These questions give way to statements. Statements like, “You should dye your hair. Have a grilled cheese sandwich.” And, then: “I believe in astrology." 

Lucille Ball explains. She is 71 years old, born Aug. 6 and a Leo. Leos are, she says, vain, proud and forthright. She is startlingly forthright. "Leos know what they’re about,” Ball says. Leos are also, she adds, accident-prone. “We break a lot of bones.” She has broken this very leg. She even suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. “They told me I’d never walk again,” Ball says, “But I want you to just feel this leg." 

She points to her leg. The leg is truly beautiful, a showgirl’s leg. I feel it gingerly. "THAT’S NOT THE WAY YOU FEEL A LEG,” Ball screams. “My God – don’t you even know how to feel a person’s leg?” She grabs my hand and then, hand in tow, grabs her leg around the calf. The leg, In fact, appears to be quite sturdy. “Years ago, that leg was completely weak. But that was years ago. Today Is another story." 

Today is another story, and "years ago” was New York. Lucille Ball was not Lucille Ball then. “I was known as Diane Belmont,” Ball says, after fixing herself the much-discussed grilled cheese sandwich. “You have to understand, I am from a suburb of Jamestown, New York. 

"When I was four, my father, who was an electrician, died. I was always what you would call stage-struck. I would recite speeches at the drop of a… anything. I’d sing, I’d dance, I’d perform all the time. But I was always interested in being of the business. Of the business. Any part of, it: makeup, costumes… anything and everything. My mother finally sent me to the John Murray Anderson-Robert Milton Dramatic School in New York City. Bette Davis was their star pupil. After one semester, they sent my mother a letter saying she was wasting her money. They said I’d never learn to talk, never learn to walk across a stage. That left a helluva mark on me. I had very little, if any, self-confidence after that. I didn’t change until I was a model for a while." 

Diane Belmont was born several years later. "To this day,” Ball says, “people say, ‘Why did you change your name to Lucille Ball?’ Can you imagine anyone changing her name to Lucille Ball? My real name is Lucille Ball. Diane Belmont was a much classier name. I came up with it in the car. I always loved the name Diane, and I was driving past the Belmont race track, and the names seemed to fit together: Diane Belmont. It was such a glamorous name. A real model’s name." 

Belmont was successful. She became a Chesterfield cigarettes poster girl, a hat model and a dress model. But BelmontBall hated New York. "I didn’t have any friends. No girlfriends and no boyfriends. I didn’t have big dreams about where I was going or with whom. I didn’t go out. I was never boy crazy or man crazy or car crazy or anything crazy, but New York was a lonely place. I never even felt pretty. I was clearly a lesser beauty. I had a very dull existence." 

When she was 17 Belmont/Ball’s career was interrupted by a debilitating disease rheumatoid arthritis. "One day it just struck me,” Ball recalls. “I was working too hard and not taking care of myself. I was laid up for three years. I had to work pretty hard to walk again, but I was lucky. Since I had no money, my boss sent me to her doctor, and he sent me to see this specialist. I became a guinea pig, and this doctor would experiment on me. The guinea pig experiments worked. In three years, I was v modeling again.” Not for long.

“I seldom use the word luck” says Lucille Ball. “But in 1933, when I became a Goldwyn girl – that was pure luck. I was just walking down the street. It was unbearably hot and someone – I don’t remember exactly who – came up to me and said, ‘How’d you like to go to California?’ This was New York, so you had to be careful when anyone asked you anything, but this was a woman asking me, so I figured I was safe. She told me that the girl they had already found for Goldwyn couldn’t make the trip. They wanted poster gals for the film Roman Scandals, and since I was the Chesterfield Girl, I fit the bill. They said the job was for six weeks. I said, ‘I’d go anyplace to get out of this heat.’ I went out to Hollywood and” – Ball smiles – “I never came back." 

