Lucille ball rapidshare

They were guest stars on the highest rated episode ever of "Here's Lucy. Liz and Penis were so popular they demanded and got credit in the opening. Something that bitch Ball was loathe to do since it meant taking away her cigarette money to redo the opening. That dancing Lucy puppet on the opening credits of Here's Lucy used to scare the shit out of me when I was a little kid. I always laugh at the sheer number of people who feared and hated that puppet, R I adored it as a kid and thought it was the best part of the show.

I would have rather watched the puppet than the real thing. Well if that creepy little thing was running around your house you'd know it'd be up to no good.

And able to hide just about anywhere. Lez demanded they use her real ring for the episode and this enraged the cheap ass Ball as she had to pay for the insurance while it was on the set. Then Penis and Lez would throw parties and invite Desi but not bitch Ball and that mooch she got remarried to. Does anyone know what happened to the doll? It must be worth a lot of money. The, Here's Lucy Show was completely awful! It wasn't funny and the scripts seemed bad. I think a lot, not all, of things in the 60's went down the tubes.

It was CBS that insisted on the clause. They wanted to use Gale Gordon for the Fred Mertz character but Desi wanted Bill Frawley and the only way to get CBS to come on board with it was to create the clause that they could fire him without penalty if he showed up drunk.

At that point in her life, Lucy was leaving plenty of decisions to Desi and he was overseeing the original casting and hiring staff and negotiating with CBS.

Lucy was already by many people's standards a tough customer to deal with but she still deferred to Desi on almost everything. He hired Vivian Vance without Lucy really knowing who she was and he hired the DP to make her look good, etc. If Richard Burton and Liz Taylor didn't like Lucille [and they didn't] and if she didn't like them either [she didn't] it was because they were polar opposites of each other in terms of the business. In the film part of the business, star treatement, long days, delays and overages because of star behavior were commonplace.

One of the ways you knew you were a star was the amount of money and time you could cost the studio and still have them kissing your ass. Lucy had spent enough of her career in movies and around movie stars to know the score but she resented that kind of fame and priviledge probably in large part because she was never given it in movies but mostly because it was antithetical to her nature as a hard core control freak and perfectionist.

Lucy believed that comedy was very precise and that there were rules that had to be respected to get laughs, granted by the time that last series was on CBS Lucy had become a much less funny version of herself than she was on I Love Lucy, but Richard Burton didn't want to learn the lines and didn't care about getting the laughs.

With Lucy, if you looked like you didn't care or were fucking up, she took it as a personal attack. She interpreted it as disrespect and probably felt very defensive because even back then television stars weren't as classy as one movie star of the Burton Taylor catagory. I don't know how they could've continued the show. Ethel just comes in and announces Fred died of a sudden heart attack?

They didn't do real life on 50s sitcoms. Maybe they could've just switched him out with another fat old guy, but I don't think the audience would've stuck with it. The first Darin on Bewitched was carefully phased out before they introduced the new one. But weren't Burton and Taylor more or less washed up as genuine movie stars by the time they appeared on the TV show?

What were the films they had starred in around the time of the TV apearance? I don't think they were in any profitable films at that time. Like hell he was! Desi Arnaz was the driving force behind Desilu; he was an excellent businessman.

He had his faults drinking, gambling, other women but he was a smart guy and his business acumen made both him and Lucy very rich. Gary Morton, on the other hand, was a big fat nothing whose career was being Lucille Ball's husband. Lucy was an exception in that she had owned an entire studio, and had achieved a level of wealth, power and fame that made her outrank most film stars.

But the Burtons fame was fading, which is why they were willing to do a TV sit com. They would never have considing appearing with Lucy three or four years earlier. Time has been particularly unkind to Burton's legacy, Taylor and Ball less so.

That clip of Here's Lucy with the Burtons is awful. How different from ILL even with the same stars and writers. I read in a bio of Lucy that yes, Desi was the driving force on the shows and you can see the quality fall on the show after he left.

