There are few American stars as famous — or as impactful on their medium of choice — as Lucille
Ball. She brought joy to countless fans, but behind the scenes, her life was full of tragedy.
Here's the inside story on the not-so-funny side of America's favorite comedian, Lucille Ball.
According to Lucille Ball's autobiography Love, Lucy, the comedian was born to parents Henry and
Desiree Ball in western New York in 1911. They moved to Montana and then on to Michigan, where
Henry, an electrician and lineman, found work with telephone company Michigan Bell. But Lucille's
life would take a tragic turn before she was even old enough to go to school. After her father came
down with influenza, a severe winter storm hit their suburban Detroit neighborhood and Henry
braved the snow to climb poles and fix broken lines. According to Charles Higham's The Real
Life of Lucille Ball, he then contracted typhoid fever, forcing the family to live under quarantine
to prevent the spread of the deadly disease. After a temperature spike and a series of
symptoms, Lucille's father died in February 1915. She was only three years old at the time.
A few years after Henry's death, Desiree remarried metal polisher Ed Peterson,
and the family moved to Celoron, New York, into a house with young Lucille's grandparents.
When Lucille Ball moved to New York and into her grandparents' home,
hers was among the three families that would reside under one roof. She wrote in Love, Lucy:
"My grandparents had little money but they gave us a richly satisfying family life."
Ball remembered a day in her teen years when their grandfather came home with a birthday
present for her brother, Fred Ball. For his 12th birthday, he was given a .22 caliber rifle.
Lucille and her brother invited neighbor kids Cleo, Johanna, and Warner over to join in
target practice with some tin cans set up in the backyard. But when it was Johanna's turn to shoot,
she picked up the firearm and Warner's mother called out for him to come home.
Warner ran right in front just as Joanna fired. He was rushed to a local hospital, where doctors
discovered that the bullet had severed Warner's spinal cord, leaving him unable to walk again.
Peterson offered to pay Warner's medical bills, but his family declined, filing a lawsuit instead.
They won and got everything, including the Balls' house. Lucille wrote:
"My grandfather never worked again. The heart went out of him. It ruined Celoron for us;
it destroyed our life together there."
One would be hard-pressed to find someone who would say that Lucille Ball
didn't have a profound effect on audiences. But a negative assessment of Ball's talent stuck with
the four-time Emmy Award winner for a long time. According to the Los Angeles Times, in 1926,
15-year-old Ball left school behind in favor of New York City's Broadway scene and a spot at
the John Murray Anderson school for the Dramatic Arts. But the staff wasn't impressed with Ball.
According to NPR, the instructors didn't enjoy her dancing and didn't care for her pronounced
Midwestern accent. One teacher said Ball should give up acting entirely. Her tenure at the school
was primarily spent in the shadow of future two-time Oscar-winning classmate Bette Davis.
After six months, the school gave up on Ball entirely and
expelled her. A note sent to Ball's mother read:
"Lucy's wasting her time and ours. She's too shy and reticent to put her best foot forward."
But Ball didn't give up. She moved back in with her mother to regroup and in a few months,
she was back in New York, landing bit parts in Broadway shows and modeling gigs.
Before they made I Love Lucy, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz starred in several big-screen
comedies together. The first was the 1940 musical Too Many Girls, where the two struck up a romance
on set and were married within six months. Their relationship was fairly tumultuous,
as their daughter, Lucie Arnaz, recalled to Closer Weekly. According to People,
Ball filed for divorce in 1944 after she apparently reached a breaking point with
Arnaz's alleged extramarital affairs and alcoholism, but the couple reconciled.
"No, Ricky! I won't get mad. You promise? I promise you I won't get mad."
While Ball and Arnaz played a happily married couple on TV, their real marriage faltered,
as Arnaz kept having affairs. According to People, Ball got so upset with her husband during one
fight that she apparently shot him in the head. The gun malfunctioned and Arnaz was unscathed.
Ball said during a 1960 court proceeding when she filed for divorce a second time that:
"It got so bad that I thought it would be better for us not to be together."
Both ended up remarried — Ball to comedian Gary Morton,
Arnaz to his neighbor Edie Hirsch — but the two stayed close. In 1986,
Ball visited Arnaz before he died of lung cancer and was very emotional at his funeral.
