Lori Landay: Well, I think the idea is that femininity and comedy are antithetical. They’re exact opposites. A good woman, a properly feminine woman, is going to be sentimental and sweet and moral and not be doing the kinds of transgressions that comedy almost always plays on and not doing the kinds of border crossing, boundary crossing, that sort of thing. So there are all kinds of issues about womanhood being the opposite of comedy and in silent comedy. The tradition is that Buster Keaton made a very anti sentimental non sentimentalized view of women and he had women be the butts of the jokes so they would get squirted with water and and that kind of thing. Chaplin was different. On the other hand, Chaplin was someone who did sentiment, sentimentalize women and showed the women were the the motivators for for the tramp to do things, to make money, to succeed in various ways. So that that’s sort of the general scheme of women in comedy from the early days, either as the butt of the joke, falling down, being squared with water, that kind of thing, or as sort of a sentimentalized object that isn’t in herself funny. She isn’t in herself funny.
Interviewer: So if you were a woman and you wanted to be funny, what? Did you have to be fat? Did you have to be ugly? Did you have to be stupid? What were the acceptable feminine comedic traditions that say in the 20s to the 40s were permissible for women?
Lori Landay: Well, certainly. Well, they certainly think about that for a second. I saw like a job interview where I have to keep talking. Okay. Thanks. Let me think about that.Well, they’re. There are people like Mabel Normand who did did things not greatly, unlike what Chaplin, someone like Fatty Arbuckle. What they were up to, where oftentimes she would be sort of like a tricky, kind of plucky heroine who would get into all kinds of scrapes and screw things up. So there’s definitely that strain of incompetence that we will see later with Lucille Ball. That is from the very beginning of women in comedy. And then there’s sort of the real transgressive burlesque tradition of vaudeville and women sort of playing playing the the role of the bad girl and being funny in that way, mocking either mocking sort of appropriately good feminine roles for women or just really transgressing them and and making comedy out of that.
Interviewer: Good. So here comes Lucille Ball. She has a movie career. She rarely gets cast in a movie where she’s permitted to be funny. Mm hmm. What do you see? How do you see her negotiating these constraints in her early movie career?
Lori Landay: Well, she is trying to fit into sort of the Goldwyn Girl, the glamour girl there at the beginning, most definitely. But I guess even from the very beginning when she was trying to get people’s attention, she did sort of kind of comic stunts, stuffed her shirt with all kinds of crazy things so that she would be noticed and she was noticed. And she did sort of manage to stand out of a crowd in that way and sort of mocking her lack of physical beauty because she wasn’t considered to be the right kind of glamour girl for that time period. But her comic. I don’t know. I don’t know why she wasn’t considered to be the right kind of glamour girl for for that period. But but she wasn’t. And it seems like, although the in terms of her film career, people were certainly trying to find a place for her. There wasn’t an easy place for her to find.
Interviewer: OK. I guess eventually she landed at RKO and rose through the ranks from a contract player to queen of the bees. Can you tell me a little bit about that passage and sort of a brief encapsulated.
Lori Landay: As she rose from a contract player to Queen of the Bees at RKO, she mostly was trying to fit in to kind of sort of the heroine, the good, strong heroine kind of pictures. But there seems to be you know, I don’t really know very much of that RKO stuff. OK, I was going to bluff, but.
Interviewer: That’s fine.
Lori Landay: I guess I know more about the later stuff, like anything else about that.
Interviewer: Yeah. OK.
Lori Landay: Or I could look it up. Another thing now. OK.
Interviewer: Now we did. I can’t. Did we talk about dance girl dance.
Lori Landay: Yes I can talk about dance girl dance. Yeah. And and Miss Richmond takes Miss Grant takes which with dance.
Interviewer: Let’s start with dance girl dance. That was, that was an RKO picture. It actually became one of her better films. She was sort of well-known in that picture. Can you just tell me briefly, what about the film, like a little plot synopsis, if you could. Don’t be comprehensive. Just, you know, so we know which movie you’re talking about.
Lori Landay: Well, Dance Girl Dance, which was directed by Dorothy Arjuna’s, she she was someone who had risen up through the ranks, being a writer and then an editor and then was directing her her own films and was well-known head for. For having films, a strong emotional content and dance girl dance pitts Lucille Ball as Tigerlily against Maureen O’Hara as the the the good girl, the sentimental heroine. And they’re actresses and they’re trying to make it in the world of performance. And it very clearly shows the two possibilities for women in performance. One is to really be the, you know, is as good and moral and what I consider to be the sentimental heroine. And the other is the transgressive Tigerlily, who is much more connected with the burlesque tradition and with the dance that she does, is she learned by going to to watch strippers and learned how to do those kinds of movements and was coached very, very heavily. It’s interesting, too, because the producer of some of the film, Eric, primeur Eric Palmer, the producer of the film, thought that he saw in Lucille Ball sort of a mixture of Jean Harlow and Mae West, but she still had her own kind of personality that came through. That’s very interesting. You think of her in that kind of tradition of transgressive heroines, transgressive actresses.
Interviewer: I am only concerned about the word transgressive because it’s sort of an academic.
Lori Landay: Oh, OK.
Interviewer: Are people OK? Is there another word we could use instead?
Lori Landay: Yes.
Interviewer: OK. And go ahead and tell me that. And I guess describe the character a little bit for me that she plays. And I’m curious whether you think there’s like a little glimmer of Lucy Ricardo peeking out.
Lori Landay: Well, Tigerlily, the character that Lucille Ball plays and dance girl dance is really someone who has no other option, sees no other options than to become the quote unquote, bad girl, someone who is going to be involved with man and someone who’s going to trade in various ways, different levels of sex for money. And that’s what associates that kind of heroine with the bad girl, the one who’s breaking all the rules, who’s going outside, what’s accepted in terms of being a good woman, as opposed to Maureen O’Hara, who’s taking a much taking the higher road, I guess would be a way to think of it.
Interviewer: And do you see any glimmerings of Lucy Ricardo? I guess what comes to my mind is the scene where she’s dancing in the wind machine is blowing her clothes off. Do you remember that?
Lori Landay: Yeah.
Interviewer: It’s a very slapstick sort of funny. No, I don’t know that.
Lori Landay: Yeah, I think I think that that in that film that we can see glimmers of the Lucy character that will emerge that Lucille Ball creates in radio and then and also in her films and her more screwball comedy films, that character starts coming out. But The Tiger Loic, her character, despite the the very comic moments that we have in that scene with the wind machine blowing her clothes and that sort of thing is a very dark character, I think, overall, because she her options don’t seem as wide open as a comic heroine, which is like Lucy, all about possibility and what the possibilities are.
Interviewer: Now, you have to remind me. Dewberry was a lady.
Lori Landay: I just know that that her hair color was called Tango Red. That’s my only guess. And then she thought that she said that if she knew, it didn’t look good in real life, but she didn’t care because it was made for Technicolor. Yeah. Tango Red.
Interviewer: I think what we’ll do is I’ve asked Dina to bring you these wonderful clips from the Time magazine.
Lori Landay: Sure.
Interviewer: And we talked about the big street, I guess. Describe for me for a moment her limitations as a dramatic actress. I mean, she had limitations as musical comedy star to because you really couldn’t think. Yeah. So tell me about some of the ways in which Lucille Ball wasn’t that gifted as a movie actress.
Lori Landay: I. Lucille Ball, in terms of in terms of being a movie actress, a dramatic actress, Lucille Ball had some definite limitations. And I think a lot of the big street, we see that the way she so physically contained in that movie in the wheelchair. And she doesn’t have the kind of doesn’t have the kind of role where she can have the physical performance. Because one of the things that ball was really brilliant at was the physical performance, her physical comedy and her ability to react. And in those dramatic roles, it doesn’t seem like she has as much to react against. And I think that that’s why a lot of where her flair really comes in what made her distinctive.
