TV Quote of the Day (‘I Love Lucy,” After Lucy’s First Driving Lesson)

[Ricky Ricardo staggers away, dazed, after he and Lucy return from her first driving lesson.]

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.”

This Day in TV History (Birth of Desi Arnaz, ‘I Love Lucy’ Star and Industry Innovator)

March 2, 1917— Desi Arnaz, a musician, bandleader, director, and producer who made as large an impact behind the scenes as he did in front of the camera with wife Lucille Ball on the Fifties hit sitcom I Love Lucy, was born in Santiago, Cuba.

Arnaz arrived at his mega-success at a time when Hispanics were often not accepted in mainstream American society. (In fact, when he found out, at the peak of his success, that a hotel wouldn’t admit him because of his ethnicity, he opened nearby the 42-room Desi Arnaz West Hills Hotel, complete with a restaurant featuring his own personal recipes.)

When he instructed the chief writers of I Love Lucy on how he wanted his character portrayed (no flirtation with other women, never falling for Lucy’s schemes), he ended up protecting his own dignity. But intentionally or not, he was also ubverting American prejudices about Latinos. With Lucy and Desi, it was the Latino who was the sober, responsible one in the relationship, not the Anglo. (More problematic: the wife remained subservient.)

The rise to fame and fortune of Arnaz is emblematic of the striving immigrant success story. Forced out of Cuba with his family as a teenager, he was forced at one point to clean canary cages in his adopted country. In time, he became a member of Xavier Cugat’s band, then head of his own 16-member ensemble, before co-managing Desilu Productions, a sprawling television empire with multiple shows on the air—and even a merchandising sideline.

While the public chuckled at Desi’s slow burn on the air, it couldn’t begin to appreciate that he was, as Lucy put it, “a genius with keen instincts for comedy and plot.” She continued, in her posthumously published memoir, Love, Lucy: “He has a quick, brilliant mind; he can instantly find a flaw in any story line; and he has inherent good taste and intuitive knowledge of what will and will not play."

At the height of his fortune, much of this came undone—partly through the cumulative stress of juggling so many balls in the air, partly because of the personal issues present in his marriage to Ms. Ball from the start: his philandering, heavy drinking, and gambling. After nine years, Lucy and Desi were finished as an on-screen couple--and so was their marriage.

While Ms. Ball moved on with her life, enjoying a longer-lived marriage to comedian Gary Morton and establishing a friendly relationship with her ex, some of the pain of the breakup lingered. “I married a loser before…,” she told Barbara Walters in 1977. “He was brilliant. But he had to lose…Everything he built, he had to break down. And he still claims he’s the same way.”

Neither Lucy nor Desi apart reached the artistic heights they had scaled together. She had three sitcoms, two of them quite successful, but on the air she lacked him as a foil, and off the air she could not lean on him to do the tough but necessary work of negotiating with network brass and production crews. He could be counted on to be shrewd (shooting the show on film ensured that it would have enough technical quality to rerun forever in syndication) and innovative (his adoption of simultaneous shooting from multiple cameras remains par for the course to this day for sitcoms).

Desi’s last show, The Mothers-in-Law—one I recall watching as a child in the late Sixties—featured two top-notch comic actresses, Eve Arden and Kay Ballard, who exuded a Lucy-and-Ethel vibe, carried over by the sitcom’s two chief writers, who had served in the same role on I Love Lucy. As executive producer and director of 23 episodes, Arnaz kept a strong hand on production. But the show only lasted two seasons.

A heavy smoker, Arnaz died of lung cancer at age 69. For a full immersion in the work of this TV pioneer--along with his peerless wife, co-star and business partner--you owe it to yourself to take a trip up to Jamestown, N.Y. to see the Lucy Desi Museum and Center for Comedy.

This Day in TV History (Jean Arthur Sitcom Fades Out, With Its Star)

Dec. 5, 1966—The 12th first-run episode was the final appearance, on the big or small screen, for one of the brightest but most tormented lights of Hollywood’s Golden Era. The Jean Arthur Show, by most accounts a formulaic sitcom, was unworthy of the talents of Jean Arthur, the raspy-voiced but endearing actress who made the likes of Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Cary Grant, and Joel McCrea appear to best advantage.

You can find many of Arthur’s approximately 80 sound and silent films on TCM, and they are among the best that Hollywood produced in the late Thirties and early Forties: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Easy Living, Only Angels Have Wings, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Talk of the Town, and The More the Merrier. Though not a classic beauty, she possessed a vivacity and a froggy voice that made Depression-era audiences warm to this spunky career girl.

Robbie Fulks summed up perfectly how classic-movie aficionados like me have felt about this star: “She could light one cigarette/And smile while the world caught fire.” The country music star titled his tribute after the actress’ name, but he could have, with perfect justice, used the refrain of his song: “God’s Jean Arthur.”

Yet Arthur, a notably shy and private woman who abominated Tinseltown’s publicity machine, reacted with relief when her contract with Columbia Pictures expired in 1944. She made only two films thereafter: Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair and George Stevens’ Shane. After the latter was released in 1953, she became something of a recluse.

