Robert Osborne: Well, one thing is, is that in those days, number one, Lucy was very anxious to do something like that because she loved to work. She was a workaholic and she wasn’t getting that many good parts in movies anymore. So the idea of that sort of thing appealed to her working a lot. And it was kind of socially unacceptable in Hollywood to be doing a television series. That was television in those days was kind of the graveyard of failed movie stars or people that had made small impressions and movies. No major stars were doing television, so they really wanted somebody like Lucy to come. And also because she’d been good on television cause she wanted Desi because she want to get him off the road, because on the road, he was always, you know, kind of slipping away from his marriage vows and was kind of out of out of her life. And she couldn’t keep an eye on him. And she loved him. She wanted him around. And so she thought it would be a great idea to have Desi play the husband. But CBS said, well, you know, Latin lovers are I mean, Latins are all lovers there. That’s Ricardo Montalban and Fernando Lamas. And going back to Rudolph Valentino, he can’t be a husband, just regular husband. So she, in essence, said, look. I don’t want to do it without him. That’s one of the main reasons for doing it. So if there’s no Desi, then there’s no me. And they needed her more than they didn’t want DLC. So it was kind of a marriage where Desi got pulled into it by her demand.
Interviewer: Now, is it your sense that when CBS put up resistance and said people won’t believe that you’re married? I guess that was another objection that they raised. She said, well, we are married and people will believe it and we’ll prove it to you because we put this vaudeville act together and we’ll take it on the road and just see how whether audiences believe us or not. Can you tell us?
Robert Osborne: Well, I will. I’m not sure that I understood it that way. I always understood it that she went out beforehand to herself to prove that people would accept her with Desi in theaters because that was also a way to work with Desi because Desi was out playing the Roxie in New York and the, you know, the Paramount and and then going on the whole Loews Circuit or the RKO circuit with all the vaudeville shows that were playing with movies. And I think they got his act together. I think kind of to prove it to themselves, to that audiences would accept the two of them together and then they could work well together. And it worked wonderfully. I mean, it was a huge sensation at the Roxy Theater in New York. And Winchell wrote about it and all of that. And so all of that kind of compounded at the same time. But she did. Lucy always wanted a movie career. I mean, she liked television. She loved being in television. But in Hollywood, you have to really remember in those days, Hollywood was a very important movie area. No one did television by choice. People did television because they couldn’t get in movies. And it still is that way a little today. You know, even though the greatest stars are on television and some of the greatest talents, you really haven’t made it in Hollywood, in the social strata. When you go to Spargo, you don’t get the best table list. You’re a movie star. You know, Jack Nicholson is a big star. All those wonderful kids on friends that work all the time and are seen every week by millions of people. That’s not Jack Nicholson. So everybody. And Lucy never quite hit that, you know, in Hollywood herself. So I think Lucy would have loved to have stayed in movies, actually, if she’d gotten better parts. And of course, right at the time that she was to do the pilot with Desi for I Love Lucy. Cecil B., the mill cast caster in the greatest show on Earth in the part of the Elephant Girl, the part Gloria Graham played. But because she got pregnant with little Lucy, she couldn’t do it. But I think she would have loved to stay in movies and done things like movies for Cecil B. DeMille. That’s kind of what she’d always wanted to do because of the way she was trained.
Interviewer: But let’s be frank with one another. She was approaching 40. You do not become a glamour movie star, you know, at age 40. If she hadn’t made it by this point, isn’t it sort of clear that she wasn’t?
Robert Osborne: Well, she did make it. Lucy did make it movies. I mean, she was a star, but the title and she worked with wonderful directors like Henry Hathaway and and others. And she was co starring with Clifton Webb and George Sanders. And she was she was known kind of like Claire Trevor was. There were a certain group of those ladies that were not. Never became Lana Turner. Never became Ava Gardner of that level. But everybody knew them and they loved them and they kind of knew they were in good hands when they saw them in a movie. But I think that she still had some good years there. If she’d gotten good parts because she was the same age as, you know, a little younger than Joan Crawford and some of those others, she just was not going in that direction. She’d started out kind of hoping, I think, to be another Ginger Rogers or another Carole Lombard, something like that. And it hadn’t quite taken off in that direction. But I don’t think she quite given up on that. In fact, you know, I think that, you know, one of the we’ll get we’ll get to that later. One of the tragedies of her life was about Mame. She really wanted to do Mame because she thought it was going to win an Academy Award and make her a great movie star at last. You know, I think that psychology, again, being at RKO and doing all those small parts and Ginger Rogers movies and in Katharine Hepburn, its movies and all of that Fred Astaire movies, you know, that was her training. She wanted to go up the ladder and be of that equal stature in the movie business. And after the great television career, which I don’t think she ever felt was all that important in the big picture when she did Mame, that was going to be the thing where it was going to win the Oscar. And she was going to become the great movie star. And it was one of the crushing blows of her life that she that the film thanked.
Interviewer: Tell us a little bit about some of the innovations that happened that first year that they filmed I love Lucy.
Robert Osborne: Oh, it was incredible. Absolutely incredible. And Desi did it and she was always very adamant that Desi got credit for that. The three camera having three cameras.
Interviewer: Start again and tell me, because, again, my subject to the sentence that when they first.
Robert Osborne: When they first started out When they first started out on television, they did something and it was Desi that made the decision that had never been done in television before. They actually rehearsed it like a stage play and they did it live in front of an audience. And instead of shooting, as most television shows did, where they would do a close up, like they made movies, a close up of somebody and then a medium shot and a long shot and all that, they shot it like a stage play with three cameras, you know, one camera getting the overall view, another camera maybe on Lucy, another one maybe on Desi, or maybe Lucy and Vivian Vance, something like that. And it was incredible. And it’s, you know, changed the look at television forever because now every television showed us that sort of thing. And it was incredible. And Desi did it. And Lucy was always adamant to make sure that does get credit. She knew, you know, he was this Latino that had this came from this family. And I met his his mama, Seeta, and she was a very quiet little lady that used to sit in needlepoint and crochet. And he came from a culture where the man was the big the big dude and the lady just kind of sat in the corner. And of course, he met Lucy. And from the moment they met, she was the star of the movie. He’d come from New York as is hot, hot, you know, sensation on Broadway. And all of a sudden he gets to Hollywood. And this woman he falls in love with is the star of the movie. And she was the star from then on ISIS clippings in a scrapbook that they had at home. And it would talk about his band appearances, maybe at some club in Ohio, and it would say how great he was. But the sensational thing of the evening was that ringside was his wife, movie star Lucille Ball. So, you know, no matter where he went. She shed that hair and she had that look. And she always attracted the attention. So she understood that about Desi, that the reason she may lose him to these women, these girls, that didn’t mean anything to him, but to those girls, he was a big guy to his wife. He was second in stature to everybody. So it was kind of reaffirming his maleness to Desi. She was always aware of that. So I think she was always very quick to give him credit wherever she could and where he deserved to have the credit because he was the kind of a business genius that put all thing together again. The culture he came from, he came from a very well well-to-do family that was used to business and dealing with people and, you know, calling the shots and all that. And that was right up his alley, not what he preferred because he was never happier than when he’s just playing those drums. But it’s something he could do and did very well. And I think it was also a great, great hurt to her that she got Emmy nominations. Vivian Vance got Emmy nominations. William Frawley, Desi never did, you know. And yet he was this great straight man to her. And she knew that and she knew he was hurt by that. So she would do all she could to make him feel important. But indeed, he did. He changed the whole face of television.
Interviewer: And is it also fair to say that that historic decision to film in front of a live audience, shoot 35 millimeter and do it in L.A. and
Robert Osborne: Friant.
Interviewer: Yeah. Did that change the history? In other words, from what we’ve been able to gather, TV was very New York centered up until that time and ever after TV was the Hollywood industry. Can you tell us a little bit about that shift that occurred?
Robert Osborne: Well, I think a great shift did occur in television moving from New York to Los Angeles because the I Love Lucy show, although I’m not sure it wouldn’t have happened even without it, because the all those early radio shows of Jack Benny and Burns and Allen all used to come from New York and they had all gone out to California as well, particularly when they could also make movies, Burns and Allen, which would help their radio audience. And Bob Hope, of course, you know, had been in New York and he came to Los Angeles. And so I think it was headed in that direction anyway. But certainly Lucy and Desi helped push it.
Interviewer: And what about the notion that because they shot on 35 millimeter film instead of the kinescope, which was standard practice until that time, all of a sudden possibile reruns?
Robert Osborne: Yes. No one had even ever thought of reruns of the possibility of that. You know, they were. It’s incredible when you look at the history of television and what’s available at the Museum of Television and Radio broadcasting, the things that aren’t available because they were all dumped or thrown away, because no one knew that they had any value. But it’s quite the same with movies. You know, a lot of movies didn’t survive because no one thought they had any value either. So that was at a time when when things like any shelf life for something was not expected or not planned. And and Desi understood all of that. But that’s that business thing that he had, that genius. He was really a genius at business. And again, that changed the face of television to having a lifespan. And we still have it on. I mean, she did say one time to me, though, she was very this was very late in her life. She said, you know, I don’t. When she was not doing a television series anymore, she says, I don’t have my arena anymore. I don’t have my arena. She said, I don’t have to work. And everybody thinks I’m working all the time because all their products out there. So it was interesting because it was kind of a curse to her that all that product was out there being rerun. And therefore, there was no demand to her for her to do any work anymore. And particularly was out there with her younger, you know, feistier and all that sort of stuff. But it was she was very sad about that because it it meant that she didn’t have to go to the studio and work, which is what she loved to do more than anything.
Interviewer: All right. Certain we’re interested in sort of the arc of this where the personal life in the end, the I Love Lucy show intersected, and I think one chapter in that story is the notion that the first season came and went and they surprised themselves and everyone else by how incredibly popular they were. And then she found herself pregnant again. Now, do you believe is it your sense from knowing her and having her tell you that she really was afraid that they might cancel the show because of her pregnancy and just becoming pregnant was, in fact, putting in jeopardy everything they worked that first year so hard to build up?