Interviewer: All right, Miss Graphics, Richmond, one of my favorite movies, just watched it. OK, well, what scene would you like to talk about? I mean, there’s so many great scenes in that mvie.
Lori Landay: One of the scenes that I think is particularly interesting, especially for a lot of the women at work, stuff that comes up later. And I Love Lucy is the scene, the opening scene where she’s doing this sort of shtick with the typewriter and there’s the typewriter ribbon and it’s getting all over the place and she’s getting on her hands. And you just know, how long could it possibly be before she starts smudging this black ink all over her face and that sort of thing? She loses the the typewriter ribbon. It rolls to the desk of her teacher. And right there we see one of the relationships that’s at the center of Ball’s comedy, certainly. And I Love Lucy, where there’s some sort of an authority figure, whether it’s the the the form foreman, the sort of militaristic foreman of the candy rapping scene in job switching, or whether it’s Ricky being sort being the the the controller of the money and telling her what she can and can’t do. Or later on, Gail Gordon is the banker and boss and those figures where there’s some kind of a conflict and Lucille Ball had a just a great ability to shoot. She had a wonderful ability to make us see what she was thinking in terms of how she might be getting away with it. So she has these moments and all these physical bits where she’s typing away. We know that the ribbon has come away from the the keys and there’s nothing on the paper. But she’s now sort of like going along and typing away anyway, as if she might be fooling somebody. And there are these moments where she’s so convinced, the character is so convinced that she’s doing a great job. And that just heightens our sense of her incompetence and her ineptitude. So that’s one scene in particular. And that’s an interesting film in terms of post-war.
Interviewer: Tell me that this frantic search.
Lori Landay: Right. Okay. Ms. Grant takes Richmond is an interesting film in terms of post-war social issues about housing and creating families and that single family dwelling that there was such an ideal. And one of the things certainly that I Love Lucy plays into the idea that that this, you know, Miss Grant, who is not considered to be intelligent in any way, in fact, she’s hired because she doesn’t have anything upstairs in there, but she has this very, very strong connection to her community and to the group of people. And so she ends up turning something that’s a scam into something that’s actually socially beneficial for the group, for the community. And that says a lot, I think, about comedy and about the ways that comedy is social, the ways that their comedy integrates into a society, into a community, and creates new possibilities.
Interviewer: Now, how about just slapstick for a moment? This crazy thing is a construction site. I mean, it certainly felt to me like a preview of what was to come. Can you talk a little bit about what she does with that scene? I guess it’s really no, it’s just visual comedy.
Lori Landay: Now, remind me which scene.
Interviewer: She’s at the construction site.
Lori Landay: Is this when they’re.
Interviewer: She’s wreaking havoc? That’s alright.
Lori Landay: I sort of remember that for whatever reason, I walked out of the room. I remember the scene when she when all the women are redrawing the plans for the houses because and that that’s a very typical scene in terms of what set up an I Love Lucy where there are there are women who are not being rational, they’re being irrational, and they think they can they’re the plans for all their houses, which aren’t at that point. There’s no intention that they’re going to be built. But the plans for all these houses are laid out with string and ball has MS. Richmond has this great line. She says, oh, you know, one of the women says, oh, my you know, Maya, my kitchen isn’t big enough for my bathroom isn’t big enough. It is. Oh, there’s plenty of string. It’s Miss Richman’s lines. There’s plenty of string. We can just redo these things all over again, having no sense that there’s, of course, a limited amount of space. And these are housing plans and that sort of thing. We see again and again. And I Love Lucy and that character of Lucy Ricardo.
Interviewer: All right. Remind me, full of Rush. No, no, no. OK. We’re gonna make the transition now. Lucy made a statement after 15 years in motion pictures. I’ve always been flying someone else. I wanted to be typecast. She wanted to develop as consistent screen personality the way a Cary Grant or Clark Gable had. And ironically, the opportunity to do so arrives radio as opposed to movies. Now, what happened when my favorite husband came along?
Lori Landay: My first husband was a huge breakthrough for Lucille Ball because she did have the ability to create a character that was consistent, that was lovable. And originally, that character wasn’t as ditzy as the Liz Cooper ended up being, partly because when Jess Oppenheimer, who was the producer and head writer, eventually I Love Lucy when he came in, he had been working on Fanny Brice, a show Baby Snugs, and took a lot of the elements of Baby Snook’s, his character, and incorporated in with Liz Cooper’s character. So then we get the much more sort of infantilized kind of character who really hit a chord. But but the Coopers, unlike the Ricardos, the Coopers and my favorite husband, were much more both mainstream middle class, living in a suburban kind of context. And the kinds in the same writers were on my favorite husband as then moved on to I Love Lucy, and they recycled a lot of the script. So you got Madeleine Pyu and Bob Carroll Junior and Jess Oppenheimer as well, who are all involved in my favorite husband. And then they move, move in to television.
Interviewer: So tell us that. In fact, my favorite husband, I guess it was CBS, his idea. Well, they were doing a lot of radio shows at the time. They took it and turned it into material for his fledgling new medium of TV. Tell us about the fact that it then would one day become basically a template for the I Love Lucy show.
Lori Landay: Well, Lucille Ball was having great success and my favorite husband on his radio show. And one of the things that’s interesting about the development of situation comedy is that the kinds of films that Ball never really hit big hit hugely in the screwball comedies that she did make. They set up sort of the courtship like in Miss Grant takes Richmond. We have two different. Do we have Miss Scritch, Miss Miss Richmond? And, oh, I’m just you up. We have we have Miss Grant and Mr. Richman, who’s her boss. And like most romantic comedies, we have the the difference between the two people is mostly about class and position and status. But the romantic comedy plays that off in terms of sexual difference, in terms of sort of a battle of the sexes or the differences between the sexes. So we have that kind of situation. But these films end when the characters get together, when the hero and heroine get together, and at the ends of some of the great screwball comedies like Bringing a Baby or The Awful Truth or The Lady Eve. It’s hard to imagine how could these characters possibly live happily ever after. And the situation comedies first on radio and then, well, first the radio shows and then you pick do here. I’ll take a sip of.
Interviewer: So you got to pick it up with, you know, unlike the ending of the movie was when they get together.
Lori Landay: At the ending of the movie, when these characters get together, it’s hard to imagine they’re going to be living happily ever after. But the radio shows and then the situation comedies that develop out of them can pick up there. They can pick up at the marriage. And how. How do how does this couple go on to live and negotiate the daily life? That’s something that’s much more domestic situation, much more domestic content. Makes sense for that to be something that’s becomes a success when it’s coming into people’s homes. Radio was had been present people’s homes for for quite some time. People were used to it and had become a part of life. And this idea that there was something from outside that was being broadcast in that television was a whole different situation because it was visual and because it was this big. The radio was also a piece of furniture, but the television was a piece of furniture that then became a centerpiece of the home. And so we have these ideas of the television in the home being put there for the first time. And at first there were only sort of wealthier people who could afford television. Other people would go to public places to watch television. But as television became to be in, television grew to be a more and more homes over America and not just on the East Coast, became a real national phenomenon, had a huge impact on how people thought about the domestic sphere. So to take these characters who were essentially in a screwball comedy situation about difference and I Love Lucy, it’s very clearly not just about gender differences, but also about ethnicity and language differences as opposed to my favorite husband, which didn’t have that ethnic element because Liz Cooper’s husband was a white middle class bank executive who was sort of struggling, hadn’t quite made it, but was trying to make it certainly, as opposed to Ricky Ricardo as the Cuban bandleader who has all other kinds of elements involved in that. So I think that’s part of the reason why these shows were very successful, sort of lost the question.
Interviewer: Right. I started to see Tom. Are you seeing Tom Petty room? I thought, you know. OK. So I guess what I really need is just like a basic factual statement that CBS is idea they wanted to take as a separate show and turn.
