CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ON JULY 6, 1989, the Presidential Medal of Freedom was awarded to five Americans. General James H. Doolittle was heralded as “the trailblazer of modern aviation,” and Ambassador George F. Kennan as “a visionary who foresaw the future of Soviet-American relations.” Senator Margaret Chase Smith was “a bold achiever who stood alone against the tide of extremism,” Ambassador Clarence Douglas Dillon, “an unparalleled public servant who shaped American foreign and economic policy.” Among this highly placed group was an unexpected name: Lucille Ball, given the medal posthumously as “The First Lady of Television—one of America’s greatest comediennes.” The citation went on: “her face was seen by more people more often than the face of any human being who ever lived. Who can forget Lucy? She was like everyone’s next-door neighbor, only funnier. Lucille Ball was a national treasure who brought laughter to us all. Love Lucy? Sure. This nation is grateful to her, and we will miss her dearly.”
The following autumn, Jim Brochu published Lucy in the Afternoon, a sentimental memoir of his friend’s later years. On February 10, 1991, CBS broadcast a turgid biography, Lucy & Desi: Before the Laughter. Starring Frances Fisher as Lucy and Maurice Benard as Desi, the made-for-TV movie received the appraisals it deserved. People: “The acting (which consists primarily of vamping and exaggerated facial aerobics) is terrible. And the clumsy set pieces that make up the exposition are strident: Lucy explodes over Desi’s constant philandering; Desi fumes over a career going nowhere. The two scenes where they do comedy together are totally torturous.” Mocking Benard’s put-on Cuban accent, the review concluded: “If ju goan to do something so tacky, at least make it funny. Grade: C−.” Yet Lucy & Desi has a place in history alongside the Medal of Freedom and Brochu’s book. For these three projects marked the beginning of the apotheosis, a phenomenon that was to make Lucille Ball unique in the history of American show business.
After Lucy’s death, widower Gary Morton dated Eva Gabor for a short time; the couple broke up, the actress stated, because he was more dedicated to golf than he was to her. Gabor may have been correct: in 1994 Morton married golf pro Susie McCallister; the marriage lasted until his death from lung cancer in 1999. With Gary out of the family picture, the Arnaz children were exclusively in charge of their mother’s image, and in the early 1990s Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill hosted a CBS program in celebration of I Love Lucy. Later she and Desi Jr. would produce and direct Lucy and Desi: A Home Movie, with candid footage of the couple made during their years together.
In 1993 the book Desilu, by Coyne Steven Sanders and Tom Gilbert, affectionately detailed the history of the studio and its founders. In 1994 Kathleen Brady’s painstakingly researched Lucille covered new biographical details of her subject’s life. In 1996 came Love, Lucy, Lucille’s autobiography, made from tape recordings pieced together seven years after her death. When TV Guide selected the “50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time” in 1996, Lucy was Number One. Two years later Time magazine picked the dominant twenty artists and entertainers of the twentieth century, men and women “who enlightened and enlivened us.” There was Lucille Ball again, this time in company with such illustrious achievers as Pablo Picasso, Charlie Chaplin, Martha Graham, Coco Chanel, and Louis Armstrong. As the new century began, the United States Postal Service issued a thirty-four-cent stamp honoring Lucille Ball. In 1999, she and Desi had been featured on a thirty-three-cent stamp celebrating 1950s television. No other civilian had ever been honored twice in so brief a period. Shortly after the new millennium began, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) paid tribute to Lucille Ball by including her in “Finding Lucy,” an entry in its AmericanMasters series. In writer-producer Thomas Wagner’s judgment, “Lucy doesn’t date.” He added: “People who saw the show fifty years ago still remember magic moments, the way Lucy and her television family kept us laughing. But our seven-year-old watched a lot of I Love Lucy for the first time when we were making this film and she got it all: the characters, the situation, and she couldn’t stop laughing either. Lucille Ball’s inspired lunacy will outlast almost everything that’s on television today.”
There were poetic tributes as well. Poets Nick Carbó and Denise Duhamel, who are married, each acknowledged the universality of the Lucy image. Carbó, a Filipino-American, describes a cousin:
She showed up on the doorstep of my apartment in Albuquerque just after the blizzard of ’85 in a fluffy tan fake-fur coat, an elevated I Love Lucy hairdo, and a twelve-year-old son.
Duhamel looks back at the immigrant experience:
Please know that your would-be American girlfriend Still pines for you, José, somewhere in Nebraska or North Dakota. She has a slew of kids now and her red dress is in storage. She cries when she watches reruns of I Love Lucy.