Robert Osborne: I never got that sense from her, but I’m not sure Lucy was ever that honest to herself about about where family fit in. I know she loved her family. She loved having kids because it was also a cementing her to Desi. They tried so often to have kids and it hadn’t happened. And of being with Desi was the most important thing in her life. I mean, that was she had made up her mind early on that that was the man for her. And he kind of was the same way about her. And there was this this tremendous pull between them because he was he spent money like there was going out of business. And she was very frugal because she worked so hard for every penny that she had when they bought Desi Lou. He had to borrow his money. She had her money and wrote out the cheque. She wants time, said, you know, he’s going to try to end up having me broke, but I’m not going to let him do it. But he’ll be broke. And she recognized that, you know, they had these they had these these such opposite personalities. But that was the guy. So I think that she wanted to have children to cement that. I think she loved having children. But I don’t think that she was all that concerned about them being cancelled because also she had proven that they could be so successful that I think she thought, well, we can do something else. Lucy was never out of work. You know, she didn’t have the shouldn’t have the pains of a lot of people like Joan Crawford when she made her comeback and Mildred Pierce. She’d been out of work for like two years, which was disastrous for her because she loves to work more than anything in the world like Lucy. Lucy was never out of work. I think there was about a three week period when she went from being a golden girl until she was signed to Columbia Pictures way back that she didn’t have a steady employment. After that, she went right from being a golden girl to getting a contract, a brief contract somewhere. And then she went to RKO. And then from RKO to MGM and then MGM freelancing, never stopped working, freelancing. And that she was always doing radio, then to television. I mean, so she never stopped. So I would doubt that really she was all that concerned about being canceled, although it certainly ended up bringing her all the money and all the fame that she wanted. But that was never as important to her as as work, just the daily work and the family. Family mainly being Desi.
Interviewer: Whose idea was it? And if this isn’t about it’s not that important, whose idea? How did the idea of incorporating her pregnancy into the storyline come about?
Robert Osborne: Well, I think he incorporated the storyline came about simply because of what. Oh, I think the idea of incorporating Lucy’s pregnancy into the storyline and I Love Lucy was something that came about simply to get the product out there when it needed to go out there and also to allow her to keep working, which she knew she could do even when she got pregnant. But, of course, that I mean, people had a fit with that because on television in those days and the movies in those days, you know, Otto Preminger can say have the word Virgin said in the moon is blue. That was so verboten. And so you couldn’t mentioned pregnancy and things like that, even on television. So I think that it was a way just to get the product out there when she knew she could work. She couldn’t when little Lucy, when she was pregnant with Lucy, shoot one of the reasons she couldn’t do the greatest show on Earth, as the doctor said, you know, it’s gonna be too strenuous. You have to go to bed. I don’t think there was that concern with with a little desi was was about to be on his way because she was she was healthy. She wanted to keep working. And there was no reason that she couldn’t keep working on that schedule. So to write. I think it was Desi again that came up with the idea to write it into the script. And also always thought that caused a lot of trauma for young Lucy for a long time, because when they would go places, when I knew them, when I first met them, and little as he was just so high and as he was littler, they go places and everybody say, oh, that’s little Ricky, this little Ricky Onoe little Desi. OK, they understood that that wasn’t the kid on the show, but they knew that that was Lucy Mary to Desi and they had the little boy. No one knew there was a girl because the TV series. So she was kind of left out. Now we feel badly for her. And it’s a miracle to me because she’s turned out to be such a lovely girl, such a nice person, so wise and and sensible and just a great, great woman. And I thought she’s done really well to do that because that was tough for her for a long time, kind of being shuffled at airports out of the way. People pushed trying to push her aside and all of that because they know who she was. She was just a little girl. There’s there’s Lucy and Ricky and Little Ricky. You know.
Interviewer: Ironically, the decision to include the pregnancy then just sent the ratings and popularity through the roof. And I guess a story that I heard recently was that people actually got together to have parties the night that the birth episode was going to air to kind of celebrate while they watch the show. Have you ever heard any.
Robert Osborne: Oh, yes. That was a national event when Little Ricky was born on television and when the when they and no one knew what the what the gender of the baby was going to be. That was big, big news because nothing like that had ever happened in television before. Television had been around that long on that big a basis that everybody fell in love with a family and watched the family every week. I mean, they loved Milton Berle because he did, you know, was funny and Martin and Lewis and all those. But there was no family that people really were amused by, laughed with and were tickled by and got so emotionally involved with us as Lucy and Ricky and Ethel and Fred and all that kind of stuff. So this was like a first thing. And it was it was kind of wonderful. It was a much more innocent era. But the whole nation kind of rejoiced in the course. They when he was born and it was announced it was front page news. And also they got just warehouses full of presents and everything that came, none of which they could keep, which was which kind of broke Lucy’s heart because of the affection with which these gifts were sent. But the government someone in the government came and they said, look, if one of those things, if there is anything in it, if there’s candy or any of those things that might be poisoned, if there’s anything in there that could be dangerous, if, you know, we cannot have that happen. So what she did was gave it all away to orphanages and stuff and also hired somebody to come and go through, sort through everything and make sure that cars were sent thank you notes, and that anything suspicious was discarded and everything. But that kind of hurt her feelings because she knew the affection with which people sent that in. And of course, she’d never had that kind of affection before. People loved her in the movies, but she had never felt that that feedback from people before in her whole career. And she’d worked very long by this point and worked very hard. So to have the whole public kind of love you like that surprise you like that, because I don’t think she ever thought that she’d be loved. I think she always thought she might be appreciated because she knew she could be clever. But I don’t think Lucy ever thought that everybody would love her to have that kind of personality. You know? She was quite a serious lady and she wasn’t light and she wasn’t. Mary. Life had been hard for her up to that point. And I just don’t think that she ever thought somebody would embrace her as the whole world embraced, or at that point, I think she’d be absolutely astounded today that people still watch Lucy and that there was a Lucy stamp and things like that. I mean, she wouldn’t believe that because she was not a movie star. Lana Turner, that might happen to her. Ava Gardner. But not not Lucille Ball. She always thought that Carole Lombard. She said that often the Carole Lombard was the great comedian. She said, you know, she’s so beautiful and she had such style and was so elegant. And she said I was. No matter how I get dressed up, I always look like a cigarette girl at the truck at Arrow. You know, she said, I look cheap no matter what I do. And she did. You know, she was great looking. But she had a hard look about her. You know, that. That Carolyn Barr didn’t have and Ginger Rogers didn’t have.
Interviewer: But ironically, when she became Lucy Ricardo and she didn’t wear the glamour girl outfits and kind of, you know, she was doing the housewife thing with the aprons, that softened her.
Robert Osborne: It it’s often her, but she was still never Donna Reed. You know, she’s still she’s still had that edge to her. And we love that, edge. That’s what we loved about her. But she still had that edge to her Jamestown. You know, being a Carnegie model, that was all in that in that character subtext in that character. But it’s what we loved about her. She always was. I remember her saying one time, because I used to love to ask her about movie stars, because to me she was easy to talk to because she was on television. And I didn’t think that much about Della, neither at that point, because I was such a movie fanatic. But she used to always say that it was like nails on a blackboard whenever she’d enter someplace. And Maureen O’Hara was there because she said, Reno hair is perfect. She is beautiful and she is perfect and I’m not perfect. And then I remember one time she’s saying that that she said that she loved to go out and go to clubs and that when she was, you know, in the 40s when they’d all dress up and she was on a country at MGM and she said, I used to love to go out. And she said, but you she said, you get all dressed up and you’d feel beautiful and be real well turned out. And she said, Then you go to a club and you’ll be fine until Hedy Lamarr walked in. And she said, then you felt like chopped liver. So you must buy the home, you know? So she’s very conscious of all that. And she read herself. She she can look at herself. And she knew she was beautiful, but she knew she was beautiful, like a cigarette girl.
Interviewer: And you said that you brought up Maureen O’Hara. We may end up talking to her. We’re not sure. She’s been very busy and it’s kind of generic. We’re hoping to catch her.
Robert Osborne: And lovely lady, by the way.
Interviewer: Yeah. That film Dance Girl Dance. You know, it’s one of my favorites, and they just embody these two very different types of women. Maybe you could just speak to that.
Robert Osborne: Well, Dance Girl Dance was the film, I think. 1940 Dorothy Arzenta, her directed at RKO. Not a big deal at the time. Not unimportant film. It’s one of those one of those many films that were kind of passed over at the time. But now years later when we got we have videotapes and again television channels to show us all films that we study it and look at it and see the value of it. But you’ve got, you know, two girls trying for a career in the theater and one is kind of a tootsie and one is very much a lady. And that was Maureen O’Hara and Lucille Ball. Lucy, of course, playing the Tootsie. And she’s terrific in it. It’s one of her it’s one of her best film performances because it really fit her. She was perfectly cast. And I think that if there’s anything on film, maybe I think her best performance on film is The Big Street. But she didn’t fit that as well as she fit dance girl dance, dance school dance is a perfect Lucille Ball film. But it also was cast very much to type of at that time. Maureen O’Hara was very much a lady and it still is. And this is just a classy lady. Lucy was never classy. She had great class to her and was a thoroughbred. But she was not the image of being a classy lady. That was Katharine Hepburn. That was Irene Dunne. That was Plaudit Kolber. Lucy was more the same kind of part that Ann Sothern played so well. And Joan Blondell, a little more of a floozy. You could expect that she would work in a burlesque call or something like that. But of course, that was also to their great value. But they dance girl dance very much embodies what was going on at that point. And Lucy, I know Bill very much in a hurry because they go to exhibitor meetings or exhibitor gatherings and things. And she said, you know, everybody pal around with me and joke and light my cigarette and everything. And then she said, Merino harrowed, come in. And then they would all treat her like a great lady. They never treated me that way. And it bothered her. But it was. But that’s the way it was.
Interviewer: Since we’re on her movies, just one more, I think one of her great, maybe not the greatest, but a truly great performance is Miss Grant takes Richmond funny. She’s just so great. And it’s very much a I think, a pre staging this kind of character.
