Lucille Ball

Ingenue

It's true!

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Mysteries and Scandals: Desi Arnaz

She was 100% right. What a completely spot on and honest thing to say. My admiration for her just got bigger.

I feel like Lucille should have gotten writing credits. She may not have written dialogue, but her life seems to have made it into various projects she did, including of course I Love Lucy but also Stage Door.

I am reading "Lucy & Desi," and it seems clear that Lucille inspired and probably even collaborated on different projects to incorporate her life.

According to the biography, Lucille was a wild child who was overly theatrical and imaginative. She sang and danced and performed for everyone all the time and didn't do well at anything except acting, for which she received a rave review in a high school play. She pulled all kinds of stunts and got herself in trouble, and she used clownish humor to win people's favor when she was in trouble. Her childhood friends say she was not good in school but could have been, and instead she was only interested in performing. Her behavior was histrionic, which the author suggests was part of her performative personality—naturally heightened emotions. She moved to NY several times, first for acting school and then to try her hand at acting and then to model, and she was regarded as a wild child and in the industry was rumored to have worked as a prostitute.

The first part sounds like the obvious groundwork for I Love Lucy. The second part sounds just like her Stage Door character.

According to the book and also to her memoirs, she got her first modeling job in NYC while failing to be cast as an actor or dancer. She was asked to model fur coats because she was so gaunt. She claimed she ate food left over on strangers' plates and made tomato soup with ketchup and water. She lived in a group boarding house. In Stage Door, she lives in a boarding house for young aspiring actresses and she has dates with various men just for the dinners. I suppose that may have been somewhat common at the time. But when Lucille was a young actress (according to the book), she was known as a wild and rough woman, very unpolished and scrappy and willing to brawl, and also willing to do anything at all in a movie role, which many women were too proud to do, and she wasn't liked by everyone because she was sassy. Again, like her Stage Door character.

According to the book, when she had her audition with dozens of other girls for one of the heads of MGM, the girls all had to line up in bathing suits. The book says that many of the women had been showgirls and had very curvy figures, and Lucille knew she wouldn't make the cut, and so she decided to stand out in her own way: ahe stuffed gloves and socks and toilet paper onto the bust of her bathing suit and made sure they were all sticking out. She said she couldn't dance, couldn't sing and wasn't beautiful and she knew she had to do something to stand out. The head of MGM did notice her and he wanted to buy her a ticket back to New York, but a casting director thought she was striking and funny and petitioned to contract her and so she got her MGM contract.

I'm only a few chapters in, but I am surprised that young Lucille, both as a child and as a young actress, was known for being funny in a clownish way and known to do wacky things as Lucy Ricardo did, yet Lucille's pop-culture legacy says she was an overly serious woman who was only funny because of the writing.

(I am rewatching Stage Door right now and Katharine Hepburn's character obviously is based on her, too. I really do think the wisecracking, scrappy version of Lucille probably is a lot like the real woman when she was young.)

Update: I just looked it up on Wikipedia, and Stage Door was adapted from a play but "almost everything was changed," and "The writers listened to the young actresses talking and joking off set during rehearsals and incorporated their style of talking into the film. Director Gregory La Cava also allowed the actresses to ad lib during filming."

This must be a close-to-life version of the real Lucille.

Her MGM contract came later---if she was part of a cattle call in NYC it would have been for something short term or for someone else. She worked for Goldwyn when he was an independent producer before that. She also had a contract with Columbia but that was broken (as were all Columbia contracts ) during the Depression. MGM signed her after she had beenan RKO contract player.

R8 According to this book, "She went from Goldwyn to Columbia to RKO":

[quote] “I seldom use the word luck” says Lucille Ball. “But in 1933, when I became a Goldwyn girl - that was pure luck. I was just walking down the street. It was unbearably hot and someone - I don’t remember exactly who - came up to me and said, 'How’d you like to go to California?’ This was New York, so you had to be careful when anyone asked you anything, but this was a woman asking me, so I figured I was safe. She told me that the girl they had already found for Goldwyn couldn’t make the trip. They wanted poster gals for the film Roman Scandals, and since I was the Chesterfield Girl, I fit the bill. They said the job was for six weeks. I said, 'I’d go anyplace to get out of this heat.’ I went out to Hollywood and” - Ball smiles - “I never came back."

[quote] There were other accommodations. “We had to line up for Mr. Goldwyn when we first went out there,” Ball recalls. “You had to have on the inevitable bathing suit. Mr. Goldwyn and 40 other men would walk by and stare at you. We were all self-conscious, but those who were Ziegfeld girls and Shubert girls were very well stacked. They were less nervous. They had it, you see. I didn’t have it."

[quote] Ball points to her breasts.

[quote] "So I made fun of myself. I put toilet paper and gloves and socks and anything I could find in the bust of my bathing suit. Some of the toilet paper was still trailing out of the top when Mr. Goldwyn came by.” Bail pauses. “If nothing else, they certainly noticed me.

[quote] "I think the one virtue that helped me was I didn’t mind doing anything. Nothing was beneath me. I’d scream; I’d yell; I’d run through the set; I’d wear strange clothes. To me it was just getting your foot in the door."

[quote] She went from Goldwyn to Columbia to RKO, where because of her less than magnificent films, she became knows as "Queen of the B’s.” But Bail did make some widely praised films. Stage Door (1937), The Big Street (1942) and the Cole Porter musical DuBarry Was a Lady (1942) all met with a critical positive response.

Lucy would have cut a bitch if Will Smith came charging at her