In the Journal of Popular Culture, Louis Phillips remembered Lucy with the poem “A Summer Spent Watching Lucille Ball Perform”:
Philosophers insist
No one laughs at a sunset,
But nothing in my heart is breaking
(Old bones do not heal so fast),
As Lucy mugs & grimaces,
Pro that she is,
Dives into a vat of grapes
With fractured Italian
(substituted on the TV screen).
What is comedy
Philosophers ask,
But grass does not laugh
Nor the trees
Still, I am only human,
Broken hip & all.
In the sunset everything seems funny.
Simultaneously, a blending of comedy and commerce got under way. Jamestown, New York, determined to treat its first daughter with the utmost respect. Drivers entering the town of 36,000 were presented with green road signs honoring Lucille Ball and another celebrity born there, the artist and naturalist Roger Tory Peterson. Lucy received top billing. The signs are there today. The Lucy-Desi Museum, supervised by the Arnaz family, has been set up as a pop shrine. At the lilac-painted installation on Pine Street, presentations take no note of any past unpleasantness; it is as if Dwight D. Eisenhower were still in the White House and Lucy and Ricky Ricardo were still in love and living with their landlords, the inimitable Fred and Ethel Mertz. More than eighty thousand tourists from thirty-six countries have paid homage since the museum was founded in 1996, gawking at costumes, merchandise, correspondence, and family photographs. In 2002, the living-room set from I Love Lucy was added. Those who want to take home a souvenir—and that includes almost all who sign the guest book—drop in at the Museum Shop on Third Street. There they can purchase games, shower curtains, dolls, T-shirts, and a vast selection of other Lucy-centered merchandise to show the folks back in their own home-town, a locale that may be in America, Europe, Asia, or Africa— anyplace where I Love Lucy has been broadcast.
Each summer, the museum schedules events for Lucille Ball’s loyal fans. In August 2002, for example, there were such activities as a “Vintage Memorabilia Collectors’ Show,” featuring movie posters, comic books, magazines, and a “Memorabilia Auction,” with more than one hundred vintage properties for sale. These were supplemented with the kind of boosterish, small-town events Lucy had sentimentalized in later life—and from which she had fled three generations before. (“Jamestown is only a place to be from. To be from only.”) Included was a musical tribute to the First Couple of Comedy by the Jamestown Suzuki Strings Students and Middle School and High School orchestras, and a candy-wrapping competition with three-person teams re-creating Lucy’s chocolate-factory routine.
With gratitude and affection for this outpouring of regard, the Arnaz children announced plans to transfer their mother’s remains, and those of their grandmother DeDe Hunt Ball, from Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood hills to a modest, tree-shaded family plot in Jamestown. Lucie also attempted to purchase the home in which Lucy grew up, but she was outbid by one Elaine Thoni of Cooper City, Florida, who apparently bought the place as an investment. “I have a few Lucy curios,” Thoni told TV Guide, “but I plan to get more. Before this I was more of an Elvis fan.”
The year 2001 marked the fiftieth anniversary of I Love Lucy’s debut. In response there were farcical events (in Jerry Zucker’s film Rat Race, for example, Cuba Gooding Jr. gets trapped on a tour bus with more than a dozen Lucille Ball imitators), as well as carefully calculated salutes from TV Land, national cable home to the show’s reruns. Later came Lucie and Desi Jr.’s two-hour documentary. Predictably, the program was freighted with sound bites from enthusiasts and film clips from the best-known episodes, including the Vitameatavegamin drunk scene, the grape-stomping battle, and the pregnancy announcement. Of greater interest was a recollection of Orson Welles, who did a guest shot in the 1950s. During rehearsals he had sat in the wings staring at the star. Asked what he was doing, Welles, enchanted with Lucy’s skills since the 1940s, explained, “I am watching the world’s greatest actress.” In the Washington Post, the beguiled TV critic Tom Shales observed: “As the camera zooms in on the two principals for the closing shot, Lucy drops presents that have been piled into her arms and puts those arms around her husband. At any given moment, it is stated on the special, people somewhere in the world are watching an I Love Lucy episode, and what they’re watching is more than high jinks, more than slapstick and wacky routines and clowning around. They are peering into a time capsule at another world that tempts and beckons. And they are also getting a look at the operation of that most intricate and delicate of all complex mechanisms, the human heart.” USA Today took a second look at the series and concluded: “Ricky symbolized how the world was supposed to run. Lucy was that absurdist factor of modern American humor—the irrational force which cannot be anticipated.”
