A Zany Redheaded Everywoman

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When her first TV series debuted on Oct. 15, 1951, there was no way to tell that Lucille Ball was beginning an apparently immortal love affair with the American public, and not much reason even to expect commercial success. Ball was a comely redhead with a semisultry voice and knockout legs, but she was also nearly 40 and a veteran of almost two decades in the supporting ranks of show business. She had been a movie actress but hardly a superstar; she had enjoyed moderate success in radio but had only fleeting experience in the new medium of video. She refused to move from the West Coast to New York City, where nearly all shows then originated, and she insisted on co-starring her husband, an obscure bandleader whose Cuban syntax was so conspicuous that his dressing room featured the sign ENGLISH BROKEN HERE.

Nothing, in short, about her prior career hinted that she could be as deft and daring as Harold Lloyd, as rubber-faced as Bert Lahr, as touching as Chaplin -- and more ladylike than Milton Berle. Along with the other foremost icon of the '50s Golden Age of TV, Jackie Gleason, Ball was a larger-than-life talent uniquely suited to the small screen. Her signature series, I Love Lucy, and its successors endured more than two decades in prime time, from 1951 to 1974, one of the few immutables in a sea of social change. Lucy, seen in more than 80 countries and in perpetual reruns in the U.S., has a cumulative audience in the tens of billions.

The daughter of a Jamestown, N.Y., electrician, Ball left home at 15 to study acting in New York City. Although she started as a model and chorus-line beauty, she never lost touch with the insecure, self-conscious adolescent inside her and seemed most at ease when playing a zany or a frump. Her great creation was the Lucy character, a Little Scamp who was forever conniving, forever failing, forever meriting punishment yet winning forgiveness. The thwarted schemer was a figure dating back to the Romans if not the Greeks, but Ball deftly sentimentalized the character, merged its cunning intellect with joyously low physical comedy and, perhaps most important, feminized it. Her shows -- I Love Lucy, The Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz Show, The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy -- reflected the major post-World War II social trends, from the baby boom to the exodus to the suburbs to the democratization of travel.

Their foremost concern was the yearning of one redheaded Everywoman to get out of the kitchen and into a job and then, once employed, to emerge from beneath the boss's thumb. She endured any indignity in search of her big chance. The greatest indignity of all, it generally turned out, was the chuckling condescension of her husband Ricky, played by her real-life husband and business partner Desi Arnaz. The confident king of the castle, he was always ready to teach Lucy a lesson. Looking back from an '80s perspective, some observers have suggested that Lucy was virtually an abused wife. In retrospect, Ball might have agreed. Certainly, she was bitter about the off- camera problems caused by Arnaz's drinking, philandering and intense workaholism.

The Lucy character began as a saxophonist who bleated, a chanteuse who croaked, a hoofer who fell down. Even in the final season, when the Lucy character met her look-alike, the actress Lucille Ball, the script concluded that the "real" Lucy was the star-struck onlooker, not the star. Yet, after Ball divorced Arnaz in 1960, the Lucy character also evolved into a capable single mother, then an independent and modestly successful career woman. Off- camera, Ball was happily remarried in 1961 to a courtly, protective ex- comic, Gary Morton, and took a keen maternal interest in the acting careers % of her daughter Lucie Arnaz and son Desi Arnaz Jr., both of whom got started on Here's Lucy.

Despite the sophistication that underlay her slapstick and the respect she commanded as the first woman to head a studio, Desilu Productions, Ball said she saw herself as "not an idea girl but a doer." Like the silent comedians she studied (Buster Keaton, her onetime office mate at MGM, taught her how to handle props) and impersonated (her mirror-image confrontation with Harpo Marx and her Chaplin homage were priceless), Ball rehearsed every sequence obsessively. Yet when the cameras were rolling she made each gesture look spontaneous, each wisecrack seem an ad lib. Memorably, Lucy and her sidekick Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance) took a job wrapping chocolates; as the candies hurtled past on a conveyor belt, the hapless duo tried to keep pace by stuffing half of them into their mouths. Seeking to emulate a pioneer woman, Lucy opened an oven to remove freshly baked bread -- and was pinned against the sink by a loaf 8 ft. long. At long last hired for a commercial, she grew increasingly malaprop attempting to pronounce Vitameatavegamin, the 46-proof tonic she was touting, and swigging, at each take.

So familiar were her trademark facial expressions that after a while scriptwriters simply inserted code words for them. "Puddling up" meant that Lucy's eyes would fill with tears just before she emitted a banshee wail. "Light bulb" signaled the alarming expression that crossed her face when she had a brainstorm. "Credentials" indicated an open-mouthed gape, as if to say, "How dare you!"

No performer can stay at the peak of popularity forever. In Here's Lucy's last season, ratings dropped abruptly. Although specials featuring Ball proved popular, an attempt at a sitcom comeback in 1986 was an artistic and commercial fiasco. Audiences were uncomfortable watching a senior citizen drop hammers, stub toes and otherwise attempt a pallid imitation of the pratfall past. But if the Lucy of her final years was limited to Oscar and Emmy appearances as a cherished memory, the eternal Lucy of the reruns remained imperishably funny and tender. At the news of her death last week, millions who felt they had known her all their lives were puddling up.