Ethel Mertz
[played by Vivian Vance]: “What's the matter with him?”
Lucy Ricardo
[played by Lucille Ball]: “Oh, he got mad at me while I was driving
through the Holland Tunnel.”
Ethel: “Ricky let you
drive through the Holland Tunnel?”
Lucy: “Well, he didn't
mean to. I got caught in the stream of traffic and I couldn't stop.”
Ethel: “But you drove
all the way through the Holland Tunnel!”
Lucy: “Halfway
through.”
Ethel: “What do you
mean, ‘halfway?’”
Lucy: “Well, Ricky was
late for rehearsal, and I saw an opportunity to... How was I supposed to know
there wasn't room to make a U-turn?”
Ethel [astonished]:
“You made a U-turn in the Holland Tunnel? Oh, brother, that must-a been
somethin'.”
Lucy: “Yeah. The
policeman said the cars were backed up all the way to East Orange, New Jersey.”—I
Love Lucy, Season 4, Episode 11, “Lucy Learns to Drive,” original
air date Jan 3, 1955, teleplay by Jess Oppenheimer, Madelyn Davis, and Bob
Carroll Jr., directed by William Asher
Lucille Ball
died 35 years ago today at age 77. She made two other long-running series in
the 1960s and 1970s, The Lucy Show and Here’s Lucy, but they were
really just variations on I Love Lucy.
Lucy Ricardo might have been a madcap redhead, but the
woman who created her was unbelievably shrewd—as seen in the fact that she
became the first woman to own her own studio as head of Desilu Productions. To
her we owe not just her own much-imitated sitcom, but a sci-fi series she gave
the go-ahead to put into production: Star Trek.
Starting out in RKO Pictures in the late 1930s, Ball
envied the deference with which everyone at the studio regarded Maureen O’Hara.
At that point in her career, Ball had to content herself with being known as
“Queen of the B Movies.”
With her move to television in the early 1950s with
husband Desi Arnaz—and her huge success with their joint vehicle, I Love
Lucy—Ball acquired a new nickname: “The First Lady of Television.”
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