The Ball's A-Rollin' from Modern Screen magazine, April 1939 by Elisabeth Badger AFTER FIVE halting years, the strange but happy career of Lucille Ball is beginning to gather momentum. You all know Lucille.  She's that tall, lanky girl with the sullen expression who looks vaguely like Ginger Rogers, wears clothes with distinction, takes pratt falls on request, and delivers lines with such stinging effect. You know her now as "Annabel," of the pert series in which she devastatingly pokes fun at the movie queens whose ranks she is about to join. You've known her in past spasms of notoriety, such as the time fashion-expert Bernard Newman pronounced her Hollywood's smartest woman, and dressed her in his own creations to prove it; the year her rumored engagement to Broderick Crawford kept Mother Helen Broderick busy issuing denials; her small triumph in "Stage Door;" and the several occasions when her marriage to director Al Hall seemed imminent. But between these flare-ups of publicity there have been long intervals when it seemed to Lucille that even her own studio didn't know she was there.  Since her first day in Hollywood, she's been waging a private battle for recognition, with weapons sometimes comic and crude, sometimes painstaking and intelligent, but--at long last--successful. "Annabel" has turned the trick.  From now on Lucille is destined for more leading roles and fewer black and blue spots. "What they don't realize," she said, happily settled over an order of cracked crab in the pleasant gloom of Lucey's restaurant, "is that though I've been around so many years, I've never really had any experience.  I've still got a lot to learn about acting.  The 'Annabel' series has helped a lot, but my chief function at the studio before that was taking pratt falls when nobody else would do it." Looking at her--small young face, deep blue eyes, and brooding mouth appearing intermittently beneath pulled down hatbrim and the year's longest feather--you might easily have mistaken her for a full-fledged movie star.  But it took only a few minutes to discover the pleasant fact that she's still an ordinary mortal.  As yet untainted with the upper-bracket idiom of rubies, racing stables and investments, she talks comfortably of bringing the family out by bus, of Chautauqua County picnics at Elysian Park and other such homely matters. She's a realist, a strange mixture of dry humor, serious ambition, disillusionment and optimism, this veteran of the screen who hasn't had any experience.  Lucille did more acting in her school days than she's done during her three years at RKO.  Her career began before the mirrom at home in Jamestown, N. Y., and flourished at school where, with her mother's help, she produced and directed plays for which she made the costumes, scenery and even the tickets and posters herself. At the age of eleven, la belle Ball toured the surrounding countryside in one of her productions and became a local celebrity.  At sixteen, she looked up dramatic school advertisements and chose John Murray Anderson's American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York, where Bette Davis was then the star pupil. "I stayed there a year and a half," said Lucille, "but I thought there were too many lessons--music, singing, dancing--and too little acting.  So I decided to get myself a real job on the stage. "I got jobs all right.  I was always chosen in chorus line-ups because I was tall and conspicuous.  But I just didn't have the knack of getting along with the other girls.  Nothing was said, no one was actually nasty.  They just froze me out, that's all.  After I'd been forced out of several shows that way, I went home." FOR several years she alternated between running home to mother, and running away from home to get back to Broadway. "I got a job in a road company of 'Rio Rita' and rehearsed for six weeks--without pay, of course.  Then someone announced that all the show girls had to be ballet dancers, so they fired us.  That finished me.  I decided the stage was a gyp, and that I wanted a job that paid regularly every week.  So I got one as a model in a clothing house.  Only $25 a week, but I knew I was going to get it.  Those people are still my friends.  I see them every time I go to New York. "When I learned a little more about how to wear clothes and how to talk and was beginning to know my way around New York, I got a job as a model at Hattie Carnegie's and stayed there for three year's, doing photographic modeling on the side. "In the meantime, I fell in love with a little guy who owned a silk business.  He's very well known around New York.  He was a pretty nice fellow.  Anyway, I'd never known anyone else, so I was contented. "I almost married then.  But I used to see girls pushing baby carriages on Riverside Drive.  You know, those black ones that look like you expect it to rain any minute.  I hate those things!  I think they were what decided me.  So I planned to go away on a long vacation. "Just then I was asked to make a test for a show girl spot in Eddie Cantor's 'Roman Scandals.'  If they'd had a chance to see me in a bathing suit, they never would have picked me.  I was so skinny then.  Fortunately by the time I got there all the girls had been chosen, but one backed out at the last moment, so they signed me without a test, and shipped us right out to California. "When Samuel Goldwyn saw us lined up in our bathing suits he looked at me and said, 'My God, where did you get that?'  But it was too late to do anything about it.  