The first season or two of the Lucy Show was funny but after Desi left it became more and more cartoony. People interviewed said that Lucy was not funny in real life and new nothing about what WAS funny.

She would send Desi scripts after he left and he would ask her things like "WHY would the girls buy a helicopter.. Boy, a lot of misinformation on this thread. He built the studio person by person, brick by brick even finding the studio space , hired Karl Freund the genius lighting designer who made middle-aged Lucy look decades younger , Jess Oppenheimer, and the Bob and Madelyn, the writers who wrote all those classic episodes. He is the one who offered to film the episodes neither Lucy nor Desi wanted to move to New York, which is where TV shows were being kinescoped in those early days and he offered to front the costs to film the series and own the prints.

CBS agreed, thinking the whole thing would be a flop and Desi could have the mess on his hands. It was Desi would thought buying RKO would be a good idea. He was a workaholic, having everything to prove since he had been looked at as "that spic husband of Lucille Ball, B-list movie star.

Too ethnic. It had never been done on a sitcom. So Desi had quite the Latin fire under his ass to prove them all wrong. Which he did. In spades, creating not only the arguably best sitcom of all time, but a studio that produced some other classic television programs such as Star Trek greenlit by Lucy and The Untouchables greenlit by Desi. Desi Arnaz was one of the most charming, handsome, business savvy men ever to set foot in Hollywood.

People adored him and loved working for him. Most of the time, that is. He also was plagued by demons. Gambling, alcoholism, womanizing.

These eventually destroyed him. For every good story, there eventually was a bad one. Lucy revealed years later that Desi had to tear down everything he built up, for whatever reasons. He ended up, with all his successes, ruining his marriage to Lucy and dismantling the Desilu empire.

Lucy eventually bought him out and ran RKO herself for some time. But make no mistake, it was the business sense and ambition of Desi Arnaz that was the fuel behind the success of I Love Lucy. He loved his wife dearly in spite of his demons and wanted to create a showcase for her talents. He did. Comparing him to Gary Morton, who was and forever will be known as "Lucy's lump of a freeloader husband," true or not, is a total insult to his memory.

I wonder if he was consulted about aspects of that episode, though, since it was one of the few genuinely funny ones of the entire run. People watched Lucy all those years for the nostalgia factor. They were willing to forgive the banal mediocrity and downright BAD shows because America had loved her so dearly for so long as Lucy Ricardo.

Desi was also really wonderful on ILL. When they got to "Lucy Desi Comedy Hours", he really started showing the sour exaggerated side of his performances. Gary might have been a professional mooch, but he gave a fairly startling performance in "Lenny" as the Milton Berle icon. And just to set the record straight about Bill Frawley, Desi sealed the deal with him about the drinking. But if you ever come to work drunk or cannot do your job, you are through.

Desi had a great affection and fondness for the old curmedgeon. Frawley needed the work and promised Desi it would never be a problem. It never was. Not once. The only indication that William Frawley had any health or drinking issues of any kind during the entire run of I Love Lucy was that his hands would shake visibly during many episodes. That is why he frequently kept them in his pockets or jingled his keys, etc.

Frawley frequently had no idea what the episodes were about. He would only read his own lines and memorize them, tearing them out of the script. He would not know why or when the laughs were coming. For instance, one time he said "I just walk in and say 'Hi Ethel' and that is supposed to get a laugh?

I don't see it. You walk in and don't see her face, but the ass end of the horse costume. And you say 'Hi Ethel. There was a total professionalism on that set that went on for nearly ten years. They might have been a bit frosty backstage but had total respect for the talents of each other.

You think once America fell in love with them that each did not understand how good they were together and how well the comedy played? They sang in harmony in all those little cheesy vaudeville show episodes. They were a very believable couple, even though they were not good friends offset.

