Wait! WHAT? She was an elevator operator? What did she do, push the button?

  I guess so. Back in the old days, you’d go into an elevator and tell the man or lady what floor you wanted to go to. Lucy also got a job as a soda jerk.

  Soda jerk? What’s that?

  Back in the old days, people would go into a pharmacy and order a soda—

  In a pharmacy?

  Yeah. And the person behind the counter would pull on a handle to make the soda come out of a spigot. Then they might add a scoop of ice cream or syrup. They were called soda jerks.

  Man, the old days were weird.

  Anyway, Lucy was fired from that job when she served somebody a banana split but forgot to put in the banana.

  Rookie mistake!

  Eventually she got a job as a model. She modeled coats in a ladies’ coat store. It paid thirty-five dollars a week.

  That’s when she dyed her hair, right?

  Yeah. Lucy had naturally brown hair. But they thought she could sell more coats if she dyed her hair blonde, so she did. Anyway, things were moving along, and then another horrible thing happened.

  Of course.

  In the middle of a modeling session, Lucy suddenly felt terrible pain in her legs. She collapsed.

  What happened?

  Nobody knows exactly. Some books I read say it was rheumatoid arthritis. Others say it was rheumatic fever. Whatever it was, Lucy was taken to a medical clinic for the poor, because she only had eighty-five dollars to her name.

  Oh yeah, and I know what was in the medicine they gave her.

  What?

  Horse urine!

  No! For real?

  Yeah, and the most amazing part is, the stuff worked! Lucy started feeling better, and she went home to Jamestown to recover. But it took two years until she was able to walk again. And after the whole thing was over, one of her legs was shorter than the other. She had to wear a twenty-pound weight in one of her shoes to fix the problem.

  Okay, so after she recovered, she came back to New York City again. She started getting work as a model and was earning a hundred dollars a week.

  And that was a lot of money in those days. It was the early 1930s, and it was the Depression.

  So Lucy took this one job posing for an illustrator. She was wearing a blue chiffon dress, and the artist painted two Russian wolfhounds next to her. Well, it turned out that the company that made Chesterfield cigarettes was starting an ad campaign and they were looking for a flashy picture. They bought the painting of Lucy, and the next thing she knew, her face was on billboards all over New York City!

  So I guess cigarettes weren’t bad for her

  health, huh?

  Very funny. Anyway, one day she was looking at herself on a billboard on Broadway when an agent recognized her. The agent told Lucy about a movie that Columbia Pictures was making in Hollywood. They needed to hire a dozen young women, and one of them had backed out. Three days later, Lucy was on a train to California.

  It’s about time she caught a break!

  CHAPTER 4

  Queen of the Bs

  Is this where the funny stuff starts?

  Not yet. So Lucy was twenty-two. It was 1933 and she’s in Tinseltown.

  Why did they call it Tinseltown? Do they have a lot of Christmas trees in Los Angeles?

  How should I know? It doesn’t matter.

  I thought you knew this stuff. There must be a reason why they called it Tinseltown.

  Do I have to do everything? Look it up! Can we stay on topic? Lucy couldn’t afford to buy a car, and she couldn’t afford to take taxis. So she bought a bicycle for ten dollars.

  I know the movie she auditioned for. Roman Scandals. It was about a delivery boy who gets bonked on the head, and when he wakes up he thinks he’s in ancient Rome.

  Yeah, and the star was this really famous actor named Eddie Cantor. Back in those days, they had lots of pretty girls standing around in the background of the movies, usually wearing bathing suits. Isn’t that horrible?

  Yeah. They could have had them wearing space suits. That would have been cool.

  Never mind. Lucy was auditioning to be a slave girl. So there’s this long row of young women lined up for Eddie Cantor to look over, and Lucy wants to do something to get noticed. Do you know what she did?

  She ripped up little pieces of red crepe paper and stuck them all over her face so it would look like she had measles.

  How did you know that?!

  I did my research! Eddie Cantor cracked up, Lucy got noticed, and she got the part in the movie. In her first scene, she was chased to a rock and accidentally fell twenty feet off a cliff. Another actor caught her just before she would have landed on some hot lights.

  I’m impressed! So anyway, Lucy starts getting small parts like that in movies. Her contract with Columbia Pictures was for seven years, so she called up her mother and convinced her to move to California. In fact, she convinced her to bring Lucy’s brother, grandfather, and cousin too.

  So the whole family could be together.

  And then, ten minutes after she got off the phone, Lucy was fired by Columbia. She was out of a job.

  Wait! WHAT?

  But it was okay. Another studio—RKO—hired her and Lucy got a seven-year contract with them.

  Anything for a Laugh

  Lucy could have been just another pretty girl in the background, but she wanted to be a real movie star. So she worked really hard. She would hang around movie sets in case anybody needed a walk-on.

  And she would volunteer to do anything. If

  they needed somebody to get a pie thrown in her face, she would do it. If they needed somebody to fall into a lake and get attacked by a crocodile, she would do it.

  Wait. She got attacked by a crocodile?

