Before I Love Lucy, Lucille Ball Spent Years Being Told No

Lee Habeeb (00:00:10):
This is Lee Habeeb and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. In the world of entertainment, few names resonate as powerfully as Lucille Ball. But long before she became a household name, she faced years and years of rejection, all before her breakthrough finally came at the age of forty. Joining us now is Kathleen Brady, author of The Life of Lucille Ball, sharing the story of the woman who changed American comedy forever.

Kathleen Brady (00:00:49):
One of Lucille Ball's childhood friends, Pauline Lopez, explained Lucille Ball better than anyone ever could. She said, Lucille would help a blind man across the street, whether he wanted to go or not. She was born in Jamestown, New York, April 26, 1911. When she was growing up, the flappers were in vogue. The flappers might have been her style models, but she was born in Jamestown, New York to a very much a working family. Sadly, her father died when she was three.

Then her mother remarried, and Lucille spent quite a bit of time with her stepfather's mother, who was a very strict woman of Swedish heritage and didn't want Lucille to be out too late. She had to come home early for supper. It was a hard disciplined life. Grandma Peterson had an idea of how she was supposed to look, and she pulled her hair back very severely. But somehow she got hold of a mirror and she started practicing making faces. And she enjoyed entertaining herself making these faces in the mirror.

And of course I think that we all, if we've seen I Love Lucy, we know some of these faces that she came up with. Lucille as a child could not be suppressed for long. One of the women who had been in kindergarten with her said that there was a Christmas play and they were supposed to be little angels. And the woman I spoke with was the first angel out, and Lucille was the second one. So Lucille angel number two, gave Cecilia, angel number one a kick and said, "Get going,", and so they all trooped out and did their little angelic thing for the Christmas play.

Her friend Pauline Lopez said that Pauline's parents took them on a sort of a cruise on Lake Chautauqua, and Lucille had convinced Pauline that the two of them should do singing and dancing and entertain the people on this ship. So one of the women said, where did you learn to do that? And Lucille Ball said, we're actresses. So she knew very early on. She loved performing, she loved being seen, and she made a history of it. In her childhood, anything wonderful was followed by something awful. I mean, Lucille wanted to be with her mother's parents and she wanted to be with her mother.

And when she did get back to her mother's family, soon her grandmother got sick and eventually died, and part of the family was her cousin Cleo, who was like a sister to her, and her brother Fred. They all lived together and they were raised together. But then Lola the mother died and Cleo had to go off and live with her father in Buffalo, so that broke up the family too, so she was never she never felt secure.

Then there was a terrible accident at the house Lucille Ball's brother had gotten a shotgun for I think it was his eleventh or twelfth birthday, and this little boy got in front of the target and was shot and eventually died. There was a terrible lawsuit. The family lost their house. I mean, that's the financial reality of her childhood. And there were a lot of people who looked down on the family a bit. Her friend's mothers did not think that DeDe was a very good mom. But the thing is DeDe had to work. She was working all the time, so the kids had a lot of time on their own.

And there was a wonderful and sad situation at Desilu when I Love Lucy was first being filmed and broadcast. The administrator's the office staff found that they had no pencils. No matter what they did when they came in in the morning, there were no pencils unless they brought their own in from home. And finally it was discovered that Lucille Ball was going around and taking all the pencils at night. So one of the chief executives said, you know, you're the vice president of Desilu. You own all these pencils. And she said, if you had been raised the way I was, you would understand.

She really was marked for life by the experiences she had. But as I said, she was also irrepressible. At Celoron, there was a wonderful amusement park and she got a job in the summer selling hot dogs, and her approach to selling these hot dogs was to get out in front of the stand and yell at people, "Stop!". That was one way she rounded up customers for her hot dogs. You know, enormous talent and verve and energy, and however hurt she might have been inwardly, she pressed on.

It was pretty much recognized in Jamestown that she had talent, and also because of the family difficulties and people needing places to live, her mother decided yes it was okay for her to go to New York and study acting. But her mother soon got a call after a couple of weeks that Lucille had no talent and very little personality and the money was being wasted.

Lee Habeeb (00:07:16):
When we come back more of Kathleen Brady and the story of Lucille Ball here on Our American Stories, Lee Habeeb here, and I'm inviting you to help Our American Stories celebrate this country's two hundred and fiftieth birthday coming soon If you want to help inspire countless others to love America like we do, and want to help us bring the inspiring and important stories told here about a good and beautiful country, please consider making a tax deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Any amount helps go to OurAmericanStories.com and give, And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Lucille Ball.