There was no "hate. I used to love it as a small child too--I was so confused why the real Lucy didn't look like this sexy puppet and was instead this horrible old crone. This was before I watched "I Love Lucy" and knew she could be so funny and attractive. If you watch them, you can see how hard-boiled and abrupt Lucy was in her later years. It's almost like you're watching a different person from the one in the sitcoms.

There's nothing funny about her at all, and sometimes she just appears to be downright mean. And the whiskey and cigarette voice doesn't help either. Lucy's voice sounded like gravel on sandpaper by that time, because of all the years of drinking and smoking. These were shot when she was riding the heights of the original series and she is much more like the Lucy Ricardo we expect There's also an episode with Desi on the WML panel, drooling and nearly falling over himself when gorgeous young curvaceous Kim Novak is revealed to be the Mystery Guest.

R is mostly right about Desi, but once the cameras were on it was Lucy that made people watch ILL Though he may have been the genius behind the scenes, I can remember my parents always complaining whenever Desi brought out his conga and started singing and sweating. She WAS a different person. Lucy Ricardo did not exist in real life.

Do you not understand the concept of acting? I wanted to watch the I Love Lucy marathon on the big color set in the living room, but my mean roommate was having a family squabble out there and insisted that I view it on the little black and white set in the kitchen, which surely reduced its impact. As a kid in the 70s watching "Lucy Show" reruns, I was always freaked out by the portrait of her in the credits bumper that looked like her head was growing out of a high-heeled shoe.

Um, no. The Burtons were still riding high in '68; they didn't know it would be only a few years before they'd become completely passee. It was considered a world exclusive in Her head was coming out of a shoe, and the expression was hard and haughty. Not a nice person. Guess this reflected what she became and Vivian Vance finally quit, and she was on her own.

Very unfunny show. The saddest thing I ever saw on TV was Lucy and Viv pretending to be teenagers and hanging out at the hamburger joint to spy on the daughter. Whatever her name was. If I rememeber the David Frost Liz and Dick interview, what was especially fabulous about it was that Frost was only going to interview Burton and that's what had been announced and planned.

But then after a while Burton was coaxed to bring out Taylor. She was clearly not prepared and so her part of the interview was quite spontaneous. It just shows you what a powerful effect I Love Lucy had on the American public. People just loved the characters and they took on a strange, unreal life of themselves. In the case of Lucy, the character she played had no similarity in any way to her own personality, in fact it was almost the exact opposite of who she really was.

After the show ended there were those Lucy-Desi Hours, then years and years of Lucy shows of one type or another.

From on Lucille Ball wa writing the goodwill and love generated by the character she paid in the '50s. The schtick got harder and harder to put over, but Lucille kept putting on the 'show' as long as the networks would pay her to do so.

For her it was about the money and the ego feed of continuing to be a big star, as she always was one. She was extremely popular and beloved again in the late 60's and 70's. We all used to hear these horror stories about Lucille Ball - her conduct and how hard she was to deal with. She knew how horrible she looked in person without her make-up, wigs and temporary face-lifts.

She knew what people though about her, she knew her reputation Desi was a mooch, he may have had a few ideas but he didn't do anything on his own but mooch off Lucy.

After Lucy dumped his Communist ass, he quickly sold her all his shares of DesiLu, then hung around the studio looking for work. The writers made ILL. If you listen to the radio show My Favorite Husband, you will see the scripts and shows are just as funny. As they should be as most of the ILL shows were lifted line for line from the radio show.

RE 18 - Carole Cook also said in the Lucie Arnaz film on her parents a couple of other telling things. One, confirming that Lucy bossed all the stars on her show around - or in her words, "you wanted to tell Lucy calm down girl - you got the job". Also, that Lucy's real first love was not her children, but her career - but that Lucy loved to present that false warm, fuzzy side in interviews, for the public.