The anniversary prompted encomia from unexpected sources. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jane Smiley remembered a childhood of reruns that entered her house in the morning: “I associate it with the feeling of being pleasantly not at school. Perhaps I saw the small screen (which did not seem at all small to me, since I was sitting cross-legged right in front of it) as a window through which I could look at what people did ‘at work,’ where my mother was.” The show made her uneasy, because “Lucy never seemed to learn from one episode to the next how not to get into trouble, and since I didn’t understand comedy, I never laughed at the incongruity of the situations.” Still the little girl watched intently, “no doubt because I identified Lucy not only as my mother, but also as myself. Could I really get into that chocolate fix? That wine vat mess? Why not? It was a frightening possibility.” When she got older, however, she “discovered Lucille Ball, Lucy’s better half, a woman of talent and ambition who had been around and knew how to make something of her talents. Lucille Ball—now there was someone to pay attention to. I knew nothing of her personal life, only that her demeanor in real life was utterly different from Lucy’s, and that was enough to say all there is to know about the difference between life and art.”
Historian Dan Wakefield, author of New York in the Fifties, asked, “Why is Lucy so loved?” and offered two theories. “Maybe because she was the first good-looking actress to throw her body around with abandon in the cause of comedy; compare her rubbery torso flings to Mae West’s statue-like stance as she shot one-liners from the side of her mouth.” Or “maybe she’s loved so long and well because her problems were as sunny as funny, unlike the darker shades of The Honeymooners.” Jackie Gleason’s domestic comedy, Wakefield went on, “gained its faithful following later, when the dark side was more admitted in a world become conscious of its own subconscious.”
National Public Radio correspondent Susan Stamberg took a contrarian view. She found Lucy: “Hilarious, of course. A brilliant comedienne. Physically fearless, slapstick silly. Impeccable timing. A direct descendant of Charlie Chaplin and Harpo Marx. I love her eyelashes and her big bright mouth. I also love Ricky’s theme song. And the neighbors.
“But as for loving I Love Lucy, no. Because certain behaviors, funny as they were, were troubling to me, coming of age in the 50s. . . . On television, Lucy was no Good Girl, and I liked her for it—her spirit and her gumption. But I didn’t like what she did to get what she wanted.”
Social critic Susan Sontag thought she knew the reasons for the durability of I Love Lucy. The program invited its audience “to observe Desi’s exasperated mutterings or Lucy’s whines with an amused sense of superiority. This sanctioned voyeurism couldn’t help but flatter the viewer it entertained.
“The show was built on an entrancing pseudo-effect of the real: that the very ordinary couple portrayed was played by a real couple, one of whom was extremely famous, successful, and rich. Lucille Ball, a real star, became a goofy housewife named Lucy Ricardo, but nobody was fooled. Didn’t we smile when we saw the heart-shaped logo at the end: Desilu Productions?
“That was the fun of it—the confusion and mixture of televised fantasy and voyeuristically apprehended reality. A dose of fantasy. And the insinuation that we might be watching something real. Which has turned out, fifty years later, to be television’s perennial, still winning formula.”
Not all voices were so upbeat. During a seminar in Las Vegas, a member of the audience asked Jerry Lewis which female comics he admired. “I don’t like any female comedians,” Lewis said. Moderator and fellow comedian Martin Short brought up the name of Lucille Ball: “You must have loved her.” “No,” insisted Lewis, “a woman doing comedy doesn’t offend me, but sets me back a bit. I, as a viewer, have trouble with it. I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies into the world.”
A backhanded eulogy came from underground-film director John Waters, who claimed that Lucy Ricardo was a profound influence on Polyester and Hairspray. Waters remembered I Love Lucy as the show that changed his life: “At last, a female impersonator who dyed her hair orange, wore obviously false eyelashes and scary red lipstick at home, married a man of another race, got pregnant on television, hung out with her blue-collar neighbors, and ran away to pal around with Rock Hudson. As an eight-year-old voyeur, looking ahead to my teenage years was a lot easier because of Lucy. I knew you could break the rules.”
Darker notes were sounded in Talk magazine, when Rex Reed compiled a set of interviews with some of Lucy’s colleagues and relations. Her longtime friend Sheila MacRae remembered an occasion at the Arnazes. “We were all having dinner with William Holden and his wife and watching a movie, and Lucy said, ‘Take it off. It’s all about people having sex.’ She started to cry and there was dead silence. It was very embarrassing. There were only six people in the room. Desi said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Lucy!’ She said, ‘I’m going to leave you.’ He said, ‘So go ahead. What do I care?’ And he moved into the guesthouse.”
