Lucille: The Life of Lucille Ball

PRAISE FOR LUCILLE: THE LIFE OF LUCILLE BALL

This is a heartfelt biography by a gifted biographer, allowing us not only to get to know Lucy a whole lot better but in the end to love her just a little bit more. —Washington Times

While Brady is a fan, she is also a fine biographer. Her admiration is both clear-eyed and penetrating. With insight and impressive detail, Brady goes beyond Ball’s most famous creation—Lucy Ricardo—to expose the complex, determined woman. —Chicago Sun-Times

The best biography of Lucille Ball. —Nashville Banner

Without ignoring the darker aspects of Ball’s life, Brady portrays a woman of impressive determination and resilience. —Time

"The strengths of Lucille: The Life of Lucille Ball are as manifold as they are manifest. Brady is meticulous." —Toronto Globe and Mail

Every so often there comes along a book with new insights into the contradictions of show business—new even to those of us who have studied it for years. She makes the reader feel for Lucy in the upsets and errors she experienced, making her far more vulnerable than her popular image would suggest. —David Shipman, author of Judy Garland and The Story of Cinema

The world’s love affair with Lucy will last for many decades to come and she has become a part of many Americans’ personal history. Kathleen Brady should find a special niche in the hearts of Lucille Ball’s everlasting fans. —Anne Edwards, author of Vivien Leigh: A Biography

Also by Kathleen Brady

Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker

Inside Out

Lucille

The Life of Lucille Ball

Kathleen Brady

For Larry, Debbie, Benjamin, and David Brady

Contents

Introduction

Introduction to the 2001 Edition

Introduction to the Centennial Edition of 2011

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

Notes

Bibliography

Television Appearances of Lucille Ball

Filmography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

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 day—several times in some markets, and even more often on cable systems—her 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 Chaplin’s 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 rebel—without 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 souls—reason and judgment, propriety and the prudent course—and 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! I’m late! Don’t 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 didn’t want to talk about, and then easing the tension with well-worn questions—was 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 I’m 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 invented—marrying 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 Hopper’s will in the basement of the Los Angeles Courthouse, I learned that Lucille’s husband Gary had purchased the car from Hopper’s 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 workman’s 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.

When I grew older, I knew there was more to her story than so apparently effortless a mastery of circumstance, that surely she had to work at life to make things turn out so well for herself. As a biographer, I intended to learn how much of what I thought I knew about her was true, and how much was the creation of her own showmanship.

Introduction to the 2001 Edition

The fiftieth anniversary of the debut of I Love Lucy offers an opportunity to explore a question that was not adequately addressed in the first edition of this book: Was Lucille Ball a great artist? Was she a performer who ranks beside Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton in the history of comedy?

To answer this, we first have to ask what makes a comic performer truly great. I say that the hallmark of greatness is that the individual is so different from everyone who came before her that she changes everything that comes afterward. In comedy a performer accomplishes this in several ways: she embodies a great character or persona, she has a major impact on her craft, and she and her work remain relevant and recognizable to every age.

Chaplin and Keaton, who are generally acknowledged to be the Mozart and Beethoven of comedy, certainly meet these criteria, although today their names are better known than is their actual work. Both shaped the development of silent comedy, which was visual and physical and did not require a single word. Chaplin’s Little Tramp, with his seesaw walk, and Keaton’s stoic Stone Face remain funny. Their gags and predicaments tickle us as they did our great-grandparents.

Both Chaplin and Keaton are seen as creators. They wrote and directed their own films, although in the silent era a script was basically a short elaboration of a premise. Everything depended on how the gags were performed. In his memoirs Keaton noted, The only words we had to write were for the title and subtitles. The great silent comedy creators began with a story idea and let it develop in action before the camera.

The lovably larcenous Little Tramp was born the day Chaplin decided to appear in a Mack Sennett film, wearing baggy pants and a tight coat. In his autobiography, Chaplin wrote: I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was … Gags and comedy ideas went racing through my mind. When Keaton worked for Sennett, he displayed a range of emotions. Yet when he produced his own films he heeded his fan mail and maintained one unchanging Stone Face before the camera, no matter what physical obstacle—a toy cannon or a collapsing house—presented itself.