  Well, it was a trained crocodile that had no teeth, but I still think she was brave to say yes.

  Lucy would wear a fright wig, a goatee, or a fake nose. She didn’t mind getting locked in a meat freezer. One time she got shot out of a steamship funnel.

  Most actresses didn’t want to do scenes that were dangerous or would make them look silly. But Lucy loved it. She was getting noticed.

  So then she got rich and famous, right?

  No. She was getting small parts, but a lot of the time she didn’t have any lines to say and she didn’t even get a credit at the end of the movie. But she didn’t give up. She kept trying, and she kept getting better.

  I counted. In 1934, Lucy was in eleven movies. Eleven! That’s almost one movie every month.

  She would become famous on TV later, but most people don’t know that she was in more than seventy movies before she began her TV career. And her parts were getting bigger and better. People started calling her “Queen of the Bs.”

  What’s a B?

  B movies were movies made with very little money, predictable plots, and actors and actresses who weren’t very famous.

  It sounds like B stood for bad movies.

  Not always! Some of them were good. And Lucy appeared in all kinds of movies—comedies, dramas, musicals. She even auditioned to play Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. But she didn’t get the part.

  She was one of the only actresses who appeared in movies with the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers, and Abbott and Costello. But she was still a nobody, earning less than a hundred dollars a week.

  Of course, back in those days it only cost fifty cents to go to the movies.

  True, but Lucy wasn’t making progress. One time she saw a casting sheet that called for an actress who was “a Lucille Ball type.” She went to the audition, but she wasn’t hired. They said she wasn’t right for the part!

  Ouch! That had to hurt.

  But in 1942, everything changed.

  Redhead

  The biggest studio in Hollywood at the time was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. They made The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, and lots of other famous movies. All the biggest movie stars worked for MGM. The company slogan was “More stars than there are in heaven.” In 1942, they signed Lucy. She was thirty-one.

  And finally, she became a big movie star,

  right?

  No.

  No?

  No. Do you know what was the first thing MGM did after they hired Lucy?

  Shave off her eyebrows?

  Yes! They also straightened her teeth and sent her to a coach to teach her how to lower her high, squeaky voice. They also told her to gain ten pounds.

  Gain?

  Yeah. Lots of actors and actresses have to worry about putting on too much weight. But Lucy was skinny. Her problem was keeping her weight up. So while the other actresses would chew on celery stalks, Lucy would wolf down a fried potato sandwich. Her favorite meal was a hamburger smothered in onions.

  She was given a complete makeover when she got to MGM. And the biggest thing they did to her was change the color of her hair.

  We said back in Chapter 3 that she dyed her hair from brown to blonde when she became a model.

  Right. But the hairstylist at MGM decided she should be a redhead.

  How come?

  Lucy had big blue eyes. They really showed up with red hair. And also, movies had started using Technicolor, a system that used three strips of film and red and green filters to make colors look really vivid and vibrant.

  So they sent her to a colorist. On the first attempt, somehow the chemicals in the dye reacted weirdly and Lucy’s hair came out green. But they fixed that, and the finished product was more orange than red. She kept it that way for the next forty years. For the rest of her life, she was the world’s most famous redhead.

  CHAPTER 5

  Lucy and Desi

  We should back up just a little, to 1939. That’s when Lucy first met this guy—

  Uh-oh. I know what this means. Here comes the yucky part.

  It’s not yucky! Lucy fell in love!

  Ugh!

  Oh, grow up, Turner! Lucy was making movies and getting more well-known. She started shooting this movie called Too Many Girls. A handsome young guy from Cuba named Desi Arnaz played one of her bodyguards. They started going out, and a year later they eloped.

  Isn’t that illegal?

  Why would eloping be illegal?

  Because you cantaloupe. Get it? Cantaloupe? Can’t elope?

  That’s totally not funny.

  Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying.

  Anyway, most people don’t know that Lucy and Desi lied about their ages on the marriage certificate. It says they were both twenty-six. But Lucy was really twenty-nine and Desi was twenty-three.

  Why did they lie?

  In those days, people thought it was strange for a woman to marry a man younger than she was.

  The old days were weird. Hey, why do we have to do a whole section in the book about Lucy’s husband? I thought the book was supposed to be about Lucy.

  Desi Arnaz wasn’t just her husband. They were a team. Trust me on this.

  Okay, let’s get it over with.

  His full name was Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III.

  But everybody called him Desi.

  He didn’t grow up poor, like Lucy did. Desi’s father was the mayor of Santiago de Cuba. His uncle was the chief of police. His grandfather was a doctor who traveled with Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders.

  TR! We wrote about him in Teddy Roosevelt Was a Moose?!

  True. The Arnaz family owned three homes. Growing up, Desi even had his own speedboat. But then something horrible happened.

  A speedboat accident?

  No. One morning in the summer of 1933, Desi heard shouts and gunfire in the distance. There was a revolution going on. Anyone involved with the government was targeted.

  So what did they do?

  Desi’s father was in Havana at the time. His mother grabbed their pet Chihuahua and they got out of there. As they ran away, Desi saw his house lit on fire. His family disguised themselves as revolutionaries and went into hiding. A few months later, they escaped to Florida. But they had lost everything they owned.

