Ball of Fire (48 page)

Haskell is particularly fond of an episode in which Lucy pores over a
New York Times
want ad section. “Oh, this is terribly unfair,” she moans. “You can’t get a job in this town unless you can
do
something.” Lucy eventually lands a job tending two misbehaving brats, and this leads to a performance on a talent show emceed by Ricky. The baby-sitter enters in moustache and chaps; the two boys back her up as singing cowboys. While Lucy is distracted the brats place a frog under her shirt. The movements of the amphibian soon force her to pop and leap like a Nijinsky-inspired jumping bean. Haskell finds the routine “an incandescent moment of magical farce that also conveys a talent and determination that will be not be denied. The performance ends with the triumphant Lucy kissing Ricky, who, recognizing her, does one of his ineffable double takes. And so do we, since unbeknownst to him, her moustache has been transferred to his face—a nice visual metaphor for the restoring of the patriarchy, Lucy-style.” Lucy may surrender at the final clinch, but “she is no ‘surrendered wife.’ In the final analysis, Lucy is a fireball who treads a fine line between independence and submission, the stay-at-home wife who wouldn’t.”

Haskell’s affectionate tone was amplified by another pop culture critic. Writing in the
New York Times,
Joyce Millman argued that Lucy “waged an unspoken battle against Ricky’s attitude of male superiority—you could feel her sense of injustice burning behind every scheme.” How did
I Love Lucy
become television’s most popular sitcom in a deeply conservative era? “It did not violate viewers’ comfort zones, particularly female viewers’ comfort zones. If Ball had been too assertive, too forthright, she might have turned women away from the show. So Ball couched her characters’ bold ambitions in peerless physical comedy. She looked silly and unglamorous; she played the clown. And as a clown, Ball was a radical, powerful figure; it was as if she was daring you to think it was unseemly for a woman to put on a putty nose or a fright wig and throw herself into a joke with body and soul. (Decades later, physical comedians like Lily Tomlin and Gilda Radner finished what Ball started, turning chaotic energy into a feminist statement).” Statements like these would have astonished Lucy, who had gone public with her view of the Movement: “Women’s lib? It doesn’t interest me one bit. I’ve been so liberated it hurts.”

But Lucille Ball had long since passed from the scene, and her statements, like her properties, her shows, and even the events of her life, were now in the hands of others. The revisionists felt free to move in. In
Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women,
Berklee College of Music professor Lori Landay chooses Lucille Ball as a prime examplar of “the female trickster in American culture.” Lucy, she holds, embodies all three categories—madcap, screwball, and con woman—providing occasions “for laughter and pleasure by creating comedy out of the constraints of the postwar feminine mystique.” The author quotes the performer in order to set up her case: “ ‘We had great identification with millions of people,’ Lucy stated, long after
I Love Lucy
was in syndication. ‘They could identify with my problems, my zaniness, my wanting to do everything, my scheming and plotting, the way I cajoled Ricky. People identified with the Ricardos because we had the same problems they had. Desi and I weren’t your ordinary Hollywood couple on TV. We lived in a brownstone apartment somewhere in Manhattan, and paying the rent, getting a new dress, getting a stale fur collar on an old cloth coat, or buying a piece of furniture were all worth a story.

“ ‘People could identify with all those basic things—baby-sitters, traveling, wanting to be entertained, wanting to be loved in a certain way—the two couples on the show were constantly doing things that people all over the country were doing. We just took ordinary situations and exaggerated them.’ ”

Producer Jess Oppenheimer is brought on as a witness: “ ‘The things that happen to the Ricardos happen to everyone in the audience. We call it “holding up the mirror.” Whatever happens, they love each other.’ ”

Landay sums up for the prosecution: “The only way to make sense of Oppenheimer’s explanation that the series holds up a mirror to everyday life is if we recognize that it is a distorting mirror. . . . How seriously can we take Ricky’s injunctions that his wife can’t be on television when Ball and Arnaz
are
a husband and wife on television? On one level, the show does what on another level it says shouldn’t happen. This contradiction illustrates the gap between the social experience of the women who were working in the public sphere and the ideology that attempted to contain them within domesticity. The series itself is a kind of trick that encourages the audience to participate in the attractive image of the stars’ happy marriage, a fiction representative of postwar behaviour and attitudes that obscures asymmetry in the sex-gender system.” Even so, the professor is forced to admit in the end that Lucy has a way of outlasting the critics and the scholars. For ultimately, “like Coyote, Brer Rabbit, the con man, and other American incarnations of the trickster, Lucy can withstand historical cultural changes.” Her antics, “her ability to create possibility where others would only recognize restraint, and her untiring optimism that this time her scheme will succeed, above all, keep Lucy, and the trickster, alive and at the center of our popular culture.”

