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| From 1947 to 1951, Ball played a wacky wife of a straight-laced banker on the popular CBS radio program, My Favorite Husband. When CBS approached her about taking the show to television, Ball set a condition: she would only participate if her real-life husband, the Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz, played her TV husband. Ball and Arnaz had eloped in 1940, after meeting on the set of RKO's Too Many Girls, but after over a decade, their incompatible work schedules--Ball stayed in Hollywood making movies while Arnaz toured with his band--had taken a toll on the marriage. Their solution: start working together on a TV comedy based around the unlikely marriage of a redheaded housewife and a Cuban bandleader. While CBS executives were initially skeptical about public acceptance of such a couple, Arnaz and Ball won them over after they went on a successful nationwide tour with their vaudeville act--including a medley number called "Cuban Pete-Sally Sweet"--and put up their own money to film a pilot of the show. When I Love Lucy premiered on October 15, 1951, it immediately became one of the most popular shows on television. In its six-year run, the show never ranked lower than third in the Nielsen ratings--it was No. 1 for four of those years and won more than 200 awards, including five Emmys. While all four principal characters, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo (Ball and Arnaz) and their neighbors, Fred and Ethel Mertz (William Frawley and Vivian Vance) became beloved fixtures in tens of millions of homes, it was Ball who won over the world with her tempestuous, disaster-prone Lucy. Perfecting her own brand of physical comedy, she represented a new kind of female character--goofy yet sexy--that TV had never seen the likes of before. The continued appearance of the very-pregnant Ball raised more than one traditional eyebrow, especially after the ground-breaking episode on January 19, 1953, when a then-record 44 million viewers tuned in as Lucy Ricardo gave birth to Little Ricky on air--the same night that Ball gave birth to her second child, Desi Jr. Apart from its content, the show also changed forever the way TV comedies were made, paving the way as the 30-minute situation comedy increasingly replaced the once-dominant hour-long comedy variety show. As head of the couple's production company, Desilu, Arnaz pioneered a new way of producing TV shows, shooting each episode of I Love Lucy on film, by three cameras, in front of a live studio audience, so that the final product could be rebroadcast any number of times instead of preserved only on a fuzzy kinescope. Although Arnaz initially reserved all rights to these shows to Desilu, he eventually sold them to CBS, allowing the couple to buy their own studio, the former RKO. By 1957, after 179 episodes, both Ball and Arnaz had grown exhausted by the show's hectic taping schedule, and their always-tumultuous marriage was again in trouble. For the next three years, they made a series of hour-long specials including The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour. |
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