Further details were added in London, where Lucie starred in a West End version of The Witches of Eastwick. Understandably, the Daily Mail interview was never reprinted in the States. By the time her mother had assumed the presidency of Desilu, said Lucie, Desi was gone and Lucy worked “from dawn to dusk. She didn’t need the money, she had everything she wanted, from clothes to jewels to cars. Yet only work mattered. She could be very cold and although she told me she loved me all the time, I didn’t feel loved. When children don’t feel they deserve love they start feeling unworthy of love . . . and I felt like that most of the time.” Lucie went on: “I never wanted to behave to my own three children the way my mother did with us, never being there to talk to us, to get our breakfast, to bathe us, to read us stories at night. We had people to look after us and my grandmother was there sometimes. But I couldn’t wait to leave home and I did at 18. I got married to the first man I went out with.” She assured Lucy, “I can make it work,” but she found that she couldn’t. “I’d made a terrible mistake and within a year it broke up. I’d made a terrible mistake.” The three children she had with Laurence Luckinbill, plus the two from his previous marriage, caused some difficulties. “At first I used to be quite sharp with my kids because I had nothing to follow, nothing to learn from.” Much as she admired her mother’s talent, Lucie concluded, “I just wish she’d been there to give us the love that we so desperately needed.”
But the sorrier aspects of Lucille Ball were more than counterbalanced by the perceptions of adoring fans and colleagues, who would hear no disparagement of the loved one. In an article on images that make men cry, the New York Times cited Douglas McGrath, the director of the movies Emma and Nicholas Nickleby. “I’ll be in bed at night with my wife,” he confided to a reporter, “and a rerun of I Love Lucy starts, and just as the heart is closing around the title, the tears well up in my eyes.” According to the paper, McGrath thought it was “because of the contrast between the triumph of love of the fictional Desi and Lucy, and the fact that they broke up in real life.” Added the Times, “Now that’s a sensitive guy!” Likenesses—rather inflexible likenesses, it must be said—went on display at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in New York and at the Hollywood and Movieland Museums in California. Lucy’s star was burnished on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Statues, whose intent was more laudable than their execution, could be found in Jamestown; at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame Plaza in North Hollywood, where Lucy had worked; and in Palm Springs, where she had vacationed. In Dallas, her words were inscribed in the Women’s Museum: “You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.” In 2001 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York, where the first Women’s Rights convention was held in 1848.
In New York City, summer school students in the English as a Second Language program at Bushwick High School were presented with an unusual assignment. They were shown the job-switching episode of I Love Lucy, in which Ricky and Fred turn househusbands and Lucy and Ethel take jobs in the chocolate factory. They were then to write papers on what they had viewed. The purpose, said the Board of Education, was twofold: “to immerse students in the language, and to introduce them to cultural institutions.” Elsewhere, Dr. Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, groped for a proper way to explain the reach of light and sound in space. “The nearest star is about four light-years away,” he said, “and there are on the order of several thousand stars within the fifty-light-year range. So the earliest episodes of I Love Lucy are washing over a new star system at the rate of about one system a day.”
All measuring devices agreed: the status of Lucille Ball was permanent, on Earth and beyond it. That being the case, entrepreneurs, indiscriminate fans, hypercritical scholars, feminists, and revisionists all moved in. The Internet, growing exponentially in the 1990s, offered more than one hundred Lucille Ball Web sites, and the number has grown since then. Some are electronic stores, offering every conceivable sort of souvenir connected with Lucy’s glory days. The home page of Cathy’s Closet displays a quote from Lucie Arnaz: “The only closet with more ‘authentic’ Lucy items than Cathy’s was my mother’s!” No one is likely to challenge that statement; Cathy’s Closet offers some fifty categories of merchandise arranged alphabetically, including Ceramic Boxes, Figurines, Games, Mouse Pads, Snow Globes, Tote Bags, and Watches. Everything Lucy, a similar site, but bearing no Arnaz endorsement, sells such exotica as “I Love Lucy” Chocolate Factory salt and pepper shakers, a large “I Love Lucy” cookie jar in the shape of a car seen on the series, and an “I Love Lucy” bear. The items are not cheap; the cookie jar, for example, sells for $149.99. Collectors can buy dolls that range back to the 1950s and go up to the present, including a “Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz Bobblehead Set” issued by Classic Collecticritters; “Celebrity Barbie” dolls by Mattel, featuring Barbie and Ken dressed as the Arnazes; and the “Lucille Ball Vinyl Portrait Doll” from the Franklin Mint, priced around $200.
