Biography

Early life and career

Ball was born to Henry Durrell Ball (1887–1915) and Desiree "DeDe" Eve Hunt (1892–1977) in Jamestown, New York and grew up in the adjacent small town of Celoron, a suburb of Jamestown. Her family was Baptist; her father was of Scottish descent [1] and related to George Washington. Her mother was of French, Irish and English descent.[2]
Lucille was proud of her family and heritage. Her genealogy can be
traced back to the earliest settlers in the colonies. One direct
ancestor, William Sprague (1609–1675), left England on the ship Lyon's Whelp for Plymouth/Salem, Massachusetts. They were from Upwey, Dorset, England. Along with his two brothers, William helped to found the city of Charlestown, Massachusetts. Other Sprague relatives became soldiers in the US Revolutionary War and two of them became governors of the state of Rhode Island.

Her father was a telephone lineman for the Bell Company, while her
mother was often described as a lively and energetic young woman. Her
father's job required frequent transfers, and within three years after
her birth, Lucille had moved from Jamestown to Anaconda, Montana, and then to Wyandotte, Michigan. While DeDe Ball was pregnant with her second child, Frederick, Henry Ball contracted typhoid fever and died in February 1915.

After her father died, Ball and her brother Fred were raised by her
working mother and grandparents. Her grandfather, Fred Hunt, was an
eccentric socialist who enjoyed the theater. He frequently took the
family to vaudeville
shows and encouraged young Lucy to take part in both her own and school
plays. In 1925 after a romance with a local bad boy (Johnny DeVito),
Ball decided to enroll in the John Murray Anderson School for the
Dramatic Arts with her mother's approval. There, the shy girl was
outshone by another pupil, Bette Davis.

Ball went home a few weeks later when drama coaches told her that
she "had no future at all as a performer". Two years later, she
witnessed the accidental shooting of a friend of her brother's, Warner
Erikson, who found himself in the path of a .22 caliber rifle shot,
severing his spinal cord. Her grandfather was sued and prosecuted, and
lost the family home.

She moved back to New York City in 1932 to become an actress and had some success as a fashion model for designer Hattie Carnegie and as the Chesterfield girl. She began her performing career on Broadway using the stage name "Dianne Belmont" and was hired—but then quickly fired—by theatre impresario Earl Carroll from his Vanities and by Florenz Ziegfeld from a touring company of Rio Rita.

She was let go again from the Shubert brothers production of Stepping Stones. After an uncred stint as a Goldwyn Girl in Roman Scandals (1933) she moved to Hollywood to appear in films. She appeared in many small movie roles in the 1930s as a contract player for RKO (including movies with the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges), where she met her lifelong friend, Ginger Rogers. Ball was signed to MGM in the 1940s, but she never achieved great success in films.

She was known in many Hollywood circles as "Queen of the Bs" (a title previously held by Fay Wray) starring in a number of B-movies, such as 1939's Five Came Back. Macdonald Carey was designated as her "King".

In 1940, Ball met Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz while filming the film version of the Rodgers and Hart stage hit Too Many Girls. Ball and Arnaz connected immediately and eloped the same year, garnering much press attention. When Arnaz was drafted to the United States Army
in 1942, he was unfaithful to Ball. Arnaz ended up being classified for
limited service due to a knee injury. As a result, Arnaz stayed in Los
Angeles, organizing and performing USO shows for wounded GIs being brought back from the Pacific. Ball filed for a divorce
in 1944. However, shortly after Ball obtained an interlocutory decree,
she got together with Arnaz again. A major obstacle in Ball's life was
marrying a Cuban. They were the first mixed-nationality TV couple. They
toured the US together to prove that the American public would accept
them together.

In 1948, Ball was cast as Liz Cugat (later "Cooper"), a wacky wife, in My Favorite Husband, a radio program for CBS.
The program was successful, and CBS asked her to develop it for
television. She agreed, but insisted on working with Arnaz. This show
eventually became I Love Lucy. CBS was initially not impressed with the pilot episode produced by the couple's Desilu Productions company, so the couple toured the road in a vaudeville act with Lucy as the zany housewife wanting to get in Arnaz's show. The tour was a smash, and CBS put the show on their lineup.

In 1953, she was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities because she had registered to vote in the Communist party in 1936 at her socialist grandfather's insistence (per FBI FOIA-released documents in this (declassified FBI file.

In response to these accusations, Arnaz quipped: "The only thing red
about Lucy is her hair, and even that's not legitimate." Ball survived
this encounter with the HUAC, naming no names.

I Love Lucy and Desilu

The I Love Lucy show was not only a star vehicle for Lucille
Ball, but a way for her to try to salvage her marriage to Desi Arnaz,
which had become badly strained, in part by the fact that each had a
hectic performing schedule which often kept them apart.

Along the way, she created a television dynasty and reached several
"firsts". Ball was the first woman to be head of a production company:
Desilu, the company that she and Arnaz formed. (After buying out her
ex-husband's share of the studio, Ball functioned as a very active
studio head.)

