The Ball of Lucy, by Alexandra Billings

I remember the first time I saw Stage Door. At the time (back in college), I was obsessed with both Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers. But from the first moment the actress playing “Judith” came onscreen, I remember vividly thinking, “Wow. Who the hell is THAT.” Every time she appeared, I wanted to see more of her. She was funny, smart, and had a world of …. something else … going on in subtext. I kept thinking, “Jesus. Who is that. She is so good.” I waited for the credits, and when I saw it was “Lucille Ball”, I remember no surprise. I didn’t gasp in astonishment that THAT was the woman I watched in re-run compulsively from before I even really have a memory. No, what I remember thinking was, “Of course. She was a star already. No surprise. Of course Lucille Ball was that good.” She stood out in Stage Door, in a cast full of stand-out performances.

But knowing her eventual trajectory, then there should be no surprise that she would always “show up” to the degree that she “showed up” in I Love Lucy. Talent like that doesn’t wait for the right perfect moment when the stars align to “show up”. Talent like that expresses itself in whatever material, at whatever time, whenever it can. Talent like that “shows up” in a community theatre production, or in a major motion picture: it does not distinguish between the two. It can’t, because it is an unstoppable force. In Stage Door, it is immediately apparent – immediately – that there is something very special about that tall redhead.

Years ago, one of my best friends, Alexandra Billings, wrote an essay for a series I used to do on my site called The Expert Essays. If you were an expert in something – anything – I would post your nerdy essay. She submitted an essay to me on Lucille Ball. Having stayed with Alex and her wife Chrisanne numerous times, I can attest to the fact that Alex watches I Love Lucy episodes on a nightly basis and cannot fall asleep if they are not on.

On Facebook yesterday, Alex posted a Youtube clip with the following comment:

Ball’s brilliance lies in her ability to say everything without a word of text. Watch her Gestures after the egg disaster. She goes through everything: Horror, fear, disgust, and that great Gesture as she pretends to be casual holding her stomach dripping with egg goo. Lucille knew how to reveal her truth even under insane circumstances.

Since it was just Lucille Ball’s 100th birthday, I thought I would repost Alex’s essay.

The Ball of Lucy

Lucille Ball was not an amusing woman. By that I mean that she wasn’t witty, she wasn’t a conversationalist, and didn’t make quick quips or bon mots. In fact, one of the funniest and most revered comics of our time was rather serious. She was serious about her life, her comedy, her producing skills, and her children. When the Arnaz’s gave parties and had people over, it was Desi who was the clown. Desi entertained, thought up charades, cooked the meals, and baba-looed his way across many a kitchen floor. It wasn’t that Lucy was a sad or a mean person, she wasn’t. She was simply the polar opposite of Lucy Ricardo. A clown on screen, not in life.

Lucille met Desi while he was performing a new Broadway show called Too Many Girls. They fell in love instantly. At first sight. They were married only a year after they met. They had two children, one of them being the most famous birth in Television history, and Desi spent most of their marriage drunk and screwing other women, while Lucille spent most of it absent, working, and throwing vases at Desi. It was not a happy union.

When Lucy and Desi got the idea to do I Love Lucy as a TV show, the sponsors balked.

“No one’s going to believe that Lucy is married to a Cuban bandleader,” they said to her in a meeting.

To which Lucille replied angrily:

“But I AM married to a Cuban band leader!”

They had to do a test pilot in order to prove to the money men that America would be fine with this interracial union. The pilot was financed by the Arnaz’s personal money. They actually mortgaged the house in order to pay for the sets. And if you’ve ever seen this episode (which is very rare), you’ll notice a very pregnant Lucy underneath the clown costume in the Tropicana scene. She’s pregnant with Lucie at that time.

The pilot went off without a hitch and was the highest rated and most critically lauded show on the tube at the time. I Love Lucy was off to a brilliant start, and continued to be a number one show for the rest of its 6 year run. In fact, most stores closed on Monday nights, and Marshall Fields in Chicago would famously hang a sign on the front doors that read:

“Sorry. We love Lucy too.”

I Love Lucy was a national phenomenon. Something unheard of now, what with all the reality shows and bug eating and switching parental units that occur, it seems almost comical that an entire country would rush home to watch one TV show. At the time though, there was no such thing as cable, no internet, and only 5 or 6 channels available. So, choices were limited, but, even if the show were to run today, I have a feeling Desperate Housewives would be running for their money. And their wigs.

It’s been deduced, that I Love Lucy, which has never been off the air since its original incarnation, is being watched somewhere in the world every 6 seconds.