Lori Landay: Oh, okay. Okay. I mean. Right. Okay. Mm hmm. So the strategy for networks like CBS we’re trying to make the transition from radio into television was to take successful radio shows and make them into television shows. And so my great favorite husband seemed like an ideal kind of thing to do, especially because Lucille Ball, while she was doing these radio performances for the studio audience, had started sort of mugging the jokes and her facial expressions and really interacting with the crowd, with the audience in a way that highlighted the comedy. And she really seemed to find a lot of her strength as a comic performer in that interaction with an audience. One of things that is missing from film and perhaps missing from those film performances, that that seemed to be kind of limited. So one of the things that CBS was trying to do was to pick up these shows that were successful and they thought they could sort of transport it. And Ball thought that was an excellent idea. But she really wanted to be working with her husband, with Desi Arnaz in their marriage, had been been really characterized by separation, both of them trying to have careers, hers being more successful, certainly at that point, already at that point than his, and only to become more so. And so they wanted to be able to work together. She had they wanted very much to have a child. And she had miscarried before. And they were very concerned about about that and their family life and really seemed like it was a time when she if they didn’t, they didn’t have a chance to really be together and work together at that point, then maybe their marriage wasn’t going to work out at all. So that was part of the reason why why Lucille Ball insisted that Desi Arnaz be part of the package. CBS didn’t like this idea at all. They said to lose the Cuban. No one’s gonna believe this. No, no. I believe that a nice American girl, all-American girl would be married to this other guy, this Cuban guy. We have to get a nice all American husband for her. But she really insisted and she won in that particular realm in the way that they did. That was they created a vaudeville act and they took it on the road to prove to CBS and hopefully to sponsors, this is something that was going to be successful. It was wildly successful. And when they cannot kinetoscope no kinescope. No, it’s certainly not kinescope, OK? And when they when they kinescopes the pilot, you incorporate. Traded elements of their vaudeville act in it. Good?Am I giving you enough? Sounds like things, OK? OK. Just because I can start again.
Interviewer: If I need you to restate it simpler or shorter, I’ll take you back.
Lori Landay: OK.
Interviewer: Like I said in that statement about the transition from radio to how much on that tape. OK. Give me a little bit about Dessy. You know, we’ve alluded to him. What kind of person was he? How is he perceived by the public at large? And who is he really? I mean, you know, everybody is a musician. And he turned out to be quite a good business man. But tell me a little bit about him.
Lori Landay: I think Desi was a really talented performer and he especially some of his reaction shots and the ways that he played off of Lucille Ball, especially the early the earlier years of I Love Lucy. And we can see that setting up. He wasn’t primarily an actor, although he was in several films and he was a musician. Part of the sort of Latin lover kind of of a tradition. And he was perceived to be the the lesser talented, certainly of the pair. And that was something that really bothered him a lot. He wanted to have a certain amount of respect and success, of course. And one of the things that happens in the series, and I Love Lucy, is that it seems like Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz created kind of a fantasy marriage in the fiction in the series where he’s the success and she’s not. It’s very strange when I start thinking about it, sort of, you know, with all or hindsight, what might have been going on and what kinds of things were being played out in that. Does that?
Interviewer: In addition to acting on the show? I think he really did take on a large role as a producer. He did take an executive producer credit on a certain point forward. You know, what about Desi as a businessman?
Lori Landay: Does he was a brilliant businessman. He really had a knack for putting together deals and figuring out how to bring the right people together. The group that was assembled for I Love Lucy is part of the reason why it’s such a phenomenal success when you have somebody like Karl Front, who was the cinematographer on Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece Metropolis. You have someone like that who comes up to the challenge of how to film for television, how to deal with the lighting. One of the things that he created was this overhead lighting for television, because the the the lighting system that had worked in film didn’t work. And also, he had the crew repainting the the walls of the sets, different shades of grey so that you could get the right kind of lighting. If you look at those early episodes, you can see it took them a little while to figure out exactly how to to work this. But just a brilliant time of innovation with some of the people that the Desi Arnaz and the rest of the group was able to assemble. And he had a real knack to for for working out the the what originally were called tie ups. But now we think of them as tie ins, the come the consumer items, working up deals and with pajama making companies and furniture making companies. And also Desi Lew had an amazing publicity machine. They were able to convey a very strong sense of what the Arnez Ball marriage was like in, you know, quote unquote real life to the public. So the public really believed that they knew them and knew their personal life. And I think Arnez had a lot to do with that.
Interviewer: OK, time to change this. I don’t want to say Fox Sense, but this is PR machine that cranked out. A notion of what their married life was and how they blended their real selves with their onscreen selves to their, for their gain, I think of no way. I mean, they seem to be no. What they were doing. So maybe you could just talk about that. And I guess the other place that that takes me is the notion that you really didn’t have a happy marriage. But in some ways, they fulfilled the fantasy themselves on TV that their better selves came out in this fictional marriage. Can you talk about that?
Lori Landay: The publicity machine that Desilu created was wonderful in terms of getting a very getting a story, a version of their real life marriage that was consistent in the publicity machine created a really consistent story of their real life marriage that highlighted the differences between the two of them and made the show into something about their marriage togetherness. People knew the story because people knew the story that they wanted to work together, even though CBS didn’t think the show should have. Both of them should have Desi Arnaz in it as well. People knew about that because it was in Life magazine and Time magazine and TV Guide when TV Guide got going a little bit of a little bit later, was in all these different, different places. And people felt very strongly that they knew them. They knew that Lucy didn’t like to get up in the mornings and that that Ricky and Desi Arnaz both were more morning people. And a lot of their early shows were really about those things. They certainly drew on my favorite husband. But the publicity doesn’t highlight that. The publicity suggests that I Love Lucy is being drawn right from this Real-Life marriage of our beloved stars, as opposed to recycling all of the plots and scripts from my favorite husband, which is much more of what what had happened.
Interviewer: And in what ways did they achieve marital harmony onscreen in a way that they never could in their real lives?
Lori Landay: It’s it’s possible to think of them achieving sort of marital harmony onscreen in a way that they couldn’t in their in their real lives because of the stresses of their careers and of their personalities, very different personalities, the ways that they were received by the public. But the onscreen version is very, very traditional in that here, Ricki, the husband, is the more successful one and the wife stays home. But interestingly enough, it’s about a wife who doesn’t want to stay home. It’s about a wife who’s constantly breaking out of those boundaries and doesn’t want to stay in the domestic sphere, has to go out and be in the performance to be in the show, wants to make her own money and have her own money. All kinds of issues about power, relationships and autonomy, women’s autonomy, both within the home and within and outside of it.
Interviewer: Well, that sort of brings up the whole question of was Lucy a feminist in a traditional view as Lucy was a put down wife? But I think in contrast to the other 50s wives from Leave It to Beaver and the various traditional shows. She was something quite out. Can you just speak to that?
Lori Landay: Yeah, I think of the character of Lucy as Proteau feminist and really addressing a lot of the ideas that someone like Betty Friedan does in The Feminine Mystique in the 1950s was a real culture of conformity. And there are ways that that was enforced, the ways that that that was really created, like with McCarthyism and the Red Scare, the red baiting that was going on with McCarthyism and the witch hunt. And that’s something that Lucille Ball ended up being very briefly sort of, you know, a victim of. But it touched a lot of people and tried to it was one of the elements of containment in that post-war period. I lost my train of thought.
Interviewer: We were just talking about was Lucy a feminist? The traditional view is she wasn’t a feminist. She was a put down wife of this patriarchal husband. But in fact, it’s more complicated.