I played in 'Roman Scandals,' and then we were all signed for a year. "I began figuring out ways of making myself noticed.  They were constantly lining us up for inspection by somebody.  Gosh, how we hated it!  I used to stuff things inside my bathing suit to make bulges.  Then just as they'd get to me in the line-up I'd make some fresh crack.  One day I had a piece of bright red paper and I tore it up and stuck little pieces all over my face and neck and arms and legs and stood there in the line-up, looking as if I had some awful disease. "I kept on clowning around the set and gradually people began to notice me.  Eddie Cantor took me aside and said, 'Lucille, you have a gift for comedy, a sense of timing that's priceless.  Why don't you break away from this and try to act?' "When Walter Winchell made his first picture 'Broadway Through a Keyhole,' he gave me the same advice.  Lowell Sherman directed a picture over there and gave me more encouragement than anyone else.  But I was afraid. "All this time I wasn't learning much about acting, but I was learning a lot about myself.  When you have to stand up against a bunch of girls like that it makes you analyze yourself and how you compare with the others in brains and beatuy and personality.  I had a chance to study a lot of big stars at close range, too.  That gives you confidence.  You see them acting up and you think, 'Well, if these great people really behave like that, I can't be so bad after all.' "At the end of the year, some of the girls had married and some had found boy friends and mink coats.  A few of us found ourselves sitting up in the same little apartment where we'd started out--and we didn't know whether we were right or wrong." Evidentally the answer was "wrong," for Lucille left the Goldwyn lot and joined the stock company at Columbia, playing bits at $75 a week.  With all that money to throw around, she decided it was time to send for he family. "My younger brother was already out here," she said, "but from the first moment I saw California I felt like I wanted to share it with as many people as I could.  Why, there's a whole colony of people from Jamestown living in downtown Los Angeles, who came out here just because of things we wrote back home.  Anyway, I sent for my mother and grandfather to come out on the bus.  Just before they arrived, I lost my job. That didn't deter la Ball.  She borrowed $500, rented a little white house that she knew her mother would love and borrowed a huge limousine in which to meet the bus.  When the welcome was over, she started work as a dress-extra.  Mammy and grandpappy had to be fed, no matter how her pride hurt. "But it turned out for the best," said Lucille--and that's a phrase that keeps recurring in her conversation--"because as a result of that I got a job as a mannequin in 'Roberta,' and that led to my present contract. THE studio, however, was even more apathetic to her talents than the rest of the world had been.  She abandoned her childish gags and studied acting in earnest, with Ginger Rogers' mother as her teacher.  She worked hard to improve her face, her hair, her make-up.  She acted in plays put on by Mrs. Rogers in a little theater on the lot, and got an offer to appear in a Brock Pemberton play.  But just as she was eagerly leaving for New York, the studio cast her in "The Girl from Paris," with Lily Pons. "They gave me the part because the girl had to take a pratt-fall," said Lucille, undeceived, "and I just did it." George Kaufman promised her a part in the New York production of "Stage Door," but just then Mary Astor's diary made the headlines and Mr. Kaufman took to the woods, Lucille's contract with him. The third time, she made it.  Two years ago she went east for a role in "Hey Diddle Diddle," played out of town, got grand notices and was all set for the New York run of the play when she was recalled for the picture, "Stage Door." One more wallop was waiting for Lucille.  When she walked into the office, Director Gregory La Cava took one look at her and said, "No, that's not the girl I wanted."  And that was that. "He had taken a dislike to me, that's all," she explained.  "I tried for weeks to get the part, but he wouldn't even give me a chance.  At last I gave up hope, and one day I went to the hairdresser and had my hair dyed black, hoping it would change my luck.  I was under the dryer and my hair was still wet when I got a call to come to the studio to help another girl make a test for the part I wanted.  I was so burned up, I didn't even put on a dress--went over in a smock, with my hair wet, and read Ginger's part in the test.  I was just as nasty and rude to Mr. La Cava as I could be.  I was ashamed of myself afterwards, but that's the way you have to treat him, I guess.  The next thing I knew I was given the part." So it all turned out for the best.  Lucille's career is rolling along.  Her mother and brother and grandfather and cousin Cleo are still living in the little white house. "I lived with them for a long while," she said, "but when Cleo came out there wasn't enough room, so I moved into an apartment.  So you see we have a very happy little clique, all to ourselves." On the subject of romance, she was typically forthright.  "I've been going with Al Hall for two years," she started without croquetry, "but I'm not anxious to get to get married now.  I'm too interested in my career.  I'm just beginning to get somewhere and I'm very happy.  And besides--those black baby carriages still haunt me." Pages 47 (above) and 72 (below) from Modern Screen, April 1939 Vintage Lucy Articles | Main | swing4243@yahoo.com