Father Knows Best first aired on October 3, 1954, and concluded its run on May 23, 1960. Like The Donna Reed Show, it was the story of a family in the Midwest—in the fictional town of Springfield. The parents were Robert Young and Jane Wyatt, both film veterans, and their three children were played by Elinor Donahue, Billy Gray, and Lauren Chapin. Young was an agent for the General Insurance Company, and Wyatt was a stay-at-home wife. The three children (“Princess,” “Bud,” and “Kitten”) ranged in age from sixteen to nine when the series began, and the stories of their growing up formed a large portion of the sitcom’s action. Father Knows Best is structured similarly to The Donna Reed Show, but centered on the husband rather than the wife (although, as always in sitcoms, every character gets to be featured as central to the story from episode to episode). Father Knows Best presents problems of money, school, job, friends, and teenage adjustment, and like The Donna Reed Show, it attempts to be as low-key and honest as possible, never suggesting marital discord of any serious nature. It took itself very seriously, and its goals were often lofty in terms of ethics, morals, and civic duty.
Taken together, these two shows define what happened to the media portrait of marriage. It was desexed, made familial. It became completely situational, week to week, with easily solved problems and an idealized, elevated status, held up as a role model most people felt they couldn’t live up to because it seemed dishonest. The old horrors presented by movies, however easily swept away in happy endings, had more guts; under the movie surface always lurked the monsters. Under the TV sitcom marriage lurked the sponsors.
Television presented marriage mostly as a family story, as in Father Knows Best, with dad Robert Young and mom Jane Wyatt and their three kids. (Photo Credit 2.103)
As popular as The Donna Reed Show and Father Knows Best were, the show that claims the sitcom crown in the marriage sweepstakes—and that is running somewhere today on some channel if you just turn on a television and look for it—started out inauspiciously. In March 1951, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball made a half-hour comedy about a married couple that they hoped to sell to CBS. This “pilot” was subsequently lost and not found for years. It finally aired as a big event on August 30, 1990. Where once it had been a hasty, on-the-cheap little playlet designed as a smart sales pitch, it was exhumed and presented to America with all the reverence of a new opening of King Tut’s tomb. That’s because the “little show” had become one of the most beloved—if not the most beloved—television shows in the history of the medium. It was called I Love Lucy and it was about a married couple.
It is fashionable today to say that the leading lady of I Love Lucy, Lucille Ball, was never a real movie star, but she had a long career and her name appeared over the title in numerous films; her face adorned the covers of movie magazines, and she even had her own endorsed set of paper dolls for little girls to play with. She was a star, just not a legendary one.32 It was her husband, Desi Arnaz, who didn’t reach the level of movie stardom that his looks and talent might have guaranteed him. During the mid- to late-1930s, Ball emerged as the headliner of inexpensive black-and-white movies at RKO. (It was at RKO that she first met Arnaz, when they co-starred in the 1940 musical Too Many Girls.) Ball was glamorous and hilarious in comedies such as The Affairs of Annabel and Annabel Takes a Tour (both 1938). She was glamorous and dramatic in Beauty for the Asking (1939) and Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), and highly effective in a serious role in The Big Street (1942), opposite Henry Fonda. In late 1942, her considerable RKO success led to the offer of a contract from the all-powerful star factory Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, proof she was seen as a real star. It also meant something else, which would ultimately derail her potential: MGM, the studio of glamour, was hiring Ball to be one more of its glamorous female creatures. (MGM had under contract Lana Turner, Hedy Lamarr, Greer Garson, and others.) Whereas RKO had been developing Ball as a sophisticated comedienne who could do slapstick as needed, MGM introduced her as “the Queen of Technicolor” in a huge Life magazine spread. MGM had Ann Sothern under contract, and she was their resident good-looking female with musical ability who could do comedy, verbal and physical. MGM didn’t need (or so they thought) what Ball could offer in comedy. The studio didn’t ignore her comic abilities; it just didn’t build them up. For instance, they cast her as the romantic and glamorous leading lady in such musicals as DuBarry Was a Lady (opposite Gene Kelly and Red Skelton) and Best Foot Forward (1943, in which she plays Lucille Ball, a movie star). Both films stressed her glamour and sex appeal, but also allowed her to do a little comedy rather than just be a standard romantic lead. Ball was a beautiful woman, tall and thin, and she wore clothes well, but she was never made to be a clotheshorse. Although she was at a top studio, her career began to languish. MGM began to use her as a kind of Eve Arden clone, casting her as the sharp-talking second lead in such films as Without Love (1945) and Easy to Wed (1946). She found welcome success away from MGM as a wisecracking secretary to a private eye in The Dark Corner (1946) and as a model menaced by a murderer in Lured (1947). She began her real work as a slapstick comedienne in The Fuller Brush Girl (1950) and in her pairing with Bob Hope in Sorrowful Jones (1949) and Fancy Pants (1950). In 1951, both her life and her career changed course, when I Love Lucy debuted.
