I joined Ringling Brothers Circus as a clown, in part, because of the crazy shenanigans of Lucille Ball on her sitcom 'I Love Lucy.' She was a gutsy lady who wasn't afraid to get sprayed with seltzer while doing the 'Niagra Falls' routine, or get chocolate goo smeared all over her face on an assembly line reminiscent of the one in Chaplin's 'Modern Times.' The canned laugh track that functioned as her Greek Chorus didn't distract me from the fact that Lucy knew her slapstick.
Lucille Ball should have quite a shindig going on for her upcoming birthday this coming August. Her hometown of Jamestown, New York, is planning a celebration, and you can see a Lucy look-alike on the main page of the city’s website at http://www.jamestownny.net/
Ball was an outstanding physical comedy actress in her day; highly acclaimed and publicized. Most purists would say that someone like Buster Keaton was the better of the two, indeed, was the superior of even Chaplin himself. And Keaton and Ball have a shared history at the MGM studios. But Buster doesn’t generate the same warmth and affection that Lucille Ball does, and, after much reading and thinking on the subject while traveling the country as a circus clown, I have an idea why . . .
In the book “Keaton” (Blesh, Rudi, Keaton (1966) The Macmillan Company ISBN 0-02-511570-7) the author devotes several chapters to the late Thirties and early Forties, when Buster Keaton, drying out for the final time from the alcoholism that destroyed his career, was relegated to the back lot of MGM studios as a gagman and occasional extra when a scene called for a spectacular pratfall or a reference to Hollywood’s “Golden Age”. It was a Tinsel Town Siberia for Buster, where the studio paid him a few hundred dollars a month and forgot about him. This was the same period when Lucille Ball was spinning her wheels at MGM, playing everything from dizzy blondes to conniving blondes to wholesome blondes to an occasional Technicolor redhead who didn’t do much but look good in an Edith Head dress. Wandering the back lot of MGM between movie takes, she struck up a deep and abiding friendship with Keaton, who saw her as something of a protégé, and taught her all he could about the subtleties of physical comedy.
From him she learned the proper way to do a double-take, where the comedian looks at something but it doesn’t register, and then snaps back to gawk in consternation, fear or anger at whatever it is that he missed the first time. He taught her to do the spit take – calmly drinking coffee or beer or some other refreshment, only to geyser it out when something untoward occurs. He showed her how to fall properly, breaking the fall with the arms so no injury occurs. Keaton taught her all the ancient lazzi, the physical business of comedy that had been around since the Greeks first put on plays. Ball proved to be an apt pupil, and wanted to put her new-found talents to work, but MGM kept putting her in empty-headed musical comedies and perky domestic comedies where she either wore an evening dress or an apron and was not allowed to do much more than pout or simper. The executives at MGM, and at most other entertainment venues, felt that physical comedy was exclusively a man’s prerogative – nice ladies, unless they were the dowager-type like Margret Dumont, did not get pies in the face. They danced, were romanced, and married happily ever after.
When Ball teamed with her husband, Desi Arnaz, in a nightclub act, she decided to pull out all the stops and go completely physical; while Arnaz stayed the smooth, gracious Cuban, Ball would lope onstage dressed in a baggy suit straight from the Goodwill Store and pretend to be auditioning as the new bass fiddle player. There followed some standard slapstick business, straight from a Keaton silent film, before the two of them would sing a ballad together and walk offstage, arm in arm. The similarities between Desi Arnaz as Dean Martin, and Lucille Ball as Jerry Lewis, are quite striking. You can see this bizarre act in their audition tape for the “I Love Lucy” Show. It was considered so outrageous by TV executives that the tape was never used during the run of the show.
Bowing to network feedback, Ball toned down her zany character, becoming the dutiful housewife who now and then gets a wild hair up her coif and is allowed to bellow, topple, and grimace like a circus clown, until Arnaz, with some help from neighbor/confidant Fred Mertz, puts everything right again.
And this is the character she kept on playing for the rest of her television career; the dutiful, demure woman, who always looked good in a pair of slacks or a Paris gown, who was allowed to go wild for a few minutes, and then was brought back down to earth by a man, whether husband, boyfriend, or boss.
Ball had learned more from Keaton than Keaton realized. While Keaton was a fantastic figure, a frozen icon, he produced no lasting affection in an audience, especially in a female audience. That is why he was honored for his genius, and then allowed to sink into poverty and near-obscurity. Lucille Ball, on the other hand, had her moments in the slapstick sun, but prudently balanced them with tender moments, as a mother, a wife, or a good friend and neighbor. Audiences, especially female audiences, could identify with Lucy when she burned the breakfast toast while talking on the phone, and men could relish her persistent good looks and guffaw at her zany antics, smugly aware that at some point a man would enter the picture and calm her down – as was a man’s duty.
She was one of the first beautiful women to buck the male-dominated comedy system and perform as an accomplished physical comedienne, yet her greatest success came exactly because she played the stereotypical housewife so well. Behind the scenes she was all business, running a large entertainment empire and finally casting off Desi Arnaz when his drinking and infidelities became too blatant (and too damaging to the ‘family’ image Ball wanted Desilu to project). Onscreen she donned an apron to make a meal at the least provocation, and looked to a man to guide her domestic life and her career. In the last analysis, she was the smartest of showmen/women, because, as P.T. Barnum had said long before, the best way to please an audience is to give them exactly what they want. As long as American audiences wanted a subservient female on their screen, they got Lucille Ball. Ball faded just as Roseanne and others like her came barnstorming on the scene, taking guff from no one, and especially not from any man.
Lucy would probably have done a spit take over that . . .
