LUCILLE BALL & VIVIAN VANCE
THE ICONIC COMEDY DUO TURNED TO EACH OTHER DURING THE TOUGHEST TIMES OF THEIR LIVES
The complicated truth behind their sisterly bond.
Vivian Vance and Lucille Ball’s madcap antics on I Love Lucy were just as entertaining to them as they were for the audience. “Lucille and I used to watch our own shows and rock with laughter,” Vivian raved of their on-screen chemistry as Lucy and Ethel. “Before shooting, Lucille and I would do advance planning. ‘What if I step on your head when I climb down from the upper berth? Suppose we both get so busy crawling around on the floor that we back up into each other under the table?’ Sometimes,” she added, “it took no more than talking about it to send us into stitches!”
There was far more than just comedic synergy between the two. “[We] were just like sisters,” Vivian insisted. And as two powerful, strong-willed women, they could fight like sisters, too, but, “We could never stay cross with each other for very long,” Lucy said. Over the years, their bond became unbreakable. “They were always there for one other, 1 million percent,” Michael Z. Stern, a longtime friend of Lucy’s, tells Closer.
“They trusted each other immensely, and they had each other’s backs.” When it really counted, the co-stars’ rivalries fell away and they helped each other get through painful personal trials, including their failing marriages and Vivian’s battles with mental illness and cancer. “In the end,” adds Vivian’s close friend Paige Peterson, “those women loved each other more than anyone in the world.”
TENSE BEGINNINGS
Their roller-coaster relationship began in 1951, when Desi Arnaz cast Vivian in the role of Ethel on the spot after seeing her in a play in LA. Vivian, then 42 and an accomplished stage and film actress, had little interest in the offer. “Nobody in their senses would choose to go into television,” she said. “Take a full-time job in a medium that didn’t amount to anything? The strain involved wasn’t worth it.”
She eventually reconsidered, but her first meeting with Lucy was icy. “You don’t look like a landlady,” Lucy said upon seeing the attractive co-star Desi, known for his wandering eye, cast on his own. Instead, Lucy hoped for “a dumpy, fat woman in a chenille bathrobe and furry slippers with curlers in her hair,” as she told Vivian.
While she and Vivian were both young and pretty, Lucy unquestionably held the power in the relationship. “Vivian always said that as great of a friend as she was, she always knew that Lucille Ball wrote the check,” Michael says, and she had no problem openly complaining if she thought Vivian looked too good on set or was a few seconds late hitting her mark.
With things off to a rocky start, Vivian worried that her years-long battle with depression — she suffered a breakdown in the late ’40s — would jeopardize her new job. “I was scared to death when we did our first show,” she recalled. That’s when her co-star first stepped in as a friend. “Lucy sensed I was scared and went out of her way to set me at ease,” Vivian said. “She got me laughing so hard before my entrance that I didn’t have time to remember that I was so frightened.”
Vivian’s mental health issues continued throughout the series’ six-season run, and she sought professional help. “Being the second banana wasn’t easy,” Paige tells Closer, nor was dealing with Lucy’s territorial nature; she had it built into Vivian’s contract that her supporting player could be written out of any script at any time.
Eventually, Lucy appreciated all that Vivian brought to the show. “Vivian, like me, was a perfectionist,” Lucy said of the woman many called one of the best script doctors in the business. And in 1954, the first year the Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series Emmy award was given, Vivian won. “Desi and Lucille were screaming with excitement,” Vivian said. “[They] hoisted me to my feet and pushed me out of my chair.”
With their friendship on more solid ground, Lucy stood by Vivian as her third marriage, to actor Philip Ober, was failing. “God! That man! He was terrible,” Lucy once said. “He used to beat her up. Loved to embarrass her. One day Viv came to work with a shiner. That did it. I think I said to her, ‘If you don’t divorce him, I will!’ ”
Philip tried intimidating Vivian to keep her from growing too close to Lucy, but it didn’t work. “They’d be in makeup or getting their hair done, like two ladies in a beauty salon, chatting away!” Keith Thibodeaux, 66, who played Little Ricky, tells Closer. “They definitely shared their problems and supported each other.”
After I Love Lucy ended its run in
1957, Lucy convinced Vivian to join her on The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour. It was during that time that Vivian and Philip divorced. “I Love Lucy provided me with a backbone,” she said. “Working with Lucille, seeing all the strength she had, all this was good and healthy.”
But sometimes Lucy needed her best friend’s strength — and nobody knew Lucy the way Vivian did. When Lucy and Desi’s marriage crumbled in 1960, Vivian was there for her in a way that everyone noticed. William Asher, an I Love Lucy director, once recalled, “When Lucy had her problems, Viv was consoling her so much that I don’t know when Lucy had the chance to console Viv on her divorce!”
The duo teamed again on-screen for The Lucy Show in 1962, but they grew apart after it ended in 1968. Vivian never warmed up to Lucy’s new husband, Gary Morton, and when Vivian married John Dodds in 1961, the couple retreated to Belvedere, Calif.
THEIR FINAL ACT
The two actresses eventually reconnected, and Vivian guest-starred on her pal’s 1977 special, Lucy Calls the President. While working on that program, Vivian complained about pains in her leg and hip, causing concern for Lucy, who convinced her friend to see a doctor. Vivian — who’d battled breast cancer in 1973 — was soon diagnosed with bone cancer.
Wanda Clark, Lucy’s assistant, was there when Lucy visited Vivian during her final year. “Vivian was very ill, and it broke Lucy’s heart to see her,” Wanda tells Closer, “but she went. She was sad to see her in pain and suffering.”
Despite years of on-set rivalry and their friendship’s ups and downs, Vivian’s face lit up when Lucy came for her final visit. “Did they have problems? Absolutely,” admits Paige, who was with Vivian at the time of Lucy’s visit. Still, “They worshipped each other, and Viv was truly Lucy’s best friend in the whole goddamned world up until the last moment.”
“They spent the afternoon telling stories, hugging and loving each other,” Paige reveals to Closer. “It was a sisterhood of love and respect. They spent many hours alone together. But when Lucy left, you could tell it was an extraordinarily painful goodbye.”
When Vivian died on Aug. 17, 1979, at the age of 70, it shook Lucy deeply. “Whenever Lucy spoke about Vivian from then on,” Michael says, “she always broke up in tears. She lost her companion. Honestly, she thought she could never go back to work again because she lost her best friend, her strength. I mean, they were like Laurel and Hardy. They worked that closely with one another.”
On or off camera, the two had grown to depend on each other for everything. As Lucy once put it, “Viv was sensational. I [enjoyed] every move that Viv made. She was something.” — Reporting by Amanda Champagne-Meadows and Ilyssa Panitz
“[Lucy and I] fought like sisters and made up the same way.”
— Vivian