Lucille Ball

What failed

Her mother enrolled her at the John Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts in New York in 1926, and her instructors told her to her face that she would not succeed in the business. Rheumatic fever then stopped her acting attempts at an early stage and left her unable to work for two years. Her chorus work in New York did not last. Earl Carroll hired and quickly fired her from his Vanities. The second firing is told two ways: Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. dropping her from a touring company of Rio Rita, or the Shuberts dropping her from Stepping Stones. One reference work says only that she was chosen for these shows and that none of the engagements materialised. The sources also disagree on when this happened, and the entry asserts no year for it. She reached Hollywood in 1933 as an uncredited Goldwyn Girl and worked there for eighteen years without becoming a major star, appearing in more than seventy-five films — bit parts at first, leads in B-pictures later, support in A-pictures — and was known around Hollywood as Queen of the Bs. Her one attempt at Broadway in this period, the Bartlett Cormack play Hey Diddle Diddle, closed after a week in Washington in 1937 and never reached New York. She signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the 1940s and never achieved major stardom there either.

What happened next

CBS Radio cast her as Liz Cooper in My Favorite Husband in 1948 and then asked her to adapt it for television. She insisted on casting her husband, Desi Arnaz; CBS executives doubted an American redhead and a Cuban bandleader would be accepted as a couple, so in 1950 the pair took a vaudeville act on the road to show that an audience existed. The tour was a hit, a pilot was ordered and shot in March 1951, and CBS was still unimpressed by it before the network put the show into its schedule. I Love Lucy went on the air on 15 October 1951, ten weeks after her fortieth birthday, and was number one by February of its first season. Desilu, the company she and Arnaz had founded in 1950, kept the post-broadcast rights to the episodes and in late 1957 bought the RKO production facilities, where she had been a contract player. In November 1962 she bought out Arnaz's holdings and succeeded him as president; she had co-owned the company for twelve years, so 1962 is when she took the presidency rather than when she first ran anything, and it made her the first woman to head a major television production studio. Under her, Desilu developed Mission: Impossible, Mannix and Star Trek; NBC rejected the first Star Trek pilot in February 1965 and ordered a second. She agreed to sell the company to Gulf+Western in 1967. The failures did not stop once the success arrived: her only Broadway show, Wildcat, ran 171 performances and closed early in 1961; Mame flopped in 1974 and was her last film; ABC cancelled Life with Lucy less than two months into its run in 1986. She died on 26 April 1989, aged 77.

The point

The record is not a long wait followed by a reward. It is eighteen years of steady, continuous film work that never produced stardom, a Hollywood nickname that measured exactly how far she had got, and then a move at forty into television. The failures carried on afterwards: the Broadway show closed early, the last film flopped, the last sitcom was cancelled inside two months. Her working life was not divided into a failing half and a succeeding half; both ran the whole length of it. Three of the stories usually told about her do not hold up. The drama-school letter — the line about her mother wasting her money, or Lucy wasting her time and theirs — has no surviving document behind it, and Ball told the story several different ways over her life, which is the tell; what is documented is that her instructors thought she would not succeed and said so to her face. The tidy figure of forty-three B-movies is too low and too neat at once: the record shows more than seventy-five films before I Love Lucy, and the single label collapses bit parts, uncredited walk-ons, B-picture leads and support in A-pictures into one bucket. And the claim that Ball personally rescued Star Trek is repeated far more confidently than the record supports: as the majority shareholder she had the power to kill the project and did not, which Fact Trek points out is not the same thing as fighting for it. Even reference works garble this — the Museum of Broadcast Communications encyclopedia cited below says her clout with CBS got Star Trek picked up, and Star Trek went to NBC.