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Lucille Ball
Pin-up photo of Lucille Ball in Yank, the Army Weekly.
BornLucille Désirée Ball
Years active1932-1989
Spouse(s)Desi Arnaz (1940-1960)
Gary Morton (1961-1989)
ChildrenLucie Arnaz (b. 1951)
Desi Arnaz, Jr. (b. 1953)

Lucille Désirée Ball (August 6, 1911 – April 26, 1989) was an iconic American comedienne, film, television, stage and radio actress, glamour girl and star of the landmark sitcoms I Love Lucy, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy. Lucille Ball was one of America's favorite stars and had one of Hollywood's longest careers. She was a movie star from the 1930s to the 1970s, and appeared on television for more than 30 years. She received 13 Emmy Award nominations and had four wins. She was the recipient of the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1979, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Kennedy Center Honors in 1986 and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Governors Award in 1989.

Biography

Early life and career

Main article: Lucille Ball filmography and television work

Lucille Désirée Ball was born to Henry Durrell Ball (September 16, 1886 – February 28, 1915) and Desiree "DeDe" Eveline Hunt (September 21, 1892 –July 20, 1977) in Jamestown, New York, and grew up in the adjacent small town of Celoron. Although Lucy was born in Jamestown, she told many people that she was born in Butte, Montana. Her family was Baptist; her father was of Scottish descent, whose mother was Mary Ball. Her mother was of French, Irish and English descent. Her genealogy can be traced back to the earliest settlers in the colonies. One ancestor, William Sprague (1609–1675), left England on the ship Lyon's Whelp for Plymouth/Salem, Massachusetts. Originally from Upwey, Dorset, England, William and his two brothers helped to found the city of Charlestown, Massachusetts. Other Sprague relatives became soldiers in the US Revolutionary War and two of them became governors of the state of Rhode Island.

Her father was a telephone lineman for Bell Telephone who's job required frequent transfers, and within three years of her birth, Lucille had moved many times, from Jamestown to Anaconda, Montana, and then to Wyandotte, Michigan. While DeDe Ball was pregnant with her second child, Frederick, Henry Ball contracted typhoid fever and died in February 1915. After her father died, Ball and her brother Fred were raised by her mother and grandparents. Her grandfather, Fred C. Hunt, was an eccentric socialist who also enjoyed the theater. He frequently took the family to vaudeville shows and encouraged young Lucy to take part in both her own and school plays.

File:Lucy7.jpg
Lucille Ball as a Young model and starlet. Photo: Howard Frank Archives

In 1927, Ball dated a gangsters son by the name of (Johnny DeVita). Because of this relationship, her mother decided to ship Ball off to the John Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts in New York City. There, Ball attended with fellow actress, Bette Davis. Ball went home a few weeks later when drama coaches told her that she "had no future at all as a performer".

Ball was determined to prove her teachers wrong and returned to New York City in 1929. She landed work as a fashion model. Her career was thriving, when she became ill with rheumatoid arthritis and could not work for two years. She moved back to New York City in 1932 to become an actress and had some success as a fashion model for designer Hattie Carnegie and as the Chesterfield girl. She began her performing career on Broadway using the stage name "Diane Belmont" and was hired—but then quickly fired—by theatre impressario Earl Carroll from his Vanities and by Florenz Ziegfeld from a touring company of Rio Rita.

She was let go again from the Shubert brothers production of Stepping Stones. After an uncredited stint as one of the Goldwyn Girls in Roman Scandals (1933) she permanently moved to Hollywood to appear in films. She appeared in many small movie roles in the 1930s as a contract player for RKO Radio Pictures, including movies with the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges. She can also be seen as one of the featured models in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film Roberta (1935), where she met her lifelong friend, Ginger Rogers. She and Rogers played aspiring actresses in the hit film Stage Door (1937) co-starring Katharine Hepburn. Ball would later state that this was the film that first got her recognition. Ball was signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the 1940s, but she never achieved major stardom from her appearance in those films.

from the trailer for Stage Door (1937)

She was known in many Hollywood circles as "Queen of the B's"—a title previously held by Fay Wray—starring in a number of B-movies, such as 1939's Five Came Back. Macdonald Carey was designated as the "King of the B's". Like many budding starlets Ball picked up radio work to earn side income as well as gain exposure. In October of 1938 Ball joined the cast of the Wonder Show staring future Wizard of Oz tin man Jack Haley. It was on this show that she began her 50 year professional relationship with Gale Gordon who served as the show's announcer. The Wonder show only lasted one season with the final episode airing in April 7, 1939.

