Hoping to revive some of the innocent thrills of my misspent youth, I made a pilgrimage to Milwaukee last week to visit the first public presentation of the “I Love Lucy” 50th Anniversary Tour.
And there it was. On a broad green lawn just outside the North Gate of Summerfest, Milwaukee’s annual spread of loud music and fast food, was a huge balloon carrying the familiar red heart logo and next to it the entrance to Lucyland — $3 for adults, $2 for children.
Inside, in three large, white tents was all the memorabilia, large and small, that a Lucyphile could desire. Three life-sized reproductions dominated the exhibit: The kitchen and living room of the New York apartment of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo at 623 E. 68th St. (a fictional address that would have placed their home in the middle of the East River); their room at the Beverly Palms Hotel in Los Angeles, where Lucy set her nose on fire while she was trying to disguise herself from William Holden; and the bandstand of the Tropicana night club, where Ricky sang “Babalu” and where Lucy so many times tried to get into the act.
A commercial venture
Above, television monitors carried a constant stream of clips from the comedy series; and at the end of the tour, in another big tent, was the Lucy Store, selling videos, posters, pins, pens, pencils, cookie jars, lunch boxes, bookmarks, magnets, photo albums, mints and bottles of Vegameatavitamin candies. This was, after all, a commercial venture, closing Sunday in Milwaukee and then starting a four-year tour of the country (Chicago dates not yet confirmed). It was designed to celebrate and profit from a series that, since its debut on Oct. 15, 1951, has never been off the air. (Indeed, after I had returned home from Milwaukee, and as I finished watching some videos of “I Love Lucy,” I switched to the cable channels and up popped Lucy and Ricky and Fred and Ethel in another rerun on Nick-at-Nite.)
On the lawn outside the exhibit tents were booths of interactive amusement keyed to three of the series’ most famous episodes.
Here, Lucy fans could indulge themselves in several ways. At the first booth, fans were being taped spieling the same tongue-twisting pitch for the Vegameatavitamin drink that Lucy had hawked in Episode 30, “Lucy Does a TV Commercial.” Perform it well enough, in 30 seconds, and your bit might be shown on the “I Love Lucy” anniversary special next October.
Scooping up chocolates
At the second booth, the most fun of all, customers were invited to scoop up chocolates (actually, chocolate-colored plastic lumps) spilling off an assembly line, just as the frantic Lucy and Ethel had done in Episode 39, “Switching Jobs.” Winners’ numbers were then posted (some teams ran their score of collected chocolates into the hundreds), to the loud cheers of friends and family. And in the third booth, fans tried to set a record for furiously jumping up and down, imitating Lucy’s memorable grape-stomping bit in Episode 150, “Lucy’s Italian Movie.”
Like the Lucy shows themselves, these were simple but effective pleasures. There was nothing particularly brilliant about the plot devices in the series, which often revolved around Lucy’s goofy debacles. Jess Oppenheimer, chief writer and producer for the series, describing the show’s premise, wrote simply, “He is a Latin American orchestra leader and singer. She is his wife.”
It had not started out with any great promise either. Lucille Ball, a success on radio with the series “My Favorite Husband,” wanted to do a series with her husband, Desi Arnaz. Network and advertising executives resisted casting Arnaz; and in one legendary screening of the pilot episode before a select few friends and advisers, the great lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II is said to have remarked, “Keep the redhead, but ditch the Cuban. And if you must keep him, don’t let him sing, because nobody will understand him.”
Three-camera technique
But Ball prevailed, and she and Arnaz as the Ricardos went in front of the CBS cameras in March 1951 to make a pilot that cost $19,500.
When the show was picked up for the fall season, the Ricardos’ friends and landlords, Fred and Ethel Mertz, entered the picture. Ball had wanted Bea Benadaret and Gale Gordon, who had been with her on her radio show, to play the roles, but by the time the series was ready to go, they were already engaged and the roles went to Vivian Vance, who at 39 was one year younger than Ball, and 64-year-old William Frawley, who were great together but couldn’t stand each other. He called her “that bitch,” and she referred to him, disparagingly, as “that little Irishman.”
By happy circumstance, the show was filmed, using the innovative technique of shooting a scene simultaneously with three cameras. The sponsor, Philip Morris, wanted the show produced live in New York, but Ball and Arnaz insisted on doing it in California, and since, in those days before a coast-to-coast coaxial cable, that meant that most of the country would have to see the show on crude kinescope recordings, the decision was made to film each half-hour episode.
It’s all in the details
Out of that came 179 episodes, six seasons and a multimillion-dollar empire.
Much of “Lucy” is out of date today. No one smokes on camera as much as Lucy and Ricky did in their cigarette-sponsored shows. And Lucy herself, scatterbrained and babylike, was hardly today’s idea of an empowered woman. And on camera, she never adlibbed.
But the shows survive and the laughs continue because the scripts mined their basic situations with such skill and because Ball was so radiant and so right in her role.
Just watch the minute details of her acting, and reacting, in any one of the episodes, and you’ll see what I mean.
You will still love Lucy.