How do we compare Lucille Ball to these two greats? The extent to which Lucille Ball created Lucy Ricardo is a matter of interpretation. She knew the essence of the type she excelled at, even in the 1940s. What I really am, she told wartime reporters who wanted to portray her as a glamour girl, is a housewife. Although she never deliberately set out to create a character, her abilities, talents, and personality were the inspiration for Lucy Ricardo (and Lucys Carmichael and Carter of her later series). As this biography relates, Lucille Ball’s writers—who began with her in radio, where she played a helpful wife—knew she drew the greatest laughs when she made faces at the studio audience, even though listeners at home could not see what she was doing. When she moved from radio into television, they added her repertoire of facial expressions, along with the sight gags and acrobatics from her slapstick pictures for Columbia in the late forties. Thus, Lucy Ricardo was born from all that Lucille Ball did best.

As Chaplin and Keaton combined aspects of theater, the music hall, and silent films, Lucille Ball’s talent burst forth when she united the physical comedy of bygone vaudeville with the verbal wit of radio and film. When I Love Lucy made its television debut on October 15, 1951, Lucy Ricardo’s antics struck the American imagination with such force that she and Lucille Ball became forever indistinguishable in the public’s mind.

Chaplin and Keaton’s trouble-ridden characters still resonate with us, although the homeless and the hapless no longer seem like figures of fun. Lucille Ball’s work, however, poses a particular additional challenge: Lucy Ricardo entered the American living room long before the phrase politically correct entered our consciousness. Given our experience over the last decades, what is amusing about a housewife with ambitions she cannot fulfill? Out of such a situation, Henrik Ibsen made great art (A Doll’s House) and Betty Friedan made a social revolution. Who was Lucy Ricardo to make it look like fun?

Audiences today are appalled when a woman is forced to obey her husband as Lucy was forced, one way or another, to acquiesce to her husband, Ricky. Let’s face it: the Lucy Ricardo who cleaned the ashtrays before dressing up like a Martian, who did what was mandatory before doing what she could get away with, was more like a servant than a spouse. This character remains timely not because she is subservient but because she is subversive.

The character of the rebellious underling has a long history in comedy. Among commedia dell’arte performers of the Renaissance, the clownish, acrobatic Arlecchino was a compelling fool, or an incompetent simpleton, upsetting the work of the wise. But Arlecchino, like Lucy, could also be a manipulator, a trickster with seemingly magical powers who, with devilish artistry, turned his master into a pawn.

Ricky Ricardo never quite became the dupe—Lucille Ball would not have done that to Desi Arnaz, her spouse on-screen as well as off—but Lucy, like all great characters (as in the works of Ibsen and Friedan) rebels. It doesn’t pay to patronize her, to count her out, or even to give her a break. In her trickery, she is the master, even if she gets out of a pickle by dissolving into ear-grinding, belly laugh-making tears. In contrast, the sad Chaplin and Keaton clowns belong to the French tradition of Pierrot, the romantic figure laughing through his tears, who leaves us remembering joy but feeling sad. Lucy Ricardo’s tears never lasted for long and her wailing made us laugh.

Chaplin and Keaton shaped the comedic approaches of those who followed them because they set the standard. Lucille Ball, bursting forth in the middle of the century, changed what came after her by expanding the possibilities of what comediennes could do. Certainly she was the first to show the farcical possibilities of homemaking. If society maintained that women belonged in the home, Lucille Ball made home the setting for horseplay, farce, and funny faces. Prior to Lucy Ricardo, housework had all the comedic potential of washing one’s face. Homemaking was either the genteel, noble work of mothers who baked their own perfect pies, or it was background business for the maid.

Just as Lucy Ricardo innovated the feminine clown, so Lucy and her sidekick, Ethel Mertz, pioneered another breakthrough—the notion of a female professional partnership. Comedy teams were pretty much a staple in entertainment—Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, as well as the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges. But I Love Lucy marked the first occasion when two women teamed up—and for knockabout gags at that. Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance set a template that, decades later, Laverne & Shirley and Kate and Allie followed with great success.