In 1940, Ball met Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz while filming the film version of the Rodgers and Hart stage hit Too Many Girls. Ball and Arnaz connected immediately and eloped the same year, garnering much press attention. Arnaz and Ball frequently argued, especially over his indiscretions with other women, but they always made up in the end. Arnaz was drafted to the United States Army in 1942. He ended up being classified for limited service due to a knee injury. As a result, Arnaz stayed in Los Angeles, organizing and performing USO shows for wounded GIs being brought back from the Pacific. Ball filed for a divorce in 1944. However, shortly after Ball obtained an interlocutory decree, she reconciled with Arnaz again. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were only six years apart in age but apparently believed that it was less socially acceptable for an older woman to marry a younger man, and hence split the difference in their ages, both claiming a 1914 birth date.

I Love Lucy and Desilu

File:LucyEthel I Love Lucy.png
Ball as Lucy, Vivian Vance as Ethel on the "Job Switching" episode of I Love Lucy

In 1948, Ball was cast as Liz Cugat (later "Cooper"), a wacky wife, in My Favorite Husband, a radio program for CBS Radio. The program was successful, and CBS asked her to develop it for television. She agreed, but insisted on working with Arnaz. CBS executives were reluctant, thinking the public would not accept an All-American redhead and a Cuban as a couple. CBS was initially not impressed with the pilot episode produced by the couple's Desilu Productions company, so the couple toured the road in a vaudeville act with Lucy as the zany housewife wanting to get in Arnaz's show. The tour was a smash, and CBS put I Love Lucy on their lineup.

The I Love Lucy show was not only a star vehicle for Lucille Ball, but a way for her to try to salvage her marriage to Desi Arnaz, which had become badly strained, in part by the fact that each had a hectic performing schedule which often kept them apart.

Along the way, she created a television dynasty and reached several "firsts". Ball was the first woman in television to be head of a production company: Desilu, the company that she and Arnaz formed. After buying out her by-then ex-husband's share of the studio, Ball functioned as a very active studio head.

Desilu and I Love Lucy pioneered a number of methods still in use in television production today..

When the show premiered, most shows were aired live from New York City studios to Eastern and Central Time Zone audiences, and captured by kinescope for broadcast later to the West Coast. The kinescope picture was inferior to film, and as a result the West Coast broadcasts were inferior to those seen elsewhere in the country. Ball and Arnaz wanted to remain in their Los Angeles home, but the time zone logistics made that broadcast norm impossible. Prime time in L.A. was too late at night on the East Coast to air a major network series, meaning the majority of the TV audience would be seeing not only the inferior picture of kinescopes but seeing them at least a day later.

Sponsor Philip Morris did not want to show day-old kinescopes to the major markets on the East Coast, yet neither did they want to pay for the extra cost filming, processing and editing would require, pressuring Ball and Arnaz to relocate to New York City. Ball and Arnaz offered to take a pay cut to finance filming, on the condition that their company, Desilu, would retain the rights to that film once it was aired. CBS relinquished the show rights back to Desilu after initial broadcast, not realizing they were giving away a valuable and durable asset. Desilu made many millions of dollars on I Love Lucy rebroadcasts through syndication and became a textbook example of how a show can be profitable in second-run syndication. In television's infancy, the concept of the rerun hadn't yet formed, and many in the industry wondered who would want to see a program a second time. In fact, while other celebrated shows of the period exist only in incomplete sets of kinescopes too degraded to show to subsequent generations of television viewers, I Love Lucy has virtually never gone out of syndication since it began, seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world over the past half century. The success of Ball and Arnaz's gamble was instrumental in drawing television production from New York to Hollywood for the next several decades.

Desilu also hired legendary German cameraman Karl Freund as their director of photography. Freund had worked for F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, shot part of Metropolis (1927) and had directed a number of Hollywood films himself. Freund used a three-camera setup, which became the standard way of filming situation comedies.

Shooting long shots, medium shots, and close-ups on a comedy in front of a live audience demanded discipline, technique, and close choreography. Among other non-standard techniques used in filming the show, cans of paint (in shades ranging from white to medium gray) were kept on set to "paint out" inappropriate shadows and disguise lighting flaws.