When we last left off, a teacher at her New York drama school had advised her mother that the tuition was being wasted, that young Lucille had no talent. For many that would have been the end of things for Lucille, it was just the beginning. Here again, is Kathleen Brady.

Kathleen Brady (00:08:32):
Lucille Ball was so intimidated. One of the people who intimidated her was the star of the school, a young woman named Bette Davis, who was doing very well even then and being cast in plays. So Lucille Ball went back home. But you know, after you've been to New York and seeing the world just a little bit, it was hard for her to stay in Jamestown, and she went back to New York not to be in school, but she was going to try to be in show business and as a showgirl or whatever.

But she was too flat chested, had a very hard time getting a job, and when she had a job, keeping it, I don't think she ever even got paid for anything that she might have been cast in. And someone said, you're so thin that you should try to be a model. And then she started having some success. And so what happened is the Goldwyn people were coming to New York and casting Goldwyn girls, and at that point she had done cigarette ads and beauty ads and she was cast, but she was the thirteenth girl and they only needed twelve, so she wasn't sure how that was going to work out.

But the mother of one of the chosen twelve said, you cannot go to godless Hollywood. You are not going. You were staying here. So a space was made for Lucille, and off she went on the train to Hollywood. And the pledge that she made herself was she was not going to make the mistake she had made at school in New York. She was going to talk, she was going to step forward and volunteer. She got to the writers of Roman Scandals.

She asked them to give her a line to recite, and when the director wanted someone one of the girls to take a mud pie in the face, Lucille Ball said she'd do it. And the other girl said, nobody is going to know who you are with mud all over your face, and Lucille Ball said, no one knows who I am anyway. So she just wanted to get out there, and she did.

She was talking to a young woman on the lot, talking about what had happened the night before, with all kinds of expressions in acting out what had happened, and this man came up and he said, young woman, if you play your cards right, you can be the greatest comedian in America. And she thought this was a line, and this guy was not to be trusted. But he was a man Edward Sedgwick, who had worked with Buster Keaton on silent movies, and he saw this girl just naturally with the gestures and the expressions that the stars of the silents had worked so hard to develop and to express and to portray.

But the thing is about Lucille Ball, nobody quite knew what to do with her. She didn't sing, and she didn't dance, and so that meant being in the background in musicals. But she was willing to work at anything and everything, and she was in enough movies that she was known as the Queen of the Bs. And the Bs were the second feature the B film. The first one was the one everybody came to see, or at least the most important one that was probably shown second.

And then there was the other one where people got to see Lucille Ball, but she was either a secretary or a gangster's girlfriend, or she worked a switchboard in the background. But Lucille Ball worked with a lot of the comedy greats as she was making these little B films. She worked with the Three Stooges on something called Three Little Pigskins, .

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Honey, when you marry me, what do you study at college?

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Pig ahead at a unk.

Kathleen Brady (00:13:03):
You wouldn't know a thing about that, would you? Oh, all right. She worked with the Marx Brothers in room service, and the only one of them that was really especially nice to her was Harpo, who was a gentleman and just very nice and took her to a dinner at Sam Goldwyn's and cautioned her that you don't eat an artichoke with a knife and fork. He had to show her how to eat an artichoke. And what's interesting is he's the only one of the Marx brothers who showed up on I Love Lucy. She always remembered her friends. She always remembered her friends and was grateful to anyone who ever helped her.

Lucille was a little bit involved with the head of the studio, so I think people knew that they had to be nice to her. But she was also extremely likable and people did like her. She had an incident with Katharine Hepburn where she Lucille Ball wanted to have good photos made and finally, finally, the photographer who was busy with Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn and the great stars, finally he could be was willing to take her photo.

But she did not have very good teeth, and one of the ways she had spent her money was to get a cosmetic device for her teeth, but she discovered she had left them in the makeup room and she had been forced to exit the makeup room in a hurry because Katharine Hepburn, who was the star one of the two stars with Ginger of RKO was coming in. So Katharine Hepburn is sitting there and getting made up, and the next thing you know, she gots hit with something and her coffee spills all over her, and Katharine Hepburn was furious and went home.

And it happened was Lucille Ball was trying to get the makeup artist's attention and she threw these little teeth in through the window. So Katharine Hepburn said to me, Lucille was a lovely creature, and somehow I ended up apologizing to her. So I guess Lucille Ball had what we call soft power in diplomacy. But she was willing to work very hard and to do anything anybody demanded. And things were proceeding apace for Lucille Ball, whether she knew it or not. She started dating a director named Al Hall, who actually had directed the Shirley Temple movies, and he had some friends. He was older.