"My hair,” Lucille Ball Is saying “has always been the bane of my existence.” Ball fluffs up her curls. Her hair goes straight up about six inches. “I have never known what to do with my hair,” she says. “It was just never chic.” A natural brunette, Ball has tried several different hair colors. Blonde. Platinum. Red. Pink. Orange. Diane Belmont was a blonde, and when she arrived in Hollywood and retrieved her own name, Lucille Bail was a Jean Harlow platinum. “You had to be a platinum blonde then,” says Ball, almost apologetically, still fussing with her hair. “They wanted you to be a platinum blonde, so I was a platinum blonde.”

There were other accommodations. “We had to line up for Mr. Goldwyn when we first went out there,” Ball recalls. “You had to have on the inevitable bathing suit. Mr. Goldwyn and 40 other men would walk by and stare at you. We were all self-conscious, but those who were Ziegfeld girls and Shubert girls were very well stacked. They were less nervous. They had it, you see. I didn’t have it." 

Ball points to her breasts. 

"So I made fun of myself. I put toilet paper and gloves and socks and anything I could find in the bust of my bathing suit. Some of the toilet paper was still trailing out of the top when Mr. Goldwyn came by.” Bail pauses. “If nothing else, they certainly noticed me. 

"I think the one virtue that helped me was I didn’t mind doing anything. Nothing was beneath me. I’d scream; I’d yell; I’d run through the set; I’d wear strange clothes. To me it was just getting your foot in the door." 

She went from Goldwyn to Columbia to RKO, where because of her less than magnificent films, she became knows as "Queen of the B’s.” But Bail did make some widely praised films. Stage Door (1937), The Big Street (1942) and the Cole Porter musical DuBarry Was a Lady (1942) all met with a critical positive response. 

The latter film marked the beginning of her red-headed days of Technicolor Tessie, a name given her by Life magazine. 

“Red was a happy color. It was good with my eyes, and it photographed well. It turned out to be a successful color. There’s nothing more to it than that,” she says. 

Ball says she fell in love with Desi Arnaz at first sight. 

“That was real love. We met on the set. We were making a movie called Too Many Girls. I played the ingenue lead.” “I asked her if she knew how to rumba,” Arnaz has said. “And when she said no, I offered to teach her." 

Arnaz, in 1940, was the chief rumba proponent in America. A native Cuban, he and his mother had fled their country following the 1933 Batista revolution. The 16-year-old Arnaz drove a cab, worked as a bookkeeper and cleaned out bird cages until, in 1937, he became a member of the Siboney Septet, a swanky hotel band. While performing with this group, he was spotted by Xavier Cugat, who hired the young singer. A year later, Arnaz started his own ensemble. He became a sensation in New York and Arnaz landed the lead role in Too Many Girls. He came to Hollywood, fell in love and within six months, he and Lucille Ball were married. 

"Our marriage,” Bail says, “was rough. We had a rough go. For the first nine years, it seemed like we were only together a few weeks.” First work kept them apart, then he was drafted, and after the war he toured with ins band for five years. “It was very successful for him but disastrous for our marriage. You can’t have a marriage over the phone. We were on our ninth year, and we’d spent something like eight and a half of them apart. We decided that we wanted to be together." 

During this period, Ball, fed up with movies, starred in a radio program titled “My Favorite Husband” (l947-1951) (1). She played Liz, the zany wife of a staid banker. CBS wanted to transfer the concept to television and Bail said OK, providing Desi play her husband. The studio objected, but Bail and Arnaz were steadfast. They put together an act, created their own company, Desilu Productions, and hit the road. The public response was terrific. CBS took notice and finally relented. Their show was “I Love Lucy”. The rest is history. 

“I am not funny,” says Lucille Ball, sounding very funny. “My writers were funny. My direction was funny. The situations were funny. But I am not funny. What I am is brave. I have never been scared. And there was a lot to be scared about. We were innovators. 

"At the beginning of Love Lucy, they gave us a choice of five, six, seven scripts and asked us what we wanted our characters to be like. No one had ever done that before. 