The couple started off the show with good intentions. Lucy thought it was a good way for she and Desi to actually spend time together, and Desi’s career was waning, and thought it a good way to get his creative juices flowing. The first year was blissful, aside from the fact that Vivian Vance (Ethel Mertz) and William Frawley (Fred) loathed each other, the scripts were good, the producing element was top notch, and Lucy hired one of the best directors in Television and one of the best cinematographers in films to help behind the scenes. This is one of the reasons for it lasting so long. The long shots, the camera movement, the ability to catch the foursome’s reactions at will all came together to help create one of the best ensemble sitcoms of this or any time.

Interestingly, Cuban-born Arnaz was the genius behind the three camera set. This revolutionized American television. When a show is produced now, there are three cameras. The audience sits behind the three which are placed strategically like a triangle in order to film all the actors’ reactions from every side. The director then sits atop, like God, in a booth calling which camera is to film when. They usually film for two days and take the best shots from each day. This was developed and dreamed up by Desi Arnaz himself. Before this, every TV show was filmed with one stationary camera in a studio without the laughter of a live group of people.

This literally changed Television forever.

With all this behind her, Lucille Ball began to work the magic that is, and was, completely hers.

When a new script came to the table, Lucy would read it over alone. She then would go to rehearsal with the rest of the cast. Desi was usually wonderful. Whatever he read at the table is how he read it for the entire week. He rarely changed. Frawley was the same way. Vance would go over and over the script, and with Lucy’s help, the two of them dissected what and why and how things worked. Why were they in the scrapes they were in? How, logically, could they get out of it? Where was the means to the end? Lucy was a sleuth. A smart actor. She never did anything without it making sense to her, and thus even the shows that border on the ridiculous, made sense to us. We could SEE how they would actually work. We understood why Lucy got into the trouble she got into.

Lucy also demanded that the Lucy Ricardo character would win. She would make bets with her husband about either being in show business, getting into the act, or buying the new washing machine, and in the end, Lucy always, always won. She never lost the bet. She always made it to the finish line. And the washing machine, although ending up in a ditch below Ethel’s apartment, was Lucy’s for a brief moment.

In rehearsal she was ruthless. A taskmaster of immoveable venture. She had been making movies for almost 20 years by the time the show happened so she was no novice to camera work and what it could and couldn’t do. She wanted to know where every light was, what it was doing, where the boom mike was located, how the sets helped the comedy. She needed to know everything in order for her props to work; her physical comedy could be carefully and meticulously choreographed. She and Vance would spend hours going over and over their physicality. This is evident by how precise she was, and thus how effortless it looked.

“Whoever said Comedy was easy was never very funny,” Lucy once remarked.

Lucy was funny.

She just wasn’t amusing.

Lucy was brave. The episode with Harpo Marx is brilliant. The last 15 minutes of the show is done in complete silence. Think of the last time anyone has seen a show where no one said a word.

Lucy was a clown. Her ability to throw on a mustache and simply become a different person by mere facial expressions is classic clowning. This simply isn’t done anymore. TV shows aren’t brave enough or smart enough to allow an actor to make such a simple choice. Most of the time, the characters on TV shows nowadays aren’t believable enough anyway.

Lucy was ridiculous. Her Vitametavegamin commercial is classic insanity. The fact that she gets drunk and is selling cough medicine is so utterly over the top and so beautifully and succinctly played, it’s fall down funny. Interestingly, this is one of the few episodes where Lucy makes several script mistakes yet they’re all left in because the scene was going so well, the director didn’t dare interrupt her. Watch it again; see if you can catch her flubs.

I love Lucy because she stood for no crap. She was tough. Everyone said so. Many hated her. As she got older she got tougher. And meaner. Yet, she was a woman in business at a time when women wouldn’t dare go near business. She had to be tough. She knew what worked, she knew how to do what she did, and she did it better than anyone else. She demanded professionalism, and when she didn’t get it she could turn into a monster. She was a woman making up the rules as she went along, and she did the best she could. She was the first female head of a major studio ever in entertainment history. She owned Desilu productions, which used to be RKO studios. She ran the entertainment world for a few years. She didn’t have time for incompetence.

But I liked her because she made me laugh.

She made me happy.

I’ve watched Lucy every night before I’ve gone to bed since the invention of the VCR.

She is the comedienne to which all other would-be comediennes aspire to be. She was a walking, falling, bumbling, tripping contradiction. She embodied what was funny and embraced what was tragic. She was the epitome of the American housewife, and the poster girl for the female business women. She was Lucy. And I love her.