Robert Osborne: Absolutely. Lucille Ball did several films in the late forties, like Miss Grant Takes Richmond with William Holden, and she also did The Fuller Brush Girl and things like that. A wonderful comedy, very underrated, called Her Husband’s Affairs with French Ahtone, where she’s zany and does funny stuff. It all started probably the first zany part she ever played, and it had a big effect on her career, although MGM never followed up on it is a film with Van Johnson called Easy to Wed, which is a remake of Leibel Lady, and she plays the old Jean Harlow role. And by this point, Lucy was no longer the star. Esther Williams was the leading lady of that. But Lucy had a secondary part and absolutely walked off of the picture because for the first time, not only did she have the orange hair rather than the red hair, but she was zany. She was slapsticky and funny. And nobody had ever quite seen that side of Lucy before because she’d been sophisticated, funny before and witty, funny and wise, cracky, funny show girl wise, funny but never zany. And indeed, out of that came these other films. And I think that’s was the genesis of Lucy. Were they somebody said this is this is this is what you do this. Now you’ve found the formula, which is what everybody was looking for. I mean, Hedy Lamarr early found her formula of being exotic and quiet, not talking much and everything. Joan Allison had found her formula being, you know, perky and sweet and good and all of that. And like with as with Van Johnson, they found his formula early on about being the all-American, you know, stalwart guy, the good fella that you’ll like, never trouble, never dangerous and everything. And Lucy had never quite found her niche. Anything that worked for until easy to wed. And then. Wow. It just went from there.
Interviewer: Talk about the scene where Van Johnson. And we enjoyed watching it. Ysterday, we watched a little bit of it with Van Johnson. In fact, we played the drunk scene for him.
Robert Osborne: Yes.
Interviewer: Just tell us a little bit.
Robert Osborne: Well, there’s a wonderful scene in Easy to Wed where Van Johnson gets Lucy drunk. And that’s where you really see the genesis of Lucy because she does that kind of. When Lucy used to get beaten by the regiment and all that and we’d get kind of sassy in with her mouth and her face. And it may not be startling today to see that. But when you think that before that, nobody had ever seen that before. She’d always been, you know, kind of elegant, you know, mature acting on screen, never zany. And she’d done some wonderful films around that time, like The Dark Corner, which is one of her best films of film noir film. She did with Clifton Webb and Mark Stephens. And she’s she’s a she’s a wise secretary to a private eye and all that. And then she’d be in other films and she’d be, you know, the smart babe or that smart lady. But an easy to which she’s she does Lucy. And it’s absolutely wonderful to see this emerge in front of your eyes. And she’s very funny. She’s very funny. And also, when you think that that it wasn’t followed up on by films because it was not long after that. In fact, I think she made one more film at MGM and then they dropped her and they dropped her at MGM. I had a talk with Sidney Giller off about that once. Who was the one that lightened the hair? He’s the one that when she first went to MGM to do, she was at RKO and she had just done the Big Street and it had not made any money. But everybody saw what a good actor she was. And then and Southern was to do a musical at MGM called Dubarry was a lady and Lana Turner was to do best foot forward. And they both got pregnant and they had these two big musicals ready to go. And nobody at MGM available or right for the part. So, Lucy, it kind of made this hit in the big streets. So. MGM bought Lucy’s contract from MARKELLE. So she went and did both, Dewberry was a lady and best foot forward. And Sidney gilleran because it was their first time in Technicolor, thought when they saw the tests of her that she didn’t look that good in color with the brown hair. So he’s the one that lighten the hair to red. And then it was a little lighter red in best foot forward. But then, then she did black and white films again without love and several others meet the people. But then when Easy to Wade came and that was in Technicolor. It was it was Sidney Geller off at that point that turned it orange. And that became then her hennah rents trademark because she was white. I mean, you would see Lucy walk down the street, you know, and you didn’t if you didn’t know who it was, you knew it was somebody because no normal being except an actress would ever have hair that color. But it was gorgeous and it fit her so well. But Sidney told me, I said, why didn’t they ever follow that up after easy to wear because she’s so spectacular. He said she wasn’t classy enough for MGM. She said she didn’t fit into that MGM style, which was Hepburn and Greer Garson and and Tracy and Deborah Carr. And, you know, those lofty people. Lucy, again, had that cigarette girl edge to her. So MGM had kind of used her and then wasn’t that interested anymore.
Interviewer: For Dubarry was a lady. I found the film ridiculous and wooden and crazy and almost incomprehensible and that she’s quite stiff in it until the very end.
Robert Osborne: Friendship.
Interviewer: Tell me about that.
Robert Osborne: Well, Lucy went to MGM and I think it was kind of a big deal for this girl. Will suddenly be at MGM because that was the Rolls Royce of movie studios. If you’re in movies, MGM is the place you wanted to be. And all of a sudden, not only is she at MGM, but she’s in this big musical. And Dewberry was a lady who’d been a huge success on Broadway with Burt La, Ethel Merman and Betty Grable. That’s what made Betty Grable famous early on. She had a secondary part, but I think Lucy was kind of intimidated. Unfortunately, with Dewberry was a lady, although it was a huge hit at the time. I have to tell you. I mean, a huge hit held over and everything. Red Skelton was very popular then and helped draw people in. And the title is very popular, very hot title. And the fact Cole Porter done songs, unfortunately, almost all the story was considered too racy to be done as a movie. Almost all the Cole Porter songs were were thrown out because Cole Porter was was a bit sophisticated in his lyrics. And so those songs couldn’t be done. And the plotline couldn’t be done because it had to do with things about extramarital affairs and kings chasing courtesans and all that kind of stuff. So they practically, you know, they they they cut off like all the good stuff out. So they just wrote it. Sappy, sappy story about it. Even Gene Kelly is not interesting in it. I mean, he’s kind of bland. So Lucy is very stiff and everything in it until they do a song. The Cole Porter did record friendship. That was a big hit for Merman and Burt Lar. You know, friendship, friendship, just a perfect friendship. And it’s a kind of thing that Lucy could do. As a bit of comedy that was not written in the rest of her character because her character is a very straight leading lady. No. One, that whole role was written for a singer like Ethel Merman. Lucy couldn’t sing. So they cut out all the her songs. So she all she had to do was kind of stand around to be this boring leading lady till she got to that song. And then she kind of she kind of like started swinging with it and doing it. And therefore, you can kind of see the fun of her there in it for the first time at MGM, because this was like 1943, easy to wear, didn’t come until three years later.
Interviewer: The other thing is she does have a couple of numbers, but they’re all dubbed. And she uses her real voice in friendship. Yes. Can you tell us about that.
Robert Osborne: Well, she never used her. I always thought before I ever met her that she was a musical comedy star because she was in so many musicals. And I hadn’t really realized that she didn’t dance and certainly didn’t sing. I didn’t know that until later when she said, I don’t sing. I never say because she was always in a nightclub singing or doing something in her movies. But she didn’t have the voice and they didn’t dub her very well, because so often I think the voices that they picked for her were voices that didn’t sound like any any connection of what she would sound like if she was singing. And that’s why I think it was so much fun and friendship. It was her own voice. She could handle it just fine. But it’s also not a song that really required a singer as much as somebody clowning around. It was also a very popular song because every truck driver could sing it. And, you know, you didn’t have to have, you know, the tones to be able to do it.
Interviewer: Now, was it an accident that that theme song makes every appearance in the I Love Lucy show in Lucy enough by the same dress where they’re going to get the Girls Club is going to go on television. Carolyn Appleby’s husband is the producer and he gives them a ride 30 to 12. And that’s gonna be a bonus.
Robert Osborne: I don’t think there was any I don’t think there was any particular connection, except that, in fact, there was a popular song and it’s a song she knew and a song she knew she could sing. And it fit the storyline so well. But it’s a song that, you know, at that point, a lot of people were singing, you know, in vaudeville acts or anything. You’d get a, you know, Hope and Crosby together at a Bond rally and they’d sing friendship because it became like it’s the same kind of song. Exactly. Like Bosom Buddies became and Mame, you know, a song that had kind of an edge to it, to people saying to one another. But it was fun for me to see it reappearing in there because, you know, I had the as a fan, I’d seen the connection and seen to Berry was a lady and love the fact that she was doing the song again. It’s just that they it’s amazing, too, as to any of us to see that movie today. Dewberry was a lady and realized what a success it was. So was best foot forward. And that’s she’s not fun in that at all either. She’s kind of stiff and uninteresting. And the great thing about Dewberry with her best foot forward when you see it is at least it’s got these brand new kids that have come to Hollywood that we’ve never seen before, like June Allison and Nancy Walker and Gloria to Haven and Stanley Donen in there somewhere. And, you know, a lot of vitality. But the movie itself is not very good.
Interviewer: Well, let’s jump forward again back to the IWC period. And I love the things that you’ve been telling us, by the way. I think you’re terrific. Thanks. Jon, good energy, an intimate knowledge of your subject. This notion that you could see the birth. You could see this character sort of being born. Do you think it’s fair to say are true to say that if. You know, if Humphrey Bogart was born to play the Sam Spade’s, or a character that Lucille Ball was born playing Lucy Ricardo.
