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<text>
<title>
(1950s) Sassafrassa, The Queen:Lucille Ball
</title>
<history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1950s Highlights</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
TIME Magazine
May 26, 1952
Sassafrassa, The Queen
</hdr>
<body>
<p> On Monday evenings, more than 30 million Americans do the same
thing at the same time: they tune in I Love Lucy (9 p.m. E.D.T.,
CBS-TV), to get a look at a round-eyed, pink-haired comedienne
named Lucille Ball.
</p>
<p> An ex-model and longtime movie star (54 films in the past 20
years), Lucille Ball is currently the biggest success in
television. In six months her low-comedy antics, ranging from mild
mugging to baggy-pants clowning, have dethroned such veteran TV
headliners as Milton Berle and Arthur Godfrey. One of the first to
see the handwriting on the TV screen was Funnyman Red Skelton,
himself risen to TV's top ten. Last February, when he got the award
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences as the top comic
of the year, Skelton walked to the microphone and said flatly: "I
don't deserve this, it should go to Lucille Ball."
</p>
<p> By this week, the four national TV rating services (Nielsen,
Trendex, American Research Bureau and Videodex) were in
unaccustomed agreement: each of them rated I Love Lucy as the
nation's No. 1 TV show.
</p>
<p> Lumps and Pratfalls. The television industry is not quite sure
how it happened. When Lucy went on the air last October, it seemed
to be just another series devoted to family comedy, not much better
or much worse than Burns and Allen, The Goldbergs, The Aldrich
Family, or Mama. Like its competitors, Lucy holds a somewhat
grotesque mirror up to middle-class life, and finds its humor in
exaggerating the commonplace incidents of marriage, business and
the home. Lucille's Cuba-born husband, Desi Arnaz, is cast has the
vain, easily flattered leader of an obscure rumba band. Lucille
plays his ambitious wife, bubbling with elaborate and mostly
ineffectual schemes to advance his career.
</p>
<p> But what televiewers see on their screens is the sort of
cheerful rowdiness that has been rare in the U.S. since the days
of the silent movies' Keystone Comedies. Lucille submits
enthusiastically to being hit with pies; she falls over furniture,
gets locked in home freezers, is chased by knife-wielding fanatics.
Tricked out as a ballerina or a Hindu maharanee or a toothless
hillbilly, she takes her assorted lumps and pratfalls with
unflagging zest and good humor. Her mobile, rubbery face reflects
a limitless variety of emotions, from maniacal pleasure to
sepulchral gloom. Even on a flickering, pallid TV screen, her
wide-set saucer eyes beam with the massed candlepower of a
lighthouse on a dark night.
</p>
<p> What is her special talent? TV men credit Lucille with an
unfailing instinct for timing. Producer-Writer Jess Oppenheimer
says: "For every word you write in this business, you figure
you're lucky to get back 70-80% from a performer. With Lucille,
you get back 140%." Broadway's Oscar (South Pacific) Hammerstein
II, hailing Lucille's control, calls her a "broad comedienne,
but one who never goes over the line." To her manager, Don
Sharpe, Lucille is "close to the Chaplin school of comedy--she's got warmth and sympathy, and people believe in her, even
while they're laughing at her."
</p>
<p> Western Mirage. Lucille explains that the TV show is
important because "I'm a real ham and so is Desi. We like to
have an audience. We like being up on our toes." But the show
also allows her some time with her ten-month-old daughter, Lucie
Desiree, and for the first time in eleven years of trouping,
gives her a home life with husband Desi. Says she: "I look like
everybody's idea of an actress, but I feel like a housewife. I
think that's what my trouble was in movies."
</p>
<p> Actress Ball was a long time arriving at the calm waters
of motherhood and housewifery. The daughter of Henry and Desiree
Hunt Ball, she was born in Jamestown, N.Y. (near Buffalo) at
what she calls "an early age." Pressed, she will concede that
it was quite a while ago; she admits to being 40. Her father was
an electrician whose job of stringing telephone wires carried
him around the country. When Lucille was four, he died of
typhoid in Wyandotte, Mich.
</p>
<p> Lucille spent her childhood in Jamestown (1920 pop.
38,917), but managed to see very little of it. Mostly, she
inhabited a dream world peopled by glamorous alter egos.
