It is said that I Love Lucy has been running somewhere in the world for more than 60 years. As a nine-year-old I worshipped Lucille Ball, weekly, on a two-year-old, black-and-white, 12in Bush television. Half a century later, in New York visiting friends, I worshipped her again. In fact, I was unable to leave the brownstone unless I’d had my two penn’orth of her comic mastery, in blazing colour, on a Dolby wall-to-wall screen. Until then, I hadn’t fully realised that her bangs were hi-vis orange.
The eagerly awaited film about Ball, Being the Ricardos, is out now. Nicole Kidman has done a fine job of bringing Ball’s accident-prone, ditsy, celebrity-seeking character back to life. Javier Bardem plays Desi Arnaz, the man she eloped with, had children with and divorced, but stayed with in partnership.
Kidman has publicly stated that she got cold feet about interpreting such an iconic class act. I know how she feels, having brought back Joyce Grenfell, Peggy Ramsay, Florence Foster Jenkins and Enid Blyton. Everybody has their own memories and opinions about their childhood heroes and woe betide the actress who fails to be their personal echo chamber.
After her radio debut on CBS in 1948 as a madcap housewife married to the actor Richard Denning, Ball insisted on Arnaz, her real-life husband, playing her spouse on screen. CBS executives were doubtful as to whether the American public were ready to accept an Anglo-American redhead being married to what they termed “a Cuban bongo player”, so Ball and Arnaz took the show on a tour across America. They then formed a company, Desilu, to film a TV pilot, which was accepted.
Desilu produced the resulting series, I Love Lucy, and kept the syndication rights, a smart move (Ball was no airhead actress). In 1958 Desilu sold those rights to CBS for $5 million, allowing the Arnazes to buy the RKO studio (Ball’s former employer). Using that studio, Desilu made more hit shows, including Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. In 1962 Ball bought out her ex-husband Arnaz for $2.5 million. Six years later she sold Desilu for $17 million to Paramount, which turned it into its TV arm.
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Ball and Arnaz became a great part of our idea of the American family. In truth, they were something very different from their screen image, she a street-smart survivor, instinctive and hardworking, he a clever and perceptive businessman. “Desi was always technically and emotionally right,” said Maury Thompson, their long-term camera co-ordinator. Arnaz on the road with his band was another story, one of serial womanising. Yet together they were an unstoppable success story. The American dream incarnate. It hadn’t always been so.
Lucille Desiree Ball was born on August 6, 1911, in Jamestown, New York, to DeDe and Henry, of English, Irish and Scots lineage. Little Lucille adored her funny, handsome father, who worked as a lineman for Bell telephones. The family moved house five times in three years, and when Henry died suddenly, Lucille was just three and her brother not yet born. The little family moved back to her grandparents until DeDe married again, after which the children were largely brought up by their strict Swedish step-grandparents on a farm. “We all worked all the time. Lucille was the boss,” her brother, Fred, said.
No mirrors were allowed in the house and stern accusations of vanity stayed with Ball for a decade. Yet her stepfather entered her for an audition for the local dramatic society and money was scraped together to send her to the John Murray Anderson drama school. It was a good year. Bette Davis was in the same intake.
Work on Broadway was not easy to find and Ball, renamed Dianne Belmont, took modelling jobs for Hattie Carnegie, who taught her poise and how to slouch in a mink. She was fired from the chorus of two Broadway shows, one of them Ziegfeld’s, and was unemployable for two years after a bout of rheumatic fever, but this kid was born with ambitious drive and headed for the lure of Hollywood.
She made 40 films and was known as the Queen of the Bs, as in B-movies. Aged 29, on the set of the prophetically named Too Many Girls, she met her nemesis, Desiderio Arnaz, a darkly handsome Cuban immigrant, six years her junior, with whom she would elope and spend the next 20 years creating a family empire with 800 beloved employees.
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Rather like Kidman latterly in Big Little Lies, Lucy — she always hated Lucille — found her medium in television. Long-limbed and small-faced, she was a perfect fit. On the large screen she could look hard and unspecific. (Most movie stars, it has been noted, are short with large heads.) In Mame she almost underplayed the eponymous eccentric aunt and was nowhere near as good as Rosalind Russell.
Also, she loved the TV studio set-up, the live audience and the unique, side-by-side domestic sets. She was in control, and as her hero Buster Keaton had taught her, she knew her props. To swirl a pizza over her head and have it land on her like a KKK hood, then wipe away pastry saucer eyes in one movement, required precision.
She was a superb clown. Reacquainting myself with her in the past week, I have been barking out belly laughter exactly as I did as a child.
The Ricardo TV family was America’s reality TV. Alongside their co-stars Vivian Vance and William Frawley, they won five Emmys, just about every lifetime achievement award and were put on the cover of Time magazine.
Ball acted the goat through two visible pregnancies at a time when pregnancy could only be called “infanticipating”. She had her actual labour on the same night in 1953 as Lucy Ricardo went into TV labour. The next morning she took the front page of every newspaper — the same day as Dwight D Eisenhower’s presidential inauguration. The water cooler had only one topic that day.
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During the McCarthy witch-hunt Ball and Arnaz were accused of being communists and faced a hearing. Her grandfather had been a member of the party and she had allowed a socialist meeting at her house in 1937. There were plainclothes police in the studio on recording nights and Arnaz had to explain to the audience that the show would go on. J Edgar Hoover hated the couple and FBI files remain in the vaults. Desilu had produced The Untouchables, not a favourite with Hoover. Luckily, they were exonerated or the US public might have staged another revolution.
By the time I Love Lucy ended its run, Arnaz and Ball were speaking only through intermediaries. The last episode, with Edie Adams singing, “I can only give you love that lasts for ever,” is bittersweet. The dream was over.
Without the rigour of a weekly show Ball was bewildered and went into a profound depression. Then the grit kicked in and she took the reins of Desilu, bought out Arnaz and faced the shareholders. She was the first woman to head a studio. She remounted The Lucy Show with the same writers, Bob Carroll and Madelyn Pugh Davis, and, with Gale Gordon, Vivian Vance and her teenage kids on board, it played from 1962-68 in the top five ratings.
She sold the syndicate and the studio for a fortune. By now happily married to the comedian Gary Morton, she remained on good terms with Arnaz for the rest of his life. She had a gift for kindness and friendship, mentoring the entertainer Carol Burnett for her entire career and always sending flowers on her birthday.
She took a dramatic role as a bag lady in Stone Pillow in 1985 — I played almost the same role in Bag Lady (1989), written by Jack Rosenthal, and felt the same invisibility — and promoted it very seriously. In an interview with Joan Rivers she is austere, almost formidable, and says: “I don’t think funny. I just take what they’ve written and work it out.’’ Oh, but she did funny better than anyone, save her other hero, Charlie Chaplin. She died, aged 77, on Burnett’s birthday, in 1989, of a ruptured abdominal aorta. That same day Burnett received her flowers.
Being the Ricardos is in cinemas now and on Amazon from December 21
