Hollywood Loved LUCY
With ambitions to become an actress, Lucille Ball entered a dramatic school in NewYork City in 1926, but while her classmate Bette Davis received raves, the school complained in a letter to Ball’s mother that she was “too shy.”This only motivated her, and she was soon seen in comedies such as Look Who’s Laughing (1941) and The Fuller Brush Girl (1950), and as a sidekick to the Marx Brothers in Room Service (1938).
As she worked her way up Hollywood’s ladder, radio welcomed her with open arms. First appearing as a supporting player on Jack Haley’s The Wonder Show, Ball graduated to guest appearances on The Abbott and Costello Show, Duffy’s Tavern,The Kraft Music Hall and The Lux RadioTheatre.
Her radio appearances were not always for laughs, as she appeared multiple times in dramatic roles on radio’s greatest series of mysteries, Suspense. One of the Suspense episodes costarred her real-life husband Desi Arnaz.
In the summer of 1948 she accepted the role of Liz Cooper, a zany housewife who found herself facing comical situations, in the radio series My Favorite Husband. Her character’s husband, George Cooper, was played by veteran actor Richard Denning. In 1950, CBS offered to adapt the popular radio program to television.
Unable to convince network brass to let Arnaz play her husband on the television series, she instead performed a vaudeville show with Arnaz that was so popular with audiences that she was given creative control over her own situational comedy series, I Love Lucy. Here, she and Arnaz pioneered the three-camera technique now considered the standard in filming television sitcoms. She also became the first woman to own a television studio when she headed Desilu Productions.
Paid $50 a week for her role as an uncredited actress in Top Hat (1935), Ball now graduated to $3,500 per episode for I Love Lucy along with part ownership of the mega-series.
Behind the camera, the relationship between Ball and Arnaz was all business until they retired to their homestead between seasons. When they were first married in 1940, Arnaz had to give his wife-to-be a ring from a drugstore because all of the jewelry stores were closed. She kept it for the rest of their marriage. In 1960, Ball and Arnaz shocked fans when they divorced just two months after filming the final episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour. The two remained close friends until his death in 1986, even though both would go on to remarry. Both made it clear in multiple interviews that each was the love of the other’s life.
Ball attempted to revive her television career — twice — with The Lucy Show (1962-1968) and Here’s Lucy (1968-1974). Neither program found the same success as I Love Lucy, and after the latter program concluded, Ball was quoted as saying, “It was a hell of a jolt to find myself unemployed with nothing to do after more than 25 years of steady work.”