People
"Lucy: The Life Behind the Laughter"
August 14, 1989
Last Updated: August 14, 1997
Formatted by: Ted Nesi
Scanned and Provided by: Garth Arrik Jensen
She is at rest now surrounded by marble statuary and acres of velvet
lawn, her place marked by a simple green plaque with the bronze
lettering MORTON, and beneath it LUCILLE BALL 1911-1989. But the silence
here at Hollywood Hills's Forest Lawn Memorial-Park seems odd;
tranquillity, after all, was never Lucy's style.
On Sunday Aug. 6, Lucy would have been 78, but she isn't around to
celebrate. It has been four months since death stilled that
high-spirited, infectious laugh of hers. Instead, on the occasion of her
birthday, here are recollections from some of those who knew her best -
who knew her love, her loyalty and her leather-tough dedication to
getting things done her own way. Not everyone loved Lucy, but most did,
and even those who didn't usually came away with a grudging respect for
the prickly genius that fueled one of the greatest comedic talents of
our time.
Desi Arnaz Jr., 36, Lucy's son, now living in Boulder City, Nev., is the
national spokesman for author Vernon Howard's nonprofit New Life
Foundation, a self-development organization based in Ojai, Calif.:
While I was growing up she tried to keep our lives simple in the midst
of what was going on, tried to let us have a real life. I grew up at the
studio behind the camera, climbing up ladders and running around the
soundstage. But I understood right away about the difference between
real life and television. I wasn't the one who was confused - other
people were. They thought I was Little Ricky. But I knew Fred and Ethel
didn't live next door - Jack Benny did.
I just saw her as my mother. She wasn't totally a disciplinarian or
taskmaster. Since Dad was no longer there [after 20 years, Lucy and Desi
divorced in 1960], she felt she had a responsibility to the show. She
had a lot of old-fashioned values that she got from her mother. My
parents always said there's a lot more to life than how much money you
have or how much you impress people.
During the days I was doing drugs, they tried to help me. My father
had a drinking problem; my mother was a person just like anybody else.
When I went through drug and alcohol recovery seven years ago, they went
through it with me. Sometimes people in the public eye don't want to
reveal anything going on inside them in front of even one other person,
and it was extraordinary that they did it. It got better for us after
that. We could talk to each other more easily.
We were really very close in those later years. Before her death,
we were able to say everything we needed to say to each other.
All along she said, "What's important in this life is to be happy
and to enjoy your life and have a good relationship with somebody." She
wanted to have a happy life. She did the best she could.
Charles Pomerantz was Ball's publicist for 38 years:
She was absolutely gorgeous in the late '30s, and she worked in the
garment district in New York as a model. They didn't make much money;
she'd date these salesmen. She'd suggest restaurants where they served a
lot of rolls. While nobody was looking she'd stuff a couple into her
pocketbook.
In those days they sold two doughnuts for a nickel, so for
breakfast she'd go to the Mayflower Donut shop on Broadway and stand
behind a guy she thought was a one-doughnut man. She'd slide onto his
stool as he got up, eat the other doughnut, and that would be her
breakfast.
About that time one of her girlfriends told her that they were
looking for Goldwyn girls out in Hollywood. She got packed in no time at
all. Once she got there, Sam Goldwyn took a liking to her. And she never
came back.
Ginger Rogers worked with Ball in the 1937 movie Stage Door:
She was always very vocal, so everybody on the set knew what she
liked and didn't like. Katie Hepburn was very quiet. Lucy was in awe of
her.
Eve Arden also co-starred in Stage Door:
At rehearsal, director Gregory La Cava passed out the scripts
around the table to the cast of ingenues and said. "Anyone who finds a
funny line, just read it." We were left to our own devices. I'd found a
couple that I thought were funny, so I said, "Well, if no one's going to
take these, I will. Lucy looked at me and said, "She's the one we have
to watch out for."
Ann Miller starred with the then unpaired Lucy and Desi in 1940's Too
Many Girls:
Desi was teaching me how to rumba for the movie.
