I Love Lucy: The Untold Story (7 page)

Our time slot couldn’t have been better—immediately following Arthur Godfrey, the number one show in the country. Nobody had to search around to find us. At nine o’clock on Monday night, October 15, 1951, Godfrey asked his audience to stay tuned, and we popped right onto most of the sets in the country. Talk about luck.

At the time, none of us had the slightest notion that we were making what would become a landmark series. We were all just in a tough job, and we were trying to do it the best way we knew how. We knew that in Lucy we had an unbelievable talent, but we were still totally unprepared for the public’s response.

Congratulations came pouring in from all quarters as soon as the first show aired. The show’s popularity kept growing and growing until it just got completely out of hand. It seemed that I had been wrong about who the “I” in
I Love Lucy
was—it wasn’t just Desi, but everyone else who tuned in as well.

A
S WONDERFUL
as the entire cast was,
I Love Lucy
was, without question, a “star” piece. The entire project rode on the radiant talent of one woman. The Lucille Ball of the 1950s was an incredible, stunning performer. In every sense, she was a star.

Most comedy writers consider themselves lucky if a star realizes 60 percent of the values they’ve written into a script. Lucy, somehow, returned about 125 percent. Unexpected qualities appeared out of nowhere. Little, human, ordinary, recognizable values. Inflections that were exactly the way your sister or your mother, or the lady bus driver used to sound. She was everywoman. Ask her to be a tough showgirl and you got back a broad who simply could not look and move like that unless she’d been pumping out bumps and grinds in a burlesque house for twenty years. Ask her for royalty and she became a queen. And she kept astounding us that way every week.

The audience never had the feeling that they were watching her act. She simply
was
Lucy Ricardo. And if you looked carefully, you would marvel that every fiber in the woman’s body was contributing to the illusion. Did Ricky catch her in a lie? She wouldn’t be just a voice denying it. Her stance would be a liar’s stance. Defensive. There would be a telltale picking at a cuticle, or a slight, nervous jerking of an elbow, or a finger brushed against an upper lip, which is the
first place you feel the perspiration of anxiety. Her hands, her feet, her knees, every cell would be doing the right thing. This was an exceptionally talented young lady. I don’t know enough superlatives to do her justice.

Lucille Ball was a hard-nosed, dedicated professional—about as different from her TV character as anyone could possibly be. To me, Lucy Ricardo represents the childish factor that’s still a part of every adult. In identifying with her, the audience can vicariously enjoy exercising their own childish impulses, petty curiosities, and foolhardy but self-gratifying escapades.

People used to ask me whether Lucille Ball was funny in real life. And I had to tell them no, not funny in the way that Lucy Ricardo was. But she could come up with things that were remarkable in their ability to evoke laughs. I never heard her suggest any dialogue—she wasn’t a writer, as such. But within her character, she had the ability to throw in little universally humorous things .

Lucy always did every stunt that we wrote for her, usually without question. Occasionally, though, she took some convincing.
In my favorite
I Love Lucy
episode, “L.A. at Last,” when William Holden visits the Ricardos’ hotel room with Ricky, an embarrassed Lucy disguises herself with kerchief and glasses and a long putty nose. According to the script, as Holden lit her cigarette, the end of Lucy’s nose would go up in flames.

It took me all week to convince Lucy that her
real
nose wouldn’t catch on fire.
Our makeup man, Hal King, used a putty nose that wouldn’t burn and placed a candlewick in it to ensure her safety. Still, Lucy was extremely nervous about it all through the rehearsal and during the final shooting, and we all held our breath until the scene was over and in the can.

When her putty nose caught fire, the script called for her to remove it and dunk it in her cup of coffee. Lucy ad-libbed and picked up the cup with both hands, dunking the end of her putty nose while it was still attached. It was an inspired moment, entirely hers.

Photo captions (next two pages):

1. Karl Freund and I watch as makeup man Hal King gives Lucy a putty nose designed to catch fire when William Holden lights her cigarette in “L.A. at Last.”

2. William Holden and Desi Arnaz react as Lucy
’s nose goes up in flames.

One of her most famous routines was when Lucy Ricardo did a commercial for a mythical health tonic called “Vitameatavegamin,” containing
23 percent alcohol. In the episode, Lucy manages to rehearse the commercial perfectly for Ricky’s benefit, but after a few more rehearsals (each requiring her to drink some of the stuff) she gets totally bombed, with hilarious results.

The night that we filmed the show, I was watching her performance from my usual vantage point in the control room at the top of the bleachers. Lucy had the audience rolling in the aisles with her progressively drunken readings of the commercial pitch. I could barely stop laughing long enough to press the talk-back button and deliver my line of dialogue as the off-stage “audio man,” telling Lucy to “go ahead” on her fourth time through. After Lucy, on her fourth reading, drunkenly explained, “It contains vitamins, meat, megatables, and vinerals,” she was supposed to tell everyone to take a tablespoon after every meal. And then she would try pouring a spoonful from the bottle for herself. She had done it just this way in the three previous readings. This time she mistakenly skipped all the way to the end of the commercial, leaving out the whole bit with the bottle.