Robert Osborne: Yes, I think she was. I think she was born to play that kind of character. They they not tragedy. That’s too serious a word. But the sad part of it was, is that I don’t think Lucy ever knew how wonderful she was or how important she would be to the world with her comedy that she would make people laugh. I had a friend not too long ago that had had AIDS and was dying. And the only thing he wanted to see, he got a whole bunch of the I Love Lucy tapes that’s that were put out and watch those. And he would laugh and you’d hear this person. You go to the hospital and see him and you’d hear him laughing. This person who is not far from dying. And I thought by that point, Lucy gone. I thought, how sad. She didn’t know that not only was she entertaining us in our homes in the 50s and 60s and but that she could even entertain somebody in a hospital that’s about to go. She would be so thrilled with that. But I don’t think she ever understood how important that was, because, again, her culture, what she was trained in and everything, you were important if you’re on Broadway. If you’re Ethel Merman or Helen Hayes. And you’re also important if you were in movies, if you were Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Plaudit, Kolber, you are not important if you were in television. Television still meant that you were had not succeeded in movies. No, she knew she had. All right. But. It was the secondary profession. I had it one time that that I still chuckle about was Vivien Leigh came to Los Angeles in 1961 doing a play Duel of Angels. And it was right at the time when John F. Kennedy was running for the Democratic nomination. And he got it was that same week. It was a terrible booking for Vivien Leigh because everyone in Los Angeles had their minds on the Democratic convention that was in town. So Scarlett O’Hara was in this play at the high end in Hartford. And not a lot of people were going, which was a tragedy because for a chance to see Vivien Leigh onstage, she was such a wonderful beauty and a wonderful actress. So Lucy wanted to go see it. So we indeed she took me. This is a point in which Desi was not around very much. She took me and another lady from Desi, Lou and another fellow. And we went to see Beenleigh and Dualla Angels and we went backstage afterwards, which I was thrilled about to get to meet Vivien Leigh. And it was very interesting because backstage at this point, Vivien Leigh was an actress that had great respect all over the world, but she was not a a name on everybody’s lips. And again, this was 61. This was many years after Gone with the Wind. And she was playing in a small theater that wasn’t sold out. Lucy was the queen of the world at this point. But when we went backstage, Vivien Leigh was the star and Lucy was the supporting player again. It was like that cast system on a film set. And it was so fascinating to see this happen the way Lucy retreated and was like this young girl who was meeting Scarlett O’Hara. And it was almost like 1939 again, where Lucy was a, you know, playing small parts at RKO and this classics. Anyway, we had a nice visit, so we went all the the the four of us, not Vivien Leigh, but the four of us that had gone to see her went across the street to the Brown Derby restaurant to have something to eat. And Lucy was in a very low key frame of mind. She kept stirring her coffee through your coffee, you know. And I said, Are you all right? And she said, Yeah. She said, I have to say this evening really depressed me. Well, I thought she was depressed because there were not that many people at the theatre seeing this wonderful performance. And I said, well, you know, it was a bad booking that at this time with the Democratic I mean, you should know it’s not that she said what depresses me is she said what she does is so wonderful and so important with words and performance. And what I do is so unimportant by comparison. So I thought, well, I’m going to buoy her spirits. So I said, Lucy, you could Vivien Leigh ever do anything like you do that would appeal to everybody in the country that would make everybody emotionally involved with what she does? Everything. She looked at me, she says. Have you ever heard of a little movie called Gone With the Wind? Has put you right in my place because I’ve forgotten that. But I think that it’s a telling story about Lucy, because I think she always kind of felt that the what she did was good and she wanted to make it good. And she was determined that anything that she did, she did seriously and professionally and got it done. But I don’t think she thought it had a lot of value. And I wish that she knew now that we’re all saying what a value she had always.
Interviewer: All right. I want to go back to the I Love Lucy period and just get some storytelling points, if we could. We talked about the pregnancy. We talked about the birth of it in the pregnancy and sort of the fast climb to number one. We interviewed Mike Dan yesterday and he said by the third week, the competition is third week of the first year. The competition has just knocked out, you know, eight or nine.
Robert Osborne: We also have to put that little in perspective, too, though, that in those days you didn’t have television competition like you do today where you’ve got so many channels and you’ve got so many big, big things competing for attention. There were a lot of things on television, but there are also a lot of things like Waterfront with Preston Foster and I led three lives with Richard Carlson. And, you know, there weren’t a lot of shows that really grabbed attention every week. You might say there might be if that week Martin and Lewis were on the Colgate Comedy Hour. Yeah, you have to watch that. Or there might be a max ledman, you know, spectacular with, say, maybe Ginger Rogers doing Lady in the Dark or something. But those things were few and far between. So. So. And I’m not negating the importance of it, but it wasn’t as though there was an awful lot of competition of really quality stuff. The I Love Lucy show stood out like a sore thumb on television in those days. You had Milton Berle being wonderful and Edwin was quite wonderful and Martin and Lewis and a few others. But the freshness and the whole zaniness and the whole joy of the I Love Lucy show was kind of unique. So it is not too surprising that it did grab the country that fast. And of course, also at that point, more and more people were starting to buy television sets. So it was they were staying home more the novelty of having a television. So I remember I was in college at the time and I never watch them much because I had to be in study. But I remember my fraternity brothers all down there, you know, and they would break. People would break to go down there to watch I Love Lucy. And these were people that weren’t watching television normally. You know, it was like an event every every night that once a week when she would come on. It was a big event to go down. Watch I Love Lucy because you never knew what that crazy Lucy was going to do next. You know, it’d be very hard for anyone to have that kind of impact now only because we have so many different shows pulling at us from so many different networks. I mean, back then there, you know, they didn’t even have. I’m not sure if that even came on before network television, but I know that that CBS some of those shows in those times would like. You know, beat they’d be local, but they wouldn’t necessarily be across the board at that same hour and every in in every city networks was so different then. And there were only, you know, like maybe four channels that you had to pick from. So when something that good would would come on. It was like you wouldn’t miss it.
Interviewer: Well, what I wanted I wanted to put you back there because I wanted you to try to help us understand that. Here she is. She’s she’s kind of captured the country’s imagination. She’s very popular. People love her. She’s recognized where she goes. And all of a sudden, Labor Day weekend, Walter Winchell comes on his show and says. The top comedian. Is a communist without exactly saying her name. Tell us a little bit about that.
Robert Osborne: One has to also. When one talks about the period that Walter Winchell accused her being a communist have to put yourself back in that time, that that was a red scare in Hollywood, the likes of which we’ve probably not ever seen in our lifetime, other than that, where everybody in Hollywood was terrified because careers were totally flushed down the toilet the minute any hint of being a communist. And this was ruining lives of people that maybe had signed up to be a communist as one would sign up to be a socialist or sign some, you know, some slip to contribute money to Russia or something in the 30s when when that was not a sin. Russia had been our ally during the Second World War. You know, major movie studios were making movies that Washington and ask them to make. I mean, every studio made one MGM made Song of Russia. Warner Brothers made Mission of Moscow. Everybody was making a movie with a Russian theme to try to help this country be more compassionate to Russia because they were our allies and they were being beaten down by the Germans and everything. Well, even those movies made in the 40s when they were our allies were movies that came to haunt the people that had made them in the 50s, as they were saying, oh, you were trying to stick communist propaganda in the movies. You know, you’re trying to take over the country. You know, it was madness. And of course, politicians have always liked to jump back to jump on Hollywood because that would get their name in the paper. It would get them high profile. And it was in that period when Larry PARC’s career was ruined after this huge career playing Al Jolson, The Jolson Story and Gail Sondergaard an Academy Award winner career totally ruined and revere an Academy Award winner. Career totally ruined J. Edward Bromberg committed suicide because of being accused of a John Garfield couldn’t get a job. Edward G. Robinson script start. Stop coming. And these were just like hints. There were papers like red channels that came out that were saying, you know, say, well, I saw so-and-so John Garfield talking to Dalton Trumbo at a party. Well, they knew Dalton Trumbo was a communist. That meant John Garfield, probably one, too. And and people that were living in Hollywood then I wasn’t but said that you be terrified to even speak to somebody in a restaurant for fear that association might might brand you a communist in a studio would drop you. Everybody was running terrified into all of that at the time when Lucy was so successful on television. Winchell said this and I believe that started through some congressmen or something that was trying to make a name for himself. I think that’s how the leak all came out. And it was terrifying to Lucy because she had she was on the brink of losing everything just like that because of this. And, of course, the fact that the person that was so loved, they had run Charlie Chaplin out of the country, you know, and Charlie Chaplin once had been this beloved comedian that everybody loved. And and the hints of him being a communist, which he always adamantly denied, literally ran him out of the country. And he was an exile, self-imposed exile. It was not really welcome back here for like 20 years. His films were not released in this country in many cities. The Veterans of Foreign Wars would pick it out in front of any theater with Chaplin film. All of that. Lucy was about the same thing was about to happen to her. And the most brilliant thing happened. CBS was not eager to lose this money machine that they had found. So they offered to give Lucy and Desi some free time. I think a half an hour free time on network television to answer this charge because it was that damaging and everybody was wanting an answer. And, of course, this half hour was going to have a huge effect on on the outcome of all of that. And it was Desi that came up with a line, the opening line of his statement that that stopped everything. And he came out. He said, I have to say the only thing read about Lucy is her hair. And that’s not really there. And everybody laughed. And then it was like, oh, that’s just another crazy thing Lucy’s done, you know? Then it became not Lucille Ball that they were equating her to the character. It was another crazy Lucy. And it was terrific because then it went away and it really never, ever haunted her again. She said a wonderful thing one time about that is that she was giving a dinner party the night that the Winchell broadcast or thing came out. And there were many Hollywood people that she named that I won’t, but that were invited to this party. And one by one, she started getting telephone calls. Oh, so-and-so is oh, my wife is sick and we won’t be able to come tonight. And everybody dropped out. Not one of the people. They all scattered like rats on a ship from her. And she was so destroyed by that. And she went to bed that night in this great turmoil. Got up the next morning and she’s walked down the stairs and out in her garden because they had a house with kind of a fence around it. And from the living room, you were in this garden in a pool. She said that she saw this man sitting in a chair outside. She thought, well, who the hell is that? She went out and it was Lou Costello who she didn’t really know that well. And she said, what are you doing here? And he said, well, I said, I’ve been through things like this and I just thought you might need a friend. So she said, I’ve got some stuff to read here. You just go about it. I just want you to know I’m here if you need anything, I’m here. And she said she never forgot that because he was the one person that showed up as a friend. And then when the charges went away, all those people started coming backing him. But she never forgave them for. In fact, there was a in one of them, there was a couple in which the husband was the singer, that she seriously wanted to do a wildcat with her on Broadway, and she wouldn’t have a minute because of because they had abandoned her that night.
Interviewer: Now, what about the whole business of should we? Should the show go on? Or shouldn’t the show go on? They were in rehearsal to film the first episode of that season that Friday night in the midst of all this turmoil and the notion that the audience might not support currently my. Or how what would happen when she walked out on stage?
