(As her 25th anniversary approaches, Norma Michaels realiz...)
As her 25th anniversary approaches, Norma Michaels realizes that her marriage to her dentist husband Malcolm has become boring. Seeking independence, Norma turns to her friend Fay while Malcolm receives advice from his swinging associate Greg.
(This documentary covers Lucille Ball from a school girl i...)
This documentary covers Lucille Ball from a school girl in Jamestown NY, to a Hollywood starlet, her meeting & marriage to Desi Arnaz & the beginning & success of "I Love Lucy".
Lucille Ball was an American actress, comedian, model and producer. To millions of Americans, she was simply “Lucy”. Her television show I Love Lucy became very successful in the 1950s.
Background
Ethnicity:
Her ancestors were mostly English, but a few were Scottish, French, and Irish.
Lucille Desiree Hunt was born Lucille Desiree Ball on August 6, 1911, in Celoron, outside Jamestown, New York, United States, to Henry Dunnell and Desiree (Hunt) Ball. Lucy's mother encouraged her daughter's penchant for the theater. Ball lost her father, a telephone lineman, when she was three years old. Ball was raised by her mother’s parents. Her mother was a pianist, which may have influenced her early interest in becoming a performer, and the actress later recalled that her favorite memories of childhood revolved around vaudeville shows, silent movies and school plays.
Education
In 1926 Ball enrolled at the John Murray Anderson/Robert Milton School of Theater and Dance in New York. Her participation there, unlike that of star student Bette Davis, was a dismal failure. The proprietor even wrote to tell Lucy's mother that she was wasting her money.
At the age of 17, Lucy was stricken with rheumatoid arthritis and returned to Celoron, her hometown, yet again, where her mother nursed her through an almost three-year bout with the illness.
Career
In spite of her enthusiasm for show business, Ball was told she had no talent. This occurred not once but many times when, in her teens, she auditioned unsuccessfully for Broadway chorus lines and other parts. But with the persistence instilled in her by her grandparents, she refused to give up so easily. Still a teenager, Ball went to work on Broadway—as a waitress and a soda jerk, and later as a hat model.
Then she signed on with Columbia studios as a bit player, and in 1929 had her first motion picture role in Bulldog Drummond. Over the next two decades, she would appear in some forty films, but success still eluded her. Film executives believed that she lacked star quality, and cast her as an understudy to Ginger Rogers, the dancer most famous for her performances with Fred Astaire. Ball starred in several light comedies with Rogers, always functioning as her zany sidekick whose nuttiness precluded the possibility of character development.
Ball moved on to Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO), and again found herself underutilized in light comedic roles. She tried her hand at drama, as for instance in 1942’s The Big Street, when she played opposite Henry Fonda as a cripple plagued by fears and obsessions. By the account of several later critics, Ball was an outstanding dramatic actress. Apparently Orson Welles thought so: the famous director, when casting his Citizen Kane (1940)—considered by some to be the greatest film of all time—wanted Ball for the role of Kane’s wife. The studio refused.
In the 1940s Ball performed in more light comedies, few of them particularly memorable. In Dance, Girl, Dance, she and Maureen O’Hara found themselves in a situation that would become familiar to later viewers of Ball’s TV shows, not to mention countless later shows such as Laverne and Shirley or Designing Women that borrowed the basic theme from Ball: two working girls trying to succeed despite all the odds against them in a male-dominated job situation. Near the end of World War II, Ball signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which placed her in Ziegfield Follies and other movies, but again the studio failed to recognize her comedic talents. Ball went on stage with Bob Hope, and in Miss Grant Takes Richmond and The Fuller Brush Girl developed the “working girl” persona that would serve her well in her later career.
Between 1929 and 1951, Ball made all but seven of her fifty-odd film appearances, and the last seven stretched over a twenty-three-year period until 1974.
At the outset of the 1950s, she was about to move to the small screen, where she would paradoxically become much, much bigger. In 1940 Ball had married Desi Arnaz, a Cuban bandleader and performer; eleven years later CBS cast them as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo in / Love Lucy. Suddenly the obscure comedienne, always in a supporting role, became a star: at forty years old, after some twenty years of frustration in Hollywood, Ball was well on her way to becoming one of American entertainment’s immortals.
Ball would have two other successful programs, The Lucy Show (1962-1968) and Here’s Lucy (1968-1973), in which she played a divorcee pitted against her boss, as portrayed by Gale Gordon. In real life, Ball divorced Arnaz in 1960, and in 1962 she bought out her former husband’s share of the production company, Desilu, that they had formed together. Her three million dollar investment, for which she had borrowed money in 1962, yielded ten million dollars five years later, when she sold the company to Gulf and Western Industries. By many accounts, Ball was an astute businessperson, and the Desilu deal was a great triumph; but perhaps on a personal level, her greatest business success came when she was able to buy RKO, the studio that had once consistently underestimated her abilities.
During her latter years, Ball made occasional TV appearances, and even an unsuccessful attempt at another series in 1986, Life with Lucy.
Lucille Ball was remembered as many things, but “author” was not among the titles usually accorded to her. Hence it came as a surprise to fans and readers when after her death, it was discovered that she had been writing a book.
Written in 1964 and published by Putnam in 1996 as Love, Lucy, the book chronicles the first five decades of Ball’s life. Influenced by the “positive thinking” philosophy of self-help author and minister Norman Vincent Peale, a close friend of Ball, the book’s style is buoyant. Hence the Christian Science Monitor described its tone as generous, showing the author’s characteristic good humor—a refreshing change from many of the star autobiographies on the market, according to the reviewer. But its lightheartedness is tempered in places by a penchant for introspection. The early death of her father, Ball wrote, and a sense of alienation from her mother as a result of it, gave her a “gnawing sense of unworthiness and insecurity.” As a result of this, she suggested, she was driven to work and to succeed. The book tells of Ball’s childhood and her strong attachment to her grandparents and her hometown of Celoron.
When Ball registered to vote in 1936, she listed her party affiliation as Communist. (She was registered as a Communist in 1938 as well.)
Views
Quotations:
"My ability comes from fairness and a knowledge of people. I ran my studio like I run my home, with understanding of people. We touch in our house. I tell my children, ‘There’s so little time.’"
"After years of being in this routine, I’ve learned to budget my hours and my energies. I reserve. The most important thing is what I have to do at the moment."
"I have to work or I’m nothing. I’ve never been out of work except for two hours once between contracts."
Personality
Ball's striking beauty always differentiated her from other comediennes. With her zany antics, her hilarious facial expressions, her knack for slapstick humor, her incorrigible optimism, and the impossible predicaments into which her onscreen character managed to get herself and others, Lucille Ball—in the character of Lucy—became a beloved member of the family to viewers and fans.
Connections
It was on the set of an innocuous film, Dance, Girl, Dance, that Lucille Ball first met her future husband, Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz. Married in 1940, they were separated by Desi's travels for much of the first decade of their marriage. The union, plagued by Arnaz's alcoholism, workaholism, and philandering, dissolved in 1960. The marriage produced two children - Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr. Thus when Ball had her second child, Ricky (officially named Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha IV), the pregnancy coincided with that of her onscreen character. The audience for the January 19, 1953, show, when Lucy Ricardo gave birth to a boy, also named Ricky, was forty-four million—a record at that time. CBS reported that the network received some one million telephone calls, telegrams, letters, and gifts from fans eager to congratulate the new parents.
In 1968, Ball married night club comic Gary Morton, and the marriage would continue until her death three decades later.