For an instant I thought we would have to retake the entire scene. But then Lucy, without missing a beat, stopped just before the very last line and went back and reconstructed what she was saying,
while
we were filming. And she did it in a way that made perfect sense and allowed her to do the bottle routine and all the other material that she had left out. I sat there watching in utter amazement.
Only Bob and Madelyn and I knew what Lucy had done.

JOE. Hey, Ross.

DIRECTOR. Yeah?

JOE. The audio man wants to get a level on her voice.. 

DIRECTOR.  Oh.....       

(Lucy stares dazedly at Joe.)

DIRECTOR.  Miss McGillicuddy?

LUCY. Huh?.

DIRECTOR. Would you mind doing it just
once
more, please?

LUCY. Oh, no sir. It’d be perfectly all right. 

DIRECTOR.  Thank you.
(Calling.)
Okay in the control room?

JESS.
(Over intercom.)
Yeah, go ahead. 

DIRECTOR.  Now we’re going to time it this time. You ready?
(He sits down in the director’s chair, and clicks the stopwatch.) …
Go!       

LUCY.
(Smiles vacantly at the director for several seconds.)…
You know, you’re awfully nice.

DIRECTOR. Thank you.  Would you go ahead, please?

LUCY. …Well—I’m your Vita—vidi— vigeevat girl. Are  you tired, run down, listless?  Do you pop out at parties  — are you unpoopular?   
(Pause.)
Well, are you? 
(Pause.)
The answer to
all
your problems is in this li’l ole bottle.
(She pats the bottle.)
Vita—meeta—vegamin.
(She checks the label to make sure.)
That’s it. … Vitameatavegamin contains…vitamins and meat and metagables and vinerals. 
(Hiccups.)
So why don’t you join the thousands of happy, peppy people and get a great big bottle ofuh…Vita-veedy-vidi-meenie minie moe.
(During this speech she’s waving the bottle around so some of its contents spill out onto the floor.)
…
I tell you what you have to do. You have to take a whole tablespoonful after every meal.
(She holds up the spoon. She has a lot of difficulty getting the spoon under the neck of the bottle, keeps pouring so that it doesn’t hit the spoon but goes on the table. Finally, she puts the spoon down on the table, takes the bottle with both hands and pours it into the spoon. She puts the bottle down, looks at the spoon to see that it’s full, beams back at the audience, turns back to the table, picks up the bottle and drinks out of it).
…
It’s so
tasty
, too.
(She puts the bottle down, notices the spoon again, picks it up and puts it in her mouth, then takes it out and licks the back of the spoon. Then she puts down the spoon, runs two fingers through the liquid on the table and then licks it off her fingers.) …
It’s just like candy.
(She picks up the bottle again.)
…So everybody get a bottle of
(She pats the bottle.)
…this stuff.
(She winks drunkenly at the camera, then leans on her right elbow, resting her cheek against the bottle in her right hand.)
 

DIRECTOR.  Miss McGillicuddy?

LUCY.  Hmm?

DIRECTOR. Are you all right?

LUCY. Oh, I’m feel fine, but ya know it’s
hot
in here!

•   •   •

Even though the entire world loved Lucy, everyone on
I Love Lucy
didn’t love everyone else. For one thing, Vivian Vance couldn’t stomach Bill Frawley. Actually, they got along quite well at first. But before long Viv became upset at the fact that people so readily accepted her lovely young self as the wife of “that old man,” as she called him. Alt hough her believability in the role was actually a testament to her talent, she felt deeply insulted, thinking that she would be better cast as Bill Frawley’s
daughter
.

When Bill got wind of her complaints, he was offended, and retaliated by suggesting lines for himself that characterized Ethel as having “a figure like a sack full of doorknobs” or some other of a long list of tried and true, if unoriginal, insults. I had to be called down to the set many times to settle arguments between the two of them. Usually it was because Viv had suggested some script changes or additional bits of business. Because it was Viv who had done the suggesting, Bill would flatly refuse to cooperate, often retreating to his dressing room in a pout. But underneath his gruff exterior, Bill was really a teddy bear, and he and I had a good relationship. I would listen to his complaints and then ask him to “do it for me.” And he would usually agree, but he always took pains to remind me “I’ll do it for you, but not for that bitch.”

We were careful to make the Mertzes like the Ricardos in some ways, yet very different in others. Lucy and Ricky were comparative newlyweds—married perhaps eleven years, and still having a relatively starry-eyed love affair. Fred and Ethel, while still in love, had been married a long time and knew each other backward and forward, and didn’t much like the view from either direction.

Photo caption (next page):

Bill and Vivian on set of “The Great Train Robbery.” Even though the entire world loved Lucy, everyone on
I Love Lucy
didn’t love everyone else.