Robert Osborne: Well, I think it was it just a terror. Absolutely terrifying thing, because, again, as I say, you have to put are you have to put back. You have to put yourself back in time as to what was going on everywhere that lives are being changed by just the merest coincidence, the merest hint of anything were causing whole careers to be ruined. And then sometimes it wouldn’t. It’s like Sterling Hayden got up and said approximately the same thing that Larry Parks did because Larry Parks had been so loved by the public in the Jolson story. They turned on him. MGM had a film that he’d just made with Elizabeth Taylor that they weren’t even going to release because Louis Viera said, I’m not releasing any movie with some damn communist in it, you know. And this is Larry. And had had been like, you know, energetic young political guy back in the 30s that had done this. He was not a serious communist trying to overthrow the country, that sort of thing. Sterling Hayden said correctly the same thing, but because people didn’t know him that well, then didn’t care that much. He didn’t affect his career at all. So one never knew how that was gonna happen. And I’m sure they were absolutely terrified of what it might happen because they had gone so high and they had so far to fall. And again, you know, Lucy was also wise enough to the ways of the world to know that when you’re when you’re that successful, they’re always gonna be. A lot of people want to shoot you down. They don’t like people love you. They love to build you up to be a success. And then once you’re up there, they love to tear you down and they really hate it if you’re more successful than they are or if you’re too successful or anything like that. They love her and they laugh at her, but they also don’t like the fact she’s that rich and they don’t like the fact that, you know, all that kind of stuff. This is part of human nature, unfortunately. But I’m sure that was terrifying to them. Absolutely terrifying. But that line about that does he came up with kind of dispel the whole thing and there was never a problem with it again. And indeed, she was never a member of the Communist Party, but she had signed some stuff. And unfortunately, that was all on record. She had a grandfather with whom she lived with the grandfather lived was she and her mother and her sister, Cleo, and the grandfather was used to hold communist meetings. But this again, this was in the thirties. This was not when you had to pull the blinds down or that you were, you know, like some, you know, Nazi group in some basement or something. You’re kind of open about it. You just, you know, and he used to have them in their house. And one time he was, you know, going around, we’ve got to get more members, go get more members. They all had quotas. You got to sign this, Lucy. So she signed it, too. But, you know, it didn’t mean anything then. And then it all changed so much in the 50s. When Lucy was at RKO. She always considered that her great break came when she met Lila Rogers. Lucy adored Ginger Rogers, who was the great female star. There were two great stars on the RKO lot, Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers. Ginger Rogers made all the money for RKO. Katharine Hepburn was the prestige star. But her films didn’t make any money. But Ginger was wonderful to Lucy. And Lucy played small parts in a lot of Ginger’s movies. Well, Lila Rogers was Ginger’s mother. Ginger could be nice because Lila wasn’t so nice. Lila was the ambitious one that did all she could for her daughter. And she used to get in Fred Ester’s way like crazy on the sets. She would go on the sets when they were dancing and she’d say, I don’t like that dress. I don’t like that. I like that. And so Fred Astaire finally said, the bosses at RKO, you gotta get Lela Rogers off the set. So at Arkia did was very smart. They had a kind of a barn on the lot. There was a storage barn and they said, Lila, we want you to train some of our young actors because she was good at that. I mean, she was she was a feisty lady and she was very good at that sort of thing. So they said, Lila, come and train our actors. We’ll build a theater for you there and you can train our actors. So they set up a thing where lead, which was very clever, actually. Lila Rogers would take all the young contract players at the studio like Lucy, not the stars, but the contract players. And she would train them in scenes and every Friday night at five o’clock before a producer could check off the lot for the weekend, she would put on one hour of skits or plays or one acts or or monologues or whether with all the contract players. And it was a way for the producers to see the young people under contract to think I could use her in the movie and so and so I could use him and such. And so and it was great for the actors because then they would be hired for the films that they otherwise wouldn’t. And it also was a great way for RKO to make sure that the producers didn’t start across the street. There was a wonderful restaurant called Lucie’s that. Everybody used to go drink out all the time. And so it kept them on the lot until at least five, 30 or six o’clock on a Friday night before they went off drinking, went to Palm Springs or wherever they went. In those days, and it was through those shows. Leila Rogers that Lucy was seen by producers and they’d start giving her bigger and bigger parts in movies. So years go by. Lucy suddenly owns RKO Studios the same lot. And it’s now Desi Studios. And that barn is still there. The theaters no longer there. But she took that barn and rebuild a theater in it and decided she was going to have her contract stable. And Duf, Intellivision, what had been done at RKO where you had contract players? No one had ever done that before. So she put about 20 people in a contract. I was one of them. Fortunately, the thing they had never worked for one important reason, Desi, Lou, Lucy and Desi own percentages of the shows on their lot. The only show I think that they owned outright was the I Love Lucy show, which at that point I think was the Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz Westinghouse show, it was called. And so they couldn’t force any of the producers to use any of the contract players because the producers had a bigger percentages. Lucy and Desi, they had hired whoever they wanted. So that never worked out. But she did put on a musical revue on the stage there. And then actually it was quite successful, became kind of an event in Hollywood at that time. And there were several offers to take it to Las Vegas. However, the one place in Vegas that didn’t offer to take it was the Sands Hotel. And the Sands Hotel had a contract with Lucy and Desi that they would forgive Desi his gambling debts because he owed them millions of dollars, only on condition that if either of them ever played in Las Vegas or had any connection to Vegas, they would play at the Sands Hotel. And so Lucy was going to be part of the Desi Lu review package. She was gonna be in it with us when we did it in Las Vegas. But because it couldn’t be done, less was done at the Sands Hotel. And that time they had, as they had their own regular stable of stars, they had Sinatra, Dean Martin, and had the regular one. So there was no slot for us. So she then filmed it and it was filmed for a Christmas show. I believe it was their big, big Christmas show of 1959 or 1960 run in there. And again, up a screenplay was written as a Lucy show with Lucille Ball was the character, not Lucy Ricardo, but she was still a very Lucy Ricardo kind of character. And they had all the various stars on the lot participating in the show, like and Southern and Bonita, Granville and Lassie and John Bromfield and everybody was in the show. Plus these reviews, sketches and musical numbers that we’ve done. But that’s how I actually met her. I had met her. I had done a done a television show for Paul Henry, the actor. He was directing a Western. And I had played a small part in one of those episodes. And I went back to the studio one day to thank him for hiring me. And he said, you should go see Milt Lewis, who’s the casting man here. He wanted to see you again on something. So I went to see Mel Lewis and he said, Have you talked to Lucille Ball yet? Well, this point I’d never met was who was it? No. What about. He said, well, she’s starting up a contract stable here and you might be good for her. So he said, let me put it let me see if she’s in her office. So he called up and she said, yes, send him up. So I went up. Well, it all happened so quickly, I didn’t have time to be nervous about it. And so we started talking and she said she said, do you have any film on you? And I said, well, I yeah, I just had done a test over 20th Century Fox with Diane Baker. So she got on the phone right away. It’s called Fox Test. Robert Osborne did a test center. I want to see it over here. Send it over. So they said it would be over like in an hour or so. We sat for the hour and talked. And I think there were two things that she liked about me. One was I’d gone to college and she was always impressed by anybody who’d gone to school because she didn’t finish high school and she equated that with knowledge. You know, she was a smart woman in the world, but she thought if you had to if you had a degree, it made you smart, you know. So she was she liked because I was smart. And also I would ask her about because I was so movie crazy about the people that she had worked with. And she was not the least bit interested in talking about the star she’d worked with, Henry Fonda or any of them. She loved the character actors and I knew who they were. And again, that fascinated her that I would know who Jane Darwell was or Edward Everett Horton or Franklin pangbourne and all that. Alice Brady. These were the great heroes to her because they were the actors and the comedians and the the old pros. So that was kind of the connection. So then she saw then she said, come on. And we had to go over to the Paramount lot, which was right next door because they had a screening room. Desi, Lou did not she a card that she used to drive around on the bottle. And I said, come on, let’s go have a look at the test. So we looked at the test and after it was over, she didn’t say a word, not a word. She just said, well nice to see you. Thanks. Thanks for all that. Oh, she really didn’t like it. But, well, I struck out. But, you know, what can you do? So I went about my business. And about two days later, I got a call from a secretary that said Lucy wants to know if you can come to dinner tonight, 8:00 at our house. Give me the address. Yes. So I was very excited. So I went to the house and there was Kate Thompson, Roger Edens from MGM, Janet Gaynor, Paul Gregory, her husband, and about Cleo, her sister, and about four or five other people. So I was invited to dinner. And all these people, you know, we’re all these were all people that had accomplished things and that were older than me. And I didn’t know why. How was there particular and Desi was not there. It’s very strange. So we had dinner and then she showed a movie, Funny Face, which was not a new movie at that point, but Kate Thompson had been in it. And I remember being thrilled because while Kate Thompson and Audrey Hepburn did want the numbers up on the screen, Kate Thompson got up beside the screen and did the number with it. So I thought, wow, I’m really in Hollywood. And I thought, this is really exciting. And so but I couldn’t understand quite why I was there, because I was not in the age group. I was not in the I hadn’t accomplished anything that these people at a company. So as I left that night, as everybody was leaving, she said, well, have you signed your papers yet? And I said, what papers? She said, well, your contract. I mean, don’t you want to. Do you want to be on a contract? To me. And I was like, are you an idiot? I said, well, nobody’s ever mentioned it. She said, Oh, these. I thought somebody call you about that. Well, I want you to go on a contract to me. The studio will send you the papers, everything. Can I shut the door? And that was it. And I came into her life at a wonderful time for me because it was at a time when Desi was not around a lot. They were having a lot of personal problems. Desi was working very hard. He was also had some girlfriends. She was not admitting that at this point, but she was alone a lot. Also, the kids were quite young and they go to bed early and there was not a lot going on. And she loved the fact that I wanted to see old movies. So she’d run old movies at her house a lot and invite a couple of the contract players over. She’d take us to Las Vegas when she would go there to do a benefit. I remember one time Shirley MacLaine and her husband at that point, Steve Parker, were very involved in Japanese things. I think Steve Parker produced shows in Japan and there was a big typhoon in Japan that had wiped out half of the country. So this big benefit was put on in Las Vegas and all these various stars participate in it. So she took several of us down. We went to that and we traveled with her. We came back to New York with her one time. And and it I think she was using us as a people to laugh with and enjoy things with. Sometimes I think also when you’re in a domestic situation and your partner is straying and part of the reason you may think is because you’re getting a little older. And Oluseyi at this point was probably just about 40, something like that. But that’s a very vulnerable age when you’re when you’re used to being young and you may not think you’re so young anymore. So what you really want to be around is younger people to make you feel young. So I think that had a lot to do with it. We also loved her kids, so we used to play with the kids a lot and Desi was never around. So she always liked having, you know, a guy or two around to that to play ball with Desi and things like that. So that kind of nurtured it, but also because they were not working except on their hour specials. So that was not being done continuously. She had a lot of free time. And so it was a wonderful time to be in Hollywood, not quite loosely, but the other people I met because they were all at that point in their career where they were not old, but they were the older generation of stars because, you know, at that point, Kim Novak was the hot new star. You know, Lana Turner and Lucy and these others, they were now they’ve moved up to this this older bracket and stuff. So it was a wonderful way to get to know her. And we used to go down to Palm Springs a lot. Desi never liked us all too much because again, in that in that kind of dramatic middle you of this this family collapsing and these two people that loved each other so much, kind of being torn apart by circumstances. You had to kind of be like one or the other. You run one team or the other team. And because Lucy kind of found us, we were kind of on her team. So he was not always that hospitable to us. He was pleasant, but never that hospitable.