Prior to Lucille Ball, the notion was inconceivable that a beautiful woman could win audiences by making herself a figure of fun. Still, in the silent film era, Mabel Normand had tried. Reckless and daring, a tireless athlete, Normand took pratfalls as ably as Keaton and Chaplin, while remaining a romantic lead.

After Normand’s addictions to liquor and drugs ended her career, Marie Dressler became the model for what a funny woman could be. By no standards a beauty, and fifteen years older than most of her costars, the large-boned Dressler was hilarious when she simply stood her ground, towering over fellow players and staring them down with dark panda eyes. As a performer, Dressler was uproarious in her being. To top herself, all she had to do was caper or swoon.

When sound came to the cinema, funny women were all talk. Carole Lombard and Rosalind Russell, both glamorous and indomitable, effervesced in screwball romances cracking wise like tommy guns. On screen, blonde Lombard had an exquisite face, astute wit, and implacable will. Dark, knowing Russell could always take care of herself in a fight. Both drew top scripts, directors, and costars who made the most of the actresses’ superb timing. Funny as they were, neither blackened her teeth, impersonated Carmen Miranda, or strapped on a bulletproof skillet, all of which Lucille Ball did in the first three episodes of I Love Lucy.

The newness of television, its lack of precedents and conventions, made it possible for Lucille Ball to bring back physical comedy. It helped that through the series of demands and lucky breaks recorded in this book, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz owned the program and the studio. Like Chaplin and Keaton in their heyday, Lucille Ball was her own boss. Well-conceived buffoonery hurtled Lucille Ball, who never seemed quite comfortable in films, into stardom.

Lucy Ricardo, of course, was not the only female character who transfixed audiences in the 1950s, when television became a way of life. Eisenhower America also loved Gracie Allen, the scatter-brained innocent of The George Bums and Gracie Allen Show, and Gale Storm, the ingénue daughter out to help and evade her financier father in My Little Margie. And, although it was never reflected in the ratings, the public took to its heart the mocking Eve Arden of Our Miss Brooks. While Arden, as Connie Brooks, was beset by students and fellow teachers alike, she was never bested by them. She triumphed by not triumphing, using her invisible weapon, the lightning quip.

But Lucille Ball was one of a kind: no other comedienne possessed her unsurpassed gifts for physical comedy, nor was any other female protagonist allowed to inflict such mayhem. Lucille Ball/Lucy Ricardo was the ultimate female making trouble for her man. Any other actress attempting this would have been a pale imitation.

Those who followed the pattern most closely were Elizabeth Montgomery in Bewitched and Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie, but neither played a woman per se. Like Lucy the housewife, they set about to help or fool their handsome men with iron determination, laser focus, and odd logic. But while Lucy’s single-mindedness forced daily life into confounding directions, witch and genie confounded normalcy through their superhuman powers.

Mary Tyler Moore made her own mark by being Lucy’s opposite, playing characters who cheerily attempted to protect others’ feelings and keep things nice, with hilariously uncomfortable results. The actress who came closest to Lucy’s methods is Fran Drescher in The Nanny, where she upends the household in which she is not a wife but a voluptuous servant.

For all her influence, there was unquestionably only one Lucille Ball. But was she great? Of course she was! She set her inimitable stamp on comedy and she personified a character who today is as recognizable as the American president. In her own era, Lucille Ball’s impact was so profound that the birth of her son rivaled the news of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s election. Her work is not only timeless, it requires no translation. Let those who doubt this turn off the sound. Carol Burnett claims that if aliens come to earth, they will understand I Love Lucy even if they don’t understand the words. Imagine them seeing it for the first time.

By now, the rest of us know what’s coming: Lucy pinches a wad of chocolate and rolls it into a ball. The conveyer belt moves faster and faster, and then… Still, Lucy never gets predictable. In 2001, we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the show’s beginning and commemorate a golden span of exceptional performance. But as we tune in knowing where each move will lead, we find ourselves laughing as if for the very first time. Lucille Ball’s great, timeless gift is to make it all perpetually fresh.

Introduction to the Centennial Edition of 2011

When Lucille Ball was born in Jamestown, New York on August 6, 1911, William H. Taft was president, there were forty-six states, and U.S. women were nine years away from achieving the right to vote. For all that she is synonymous with the immortal Lucy Ricardo, Lucille Ball is fixed in time. The year 2011 is her centennial and the occasion of this new edition.