[Producer-director] George Abbott invited me to go ballroom dancing one
night to El Zarape, a popular L.A. restaurant where the rumba was
fashionable at the time. I said to Lucille - who wasn't the cuckoo girl
then; she was a glamour girl - "Why don't you and Desi come along with
George and me?" They did. It was their first date. From that time on,
the romance just clicked.
Tom Watson, Lucille's publicist for the last three years:
After Too Many Girls was over, Desi met her at the airport in New
York and asked her to marry him. They eloped to Connecticut, but they
had to do it in a hurry because Lucy had a show in Manhattan that night.
Then she went with him on his orchestra tour to Detroit, where they
spent their honeymoon. She kept all the souvenirs from the hotel, the
stationary, matches and all that.
Keith Thibodeaux, 38, played Little Ricky on TV's I Love Lucy:
I can see why their marriage didn't make it. Desi was really a
great guy when he wasn't drinking, but as kids we'd definitely stay away
from him when he was drunk. Once I was sleeping over when he heard that
the tutor had called Desi Jr. spoiled. We were awakened by a fistfight.
That night, Desi came down and caught the guy talking to a girl in the
living room and just beat him, badly. Desi Jr. and I hid in the maid's
quarters. Then there was the I time he fired his gun into the air when
he saw someone sitting on his beach property.
Ann Sothern met Ball in the 1930s:
Like all great comics, she had a sad streak. When Desi was drinking
a lot, she'd call me in the middle of the night and say, "Get the
priest. Do something, Ann, do something."
Edie Adams, wife of the late Ernie Kovacs:
Ernie and I were the last guests on the I Love Lucy show, and by
that point Desi and Lucy weren't speaking to each other. Someone would
come over and say, "Miss Ball would like you to do so-and-so, Mr.
Arnaz."
Jack Carter was best man when Lucy wed nightclub comic Gary Morton in
1961:
After her divorce she was going out every night with stage door
johnnies, rich guys, boring people. She loved fun, so we brought Gary
around. We went to some restaurant on Third Avenue in New York, and they
just kept staring at each other. For days she kept calling him "that
kid, what's his name, that guy, you know..." They were inseparable after
that.
Lillian Briggs Winograd, who sang the 1955 hit "I Want You to Be My
Baby," was Lucy's closest friend in her final years:
She'd had a lousy situation with Desi's carousing and gambling for
18 years, and after the breakup she was going to leave the country and
raise the children in Switzerland. That was going to be the end of it.
She wanted out of Hollywood because everyone was always saying, "Poor
Lucy!" on account of the way Desi had been. Then she met Gary, and she
said the only thing she could remember, from the first minute they met,
was that he made her laugh.
He would always call to tell her where he was and ask, "Can I come
home now?" It was everything Desi never did. She never dwelled on it,
but she'd mention how the police used to drop Desi off at the back door
so it wouldn't get into the newspapers.
Charles Pomerantz: She counseled a number of actresses when they got
their divorces. She told them, "If you're in the public eye, the
greatest problem you're going to have is that the men you attract are
going to feel castrated." She could have had anybody. I saw Gary Morton
on the set one day and asked her, "What's going on?" She said, "He needs
me."
Betty White, Lucy's friend since 1956:
The day that Desi died [in 1986] she and I were doing Password
together. She was being real funny on the show, but during a break she
said, "You know [her language was always salty] it's the damnedest
thing. Goddamn it, I didn't think I'd get this upset. There he goes." It
was a funny feeling, kind of a lovely, private moment.
Michael Stern, 28, a Los Angeles furniture salesman who briefly worked
as Lucy's personal assistant and was considered by Ball to be her
biggest fan:
In London this past February I was able to slip up to Queen
Elizabeth at a public tree-planting ceremony in Kensington Gardens. I
said, "Back home in the States I work for Lucille Ball," and the Queen
smiled and said, "Tell her I said hello and asked how she was doing."
After I got home, I told Lucy about that. She said, "The Queen knows who
I am?" She called Gary and said "Guess what! The Queen told Michael to
say hello to me!" She was as excited as a kid.