Interviewer: And I think, Deena, that she preferred the company of men. What do you think about that?
Robert Osborne: Well, I. I think that that happened a lot in Hollywood at that point because men. Ran the industry and, oh, I think it happened a lot in the industry at that time, that women like Lucy. preferred the company of men to other women. I think women were not only competitive for screen roles, but also competitive for the men in their life. And also, I think that a lot of it had to do with the fact that people like Lucy were raised in a world where they learned how to manipulate men. They were comfortable. They knew how to work them. They didn’t know how to work women. And I saw that not only with Lucy, but with many women. Betty Davis was very much that way. Watching Betty Davis on the set, she she knew how to flirt with men to get exactly what she wanted. And when somebody would show up on a set that was a woman director or a woman in charge, she didn’t know how to woo a woman. She wasn’t interested in that. That was not part of her training. So I think like like Lucy, many women from that era were much more comfortable being around men.
Interviewer: How would you describe her on the set? You did work with her and watched her work.
Speaker Yes. Lucy was very business. Once you got on the set and again, it came from her background of having no money when she started out having to work very hard. She would talk about going to to when she was a model in New York. They’d get extra money by by just going. And I don’t think there was any. I really got the feeling that that Lucy was a very moral person and it was not a lot of fooling around. But they go to things where they were literally invited to go. A bunch of girls, you know, sit with gangsters while they were having a meal. And she knew a lot of gangsters. I mean, I met gangsters through her that she knew those people. But way back in the New York days, she said you’d go in and it’s you’d be taken in this room. There’d be a huge table empty and you’d sit. Every other girl would sit around. She said the first thing you do is you reach in the plate, get a hundred dollar bill, and then you sit and be their company through. And then the guys who come in, is it me, the company? And then you go home. And I don’t think there was. I don’t think she would’ve told it if it was, you know, if there was anything more to that. But I mean, that money was not easy to make in those days. And she supported her mother, her sister and her brother. So money was not easy to come by. So Lucy on a film set, was very conscious of that, particularly when she had her own company. But I don’t think she would have done it with anybody else’s money. It’s why people like working with her. She’d show up on time. She knew her lines. She was prepared. And she expected everybody else to be, too. She did not fool around. She did not joke around. There’s some people that I’ve watched on film sets and that is there the way they operate. But it’s to get everybody jolly. So you’ve got a. So it’s to pay off in a jolly way. Lucy was very much to stick to the business, get the business done. And she was not fun on a set. I think almost anyone would say that it was very business, like you get it done. And she worked very hard and she didn’t expect anyone to work any less hard. But she would not ask anybody to do anything. She wasn’t willing to do. But she loved the work process. And that was another thing. She was never happier than on a set. I mean, all the times I saw in her home entertaining is that she was never she wasn’t happy unless she was working. But she loved the fact that as Lucy, she had to do so many crazy things like play a saxophone badly or do something badly, because she said, I have to learn to do it well before I can do it badly. So she’d have to learn and practice the saxophone or she’d have to practice ballet and how to really get up on her toes so that she could do it poorly. When they as Lucy. And she loved that. But she loved that. Again, it was learning. It was it was like improving her mind because she was dumb, you know, in her mind. She hadn’t yet made a high school. So I’m dumb, you know, so it’s like learning a backgammon and word games and scripts. And where do you get a script? We have to do pantomime. She loved all that kind of stuff. But the work, the work was what she did. And that’s that’s actually, I think, why she did start drinking a lot towards the end of her life. And I think one reason she tried to Della Sensor’s was the fact that she didn’t have that work to do and work was her life. She loved her family. But I think if she was honest and it’s not just Lucy, but I think a lot of those people, Betty Davis always said, oh, my children are the most important thing in my life. I don’t think that’s quite true. I think any of those ladies that were trained and worked so hard to get where they got and were so good at what they did, but had to work so hard to keep where they got on. I think any of them would have gotten really kids, the family or whatever, if it meant, you know, having to give up the career. There was some that certainly did give up their careers and did it happily. But a lot most of those ladies like those really top ladies like Joan Crawford and Betty Davis and those either that or like Katharine Hepburn, they didn’t have kids because they didn’t want to be put in that position, credit culture. And they were very free to admit. I don’t have everything. I don’t have kids. But what do I do if I’m opening on Broadway and a whole company is depending on me and whose investments are there and my kid is in the hospital and needs me. I do not want to be put in that position.
Interviewer: Describe the feeling Desilu, when you were there. Was it a family company? We hear these stories about these Desilu picnics.
Robert Osborne: Yeah, they had Desilu picnics. They tried to make it very family oriented and Lucy would show up. But Lucy was always the boss and always, I think, terrified people. Because, again, Lucy was not fun. She was not a light hearted person. And I think it’s like a lot of family or company picnics. So you go to where you have fun until the bosses are around, you know. But particularly with Lucy. Lucy was Lucy had that red hair. And she was a star and she was a woman and all those things. And there was kind of off-putting to a lot of people, but they did all they could to make it a family atmosphere. The one thing they didn’t have, interestingly enough, was a commissary on the lot. They didn’t have a place to eat. And so you’d have to which I loved. You had to go next door to Paramount Pictures, which we had the use of the Paramount Commissary. And you go in there and there could be Marlene Dietrich be having lunch. You could see Sophia Loren walk in. And so that was great. I loved all that. They finally they finally built a commissary. But but basically, they did have the picnics and all of that where they would try to bring everybody together.
Interviewer: Did you go to one of those picnics?
Robert Osborne: I did. They were fun.
Interviewer: I want you to tell it, because they’re these fabulous pictures in Life magazine by some great photographer.
Robert Osborne: Really?
Interviewer: Just so you know, they’re very mythic looking, the kids and everyone looks like they’re having a good time. Maybe it’s not accurate.
Robert Osborne: Well. Well, I think. No, I think everybody didn’t have a good time at those company picnics, see, because, you know, it was like in Hollywood. That’s not the kind of thing you did very often is have that kind of sense of small town. I came from a small town and I was used to that and I love that. But I don’t think a lot of people were too used to that in Hollywood and people didn’t have a good time. You’d bring your kids and they have lots of food, Nadaf games and, you know, you’d have the rate three legged races and all that kind of stuff. I don’t think they had that much fun when Lucy, was arriving or was there, they’d always make the appearance because that’s what you do. But I think everybody had a better time after Lucy and Desi left Desi. However, people had fun with Desi, Desi liked people. And he was a. He was. You know, down to earth guy, and he loved to go off to anybody and he could talk to anybody and put the arm around the shoulder and chat and all that kind of stuff. And people loved him. And he was a he was a good egg. Lucy was a little more inhibiting than that, again, because she did not exude a sense of humor. There are certain people that when you’re around them. Ginger Rogers. Yeah. Everyone, you know, she was a great star. But Ginger Rogers was somebody you always felt you could just go up and talk to because she was sunny and she was fun. You know, Alison, you could do that. Esther Williams of the Lucy was a little more. She’s a little tougher. Again, it’s a cigarette girl at the Trocadero that came out. You know, it kind of didn’t fool around with Lucy, you know, Big Red, you know.
Interviewer: Tell me about the time now when she goes on and buys Desi out and all of a sudden she’s president of this company. What do you observe?
Robert Osborne: All of a sudden she was president of a company that she didn’t really want the first place, because I don’t think Lucy ever wanted that kind of responsibility again. She won work. She loved to work, but she didn’t want the responsibility of worrying. She was a sensitive woman underneath all of that. That core, that chic, the shell that she kind of exposed. She didn’t like to be responsible for the fact that lives were depending on her, that that if the stockholders reports weren’t good or this show or that show got canceled, that they’d have to lay off people and that people might lose their furniture and do it. She came from that culture when when, you know, from working people. And that was very serious stuff to her. And she didn’t want to be responsible. That’s not why she worked all those years. It was kind of desi that had gotten her into that, the business aspect. So that was one kind of knew that once she once the Big Red became the head of the studio, that that wasn’t gonna last too long because she also that wasn’t creative enough for her. She didn’t like to get up in the morning and have to worry about a stockholders meeting that she was going to have to talk to at lunch or some group of of her husband’s corporate husbands and their wives that she had nothing in common with, that she had to go be charming to in the in the evening. She could do it. But that’s not what she wanted to do. She wanted to be performing. And so that’s why she not only sold the company, but immediately took off and went to New York to show us again, she thought being a movie star and being a stage star was important. Being television was not that important. And so the first thing she did was head back to New York to do. First, she thought about doing a Dorothy Parker story called Big Blonde, which was rather dramatic. And then she thought, no, I’m so depressed that I want to have fun. So she thought a musical would be fun, even though, again, she didn’t sing, but she chose to do Wildcat, written by the fellow who also had written The Rainmaker. And it was not good, but it was upbeat. And she had, I think, a lot of work to make it work. But she did because she kind of would break character and talk about Fred Mertz and things like that. Not Insys loved it. They just want to see her onstage. And she was magic. She was magic. The show was not, but she was.
Interviewer: Before we leave the presidency. Do you think it’s fair to say that she bought it for one sum and sold it for a greater sum, which I think is factually accurate? Yeah, she did sell it at a profit and then therefore, on some levels, she must have been a successful business. Well, I think she was. And that she also because it was the first time, other than the 20s when Mary Pickford was a studio owner as a woman. But I think in that era, she was really the first. And then that spawned the Mary Tyler Moore as you young people, the women who then had their own production companies. Can you just.