A complex woman. That Joan Rivers interview is interesting to me when Lucile misinterprets "hit on you" to mean critize. Seems like she's acknowledging that a lot of people don't like her, but she doesn't give a crap because her work still stands. When I was a kid in the early 90's, I recall watching the Johnny Carson show and he was interviewing Lucy. She said when they did the I Love Lucy show, the cast and crew buried a time capsule on the grounds of the studio. She said someone years later bought the studio and tore the studio down.

But, the time capsule was never found. Know one knows what happened to it. Lucie Arnaz said other than Vivan Vance eventually, but not at first only three people were ever able to stand up to Lucy. Lucy friends with Sothern and was in awe of Merman and Dean Martin. R, underneath the boozy charm Dean was a real tough guy-- Sinatra did not mess with Dean either. Maybe Lucy admired him for that. Dean Martin is also extremely underrated as an actor. He had fantastic timing.

Very insightful and sympathetic to Lucy yet did not shy from being critical of her and Desi. Though no Lucie or Desi Jr. Lots of scenes of Lucy running the Desilu board meetings. When I was young and non-discriminating I loved Lucy too. When I watched the show in my 40's I came to loathe Lucy. Why Ricky didn't beat the shit out of her at least once a day is beyond me.

She was manipulative, selfish, conniving and a bully to Ethel and all of her friends. As a fiction character she is marginally tolerable. If she were real she would be the demon seed. Lucille Ball never had me fooled. Even as a child I thought she was a mean old bitch with very little talent. Her "Here's Lucy" shows look terribly amateurish.

Part of the fun of the show is that Lucy is indeed "human," for a 50s sitcom character She wants to have fun, she wants to go places and do things she hasnt done, she wants people to adore her, she wants money and things, she hates doing housework, she wants to outdo her friends usually that bitch Caroline Applebee She gets jealous of her husband, but likes it when a guy comes on to her usually planted by Ricky etc.

Plus, maybe cause they were married in real life, you can imagine despite the twin beds that Ricky and Lucy are into each other seuxually. Not only Lucy but the others, Ricky has a bad temper and a huge ego, Fred is a grumpy tightwad, Ethel is a whiney nag, etc. Watch any other 50s and 60s wife and mothers and see how bland they are in their perfection. In a way ILL is a 50s version of Seinfeld, where selfish, but totally relatable people do things and then it blows up in their faces.

Desi really was the creative genius behind that first show. I think I mentioned in an earlier post that he was the producer and director of "Mothers in Law" with Kay Ballard and Eve Arden which I think is one of the 2 or three funniest sitcoms ever. Lucy and her work were never remotely as good as was her work with Desi- not close in my opinion.

One of the reasons the Burton show was funny was that Lucy reverted to her physical humor- the hand behing he curtain. That is right out of her first show. Lord, "Mothers In Law" is one of the most dreadful shows in shitcom history.

Pugh and Carroll simply lost their touch. Their first few seasons of "The Lucy Show" are good, and some episodes rival ILL like the shower episode or the antennae episode but their output after was terrible. Plus, Kaye Ballard is very hard to take on the small screen. Ricky treated Lucy like a she was a disobedient child. Very common in the s, not acceptable today. Actually R makes a point. Lucy was a self centered, selfish, brat who brought nothing to anyone's life but mayhem, trouble, and strife.

She manipulated everyone around her. The saving grace was she usually got her ass kicked metaphorically. Actually, Dean Martin was probably not as boozed up as he appeared during his Vegas act or the Roasts. I thought i read he drank tea instead of booze.

He was very depressed in his life. Maybe more so after his son died but he was depressed most of his life. Probably a recluse in the later years. Lucy was manipulative, but you have to remember Ricky was the boss. She'd actually call him sir, especially when he got angry. That reflected their real relationship too, Desi was domineering because he was raised in a very patriarchal culture.

He spanked her in a few episodes, somewhat playfully, but still. So Lucy had to scheme and carefully manipulate Ricky to get his permission to do what she wanted. That explains why she was manipulative with him anyway, but not why she was manipulative with others. God, comedy television was really dominated by a bunch of tired, middle-aged, washed-out drunks in the late 60s.

