Lucille Ball

The model who couldn't act

Lucille Ball arrived in New York with little money and a label hung around her neck: failure. At drama school, John Murray Anderson suggested she look for another line of work because she lacked talent. But she insisted, modeling for cigarette ads before trying her luck in Hollywood.

During the 1930s, she worked in dozens of B-movies. The press nicknamed her the Queen of the Screamers, much like others earned the title of luxury extra. No one saw in that dyed redhead the woman who would end up controlling the industry.

And then Desi Arnaz showed up.

They met on the set of Too Many Girls in 1940 and married a few months later. That union was not only romantic. It fueled a business structure that changed the way we watch television today.

The Business of the Three Negatives

When CBS proposed bringing her radio show to television, she set one non-negotiable condition. Her husband had to be her co-star. Network executives feared the public wouldn't accept a Cuban musician as the husband of an average American woman. Ball held her ground and financed a pilot with her own money to prove them wrong.

The premiere of I Love Lucy in 1951 changed the technical game. Instead of broadcasting live from New York with mediocre picture quality, they decided to shoot in Los Angeles using 35-millimeter film. That decision allowed the episodes to be sold for rebroadcast years later.

That was the birth of television reruns.

Desilu Productions was more than a family business for managing contracts. In 1957, the company bought the former RKO studios for six million dollars. That deal made Ball the first woman to head a major production studio in the United States.

Managing the Decline

After her divorce in 1960, she took full control of the company. Under her leadership, projects that other networks had rejected as too expensive or too strange were approved. So she gave the green light to the original versions of Star Trek and Mission: Impossible.

But her business instincts did not always bring personal peace. She sold her stake in Desilu to Gulf+Western in 1967 for 17 million dollars. From then on, she focused on new versions of her character that never matched the impact of the original series.

And the gamble paid off for decades.

In 1986, she attempted a comeback with the comedy Life with Lucy. ABC canceled the show after airing only eight episodes due to harsh reviews and low ratings. It was her last major effort on television before she largely stepped away from the spotlight.

In 2021, the film Being the Ricardos revisited part of her life story, centered on the political crisis of 1952. A year later, the documentary Lucy and Desi examined the audio tapes the couple recorded during their years of success. On April 26, 1989, Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles confirmed her death at five in the morning.