Lucille Désirée Ball (August 6, 1911 – April 26, 1989) was an iconic American actor, comedian and star of the landmark sitcom I Love Lucy, a four time Emmy Award winner (awarded 1953, 1956, 1967, 1968) and charter member of the Television Hall of Fame. A major movie star and "glamour girl" of the 1930s and 1940s, she later achieved tremendous success as a television actress. She received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1986. Ball, known as the "Queen of Comedy," was also responsible with her then-husband, Desi Arnaz, for the foundation of Desilu Studios, a pioneering studio in American television production in the 1950s and 60s.
Lucille Désirée Ball was born to Henry Durrell Ball (1886–1915) and Desiree "DeDe" Eveline Hunt (1892–1977) in Jamestown, New York, and grew up in the adjacent small town of Celoron, a suburb of Jamestown. Her family was Baptist; her father was of Scottish descent. Her mother was of French, Irish and English descent.[1] Lucille was proud of her family and heritage. 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. They were from Upwey, Dorset, England. Along with his two brothers, William 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 the Bell Company, while her mother was often described as a lively and energetic young woman. Her father's job required frequent transfers, and within three years after 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 working mother and grandparents. Her grandfather, Fred C. Hunt, was an eccentric socialist who 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.
In 1925 after a romance with a local bad boy (Johnny DeVita), Ball decided to enroll in the John Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts with her mother's approval. There, the shy girl was outshone by another pupil, Bette Davis. Ball went home a few weeks later when drama coaches told her that she "had no future at all as a performer".
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 impresario 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 (including movies with the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges), where she met her lifelong friend, Ginger Rogers. She and Rogers played aspiring actresses in the hit film Stage Door (1937) co-starring Katherine Hepburn. Ball would later claim that this was the film that first got her recognition. Ball was signed to MGM in the 1940s, but she never achieved great success in films.
She was known in many Hollywood circles as "Queen of the Bs" (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 her "King".
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.
In 1948, Ball was cast as Liz Cugat (later "Cooper"), a wacky wife, in My Favorite Husband, a radio program for CBS. The program was successful, and CBS asked her to develop it for television, a show that eventually became I Love Lucy. 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 the show 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 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 captured by kinescope, and the picture was inferior to film. The decision was made to film the series, a decision driven by the performers' desire to stay in Los Angeles.
Sponsor Philip Morris did not want to show kinescopes to the major markets on the east coast, so Desilu agreed to take a pay cut to finance filming. In return, CBS relinquished the show rights back to Desilu after 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.
Desilu also hired legendary Czech cameraman Karl Freund as their director of photography. Freund had worked for F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, shot part of Metropolis, had directed a number of Hollywood films himself, and knew his business. 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. 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). According to a number of sources, such as biographers Stern Kanfer and Bart Andrews, when the couple finally found time to attend a Hollywood movie premiere in late 1953, the entire star-studded audience stood and turned with a thunderous applause. It finally connected with the Arnazes. I Love Lucy made them the biggest stars in the nation, even among the Hollywood elite.
Desilu produced several other popular shows, most notably Our Miss Brooks, The Untouchables, Star Trek, and Mission: Impossible. Many other shows, particularly Sheldon Leonard-produced series like Make Room for Daddy, The thingy Van d**e Show, The Andy Griffith Show, and I Spy, were filmed at Desilu Studios and bear its logo.
Children and divorce
On July 17, 1951, just one month shy of 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 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.
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 this declassified FBI file).[2] In episode 68 ("The Girls Go Into Business") of I Love Lucy, people in the audience made signs and started booing her. Desi Arnaz came out 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 at her.
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 2 months after filming the final episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, the couple divorced, ending one of television's greatest marriages. However, until his death in 1986, Arnaz would remain friends with Ball. Indeed, both Arnaz and Ball spoke lovingly of each other after the breakup.
The following year, Ball married comedian Gary Morton, a Borscht Belt stand-up comic who was twelve years younger than she. Morton told interviewers at the time that he had never seen Ball on television, since he was always performing during primetime. 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.
Following I Love Lucy, Ball appeared in the 1960 Broadway musical Wildcat, which was a successful sell-out that ended up losing money and closing 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." She made a few more movies (including Yours, Mine, and Ours, and the musical Mame), a film in which Ball was considered by many to be too old to play the starring role, 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.
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. The second part of the special ended with her receiving a kiss on the cheek from John Ritter. 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 Miss Ball, Gary Morton, and former actor Aaron Spelling) was a critical and commercial flop which was canceled less than two months into its run by ABC.
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 appearance, several weeks before her death, was at the 1989 Oscar telecast in which she was presented by Bob Hope to a cheering audience.
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 nicely; she was walking around her room with little assistance. On April 26, shortly before 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 5:17 a.m., 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 ashes were moved to the family plot at Lake View Cemetery in Jamestown, New York where Ball's mother, father, brother, and grandparents are buried.
On July 6, 1989, Lucille Ball was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George H. W. Bush.[3]
In 1991, The Little Theatre in Jamestown, New York was renamed the Lucille Ball Little Theatre.[4]
In 1990, Lucille Ball was posthumously awarded the Women's International Center's Living Legacy Award.[5]
In 1990, at Universal Studios Florida, a Lucille Ball Museum was built as a walk-thru attraction, called "Lucy, a Tribute". It is still there as of May 2007.
In 1996, the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center opened in Lucy's hometown of Jamestown, New York.
In 1996, TV Guide voted Lucille Ball as the Greatest TV Star of All Time.
From 1997 to 2000, Lucile Ball's life and legacy was celebrated at annual Loving Lucy conventions.[6]
In 2000, Lucille Ball was among Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the Century.[7]
On August 6, 2001, on what would have been Lucille Ball's 90th birthday, the United States Postal Service honored Lucy with a commemorative postage stamp as part of its Legends of Hollywood series.[8]
In 2001, TV Guide commorated the 50th Anniversary of I Love Lucy with eight collector covers celebrating memorable scenes from the show.
In 2002, Lucille Ball was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.[9]
In 2002, TV Guide named I Love Lucy the second most influential television program in American history.[10]
In 2005, Lucille Ball was voted the most popular deceased celebrity.[11]
In 2007, Lucille Ball was posthumously awarded the Legacy of Laughter award at the 5th Annual TV Land Awards.[12]
In 2007, I Love Lucy was named the Greatest TV Series by Hall of Fame Magazine.
Lucille Ball has appeared on the cover of TV Guide more than any other person; she appeared on 39 covers.