Lori Landay: Yeah, yeah. One one way to look at I Love Lucy is to think of Lucy as a sort of a put down wife. And it’s all about at the end. Ricky reassert his authority over her. But it’s much more complicated than that. Can look at the endings and see that most of the shows actually end up at a on a place of balance where they say something like now we’re even or have some kind of a truce in the ongoing battle of the sexes rather than than the husband reasserting. And I think of Lucy is as proto feminist. She’s addressing a lot of the issues about women’s dissatisfaction in the home and all the kinds of 1950s domestic ideology, the ideas of domesticity of the 1950s were about containment and about the idea, the idea that if you’re unhappy, it’s because you’re not conforming. And I Love Lucy speaks to that in very real and interesting ways. It’s not that Lucy’s not happy because she’s not conforming to terrible things, but it’s it’s much more that that Lucy wants things outside of the home. She wants things and she’s ridiculed for it. But it’s also expresses something that undoubtedly a lot of people were feeling, especially women.
Interviewer: Now, the other thing that you mentioned earlier is this whole notion of hope. I mean, she does sort of get chastised for schemes rarely succeed usually, but rarely. And at the end of each episode, she sort of does get put back in her place, but it doesn’t stop her from the next time. Trying again. There’s something about that. It’s so infectious. Maybe.
Lori Landay: Yeah, Lucy’s a very optimistic character. She’s a trickster. When people say to her, no, you can’t do this. She can only do this one thing. She’s going to create a whole new possibility, something that no one else has ever thought of and go out and do it. And they’re wacky and zany schemes. And she’s always coming up with these weird ideas. And for the most part, no, they don’t work. They’re not successful, although there were some real glimmers of success throughout. I’m sure that that was something that that’s something that really appeals to people, a character who can create possibility when there seems like there isn’t any. And part of what is created in terms of possibility are possibilities for women outside of the home.
Interviewer: All right. Let’s talk about a couple of specific episodes of the schedule, I guess a good sex. Tell us a little bit about the story of that episode of how you see that is expressing her like we’re proud of.
Lori Landay: Mm hmm. Yeah. Okay.
Interviewer: Like a feminist or anticipating that.
Lori Landay: Okay. Sure.
Interviewer: Talk about that episode.
Lori Landay: Well, in the episode, the schedule the setup is that Lucy keeps. Being late for everything. And so there’s a really important dinner at Ricky’s boss’s house played by Gail Gordon quite, quite brilliantly. Someone who they wanted very much to play the part of Fred originally. But he had other commitments and says one of the ways that they incorporated people see over Lucille Ball’s career, she she constantly worked with the same people over and over again, always tried to do business with friends and family and incorporate the people who were her around her and close to her. She liked to work with. And so Gail Gordon plays the boss in that episode. And so what Lucy does is she sets the clock ahead one hour because that that will make it so that she’ll be on time. But she does the opposite. In fact, they’re already an hour late. She does the clock wrong. And they get to Lucy and Ricky, get to the boss’s house and they find, of course, that dinner has already been served. They’ve already eaten their dinner. And Lucy has all kinds of funny moments where she gobbles down this plate of mints and there’s some wax fruit that our attention has been called to earlier in the episode. And she gets this apple stuck in her face. And there’s all these really unfeminine things. She does everything that a good a good wife wouldn’t be doing. She’s not helping her husband’s career. She’s not acting as part of a companionate marriage where they’re a team and they go forth into the world. She’s certainly not supporting him and making him look good. She’s doing all these bizarre things. So Ricky feels bad that that he’s, you know, looks like an idiot in front of his boss because he’s got this, you know, aberrant wife, this misbehaving wife. And he then says, come over to dinner to the boss, because what he’s done is he’s put Lucy on a schedule. He decides that she can’t manage her own time and so has to have it manage for her. And he comes up with a schedule that looks a lot like a TV schedule. What must have been in TV Guide? By that point, 1952, 1953. And they have actually, that’s not true. I don’t think TV guy was there, but so he puts her on a schedule. It’s very much like the way that TV time is divided up and gives her so much time for this, so much time for that. And she’s gamely goes along with the schedule. So what’s at stake here is who controls women’s time in the household? The idea is that men know better. That’s what Ricky is going on, that that assumption that he knows better how to organize her time in the house and how to for her to do her housework. And she goes along with it, but she fudges and she adds an extra time by borrowing from the next day. Another one of these irrational solutions to something that that, you know, of course, Krista isn’t going to work and she’s going along with this. She’s going along with the schedule. But the boss’s wife and Ethel are very concerned that she’s being so, so good about this and going on with schedule because now their husbands are going to put them on a schedule. So what they do is they concoct this dinner arrangement. Ricky’s gone over to his bosses and said, come over, I’ll show you. I’ve got my wife working like a trained seal, which is kind of interesting because in their vaudeville act, Lucy actually didn’t act where she was like a seal and played played some horns like a trained seal. So there’s sort of a kind of an in-joke there in terms of the way they got the show even on air at all. And so when the boss’s wife comes over and tells Lucy, Oh, this is what your husband said. The three women come up with a plot. And what they do is they rush the men in and they go back and forth and they run around and they give them only 10 minutes, ten seconds for this and 10 seconds for that, putting food in front of them and snatching it away before they can eat it and trying to show the absurdity of the schedule. It’s interesting because the boss’s wife comes into Lucy’s house and gangs sort teams up with Ethel and and Lucy in this. So it’s a real battle of the sexes kind of moment. And it’s all about preserving women’s autonomy in the home.
Interviewer: Now, another episode that we’ve talked about is the whole job switching and maybe you could just summarize the plot briefly and sort of I guess it’s like the setup.How do you get to that conveyor belt? You know, a lot of times when I started that the writers work backwards. They envision the crazy climax, and then they said, how do we get her there? You know, briefly set up the job switching premise and then take us to the conveyor belt scene. Also, we talked about the Chaplin analogy to an answer. I think this is familiar ground for you.
Lori Landay: Yeah, absolutely. In that wonderful episode, job switching, we have one of the comic climaxes that I Love Lucy was such a it was a just brilliant at coming up with these these comic climaxes of the famous conveyor belt scene that speeds up and up and up, which is an old bit goes back to Chaplin, at least in modern times. But one of the things that I Love Lucy did that Jess Oppenheimer and Marilyn Pugh and Bob Carroll were very insistent on, is having some kind of justification for these comic climaxes. They wanted to base their show in everyday life, in real life, domestic, everyday life. So they had these elaborate setups. The way that this show works is that Ricky comes in. He’s furious because Lucy is once again overdrawn. She’s written a check on the back of the cheque. She writes, Dear Teller, be a lamb and don’t cash this until next week. Of course, an irrational, emotional way of approaching the money which isn’t going to work out in the business world. And that sort of thing. And then Fred and Ethel enter into this whole situation where Ricky is scolding her for for, you know, not being able to manage her money. And Fred announces that there are two kinds of people in the world, the husbands and the wives just blown the earners. And there are two kinds of people in the world, the earners and the spenders, more commonly known as husbands and wives. It’s real division of labor in terms of of of gender and making marriage be about this consumer culture that’s growing at this point in the post-war time period. So we’ve got the battle of the sexes set up. Fred makes this assertion and Lucy and Ethel start saying Lucy in particular starts saying how well we’ll go out and make the money and you stay home and do the housework and see how much you like it. So they have a battle of the sexes and a general gender reversal wasn’t the only time that there were things like that. There was an episode called Equal Rights, which is also on the. Based on the same premise. And the the men decide they’re going to treat the women. The women insist that they be treated equally because they want their equal rights. And then they all go out to dinner. And the women, of course, don’t have any money and the men leave. The women have to wash dishes. That kind of thing is something we see again and again in in I Love Lucy this this battle line between the battle of the sexes. So get in in the job switch.
Interviewer: I’m sorry.