You can see how ripe it was for Norman Fell and Grant Tinker to waltz in and change everything in Dean Martin spent his final years as a recluse, drinking and smoking all day and night until it finally killed him.

Martin must be a generational thing, because from the clips I've seen of him performing I just don't understand the appeal. Like it or not, you have to put Lucy Ricardo and I Love Lucy within the context of its times and also how other marriages and families were being portrayed on American television. Gracie Allen wasn't very smart George Burns just let her screw things up because you can't argue with a crazy person.

He didn't act like her father or drill sergeant. R, this has been documented. If you had been born already or knew how to read or weren't living in a cave, you'd know it. Get the point now dingy? I don't give a flying fuck how horrid Lucy was off screen. The work in ILL is classic and timeless. That's all I care about. I read that too. For some reason Lucille Ball loved Dean. She said that of all the show she ever did in her life, in any of her series, her favorite episode was on the Lucy Show, the episode that guest starred Dean Martin.

I thought it was a rather run of the mill episode. Anyone else remember it? It was pretty average, but it was Lucille Ball's favorite show she ever did. I thought Dean Martin was seen in his later years having dinner every night at the same restaurant.

He might have been a lonely, retired drunkard, but I don't think he was a recluse as we traditionally think of it. And who cares if the Lucy character is childish, selfish, and relentless. Many a great comic character in literature is built around someone deeply flawed who's keeps resorting to type by exhibiting antisocial behavior.

And as for TV. This is so patently untrue. It was an act they had, scripted and honed from until her retirement in Try reading one of the many memoirs written by Burns or other bios. She didn't screw things up This is true.

She was his bread and butter and why mess with it. Also, one of the nicest things about their act is that he never got impatient or exasperated with her character's quirkiness.

Gracie Allen was actually a highly intelligent woman. The 'Gracie' character from the Burns and Allen performances was just an act. George Look at his radio scene magazine. We were supposed to be on the cover, but it's only you. And over the years they learned audiences didn't like it if they were mean to each other, and especially when George was mean to Gracie for being such a dingaling, so they decided to have him always be nice to her when they did the television show, and that was one of the reasons for their success.

She would be so exasperating if her dinginess actually irritated George, but by making it clear she never truly upset him it was endearing. I loved the device of George watching what the other characters were doing on the TV set in his man cave over the garage. In every picture where she's not wearing a wig and has her natural hair, she wears huge tinted sunglasses to hide her eyes.

When she's wearing a wig -- and therefore employing her lever-and-pulley facelift system -- she's without glasses. The radio show was different. It evolved over something like 15 years. At the start, George and Gracie weren't married on the show. They were married in real life, but they played single people on the radio show. Over the years the structure of the show changed, from variety to arguably the first sitcom show.

Jack Benny's wife was a real bitch and one of the few people Gracie Allen disliked in real life. But Jack and George were best friends. George wasn't fond of her either but he never said anything out right mean about, just that she wasn't his favorite person. What was the deal with Mary Benny. Never heard a nice word about her.

Only see her described with words like bitch, mean, greedy, horrible, depressing. How could Jack have been such a great guy, and his wife so hated? I have heard that Mary Benny used to have parties ,and she was so rude asking her guests at her parties about their private lives.

She loved gossip and she asked various people about dirt different people in Hollywood. Just curious, has anyone ever seen any of the footage of the sequel to Stone Pillow that they were shooting at the time of Lucy's death? Mary Livingstone Benny was probably frustrated and angry to be married to a homosexual. People say she was often openly hostile to Jack while he took it with quiet grace. Perhaps he felt guilty about using her for the sake of his image.

Gracie Allen had a heart condition that forced her into early retirement. She was given a big send-off in the form of a "Gracie Retires from Show Biz" TV special, with a big party and tons of newspaper coverage. All the hoopla was designed to cover up the sad fact that she needed to save her strength in the hopes of prolonging her life.