I Love Lucy dominated the weekly TV ratings in the United States for most of its run. In the scene where Lucy and Ricky are practicing the tango in the episode, "Lucy Does The Tango," the longest recorded studio audience laugh in the history of the show was produced. It was so long, in fact, that the sound editor had to cut that particular part of the soundtrack in half. The strenuous rehearsals and demands of Desilu studio kept the Arnazes too busy to comprehend the show's success. During the show's hiatus, they starred together in feature films: Vincente Minnelli's The Long, Long Trailer (1954) and Alexander Hall's Forever, Darling (1956).

Desilu produced several other popular shows, most notably Our Miss Brooks (starring Ball's 1937 Stage Door co-star Eve Arden), The Untouchables, Star Trek, and Mission: Impossible. Many other shows, particularly Sheldon Leonard-produced series like Make Room for Daddy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show, and I Spy, were filmed at Desilu Studios and bear its logo.

Testimony Before the House Committee on Un-American Activities

In 1953, Ball was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities because she had registered to vote in the Communist party primary election in 1936 at her socialist grandfather's insistence (per FBI FOIA-released documents in a declassified FBI file). Immediately before the filming of episode 68 ("The Girls Go Into Business") of I Love Lucy, people in the studio audience made signs and started booing, their minds on her Capitol Hill appearance. Desi Arnaz came onstage and quipped: "The only thing red about Lucy is her hair, and even that's not legitimate." Then, he presented her and people started cheering for her.

Children and divorce

On July 17, 1951, just one month before her 40th birthday and after several miscarriages, Ball gave birth to her first child, Lucie Desiree Arnaz. A year and a half later, Ball gave birth to her second child, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV, known as Desi Arnaz, Jr. When he was born, I Love Lucy was a solid ratings hit, and Ball and Arnaz wrote the pregnancy into the show (indeed, Ball gave birth in real life on the same day that her Lucy Ricardo character gave birth). There were several challenges from CBS, insisting that a pregnant woman could not be shown on television, nor could the word "pregnant" be spoken on-air. After approval from several religious figures the network allowed the pregnancy storyline, but insisted that the word "expecting" be used instead of "pregnant". (Arnaz garnered laughs when he deliberately mispronounced it as "'spectin'.) The episode's official title was "Lucy Is Enceinte," borrowing the French word for pregnant. The birth made the first cover of TV Guide in January 1953. Ball's instincts with business were often astonishingly sharp, and her love for Arnaz was passionate, but her relationships with her children were sometimes strained. Lucie Arnaz, her daughter, spoke of her mother's "controlling" nature. She had a few very good friends in the business: Ginger Rogers, Mary Wickes and Vivian Vance. All were childless; Wickes never married. By the end of the 1950s, Desilu had become a large company, causing a good deal of stress for both Ball and Arnaz; his increasing drinking further compounded matters. On May 4, 1960, just two months after filming the final episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, the couple divorced.. However, until his death in 1986, Arnaz and Ball remained friends and often spoke very fondly of each other. Indeed, both Arnaz and Ball spoke lovingly of each other after the breakup. However, her real-life divorce indirectly found its way into her later television series, in that she was always cast as a single woman.

The following year, Ball did a musical on Broadway, Wildcat, co-starring Paula Stewart. It was Stewart who introduced her to her next husband Gary Morton, a Borscht Belt stand-up comic who was thirteen years her junior. That marked the beginning of a 30-year friendship between Lucy and Paula. Ball immediately installed Morton in her production company, teaching him the television business and eventually promoting him to producer. Morton also played occasional bit parts on Ball's various series.

Later career

The 1960 Broadway musical Wildcat was a successful sell-out that ended its run early when Ball became too ill to continue in the show. The show was the source of the song she made famous, "Hey, Look Me Over", which she performed with Paula Stewart on The Ed Sullivan Show. She made a few more movies including Yours, Mine, and Ours (1968), and the musical Mame (1974), and two more successful long-running sitcoms for CBS: The Lucy Show (1962–68), which costarred Vance and Gale Gordon, and Here's Lucy (1968–74), which also featured Gordon, as well Lucy's real life children, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz, Jr.

Ball was originally considered by Frank Sinatra for the role of Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate. However, director/producer John Frankenheimer had worked with Angela Lansbury in a mother role in another film, and insisted on having her for the part. (Source: Frankenheimer's DVD audio commentary.)