Actress Carole Cook recalled: “I went to see her on the set of that last show that she did and she was in a tirade. I said, ‘Gosh, Lucy, you’re working again.’ And she said, ‘They just don’t like women over fifty.’ I said, ‘You’ve been over fifty a long time, you know? If it’s your first bad review, that’s not such a bad deal.’
“I always thought it was sad that a woman like that—who could have done charity work, gone to the theater, traveled, read, held classes—spent her dumb days playing backgammon.”
Actress Polly Bergen described her Roxbury Drive neighbor in very specific terms. Lucy’s “outer persona as a performer was this cute, bubbly, zany character. But in her personal and social life she was a very tough broad.”
Paula Stewart blamed Gary Morton for much of Lucy’s downhill slide toward the end. “She was taking all these different medications and she was very sick. The high blood pressure was the killer. She was depressed and she was having a hard time with Gary. They were not getting along. But she still liked the margaritas with salt, and she’d sneak sardine sandwiches. You know, anything with salt. And Gary would say, ‘Oh, let her have the salt.’ ” Several years later, during one of Lucy’s hospital stays, “she needed a nurse to watch over her. Gary let the nurse go. He said it was too expensive. I said, ‘What? She’s one of the richest women around.’And not only that, but her insurance had to be paying for everything. What could that nurse have cost?”
Lucy’s publicist, Thomas Watson, said: “She never raised herself to grow old gracefully. She used to tell me, ‘I am not Helen Hayes.’ She should have retired.” When the last series failed, “she didn’t know what to do. Gary never said, ‘Show business is my life.’ He always said, ‘Show business is my wife.’ ”
Lucie Arnaz weighed the pros and cons of her mother’s life and career. “On the positive side, she had tenacity, an amazing ability to keep going until she got it right. Bravery. She was the first to do things that women didn’t do. She was gifted, she had genius, like Chaplin. Artistry of the top rank. On the negative side, she was tactless with some people. Brusque. She wasn’t able to really be open, close, intimate with a lot of people. That was a negative—for her and for what we lost as a family.”
Further details were added in London, where Lucie starred in a West End version of The Witches of Eastwick. Understandably, the Daily Mail interview was never reprinted in the States. By the time her mother had assumed the presidency of Desilu, said Lucie, Desi was gone and Lucy worked “from dawn to dusk. She didn’t need the money, she had everything she wanted, from clothes to jewels to cars. Yet only work mattered. She could be very cold and although she told me she loved me all the time, I didn’t feel loved. When children don’t feel they deserve love they start feeling unworthy of love . . . and I felt like that most of the time.” Lucie went on: “I never wanted to behave to my own three children the way my mother did with us, never being there to talk to us, to get our breakfast, to bathe us, to read us stories at night. We had people to look after us and my grandmother was there sometimes. But I couldn’t wait to leave home and I did at 18. I got married to the first man I went out with.” She assured Lucy, “I can make it work,” but she found that she couldn’t. “I’d made a terrible mistake and within a year it broke up. I’d made a terrible mistake.” The three children she had with Laurence Luckinbill, plus the two from his previous marriage, caused some difficulties. “At first I used to be quite sharp with my kids because I had nothing to follow, nothing to learn from.” Much as she admired her mother’s talent, Lucie concluded, “I just wish she’d been there to give us the love that we so desperately needed.”
But the sorrier aspects of Lucille Ball were more than counterbalanced by the perceptions of adoring fans and colleagues, who would hear no disparagement of the loved one. In an article on images that make men cry, the New York Times cited Douglas McGrath, the director of the movies Emma and Nicholas Nickleby. “I’ll be in bed at night with my wife,” he confided to a reporter, “and a rerun of I Love Lucy starts, and just as the heart is closing around the title, the tears well up in my eyes.” According to the paper, McGrath thought it was “because of the contrast between the triumph of love of the fictional Desi and Lucy, and the fact that they broke up in real life.” Added the Times, “Now that’s a sensitive guy!” Likenesses—rather inflexible likenesses, it must be said—went on display at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in New York and at the Hollywood and Movieland Museums in California. Lucy’s star was burnished on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Statues, whose intent was more laudable than their execution, could be found in Jamestown; at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame Plaza in North Hollywood, where Lucy had worked; and in Palm Springs, where she had vacationed. In Dallas, her words were inscribed in the Women’s Museum: “You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.” In 2001 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York, where the first Women’s Rights convention was held in 1848.
