Lucille Ball (1911 – 1989):
“The secret to staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.”
Thought of as a dizzy sitcom redhead with big showbiz aspirations, Lucille Ball was, in fact, an industry powerhouse, a television pioneer, a Gay Icon, a Feminist Icon and not really a redhead. She was noted for her impeccable comic timing, deft pantomime abilities and an endearing talent for making the outrageous believable.
Ball was not just one of the great comic actors of television, and powerhouse in the biz, she was also a supporter of Gay Rights. In an especially candid interview for People in 1980, an era when LGBTQ characters were not often depicted on television, she was asked how she felt about the burgeoning Gay Rights Movement, Ball answered:
“It’s perfectly all right with me. Some of the most gifted people I’ve ever met or read about are homosexual. How can you knock it?”
It was reported that she was surprised and delighted to find out that a gay bar in West Hollywood played I Love Lucy episodes on video monitors.
From 1969 to 1975, The Dick Cavett Show aired on ABC late night. Lucille Ball appeared on an episode on March 9, 1971, along with her daughter Lucie Arnaz and another famous redhead, Carol Burnett. Ball also was on his first CBS variety show, imaginatively also titled The Dick Cavett Show in 1975.
On the 1971 show, Cavett introduced Ball by noting that I Love Lucy can be seen four times a day in New York City, plus her current series Here’s Lucy (1968 -1974) was on Monday nights on CBS. He adds that she has also appeared in 76 films.
Discussing her small role in Roman Scandals (1933), Ball said she still had the G-string, but not the wig that she wore. Cavett added that the near nudity was arousing to him as a young lad. I don’t know how I feel about young Cavett having a boner for Ball.
Ball and Cavett bonded over their Scottish / English heritage.
She recalled that as a young model she pretended to be from Butte, Montana, instead of her hometown Jamestown, New York, just to sound more interesting, but she said that she now loves Jamestown.
Cavett (of Jamestown): “Is there a plaque there someplace?”
Ball: “No, a plot. They have a hulluva cemetery.”
Curiously, after she left this world, Ball was first buried at Forest Lawn – Hollywood Hills. In 2002, she was moved to the family plot in Jamestown. Today the upstate New York town is defined by being Ball’s birthplace, with numerous plaques, murals, and that horrible statue.
After a commercial break, Ball recounted, with some little embellishments, the plot of one of her favorite episodes of I Love Lucy: Lucy’s Italian Movie. She talked about casting the “stocky” Italian women to play Lucy Ricardo’s fellow grape-stompers. According to Ball, the women spoke no English and had to be directed via a translator, and that the other woman in the vat was a real grape-stomper from Napa Valley when she was actually Teresa Tirelli D’Amico, an opera singer.
Ball: (about her grape-stomping partner): “She was half a ton!” She told of how the fight with Tirelli in the vat got out of hand and she was held under so long she thought she might drown. Ball:
“To drown in a vat of grapes was not the way I had planned to go.”
Cavett asked Ball about her son Desi Arnaz Jr.’s “somewhat Playboy existence”. She says that it does worry her, but he is learning fast. Her son had an affair with Liza Minnelli (she was seven years older) that was fodder for tabloid gossip due to their age difference. Ball:
“Yes, it bothers me. But I, too, love Liza. I miss Liza more than he does. But you can’t domesticate Liza.”
Finally, Ball told the strange but true story of how she helped the USA win World War II with the help of her dental fillings. Driving home from the studio late at night she heard Morse Code tapped out emanating from the lead fillings in her mouth. Next day she reported the location she heard the sounds to the FBI and they discovered an underground Japanese radio station.