She was a teenager during the flapper era. During Prohibition she went to speakeasies in Harlem. In the conformist 1950s, she portrayed the nation’s most outrageous oddball while wearing shirtwaist dresses, snug fitted hats, and spotless gloves. By the disillusioned 1970s, the actress herself had had her best days while the public continued to revere her as Lucy Ricardo. On talk shows she seemed bitter and out of sorts, abrupt with her answers. Her malady was that this tireless worker was not working very much. Surpassing fame and pots of money provided her with no idea, aside from playing backgammon, of what to do with herself. But that is the story of this biography, the first edition of which was published in 1994 and the second in 2001, on the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere of I Love Lucy.

Through the years I have had many encounters, interviews and conversations about Lucille Ball, but three stand out: When my oldest friend gave birth for the first time on the other side of the country, I phoned her while she was still recuperating. As it happened, Lucille Ball was in the hospital too and the nation knew that she was gravely ill. The first thing my friend said to me, before she went on to elaborate on the perfections of her tiny son, was this: Isn’t it wonderful that you were able to interview Lucille Ball?

Years after the book was published, an accomplished colleague of mine told me that her mother, who had arrived in the United States as a bride from France speaking no English, had taken inspiration from I Love Lucy. She had agonized over her grammatical mistakes and was isolated during the simplest conversations. Watching television, she could tell that Ricky Ricardo mispronounced words but that everyone liked him anyway. The show gave her reason to hope that strangers in America could come to like her too, and so she persevered and the foreign tongue became her own.

Finally, there was the day I spoke to a class in communications at Brooklyn College. The students were recent immigrants from diverse places like Latvia, Ecuador and the Caribbean. They sat attentively as I recounted the history of I Love Lucy and illustrated it with slides that flashed on the screen. I told them how CBS executives did not want Desi Arnaz to play Lucille Ball’s husband because they did not think the American public would accept the earthy Cuban as the husband of a red blooded American girl, but Lucy prevailed and made him her co-star. I told of how the show hastened the industry’s move to Los Angeles and how it fostered innovations that are standard today. I had no idea how my lecture went over. In a way I could not immediately figure out, they were different from any other group I had ever spoken to, and then it hit me. Not one of them had ever seen I Love Lucy or knew who Lucy was. After the class one tall blonde girl from the former Eastern Bloc came up to me. Did they? she asked. Did anyone write in to complain about a Cuban married to an American girl? No, I said. Not that I ever heard of. I talked to several of the CBS executives, including William Paley. No one said there were any complaints. The realization made me teary. Score one for the American people. For Lucy and Desi as well. But should it be surprising? Her artistry took us to our best selves and gave us entry to a place beyond the critic and the antagonist to the place in our hearts where we are joyous, clearest, and most free.

1

AROUND HER, people rocked with laughter. The skinny fourteen-year-old girl with chestnut hair and vibrant blue eyes was less aware of the performer in front of her than she was of the extreme effect he was having on the people in the theater. Her name was Lucille Ball and she sat motionless, no longer caught up like the others, but simply trying to figure out how the man was able to so delight them.

On a stage bare except for a single chair, a table, and a glass, Julius Tannen—tall, dour, and dressed in a business suit—stood in the stark spotlight and delivered a monologue that at first convulsed, then sobered, the people of Jamestown, New York. Firing off observations on matrimony, politics, and life in the mid-1920s, he delayed his punch lines just long enough for the sense of human folly to possess his audience.

Exactly what Tannen said that day she would never quite remember, but his usual routine was to become several characters, women as well as men, each speaking a different dialect and uttering a different plaint. Although his humor did not survive vaudeville, in his day Tannen was considered brilliant and became known for such signature lines as Pardon me for being late—I squeezed out too much toothpaste and couldn’t get it back and I sent my collars out to the laundry to be sharpened. He also had the gift for ad-libbing in the demands of the moment. Once, in New York City, when a loud noise boomed from backstage and interrupted his monologue, he shouted Sneak thieves! Another time a theater’s mouse catcher wandered out in the middle of his performance and Tannen hissed it away, saying This is a monologue, not a catalogue.

