Saturday, August 6, 2011

The Lucille Ball Centennial

Lucille Ball in a publicity still for THE BIG STREET (1942).
Lucille Desiree Ball was born on August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York to a telephone lineman and his wife. Her beginnings were humble but one hundred years later, she is an icon, one of the most widely recognized and well-loved women in the history of show business. Her image and influence is everywhere. She will always be with us.

Like millions of others, I was first introduced to Lucille Ball through afternoon reruns of her hit sitcom I Love Lucy. She was funny, always getting into trouble and making herself look ridiculous. I think we watched her everyday.

I remember the moment when I first discovered she was a redhead. Ricky referred to her in one episode as a “crazy redhead” and I was surprised. I suppose I’d never really given the matter of her hair color much thought before. After all, I’d only ever seen her in black and white. Was this common knowledge? I called out to my mom. “Did you know that Lucy had red hair?!” “Yes,” she replied, in a tone that confirmed for me that this was, in fact, common knowledge. “She was famous for it.” It was a revelation to me. Of course, she was a redhead. It suddenly made sense. This lady wasn’t an ordinary blonde or brunette. She was a redhead. She was different.

It’s strange that this memory has stuck in my mind over the years. But it has. Lucy is one of the very few performers that has always been somewhere in my consciousness. I don’t remember a time where I wasn’t aware of her. She’s just always been around. And although I’ve seen pretty much all of her sitcom episodes, she still makes me laugh. The familiarity of her shows is comforting. It’s like visiting an old friend. I love her for that.

Lucy really struggled to reach the top. Her success certainly didn’t come overnight. She climbed slowly but surely through the ranks, progressing from fashion model to chorus girl to bit player and finally to featured roles. Lucy appeared in 55 movies between 1933 and 1951. She knew all about hard work, appearing in all kinds of roles in a wide variety of pictures, mostly B movies. She bounced around the different studios, always looking forward to the next opportunity and hoping for the break that would finally catapult her to the top of the Hollywood heap. During these years, she appeared in a lot of forgettable movies (as well as a few good ones) but she gained valuable experience and really honed her craft.

Lucy fixes her makeup on the set of Kid Millions (1934).

The studios quickly noticed that Lucy really excelled in comedy. She could deliver one-liners with a sense of effortlessness and ease and, perhaps most importantly, she was willing to do the broad style of slapstick comedy that a lot of other actresses weren’t. Lucy was fearless in that regard. She didn’t mind looking like a fool. Although she regularly played a wisecracker on screen, she was actually quite serious in person. She wasn’t naturally funny. She just had an innate talent for playing comedy. Maureen O’Hara, her co-star in Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), recalled working with Lucy in her autobiography.
By the time dance classes were finished, Lucille and I were inseparable chums. We were a lot alike, two tough dames. She wasn’t hysterically funny off camera, more of a wisecracker with a quick wit and a short fuse. Lucille wasn’t a star yet, but she made no bones about the fact that she planned to be one. She was very ambitious and calculating where her career was concerned. – Maureen O’Hara, ‘Tis Herself

Despite this determination to become a star, Lucy still hadn’t found her place in the industry. She was certainly well-known but she hadn’t truly shined yet. She was finally given the opportunity in August 1942, when she signed a contract with MGM, the biggest and most prestigious movie studio in Hollywood. It liked to boast that it had “more stars than there are in heaven,” and Lucy hoped to become one of them.

MGM’s resident hair stylist Sidney Guilaroff first suggested that Lucy become a redhead. He knew that it would set her apart from the other starlets and accentuate her unique beauty. Her first MGM film, the musical-fantasy DuBarry Was a Lady, was also her first in Technicolor. With her flaming red hair, Lucy glowed on screen. If audiences hadn’t paid much attention to her before, they certainly did now. A year later, Life magazine published a feature article detailing her appeal and dubbing her “Technicolor Tessie.”
Lucille Ball is a colorful girl. The combination of her blue eyes, strawberry-blonde hair, coral-rouged lips and fair skin has led Hollywood cameramen, make-up artists and other technicians to award her the title of ‘Technicolor Tessie.’ Playing with words, they say she is technically perfect and colorful from any angle. Subject most discussed is the color of Miss Ball’s hair. Descriptions range from carrot-topped, apricot-colored, strawberry blonde and just plain orange to the highly polished, brassy interior of Tommy Dorsey’s trombone. – Life, August 9, 1943.