In New York City, summer school students in the English as a Second Language program at Bushwick High School were presented with an unusual assignment. They were shown the job-switching episode of I Love Lucy, in which Ricky and Fred turn househusbands and Lucy and Ethel take jobs in the chocolate factory. They were then to write papers on what they had viewed. The purpose, said the Board of Education, was twofold: “to immerse students in the language, and to introduce them to cultural institutions.” Elsewhere, Dr. Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, groped for a proper way to explain the reach of light and sound in space. “The nearest star is about four light-years away,” he said, “and there are on the order of several thousand stars within the fifty-light-year range. So the earliest episodes of I Love Lucyare washing over a new star system at the rate of about one system a day.”
All measuring devices agreed: the status of Lucille Ball was permanent, on Earth and beyond it. That being the case, entrepreneurs, indiscriminate fans, hypercritical scholars, feminists, and revisionists all moved in. The Internet, growing exponentially in the 1990s, offered more than one hundred Lucille Ball Web sites, and the number has grown since then. Some are electronic stores, offering every conceivable sort of souvenir connected with Lucy’s glory days. The home page of Cathy’s Closet displays a quote from Lucie Arnaz: “The only closet with more ‘authentic’ Lucy items than Cathy’s was my mother’s!” No one is likely to challenge that statement; Cathy’s Closet offers some fifty categories of merchandise arranged alphabetically, including Ceramic Boxes, Figurines, Games, Mouse Pads, Snow Globes, Tote Bags, and Watches. Everything Lucy, a similar site, but bearing no Arnaz endorsement, sells such exotica as “I Love Lucy” Chocolate Factory salt and pepper shakers, a large “I Love Lucy” cookie jar in the shape of a car seen on the series, and an “I Love Lucy” bear. The items are not cheap; the cookie jar, for example, sells for $149.99. Collectors can buy dolls that range back to the 1950s and go up to the present, including a “Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz Bobblehead Set” issued by Classic Collecticritters; “Celebrity Barbie” dolls by Mattel, featuring Barbie and Ken dressed as the Arnazes; and the “Lucille Ball Vinyl Portrait Doll” from the Franklin Mint, priced around $200.
The most dedicated fans, however, are less interested in accumulation than in making points about their favorite. Oxygen Media, whose television channel and Web site target a female audience, regards Lucy as an avatar of women’s rights: “Generally, what she wanted was to play a less passive role, to be more actor than acted upon. She wanted attention and what’s wrong with that? We all want it; Lucy was just very up-front and focused about getting it. Not one to repress her insecurities, Lucy tackled them head-on, and since her fears were our fears, we rejoiced in her flagrant disregard for propriety in her quest for inclusion.”
Michael Karol, author of that compound of insight, fact, and trivia Lucy A to Z, conducts the serious, if worshipful, site www.geocities.com/Sitcomboy/. On it he examines the influence of I Love Lucy on situation comedies that followed in its slipstream:
Sitcomboy rushes on: “If you’re a dedicated channel surfer, unique delights await you. Within the space of a few hours just recently, I saw ‘Lucy’ make an appearance on the Simpsons (as Lucille MacGillicuddy Ricardo, I believe): she turns up to help Lisa Simpson, who’s having a problem managing Homer and Bart while Marge is in the hospital. And then, a bit later, I was passing through VH-1 when I noticed a familiar drummer: Desi Arnaz, Jr. Intrigued, I watched as Dino, Desi & Billy (the rock trio that had some minor success in the 1960s) played a forgettable love song, then went to be congratulated by Ed Sullivan (the show itself was a syndicated clip fest of rock moments from his Sunday night show). Ready to keep surfing, I stopped as Sullivan introduced one of the trio’s mothers from the audience—none other than Lucy herself.”
The feminist site Lucille Ball Is a Cool Woman! stresses the influence of Lucille Ball on female entertainers—and on American women in general: “One of the most important things that Lucy showed us was that women could be funny and attractive all at once—a groundbreaking concept for the day. This was particularly admirable given that Lucy was beautiful enough to be a conventional film star, and, in fact had become a Hollywood movie sensation as ‘Queen of the B-Movies.’ But she shrugged off the persona of a cool beauty, instead reveling in the chance to get a laugh. She was never afraid to look foolish, silly, or even ugly for the sake of a good gag and her public loved her for it. By proving this formula, she paved the way for generations of funny women to come. Think of Carol Burnett, Roseanne, Gilda Radner, and Candice Bergen—they all owe at least a part of their success to the amazing Lucy.”