As he talked he drew together all the disparate types in the Jamestown audience—the president of the furniture company, the Swedish lathe turner, the Italian grape picker, and the straitlaced Protestant matron—and united them in a single wave of happiness. Lucille knew at once that she wanted to move people as this man did, to lift them from their daily concerns and transport them from tears to laughter and back again with just a strong voice and a deep belief in every action.

By the 1920s, Jamestown, in western New York State, was a manufacturing town that provided a bare living for Lucille’s family. It was both a business hub and smoke-covered factory town with a population of 43,000 people and an air of bustle heightened by the clangor of its many red trolley cars. For a century the area’s pine forests and the water power of the Chadakoin River had made it a center for furniture manufacturing, where immigrant cabinetmakers joined native-born workers to turn out tables and chests. Expansion into the production of metal furniture and mechanized voting booths provided an economic boost, but at the dawn of the flapper era, the town and its family-run businesses were losing out to the cheap labor and newer factories in the South.

Lucille came from a line of working people who had come to America in the middle of the seventeenth century. By the time of the Civil War, her Ball ancestors had worked their way west as far as the Great Lakes. Then, in 1865, her great-grandfather Clinton Ball was visited by luck. Oil was discovered near his property in Pithole, Pennsylvania. He quickly sold his farm for three quarters of a million dollars, abandoning the filthy, unpredictable business of rigs and derricks to gamblers and roustabouts. His prudence was canny, for the boomtown busted within the year. Clinton Ball took his Pithole windfall and bought four hundred acres of clay-rich soil in the grape belt along Lake Erie, where Dr. Thomas Branwell Welch founded America’s concord grape juice industry. Along with his fellow wealthy growers, Clinton built a handsome house in nearby Fredonia, a beautiful, enterprising village that had been gas-lit as early as the 1820s, when natural gas was discovered there.

Perhaps to show his gratitude to the Lord, perhaps to keep true to the straight and narrow path that had led to earthly wealth, Clinton heaped donations on local Protestant churches, closely tested itinerant ministers on fine points of Scripture, and so fiercely disapproved of dancing that he forbade his children to skip a step to music.

But one of his sons rebelled. Lucille’s grandfather, Jasper, known as Jap, the third of Clinton’s six children, chafed against righteousness. He sold land he was supposed to pass down to his children and invested their heritage first in butter manufacture and then in the telephone. In the mid-1890s, like other entrepreneurs around the nation, Jap took advantage of the expiration of Alexander Graham Bell’s patents and started his own telephone exchange in rural Busti, New York. This venture floundered, but he remained confident that he could make money in new technologies pioneered by Bell and Thomas Edison. After settling his wife and five children in Jamestown, Jap traveled to Missoula, Montana, where he became manager of the Securities Home Telephone Company.

His younger son, Henry Durrell Ball, nicknamed Had, followed him there and became an electrician for a telephone company. Had was slim to the point of gauntness with big blue eyes, physical traits his only daughter would inherit. Had’s face was almost like a Plains Indian’s, with a stoic expression that seemed ready to accept life’s difficulties. He returned to Jamestown in early 1910 to see his mother and sisters, and there he fell in love. On September 1, 1910, at the age of twenty-four, Had married eighteen-year-old Desire Hunt, who had already softened the implications of her given name by changing it to Desirée. His new wife had narrow eyes that constantly assessed what she saw and a mouth that was firm but full, features that could be considered harsh or sensuous depending upon how she turned her face or where she stood in the light. Their wedding, with 140 guests presided over by a Baptist minister, was held at the home of the bride’s parents and reported in detail on the local society page. Fred and Flora Hunt were a woodworker for a local furniture company and a midwife who had raised her orphaned siblings. A year earlier they had lost their only son, Harold, to tuberculosis. For their elder daughter they decorated their home in yellow and white and filled it with autumn sunflowers in what was perhaps a deliberate act of faith in the future.

