The charges, based on her registering to vote as a Communist in 1936, were dropped when Miss Ball explained she had done so only to please her ailing grandfather. Stevenson interrupted the show once for a political message, he was flooded with angry mail.Įven a charge that Miss Ball was a Communist, made by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, failed to dent her popularity. In fact, nighttime shoppers became so scarce in Chicago that the mammoth Marshall Field department store posted a sign that read: “We Love Lucy, too, so from now on we will be open Thursday night instead of Monday.” When presidential candidate Adlai E. The show was so popular during the 1950s that it literally stopped the nation every Monday night from 9 p.m. They filmed the programs in front of a live audience and in doing so, invented the popular and financially rewarding rerun. In creating the show, Miss Ball and Arnaz-who died in 1986-set a pattern of television that was to be repeated in decades to come.

The show was a weekly dash into absurdity that boasted the biggest television audience of its time-of almost any time. The 30-minute comedy starred Miss Ball and the Cuban-born Arnaz as the wacky Lucy Ricardo and her conga-playing husband Ricky. 15, 1951, that earned Miss Ball her niche in television history. It was “I Love Lucy,” which premiered on CBS on Oct. Not when I did movies, certainly not when I was a model and not when I did “I Love Lucy.” “I am not funny,” Ball told an interviewer for Rolling Stone magazine in 1983. Her greatest achievements, she always would add, were not any milestones in her career but ranked somewhere under the birth of her two children, Lucie in 1951 and Desi Jr., two years later. From her star-struck childhood through her struggles as a wisecracking movie actress in the 1930s and ‘40s to the television career that made her a legend, Miss Ball’s life was in the best show business tradition of rags to riches.Īlmost humbly, she liked to say she owed her enormous success, not so much to talent, but to a magical combination of guts and good supporting players.

Miss Ball was a tough-talking woman who had used her stardom and show business savvy to become, with her then-husband, the late Desi Arnaz, head of one of Hollywood’s major studios, Desilu.ĭespite her business acumen, she remained the unquestioned queen of television comedy.

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