Juicy Lucy

Let's talk today about two icons — undisputed titans of television — and the contrasting ways they're being remembered.

About a week ago, had she still been around to blow out all those candles, Lucille Ball would have celebrated her 100th birthday. Lucy: America's redhead, once hailed, derisively, as "Queen of the B-Movies." We love Lucy, and 54 years since her transcendent sitcom ended its primetime run on CBS, we still do.

I'm not particularly happy to admit I was alive to watch many of those first-run episodes on the network, albeit through a child's eyes. Still today, it's said no hour passes any day when a black-and-white I Love Lucy rerun isn't airing somewhere in the world; cable's Hallmark Channel seems to run them on a continuous loop. The daffy New York City housewife and frustrated nightclub performer is constantly being introduced to new, younger audiences who admire her comic genius afresh. But incredibly, that nearly wasn't the case.

In the '50s, most series were broadcast live and quickly forgotten, or, if recorded at all, committed to fragile kinescopes. Ball wouldn't stand for that, or maybe she knew something. Some biographers suggest she was pregnant with "Little Ricky" and didn't want to make the commute to New York from her California home. Whatever the reason, she and Desi Arnaz, her on- and off-screen husband, fought tooth and nail with CBS and sponsor Phillip Morris to put I Love Lucy on film, ultimately agreeing to take pay cuts to cover the added expense.

What good fortune! Can you imagine our national comedic DNA without Fred and Ethel, "Babaloo" or "Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do!" Or deprived of Lucy's classic scenes that can be recalled with a single word? Winemaking? Chocolates? Harpo? Vitameatavegamin? Ball put the "situation" in situation comedy. As a glorious side effect, she and Arnaz virtually invented the rerun and syndication.

That's not all. She had television's first intercultural marriage — again, going to war with network nabobs who didn't believe the country would accept a Cuban bandleader as her TV hubby. Eventually, she and Arnaz went on the road with a live music-and-comedy revue to prove their likability. And again, she must have known something: For four of its six CBS seasons, I Love Lucy was the most-watched show in the United States and ended No. 1 in the ratings. She also gave us TV's first high-profile pregnancy, incorporating her real-life gestation into the show's storyline in its second season, though they weren't allowed to use the word in those days. (They said she was "expecting.") When she finally gave birth to Desi Jr., the news pushed Dwight Eisenhower's presidential inauguration off the front pages of papers nationwide.

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