Viewers of the small screen could see shows that purported to be realistic, as in The Donna Reed Show, with Reed as a typical 1960s housewife … (Photo Credit 2.104)
… or shows that bounced off that wall, as in I Love Lucy, with Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball, and Vivian Vance. There was nothing typical about Lucy. (Photo Credit 2.105)
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz got married on November 30, 1940. Arnaz then served in the armed forces during World War II, and despite excellent earlier appearances in such movies as Bataan (1943), at war’s end he found he could not jump-start his film career. He went on the road with his band, and the Arnazes experienced serious marital troubles. After a reconciliation, he began to look for ways he and his wife could work together in a show that would keep him at home. He wanted to find something to utilize both her considerable comic skills and his musical knowledge, and he came up with an idea. Ball had been appearing regularly in a successful radio show called My Favorite Husband, and radio had always been a good locale for the short-form comedy featuring married couples. There were Fibber McGee and Molly, Burns and Allen, I Married Joan with Joan Davis, and a model that may well have directly influenced Arnaz: The Phil Harris–Alice Faye Show. There was also a wonderfully funny radio act called The Bickersons, starring Frances Langford and Don Ameche, which stands today as a yardstick by which all shows about bickering married couples can be measured. The radio show gave Arnaz an idea for television.
Arnaz’s thinking resulted in the pilot that ultimately sold the idea of I Love Lucy to CBS. I Love Lucy (1951–1957) and the subsequent thirteen hour-long comedies set in their country home in Connecticut (The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, 1957–1960) were unprecedented hits. In all of them, Ball and Arnaz played a married couple called Lucy and Ricky Ricardo.33 There weren’t really many imitators of I Love Lucy, because there weren’t many Lucille Balls. She was a brilliant physical comedienne and possibly the greatest female slapstick artist ever to be seen in the media. (We don’t have enough footage of Mabel Normand for a solid comparison.) Her comic timing was precision-perfect. She was physically agile and apparently fearless. Although really a tall, slim, and beautiful woman, she wasn’t afraid to let herself look silly, or even bad. She was a treasure, and her husband of those years, Desi Arnaz, was not only her perfect foil and an equally brilliant straight man, but also a smart businessman who understood what to do with her.
Most people think of I Love Lucy as a typical 1950s married couple. Lucy, in particular, is thought of as a 1950s housewife (God help us!). But nothing about I Love Lucy is really “typical” the way The Donna Reed Show and Father Knows Best are. I Love Lucy merely uses a real marriage as a springboard to hilariously off-the-wall (and totally unrealistic) comedy adventure
s. Yes, it’s true that Lucy is a 1950s housewife, and she and Ricky are happily married. They even become parents when Little Ricky is born. Yes, it’s true that Lucy wears comfortable clothes around the house—flats, pants, simple dresses, even aprons—and yes, she cooks, she irons, she keeps house, she shops for groceries. But—and it’s a very big “but”—when Lucy cooks, the bread she’s baking (with too much yeast) fires out of the oven like a battering ram and knocks her out the door. When she irons, she burns. When she cleans, she crams everything into one closet and opens the door in time to bonk her mother-in-law on the head. And when she shops for groceries, she turns it into a Ponzi scheme in order to bilk her neighbors.