Lori Landay: Yeah. Yeah. In job switching, the battle lines are drawn between the men and the women and the women go out to try to find work and they can’t they don’t have any experience. They finally lie and say that they have plenty of experience being candy makers and they get the job in the candy factory. And the comic structure of these episodes is to build and build and build. And this one switches back and forth between two lines of parallel action at home. The men are doing the housework and they think Ricky thinks he’s doing a great job. He’s come up with a wonderful invention because he can put the sports pages on the vacuum cleaner and read the sports pages while he does the housework. How come women haven’t thought of this and very full of himself? He’s gonna make dinner. Fred’s gonna make dessert. They’re all set that that situation at home builds to a comic climax and hysterical scene in the kitchen where Ricky thinks that about a pound of rice per person will be the right amount. So the rice pours forth off of the stove and they slip and fallen in. That’s a real comic climax. And then at the same time intercut with the stuff going on at home with the scenes going on at home. You’ve got the scenes at the candy factory. One is when Lucy is dipping the chocolate and ends up getting into a sort of a chocolate food fight with the candy dipper, who is a professional candy, before they actually brought in a professional candy dipper and she really sort of hauled off and slugged Lucy. They almost really knocked her off the stool there. So there a moment of sort of unpredictable kind of physical comedy in that scene. Ball does a little bit with the fly, which is also borrowing from Chaplin, this whole episode. Borrows a lot from Chaplin and modern times in particular. So we’ve got these two lines of parallel action with what’s going on at home. The men thinking they’re doing a great job and screwing everything up, making all kinds of mistakes. And the women thinking they’re doing a great job are realizing that actually they’re not doing a great job. And this conveyor belt, the candy wrapping is the last department. If they can’t make it there, they’re gonna be fired completely. And so, of course, the conveyor belt speeds up and up and up, gets faster and faster. And if they’re going to let one piece of candy go past them without being wrapped, then they’re fired and they’ll lose the bet. There’s a lot at stake because it’s a battle of the sexes kind of show. So the the very kind of militaristic supervisor comes in and she’s she thinks are doing great job, speeds it up and when she comes in, they don’t know what to do. Let me think of another way to talk about this.
Interviewer: Well, you know, we’re going to.
Lori Landay: I know, right? Yeah, yeah. OK.
Interviewer: The solution is to stop it in there. Right. OK. Like a visual gag. You know, I mean, you can explain it or not. Mm hmm. We can use it without.
Lori Landay: Right. OK.
Interviewer: But I guess. So what did they learn at the end of the episode?
Lori Landay: How does this particular battle of the sexes resolve this battle of the sexes resolves itself in a way that isn’t really resolved to the women. Certainly don’t want to be going out and having to to get wage labor because they can’t seem to keep it. They can’t. There’s nothing that they can do out there. The men have made an enormous mess in the kitchen when they get home. So the women get home. They look in the kitchen. They see this disaster. They’ve been fired and they’ve eaten all this chocolate. And then the men come in and what they’re going they say, let’s go back to the way it was. We’ll make the money and you can spend it, which isn’t what the issue’s been over the course of the show at all. It’s been about, you know, earning money and doing housework. Not the same thing at all. They they give the women five pound boxes of chocolates as their rewards, which, of course, is the last thing they want to say after they’ve been gorging themselves on chocolate. To sort of keep keep things going there in the factory. So it’s an example of the way that oftentimes these episodes and a little bit off balance in terms of the men reasserting themselves. But certainly an episode like job switching or like the schedule gives us an example of some of the idea that an episode like job switching or the schedule, both of those episodes give us an idea of that. Women should stay in their in the home. That’s where women belong. That’s where women are most competent because Lucy may be incompetent and all these other realms, all these other spheres, like when she goes into business or goes into performance or that sort of thing. But when it comes to the home, she doesn’t seem to know their house is in a mess. Their apartment looks tidy, and she obviously cooks and has dinner on the table and has some sort of basic competence as a housewife. But these episodes reinforce the idea at the same time that these episodes reinforce the idea that men and women have very, very different kinds of roles. Women in the home, men outside, in the public sphere. They also question that because there was a gap, I think, between between what? The kind. There’s a gap between the kinds of roles that we see in a show like I Love Lucy or in Father Knows Best. We’re real polarized gender roles and between what people’s real experience was, because although women were working during World War Two and then were fired from those jobs, a lot of women did go back into the workforce after World War Two. There has been a steady increase since then. More and more married women were working. Granted, low pay, part time jobs, not careers necessarily. But this was something that a lot of people were facing, a lot of couples were facing. Women working and women trying to bridge that line between the home and the paid labor force. So an episode like Job Switching really makes fun of all that creates comedy out of a situation that people were facing in their everyday lives.
Interviewer: All right. I’m glad you brought up the sort of culture of the time, because I think a lot of ways I Love Lucy held up a year to the culture. And as the show progressed, you know, they started out in the post-war kind of lean years in their cramped apartment. And then when people started moving west, the Ricardos went west. And when people started to afford to go to Europe, the middle class for the first time could afford to travel to Europe. The Ricardos go to Europe. And then finally, when people start moving to the suburbs, they also the suburbs. Can you speak a little bit to those cultural trends and how the show I was reflecting? I don’t think the show was creating the culture, but rather reflecting it.
Lori Landay: Yeah. The series did reflect changes that were going on the culture as the the show’s creators very self consciously tried to make sure that the topics were relevant to its audience. And that’s another reason why I Love Lucy was so incredibly successful. Just Oppenheimer’s said that they were holding up a mirror to society. And it may be a mirror, but of course, it’s a distorted mirror. It’s a distorted mirror of comedy and forest and a distorted mirror of really idealized lives. But yes, at the beginning we have Ricky and Lucy their in their apartment and it’s not a very big apartment. And they’re trying to sort of negotiate Ricky’s boss and Lucy’s they don’t have enough money to do all the things that Lucy would want to do. She’s got to be on a budget. These kinds of constraints, she’s excited about buying a fur coat or a freezer. A lot of the episodes are about buying things, the things the consumer society, because the good life that I Love Lucy portrayed was one that was about having a home and a family and having the things in that home. The there were episodes about getting new furniture and they did get new furniture. And then those furniture sets were advertised with slogans like Live Like Lucy. So they not only reflected some of the styles and trends and ideas and goals of that time period, but they also helped to create it and shape it.
Interviewer: How about the baby boom, I mean, she just happened to get pregnant. You know, that whole story and what they were the concerns that she would be fired or they would cancel the show. Can you tell us a little about that?
Lori Landay: In the film studios. it was just standard practice that once an actress was pregnant, she wouldn’t be on camera. Lucille Ball was the first pregnant woman to be on film, on camera and to be broadcast into people’s homes. The idea at the time was that, first of all, people didn’t talk about women who were pregnant, really, and they could never use the word pregnant. They used the French word, ensenat, instead means pregnant and. At first, they thought when they realized that ball was pregnant. Here they have this hit series. Everything is going great and then she’s pregnant. It’s an example of a clash between their personal lives and their public lives, their careers, because they really wanted another baby. Desi in particular wanted to have a son. They had had the daughter first. And so this is something is very important to them. And also because Ball had miscarried before they were. There were concerns about her health. And at first they thought, well, you know, the CBS thought, we’ll just hide her behind things. She can stand behind couches and things like that. And Arnez said, no, that’s just a ridiculous thing to do. That’s not going to work. We’ve got to do something bad. We should incorporate it. It was a brilliant thing to do because instead of really breaking down the kind of success that they had created and the rapport they had with the audience, they only increased it at a time of the baby boom, at a time when people were very much as in the words of the title of Elaine Tyler Meiwes. Good book. Excellent book on post-war culture, Homeward Bound. The time when people were homeward bound and focused on the domestic, they created all that. And people felt like they were participating in the creation of this family life. And they were because they scheduled balls. Cesarian was scheduled in advance. Ball Caesarean was scheduled to be the morning after that Tuesday morning after the 9:00 p.m. slot when Lucy would go to the hospital, not have the baby. So when Lucy goes to the hospitals, the way that was thought, they had to have religious advisers to make sure that there was nothing that was an unseemly. There was nothing that that wasn’t quite moral and good. And there was a lot of concern that motherhood and pregnancy not be ridiculed, not be made fun of kind of shades of the production code from the earlier times and in film.
