"I Love Lucy" Fans RED ALERT!

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danemodsandy

danemodsandy

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To Pat Coffey and our other Lucy fans:

Vivian Vance's personal archives have been re-discovered in San Francisco, and there is a huge article about it in that city's newspaper, the Chronicle. There are 120 photos from Vivian's own scrapbook. I strongly urge our Lucyphiles to warm up their right-clickiing fingers and go to the link below. Here's an undated photo of Vivian that appears to be from the later 1930s or early '40s:


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OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sandy,
That is awesome.....thanks for bringing that to my attention. I have read Lucy's, Desi's and Jess Oppenheimers's (the head writer and producer of My Favorite Husband AND I Love Lucy) autobiographies and I can not wait to read Vivian's. I hope Serge finds a publisher soon as I am dying to see what Vivian REALLY thought of Bill Frawley. I know they did not get along but I would love to read in her own words what she thought of him.....PAT COFFEY
 
She was quite the looker~

An interesting tibit of "I Love Lucy" trivia...

Who was Lucille Ball's first choice to play Ethel Mertz? It wasn't Vivian Vance!!

Any ideas?
 
Ahhh, your good-Sandy!

Yes, the fabulous Bea Benaderet, of "Petticoat Junction" and "The Flintstones"!
 
Lucy wanted Bea

because she played Iris Atterbury to Gale Gordon's (who was her first choice for Fred Mertz) Rudolph Atterbury on Lucy's radio show My Favorite Husband......PAT COFFEY
 
I was reading the article and I wanted more! If that book ever gets published I will certainly buy it. Just reading it made me feel like she was here telling me about her life. I love books like that and they are hard to put down. One book that was like that was Gilda Radner's Its Always Something. Love that book.
 
Here's a Real Gem:

One of the things I didn't like about this article and the photo selection was that no one took the time to research what each photo was. Some are self-explanatory, some are very much not self-explanatory. However, here's one I know about, and it's a real rarity.

It's from a Broadway musical that opened in 1941 and ran through '43, racking up 547 performances - a real hit in those days. It was called Let's Face It, by Herbert Fields and Dorothy Fields, with music and lyrics by no less than Cole Porter. The photo is of the number "A Lady Needs a Rest," showing Vivian (right) with co-stars Eve Arden (centre) and Edith Meiser (left). I'm unable to locate the song's lyrics online, and my copy of The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter is in storage, so I'll settle for quoting my favourite couplet from memory:

"Life is very far from easy for a lady nowadays
What with buying stocks in Woolworth's, and jewellery from Cartier's"

As you can tell, the show was something similar to The Women in style and comic intent. Vivian was considered a very expert light comedienne and singer in those days, and easy on the eyes, too. She later had a very big personal hit in a straight play, The Voice of the Turtle. She was very much a star in her own right in the '40s, which had to have made her "second banana" status on Lucy take some getting used to.

P.S.: "A Lady Needs a Rest" is famous for having stopped the show every night of the run. With Vivian Vance, Edith Meiser and Eve Arden all onstage at the same time, why am I not surprised?

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Here's Another...

...From the same show. Looking at the two photos, I'd venture to say that the one in my previous post is a rehearsal photo, and that this one is of the three ladies as they appeared in actual performance - you can see that they're all wearing full costume here, not the shorts they're wearing in the previous shot. However, this photo would have been taken during a run-through staged specifically for the purpose of taking cast photos - in those days, no one was allowed to photograph an actual performance except in very special circumstances, because flashbulbs of that time were very distracting to both actors and audience:

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Re: Edith Miser

Edith and Vivian were reunited in the early 1950's on I Love Lucy. Edith Miser appeared 3 times on I Love Lucy, twice as Pheobe Littlefield, Ricky's bosses wife, and then once as Mrs Benson, the neighbor the Ricardo's switch apartments with......PAT COFFEY
 
Pat:

Yeah, that was Desilu for you - a lot of working relationships within that company extended back to people Lucy or Viv had worked with in the past, on the stage or in movies. The third member of the "Lady Needs a Rest" triumvirate, Eve Arden, got (as you know) her own hit Desilu series, Our Miss Brooks.

BTW, Eve had one of the best laugh lines I've ever heard in a sitcom on her show. In one episode of Our Miss Brooks, a character played by Mary Jane Croft (those connections again!) says: "You know, when I was a teenager, there weren't many stars on television."

To which Eve replied in That Voice: "When you were a teenager, there weren't many stars on the flag!"

One of the nicest - and saddest - relationships was Lucy's use of Barbara Pepper in a lot of bit parts. Barbara had once been a glamour girl equal to Lucy herself; they'd been in Roman Scandals together. Barbara's career did fine in the '30s, but then she began drinking and gained weight, and by the '40s her career had dwindled away to uncredited bits, and damned few of them. On I Love Lucy, Lucy gave Barbara regular work, on the condition that the bottle couldn't interfere with business. Barbara pretty much kept her promise, with the result that she began working much more regularly, in parts for both Desilu and other studios. She was even in My Fair Lady, dancing with Stanley Holloway in "Get Me to the Church on Time." So, even though Lucy could be a very tough cookie, she was loyal to people, and I think she really just wanted people to treat her as well as she wanted to treat them.
 
Wasn't Edith Miser the housekeeper in "The Sound of Music"? Or am I having a brain fart? She was on the episode where Rickey puts Lucy on a schedule because they had been scheduled to be at his new boss's home and Lucy had set the clock back instead of forward and they were more than an hour late.The wive's get together and perform a hillarious skit at the dining room table and pitch dinner rolls across it using a catcher's mit.
 
Here's something I've always wondered about Lucy.. When we were teenagers (mid-late 1970's) we frequently drove down to West St. beach in Laguna, and people there always claimed one of the homes overlooking that beach belonged to Ball. It was a white Spanish-style house with a red tile roof.

We never saw her, either inside the house or on the beach, so I have my doubts. Anyone know?
 

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