She died only a few years later. Mary Benny was SO jealous that Gracie got all that special attention, she announced her own "retirement from show business" the following year.

If Desi drank and womanized, it was because he was married to her. She treated everyone on the set at underlings. She belittled Vivian Vance, knowing that Viv was so much prettier than her, she made her wear frumpy outfits so Vivian wouldn't upstage her. Lucy did not age well either. By the 's she looked like Baby Jane, scary looking. Her daughter isn't much nicer.

At a autograph signing, Lucy Arnaz had that "don't you know who I am" attitude towards the staff. Read Langella's chapter on Burton. Then consider the source. Then consider that many can't stand Langella.

And consider that source. His timing was flawless, that Cuban accent made everyone laugh. Lucy was okay with physical comedy, but she didn't have the natural ability to make people laugh like Desi - he knew how to make laugh at himself too, unlike her.

She was not pretty either - and she knew it - so I think that bothered her. She had a nice figure, but she was actually ugly. I Love Lucy worked because of the chemistry between all the characters. Lucy gave herself too much credit. I agree with R, but I'm sorry, Langella's book is a gossiphound's delight.

He's catty and petty, just the way I like it. Here's an excerpt about Burton from Langella's book:. Could anyone, I wondered, be so unaware of what a crashing bore he had become? There sat a man approximately fifty-two years of age, looking ten years older, dressed in black mink, with heavily applied pancake, under a tortured, balding helmet of jet-black dyed hair, grandly reciting poetry.

I am coldly sarcastic with her to the point of outright contempt but she hears only what she wants to hear I make a point of never seeing her again A lot of parents copied Lucy and Ricky in the 50s.

My brother was named "Ricky. My mother was a little too pretentious to carry off Lucy's zany antics but she had dyed red hair just like Lucy, and together they looked the part. In our little microcosm, Dad, like Desi, was screwing everyone in town, and Mom was smoking more and more, while getting bitter at being the laughinstock of our neighbors.

When they divorced, I thought she'd never get over it. He was the great love of her life. I can understand why the show was so popular. That's embarrassing. It's one thing to be on a show you might consider "beneath you" but if you're on it, be good at it or you look twice the fool.

In the context of her time, Lucy was considered a great beauty. Google pics of her Gerswhin Girl days. Lucille Ball was a beautiful young woman and certainly an attractive woman all her life, even though at times her looks were downplayed or seemed a thing of the past, as they are for most people later in life. Some corrections: Jack Benny wasn't a "homosexual. It seems everyone who ever worked with him loved him. I have no idea if Mary Livingston was a bitch, though by all accounts she could be difficult.

Sometimes it's heard to be married to the nicest man in the world. Your role is pretty much cut out for you. Lucille Ball was not only not "ugly," she was beautiful -- in her movies and on TV until age and smoking and sun and probably stress and worry and disappointment caught up with, as they do at some point with almost all of us. Desi Arnaz was a talented straight man, one of the best and for a long time overlooked, but was never the focus of the show. Lucille Ball was the focus, and on I Love Lucy at least was very, very funny.

She was also funny in her pre-Lucy movies. See, for example, Stage Door and Without Love, which she steals from Tracy and Hepburn though, admittedly, it's a pretty stinky picture to steal.

I'm sure Ball could be demanding and even imperious, but both zdesi Arnaz and William Frawley adored her. Her relationship with Vivian Vance was fraught with minor jealousies, but all the books about them -- and there are more than you might think possible -- say that they were good friends who respected one another.

It's true that L probably liked and needed V more than the reverse, but she was also more public and outspoken about V's talents. She was quoted repeatedly about them. You can see on YouTube L's reaction at one of the early Emmys; she obviously was crazy about her co-stars.