The most dedicated fans, however, are less interested in accumulation than in making points about their favorite. Oxygen Media, whose television channel and Web site target a female audience, regards Lucy as an avatar of women’s rights: “Generally, what she wanted was to play a less passive role, to be more actor than acted upon. She wanted attention and what’s wrong with that? We all want it; Lucy was just very up-front and focused about getting it. Not one to repress her insecurities, Lucy tackled them head-on, and since her fears were our fears, we rejoiced in her flagrant disregard for propriety in her quest for inclusion.”
Michael Karol, author of that compound of insight, fact, and trivia Lucy A to Z, conducts the serious, if worshipful, site www.geocities.com/Sitcomboy/. On it he examines the influence of I Love Lucy on situation comedies that followed in its slipstream:
Sitcomboy rushes on: “If you’re a dedicated channel surfer, unique delights await you. Within the space of a few hours just recently, I saw ‘Lucy’ make an appearance on the Simpsons (as Lucille MacGillicuddy Ricardo, I believe): she turns up to help Lisa Simpson, who’s having a problem managing Homer and Bart while Marge is in the hospital. And then, a bit later, I was passing through VH-1 when I noticed a familiar drummer: Desi Arnaz, Jr. Intrigued, I watched as Dino, Desi & Billy (the rock trio that had some minor success in the 1960s) played a forgettable love song, then went to be congratulated by Ed Sullivan (the show itself was a syndicated clip fest of rock moments from his Sunday night show). Ready to keep surfing, I stopped as Sullivan introduced one of the trio’s mothers from the audience—none other than Lucy herself.”
The feminist site Lucille Ball Is a Cool Woman! stresses the influence of Lucille Ball on female entertainers—and on American women in general: “One of the most important things that Lucy showed us was that women could be funny and attractive all at once—a groundbreaking concept for the day. This was particularly admirable given that Lucy was beautiful enough to be a conventional film star, and, in fact had become a Hollywood movie sensation as ‘Queen of the B-Movies.’ But she shrugged off the persona of a cool beauty, instead reveling in the chance to get a laugh. She was never afraid to look foolish, silly, or even ugly for the sake of a good gag and her public loved her for it. By proving this formula, she paved the way for generations of funny women to come. Think of Carol Burnett, Roseanne, Gilda Radner, and Candice Bergen—they all owe at least a part of their success to the amazing Lucy.”
Floating above these fans’ notes is the Higher Criticism—inquiries about, and analyses of, Lucille Ball as comedian, artist, and executive. Molly Haskell, one of the most prominent and discerning critics of popular culture, had her say in a piece entitled “50 Years and Millions of Reruns Later, Why Does America Still Love Lucy?” To Haskell, the answer lay in Ball’s subversive approach. “Although the Lucy persona would disavow any connection with feminism,” the author asserts, “in her own foot-in-mouth way, she cuts a wide swath t
hrough male supremacy, saying anything that comes into her head and taking down sacred cows and chauvinist bulls along the way. Trying to say ‘thank you’ to Ricky’s pompous Cuban uncle, and garbling her Spanish, she calls him a fat pig before accidentally (?) shredding his foot-long, hand-rolled cigar—no mean symbol of Lucy’s assault on puffed-up male potency.”
Haskell is particularly fond of an episode in which Lucy pores over a New York Times want ad section. “Oh, this is terribly unfair,” she moans. “You can’t get a job in this town unless you can do something.” Lucy eventually lands a job tending two misbehaving brats, and this leads to a performance on a talent show emceed by Ricky. The baby-sitter enters in moustache and chaps; the two boys back her up as singing cowboys. While Lucy is distracted the brats place a frog under her shirt. The movements of the amphibian soon force her to pop and leap like a Nijinsky-inspired jumping bean. Haskell finds the routine “an incandescent moment of magical farce that also conveys a talent and determination that will be not be denied. The performance ends with the triumphant Lucy kissing Ricky, who, recognizing her, does one of his ineffable double takes. And so do we, since unbeknownst to him, her moustache has been transferred to his face—a nice visual metaphor for the restoring of the patriarchy, Lucy-style.” Lucy may surrender at the final clinch, but “she is no ‘surrendered wife.’ In the final analysis, Lucy is a fireball who treads a fine line between independence and submission, the stay-at-home wife who wouldn’t.”