A color photograph of Lucille Ball from the August 9, 1943 issue of Life.

While Lucy’s tenure at MGM certainly helped her career, it didn’t prove to be as successful as she had initially hoped. After her contract expired in 1946, she began freelancing at other studios. She starred in her own radio comedy show, My Favorite Husband, which was a hit with audiences. But television was becoming increasingly popular and, in 1950, CBS asked her to star in a television version of the show. Lucy had other plans. She was willing to make the transition to television but only if she could co-star with her real-life husband, Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz. CBS reluctantly agreed and I Love Lucy was born. It premiered in October 1951 and was an immediate ratings hit.

Lucy and Desi pucker up for an I Love Lucy publicity still.

I get the impression that people think Lucy was washed-up when she finally found success on television and that simply isn’t true. Her movie career may have slowed down a bit, but she was still quite famous and relatively wealthy when I Love Lucy premiered. Lucy turned 40 years old in 1951 and she must have realized that her chances of reaching the top as a leading lady in movies were now considerably diminished. A shelf life has unfortunately always been imposed on an actress’s screen career, both then and now. As a woman ages, it becomes increasingly harder to get good roles. Going into television was a natural progression for Lucy. It allowed her to continue her career as a star, on her own terms, and in a new medium.

Of course, I Love Lucy was a tremendous success. It was rated the #1 television show for four of its six seasons and won multiple Emmy Awards, including two for Lucy. Audiences fell in love with her and elevated her to global superstardom. Jess Oppenheimer, the show's creator, producer and head writer, attributed the its massive success to its star.
Of course, the most important piece of magic was Lucy herself. Her radiant talent, her wonderful combination of beauty and clown, her sure touch for the human quality, which found recognition in every segment of the viewing audience, were the sparks that gave life to the entire series. She was truly one of a kind, and I thanked my lucky stars that our paths had crossed when they did. – Jess Oppenheimer, Laughs, Luck--and Lucy

Lucy and Desi Arnaz divorced in 1960 but her television career continued. She starred in two more hit sitcoms, The Lucy Show and Here’s Lucy, before leaving television in 1974. Her status as a living legend was already firmly cemented. However, despite these later successes, it’s the original, I Love Lucy, that remains most treasured by fans.

Lucy smoking a cigarette in the 1960s.

The impact that I Love Lucy has had on the world cannot be overemphasized. It not only helped define the medium of television in its earliest years but has also become an important piece of American pop culture exported around the world. Through reruns, Lucy has been introduced to successive generations of TV audiences around the world and continues to find new fans today.

Lucille Ball died at the age of 77 on April 26, 1989. Tributes started pouring in from around the world as soon as the news of her death reached the public. People magazine summed up what audiences loved about Lucy quite nicely:
Viewers adored Lucy—no TV performer before or since has been so dearly loved. We loved her Raggedy Ann looks: the big, red, floppy, bow-tie mouth, the baby-blue, sunny-side-up eyes, the ha-ha hairdo that topped her off like a giant orange dandelion. We loved her raucous guffaw that whacked the ear like a seal's bark, and her high-low voice that sometimes squeaked like Minnie Mouse and sometimes rasped and rattled like roller skates on rough cement… Above all, we loved her for being her all-too-human, indefatigably silly self: a Don Quixote in pin curls who tilted hopelessly but hilariously at the male establishment, a beguiling caricature of all those wistful hausfraus of the '50s who dreamed of conquering the great big world out there but time and again wound up bitchin' in the kitchen. - People, May 8, 1989.

Perhaps the most moving expression of what she means to the world, however, came while she was still alive. Sammy Davis, Jr. lovingly paid tribute to Lucille Ball in 1984 with these words:
Be proud, Lucy, of your legacy… The sun never sets on Lucille Ball. All over this worried world tonight, nations of untold millions are watching reruns they also watched the first time around. Joy requires no translation. God wanted the world to laugh, and He invented you. Many are called, but you were chosen. Clown you are not. All of the funny hats, the baggy pants, the mustaches and the wigs, and the pratfalls and the blacked-out teeth—they didn’t fool us for one minute. We saw through all the disguises, and what we found inside is more than we deserve. - Sammy Davis, Jr.

How true.

Happy 100 Birthday, Lucy.

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