Kathleen Brady - Lucille: The Life of Lucille Ball

Lucille in the first pair of womens slacks seen in Jamestown

Lucille with Marion Strong in front of a mansion in New York City

Photos courtesy of the collection of Marion Strong Van Vlack

Lucille had a bittersweet reunion with her controversial former beau Johnny De Vita in Jamestown in the 1940s (Collection of Jim Rosette)

At a party Eddie Bracken hosted for the cast of Too Many Girls, the attraction between Lucille and Desi was obvious (Collection of Eddie Bracken)

In the years since she captured the American imagination, much has been written about Lucille Ball. While some accounts portray her life as a romp, others portray her as chronically miserable, tense, and unhappy. None of the many books devoted to her or to I Love Lucy has explained who she was, her contradictions and the source of her ambition.

At her peak, her comedic mastery seemed effortless, but in fact, in the films Lucille Ball made in the thirties and forties with The Three Stooges, The Marx Brothers, Edgar Bergen, and Harold Lloyd, she was wooden. She appears to have been no more aware than her co-stars of her natural gifts. How did so apparently ordinary a performer discover her great genius? How did she later remain so seemingly humble in the face of her hold on the American public? Lucille Ball is one of the greatest performing artists America has ever produced and probably the most familiar by virtue of the reach of television. Her work is on a par with that of Chaplin or Keaton, but because her shows are rerun every dayseveral times in some markets, and even more often on cable systemsher virtuosity may have become too accessible to achieve the mystique of art. Admittedly, she did not write and direct her own material as Chaplin and Keaton did, and although her greatest character, Lucy Ricardo, is a brilliant creation, she cannot be judged profound. While Chaplins Little Tramp outwits his betters, and Keaton stoically bungles into success, both of these classic clowns remain poignant and heroic strugglers against life and fate.

Lucy Ricardo, in contrast, rebels the way most people rebelwithout intending to abandon what is comfortable about her life. That she is doomed to fail in show business is not a thing of tragedy, for her talent lies in the realm of havoc and tricks. A blend of incompetence and cunning, she inspires laughter with her subversion of the conventional, and her exaggerated way with the commonplace. In sum, Lucy Ricardo defies the imperatives that mold lesser soulsreason and judgment, propriety and the prudent courseand proclaims that one dogged individual can prevail on her own illogical terms.

Biographers seldom have an opportunity to meet their subjects, but on the last day of June 1986, I met Lucille Ball. Had I never spent time with her, I doubt I could have understood what a puzzle she presented. Each of her changing moods had a force and intensity that she herself did not entirely command.

I went to see her on assignment for Working Woman magazine. When her maid answered the door in Beverly Hills, the theme of I Love Lucy was playing in the house, as if my ringing the bell had cued the waiting band. I sat expectantly on a green armchair in her citrus-colored den until I heard, Kathleen! Im late! Dont shake my hand, my nails are wet. Shake my elbow! Wearing a pink jogging suit, she strutted in, elbow first. She was a few months shy of her seventy-fifth birthday, a fact she could not deny because for three decades her age was a published fact, but she tried to obscure the obvious signs of time by wearing large glasses tinted as blue as her eyes were supposed to be. She had dropped the curtain on the exaggerated expressions that delighted her audience, but still cultivated her trademark carrot-colored curls.

She had, she informed me, just been chatting on the phone with Desi Arnaz, her ex-husband for a quarter-century, whom she continued to credit with 90 percent of her business success. She had done her hair and nails while watching I Love Lucy, which explained why I heard the theme. When the small talk was over, she seemed to brace herself for questions by putting her hand on her knees. Dealing with this Scheherazade of a thousand interviews proved to be exhausting, a matter of lugging her over subjects she didnt want to talk about, and then easing the tension with well-worn questionswas William Frawley really as irascible as Fred Mertz?

Topics I thought would upset her did not; comments I thought innocuous unnerved her. She grew belligerent when I observed that people said she was tough. By then, most powerful women had come to accept that quality as potentially positive, but not Lucille Ball. Who says Im tough? I want to know exactly who told you that! I want their names! she demanded, and stood up to full height to glare at me. I mollified her by turning the conversation to Edward Sedgwick: Thank you for mentioning the name of my great mentor, she said softly. No one knows who he is anymore.

I asked about things a later generation of women thought they had inventedmarrying younger men, giving birth for the first time at the age of thirty-nine, and running her own company. What had made her such a trailblazer? Happenstance! Happenstance! she shouted. I was trying to do things like everyone else! Her statements, I would later learn, were not entirely to be trusted. I asked if it was true that the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper had bequeathed her a Rolls Royce. Eyes wide with what I thought was respect for my research, she confirmed that it was so. Years later, checking Hoppers will in the basement of the Los Angeles Courthouse, I learned that Lucilles husband Gary had purchased the car from Hoppers estate. Since my story was better than the fact, she certified it.

For all her fame, she was quite ordinary. Her den was no more remarkable than that of any middle class home except that it was larger and sunnier, and decorated with pictures of Lucille Ball. Her handbag, which rested on a straight-backed chair near the door, was shaped like a workmans lunch pail.

She snapped at me and laughed with me, then instructed me to turn off my tape recorder, at which time she counseled me on how to lighten my hair and decide on a husband. I was a stranger, but while she had me with her, she was determined to put my life on track.

Although the interview was scheduled for forty-five minutes, she let me stay two and a half hours, until it was time for her dental appointment. Later I realized she encouraged me to linger because simply had not wanted to be left alone.

When I was a child in the 1950s, I wanted to be Lucy Ricardo. I wanted to stun my family with extraordinary pranks and to experience the kind of improbable adventures that were everyday events for Lucy. When I was an adolescent, I wanted to be Lucille Ball. Like her, I wanted to be the master of extraordinary talents, to have total control of my life, to be able to rectify all my mistakes while having everyone honor and love me.