On the other hand, once [in 1986], she was doing Joan Rivers's show
with Nancy Reagan. One of Mrs. Reagan's entourage came into the dressing
room and said, "Mrs. Reagan would like to see you now, Miss Ball." Lucy
looked at her and said, "Okay. Send her in."
Jack Carter: Directing Lucy was like trying to flag down the Super Chief
with a Zippo lighter. When we got to air on the last show we did, she'd
restaged the whole thing without telling me: The bank was over here, the
chair was this way. You had to really be a stage Door cop for her. Keep
the traffic moving and stay out of her way. Every good director who
lasted with her, like Jack Donahue, knew how to roll with the punches.
When she yelled at him, he'd turn to the crew and say, "Did the redhead
say something? Did she yell at me? I could have sworn I heard her say
something."
Keith Thibodeaux: You had to walk softly around her sometimes, if she
wasn't feeling well that day or something. There would be a tenseness in
the air. She had a temper. She would slam doors. Lucy had a big heart
and could be a joy to be around. But I was always pretty much in awe or
scared of the lady, really.
Madelyn Pugh Davis, who along with Bob Carroll made up Lucy's
longest-running comedy writing team:
She always had people on the show she'd worked with before; she had
the same help at her house for years. She had dogs that were 14 years
old. At the ranch she and Desi had outside L.A., she'd fall in love with
the chickens and wouldn't kill them. She had the oldest chickens in the
valley.
She kept us a long time, too: part loyalty, part self-preservation.
When we were going out of town, she'd say, "Are you taking separate
planes?"
Tony Randall was a guest on Lucy's show in the 1970s:
A lot of people found her very, very tough to work with. She bossed
everybody around and didn't spare anybody's feelings. But I didn't mind
that because she knew what she was doing. If someone just says, "Do
this!," it's awful if they're wrong. If they're right, it just saves a
lot of time. And she was always right.
Joan Rivers appeared in a Here's Lucy skit:
I was working with her one time when she stopped the shot and said,
"The camera angle is three inches off." They said, "Oh, no, Lucy, it's
not." And she said, "Measure." It was.
Actress Mary Wickes was Lucy's friend for 30 years:
She had looks, and boy, did she know how to take care of them. She
gave all of us those facial steamers, which we were supposed to use.
Vivian Vance used to say that Lucy was a frustrated hairdresser.
Shelley Winters worked with Ball on The Lucy Show:
We were on camera, and we needed a certain kind of table in a
hurry. The art director said, "Well, I'll try to find one, Miss Ball,
but it will take quite a while." Lucy said, "Go down the second aisle,
in the fourth bin, up on the second shelf."
William Asher directed five years of I Love Lucy:
In the famous candy-factory show, Lucy chases a fly and hits the
woman next to her, who then shoves chocolate in her face. The woman, not
a professional actress, was having a hard time actually plastering the
Lucille Ball with chocolate. Finally, determined, she really nailed
Lucy, damn near broke her nose. Lucy was fine, though. She just played
it up.
Rose Leiman Goldemberg wrote the 1985 TV movie Stone Pillow, in which
Lucy played a homeless bag lady:
On Stone Pillow we used "actor rats," about a dozen of them. But
she didn't like them. She'd say, "These are sissy rats. I want real
ones.
She also had this idea she wanted to call a dog over and hug it,
but the dog they hired didn't want to come. In the final cut, she just
grabbed that dog and pulled him down. She was gonna have him whether he
wanted to come or not.
Milton Berle knew Lucy for nearly 50 years:
She always remained in character on her show, no matter what
happened. But one time she dumped a chefs salad on my head. The
mayonnaise was dripping off my nose, the thousand-island dressing was in
my hair with the ham and turkey and swiss cheese. And she broke up. She
couldn't stop laughing.
Danny Thomas starred with Lucy on an I Love Lucy episode called "Lucy
Makes Room for Daddy":
I was playing the old doctor, and I had to examine her. Every time
I'd move in close to examine her eyes or tonsils, she'd whisper, "You're
in my shot." She had me laughing so hard we had to stop working for an
hour.