The newlyweds headed to Montana, but returned to Jamestown eleven months later so that Flora could help deliver their first child. On Sunday, August 6, 1911, at five in the afternoon, Desirée gave birth to a daughter in her parents’ two-story gabled home at what is now 60 Stewart Avenue. The couple apparently deliberated a few days before deciding to call her Lucille Desirée, because they did not include the name in the newspaper notice that ran a few days later, nor was it entered on the baby’s birth certificate.

Lucille spent her first few years in Montana and in Wyandotte, Michigan, outside Detroit, where Had worked as a lineman with the Michigan Bell Company. She was lively, talkative, and fearless. When she was three and a half and Desirée was pregnant with a second child, Had was stricken with typhoid fever. So that she could nurse her husband while the child played outside, Desirée tied a rope around Lucille’s waist and attached it to a metal runner on the wire clothesline. As long as she heard the metal riding along the wire, Desirée was confident of her system, but when the traveling gadget fell silent she ran anxiously downstairs only to find her daughter outside talking the milkman into setting her free. Mister, help me. I got caught up in this silly clothesline. Can you help me out? Lucille was asking. Exasperation surely battled amusement in her heart, but over the years Desirée would recount the story as an example of her daughter’s precocity.

Had died of his illness and Lucille was left without a single recollection of what he was like, or how he lifted her up, or whether he had played with her at all. With his absence he left a psychic impression of loss so indelible that Lucille came to register February 28, 1915, the date of her father’s death, as her first memory: I do remember everything that happened … hanging out the window, begging to play with the kids next door who had measles … the doctor coming, my mother weeping. I remember a bird that flew in the window, a picture that fell off the wall. That bird became a haunting reminder of loss so deep that the sight of bird motifs forever after caused her to panic in anger. Psychologists call such a fetish a screen memory, an image to hold in place of one that is far worse, such as the death throes of her father and the grief of her mother. Lucille’s antipathy to birds remained so vehement that decades later stagehands on the I Love Lucy show learned never to place porcelain parrots on the set, and her favorite florist in Beverly Hills, having suffered her outrage over finding a tiny artificial robin lurking in her bouquet, instructed his staff never again to garnish any of her floral arrangements in such fashion.

While Desirée and her brother-in-law made arrangements to ship Had’s body to Jamestown, a grocer named Mr. Flower took little Lucille to his store and sat her on its counter with an empty jar. Sympathetic neighbors filled it with coins as she recited nursery rhymes and told the story of a frog that went harrummph as it jumped up and down. Although she didn’t know what she was doing at that age, I guess you could say it was the first money she ever earned acting, Desirée later said.

At the beginning of March, when the winter landscape of western New York is at its bleakest, Desirée took Had’s body home. She moved in with her parents and eighteen-year-old sister, Lola; then, a month before Lucille’s fourth birthday, she gave birth to a son, whom she named Fred after her father.

Aside from a few cousins, Lucille and her brother had little contact with the Ball family. According to family legend, Jap Ball, whose business ventures failed, rustled cattle for a time. If so, he carried the gene for the bold and dramatic and passed it down for better and greater manifestation in his celebrated granddaughter. However, his only probable influence on her life was as a legend of squandered resources and neglected obligations.

Desirée took a job in a factory after America entered World War I in April 1917, and there she met Ed Peterson, a tall, strapping man with a mobile face and eyebrows that punctuated his forehead with quick dashes. Ed, whom Lucille later described as ugly/handsome, was, like many of the townspeople, a second-generation American, the son of Swedish immigrants. At thirty-one, Ed was devoted to enjoyment, and in light of the sorrows of her own past, his ebullience appealed to Desirée. She married him on September 17, 1918, in Jamestown, when she was twenty-six, after three years of widowhood. Although Lucille and Fred, now seven and three, were delighted to have a father, by all accounts Ed did not like children and refused to let them call him Daddy. Soon after the wedding he took Desirée to Detroit, where he had a job that was supposed to last six months. Desirée entrusted Lucille, now in first grade, to Ed’s parents and left Fred with her own.