Floating above these fans’ notes is the Higher Criticism—inquiries about, and analyses of, Lucille Ball as comedian, artist, and executive. Molly Haskell, one of the most prominent and discerning critics of popular culture, had her say in a piece entitled “50 Years and Millions of Reruns Later, Why Does America Still Love Lucy?” To Haskell, the answer lay in Ball’s subversive approach. “Although the Lucy persona would disavow any connection with feminism,” the author asserts, “in her own foot-in-mouth way, she cuts a wide swath through male supremacy, saying anything that comes into her head and taking down sacred cows and chauvinist bulls along the way. Trying to say ‘thank you’ to Ricky’s pompous Cuban uncle, and garbling her Spanish, she calls him a fat pig before accidentally (?) shredding his foot-long, hand-rolled cigar—no mean symbol of Lucy’s assault on puffed-up male potency.”
Haskell is particularly fond of an episode in which Lucy pores over a New York Times want ad section. “Oh, this is terribly unfair,” she moans. “You can’t get a job in this town unless you can do something.” Lucy eventually lands a job tending two misbehaving brats, and this leads to a performance on a talent show emceed by Ricky. The baby-sitter enters in moustache and chaps; the two boys back her up as singing cowboys. While Lucy is distracted the brats place a frog under her shirt. The movements of the amphibian soon force her to pop and leap like a Nijinsky-inspired jumping bean. Haskell finds the routine “an incandescent moment of magical farce that also conveys a talent and determination that will be not be denied. The performance ends with the triumphant Lucy kissing Ricky, who, recognizing her, does one of his ineffable double takes. And so do we, since unbeknownst to him, her moustache has been transferred to his face—a nice visual metaphor for the restoring of the patriarchy, Lucy-style.” Lucy may surrender at the final clinch, but “she is no ‘surrendered wife.’ In the final analysis, Lucy is a fireball who treads a fine line between independence and submission, the stay-at-home wife who wouldn’t.”
Haskell’s affectionate tone was amplified by another pop culture critic. Writing in the New York Times, Joyce Millman argued that Lucy “waged an unspoken battle against Ricky’s attitude of male superiority—you could feel her sense of injustice burning behind every scheme.” How did I Love Lucy become television’s most popular sitcom in a deeply conservative era? “It did not violate viewers’ comfort zones, particularly female viewers’ comfort zones. If Ball had been too assertive, too forthright, she might have turned women away from the show. So Ball couched her characters’ bold ambitions in peerless physical comedy. She looked silly and unglamorous; she played the clown. And as a clown, Ball was a radical, powerful figure; it was as if she was daring you to think it was unseemly for a woman to put on a putty nose or a fright wig and throw herself into a joke with body and soul. (Decades later, physical comedians like Lily Tomlin and Gilda Radner finished what Ball started, turning chaotic energy into a feminist statement).” Statements like these would have astonished Lucy, who had gone public with her view of the Movement: “Women’s lib? It doesn’t interest me one bit. I’ve been so liberated it hurts.”
But Lucille Ball had long since passed from the scene, and her statements, like her properties, her shows, and even the events of her life, were now in the hands of others. The revisionists felt free to move in. In Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women, Berklee College of Music professor Lori Landay chooses Lucille Ball as a prime examplar of “the female trickster in American culture.” Lucy, she holds, embodies all three categories—madcap, screwball, and con woman—providing occasions “for laughter and pleasure by creating comedy out of the constraints of the postwar feminine mystique.” The author quotes the performer in order to set up her case: “ ‘We had great identification with millions of people,’ Lucy stated, long after I Love Lucy was in syndication. ‘They could identify with my problems, my zaniness, my wanting to do everything, my scheming and plotting, the way I cajoled Ricky. People identified with the Ricardos because we had the same problems they had. Desi and I weren’t your ordinary Hollywood couple on TV. We lived in a brownstone apartment somewhere in Manhattan, and paying the rent, getting a new dress, getting a stale fur collar on an old cloth coat, or buying a piece of furniture were all worth a story.