Haskell’s affectionate tone was amplified by another pop culture critic. Writing in the New York Times, Joyce Millman argued that Lucy “waged an unspoken battle against Ricky’s attitude of male superiority—you could feel her sense of injustice burning behind every scheme.” How did I Love Lucy become television’s most popular sitcom in a deeply conservative era? “It did not violate viewers’ comfort zones, particularly female viewers’ comfort zones. If Ball had been too assertive, too forthright, she might have turned women away from the show. So Ball couched her characters’ bold ambitions in peerless physical comedy. She looked silly and unglamorous; she played the clown. And as a clown, Ball was a radical, powerful figure; it was as if she was daring you to think it was unseemly for a woman to put on a putty nose or a fright wig and throw herself into a joke with body and soul. (Decades later, physical comedians like Lily Tomlin and Gilda Radner finished what Ball started, turning chaotic energy into a feminist statement).” Statements like these would have astonished Lucy, who had gone public with her view of the Movement: “Women’s lib? It doesn’t interest me one bit. I’ve been so liberated it hurts.”
But Lucille Ball had long since passed from the scene, and her statements, like her properties, her shows, and even the events of her life, were now in the hands of others. The revisionists felt free to move in. In Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women, Berklee College of Music professor Lori Landay chooses Lucille Ball as a prime examplar of “the female trickster in American culture.” Lucy, she holds, embodies all three categories—madcap, screwball, and con woman—providing occasions “for laughter and pleasure by creating comedy out of the constraints of the postwar feminine mystique.” The author quotes the performer in order to set up her case: “ ‘We had great identification with millions of people,’ Lucy stated, long after I Love Lucy was in syndication. ‘They could identify with my problems, my zaniness, my wanting to do everything, my scheming and plotting, the way I cajoled Ricky. People identified with the Ricardos because we had the same problems they had. Desi and I weren’t your ordinary Hollywood couple on TV. We lived in a brownstone apartment somewhere in Manhattan, and paying the rent, getting a new dress, getting a stale fur collar on an old cloth coat, or buying a piece of furniture were all worth a story.
“ ‘People could identify with all those basic things—baby-sitters, traveling, wanting to be entertained, wanting to be loved in a certain way—the two couples on the show were constantly doing things that people all over the country were doing. We just took ordinary situations and exaggerated them.’ ”
Producer Jess Oppenheimer is brought on as a witness: “ ‘The things that happen to the Ricardos happen to everyone in the audience. We call it “holding up the mirror.” Whatever happens, they love each other.’ ”
Landay sums up for the prosecution: “The only way to make sense of Oppenheimer’s explanation that the series holds up a mirror to everyday life is if we recognize that it is a distorting mirror. . . . How seriously can we take Ricky’s injunctions that his wife can’t be on television when Ball and Arnaz are a husband and wife on television? On one level, the show does what on another level it says shouldn’t happen. This contradiction illustrates the gap between the social experience of the women who were working in the public sphere and the ideology that attempted to contain them within domesticity. The series itself is a kind of trick that encourages the audience to participate in the attractive image of the stars’ happy marriage, a fiction representative of postwar behaviour and attitudes that obscures asymmetry in the sex-gender system.” Even so, the professor is forced to admit in the end that Lucy has a way of outlasting the critics and the scholars. For ultimately, “like Coyote, Brer Rabbit, the con man, and other American incarnations of the trickster, Lucy can withstand historical cultural changes.” Her antics, “her ability to create possibility where others would only recognize restraint, and her untiring optimism that this time her scheme will succeed, above all, keep Lucy, and the trickster, alive and at the center of our popular culture.”
