Lucille Ball wasn’t a natural comic genius. Her true brilliance lay in recognizing that fact, and surrounding herself with people who made her look like one.
“I’m not funny. What I am is brave,” she once said. In truth, Ball was funny—watch one of the comedies from her hit-or-miss film career and you’ll get a sense of her own dry sense of humor. But as Aaron Sorkin’s new film Being the Ricardos (streaming now on Amazon Prime) makes clear, Lucille Ball was not the Lucy Ricardo of I Love Lucy, a zany housewife getting into scrapes with best pal Ethel Mertz. At the initial table read for each episode of the CBS series, Ball couldn’t get a laugh. And over and over in the film, Nicole Kidman’s Ball says, “I’ll get it by Friday.”
Ball always did, in part because, from the start, she turned to people who knew more. After a decade as “Queen of the B” movies at various studios around town, Ball’s film career still hadn’t snapped into focus the way it did for her peers. Still, a few people recognized her potential, among them pioneering silent film star Buster Keaton, who spotted Ball’s knack for physical comedy when she got a laugh with a well-timed bite of a celery stalk. Keaton had invented a comedic persona that found him remaining expressionless even as he flung himself into physically demanding—if not wildly dangerous—stunts, then faded into semi obscurity, finding work as a gag writer at studios around town. Under the mentorship of both Keaton and Ed Sedgwick, Ball would begin to assemble the beginnings of her own comedic style.
As her film career stalled, Ball found success with the radio series My Favorite Husband. When it premiered as a weekly program in 1948, the series starred Ball and Richard Denning as a well-off society couple. Ten episodes into the first season, the writing team was replaced by Jess Oppenheimer, Bob Carroll Jr., and Madelyn Pugh, who promptly rewrote the characters to be a comfortably middle-class couple who, as the tagline went, “live together and like it.”
By the time CBS approached Ball about adapting My Favorite Husband to TV, she’d learned a few things about herself as a performer, including the reaction she was getting on a weekly basis working with Oppenheimer, Carroll, and Pugh’s scripts. Ball also knew that this was her shot at finally settling down with husband Desi Arnaz, who was frequently on the road touring with his band. So if CBS wanted Ball, it would have to concede to the couple’s demands—including that Arnaz play Ball’s husband, despite the studio’s reluctance to put an interracial marriage on TV. In the meantime, they’d tour the country with a new act and prove just how willing American audiences were to see them as a couple.
For the tour, Ball rehearsed for hours with both Keaton and Pepito Perez, known as Pepito the Clown. Together, the two men concocted an act for Ball based largely on Pepito’s own, involving a tramp costume and a giant cello. The tour was a smash and, when CBS finally deigned to allow Ball and Arnaz to film a pilot, they recreated the sketch. The sequence eventually found its way into the first season as part of Episode 6, “The Audition.”
By that time, Oppenheimer, Carroll, and Pugh had been repurposing scripts from episodes of My Favorite Husband and Vivian Vance and William Frawley had joined the series as Ethel and Fred Mertz—only after Ball’s original choice, My Favorite Husband alum Gale Gordon, had turned down the role of Fred due to a prior commitment. I Love Lucy went on to make major entertainment history, both onscreen and behind the scenes, breaking down barriers regarding everything from onscreen pregnancy to how TV shows were filmed at the time.
Ball would go on to make TV history a few more times with three more series. But even as the set-ups and character names changed, a few things remained steadfast: Ball was always the star; the Lucy character’s last name always had “ar” in it; and every show included Vance, Gordon, and scripts by Oppenheimer, Carroll, and Pugh.
From the first episode of I Love Lucy through six seasons each of The Lucy Show and Here’s Lucy, Ball never starred in a series that did not involve all five. Even the short-lived Life With Lucy in 1986 found Ball luring Gordon out of retirement and Davis and Pugh writing five of the 13 scripts filmed.
A few years earlier, while appearing on The Merv Griffin Show, Griffin asked Ball if she’d ever return to a weekly series. “I don’t think so,” she replied. “Gale is around, but my Vivian is gone. And, well, let’s not talk about it. There’s no sense in trying to top what we’ve done.” Ball, the woman who was instrumental in inventing sitcoms, couldn’t picture herself returning to the art form she pioneered without her stalwart team. That’s not funny. That’s generous.
Mark Peikert is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. His first novel, Jagged Sophistication, is out now.
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