Interviewer: So that final episode when Little Ricky is born, I guess, was the highest ever in TV history and managed to knock inauguration, you know.
Lori Landay: Yeah. Yeah.
Interviewer: Can you speak about it? Have you heard that? Someone just told me that people had parties.
Lori Landay: People had this. Oh, now, let me look at my notes, cause I wrote down.
Interviewer: Your statistics?
Lori Landay: Yes.
Interviewer: Yeah. I’m sorry. Can I ask where we were? Okay. Time of the birth episode. And it was incredibly. Ratings were so high that people the hoopla surrounding it.
Lori Landay: The hoopla surrounding the birth episode Lucy goes to the hospital was incredible and unprecedented. There was already a Lucy phenomenon, but the birth of the baby, the Ricardo baby, and then Lucy and Desi’s baby in real life. And those two things happening virtually simultaneously. Just an incredible media event and throw people fascinated them and made them really feel like they were participating in something in the creation of a family at a time when that was hugely important. There were 44 million people, 44 million people watched the episode. Lucy goes to the hospital. That was one fifth of the entire American population. An extraordinary number of people to be watching one television show at one time. In general, when I Love Lucy was on TV at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday nights on CBS, then things stopped there. You couldn’t get a taxi. There’d be nobody out on the street. Water usage went down. All kinds of things happened because so many people were watching. But with the Lucy goes to the hospital episode and the baby being born, 30000 people sent personal congratulations to perhaps to the Riccardo’s, perhaps to Lucy and Desi, to some combination of the two. But that’s a huge outpouring of wanting to to send congratulations.
Interviewer: Is there a little bit of a slight to Eisenhower? I guess he took it in good spirit. But, I think the number I heard was twenty nine.
Lori Landay: Yeah. Yeah. So as opposed to the 44 million who watched Lucy goes to the hospital, that episode the next day was Eisenhower Ike’s inauguration. Is that right? Yeah. The next day was Ike’s inauguration and only 29 people watched that.
Interviewer: Say it again but it’s twenty nine million.
Lori Landay: Twenty nine million and only twenty nine people watch that. In contrast to the 44 million people who watched the Lucy Goes the hospital episode, only twenty nine million people watched Eisenhower’s inauguration the next day. Granted, it was not in primetime. It was during the day. But still, it people can we can think about that as being that that people like Dich, but they loved Lucy.
Interviewer: Before we leave the whole pregnancy thing. Just describe briefly the episode where she tells Ricki that she’s pregnant. I think for me it’s one of the most emotional episodes. I always get choked up when I watch it and you feel like there are real feelings are spilling forward. And I think it helps to make people feel like they’re participating in their events. So can you just describe that? Not even the first, you know, just really the moment, I guess, in the club where she finally is able to communicate that.
Lori Landay: Lucys been trying in that episode, Lucy’s been trying to tell Ricky that she’s pregnant, she’s going to have a baby for some time, and something always changes it. And it’s not until they’re actually in the club at Ricky’s Club when she’s finally able to tell him. And it’s interesting, it’s in a public arena, in the club, in this space of performance that she’s always trying to get to. And as she tells him, there’s this real moment where they both sort of tear up and and look at each other. And, you know, we know as the audience that they are really going to be having a baby in real life. And the emotion that they must have been feeling as parents and parents to be and as a married couple really spills forth. And you can see that line between the reality and the fictions completely blurred in a really wonderful and moving way. It’s it’s really an extraordinary moment. It feels like real life because it was real life. And that’s what television could do. That’s what television was doing for the first time for people. And in this new way.
Interviewer: OK. We haven’t talked about the friendship.
Lori Landay: Oh, can I say something about the, um, about Ricky being dressed up like like an African savage? Yeah. Yeah. One curious thing is that that Lucy goes to the hospital episode is that Ricky has been in some kind of a performance, some kind of act where he’s dressed up like an African savage, like with with teeth for a necklace and a spear. And just the the most grotesque kind of caricature of someone who is not white and someone who is not civilized and savage. And so it’s in this crazy sort of witchdoctor garb that he goes to the hospital when Lucy’s having the baby. It’s very strange, given the difference in ethnicity and the difference in language that this would be something that would be played out in that way. It’s a strange image.
Interviewer: All right. The friendship between Ethel and Lucy was certainly a huge part of the appeal of the show. And in fact, the thing that continue into the later shows in a way that marriage did. Talk to me a little bit about that girlfriend bonding and how those two characters played off each other with Lucy the schemer, and Ethel was the skeptic. But then eventually she no longer just described their relationship onscreen.
Lori Landay: They’re there on the On-Screen relationship of Lucy and Ethel is an extraordinary one for female friendship because they are t they are a team. They need each other in a way of certainly for Lucy to be able to sort of do these schemes, bring these schemes to any kind of success at all or even to be able to really create them. She needs to have a willing participant and the kind of play between the two them. Ethel was there. Certainly as the show developed to say, that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard or that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard or something like that to say this is a crazy idea. And also to reinforce the sense of Lucy’s character. Oh, well, if anyone’s gonna come up with something like this, it would be you, that kind of a thing. So it’s very she’s very much a foil in that way. And someone that Lucy bounces off of in the earliest episodes, it seemed like she was going to really egg on Lucy, that she was going to be sort of more of a troublemaker who would make Lucy do various things. But then it developed in a different way between Lucy and Ethel. There’s a generational gap, and that’s one of the conflicts that the series plays off of the Merce’s versus the Riccardo’s in terms of generations. But the so many of Lucy’s schemes need a partner in order to work. Part of that is just the tradition of comedy and comic partners where there’s some difference between the two that’s exaggerated, but also because so much of it was about a woman trying to trick her way out of the domestic sphere, trying to trick her way out of the home. We get that in the later episodes. You know, that that friendship is is so cemented that it’s impossible to really think about Lucy without that kind of a sidekick, without her friend. And in Inheres Lucy, the show that the first the the Lucille Ball show and then it was Here’s Lucy and here’s Lucy, which was the show that Lucille Ball did after the end of I Love Lucy.
Interviewer: Actually, Lucy show was the second one. And here’s Lucy was the third one.
Lori Landay: Oh, okay. I’m in I’m in the Lucy show, which was the show that Lucille Ball did after I Love Lucy and after the divorce with Desi Arnaz. She could. She needed to have that best friend. It’s like we can think of her being able to go on as long as she has Viv. But we don’t need necessarily to have the Ricky figure as a husband. The boss, the banker figure takes over the person who’s constraining the money so she could go on without Ricky, but not without Viv. No, without Ethel. And then Viv.
Interviewer: Just I mean, do you take pleasure in their friendship? As a viewer?
Lori Landay: Oh, yeah. Their friendship is one of the things that I think we love the most, because it’s so great to think of someone having a friend who, no matter what kind of wacky scheme you come up with, will come along and participate. And then, of course, there are the moments when they’re real calm. There’s real conflict between the two of them, which is a, you know, a part of any kind of friendship. It’s very seems very real to life in that way, part of everyday life.
Interviewer: You think there’s anything feminist about the sort of female bonding? I mean, it’s sort of ironic because I think in real life, Lucille Ball much prefer the company. Yeah, she did.
Lori Landay: Yeah.
Interviewer: But there’s something I experience about the solidarity of females in their relationship. Am I just imagining that or do you think it’s there.