Sometimes she imagined herself to be a young lady of great poise
named Sassafrassa, who combined the best features of Pearl
White, Mabel Normand and Pola Negri. Another make-believe
identity was Madeline, a beauteous cowgirl who emerged from the
pages of Zane Grey's melodramatic novel, The Light of Western
Stars. To get authentic background for Madeline, young Lucille
corresponded with the Chambers of Commerce of Butte and
Anaconda, Mont. She read and reread their publicity handouts
until she felt she knew more about Montana than the people who
lived there. It was the powerful spirit of Madeline that caused
her for many years to claim Butte, Mont. as her birthplace. Only
in the most recent edition of Who's Who did she finally,
grudgingly admit to being born in Jamestown, N.Y.
</p>
<p> Horrses to Warter. While she lived there, Lucille did her
best to rid Jamestown of dullness. Sometimes she gilded reality
by imagining that the family chicken coop was her palace ("The
chickens would become my armies"). She remembers that she was
always unmanageable in the spring. "I'd leave the classroom for
a drink of water and never come back. I'd start walking toward
what I thought was New York City and keep going until someone
brought me home."
</p>
<p> By the time she left high school at 14, she had staged
virtually a one-man performance of Charley's Aunt. ("I played
the lead, directed it, cast it, sold the tickets, printed the
posters, and hauled furniture to the school for scenery and
props"). In a Masonic musical revue, she put so much passion
into an Apache dance that she threw one arm out of its socket.
Jamestown citizens still remember her explosive personality with
wonder; it took quite a while for the dust to settle in
Jamestown when Lucille finally left for Manhattan at the age of
15.
</p>
<p> Probably because of the dreamy mental state induced by
Sassafrassa and Madeline, Lucille is not too clear about dates,
events and people. In New York, she headed straight for John
Murray Anderson's dramatic school. At the sound of her voice ("I
used to say `horrses' and `warter'"), her teacher clapped hands
to her forehead. Anderson tactfully told Lucille's mother that
her daughter should try another line of work. Lucille made a
stab at being a secretary and a drugstore soda jerk, but found
both occupations dull. She answered chorus calls for Broadway
musicals with a marked lack of success. When she even lost a
job in the chorus of the third road company of Rio Rita, a
Zeigfeld aide told her: "It's no use, Montana. You're not meant
for show business. Go home."
</p>
<p> Periodically, Lucille did go home to Jamestown. But she
returned again and again to the assault on New York. She managed
to get into the chorus of Stepping Stones, and held on until the
choreographer announced that she wanted only girls who could do
toe work ("I couldn't even do heel work"). Lucille turned to
modeling, progressed from the wholesale garment houses through
department stores to the comparative eminence of Hattie
Carnegie. She still has a warm feeling for people in the garment
trade, because "they're the nearest thing to show business in
the outside world. They're temperamental and jealous. I like
them." She had a great many admirers. One of them, Britain's
Actor Hugh Sinclair, says: "She disarmed you. You saw this
wonderful, glamorous creature, and in five minutes she had you
roaring with laughter. She was gay, warmhearted and absolutely
genuine."
</p>
<p> As a model, Lucille called herself Diane Belmont, choosing
her name in honor of Belmont Race Track, where fashion shows are
sometimes staged. But it was another few years before Lucille
finally got her break. She was walking up Broadway past the
Palace Theater when she met Agent Sylvia Hahlo coming down from
the Goldwyn office. Sylvia grabbed her and cried breathlessly:
"How would you like to go to California? They're sending a bunch
of poster girls there for six weeks for a picture. One of the
girls' mothers has refused to let her go."
</p>
<p> $50 to $1,500. The movie was Roman Scandals, starring Eddie
Cantor, and it was six months instead of six weeks in the
making. Lucille was grimly determined to keep her foot in the
Hollywood door. She got a succession of bit parts in such movies
as Moulin Rouge and The Affairs of Cellini, worked for three
months with the roughhouse comics known as The Three Stooges
("It was one continuous bath of Vichy water and lemon meringue
pie").
</p>
<p> When RKO picked up her contract, she gradually emerged as
a queen of B pictures, then began making program movies with
Comics Jack Oakie, Joe Penner and the Marx Brothers (Room
Service). Her salary rose from $50 a week to $1,500, and her
hair, already turned blonde from its original brown, now became
a brilliant but indescribable shade that has been variously
called "shocking pink" and "strawberry orange." While she was
in Dance, Girl, Dance, and being hailed by Director Erich Pommer
as a new "find" (by then, she had been playing in movies for
six years), she met a brash, boyish young Cuban named Desi
Arnaz.