Lillian Briggs Winograd: Give her an ashtray, and she could do 20
minutes of shtick; she was one of the greatest comedians of all time,
but she could not tell a joke. She used to laugh at anything, though,
and she was a good practical joker. She used to love scaring Gary. She'd
creep up on him or go outside and yell in the window when he was taking
a shower.
One time I took her to the dentist to have two molars extracted.
She came out bleeding, and her mouth was filled with cotton. I said,
"Come on, Lucy, we'll go home and take a nice nap." Through the cotton
she said, "I wanna play backgammon." I said, "We're not playing
backgammon. You're bleeding, for crissakes!" And she said, "Just one
game." I said, "Okay, just one game." She rolls her dice and it turns
out they were the two molars. She was in pain, bleeding, but all she
wanted to do was pull that joke on me. She was hysterical.
Phyllis McGuire started palling around with Lucy back in the early '50s:
A few years ago, she and I took her grandson, Simon, to see The
King and I in New York, and during intermission people kept coming up
and saying, "Oh, Lucy, we love you!" I asked how it felt be called Lucy.
She said, "It always gives me a thrill. I don't know how I could even
answer if they called me Miss Ball."
Ann Sothern: When I first knew her, she had a little apartment some
funny place somewhere and she asked me to come over and help her get it
together. I said, "Lucy, we need to get some curtains," and she said. "I
just can't afford it." I knew damn well she could, so I just went out
and bought her some. She always said I was the most extravagant person
she ever knew.
Jack Carter: She was a little tight with a buck. At her daughter's first
wedding, out by the pool, catered, it was almost like a Lucy sketch.
She'd just sold Desilu studios [for $17 million] - but she had cold cuts
and paper plates. She had no knowledge of the correct, chic thing to do.
Lillian Briggs Winograd: Nannies never took care of the children. She
never went anywhere without the kids, even on the set. She had a lot of
problems with Desi Jr. because of dope and every thing. She never gave
up on him. He finally called her and said, "Mom, help me," and she
described that as "a call for help in the middle of the night." She'd
start to cry that this boy who'd missed two-thirds of his life, who
didn't even remember what had gone on, had been able to come back. She
was so proud of him.
Keith Thibodeaux: My dad worked at Desilu, so Lucy was his boss. She
would call and say, "I want Keith to come over and play with Desi Jr.
this weekend." Sometimes I'd cry, but my dad worked for Lucy, and that
was that. Even so, there was a time when I was basically Desi Jr.'s only
genuine friend, or at least one of the very few.
One time around 1961, Desi Jr. and I took a chocolate cake on top
of the house to eat it, because he was on some sort of diet. Lucy found
out about it and banned me from the house for several months. It was
harsh.
Carol Burnett first met Lucy in 1959:
Lucy came to visit me in the hospital when my second daughter was
born and brought me the present of a hand mirror. She told me to look in
the mirror, and then she said, "That's the most important person in your
baby's life right now - and don't you forget it."
Betty White: When the grandchildren came along, you'd think nobody else
had ever had them. She couldn't get over how young Lucie was with her
children. She'd say, "My daughter, who was in show business, has turned
into Mother Earth."
We were at a party one night, and she dragged me aside and said,
"What the hell am I going to do if I lose my mother? How do you handle
it?" When she lost [her mother] Dede [in 1977], she sort of took my mom
over. Every year on Dede's birthday, she would send my mom a basket of
violets.
Shirlee Fonda, whose late husband, Henry, once dated Lucy in the early
days:
She was always calling or coming over to see him when he was ill.
And after he died, she was one of the ones who always included me in
social gatherings. When I gave that first party after Henry's death, I
said, "Lucy, you have to be here and help me get through this." And she
was there for me.
Lillian Briggs Winograd: Around the time she was making Mame [1974], she
was skiing, and someone sideswiped her, breaking her leg in four places.
That was the start of the decline of a comic genius. She lost her
lateral movement because of the four pins in her leg. That eliminated
the physical comedy. She would always say, "I miss my work."