The fatherless Lucille now had for her temporary mother a punitive figure worthy of a Grimm’s fairy tale. Sophia Peterson was stern and forbidding with the long winter of Sweden in her soul, and such was her shadow that it seemed to subsume her husband. At the age of sixty, intending that Lucille become a God-fearing woman without conceit, Grandma ridiculed the way the child looked, spoke, and walked. With her long legs, oversized feet, crooked teeth, and high shrill voice, Lucille was easy to mock. Grandma Peterson saw fit to put her in dresses long enough for her to grow into and shoes so hard they squeaked. She parted Lucille’s mousy brown hair in dead center and pulled it back so tightly that the girl had a look of perpetual shock. As mirrors encouraged vanity, Sophia banned them, except for one in the bathroom, where once she found Lucille staring at her face. Punished for her self-importance, the girl nevertheless found a way to study her face and the range of her various expressions. In the reflecting windows of the trolley car that carried her to her Hunt grandparents, she widened her eyes and moved her mouth to see the effect, exaggerate, and judge it.

This sad, inventive child created the imaginary friend Sassafrassa with whom to share secrets and phantom adventures. Sassafrassa made her existence known to Grandma Peterson the day she walked in and found Lucille wide-eyed with arms flailing as she talked to an apparently empty chair.

Grandma assigned a schedule of chores, which ranged from Lucille’s least favorites, rolling the edges of linen towels for stitching and darning heavy hosiery, on to her favorite, crocheting. Nightly she stood on a box at the kitchen sink and washed dishes by the light of a little gas jet so dim that her work was sloppy and often needed to be redone.

Money was so scarce that Lucille did not have a pencil in school, a shame so searing that even in her forties she continued to hoard pencils that were meant for her employees to use. When an executive asked her where they were going, she took him to her closet and opened the door, revealing a cache of unopened packages. If when you were a little boy you didn’t have a pencil in school, the way I didn’t, you would understand, she said, and surrendered them only after he convinced her that she owned all the company’s pencils, no matter who used them, and that she was stealing only from herself.

On Lucille’s ninth birthday, when she was getting ready to visit the Hunts for the day, Grandma Peterson, who regarded any pleasure as devil’s bait, warned her to prepare for a surprise party and thus turned what should have been a treat into an obligation. I made crazy faces all the way to the party, trying to think of ways to look surprised, Lucille said.

The energy and activity of her mother’s family seemed blessed, and she longed for its warmth. Fred and Flora Hunt’s house was crowded with people, which is probably why Lucille, the elder, was farmed out and only her brother allowed to stay there. Lola, who had married a handsome Greek immigrant named George Mandicos, had returned home to give birth to her daughter, Cleo. Lucille was told she should be grateful to Grandma Peterson, and she truly was, counterbalancing any harsh memories by acknowledging ways she had benefited under her rule: Her grades had been above average, she had been made self-reliant, and she learned to live in her imagination while outwardly doing what she was told. However she may have missed her mother and her true grandparents, Lucille clung to the one thing she admired in the woman who raised her from her eighth to her twelfth years. Behind her narrow little house, Grandma cultivated a flower garden with daisies, lilies, and daffodils, and her rich green grass was comforting to bare feet that even in summer had to pad indoors at sundown while other children played outside.

Lucille responded to a love that meant well and to the older woman’s attention, for it was all she knew. Implacable as Grandma Peterson may have been, she was the one who sent her off to school with a lunch bag and felt her clammy forehead when she was sick. Grandma Peterson was a presence in the child’s life when her parents were a distant memory. To Lucille, Grandpa Peterson was a shadow without voice or substance who demonstrated no affection until he broke down and wept the day Desirée finally came to take her back for good.

Lucille left the Petersons unable to ever bear to be alone. To her privacy was never a joy, for her solitude had been abject. She lacked a sense that a loving person waited beyond a closed door or kept her in mind when she was out of sight. Her need for companionship was desperate and only in her childhood was she able to mask that fact. Over the course of her life she reenacted the harsh treatment she had received in dramas of fire and flood that those who experienced never forgot. Fiercely she would scold friends as to how they should behave or how they should live, and then after her hot outburst she would dissolve into helpless tears.