</p>
<p> Gold Initials. Desi had come to Hollywood to make the movie
version of the Broadway hit, Too Many Girls. Taking one look at
luscious (5 ft. 7 in., 130 lbs.) Lucille, who was wearing a
sweater and skirt, he cried: "Thass a honk o' woman!" and asked:
"How would you like to learn the rumba, baby?" He took her for
a ride in his blue convertible, with the gold initials on the
door, and she shudderingly recalls that the only time the
speedometer dipped below 100 m.p.h. was when he rounded a curve.
On the way home, Desi hit a bump and, as Lucille tells it, a
fender flew off. He simply flicked the ash from his Cuban
cigarillo and sped on.
</p>
<p> Lucille was as dazzled by his full name (Desidero Alberto
Arnaz y De Acha III) as by his history. The only child of a
prosperous Cuban politician who had been mayor of Santiago and
a member of the Cuban Senate. Desi had fled to Miami with his
mother during the revolution of 1933. His father, a supporter
of President Machado, was put in jail, and the Arnaz possessions
disappeared in the revolution.
</p>
<p> After six moths, Desi's father was released from jail and
rejoined his family in Miami, where he went into the export-
import business. Desi, who was 16, enrolled in St. Patrick's
High School (his closest friend was Al Capone's son Albert), and
got a part-time job cleaning canary cages for a firm which sold
birds to local drugstores. He soon found steadier work as a
guitarist in a four-piece band incongruously called the Siboney
Sextette. The critics agreed on Desi's meager musical gifts;
"He was always off-beat," says Theater Owner Carlos Montalban.
"But he's an awfully nice guy--a clean-cut Latin."
</p>
<p> Conga Line. Whatever Desi had, it was something the public
liked. He began beating a conga drum in Miami and soon nightclub
audiences, from Florida to New York, were forming conga lines
behind him. His good looks and unquenchable good humor
interested Producer George Abbott, who was searching for a Latin
type to play a leading role in Too Many Girls. "Can you act?"
asked Abbott. "Act?" answered Desi, expansively. "All my life,
I act."
</p>
<p> The courtship of Desi and Lucille was predictably stormy.
Says a friend: "He's very jealous. She's very jealous--they're
both very jealous." They were married in 1940, while Desi was
leading his orchestra at the Roxy in New York and Lucille was
between pictures in Hollywood. She flew in from the Coast; they
got up at 5 a.m. and drove to Connecticut, where they were
married by a justice of the peace. Since they had no apartment,
Desi compromised by carrying his bride across the threshold of
his dressing room at the Roxy. Hollywood offered odds that the
marriage would not last six weeks.
</p>
<p> The marriage lasted better than six weeks, but after four
years trouble blew. Desi kept moving about the country with his
band, and Lucille, when not making pictures, mostly sat home
alone. Their marriage was drifting on the rocks, and only World
War II averted immediate shipwreck. Desi refused a commission
in the Cuban army and was drafted into the U.S. infantry. He
was moved on to Special Services, and spent much of the war
shepherding USO troupes from one base to another.
</p>
<p> In 1944, Lucille filed suit for divorce. She won an
interlocutory decree but never got around to filing for her
final papers. The reason: she and Desi were in the midst of a
new reconciliation. But all the old difficulties remained.
Lucille would sit night after night at the clubs where Desi's
band was playing, but that resulted in rings under her eyes
rather than a new intimacy. She tried cutting down on her movie
work by starring in a CBS radio show called My Favorite Husband,
and Desi also took a flyer at radio. They worked out a
vaudeville act and toured U.S. theaters with their new routines.
</p>
<p> Lucille credits Desi with being the one who was willing to
take a chance on TV. "He's a Cuban," she says, "and all Cubans
gamble. They'll bet you which way the tide is going and give
you first pick." But it was a real gamble. Movie exhibitors do
not look kindly upon those who desert to the enemy. If the show
flopped, Lucille would have no place to crawl back to. They told
CBS that they would give television a try only if both of them
could be on the same show. At first, they wanted to play
themselves. They compromised by turning Desi into Ricky Ricardo,
a struggling young bandleader, and letting Lucille fulfill her
lifelong ambition of playing a housewife.
</p>
<p> The decision to film the show also made CBS bigwigs uneasy.