“ ‘People could identify with all those basic things—baby-sitters, traveling, wanting to be entertained, wanting to be loved in a certain way—the two couples on the show were constantly doing things that people all over the country were doing. We just took ordinary situations and exaggerated them.’ ”
Producer Jess Oppenheimer is brought on as a witness: “ ‘The things that happen to the Ricardos happen to everyone in the audience. We call it “holding up the mirror.” Whatever happens, they love each other.’ ”
Landay sums up for the prosecution: “The only way to make sense of Oppenheimer’s explanation that the series holds up a mirror to everyday life is if we recognize that it is a distorting mirror. . . . How seriously can we take Ricky’s injunctions that his wife can’t be on television when Ball and Arnaz are a husband and wife on television? On one level, the show does what on another level it says shouldn’t happen. This contradiction illustrates the gap between the social experience of the women who were working in the public sphere and the ideology that attempted to contain them within domesticity. The series itself is a kind of trick that encourages the audience to participate in the attractive image of the stars’ happy marriage, a fiction representative of postwar behaviour and attitudes that obscures asymmetry in the sex-gender system.” Even so, the professor is forced to admit in the end that Lucy has a way of outlasting the critics and the scholars. For ultimately, “like Coyote, Brer Rabbit, the con man, and other American incarnations of the trickster, Lucy can withstand historical cultural changes.” Her antics, “her ability to create possibility where others would only recognize restraint, and her untiring optimism that this time her scheme will succeed, above all, keep Lucy, and the trickster, alive and at the center of our popular culture.”
In High Anxiety, University of Wisconsin history professor Patricia Mellencamp uses Lucy to underscore her investigations of 1950s America. Fred Mertz’s definition speaks to prevailing conditions. “When it comes to money, there are two kinds of people: the earners and the spenders. Or as they are more popularly known, husbands and wives.” To Mellencamp, “this ‘ethos of gender’ recognizes a key facet of postwar ideology, a cluster of ideals and expectations at the crossroads of mainstream representatives of gender roles, marriage, domesticity, and consumerism.” Every week for seven years, she reminds us, “Lucy, the chorus girl/clown, complained that Ricky was preventing her from becoming a star. For twenty-four minutes, she valiantly tried to escape domesticity by getting a job in show business. After a tour de force performance of physical comedy, in the inevitable reversal and failure of the end, she was resigned to stay happily at home serving big and little Ricky. The ultimate ‘creation/cancellation’—the series’ premise, which was portrayed in brilliant performances and then denied weekly—was that Lucy was not star material.” In one celebrated episode (“The Ballet”), Lucy throws a pie in Ricky’s face during his solo at the Tropicana. But he gets the last laugh by rigging a bucket of water over the apartment’s front door. When Lucy opens the door, she soaks her head, and at the fade-out pleads, “You were right all along, Ricky. Forgive me?” Notes Mellencamp dryly: “Laughter. Applause. Seven days later, Lucy repeats her break for freedom, her anarchism against wifery. To rephrase Freud, ‘An action which carries out a certain injunction is immediately succeeded by another action which stops or undoes the first one.’ The affect, drawn by Freud from war neuroses and for me from popular culture, is one of anxiety.”
Frances Gray’s Women and Laughter views the 1950s as a shadowed and contradictory time, for when “the older generation of women hung on to their jobs: for the younger, educated middle class, a problem developed.” Gray say the problem was articulated for them by Adlai Stevenson, the former Democratic candidate for president, in his 1955 commencement address at Smith College: “Once they wrote poetry. Now it’s the laundry list. Once they discussed art and philosophy till late into the night. Now they are so tired they fall asleep as soon as the dishes are finished. There is, often, a sense of closing horizons and lost opportunities. They had hoped to play their part in the crises of the age. But what they do is wash the diapers.” But Stevenson, Gray insists, didn’t unearth the root of the problem. To him, in common with most of his countrymen, the American woman had a unique opportunity to “inspire in her home a vision of the meaning of life and freedom . . . to help her husband find values that will give purpose to his specialized daily chores.” This “opportunity” would undo many, says Gray, ominously dropping a name: “Sylvia Plath, like all the class of ’55, applauded enthusiastically.”
Had Lucille Ball been present, Gray implies, she too would have clapped and cheered. For when Lucy wasn’t up on the sound stage she was a follower, not a leader, and she approved of the 1950s values. Onscreen she protested that her status was nothing to quo about, but that was only so that she could do her Sisyphus routine, making a grand effort—and then falling back to the starting point to begin again next week. The plots of her show set up “tensions rarely found when male slapstick performers are at work; we are invited to pity Harry Langdon, admire the stoicism or to rejoice in the subversive triumph of Chaplin’s Little Man—but each of these had an existential integrity denied Lucy.” Chaplin’s hero may be downtrodden by society, “but he knows who he is and avoids social or economic thrall to another individual. The essence of Chaplin is that he is his own man. Lucy isn’t her own woman; her triumphs are always partial, her power fragmented, her defeats always sanctioned by the narrative.” A reference to Lucy’s bag lady performance in Stone Pillow encapsulates the author’s contrarian view: “It’s understandable that in the world of the 1980s Ball chose to play Chaplin’s symbol of existential freedom, a tramp.”
