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Review by Jayne Plymale-Jackson
With a popular culture icon such as Lucille Ball, what more can be said? Now, for the first time, the star speaks for herself about her childhood in Jamestown, New York, her rebellious youth, her travails as a Hollywood ingenue, and her legendary foray into television.
Related by the author over 30 years ago, the manuscript and taped interviews were serendipitously discovered during ongoing efforts by Lucille's children to organize her estate. Familial memories abound. Recounted are restless teenage years in a town not big enough to sustain the heroine's ambitions. Jaunts into New York City and dalliances in modeling and acting only whet her appetite for something bigger. A stint in Hollywood "B" movies followed. Then, there were typecasting transformations, from glamorous clotheshorse to wisecracking femme to charismatic comic. Radio audience recognition with My Favorite Husband proved pivotal and a now famous characterization was refined -- one later made manifest in Lucy Ricardo, the dizzy, scheming, intensely appealing housewife. Talent, hard work, and fortuitous associations culminated in the I Love Lucy show.
Throughout all, personal relationships were central, particularly Lucille's friendship with backstage mentor Lela Rogers (Ginger's mother) and, of course, her marriage to bandleader Desi Arnaz. Halcyon days at the Desilu Ranch in Chatsworth, California, turbulent private lives, and highly successful artistic collaboration are part of the Lucille and Desi saga.
The apex of that success -- I Love Lucy -- was a risky venture. Abandoning a floundering career in movies, Lucille was poised for potential career-destroying backlash by a motion picture industry wary of the new medium of television. Similarly, the network and show's sponsor, Philip Morris, balked when Desi proposed filming the series in Hollywood -- a costly suggestion at a time when most television shows originated in New York and used kinescope techniques. Yet, in return for a salary cut and full rights to the show, Lucille and Desi secured not only the cash advance necessary to start production but also their place in history.
Poignantly occupying the margins of her memoir is the inevitable dissolution of Lucille's marriage to Desi. Ironically, it was success, both financial and popular, that unraveled their relationship. Public obligations -- of delivering a quality product to their audience, of maintaining a production entity, of negotiating investments -- eclipsed private concerns.
Conveyed most tellingly in Love, Lucy is the author's late-life blossoming. For her generation, Lucille reached the pinnacle of success when most other actresses were contemplating retirement. Related with candor, her memoir belies the attitudes of a hardworking genius, one informed by a deeply ingrained ethic. It is the testament of a woman with many roles, both literally, as a performer, and figuratively, as an actress, wife, and mother.
Lucille eventually abandoned the autobiography project, presumably because she wasn't ready for the mortality it connoted: still in the midst of her career, it was not quite time for reflection. For that reason, she tells her story with an optimism that eludes other entertainers' reminiscences. A foreword by Lucie Arnaz and two sections of photographic plates round out this legend's one and only autobiography.
Jayne Plymale-Jackson is a freelance writer in Athens, Georgia.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.