In
High Anxiety,
University of Wisconsin history professor Patricia Mellencamp uses Lucy to underscore her investigations of 1950s America. Fred Mertz’s definition speaks to prevailing conditions. “When it comes to money, there are two kinds of people: the earners and the spenders. Or as they are more popularly known, husbands and wives.” To Mellencamp, “this ‘ethos of gender’ recognizes a key facet of postwar ideology, a cluster of ideals and expectations at the crossroads of mainstream representatives of gender roles, marriage, domesticity, and consumerism.” Every week for seven years, she reminds us, “Lucy, the chorus girl/clown, complained that Ricky was preventing her from becoming a star. For twenty-four minutes, she valiantly tried to escape domesticity by getting a job in show business. After a tour de force performance of physical comedy, in the inevitable reversal and failure of the end, she was resigned to stay happily at home serving big and little Ricky. The ultimate ‘creation/cancellation’—the series’ premise, which was portrayed in brilliant performances and then denied weekly—was that Lucy was not star material.” In one celebrated episode (“The Ballet”), Lucy throws a pie in Ricky’s face during his solo at the Tropicana. But he gets the last laugh by rigging a bucket of water over the apartment’s front door. When Lucy opens the door, she soaks her head, and at the fade-out pleads, “You were right all along, Ricky. Forgive me?” Notes Mellencamp dryly: “Laughter. Applause. Seven days later, Lucy repeats her break for freedom, her anarchism against wifery. To rephrase Freud, ‘An action which carries out a certain injunction is immediately succeeded by another action which stops or undoes the first one.’ The affect, drawn by Freud from war neuroses and for me from popular culture, is one of anxiety.”

Frances Gray’s
Women and Laughter
views the 1950s as a shadowed and contradictory time, for when “the older generation of women hung on to their jobs: for the younger, educated middle class, a problem developed.” Gray say the problem was articulated for them by Adlai Stevenson, the former Democratic candidate for president, in his 1955 commencement address at Smith College: “Once they wrote poetry. Now it’s the laundry list. Once they discussed art and philosophy till late into the night. Now they are so tired they fall asleep as soon as the dishes are finished. There is, often, a sense of closing horizons and lost opportunities. They had hoped to play their part in the crises of the age. But what they do is wash the diapers.” But Stevenson, Gray insists, didn’t unearth the root of the problem. To him, in common with most of his countrymen, the American woman had a unique opportunity to “inspire in her home a vision of the meaning of life and freedom . . . to help her husband find values that will give purpose to his specialized daily chores.” This “opportunity” would undo many, says Gray, ominously dropping a name: “Sylvia Plath, like all the class of ’55, applauded enthusiastically.”

Had Lucille Ball been present, Gray implies, she too would have clapped and cheered. For when Lucy wasn’t up on the sound stage she was a follower, not a leader, and she approved of the 1950s values. Onscreen she protested that her status was nothing to quo about, but that was only so that she could do her Sisyphus routine, making a grand effort—and then falling back to the starting point to begin again next week. The plots of her show set up “tensions rarely found when male slapstick performers are at work; we are invited to pity Harry Langdon, admire the stoicism or to rejoice in the subversive triumph of Chaplin’s Little Man—but each of these had an existential integrity denied Lucy.” Chaplin’s hero may be downtrodden by society, “but he knows who he is and avoids social or economic thrall to another individual. The essence of Chaplin is that he is his own man. Lucy isn’t her own woman; her triumphs are always partial, her power fragmented, her defeats always sanctioned by the narrative.” A reference to Lucy’s bag lady performance in
Stone Pillow
encapsulates the author’s contrarian view: “It’s understandable that in the world of the 1980s Ball chose to play Chaplin’s symbol of existential freedom, a tramp.”