He had some friends named Buster Keaton and Edward Sedgwick, and these men knew exactly who Lucille Ball was. She was a physical comedian, but the studio was not interested in beautiful women who could take pratfalls. Sam Goldwyn said women are to be beautiful, and that was the mandate for what they were supposed to do. Being funny not so much. You could be unattractive and get a laugh, but not if you were beautiful. So that was a problem. The thing about Lucille Ball, her timing was off in one respect. She came in at a time when film had sophisticated beauties, very sophisticated, and she was the girl next door.

I mean, you could see this if she was in a fashion show. You know, these sophisticated women would come out and she would come out. And she certainly knew how to be a model, but she did not have the hauteur and the sophistication that was called for, and she never did, but I get she didn't need it by the time I Love Lucy came along.

Lee Habeeb (00:17:00):
And you've been listening to Kathleen Brady telling the story of Lucille Ball, and my goodness, she was not deterred by those early reviews from her teachers in acting school, and she just tried to break in first with modeling and she started to gain some traction there: cigarette ads, beauty ads, but she wanted to get out there, and by goodness, by sheer force of will and personality, she did. She didn't sing, she didn't dance, And this is the golden age of Broadway. The unattractive girls were the ones who were supposed to get the laughs, not the beauties. Lucille Ball would defy all of these trends and set her own.

When we come back, more of the remarkable story of Lucille Ball here on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories. When we last left off, Lucille Ball was dating film director Al Hall, a relationship that was helping open doors for her in Hollywood. That success in that world was rarely simple. Let's get back to Kathleen Brady with more of the story.

Kathleen Brady (00:18:30):
Among Al's friends with somebody else who recognized who she was. A guy named Jack Haley who played the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz. He had a radio show and he invited her on the radio show to perform. She knew from her first days on radio that being in front of a live audience made her come alive. The response, the warmth of the audience really boosted what she was doing.

And I mean, maybe we have Grandma Peterson to thank for the fact that Lucille Ball desperately appreciated anybody she could get a reaction from, and it meant a lot to her to see somebody giving a monologue and suddenly a whole audience was erupting in laughter or tears or whatever. She finally she worked. She got her own show called My Favorite Husband.

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It's Time for My Favorite Husband, starring Lucille Ball everybody.

Kathleen Brady (00:19:32):
And she was asked to do commercials and she was to be Little Miss Muffet and she would make these faces like seeing the spider. Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet and along came a spider, and well, the audience would howl at these faces. And the people who were writing the radio show took note of this, and as their own careers came along, that would come into play and their names were Bob and Madelyn, and they eventually wrote the I Love Lucy Show. The show I Love Lucy is really the product of everything that had gone before it technologically in entertainment in the twentieth century.

You know, it's ancestors were the silents and radio and film and of course at least does a conversation piece Technicolor and her red hair. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, we'll be back next week. At the same time Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. What drew those two together? Well, Maureen O'Hara was with them when they met in the RKO cafeteria and she said it was like wow. Now. Desi Arnaz had just filmed for a film called Too Many Girls, in which Lucille Ball was also going to play a part. He was grass stained and bedraggled because he'd been playing a football player and was all banged up.

And Lucille Ball and Maureen O'Hara had just been filming Dance, Girl, Dance and they had a fight seeing the two of them.

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Come prod and I acting jealous little pig.

Kathleen Brady (00:21:26):
Where they ripped each other's clothes and hit each other in the head. And so Lucille Ball had a black eye from makeup and didn't look very sophisticated, but there was this attraction. Very soon after. A couple days later, they went to a party given by Eddie Bracken, who also had a big role in the film Too Many Girls, and people could see that there was a real attraction between these two, which was interesting because they were each engaged to somebody else at the time, Lucille Ball to her director Al Hall, and Desi to a dancer that he had worked with on Broadway.

And Eddie Bracken told me they made a bet how long it would last, and he said, I won the bet because I said six months. And of course the relationship was significantly longer lasting and more impactful than anyone knew. She wanted them to have work that they could do together so that he would not have to earn his living by going out around the country with his band. Well, Desi was a charmer and all the women were in his corner, but studio executives and certainly television executives were not. They said, who would believe a red-blooded American girl could be married to a Cuban.

So they decided to prove that they were acceptable as a couple, and they went out doing vaudeville in motion picture theaters. What used to happen in addition to getting two films, when you went to the movies, sometimes you'd get a show, particularly if the show was, you know, in a big city with the big audience. And so they went around and the audience just absolutely loved them.

