"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:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/collectivemind/detail?entry_id=55214
danemodsandy++1-19-2010-21-59-16.jpg
 
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?

danemodsandy++1-21-2010-00-24-11.jpg
 
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:

danemodsandy++1-21-2010-00-43-28.jpg
 
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?
 
Pat:

Do you know something we don't? The IMDb has Edith Meiser's I Love Lucy credits listed only as two 1952 appearances as Phoebe Littlefield, wife of Alvin Littlefield, played of course by Gale Gordon. Norma Varden is listed for a 1953 appearance as Mrs. Benson. However, I'm asking here, not claiming anyone's incorrect, because it wouldn't be the first time IMDb got something wrong!
 
laundromat:

No, you're thinking of Norma Varden, who played Frau Schmidt, not Edith Meiser. Edith retired in '63, two years before The Sound of Music was filmed, after years of thankless "guest star" roles on TV that were really not worthy of her talents. She was a comedienne and singer, which Lucy understood, but the rest of Hollywood didn't always. Edith lived until '93.
 
Jeff:

I think the story you heard may have something to do with the claim that Lucy had a secret child before beginning I Love Lucy. The story was that she had a baby by Desi, but felt it wasn't good to be seen as a mother when she was playing a housewife a good ten years younger than her actual age. The story has it that she turned the baby over to another woman to raise as her own, buying a house in Laguna Beach for the woman to live in. I have absolutely no idea whether any of this story is true, except to say I suspect it isn't. There's a link below to a newspaper story about the kid, who's trying to prove the link between her and the Arnaz children (good luck with that, honey - they'd have to give up millions to you if you could):

http://www.fairfieldweekly.com/article.cfm?aid=13804
 
in Lucy's autobiography...

She mentions her yearning for a child before Lucie was born. It reads very genuine to me; you can HEAR her voice in it. And I mean her real, throaty voice, not the childish one she used for Lucy Ricardo. Not that it would be out of the question for a star of that era to hide a child, but something inside me says NOT.
 
another Pheobe...

..does anyone remember another "Pheobe" from another episode?...played by another wonderful actress...she gave the girls their "CQ"...

what a terrific thread, like most of them on this very cool site :)
 
It does sound far-fetched, although Sandy's link mentions something about DNA testing. That should settle the question, if one of Lucy's kids agrees to it.

Back then there wasn't any talk about secret children or people being "kept" in that house. It was simply referred to as Lucille Ball's house. I looked it up on Google maps and it's still there:

JeffG++1-21-2010-13-43-55.jpg
 
Jeff:

"It does sound far-fetched, although Sandy's link mentions something about DNA testing. That should settle the question, if one of Lucy's kids agrees to it."

They probably wouldn't without a court order, because there's so much at stake if they do. I think it's unlikely, and you think it's unlikely, but what if there was something to this story? That resets the entire financial basis of whatever estates Lucy and Desi left, and there are probably huge financial stakes in companies, etc., because of all the shows in which Lucy and Desi had an interest.

You never know what parents have been up to outside the family that you know about - I've known more people who had the shocks of their lives when some secret or other was finally revealed. I know one guy in Atlanta who found out his yard guy was his half-brother - his dad had been, ahem, "seeing" their housekeeper on the side, and the yard guy was her son. He'd begun doing the yard work as a teenager. Blew my friend away, let me tell you.
 
Pat Do you know something we don't?

Sandy, I certainly do know something you don't...and that thing is that I got Norma Varden mixed up with Edith Miser LOL...........The both look kind of similar to me and they both have a unique kind of whine to their voices...........
 
Sandy, did you read the comments for the article you posted? Some interesting stuff, some of it from people involved in this case.

One post claims Ball had three miscarriages, in 1940, 1949 and 1950. If that's true, it makes the claim that she would conceive a child in secret and give it away in the late 1940's that much more implausible. Also, the logistics of hiding a pregnancy, especially in 1940's Hollywood, while not impossible, border on ludicrous. I just can't see Ball dropping everything she was involved with at the time (films, radio etc) just to accomodate a secret pregnancy.
 
Jeff:

I'm going to leave whether the story about Lucy is true or not to others to decide, but never underestimate the power of Hollywood studios to conceal stuff during the Classic Era. Loretta Young had a daughter, Judy Lewis, by Clark Gable, and passed her off as an adopted child, very successfully. If you listened to studio publicity departments, you believed Rock Hudson was straight, that Bing Crosby was a sweet-tempered, caring father, that Alan Ladd was six feet tall and that Joan Crawford was the perfect Mommie.
 

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