Lori Landay: Oh, there’s definitely something about the solidarity between women there in that relationship between we’ve seen Ethel. We see it in the schedule when we have the boss’s wife put into the mix as well. Sometimes there’ll be other women who are involved. But that that’s one of the that’s one of the the strengths of, like women being in the home. And it’s sort of a throwback to kind of a more an earlier time when there were more extended families. And that was the kind of family situation that was changing. And in that apartment building, you get a real sense of community. And I’m sure that was appealing to people who were moving to the suburbs and these sort of single family dwellings and maybe would be missing those kinds of things. It’s certainly what happens when Lucy and Ricky moved to Connecticut, moved to the country. They missed the merce’s so much. They have to have them come move there, too. They can’t get along without them. But there is something that that’s that’s feminist about that friendship and it being so central, so important.
Interviewer: Since you mentioned Connecticut. One of the episodes, that is certainly a classic, I think it holds the record of being the longest recorded studio laugh on the I Love Lucy show is that tango episode where she crushes the eggs in her top. And I guess what I find interesting about that is here she is, this glamorous woman and typically glamour women didn’t like to get messed up in life to get their hair dirty or their clothes dirty or whatever. And God knows, they didn’t want to crush two dozen eggs against their bare skin. So maybe you can describe that that episode of the climax of that episode and how you sort of unique she was in the life that she was willing to go for for a laugh at the sacrifice of her vanity.
Lori Landay: Mm hmm. Yeah. One of them was a Life magazine article called Beauty into Buffoon from 1952 that addressed the whole idea that why would this beautiful actress who actually is very pretty and, you know, shapely? Why would she put on baggy pants and black out her teeth and have her hair look all crazy and and awful. And you know that there’s something sort of odd about a woman who’d be willing to go to those lengths for the laughs. But Lucille Ball always did go to those lengths for the laughs when Walter Martha was inducting her into a comedy hall of fame. He said something like, there was no height, she wouldn’t scale and no fall she wouldn’t take, which is the highest compliment you can pay to to a comedian, someone who’s a comic performer, that there is no fault they wouldn’t take. And that certainly is characteristic of Bob, even when it made her look unfeminine. And, you know, weird in in that way the. The longest laugh was when Lucy, they’ve started right there in Connecticut and they’ve started raising chickens as what they come up with to do out there in Connecticut. And Lucy has all these eggs that she’s stuffed in her shirt, which is reminiscent of the job switching scene with the chocolate sticking those in there. And so she’s got all these egg stuffed in her shirt and she and Ricky are practicing a tango for some kind of performance out there in Connecticut. And he sort of grabs her. And we can see and imagine what it must have felt like for Ball to have all these it for Lucy to have all these eggs, you know, like in her shirt. And then to have them all crushed and running down. And that’s a very good example of one of things that Lucy learned from Buster Keaton, which was he said that that good comic acting was to listen, react and then act. And that’s part of Lucy’s brilliance in front of the studio audience. She knows how long to wait. They actually had to wait for it’s 70 something seconds or something that incredibly long time for people laughing after that, because we could see on her face the way that it would feel to have these eggs running down. How funny it is. And she gives us the time to look at that and appreciate that. And that’s something it’s something about live television to something. That’s something being Leive that gives that kind of a possibility.
Interviewer: Now, you mentioned Buster Keaton. So you believe it’s really true that he worked with her on top of things and counseled her?
Lori Landay: Yeah, she, um. She certainly was. Lucy was very good friends with Buster Keaton. And they went back quite, quite a ways. And I think he did counsel her. Yeah. That that’s that story really rings true. I think her comic style in general was more influenced by Charlie Chaplin because Buster Keaton star was all about being like the sort of the static person who’s didn’t have facial expressions, great stone face. You know, that that it kept his face perfectly still. And all these crazy things happened around him where Charlie Chaplin, his comic style was much more about a comedy that was in the body, the way he moved his body, the way that he moved his face, the kinds of expressions and the ways that he interacted with props, which was one of the things that Lucy did so brilliantly, interact with props. Chaplin would pick something up and kind of animated. He would make it into something else. And Lucy does the same thing.
Interviewer: Now, it’s interesting to me that we’re looking at her roots and her origins and we’re looking at male figures. Is it possible that there was no female role model for her and that she had to create one by incorporating these masculine?
Lori Landay: There weren’t a lot of female role models for someone like Lucille Ball trying to create a new kind of comedy, a kind of women’s comedy. There were certainly Jean Harlow and Mae West, but Lucy was never that tough talking kind of characters. She was much more sort of ordinary and everyday. She’s. She looks deceptively ordinary. She is the girl next door. And that’s part of her comic persona, is someone who is just like everybody else is just average. She had to look to the male comics because that’s the tradition that that is really inherited an episode like the ballet. You see this illustrated where the women when Lucy wants to be in the show. And so there are two options. There is a space for a female ballet dancer or a male burlesque comic for the women’s role. And performance is to be beautiful and sort of ballerina. And the male is the males. The male comic is to be to be squirted with water, with seltzer water and be hit and that kind of thing. Pie in the face. That’s comedy. It’s masculine and feminine. Performance is this beautiful ballet. And Lucy integrates those two. And that’s part of her acting style. That’s part of what she’s creating in that show with her physical comedy is a place for women to be that kind, to a place for women to participate in that kind of comedy that up to that point really had only been in the province of men rather than just being the butt of the joke and following or being knocked over or squirted with water. Here’s someone who is doing those things as well.
Interviewer: OK. I think at the very end, Tom is going to do some pickups around the same subject, but I’m gonna just move forward in the interest of staying on schedule and not forgetting the end of her career.
Lori Landay: Right. In the later shows. It seems like Lucy was successful at changing with the times when she reinvented herself in the Lucy show. She was a single mom. Now she was a widow, she wonders. She was struggling with issues that were kind of radical, I guess at that time, being a single mother was slightly unusual, but definitely a trend that Woody would grow and increase. And then when she reinvents herself again, here’s Lucy. She’s a working mom who is holding down a job and trying to raise these teenage kids. Can you speak to the way she was able to reinvent herself as times changed.
Lori Landay: Yeah, the the Lucy character evolves over time. And in response to changes that Lucille Ball was going through in her own life and also changes that a great number of women were going through in their own lives in. I Love Lucy. She’s the wife who doesn’t want to be just the wife who’s always trying to do something more. But she’s in an economic situation where she has a husband who’s providing for her in the next show. The Lucy Show. She is a widow and she has been provided for, but she doesn’t have full access to the money. And that’s where there’s the same kind of tension that went on between Ricky sort of being in charge of the money and Lucy trying to cajole and wangle and trick her way into getting what she wants. We get that same tension in here as Lucy, but this time it’s with the banker. Lucy show Cupid in the face just to get that same tension in the Lucy show between the banker Gail Gordon and Lucy. Then in Here’s Lucy. She’s a working mother and is starting to deal with a lot of those challenges that we’re facing women. Let me just look at this for a sec. I can tell you the dates I those down shows I know you don’t want to know about. Ok, the the Lucy show started, the Lucy show started in 1962, and she continued to do this sort of evolve this character of Lucy Carmichael up through 1974. And in that time period, that was 12 years, there were enormous changes that were occurring all of the 60s and certainly the beginning of the women’s liberation movement. And at the end of the 60s and well into the 70s, all kinds of of conversations going on around the country about women working and women being independent, single mothers in the Lucy show, she’s a she’s been widowed. And then and here’s Lucy. She’s a working mother and has to go out into the public and is trying to juggle a lot of the things that women were trying to juggle. So that Lucy character responds to changes that are going on in Lucille Ball’s life, but just in the lives of American women, kept her really relevant and important in that way.
Interviewer: What comedians do you think she has made possible? Who stands to inherit or has already inherited her mantle, her legacy? Who’s your favorite thing you think walking?