Desilu and I Love Lucy pioneered a number of methods still in
use in television production today. When the show premiered, most shows
were captured by kinescope,
and the picture was inferior to film. The decision was made to film the
series, a decision driven by the performers' desire to stay in Los
Angeles.

Sponsor Philip Morris
did not want to show kinescopes to the major markets on the east coast,
so Desilu agreed to take a pay cut to finance filming. In return, CBS
relinquished the show rights back to Desilu after broadcast, not
realizing they were giving away a valuable and durable asset.
Desilu]made many millions of dollars on I Love Lucy rebroadcasts through syndication and became a textbook example of how a show can be profitable in second-run syndication.

Desilu also hired legendary Czech cameraman Karl Freund as their director of photography. Freund had worked for F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, shot part of Metropolis,
had directed a number of Hollywood films himself, and knew his
business. Freund introduced the three-camera setup, which became the
standard way of filming situation comedies.

Shooting long shots, medium shots, and close-ups on a comedy in
front of a live audience demanded discipline, technique, and close
choreography. Among other non-standard techniques used in filming the
show, cans of paint (in shades ranging from white to medium gray) were
kept on set to "paint out" inappropriate shadows and disguise lighting
flaws.

Desilu produced several other popular shows, most notably Make Room for Daddy, Our Miss Brooks, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show, The Untouchables, I Spy, Star Trek, and Mission: Impossible.

Ball's instincts with business were often astonishingly sharp, and
her love for Arnaz was passionate, but her relationships with her
children were sometimes strained. Lucie Arnaz, her daughter, spoke of her mother's "controlling" nature. She had a few very good friends in the business: Ginger Rogers, Mary Wickes and Vivian Vance.
All were childless; Wickes never married. Vance said, following her
first meeting with Ball, "I'm going to learn to love that bitch."

On July 17, 1951, just one month shy of her 40th birthday and after several miscarriages, Ball gave birth to her first child, Lucie Desiree Arnaz. A year and a half later, Ball gave birth to her second child, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV, known as Desi Arnaz, Jr. When he was born, I Love Lucy
was a solid ratings hit, and Ball and Arnaz wrote the pregnancy into
the show (indeed, Ball gave birth in real life at about the same time
that her Lucy Ricardo character gave birth). There were several
challenges from CBS, insisting that a pregnant woman could not be shown
on television, nor could the word "pregnant" be spoken on-air.

After approval from several religious figures the network allowed
the pregnancy storyline, but insisted that the word "expecting" be used
instead of "pregnant". (Arnaz garnered laughs when he deliberately
mispronounced it as "'spectin'.) The birth made the first cover of TV Guide in January 1953.

By the end of the 1950s, Desilu had become a large company, and Arnaz's drinking further compounded matters. On May 4, 1960, a few weeks after filming the final episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour,
the couple divorced, ending one of television's greatest marriages.
However, until his death in 1986, Arnaz would remain friends with Ball.
Indeed, both Arnaz and Ball spoke lovingly of each other after the breakup.

The following year, Ball married comedian Gary Morton, a Borscht Belt stand-up comic
who was thirteen years younger. Morton told interviewers at the time
that he had never seen Ball on television, since he was always
performing during primetime.
Ball immediately installed Morton in her production company, teaching
him the television business and eventually promoting him to producer. Morton also played occasional bit parts on Ball's various series.

Following I Love Lucy, Ball appeared in the Broadway musical Wildcat,
which was a wildly successful sell-out that ended up losing money and
closing early when Ball became too ill to continue in the show. She
made a few more movies (including Yours, Mine and Ours, and the musical Mame), and two more successful sitcoms: The Lucy Show (1962–1968), which costarred Vance and Gale Gordon, and Here's Lucy (1968–1974), which also featured Gordon, as well as appearances by Lucy's real life children, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz, Jr.

During the mid-1980s, she attempted to resurrect her television career. In 1982, Ball hosted a two-part Three's Company
retrospective, showing clips from the show's first five seasons,
summarizing memorable plotlines, and commenting on her love of the
show. The second part of the special ended with her receiving a kiss on
the cheek from John Ritter. A 1985 dramatic made-for-TV film about an elderly homeless woman, Stone Pillow, was well received. However, her 1986 sitcom Life With Lucy (costarring Gale Gordon), was a critical and commercial flop which was canceled less than two months into its run by producer Aaron Spelling.

The failure of her series was said to have sent Ball into a serious
depression, and other than a few miscellaneous awards show appearances,
she was absent from the public eye for the last several years of her
life. Her last appearance took place several weeks before her death at
the Oscar telecast in which she was presented by Bob Hope to a cheering audience.

Lucille Ball died on April 26, 1989, of a ruptured aorta at the age of 77 and was cremated. Her remains were initially interred in the Forest Lawn – Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, but were later moved by her children to the Lake View Cemetery, in Jamestown, New York.

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