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Lucille Ball’s posthumous career is the continual association of her name with Charlie Chaplin’s. The comparisons were first made in the 1950s and elaborated upon in 1963, when she paid homage to Charlie by donning a little moustache and twirling a cane on an episode of The Lucy Show. TV Guide praised this episode as the best of the lot “because it rose from a simple source: The daughter, giving her first boy-and-girl party, doesn’t want mother at home. The party is a dud until Lucy does her Chaplin routine.” At times, the piece concluded, “you have to wait between the great moments. But it isn’t hard. After all, you can always look at Lucille.” Others, including her family, also made the comparison between Charlie and Lucy. And some four decades after I Love Lucy went off the air, The Dictionary of Teleliteracy, compiled by New York Daily News critic David Bianculli, mentioned the guest appearance of Harpo Marx on I Love Lucy, calling it especially fitting “because Lucille Ball did enough comedy, verbal and physical, to qualify as a Marx sister—or as TV’s closest female equivalent of a Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, or Buster Keaton.”
There have been many other slapstick performers since the Little Tramp capered on the silent screen. Why should Lucille Ball be esteemed so highly? In large measure the praise is due to her talent and grit. She was not only funnier than anyone else on TV; she was also more beautiful—a matchless combination. But there is another component in the mix.
Prior to the introduction of TV Land, I Love Lucy’s current cable venue, a Viacom executive complained: “The only problem with I Love Lucy is that it’s not in color. That’s why you never see Lucy reruns in early fringe or prime time. The stations believe that people buy color sets, so therefore they want to see color programs. So what happens is Lucy is relegated to the morning time periods when full viewership levels are not available.” Ironically, those were the very conditions that solidified Lucy’s reputation. The comedians to whom Lucy has been compared, those who achieved iconic status worldwide—Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers—all capered before the Technicolor era. Even Bob Hope, who was still filming into the 1980s, is best remembered for his pre-color work in such films as My Favorite Brunette and the Roadpictures. The clowns who came to prominence after 1960, when color became the norm rather than the exception, have by and large been supernovas, glowing brilliantly—and then vanishing in the void. There is something incompatible about humor and color; the palette calls attention to itself, instead of to the jokes. Lucy’s contemporary Danny Kaye, for instance, was MGM’s biggest comic star, clowning in vivid red, yellow, and blue. His range was wide, his abilities unquestioned. Yet his films are virtually unknown to the generations that followed him, and his television specials are rarely glimpsed. The episodes of I Love Lucy, from “Lucy Thinks Ricky Is Trying to Murder Her” through “The Ricardos Dedicate a Statue,” have never stopped rerunning.
Lucille Ball was a festival of contradictions: a woman who yearned for her own family—and didn’t know how to relate to her children; a demanding wife who allowed herself to be humiliated by a philanderer; a cold-eyed, exacting businesswoman who made others cry—and then retreated into tears when her authority was questioned. In the end, all the negatives will be forgotten or forgiven, as they usually are with performers—particularly funny ones, whose lives tend to be counterweights to the laughter they engender. Whatever Lucy’s private faults, her public accomplishments over a comparatively brief period are enough to guarantee her a lofty place in the history of popular entertainment. In W. H. Auden’s indulgent words about another poet, “You were silly, like us: / your gift survived it all.”
Lucy would have been the first to admit that she was silly; that she made profound and painful mistakes; that nothing else she did on radio, TV, film, or theater ever equaled I Love Lucy and its follow-up, The Lucy Show; that she simply fell into fortune—the right producer, the right writers, the right husband, the right decade, the right medium. In the end, though, that very improvisatory quality is what will make her endure as long as there are audiences to laugh at pranks and pratfalls.
Everyone has spoken of Lucy’s gift of timing. Yet it was her lateness—or, to be more accurate, Desi Arnaz’s—that conferred immortality. While others were disporting in a variety of rich hues and tints, she remained in stark, contrasting shades no different from those of the great silent-film comedians. So many other comedians, male and female, have come after her, enjoyed the tinted spotlight, and then slipped into obscurity. Lucy stays eternally comic because of the vital, frenzied, irreproducible years when the Ball of Fire got it all down in black and white.