Fast forward to the mid-1960s. Lucille Ball, who cited Arthur as an inspiration for her own comic style, tried to cajole her friend into appearing on her first post-Desi Arnaz series, The Lucy Show. Astonishingly, though, Arthur’s agent somehow talked her into doing an entire series focused on her, not just a guest appearance on someone else’s. After a surprisingly successful “tryout” on Gunsmoke meant to gauge how well she adjusted to the grind of television, the green light was given for her own show.

The premise must have sounded perfectly fine to Arthur: a widowed lawyer who continually astonishes her partner, her straitlaced son, with her unconventional ways. The profession of that career would have appealed to an actress who specialized more in career women than housewives. And the notoriously press-averse star not only agreed to interviews with the media, but even promoted the show’s advertisers in commercials. (The sole episode I've come across is this YouTube clip.)

None of it did any good. The show could never get out of the bottom third of all TV shows. Nor did it ever enjoy a healthy afterlife in syndication: it didn’t even last half a season.

The cancellation of her show did nothing to encourage Arthur to return to her home. In fact, she decided to take an even bigger risk: a return to Broadway for the first time since she had appeared in Peter Pan in 1950, a show in which she not only had the starring role but had invested $50,000 of her own money: The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake.

How bad was it? William Goldman, in The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway, called the comedy “the one legendary production” of that year—if you associate “legendary” with “a certain kind of Broadway show that by virtue of its birth agonies and the resulting publicity achieves an immortality most productions never dare aspire to.” Critic Peter Filichia, imagining a “Broadway Time Machine,” wished he could have seen Arthur’s final preview performance for this show: “A friend who was there told me that Arthur broke character and the fourth wall to tell the audience that she was leaving show business and giving away all her worldly possessions."

As I discussed in a prior post, Arthur had yet another unusual post-TV gid. A decade after the end of her sitcom, the actress—by now a septuagenarian—was prevailed upon to take the role of the first (fictional) female Supreme Court justice in the Cleveland opening of the Jerome Lawrence-Robert E. Lee play, First Monday in October. 

It was not a happy experience, as the stage fright that had afflicted Arthur three decades before in out-of-town tryouts for Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday returned with a vengeance. She never acted again. The actress who had played fearless, wisecracking women fell victim to the most disabling fear that a stage performer can experience. No matter: Jean Arthur may have died in 1991, but she is still "God's Jean Arthur" to those who catch her film work.

Quote of the Day (Lucille Ball, on the Effect of Her Show)

“I Love Lucy has been called the most popular television show of all time. Such national devotion to one show can never happen again; there are too many shows, on many more channels, now. But in 1951-1952, our show changed the Monday-night habits of America. Between nine and nine-thirty, taxis disappeared from the streets of New York. Marshall Fields department store in Chicago hung up a sign: ‘We love Lucy, too, so from now on we will be open Thursday nights instead of Monday.’ Telephone calls across the nation dropped sharply during the half hour, as well as the water flush rate, as whole families sat glued to their seats.”--Lucille Ball with Betty Hannah Hoffman, Love, Lucy (1996)

Today marks the centennial of the birth of America’s favorite TV redhead. Lucille Ball has been featured twice on my blog already: once, commemorating the birth of the show’s “Little Ricky”; the second, featuring a lovely photograph of (and an even lovelier quote from) the peerless comedienne. Naturally, it would please me no end to have you check those out.

But if you would like to learn even more about her, I’d recommend that you take a look at some prime pictures of Lucy up right now on the Huffington Post, as well as visit the Web site for the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center in Jamestown, N.Y. (Ball’s hometown).

(By the way, I just had to pick this shot of Lucy for this post. The star was usually game for putting her character into every kind of predicament, but this especially looked wild!)

Quote of the Day (Lucille Ball, on Helping Others)

“I have a theory about the assists we get in life. Only rarely can we repay those people who helped us, but we can pass that help along to others.”—Lucille Ball, Love, Lucy (1996)

This Day in Cultural History

January 19, 1953 – Lucy Ricardo gave birth to baby Ricky on I Love Lucy. The episode of the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz sitcom drew more viewers (44 million) than the inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower as President the following day.

The seven shows concerning the pregnancy were filmed early the prior fall, until Ball – in a case of life imitating art, pregnant herself with her first child, at age 41 – decided that carrying 33 extra pounds was too much.

As it happened, “Little Ricky” Ricardo and Lucy and Desi’s real-life child, Desi Jr., were both delivered on this date. The madcap redhead – who, many Hollywood insiders had thought only a few years ago, was approaching the end of her reign as “The Queen of the B’s” – found seven thousand letters and a thousand telegrams waiting for her at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Before long, more than 1 million well-wishers would write her.

Fans of I Love Lucy can learn more about this episode – and many, many more – at the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center in Jamestown, N.Y. I visited this fascinating museum last summer, combining it with a trip to nearby Chautauqua, N.Y.

I hope to write, at far greater length, about this museum at a future time, and perhaps even another venue. But for now, I thought I would include this tidbit from her life, as well as a photo I took – the first one of my own that I’ve ever posted to this blog.

This particular shot is one of four giant murals in downtown Jamestown. It depicts another fondly remembered episode from the show – in which Lucy Ricardo extols the benefits of “Vitameatavegamin” to disastrous, and increasingly hilarious, effect in a commercial.