Robert Osborne: Oh, I think absolutely. She was a almost a pioneer, certainly a pioneer in television for somebody running a company and owning it. But I think that she always made it very came out very loud and clear that that was never a goal of her. She never being a mogul running a television studio. She said that she was fascinated by the the legend, the grew up, that she had, you know, been at RKO saying someday I’ll own this, too. She said the last thing in the world that I wanted to was on a studio. You know, that all kind of happened because it was a good business deal at the time. And Desi knew how to do that kind of stuff and they thought they’d be together forever. But when she ended up having this, she didn’t want that. And again, you have to realize that we’re in such a world today where money is the first thing anybody talks about. How much money am I going to make? How much money did they make? People magazine will have somebodies name and they’ll say. Com. Who makes made 22 million dollars for her last picture? That that wasn’t done so much in those days. And Lucy also came from a culture that I think she wanted to be. Financially secure. And she was she had been before they even bought Desilu. I mean, she’d saved money and invested money and all of that. And I don’t think that that was ever an objective then to be a Moghuls or to do all of this. And I think that when she thought, I’ve got I’ve got enough money, what I want to do is work. I’ve got enough money to take care of me. And the kids are set. And my mom has said, and if anything happens to Cleo, she’s sad and stuff. I just want to get out of here because, again, she didn’t want she didn’t want some momma with the baby coming up crying because the husband might lose his job. You know, that was not what she had gotten into as an actress or what she ever was interested in getting into. So I think she fled in terror from something like that. And again, she had the ability, though, because of her talent and because of the way her mind work to make money. So when she sold it, yes, she did sell it for a profit and she was very successful and she didn’t gamble it away as Desi often gambled his sums of money away. But again, it’s kind of an interesting lesson that and she always said that was true when we first several of us were under contract the first and we were making so little money, she said, no, you all first thing you have to do is open a savings account. Say, Lucy, we’re not make enough money to even, you know, practically pay our rent and buy our food. She said no. She said. So she went across the street. There was a bank, Bank of America, right by a restaurant called Nick Adel’s, which is right by the Dazzlers studios. She went and opened like 20 savings account, put like five bucks in each one of them and gave them. She had all the names. I mean, that gave us each her book. She said, no, I don’t care if it’s only five dollars, but at least five dollars of every paycheck put in a savings account. She said, I’ll add up. And she said, what you want to do is have enough money. You never have to make decisions based on money. And that was her philosophy. And she was right, of course, you know. So I think that that it was important for her to have enough money to get by. But it was never she never won a car. She never wanted houses. She never wanted to close. She does want to work and be with Desi, you know. And the tragedy of her life was the fact that she didn’t get Desi. She never lost him, actually, because, you know, she was back in his life at the end of his life and never was out of his life that long. But she wanted to be with him. She really loved him. And also she wanted to succeed. I think being a success was very important to her. And when she divorced, Desi was she’d failed. She’d failed at marriage. And I think that was very hurtful to her because she had this thing she had to succeed. And I don’t know where that came from. That could come from. Instead of saying, I’m going to own this studio someday, it could have been, you know, the little girl and Jamestown, New York, where, you know, the family has nothing and she’s hungry at night saying, I’m going to win, you know? And as far as she was concerned with Desi, she hadn’t won. She’d failed because the marriage of the one man in her life that she wanted in her life and he died or he the marriage died again. Okay. I think the one thing she wanted more than anything in the world was to be able to work, be financially secure and be with the one man that she loved. And that didn’t happen.
Interviewer: My feeling and I’m asking everybody, and it’s this notion that one of the things that maybe the Lucy show popular and continues to make it popular is this friendship between these two women, not Lucy, Lucille Ball and Vivienne Vance, but rather Ethel and Lucy. And our hope is to use that friendship song when they do it on that episode. I find it so charming, particularly the rehearsal version, not when they have the dresses on and they’re ripping things off, but when they’re in the apartment and they’re showing the boys their act. And I just think it is so charming, sweet, and the boys are so great. Also, I remember after the girls exit, they go at it at that. And they immitate the girls. And you feel that the Fred Ricky friendship and you feel that Ethel Lucy friendship and you just think I would be so lucky if I could be have a best friend like you talk to.
Robert Osborne: I yes. I think a great deal of the appeal of the show is the fact that it’s that they represent things that we like to have in our own lives. I’ve always been a little fascinated that I Love Lucy is so successful when there’s so much malice sometimes between the wife and the husband, she’s always doing things behind his back and all that. And there must be something psychologically in that that we respond to, too. How did not how to cheat on your mate, but how to. How to do. Get around the mate, you know. But I think the fact that the friendships are wonderful love. The fact that for them or such great friends it’s kind of way. Oh so we like friends. The TV series today is because you’d like to have pals like that. They’re always they’re always gonna back you up, always gonna help you out. I was gonna pull you in. Always gonna take care of you and everything. And I think that is one reason that it’s so successful. I think it’s also fascinating that that they conveyed all of that and when there was not always that greater rapport between them. In person, I mean, Bill Frawley was a very difficult man and didn’t like Vivian Vance at all. And she didn’t like him at all. And I think there was long periods when there was a lot of not hostility, but suspicion between Vivian and Lucy because Lucy really wanted to be the show. And she didn’t want that strong a second banana. She thought that it was gonna be Ben Adara and could be much more controlled than Ethel was control. She’d loved Ethel and really came to care for her. But I think she also, as one artist competing with another, I think she was all there was a lot of hostility to Vivian was very, very upset because she was she was used to being on Broadway or in road companies, playing the elegant second woman. That was what she did. She you know, she replaced Merman on Broadway. It was an understudy for Merman on Broadway and a couple of shows. And she was used to being in really Tony company. She didn’t like being in a house dress as a frumpy woman playing the second woman. And supposedly old enough to be married to Fred Mertz. You know, she hated all of that, which is interesting because that’s why in the later Lucy shows, here’s Lucy and all that when Desi was no longer around. You see Vivian getting more and more glamorous all the time because that’s the only way they could get her back if she could play a character where she’d have as pretty close as Lucy and everything. So there was a lot of hostility going on. And yet through all of that, they were able to convey this great warmth and friendship, which is amazing because it really proves that not only were they consummate pros, but they were all better actors then than perhaps we’ve ever given them credit for. Although I do think that again, underneath it all, with Lucy and Vivian, there was great respect and a great deal of love that came into it. But there was also total competition the whole time they were there and certain with Bill Frawley. Nobody liked him. I mean, he was a he was the old curmudgeon, but he used that, you know, and the scripts are so well written that it worked out perfectly. It was a magic combination. And that kind of thing happens so rarely in anything. Today, we’ve got the perfect people for the perfect parts because there’s so many talented people out there and so many people that can do everything that Lucy, Desi, Vivian and Bill Frawley could do. But the four of them doing it together were the perfect mix for that. And if you changed any one of those elements, the whole history of the I Love Lucy show could have been different.
Interviewer: Tell me about. I think friendships were very important to Lucy in her own life. Perhaps the wealthy is a better way of putting it. She wanted to surround yourself with people that she knew. As you know, we’ve interviewed Van Johnson. Tell me a little bit about Van Johnson and Lucy. This idea that she helped make him. And then not too many years later.
Robert Osborne: Yeah.
Interviewer: He came back and was on that show. Do you know that episode, The Dancing Star?
Robert Osborne: Yes.
Interviewer: He’s. He’s by the pool asleep. And she’s pretending. Mouthing as if she’s talking to him.
Robert Osborne: Well, Van Johnson, Lucille Ball had one of the really interesting histories because in Desis first film in Hollywood, too many girls. Lucy was the star of it. And Van had been in the Broadway show as a chorus boy. And it came out. These, of course, boy in the movie. And he doesn’t have any speaking lines and you just kind of see him in the background. But it’s fascinating about Van. He had such star quality that even when you’re watching that movie, you keep kind of noticing that guy back there because he kind of dances a little better than everybody else and he’s kind of got a zing to him. And he had, of course, that red hair and that kind of. That he kind of looked a little like a handsome Howdy Doody with that smile, those freckles and everything. But he’s the star of it. And our Lucy is the star of the movie, and he’s the chorus guy. So then he’s getting ready to go back to New York. And because he can’t make it in films, nobody’s picked him up. He did a lead in a movie. A little big picture at Warner Brothers with Faye Emerson called Murderer. Is something something a murder story. And he was about to go back and he was at the one the nightclubs in Hollywood. And Lucy was there and Desi was there and he was kind of at the bar having a drink and. And she said, hey, how are you? And he said, well, I just came in. I want to say goodbye to some my pals. She said, What do you mean? I said, Well, I’m going back to New York tomorrow. Nothing’s happening. I can’t get a job. She said, we can’t let you go back. You’re too good to go back to New York. So at the bar down at the end, the bar was Billy Grady, a talent coach at her scout at MGM, said a Billy, Billy, you got to come and meet this guy. He’s great. He was in too many girls. You shouldn’t let him get away, particularly since, you know, all the guys were going off in the service and they needed young guys in Hollywood. So from that meeting, Billy Gray set up on a point with Van Johnson. Benson was put under contract to MGM and within two years was a major, major star. Four years later, he was starring in a movie at Lucille Ball, was playing a supporting part, easy to win, sensational part for Lucy. But Van was the star of the picture. So then years go by, Van does a guest shot on the I Love Lucy show. Now she’s this huge star. And then a few years later, not many years later, she’s still a huge star making a movie called Yours, Mine and Ours with Henry Fonda and Vance Johnson as a supporting role in that. So their lives have gone. Their careers have gone so up and down and they’ve remained great friends. And I think Van has a great loyalty to Lucy. And certainly she was always devoted to Van Johnson. She loved people like Van that because he was a role and is a real pro. But also he made her laugh and she loved to laugh because she didn’t have that sense of humor herself. She didn’t find life funny. And so anyone that could make her laugh. She loved that because she’d love to feel good and have a good laugh because it was not in her her nature to conjure up the humor herself. She didn’t see things funny. She had a she had a great sense of what was funny and how to be funny. But she didn’t see life or things as funny.
Interviewer: Describe that episode, The Dancing Star, where Van Johnson is now playing a movie star in Hollywood.