Moreover, 20 years later, on a Merv Griffin show she chokes up when talking about Vivian Vance. You can tell she loved and valued her.

From everything I've read and heard, Lucie Arnaz is supposed to be nice and down-to-earth. I admire the fact that she's been candid about her mother but also loving and loyal.

She displays the kind of perspective that most people in show business seem to lack. If her mother was increasingly controlling, tough, and self-protective, she says, those were comparatively minor flaws in a world full of really bad parents. She appears to be grateful for all she had and still has. After his son Dean Paul Martin died in the mids, Dean would go to Dan Tana's nearly every night and get shitfaced drunk, then have to be helped out to his car.

He might have played with the drinking act earlier in his career, but by the end he was a sad alcoholic. Why didn't Dean eat at Dino's Place? R I ate there once in the '70s and spotted Jim Nabors there. Which are the best movies of Lucille Ball except her yawning Lucy Show?

The actress and comedian was a trailblazer in a myriad of ways, whether it was daring to be a woman in comedy, being one of the first women to act while visibly pregnant on television, or normalizing an interracial marriage in front of the entire world. Indeed, Ball projected an aura of fearlessness, which is the enduring legacy of one of Hollywood's most beloved stars of all time. But, believe it or not, there's more to Ball than her incredible career accomplishments as she was also a human being just like anyone else.

She had her ups and downs throughout life, which included bringing children into the world, marrying and later divorcing Desi Arnaz, and remarrying before passing away from heart issues in So, what else is there to know about the pioneering and intrepid Lucille Ball?

What was she like in real life; what made her tick? Read on to discover her untold truth. Although Lucille Ball was known for her deft comedic abilities, she didn't come from an especially humorous or even happy family. After losing her father when she was only four years old, Ball's mother remarried and the preschooler went to live with her stepfather's grandparents.

As Ball tells it, they were strict and had "old-country ideas. They did that to discipline me, but for me it was the wrong way to bring up a child. Perhaps unwittingly, however, that method of arguably incorrect parenting led Ball to discover the power of humor. Her stepparents also encouraged her to pursue the arts. On July 4, , Lucille Ball's life would change irrevocably in an instant. On that day, Ball's grandfather was teaching her brother how to use the gun he'd just purchased for him, after meticulously setting up a tin can target in the backyard.

Sadly, when a friend of her brother's was aiming at the target, Ball's eight-year-old neighbor accidentally wound up in the path of a bullet. And while he didn't die, the bullet severed his spinal cord, paralyzing him for life. The boy's family later sued Ball's grandfather for everything he was worth. Lucille Ball may have been Hollywood royalty thanks to her brilliant mind and incredible comedic chops, but she certainly wasn't born into it.

In fact, when she first moved out to Los Angeles, California to pursue her artistic dreams, Ball was completely broke. Vaudeville was the only thing I knew so I tried to break in. Unfortunately, by the time Ball arrived in Hollywood, Vaudeville had already come and gone, which forced her to explore other avenues. One of the things Lucille Ball is known for is appearing on television while visibly pregnant.

And, in fact, she was one of the first women ever to do so. At the time it was taboo to the point that she and Desi Arnaz had to get permission from the network to acknowledge the pregnancy on-screen. They also needed a priest, minister, and rabbi — which sounds like the makings of a bad joke — to sign off on each episode. What's lesser known about Ball is that she was also candid about having a miscarriage , which occurred just after she and Arnaz dreamed up I Love Lucy.

In fact, one of the reasons they took their proto show to Vaudeville was to help her cope with the loss of that child. Ball wasn't shy about discussing her birth experiences either. If you know your baby is going to be a Cesarean baby, it helps you call your shots.

Take the gloves off. The real-life couple had a tumultuous off-screen relationship, which culminated in their divorce in Arnaz passed away in Ball died in Their divorce was horrible.

And then there was the alcoholism. I had preferred those things had never been there. He captured the heart of my mother, my father, their relationship. She crawled into her head.