When Desirée returned from Detroit with Ed in mid-1922, she took Lucille to Celoron, a village ten minutes from Jamestown on the trolley line, a spot so unprepossessing that vaudevillians who played Jamestown learned that just mentioning the place guaranteed a laugh. Fred and Flora Hunt had bought a house there because it was a less expensive place in which to meet expanding responsibilities for their tribe. Flora, who was in her mid-fifties, was suffering from cancer of the uterus, and it was the failure of her costly medical treatments in Buffalo that brought Desirée home to take care of her mother and to reunite her young children. The Celoron house still accommodated Lola, who had separated from her husband, and her tiny daughter Cleo, who called Desirée DeDe, the name she finally liked and that she used forever afterward.

Lucille came home to a family strained and in shock. Whatever relief she may have felt at being back with her own blood was frustrated by the illness of Flora Hunt, who died shortly after the girl reached Celoron. Yet Lucille would remember that house on Eighth Street (later renamed Lucy Lane) as Eden, her Oz, her place of perfect childhood.

It was a boxy two-story white dwelling with a small front porch surrounded by lilac bushes whose heady fragrance would forever return Lucille in memory to this place. Inside the front door, just past the foyer, was a staircase where Lucille performed songs and dances for whoever took the time to watch. This makeshift stage looked into the living room, closed off by a curtain that was by turns Lucille’s prop or the means of privacy for those who were ailing. There was also a downstairs bedroom and a dining room where the family congregated, a kitchen with a huge iron sink, and a half bath. Upstairs were the full bathroom and the bedrooms, including Lucille’s, which to her delight gave her a view of the chickens in their yard.

Her grandfather Fred Hunt was the presiding spirit of the establishment, wielding a pipe of Prince Albert tobacco and wearing an old cardigan sweater and a wide-brimmed hat at a tilt. In his prime he had the full fleshy look of a salesman sure to meet his quotas, but as the years passed his features wrinkled and sagged, as if time were depriving his face of hope. He sang naughty songs at the piano and liked to exasperate his wife by claiming the first Hunt in America was a horse thief. Actually, that man was Thomas Hunt, an indentured servant to the governor of the Colony of New Haven when he arrived in 1639. Four years later Hunt and his wife were banished to Stamford for befriending, particularly on the Sabbath, a lewd and disorderly person. Whether Fred Hunt knew the truth about his distant ancestor or not, he certainly was aware that his grandfather Elvin Hunt, one of the area’s early settlers, had been renowned as an excellent worker in wood, having great natural mechanical genius. So great was the reputation of Hunt’s goods that they always commanded the highest prices, according to a local history.

Fred himself was a woodworker, a craftsman who wanted to be his own boss but was snared in the Machine Age and relegated to performing mechanical tasks at a succession of local furniture factories. Fred was a union man and, to the probable annoyance of his bosses, an ardent proponent of the ideas of the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs.

Fred’s authority was not questioned by Ed Peterson, who did not either feel the need or see the opportunity to be head of his own household. He did not interfere in the running of family affairs, nor was he willing to help DeDe’s children. Himself raised by Sophia Peterson’s principles, he had a passivity Lucille could never acquire, even when she attempted to. My stepfather was a dud. He did no damage, no good, Fred Ball said.

His outlet, according to neighbors, was drink. Lucille’s stepfather made good money. Weekends he overindulged. Her mother was happy to have a husband and although she had a strict upbringing, she became loud and joined in imbibing with Ed, said Pauline Lopus, who lived next door.

Of necessity and by inclination, the Hunt household was a hardworking one. At least part of the time Fred ran a grocery and studied chiropractic. Lucille’s aunt Lola, with her niece often underfoot and wanting her hair done, operated a beauty shop in part of the house. DeDe was a saleswoman at a Jamestown dress shop, and Ed worked in local factories.

The children also had their tasks. Cleo dusted, Freddie made the beds, and all three took turns doing dishes and setting the table. As the oldest, Lucille was in charge when the adults were away, and she started the children at their whole day’s tasks only in early evening when they heard the bell of DeDe’s trolley as it reached Celoron. Domesticity was not Lucy’s thing. You didn’t find her beating up a cake in the kitchen, Cleo recalled.

To Grandpa the children were Lucyball, Fritzi Boy, and Cleo Baby. Despite a difference in their ages—when Lucille was twelve, Fred and Cleo were eight and four—they formed so tight a bond that Lucille and Fred called Cleo their sister. The trio was often on its own,