Why would anyone imagine that the Ricardos were the role model for American married couples? The Ricardos give audiences two contradictory things: wedded bliss and resounding discord.34 They aren’t even like other sitcom families. Ricky and Lucy live in an apartment in New York City, not a house in the suburbs or some vague midwestern locale. They have no relatives living with them, and, initially, no children. Their best friends are their landlords, Fred and Ethel Mertz, and he’s an ex-Vaudevillian. Lucy dyed her hair, and Ricky was a Cuban bandleader, for heaven’s sake! I Love Lucy was not about the neighborhood, the children, and their troubles at school. It was not about the husband’s challenges in his work as lawyer or doctor, or the wife’s management of her home or her problems at the PTA meeting. I Love Lucy was a slapstick musical comedy about show business. The wife’s frustration was that she wanted to get out of the house and into her husband’s act. Instead of a Blondie/Dagwood situation in which the ever-reliable Blondie bailed out the bungling Dagwood from his mismanagement of day-to-day activities, the beleaguered Ricky—supported by the cheapskate Fred Mertz (William Frawley)—had to survive the tactics of his scheming wife. In her various shenanigans, Lucy was herself supported by her faithful Sancho Panza, the equally numbskulled Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance).
The truth is that Lucy is dangerous—comically dangerous, but dangerous. She’s not the all-American wife and mother; she’s like the movies’ mad doctor who invents things: he can get the plan off the ground, but then it goes wild and destroys civilization. Lucy has an endless fountain of crackpot ideas to further her goals, but also an indomitable spirit to keep her plugging away at them when they obviously aren’t working. Who has forgotten Lucy eating the chocolates on the assembly line? Stomping the grapes in the wine vat? Gamely coming down the stairs in high heels and a “Follies girl” hat that is tipping her dangerously backward? None of these enterprises goes right for her, but she presses onward, never relenting, never stopping, and always acting as if she can master her fate if she just keeps going. (This is why Lucy became emblematic of the 1950s American woman: not because she’s “normal,” but because she’s determined. She treks ever onward, confident there must be a better life somewhere up there ahead.) Furthermore, Lucy’s got a mean streak. When she reads about a wife who’s conked her mate on the head with a baseball bat, she bursts into hysterical laughter: “The idea of someone letting go and doing exactly what they want after twenty years just kills me!”
Lucy accompanies Ricky to Europe, where she teaches Charles Boyer how to be Charles Boyer and where she stomps some eternal grapes. Lucy and Desi also go to Hollywood, where Lucy (with the help of the ever-wary but ever-reliable Ethel, of course) steals John Wayne’s footprints from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. She sets William Holden’s nose on fire at the Brown Derby, and burgles Richard Widmark’s house. In each case, she directly encounters the famous star (guesting on the show). Lucy is thus no ordinary housewife, and no ordinary sitcom wife. (She’s Lucy, she’s out there, and look out if you run into her! Out on the street, Lucy and Ethel were a menace. In the home, their own turf, they were atomic.)
Lucy and Desi are exaggerated. The difference between I Love Lucy’s marriage and a more conventional sitcom marriage is illustrated by the episode “Lucy Does the Tango.” Now living in their Connecticut home, with the Mertzes still next door, the Ricardos are carrying on in their usual manner. Lucy wants to keep chickens and sell the eggs to make some money for herself. Ricky is totally opposed. Naturally, with Ethel’s help, Lucy secretly raises chickens and hatches eggs. When she and Ethel bring several dozen eggs into the house, Ricky comes downstairs unexpectedly and tells Lucy it’s time to rehearse their tango. Tango? Here’s where the marriage of the Ricardos can be marked out as an “unrealistic” situation. The chickens are acceptable, and certainly the eggs; telling a lie to a husband is standard sitcom behavior. But the tango? It’s the tango that marks the Ricardos out as the married-sitcom “other.” In a normal family, the husband is not a bongo drummer, and he does not need to rehearse the tango—and if he did, his wife wouldn’t know how to do one. It’s perfectly “real” for the marriage established for the Ricardos in the Ball/Arnaz sitcom universe, but it is not realistic in the everyday world of the viewers.