Robert Osborne: I haven’t I I’m not gonna be a great Wonderbook because I haven’t seen that for so long. But I remember that he did it. And I remember they were wonderful together.
Interviewer: And I would never have probably worked out if it hadn’t been for him. And I’m glad we got it. It’s just a classic. And she’s really good in it.
Robert Osborne: She loved to when she had her television show. She loved to work with those people, particularly the character actors Elizabeth Patterson and Barbara Pepper. That was a great friend of hers who’d been a Golden girl. She always would get them jobs and like to have them on the show. And she loved those those people like William Holden that she had done. Miss Grant takes with Richmond, with Ann and merging Croft, of course, but also Van and new people. She’d be like Van Johnson, like Rock Hudson and people like Rock Hudson and stuff that she would have on her show. And of course, people like John Wayne that she’d never had a chance to work with in films. She loved it when she could get a John Wayne or Richard Widmark or some of those people on her series.
Interviewer: How about Doris Singleton? Do you know how she felt about Doris or the character Carolyn Appleby that she played on the series?
Robert Osborne: Well, I think that Lucy, again, going back to her great appreciation for character, people she loved, people that were good and had a good approach and that we’re professionals that she didn’t have to worry about that could come and deliver the goods and deliver it quickly. And she would if she was. She did not hold a lot of patients for people that couldn’t do that. She’s not somebody that could have ever worked with a Marilyn Monroe or someone like that that, you know, had to be kind of, you know, pampered and turned around and stuff. That wasn’t her style at all. You delivered because that’s what you’re being paid for. And time is money. And, dammit, you know, you’re a pro. You should be professional. She was not alone in that. Many people were like that. Betty Davis is very much like that and others. I know she was very, very impatient with Joan Crawford when they did the the thing was called star next door or something like that. Now, that was Tallulah Bankhead that she was impatient with you, but with Joan Crawford, Crawford drank so much during rehearsals and that they thought, as a matter of fact, that they were going to have to replace her because she was just not coming through. And of course, that night on the show, she was is is a little schlocker, too, which you can see on the show with Tallulah. She was very upset when they did. I think that was called the celebrity next door. And Tallulah Bankhead had come and was versing the show and could never and they had a very strict schedule. Monday, you came in and you read through Tuesday you block Wednesday of this Thursday, that Friday, tape it and all of that. You had to stay on schedule. And Tallulah never could learn lines. She didn’t have a clue on her line, was carrying the book up until like Thursday or whenever the day before the shooting. So much so that they were thinking about postponing it. But they called Betty Davis and said, we have a problem. We have Tallulaha Bankhead. She doesn’t know our lines. If we send you the script, can you come and do it next week? And Betty Davis didn’t because there had already been wild speculation after all about Eve that Betty Davis, until Lula banquette were big rivals and they were not. But she thought, this is not good. If I come and replaced a little banquette, it’s only going to add fuel to that fire. Betty never or Lucy never quite forgave Betty Davis for that. And as a matter of fact, when Betty wanted to play the Agnete or the Vera Charles part in Mame, the movie with Betty and do the Bosom Buddies, no, Betty or Lucy wouldn’t have her in the movie, still kind of irritated that she had turned that down. However, the night that they got so they decided to forge through with Taylor Rankin and the night they got to the taping, Lucy said she spent the whole day figuring out how to cover for a little banquette, that she’d forget this line. And I can say this and I’ll do this and I’ll say that and then I can jump in here. And she was so concentrating on how to save Tallulah that they started the show and Tallulah knew every line perfectly. And so Lucy is actually on that show kind of left holding the bag sometimes, which is unusual because she obviously hadn’t worked on her performance as much as she otherwise would have. So it turned out, of course, it was a ploy by one actress having one upmanship on another on how to get the best, how to steal the show and of course, the little bank it did. But she didn’t like that sort of thing. So she would have like someone like Doris, Mary Jane Croft and those others that came in and knew their business and delivered, didn’t get in the way, didn’t compete, knew their place, knew who the star was, was sitting in that chair ready to go when she was needed and all of that kind of stuff because they didn’t have time for for fooling around with. Moments and there were too many good people like Doris and Mary Jane Croft. They weren’t temperamental that delivered.
Interviewer: I think this will be the last question, unless you guys over here want to. Anybody want to chime in? We probably won’t spend a lot of time in our documentary about the latter two shows, the Lucy show and here’s Lucy. We are going to talk to Dick Martin, whose breath carry the story of the Lucy show. But how how do you think we should look at those later incarnations of Lucy?
Robert Osborne: I think that, again, was. You mean the result of it or. Well, I think that I think, of course, she did the shows because she again wanted to work. That was the whole motivating factor. She wanted someplace to go. She also wanted a place that she could be a queen in the domain where she was the boss and could call the shots. And that was important. The reason I don’t think it worked anymore was the fact that I think that her age worked against her because when she did crazy things as Lucy when she was in her 30s, you could kind of say, well, yeah, she’s crazy, but she’s going to grow out of that. You know, when she’s kept doing it as an older woman, then she became like a dangerous liability, where you say, that’s it. That’s a crazy lady and she’s going to do some damage to herself and her neighbors. You know, she’s going to fall off that ledge. And that’s not going to be a pretty sight. You know, it’s it psychologically, it was wrong for her to be playing that kind of physical woman, getting in crazy situations as an older person. And it was not as attractive. And also, I just think that the the voice got deeper. I think she did not she was not certainly an alcoholic or anything, but she’d start drinking a lot. She didn’t drink at all. And I knew her back then. But I think that it it gave her that cigarette girl became more and more prominent, get tougher. You know, and it was the because she was not liked to begin with. It got heavier. And all of that. And it wasn’t because she didn’t have a basic fun in her as a person. She was a serious person. I think that that showed up more and more to her, couldn’t be disguised as easily.
Interviewer: Do you think it’s fair to say that she was both her greatest triumph was those you, Ricardo character, but it was also a trap that she could never go beyond?
Robert Osborne: It was her greatest triumph, certainly. It was a trap. But.
Interviewer: Can you say it again, I’m sorry, because the audience won’t know what we’re talking about.
Robert Osborne: I Love Lucy was her greatest triumph. Certainly, I’m not sure if one could call it a trap or not, because it was a place that allowed her to do what she really wanted to do more than anything in the world. And if you consider the alternatives, again, the opportunities for all those wonderful comedians, the Carole Lombard, you know, died early. So she didn’t have to face that. But Rosalind Russell, you know, started having play larky nuns and, you know, and not end or not work at all. And all those wonderful people, Claudet Kolber retired basically to Barbados. And Ginger Rogers, you know, worked for J.C. Penney’s designing clothes and going out, selling them and stuff. So I’m not sure that was one could call it a trap. I think if anything, it’s the fact that along the line, because Lucy had come from such humble beginnings and had to work, that she didn’t develop people’s skills along the way to have hobbies or anything other than work to fill her life. And I think that if anything, that we can learn from that it is the fact that you have to have something in your life besides work. Work is not emphasized enough today. People nobody seems to want to work, but if you can find a work you love, it’s great. But it cannot be so all important to you that there’s nothing for you. When that work should normally stop, Lucy could have had a wonderful life if she had quit working and had produced films or taught she tried teaching classes. She didn’t really like that so much. She produced, although her name is not on it with Garry Morton, all the right moves with Tom Cruise because it had some dialogue in it that she didn’t approve of. She didn’t want her name on the film because you don’t want to a name with with some cursing in it that if her name was on it, she knew people might go to see it because it was two syllables name on it. But she wasn’t really interested in that either. She just wanted to work. And that’s really bad for anybody because you can’t keep working and you can’t be doing it 50 what you were doing at thirty and you can’t do it 60 or 70 what you were doing when you were 40, because each each age has its compensations, but it has to change somewhat. And if she could have gone like like Gail Patrick Jackson, who produced who went from being an actress to producing the Perry Mason series, or if she’d gone like Jackie Kennedy, going from being first lady to being a, you know, in the book business, you know, book editor and things like that, if she could have found some other area with and or without show business, that she could put that great energy, that knowledge, those people skills, that professionalism and everything into it. I think she could have had a wonderful life. Unfortunately, all she wanted to do was work as an actress and all the public would ever Biron was Lucy. And then it came that they wouldn’t Buyers’ Lucy. And then that was the tragedy of her life when that last series failed. She was quite a broken woman, very, very upset about that because she thought the public didn’t like her anymore. And it’s not that we didn’t like her. We just didn’t want to see her at a certain age doing that dangerous stuff that we liked her and when she was 30. And she never seemed to fit in anything else too well. And she was a wonderful actress. You see some of those drama. She was in early on. She was wonderful. But she never developed those skills much. She didn’t like Broadway that much, so she didn’t go to Broadway. There are many things she could have done other than beyond a television set doing. I Love Lucy and whatever form it was, you know, 40 years later.
Interviewer: All right. Last question. Favorite episode. Why?
Robert Osborne: Well, her favorite. Oh, she always said. Oh my favorite? Well, I must say that my favorite is the one with William Holden at the Brown Derby. I think that is so classic and so funny. And William Holden’s wonderful in it, too. And the no, when she’s just her expression in the Brown Derby, when she sees William Holden sitting there and she spills the spaghetti on him, and then when she tries to disguise herself and light the match and the nose catches on fire, I mean, that’s all such classic stuff. A single moment, I think, would be have to be the candy factory where she and f there on that on that line with Elmira. I forget what her last name was, the character actors that play the role. But I mean, that is so that is so classic and so funny. But almost every one of those shows has a classic moment of comedy or classic moment of timing that she did. That’s so extraordinary, particularly when you realize how quickly it was done, how fast those things were turned out. And also, they didn’t have any idea this had a lifespan. Those things were so disposable and everything was in those days. And to think that that she did stuff that we still look at, that she made quick decisions as an actress. I’m gonna do this. I’m going to do that. And we’ll do them. And it’s stuff that like 50 years later, we’re still laughing at 40 years later. I mean, it’s just incredible. And the kids who weren’t even born. Look at that. And as I say, my friend who was sick, who who laughed up until the time he died, thanks to Lucille Ball with a. I mean it. What what what medicine she gave us. What joy she gave us. ‘