During the mid-1980s, she attempted to resurrect her television career. In 1982, Ball hosted a two-part Three's Company retrospective, showing clips from the show's first five seasons, summarizing memorable plotlines, and commenting on her love of the show. A 1985 dramatic made-for-TV film about an elderly homeless woman, Stone Pillow, was well received. However, her 1986 sitcom comeback Life With Lucy, costarring her longtime foil Gale Gordon and co-produced by Ball, Gary Morton, and former actor Aaron Spelling, was a critical and commercial flop which was cancelled less than two months into its run by ABC.

Ball at her last public appearance at the 61st Academy Awards in 1989 just four weeks before her death

The failure of this series was said to have sent Ball into a serious depression, and other than a few miscellaneous awards show appearances, she was absent from the public eye for the last several years of her life. Her last public appearance, just one month before her death, was at the 1989 Academy Awards telecast in which she and fellow presenter, Bob Hope, were given a standing ovation.

Death

On April 18, 1989, Ball complained of chest pains and was rushed to the emergency room of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She was diagnosed as having a dissecting aortic aneurysm and underwent surgery for nearly eight hours. The surgery was successful and Ball was recovering; she was walking around her room with little assistance. On April 26, shortly after dawn, Ball awoke with severe back pains. Her aorta had ruptured in a second location and Ball quickly lost consciousness. All attempts to revive her proved unsuccessful and at approximately 05:17 PST, Lucille Ball died at the age of 77. She was initially interred in Forest Lawn – Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, but in 2002 her children moved her ashes to the family plot at Lake View Cemetery in Jamestown, New York where Ball's mother, father, brother, and grandparents are buried.

Legacy and posthumous recognition

On May 1, 1989, one week after her death, Lucille Ball was featured as a subplot on the TV series Designing Women wherein stars Jean Smart and Dixie Carter discuss Charlene (Smart)'s new Lucille Ball VHS tape and Julia (Carter) responds, "Yes, I love Lucy, we all love Lucy." A photo of Lucy on the set of I Love Lucy was used as the backdrop to the episode's credits, as well as the theme song of the series. On July 6, 1989, Lucille Ball was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George H. W. Bush. In 1990, she was posthumously awarded the Women's International Center's Living Legacy Award. In 2002, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. The Little Theatre in Jamestown, New York was renamed the Lucille Ball Little Theatre in 1991. In 2000, Lucille Ball was among Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the Century. On August 6, 2001, on what would have been her 90th birthday, the United States Postal Service honored her with a commemorative postage stamp as part of its Legends of Hollywood series. Lucille Ball has appeared on the cover of TV Guide more than any other person; she appeared on 39 covers, including the very first cover in 1953, with her baby son Desi Arnaz, Jr. In 1996, TV Guide voted Lucille Ball as the Greatest TV Star of All Time. In 2001, it commemorated the 50th anniversary of I Love Lucy with eight collector covers celebrating memorable scenes from the show. In 2002, TV Guide named I Love Lucy the second most influential television program in American history. In 2007, she was posthumously awarded the Legacy of Laughter award at the 5th Annual TV Land Awards. and I Love Lucy was named the Greatest TV Series by Hall of Fame Magazine. In November 2007, Lucille Ball was chosen as the second out of the 50 Greatest TV Icons, after Johnny Carson. However in a poll done by the public they chose her as the greatest icon.

Radio appearances

References

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Further reading

  • Love, Lucy (1997) ISBN 0-425-17731-9
  • The Comic DNA of Lucille Ball: Interpreting the Icon by Michael Karol (2005) ISBN 0-595-37951-6
  • Lucy A to Z: The Lucille Ball Encyclopedia by Michael Karol (2004) ISBN 0-595-29761-7
  • The Lucille Ball Quiz Book by Michael Karol (2004) ISBN 0-595-31857-6
  • Lucy in Print by Michael Karol (2003) ISBN 0-595-29321-2
  • Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz by Coyne Steven Sanders and Tom Gilbert (1993) ISBN 0-688-13514-5
  • Laughing With Lucy: My Life With America's Leading Lady of Comedy by Madelyn Pugh Davis with Bob Carroll Jr.(2005) ISBN -13; 978-1-57860-247-6
  • Ball of Fire: the tumultuous life and comic art of Lucille Ball by Stefan Kanfer (2003) ISBN 0-375-41315-4

External links

Template:S-awards
Preceded byRed Skelton Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award
1979 		Succeeded byHenry Fonda
Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series
1950–1975
1976–2000
2001–present

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