What happens moves from “let’s rehearse” (which might be normal) to the tango (which is becoming esoteric) to the bizarre. To hide the eggs, Lucy stuffs as many as she possibly can into her blouse. To keep Ricky from finding out what she’s doing behind his back (raising chickens), she must tango very, very carefully. In particular, she must not let him sweep her close in a passionate chest-bumping embrace that would break the eggs and reveal her lie. And so the viewer is drawn into the world of show-business professionalism, inhabited by two people who know one another’s rhythms and moves, and who both understand their half of the pairing. Desi Arnaz, underrated in his ability to handle Lucy and enhance her comedy, spins her, twirls her, and tries to embrace her, innocently unaware that there’s anything more at stake than a good tango. Lucy, a physical genius, blocks him at every turn but with a shaky smile and a worried look that she glosses over. Time and time again they almost crash, until the final punch line—smash go the eggs!—and the aftermath of chagrin for her and startled questioning for him.
This tango-of-the-eggs is more than a funny slapstick comedy routine; it’s a classic marriage metaphor played out by two people who are married in real life. It’s about everyday deception of a practical nature paired with the awarenesses of years lived together. Nobody needs to be a cultural analyst to get it; one only has to be married. There was more than comedy to Lucy and Desi; there was marriage—real marriage, and a complicated one at that. This element is strongly layered over everything they do, and probably accounts for why people remember their shows as typical rather than exaggerated. It is significant that audiences could feel the real tension in Lucy and Desi’s marriage via a dozen eggs, and decide as a result that here was a real marriage, and also know that, at their core, the marriages of Donna Reed and Robert Young were false.
When Desi Arnaz chose to expand I Love Lucy to the one-hour format, the strange reality/unreality of the televised union between Ball and Arnaz became even more apparent as they interacted with four other real-life show-business couples: Betty Grable and Harry James, Edie Adams and Ernie Kovacs, June Haver and Fred MacMurray, and Ida Lupino and Howard Duff. Ball and Arnaz are playing Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, but the other four couples play themselves. The real-life couples act as if Lucy and Ricky are, like themselves, a real married couple at work in show business. The strangeness of this blurring of marital reality is compounded by a fifth complication: Danny Thomas and his fake television family from Make Room for Daddy also do an episode. (Make Room for Daddy was a Desilu-owned and -produced sitcom.) Was it any wonder that confusion about identities, marital responsibilities, and role playing emerged? When Ball gave birth to a son both onscreen and offscreen in 1953, the fusing of the Arnazes (real people) and the Ricardos (fake people) became forever set in the minds of their audiences.
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz also made movies together. They start out happy after their big wedding, driving off in their brand-new Long, Long Trailer … (Photo Credit 2.106)
… only to end up in a cheap roadside diner, bandaged, bewildered, and brok
enhearted. (Photo Credit 2.107)
Lucy and Desi were an enormous success on television, so much so that the movies suddenly wanted them again; they both became movie stars by default. Since they were totally associated with marriage, MGM hired them to make two movies about marriage: The Long, Long Trailer (1953) and Forever, Darling (1956).35 Both these films were hits, and in them, the Arnazes essentially played the Ricardos. These movies were an extension of their television show, with The Long, Long Trailer providing a perfect visual metaphor for marriage: the title vehicle. As newlyweds, Lucy and Desi disagree on things right from the start. In particular, Lucy thinks it would be grand to buy a trailer—a long, long trailer—and make it their new home. As they drive to their new living location, that metaphor for marriage—a long, long, and unwieldy trailer—rides behind them like a rigid beast that at any moment may charge forward and destroy them. The ability to move easily from TV to movies was characteristic of the work of Lucy and Desi, for whom the movie was always the gold standard, the place where they had learned their techniques.
In 1993, after both her parents were dead, Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill made a poignant and intelligent documentary about them that addressed their real-life marriage from the point of view of a child in the family. It turned out to be an amazingly honest marriage movie. Sitting alongside her brother, Desi Arnaz Jr., and with her own children around her, Lucie Arnaz asked herself (and thus her viewing audience) the familiar question: “Why couldn’t they stay married?” Using archival footage, home movies, and interviews, Arnaz explored what she called “the personal side” of her parents’ union, by which she means, of course, not the Lucy and Ricky Ricardo side. “Things don’t just happen,” she says, as she goes back to look for an answer that can help her (and her brother) come to terms with their background. (Imagine being Desi Arnaz Jr., who became a TV character known as Little Ricky on TV the day he was born, played by another child. Throughout his life Desi Jr. was approached by strangers with the words “You’re Little Ricky!” “No, I’m not—I’m not who you think I am!” he tells viewers in the documentary.)
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