Lori Landay: Well, I think that Lucy’s footsteps are hard to walk in, but there are some comedians who certainly have have been trying and have been successful in a lot of ways. Lucy. Lucy opened up the field, opened up that that terrain for women in comedy in a way that nobody had before because of her physical performance and because she was she had the opportunity to create a character that evolved over time and really spoke to a lot of things going on in people’s lives, in everyday life. Laverne and Shirley is something that certainly wouldn’t have been possible without the Lucy and Ethel precedent and the kinds of schemes that they would get into. And they were much more independent. While the Lucy show was was on, that girl emerged and that girl was about the single woman who was working, who had the boyfriend fiancee, but wasn’t necessarily going to marry him because she was single and independent and autonomous and liking that life. And that’s like the next generation of what comes after Lucy. And so characters like. Well, see, well, Ellen is Ellen is a good example of someone who really inherits Lucy’s legacy in some ways, although her comedy is much more like a verbal comedy of Gracie Allen than necessarily the physical comedy that she had some some moments when she dressed up in a chicken suit. I remember in particular as being funny and goes into a party dressed up in a chicken suit. And there are other kind of physical moments. But she seemed to place herself very clearly in a tradition that harkens back to Lucy in episodes where she mentioned Lucy, I mentioned Lucy. Eva says there’s one where she’s going to have a mammogram and she’s nervous. And she runs into Jeanine Garofalo doing a doing a guest spot. And they Janine Gruffalo character says that when she’s nervous, she thinks of Lucy episodes. And so as Ellen goes in to have her mammogram, she’s thinking about different. I Love Lucy episodes repeating Lucy goes into the freezer. Lucy. I dont know any of the rest right now. But she repeats the the titles of Lucy shows and imagines what it might what Lucy might have done in this situation, which is interesting. We think about Lucille Ball being the first pregnant woman on television and all the issues there were about showing her pregnancy and showing her pregnant. Making comedy out of something is sacred as motherhood. And then for later, for an actress like Ellen to do a show that is actually very informative about the importance of women having mammograms can see that there’s been a huge change in what can be put on television and how television responds to women’s lives. So she’s a good example. Ellen’s an example. Sybil Shepard had a show for while Sybil and she and her best friend Marianne were just crazy and great. I really like that show a lot. I thought that was wonderful. Was a little too short lived, certainly for me. But that had a lot of the sort of the team. I think that more than anything, that what Lucy contributes is that team, the buddy, the two women together who are going off on these crazy schemes. And the idea that there’s that comic possibility that can be created in no matter how restrictive a situation looks, there’s always a comic way out that somebody like Lucy can think of.
Interviewer: How about Fran Dresche?
Lori Landay: Oh, Fran Drescher certainly is in the tradition of Lucy the Nanny is interesting because in that it’s the woman who is ethnic rather than the man, and he’s been British sort of upper crust. So we’ve got a class difference, an ethnic difference, a religious difference, all kinds of cultural differences that she’s playing off of. She. Fran Drescher has the kind of facial expressions that and of course, her Pritish has her own facial expressions. But Fran Drescher uses facial expressions in a way that’s similar to the way that that Lucy used facial expressions and her crazy schemes and her subversion. Lucy was always Lucy was always trying to turn the tables. If someone else was empower, Lucy would be trying to turn the tables so that she would be empowered. And we see that with the nanny over and over again.
Interviewer: And isn’t she also an executive? Fran Drescher. She created the show or sold it to CBS, even in a similar vein. She controlled the creative product in a way that.
Lori Landay: Yeah. Lucy. Lucy was able to control her creative project. Product. Lucy was able to control her creative product and have a huge impact on how that character was presented and received. And Fran Drescher has been able to do that as well. Lucille Ball was the first woman to be able to do that. She was the first head of a film studio. Although she had a real hands off management style, she still was the president. And she still did have that that power and a lot of influence and was able to surround herself, even though she she wasn’t necessarily making all the decisions herself. And I think Fran Drescher or other people’s civil Shapard or. I don’t know. But what’s the Dharma and Greg? What’s her name from Dharma and Greg? Yeah. I don’t know. She’s.But Fran Drescher is someone who has a lot of executive control over her show, created the show. Roseanne is another person who she all the kinds of things that Lucy the lines that Lucy sort of danced up to and then skirted away from terms of like not being, you know, like a good mother and woman and wife. Roseanne completely goes into that whole area. Her house is a mess and she’s not always very nice to her kids. And the only way she can deal with her kids is to trick them. And so she’s somebody who goes past the terrain that Lucy carves out in the way that she doesn’t fulfil these roles of wife and mother and woman and and that kind of thing.
Interviewer: OK. I want to stop for a second.
Lori Landay: Historically, there weren’t very many options for women in in performance and especially not in comedy. There were the stereotypes of the good women, the heroine. And then in comedy, there were the sort of grotesques that were exaggerated one way or another, ugly or fat or stupid in particular, becomes more and more prominent. The dumb blonde is a character type that really takes hold in the 1920s and we see that played out throughout. And Lucille Ball didn’t want to go into any of these stereotypes. She didn’t want to have to fit into any of these character types and was creating something that was new by drawing on some of it and combining combining some of these character types. Vaudeville, which is where comedy comes from, was really a male preserve. The audience was men, primarily men. The performers were primarily men. And although there were women who participated in it, they did so in a really stereotypical way. So as the real good girl or as someone who’s very sort of plain and could be made fun of in that way, physical types that could be made fun of, whether because of hair color or, you know, body type that or. And also women playing the parts of children like Fanny Brice’s baby Snooks, which by the time she got on the radio, people had a really good idea of what she looked like as baby Snooks. And so that was a very visual thing as well. Or somebody like Mae West was a real sexual predator who set all kinds of things that were really outrageous and sexual innuendo and played the bad girl and all in very interesting ways.
Interviewer: Good. I would like just one succinct statement about Hollywood. Really misunderstood.
Lori Landay: Oh, OK.
Interviewer: I just didn’t get what she had to offer. They kept trying to make her anything. She wasn’t going to be just kind of short.
Lori Landay: Hollywood didn’t get Lucille Ball. Here was this great talent and they couldn’t figure out what to do with her. And she obviously had this real sort of. She had it. She had a real charisma in front of the camera. But overall, they weren’t sure. And maybe it’s because she didn’t really fit in to any of the roles that had already been created for women in film. She hits her stride in radio and then particularly in television. Lucille Ball found herself and found her character in television and television, found itself and found its character and Lucille Ball. There’s a sound bite that’s a sound bite, I’m getting better.
Interviewer: She leaves RKO. She goes to MGM and they give her the star treatment. Supposedly, this is when they concoct this color because now she’s gonna go from being black and white pictures to being colored pictures, Technicolor tessy. And there’s a lot of publicity surrounding this, including, I think, Life magazine Deaner. You don’t have to say, but magazine spreads that feature her hair. And tell us a little bit about that. And this notion of redhead.
Lori Landay: Part of the Lucy persona that was so recognizable and attractive to people was as a redhead. And that goes back that goes back to obvious associations with fire and being fiery and the redhead in that way, but also to the 1920s when Elinor Glyn, who was a real romance, sort of the mother of the romance novel, and then also somebody who started having a hand in film. She chose Clara Bow to work with some of them. I’ll start again, actually, if that’s alright.
Interviewer: You shouldnt go back that far,.
Lori Landay: No, no. I realize, as I said that. OK.
Interviewer: You can say that Lucy wasn’t born because that’s the truth.
Lori Landay: OK.
Interviewer: And then she got this red hair.
Lori Landay: Ok. One of the aspects of Lucille Ball’s persona of the Lucy character was her red hair, which was very well known, even though she was working in black and white television. Something that she wasn’t born a redhead and she experimented with different types. And in those days of film, in the studio era, women actresses were actresses, were really typed by their hair. So there’s the fiery redhead and that’s the character that she started to create. And she became something there. Her hair color that that now we think of that sort of pinkie orangy red color that she created was created for Technicolor, not for television and not for real life. And she said that maybe it didn’t look so great in real life, but it didn’t matter. It was made for Technicolor. And she told all the reporters to call it Tango Red. The name that she came up with for that.