She played a lot of backgammon. She'd wake up early in the morning,
have her breakfast in bed, read, go through all her mail in bed until
noon. Then she'd come downstairs, and we'd play backgammon - the whole
afternoon. Maybe once in a while she'd say, "You want to go for a swim?"
so we'd do that for an hour, tops. Then we'd go back to backgammon.
Sometimes she'd go to a beauty parlor during the day, but she hated
shopping. Once a week, we'd go out to dinner. But on Sunday, when the
help was off, Lucy would get in the kitchen and start making things her
mother used to make, like green tomatoes she'd dip in bread crumbs and
fry. She used to love that.
Rose Leiman Goldemberg: When we shot the Stone Pillow in Greenwich
Village, people would see her and say, "Didn't that used to be Lucille
Ball?" They were surprised that she was an old woman. They thought of
her as being young.
Ann Sothern: She called me on the phone when she did her last show [the
disastrous Life With Lucy in 1986, which folded after two months]. She
was crying. "Ann, I've been fired. ABC's let me go. They don't want to
see me as an old grandma. They want me as the Lucy I was.
It was hard for her not to work. She brought so much happiness to
people, but I don't think she really knew how much people loved her.
Lillian Briggs Winograd: The failure of her last TV show hurt her more
than anything, but not for herself. She kept saying, "My God, these
people are going to be out of work." One headline in an L.A. newspaper
read THE QUEEN IS DEAD. That hurt her more than anyone can know. She
kept saying, "I should never have done it." The effect was awful. She
couldn't understand why her comedy didn't work anymore.
She wanted people like me around, anybody who could be up and
bright and keep her from getting depressed. She'd get up from the middle
of a backgammon game to straighten a vase if a flower wasn't the way she
wanted it. Difficult? Yeah, she was tough. But at the point in her life
that I met her, she deserved to be tough.
Brooke Shields worked with Ball on NBC's 1988 Bob Hope Birthday Special:
She was doing a wonderful dancing and singing sketch, but there
hadn't been enough time to rehearse, and it was difficult for her to
match her steps to the orchestration. I saw her as a little girl, then -
frustrated, embarrassed that she was having trouble with the steps.
Lee Schiller, Lucy's personal assistant during filming of the Stone
Pillow:
On one visit to her house, she showed me her leather-bound copies
of the I Love Lucy scripts, and we cried. She said there are things in
life you can make happen, but love wasn't one of them. Love and death
were the things you could not control.
Joan Rivers: As far as her private life goes, I think she was one of the
luckiest women alive. She lived a long, full, happy, successful life.
Her children are fine. She had grandchildren. She wasn't forgotten. She
was happily married. She was adored in her profession. And she was rich.
I'd settle for that right now - God, where do I sign? Gilda Radner was a
tragedy. Lucille Ball? Terrific life, wonderful life.
Gale Gordon, who co-starred with Lucy in three of her television shows:
No one worked harder than Lucy. There weren't any 10 men who could
keep up with her.
So many things are difficult to bring to life when you talk about
them. The way her eyes sparkled when she said something funny . . . the
way her red hair just stood on end . . .
Carol Burnett met Ball's daughter and husband on April 24:
Little Lucie and Gary were both encouraged by the progress Lucy was
making and how she was joking and up in the hospital. [Two days later,
on Burnett's 56th birthday, Lucy died.] I don't think a day has gone by
that I haven't thought of her. I don't think any public figure -
politician or movie star - has ever attracted the public like this. This
was like having someone in the family die. Anybody alive who had TV felt
Lucy was part of the family - I don't know if that was or ever will be
duplicated.
Michael Stern: The last time I saw Lucy was in early April, right before
she got ill. No one saw her in the hospital except family. But her
private nurse said that she went to bed that Tuesday night feeling good,
knowing that the world loved her. God gave her that extra time so she
would know she was still loved. I think she needed that.
-Susan Schindehette, Suzanne Adelson, Doris Bacon, Leah Feldon and Lee
Wohlfert in Los Angeles
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