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Hi Lo Hi, do you hear what happened to me in the way of the maypower tonight? No, what happened well, at first came up to me in the street.

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I said, you hadn't had a Biden? Wait, what did you do?

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Biden?

Kathleen Brady (00:23:44):
They felt that this was going to be sufficient proof for the executives. And what happened is William Paley and the others told the writers. All right, put him in the show, but just have him on camera if it has something to do with music or whatever, but just to have him there then. And so, of course, the writers Bob and Madelyn, who loved Desi, made his being a bandleader and Lucy wanting to get into show business a major theme, if not the theme of the whole. I Love Lucy show. So that's how Desi got on camera as much as he did and won the hearts of America.

I could find no record of anybody ever complaining about Lucille Ball, red-blooded American girl and her Cuban husband. I have talked to people who were immigrants at the time in this country and said how much it meant? I mean a Frenchwoman said everybody loved Desi. I thought they would forgive me for my accent. I mean, it's really heartwarming what he meant to people. It's amazing how important it was to have a Hispanic man, a Cuban on television. At that point. Several things were going on in the show. It was about love of this couple, but it was also love between friends.

You know, there were shows with people had neighbors, but the Ricardos and the Mertzes really were very involved with each other. Lucy Lucy?

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Oh?

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I Rick?

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Is Lucy back yet?

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Well? Goodbye? Rick? Come back here?

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Where is Lucy? Lucy?

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Yeah?

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Victoria Philippic call and he's coming over.

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Where is she?

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Where is she Athol? Where didn't Lucy go?

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Where did Lucy go?

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Will you stop repeating everything I say? Where did she go?

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Well?

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Did you go shopping?

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I promise not to tell.

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Did you go around?

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Sucking up local color?

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Sucking up local color?

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I think.

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Me and I could get it these little bit.

Kathleen Brady (00:26:30):
It was so funny and it made everybody so happy. It gave people joy, and it was an enormous success, So that made everybody happy behind the scenes as well.

Lee Habeeb (00:26:42):
And you've been listening to Kathleen Brady tell the story of Lucille Ball and Desi Ernez too and this magic pairing. A lot of people wondered, will anyone believe that a red-blooded, redheaded American woman would actually be attracted to a Cuban man? And there was that kind of prejudice and bias in the country at that time. And they took it out on the road. They went to Vaudeville to test it out, and there it was that chemistry was real and it was beautiful. What we learned about America there is that the country didn't care. No one cared. A lot of the executives cared. People watching didn't.

When we come back more of the story, the life story of Lucille Ball. Here on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Lucille Ball. Here again is Kathleen Brady.

Kathleen Brady (00:27:48):
Then there was the wonderful episode when they decided that they were going to raise chickens. Ricky discovered that their chicken business was resulting in eggs. It cost nine dollars apiece to produce, so he was trying to put an end to that. First Ricky he went into New York. How about Fred he's taking a nap. How you know that? It's after luncheon, before dinner. What else would he be doing? We'll get your eggs. Let's get out there already.

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What's the matter.

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Your sleeping prints.

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He's out by the henhouse chopping wood.

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He's supposed to be taking a nap.

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Can't he ever do anything right? Well, now, what'll we do?

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We gotta get these in the nest before Ricky comes home. Well, what don't we do?

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Well, we'll just have to stash him on some place and just walk casually by Fred.

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We can't stash away five dozen eggs.

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Well, we can give it a try here, open them up.

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What are you going to do? Well, I'm going to put some of my blouse.

Kathleen Brady (00:28:57):
I can get some of my hip pockets too. Simultaneously, they were going to put on a show at little Ricky's school, and Desi came home and wanted to practice the dance they were going to do. Lucy, why I thought you were in New York.

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Well, I decided to take the letter train because I want to rehearse her.

Kathleen Brady (00:29:20):
Number rehearse, And so Lucy had these eggs that he didn't want produced in her shirt.

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Come on Honey.

Kathleen Brady (00:29:35):
They had to dance, and he spun her around, spun her toward his chest, and yeah, as was supposed to happen, the eggs broke. Lucy worked these eggs which were breaking and going down her leg. She worked that so long and so hard. It was the longest laugh the show ever got. And editing it supposed he was a problem because it couldn't go on forever, but they just it went on forever.

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I know that this is a ridiculous question, what what you're doing with eggs under your shirt trying to have them?