It would cost four times as much as a live show, and the only
interested sponsor, Philip Morris, wasn't prepared to go that
high. Again, there was a compromise. Desi and Lucille agreed to
take a smaller salary in return for producing the show and
keeping title to the films.
</p>
<p> Real Plumbing. Long years in the practical business of
orchestra leading had given Desi considerable organizing ability
and business sense. He set up Desilu Productions (Desi
president, Lucille vice-president), and leased a sound stage
from an independent Los Angeles studio. Because Lucille was
"dead" without an audience, a side wall of the studio was
knocked out to make a street entrance, and seats installed for
an audience of 300. When a show is ready for the cameras, the
audience laughter is picked up on overhead microphones and used
in the final print.
</p>
<p> Though I Love Lucy is filmed, it is more like a play than
a movie. All of the lines and action are memorized and, whenever
possible, the show is played straight through from beginning to
end, and not shot in a number of unrelated scenes. The action
takes place in four sets; two of them represent the Ricardos'
Manhattan apartment, a third shows the nightclub where Ricky's
band plays and the fourth is used for any other scenes called
for by the script. Says Desi proudly: "We have real furniture,
real plumbing, and a real kitchen where we serve real food. Even
the plants are really growing, they're not phony."
</p>
<p> Desilu Productions hired a pair of veteran troupers,
William Frawley and Vivian Vance, to play the family next door
and serve as foils and friends for Desi and Lucille. Academy
Award-winning Karl (The Good Earth) Freund supervises the three
cameras, and Director Marc Daniels, (soon to be replaced by Bill
Asher) gives Lucy its rattling pace. The writers--Jess
Oppenheimer, Bill Carroll, and Madalyn Pugh--turn out scripts
that do not impose too much on the audience's credulity and are
reasonably free of cliches. The writers are held in an esteem
not common in TV. Lucille bombards Jess Oppenheimer with
photographs flatteringly inscribed to "the Bossman," and Desi
has presented him with a statuette of a baseball player and a
punning tribute, "To the man behind the ball."
</p>
<p> "Wanta Play Cards?" Desi and Lucille live an unpretentious
life on a five-acre ranch in the San Fernando Valley. The only
Hollywood note is a kidney-shaped swimming pool, and the most
recent addition to the house (a wing devoted to daughter Lucie
and her nurse) cost $22,000--more than the house and land cost
originally. Neither Desi nor Lucille has ever been socially
ambitious, and their friends are the same ones they have known
for years. Both Desi's mother (now divorced from Arnaz Sr., who
still lives in Miami) and Lucille's Mom live near by.
</p>
<p> At home, Lucille, who collects stray cats and dogs, is an
amateur painter ("I use oils because it's easier to correct
mistakes than with water colors"), and generally considers
herself a lazy, lounging homebody. She is fascinated by Desi's
boundless energy. He spends weekends fishing on his 34-foot
cabin cruiser, Desilu; plays violent tennis; likes to cook
elaborate dishes. Says Lucille: "Everything is fine with him all
the time. Wanta play cards? Fine. Play games? Fine. Go for a
swim? Great." There's only one problem, Desi is a great
thermostat sneaker-upper and I'm a thermostat sneaker-downer.
Cold is the one thing that isn't great with him."
</p>
<p> Sex and Chic. Though life has grown noticeably more placid
for Desi and Lucille, it promises more money than they ever made
before. Desilu Productions has already branched out beyond I
Love Lucy. It is filming TV commercials for Red Skelton, and is
at work on a new TV series, Our Miss Brooks, starring Eve Arden.
Three of the best 30-minute Lucy shows are being put together
in a package and will be released to movie theaters in the U.S.
and Latin America. This year, I Love Lucy has grossed about
$1,000,000, and Sponsor Philip Morris has signed a contract for
39 more shows beginning this fall. All of the old Lucy films
can be sold again as new TV stations go on the air (eventually
there will be 2,053 TV transmitters in the U.S., compared to
today's 108).
</p>
<p> In reaching the TV top, Lucille's telegenic good looks may
be almost as important as her talent for comedy. She is sultry-
voiced, sexy, and wears chic clothes with all the aplomb of a
trained model and showgirl. Letters from her feminine fans show
as much interest in Lucille's fashions as in her slapstick. Most
successful comediennes (e.g., Imogene Coca, Fanny Brice,
Beatrice Lillie) have made comic capital out of their physical
appearance. Lucille belongs to a rare comic aristocracy: the
clown with glamour.
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>