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz's second child, Desi Arnaz, Jr., arrived on January 19, 1953. Ball's I
Love Lucy character Lucy Ricardo was pregnant, too, and on the exact same day that Arnaz,
Jr. came into the world, Little Ricky was born on TV. Arnaz followed his parents into television,
appearing as a series regular on Here's Lucy as a teen, which, along with a singing career,
elevated him to teen heartthrob status. According to People, Arnaz, Jr. was romantically linked with
Patty Duke, Liza Minnelli, and Tina Sinatra, all before the age of 20.
"I just want to know one thing, with whom are you in love with today? No one. Only you."
But the young heartthrob struggled with addictions to drugs and alcohol. Arnaz,
Jr. told Closer Weekly in 2020:
"I was destroying myself. I got tired of being me."
Her son's substance abuse left Ball devastated. She once stated:
"I can't tell you how much his addiction hurt us. It tore me apart."
In the early '80s, Arnaz, Jr. entered a drug rehabilitation program,
with the full and public support of both of his parents. Arnaz, Jr. told People at the time:
"Sometimes people in the public eye don't want to reveal anything going on inside them
in front of even one other person, and it was extraordinary that they did it."
By 1953, Lucille Ball was the biggest star of the small-screen. I Love Lucy ranked as the Number 1
show on television in its second season, making Ball one of the most famous people in the country,
which led to public scrutiny. The year 1953 fell in the middle of Senator Joseph McCarthy's "Red
Scare," a tireless drive to root out Communists. According to the Washington Post, an investigation
by the associated House Un-American Activities Committee revealed that in 1936, Ball had
registered to vote as a Communist. The actress defended herself in 1953, saying it was something
she did to please her grandfather and that she'd never been an active member of the party.
Ball's perceived transgression was forgiven, but FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wasn't ready
to trust TV's brightest star. After her death, it was revealed that Hoover kept tabs on Ball
and Desi Arnaz for years. While the agency says it never opened an official investigation on
Ball and Arnaz, it did secretly collect data and issue confidential memos about the pair.
In 1937, Ball allowed a Communist Party meeting to take place at her house,
even though she wasn't in attendance, and in 1971, the Nixon administration requested
a background check on the actor, believed to be in relation to a White House visit.
Not only was Lucille Ball one of television's first stars, she was one of longest-lasting,
too. For nearly 25 years, she headlined a hit sitcom, a run that included I Love Lucy,
The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, and Here's Lucy. Ball was so deeply associated
with television comedy that resistance was strong when she tried to do anything else.
She tried to restart her movie career in 1974 with Mame,
a musical version of the 1958 movie Auntie Mame. Ball portrays the title character, a vivacious,
hard-partying socialite tasked with raising her adoring orphaned nephew. The original version
was a hit, earning six Academy Award nominations, and was the second highest-grossing film of 1958.
But Mame bombed at the box office and critics panned it. Esquire called Mame:
"One of the most inept and repugnant items ever to crawl out of the Hollywoodwork."
In 1986, ABC wanted a similar success to NBC's run of successful sitcoms,
so the network sought to bring back one of TV's biggest stars, Lucille Ball. ABC catered to the
actor's long list of needs, which included a guaranteed spot on the fall 1986 schedule
and full creative control, hiring writers and crew members she'd worked with since the 1950s.
On Life with Lucy, Ball portrayed Lucy Barker, a widowed, 70-year-old health fanatic
who takes over her dead husband's hardware store and moves in with her daughter and grandkids.
A broad comedy mixed with physical, slapstick stunts, the show was vintage Ball. And that was
the problem. The show felt like a dated throwback and after low ratings and bad reviews, ABC ended
Life with Lucy after eight episodes. It would mark Ball's last TV series. She was extremely
saddened by the show's failure, as she told the titular host of The Late Show with Joan Rivers:
"I cried. My god, I cried."
In June 1988, Lucille Ball made headlines when husband Gary Morton told the Los Angeles Times
that she suffered a heart attack a few weeks prior. She was released and said to be on the
mend. On April 18, 1989, after complaining of moderate chest pains and difficulty breathing,
Ball arrived at Cedars-Sinai where she had to undergo seven hours of open heart surgery
to replace part of her aorta and aortic valve, according to the Associated Press.
Hospital spokesman Ronald Wise reported that once news broke about Ball's situation, the facility's
telephone lines were jammed with calls from fans from around the world. Ball remained hospitalized
for her recovery but less than a week later, a different part of her aorta ruptured. The medical
emergency ultimately led to complete heart failure and an hour of revival efforts by medical staff,
but it proved unsuccessful. Comedy legend Lucille Ball passed away at 77 years old.
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