Kathleen Brady (00:30:32):
Interestingly enough, one of the things that Desi Arnaz did not want and thought it was a ridiculous idea was a laugh track, but the studio prevailed upon him to allow this laugh track. And what is wonderful about it is the family and lots of wonderful people came to the show. Lucy's mom came, Desi Arnaz's mom came, and you can hear them laughing. The laughter of these people is existing and going on through the ages, and it's quite wonderful. One of Lucille Ball's great gifts was that she did a fabulous job of acting drunk.

It's very hard to do, and throughout her film career it had won her a lot of attention because she could do it and also be charming and be very realistic. So I think it was that great skill that inspired divided me to Vitameatavegamin episode.

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Oh Friends, I'm your body met of vegmin Girl, are you tired, run down, listless? The answer to all your problems is in this a little bit.

Kathleen Brady (00:31:59):
The more she did it, and the drunker she got, the funnier the episode was.

Archival Audio (00:32:05):
So why don't you join the thousands of heavy peppy people and get a great big bottle off Maria Meda Minjamin remember that name, maa Bada media man.

Kathleen Brady (00:32:21):
As long as she got a laugh, she did not care how she looked. The more ridiculous she could look, the happier she was because she knew it was going to get a laugh.

Archival Audio (00:32:30):
So why don't you join the thousands of heavy pebby people and got a great big bottle of her? Vitameatavegamin My.

Kathleen Brady (00:32:43):
Before they started the show. A great thing happened to Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz because she finally, after years of trying, gave birth to their little Cie Arnez. And so they did the show, and lo and behold, a couple of years into this show, Lucy got pregnant, and they were thrilled on the one hand, but I mean, those were the days when even though they were married in real life and the characters were married on the show, they had to sleep in separate beds.

So here was this woman pregnant, and when she got really big, you know, there was talk about hiding her behind a chair or whatever, and that was not going to work. So they went to the producer, Jess Oppenheimer, and he thought this could work, and lo and behold, they filmed the show. And what happened when they filmed the part where Lucy was going to tell Desi, and you can see she's already where that's actually a maternity dress. She's already wearing when she surprises him with the news. It chokes me up to even talk about it. They both started crying because it reminded them of everything they'd been through.

Oh their disappointment. She had several miscarriages before Lucie. That scene is it's wonderful and it's heartwarming, and it's very touching were having a baby. Mind, Desi had a lot of challenges and problems drinking and gambling, probably workaholism, having been forced to flee his country and coming to the United States, where instead of being the most important young man in Santiago, Cuba, he had to clean bird cages to live, and also serial infidelity. So Desi had challenges. Lucille was also difficult. If his problems hadn't been so glaring, her own workaholism would have probably caused trouble in the marriage too, So eventually this really tore them apart.

The infidelity bothered her a very great deal, but it really became impossible for her to stand when it became more or less public knowledge and got out into the sleazy press and was publicly humiliating for her, And so it got to the point where they just could not go on, and they did get a divorce, which broke the hearts of a lot of people in America. The day I went to interview her, I went to her home in Beverly Hills, and I rang the doorbell and I heard the I Love Lucy theme, and I thought, Oh, dear God, don't let this be Sunset Boulevard. What is this woman really like?

The housekeeper let me in. I sit down. I sit down for maybe three minutes, and I hear coming down, Kathleen. I'm late. I've been doing my nails. Don't shake my hand, shake my elbow. And then she comes the stairs, and you know, we sit down and we talk. I was supposed to stay forty five minutes, but she let me stay. The whole afternoon, we were winding up and I said, how much of your success do you attribute to Desi Arnaz. She said, business wise, one hundred percent. She said. We were upstairs on the phone watching I Love Lucy. That's why I was late. So it was not the doorbell.

I heard the theme from the show because she and Desi Arnez were together on the phone watching I Love Lucy. You know, they really loved each other. I think even when they hated each other, they hated each other because they loved each other. It's really it's a remarkable story because I tell you these were lives like nobody else's.

Lee Habeeb (00:37:19):
And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling by our own Madison Dericott. And a special thanks to Kathleen Brady her book The Life of Lucille Ball Boy. We learned so much about Lucille, about her husband, and a couple of years into the show that great "Lucy gets pregnant" sequence. When they share that information on the set, the two of them just cry. They've been through so much together, including miscarriages, and in the end, Desi's challenges were just well, they were just insurmountable, the drinking, the gambling.

But as we learn in the end there these two loved each other even as they hated each other and argued, and in the end Lucille understood the importance of Desi, attributing one hundred percent of her success to their pairing. The story of Lucille Ball here on Our American Stories