In High Anxiety, University of Wisconsin history professor Patricia Mellencamp uses Lucy to underscore her investigations of 1950s America. Fred Mertz’s definition speaks to prevailing conditions. “When it comes to money, there are two kinds of people: the earners and the spenders. Or as they are more popularly known, husbands and wives.” To Mellencamp, “this ‘ethos of gender’ recognizes a key facet of postwar ideology, a cluster of ideals and expectations at the crossroads of mainstream representatives of gender roles, marriage, domesticity, and consumerism.” Every week for seven years, she reminds us, “Lucy, the chorus girl/clown, complained that Ricky was preventing her from becoming a star. For twenty-four minutes, she valiantly tried to escape domesticity by getting a job in show business. After a tour de force performance of physical comedy, in the inevitable reversal and failure of the end, she was resigned to stay happily at home serving big and little Ricky. The ultimate ‘creation/cancellation’—the series’ premise, which was portrayed in brilliant performances and then denied weekly—was that Lucy was not star material.” In one celebrated episode (“The Ballet”), Lucy throws a pie in Ricky’s face during his solo at the Tropicana. But he gets the last laugh by rigging a bucket of water over the apartment’s front door. When Lucy opens the door, she soaks her head, and at the fade-out pleads, “You were right all along, Ricky. Forgive me?” Notes Mellencamp dryly: “Laughter. Applause. Seven days later, Lucy repeats her break for freedom, her anarchism against wifery. To rephrase Freud, ‘An action which carries out a certain injunction is immediately succeeded by another action which stops or undoes the first one.’ The affect, drawn by Freud from war neuroses and for me from popular culture, is one of anxiety.”
Frances Gray’s Women and Laughter views the 1950s as a shadowed and contradictory time, for when “the older generation of women hung on to their jobs: for the younger, educated middle class, a problem developed.” Gray say the problem was articulated for them by Adlai Stevenson, the former Democratic candidate for president, in his 1955 commencement address at Smith College: “Once they wrote poetry. Now it’s the laundry list. Once they discussed art and philosophy till late into the night. Now they are so tired they fall asleep as soon as the dishes are finished. There is, often, a sense of closing horizons and lost opportunities. They had hoped to play their part in the crises of the age. But what they do is wash the diapers.” But Stevenson, Gray insists, didn’t unearth the root of the problem. To him, in common with most of his countrymen, the American wom
an had a unique opportunity to “inspire in her home a vision of the meaning of life and freedom . . . to help her husband find values that will give purpose to his specialized daily chores.” This “opportunity” would undo many, says Gray, ominously dropping a name: “Sylvia Plath, like all the class of ’55, applauded enthusiastically.”
Had Lucille Ball been present, Gray implies, she too would have clapped and cheered. For when Lucy wasn’t up on the sound stage she was a follower, not a leader, and she approved of the 1950s values. Onscreen she protested that her status was nothing to quo about, but that was only so that she could do her Sisyphus routine, making a grand effort—and then falling back to the starting point to begin again next week. The plots of her show set up “tensions rarely found when male slapstick performers are at work; we are invited to pity Harry Langdon, admire the stoicism or to rejoice in the subversive triumph of Chaplin’s Little Man—but each of these had an existential integrity denied Lucy.” Chaplin’s hero may be downtrodden by society, “but he knows who he is and avoids social or economic thrall to another individual. The essence of Chaplin is that he is his own man. Lucy isn’t her own woman; her triumphs are always partial, her power fragmented, her defeats always sanctioned by the narrative.” A reference to Lucy’s bag lady performance in Stone Pillow encapsulates the author’s contrarian view: “It’s understandable that in the world of the 1980s Ball chose to play Chaplin’s symbol of existential freedom, a tramp.”
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Lucille Ball’s posthumous career is the continual association of her name with Charlie Chaplin’s. The comparisons were first made in the 1950s and elaborated upon in 1963, when she paid homage to Charlie by donning a little moustache and twirling a cane on an episode of The Lucy Show. TV Guide praised this episode as the best of the lot “because it rose from a simple source: The daughter, giving her first boy-and-girl party, doesn’t want mother at home. The party is a dud until Lucy does her Chaplin routine.” At times, the piece concluded, “you have to wait between the great moments. But it isn’t hard. After all, you can always look at Lucille.” Others, including her family, also made the comparison between Charlie and Lucy. And some four decades after I Love Lucy went off the air, The Dictionary of Teleliteracy, compiled by New York Daily News critic David Bianculli, mentioned the guest appearance of Harpo Marx on I Love Lucy, calling it especially fitting “because Lucille Ball did enough comedy, verbal and physical, to qualify as a Marx sister—or as TV’s closest female equivalent of a Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, or Buster Keaton.”
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