Comic, singer known for Broadway, clubs, ’60s sitcom
KAYE BALLARD | 1925-2019
LOS ANGELES — Kaye Ballard, the boisterous comedian and singer who appeared in Broadway musicals and nightclubs from New York to Las Vegas and starred with Eve Arden in the 1960s TV sitcom “The Mothers-In-Law,” has died. She was 93.
Ms. Ballard died Monday night at her home in Rancho Mirage, California, after a fight with kidney cancer, her friend Marguerite Gordon said Tuesday.
“The Mothers-In-Law,” in which Ms. Ballard starred with Arden (of the 1950s sitcom “Our Miss Brooks”), aired from 1967 to 1969. It marked a high point in a career that began when Ms. Ballard was 12 and lasted into the 21st century.
She was on hand last week when a documentary on her life and career premiered at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.
“She was so excited to be able to tell her story,” said Dan Wingate, the film’s director. “She was really anxious for young people, especially, who are going into the arts to understand the full breadth of a life in the arts, the ups and downs.”
“The Mothers-In-Law” was set in a Los Angeles suburb and featured its stars as women who become thorns in their married children’s lives, with comedic results influenced by the screwball style of “I Love Lucy.”
Desi Arnaz, who starred with wife Lucille Ball in that classic sitcom, produced and directed 24 episodes of the Ballard-Arden show. The “I Love Lucy” team of Bob Carroll Jr. and Madelyn Pugh Davis were the show’s creators and lead writers.
Ms. Ballard made a mark in every form of show business except movies. She did appear as a secondary player in a few films, but her high-octane personality may have been too potent for the big screen of that era and its more restrictive portrayals of women.
Movie stardom was her first dream, as it was for others of her generation, filmmaker Wingate said, and he wanted the documentary to be seen on the big screen to help fulfill that goal.
Ms. Ballard was born Catherine Gloria Ballota to Italian immigrant parents in Cleveland, Ohio, on Nov. 20, 1925, according to her 2006 memoir “How I Lost 10 Pounds in 53 Years.” (She noted she had always said she was born in 1926.)
Ms. Ballard’s first real break came when she was singing in a Detroit nightclub, The Bowery. Comedy bandleader Spike Jones dropped in one night and quickly drafted the young singer into his musical contingent. In 1945, she moved to New York and sought work in theater, appearing on Broadway.
Ms. Ballard began working on TV in the early 1950s, becoming an in-demand performer on network variety programs.
Her nightclub act played in first-class venues including the Blue Angel in New York, Mr. Kelly’s in Chicago, the Flamingo in Las Vegas and the hungry i in San Francisco.
She changed her name to Kaye Ballard when she entered show business. On the advice of a numerologist, she switched to Kay in midcareer.
“He said my luck would change if I dropped the ‘e’,” she told a reporter in 1983. “It did. It went steadily downward.”
She eventually returned to being Kaye. Determined to become an actress, she would not be discouraged by a high school teacher who rejected her for a drama class, concluding she “wasn’t pretty enough,” nor her parents, who didn’t understand the business.
Ms. Ballard was engaged four times but never married.
“I didn’t want to,” she told The Associated Press in 1999. “I could have, many times. But I just wanted a career too much. I was smart enough to know, if you get married and have children, that’s it. Being Italian and raised as a Catholic, I took children seriously. Maybe I made a mistake. Who knows?”
She purchased her Southern California desert home from Arnaz in the early 1940s.
“It’s a stone’s throw from Gerald Ford,” she said of her presidential neighbor in a 1981 interview. “When he moved in, he upped my property value. It made me think of becoming a Republican.”