  Wow. So both Lucy and Desi’s families lost everything at some point.

  Right. Desi was seventeen years old, and he didn’t speak English yet. But he was really ambitious. While he was going to high school in Florida, he earned money by walking dogs, driving a taxi, and cleaning canary cages in a pet store. At one point, he drove a banana truck.

  They have trucks shaped like a banana?

  No, dope! He drove a truck that carried

  bananas.

  Oh, I knew that.

  Desi was also a talented singer and guitar player. In 1936, he got a job playing in a rumba band at a Miami hotel. People liked him, so he decided to start his own band. They weren’t very good, until Desi decided to try the popular Cuban song “La Conga.” The audience forms a line and they dance their way around the room.

  I’ve heard of conga lines.

  It became a dance craze all over America. Desi was just twenty-two. He became an overnight sensation. He had never even seen a Broadway show, but soon he was the star of one, and it ran for seven months. After that, he started to appear in movies.

  And that’s when he met Lucy.

  Right. They fell in love. And one November day in 1940, Lucy was being interviewed for a magazine article about why she liked being single. Desi showed up and said it was going to be a hard article to write. Lucy asked him why, and he said, “Because I have everything arranged to marry you tomorrow morning.” Isn’t that romantic?

  No.

  Well, how about this: When they were about to get married the next day, Desi realized that he forgot to get a wedding ring. So his manager ran to the local Woolworth’s store and bought a brass ring from the costume jewelry counter.

  And I suppose they lived happily ever after?

  Honestly, they didn’t. They loved each other, but Desi was on the road with his band a lot and he was hardly ever home. He also liked to drink, gamble, party, and stay out all night. Lucy and Desi fought a lot. There were nights when Desi would pack his clothes and go to a hotel. It got to be pretty expensive. So you know what he did?

  Yeah. He built himself a little house in their backyard where he would sleep when they were fighting.

  How did you know that?

  I told you. I did my research! And Lucy was fine with it, because at least it was a way to keep Desi at home.

  If only there had been a project the two of them could work on together. Hmmmm.

  Hmmmmm . . .

  My Favorite Husband

  People in the movie business were starting to freak out in the late 1940s. Radio was really popular and television was starting up. Instead of paying money to go out to a movie, a lot of people were staying home to listen to the radio and watch TV.

  Lucy appeared on a lot of radio shows to make extra money, and she loved it. When she made a movie, she couldn’t see the audience react. But performing in front of a live audience on air, she could see

  and hear people responding.

  And laughing.

  In 1948, she was the star of a radio comedy called My Favorite Husband. It ran for 124 episodes, and CBS wanted to turn it into a TV show. Lucy thought it would be the perfect opportunity for her and Desi to work on something together. So she said she would do the TV show, but only if Desi—her real husband—could play her TV husband.

  And the rest is history?

  No, it’s not. CBS didn’t want Desi.

  Why not?

  Desi wasn’t like anyone else on TV at that time. He didn’t speak perfect English. He had a Cuban accent. CBS was afraid that people wouldn’t accept Lucy and Desi as a married couple.

  But they were a married couple!

  What can I say? The good old days were

  messed up.

  So what did Lucy and Desi do?

  They put together an act and took it on the road to prove that people would like them as a couple. Desi played a bandleader who sang and played bongos. Lucy played his nutty wife who wants a job playing cello with the band.

  Oh yeah! I saw that on YouTube. She had a trick cello with flowers and a toilet plunger hidden inside it. She used the strings of the cello to shoot the bow at Desi. It was hilarious.

  At one point in the act, Lucy imitated a seal. She flopped around on her stomach and played a xylophone with her nose.

  They did the act in theaters around the country, and people loved it. So CBS finally agreed to

  put Lucy and Desi together as husband and

  wife in their own TV show. And of course they called it . . .

  CHAPTER 6

  I Love Lucy

  Lucy and Desi combined their names and started their own company—Desilu Productions. They also named their house, their boat, and their station wagon “Desilu.”

  Desi was a good cook, and he even named his special goulash “Desilu.”

  But before they could start working on their TV show, something else was on their minds. On July 17, 1951, Lucy had a baby girl! They had decided in advance to name the baby “Susan” if it was a girl. So when Lucy woke up from aesthesia and was told she had a girl, she asked to see Susan. But while Lucy was asleep, Desi signed the birth certificate with the name “Lucie.”

  Why did he do that?

  I guess he just had to have more than one Lucy in the family!

  Anyway, just six weeks after Lucie Arnaz was born, the rehearsals for I Love Lucy began.

  We should mention that it was like a different world in 1951. Hardly anybody had a TV back then. And nobody had a remote control. It hadn’t been invented yet.

  So how did they change the channel or adjust the volume?

  They had to get up off the couch and turn a dial on the TV.

  What? That’s crazy!

  Yeah, there was a lot less channel-flipping. There were also a lot less channels.

  How many channels did they have?

  Four.

  Are you kidding me? How did they survive?