"I… didn’t want us to be a ‘typical Hollywood couple,’ whatever that is. I wanted our characters to have problems. Economic problems. Ail kinds of problems. I wanted to be an average housewife. A very nosy, but very average housewife.” Ball pauses. “And I wanted my husband to love me.”

By the beginning of the second season, the show was the biggest hit In TV history. But not everyone was happy. Vivian Vance, for Instance. Despite her rather matronly appearance, Vance was actually one year younger than Ball (who was 41 when she became Lucy). And to guarantee Ethel Mertz’ dowdy image, it was stipulated in Vance’s contract that the actress always remain 20 pounds overweight. This agreement caused some friction. (2) 

But Lucy was positively gleeful about the show. It was her family. Her second child, Desi Jr., was born to much fanfare the very same night Lucy Ricardo gave birth to her baby, Little Ricky, on national TV. An estimated 44 million viewers watched. 

"Things were wonderful then,” Ball says, almost dreamily. “Things were just wonderful." 

But there was still trouble in her marriage. She thought the show would turn things around. But Desi Arnaz, apparently, was not Ricky Ricardo. "He was like Jekyll and Hyde,” Ball says now. “He drank and he gambled and he went around with other women. I was always hoping things would change. But Desi’s nature is destructive. When he builds something, the bigger he builds it, the more he wants to break it down." 

In 1957, "I Love Lucy” ceased weekly production. The show’s format changed Ricky Ricardo bought Club Babalu. Guest stars began popping in for nightcaps. And “I Love Lucy” reappeared as hour-long specials that aired roughly once a month. 

In 1960, Lucille Ball filed for divorce. The divorce was uncontested. She was awarded half of Desilu Productions, the Beverly Hills house, two station wagons and a cemetery plot at Forest Lawn. 

Gary Morton is Lucille Ball’s second husband. She met him in New York while she was starring on Broadway in the Desllu-financed musical Wildcat. Morton was a stand-up comic. Now his office at the Twentieth Century-Fox studios is papered with framed Lucy photos. 

"We are very compatible,” Morton says. “We even sing in the same octave.” Morton runs Lucille Ball Productions, an outgrowth of Desilu Productions. Desi Arnaz, who ran Desilu after the divorce, had built the company into a multimillion-dollar business. Not only did it produce love Lucy, the company also produced 60 other prime-time series, including “The Untouchables” and “Our Miss Brooks.” 

Lucille Ball looks sad when she talks about Lucy. She isn’t Lucy, you see. “Lucy, for me,” she says, “is like a memory. I am nostalgic about Lucy. I could still be playing that part. Before I quit working in 1974, my ratings were high, and they wanted me to sign on for another five years of “Here’s Lucy.” I said, That’s ridiculous.’ The Lucy character is too old to run around like an idiot. (3) I’d probably still be playing Lucy if I’d signed that contract, but it was silly to keep playing the same thing." 

Ball pauses. 

"But now I miss her. I miss my arena. I miss getting up and going to work every day. I have my charities, and I’m getting my house in order, but it’s not the same.”

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FOOTNOTES FROM THE FUTURE

This article is a reprint of an article that appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine on June 23, 1983.  Magazines were usually post-dated, so this issue of Rolling Stone was already on the newsstand on June 16, 1983.

(1) “My Favorite Husband” aired a pilot episode on July 5, 1948, not 1947 as is stated here.  However, the source material naturally pre-dates the radio series. 

(2) The controversial contract that kept Vivian Vance frumpy was discussed on “Dinah!” on December 1, 1975.  Vivian has brought a long a copy of the ‘contract’, which she describes as a gag, never to be taken seriously.  Whether Vance is now covering for Ball’s initial misgiving’s about her casting, or the contract was indeed a joke, we will never know. 

(3) Perhaps Lucille Ball forgot about this fact when tempted back onto television in 1986 for “Life With Lucy.”  Most of the critics remarked that it was not funny to see a woman of Ball’s advanced age doing pratfalls and stunts. 

This same article was published two days later in The Ottawa (CAN) Citizen. The photographs, artwork, and headline were different, but the text remained essentially the same.