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Lucille Ball’s posthumous career is the continual association of her name with Charlie Chaplin’s. The comparisons were first made in the 1950s and elaborated upon in 1963, when she paid homage to Charlie by donning a little moustache and twirling a cane on an episode of
The Lucy Show. TV Guide
praised this episode as the best of the lot “because it rose from a simple source: The daughter, giving her first boy-and-girl party, doesn’t want mother at home. The party is a dud until Lucy does her Chaplin routine.” At times, the piece concluded, “you have to wait between the great moments. But it isn’t hard. After all, you can always look at Lucille.” Others, including her family, also made the comparison between Charlie and Lucy. And some four decades after
I Love Lucy
went off the air,
The Dictionary of Teleliteracy,
compiled by New York
Daily News
critic David Bianculli, mentioned the guest appearance of Harpo Marx on
I
Love Lucy,
calling it especially fitting “because Lucille Ball did enough comedy, verbal and physical, to qualify as a Marx sister—or as TV’s closest female equivalent of a Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, or Buster Keaton.”

There have been many other slapstick performers since the Little Tramp capered on the silent screen. Why should Lucille Ball be esteemed so highly? In large measure the praise is due to her talent and grit. She was not only funnier than anyone else on TV; she was also more beautiful—a matchless combination. But there is another component in the mix.

Prior to the introduction of TV Land,
I Love Lucy
’s current cable venue, a Viacom executive complained: “The only problem with
I Love
Lucy
is that it’s not in color. That’s why you never see
Lucy
reruns in early fringe or prime time. The stations believe that people buy color sets, so therefore they want to see color programs. So what happens is
Lucy
is relegated to the morning time periods when full viewership levels are not available.” Ironically, those were the very conditions that solidified Lucy’s reputation. The comedians to whom Lucy has been compared, those who achieved iconic status worldwide—Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers—all capered before the Technicolor era. Even Bob Hope, who was still filming into the 1980s, is best remembered for his pre-color work in such films as
My Favorite Brunette
and the
Road
pictures. The clowns who came to prominence after 1960, when color became the norm rather than the exception, have by and large been supernovas, glowing brilliantly—and then vanishing in the void. There is something incompatible about humor and color; the palette calls attention to itself, instead of to the jokes. Lucy’s contemporary Danny Kaye, for instance, was MGM’s biggest comic star, clowning in vivid red, yellow, and blue. His range was wide, his abilities unquestioned. Yet his films are virtually unknown to the generations that followed him, and his television specials are rarely glimpsed. The episodes of
I Love Lucy,
from “Lucy Thinks Ricky Is Trying to Murder Her” through “The Ricardos Dedicate a Statue,” have never stopped rerunning.

Lucille Ball was a festival of contradictions: a woman who yearned for her own family—and didn’t know how to relate to her children; a demanding wife who allowed herself to be humiliated by a philanderer; a cold-eyed, exacting businesswoman who made others cry—and then retreated into tears when her authority was questioned. In the end, all the negatives will be forgotten or forgiven, as they usually are with performers—particularly funny ones, whose lives tend to be counterweights to the laughter they engender. Whatever Lucy’s private faults, her public accomplishments over a comparatively brief period are enough to guarantee her a lofty place in the history of popular entertainment. In W. H. Auden’s indulgent words about another poet, “You were silly, like us: / your gift survived it all.”

Lucy would have been the first to admit that she was silly; that she made profound and painful mistakes; that nothing else she did on radio, TV, film, or theater ever equaled
I Love Lucy
and its follow-up,
The Lucy Show;
that she simply fell into fortune—the right producer, the right writers, the right husband, the right decade, the right medium. In the end, though, that very improvisatory quality is what will make her endure as long as there are audiences to laugh at pranks and pratfalls.

Everyone has spoken of Lucy’s gift of timing. Yet it was her lateness—or, to be more accurate, Desi Arnaz’s—that conferred immortality. While others were disporting in a variety of rich hues and tints, she remained in stark, contrasting shades no different from those of the great silent-film comedians. So many other comedians, male and female, have come after her, enjoyed the tinted spotlight, and then slipped into obscurity. Lucy stays eternally comic because of the vital, frenzied, irreproducible years when the Ball of Fire got it all down in black and white.