It must have been tough. Anyway, on the show, Lucy played Lucy Ricardo, a housewife who wants to get into show business. Desi played Ricky Ricardo, a bandleader a lot like himself. Their neighbors and landlords were Fred and Ethel Mertz, who were played by the actors William Frawley and Vivian Vance.

  I heard that in real life, Vivian Vance and William Frawley didn’t like each other. He was twenty-two years older, and she said, “How can anyone believe I’m married to that old coot?” But they made a great pair on TV.

  Lucy loved performing in front of a live audience on radio, so I Love Lucy was filmed in a studio with three hundred people. And I bet you don’t know who was in the studio audience for every episode.

  Sure I do. It was Lucy’s mother, DeDe! Sometimes you can even hear her laughing in the background.

  I can’t believe you knew that!

  I know lots of stuff. Did you know that a few minutes before the first episode was shot, the Los Angeles health inspector came in and threatened to shut the studio down?

  Why?

  Because the ladies’ bathroom was too far away from the studio audience.

  So what did they do?

  Lucy saved the day. She said the women in the studio audience could use the bathroom in her dressing room.

  The first episode they filmed was titled “Lucy Thinks Ricky Is Trying to Murder Her.” I Love Lucy went on the air on Monday night, October 15, 1951, at nine o’clock.

  Queen of the John

  Well, it was a big success, right away. Within a month, fourteen million people were watching I Love Lucy. A month after that, it was sixteen million.

  And this is a time when there were only about fifteen million television sets in the whole country!

  Wait. How is it possible that sixteen million people were watching fifteen million TVs?

  Because more than one person was watching each set. Not many people had TVs yet, so friends and families would gather around the TV to watch together. And most of them were watching I Love Lucy. Within six months, it was the number-one show in America. At some point, the weekly audience grew to thirty-one million people—nearly a fifth of the United States population.

  Monday night at nine became “Lucy Time.” Taxis disappeared from the streets of New York City because everybody was watching I Love Lucy. The Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago closed on Monday nights because nobody was shopping at that time. The number of telephone calls dropped during the half hour when I Love Lucy was on. Lucy was also called “Queen of the John.”

  Why?

  Because water use dropped while I Love Lucy was on. People would wait until the show was over to go to the bathroom.

  Classic Episodes

  Lucy’s character on I Love Lucy was sort of like everybody’s next-door neighbor, but funnier. Here are a few of the most famous episodes of the show. We watched them all on YouTube . . .

  Ricky is hosting a TV show, and Lucy tricks him into letting her do a commercial for a health tonic called “Vitameatavegamin.” She doesn’t realize the stuff contains twenty-three percent alcohol, and after a number of practice runs sipping it she’s totally drunk, slurring her words and staggering around the studio.

  Lucy is in Rome, and she meets a director who needs a typical American tourist to play a part in a movie about the wine industry. She has to climb into a giant vat filled with grapes and stomp on them with her bare feet. Afterward, Lucy said, “It was like stepping on eyeballs.” A local woman is stomping around in the vat too, and the two of them end up slipping, sliding, and wrestling in the grape juice.

  Actually, Lucy almost drowned shooting that scene. The actress playing the local woman didn’t speak English, and she held Lucy’s head under the smashed grapes too long. Later, Lucy said, “I had grapes up my nose, up my ears. I thought it was my last moment on earth.”

  Still, it’s hilarious.

  Lucy and Ricky decide to make money by raising chickens in their backyard. But the chickens don’t lay any eggs, and Lucy doesn’t want Ricky to find out. So she buys dozens of eggs at a store and hides them in her shirt when she goes out to the chicken coop. Then Desi shows up and says he wants to practice a tango for his nightclub act. They do the dance and all the eggs crack inside her shirt.

  It was hysterical, of course, and the studio audience kept laughing for sixty-five seconds. It was one of the longest laughs the show ever got. It went on so long, they had to cut it in half when the episode was edited.

  This is probably the most familiar scene in I Love Lucy. Lucy and Ethel get jobs working in a candy factory. They have to wrap pieces of chocolate as they slide along a conveyor belt. The belt moves faster and faster until Lucy

  and Ethel can’t keep up

  and they have to stuff the chocolates in their mouths,

  in their hats,

  and down

  their shirts.

  I dare anybody to watch that one without laughing.

  But there’s one episode of I Love Lucy that was the most famous of all . . .

  CHAPTER 7

  Lucy Goes to the Hospital

  Near the end of the first season of I Love Lucy, the real-life Lucille Ball found out that she was going to have another baby. At first, Lucy and Desi thought that meant the TV show was over. But their producer, Jess Oppenheimer, had another idea: “Why don’t we continue the show and have a baby on TV?”

  That was a revolutionary idea in the 1950s. You didn’t see pregnant women on TV. Actors couldn’t even say the word pregnant on TV. They had to say a woman was expecting or with child.

  What’s wrong with the word pregnant?

  They thought it was inappropriate, for some reason.

  Man, the good old days were really messed up!

  Hey, there are words kids say all the time that would be considered inappropriate if they were in this book. Maybe someday it will all seem silly. Anyway, CBS didn’t like the idea of Lucy being pregnant. But I Love Lucy was the most popular show in the country, and CBS finally agreed to make Lucy’s pregnancy part of the show.

  So Season 2 went along and Lucy’s belly got bigger and bigger until she had the baby in Episode 16—“Lucy Goes to the Hospital.” And it just so happened that the real Lucy gave birth on January 19, 1953, just twelve hours before TV Lucy delivered their son, “Little Ricky.”

  The real baby—Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV—was called Desi Jr. Little Ricky was played by twin child actors.

  Lucy giving birth was probably the biggest thing to happen in the history of television. Ninety percent of the people who owned a TV watched the episode—forty-four million people!

  Yeah, and the next day only twenty-nine million people watched President Eisenhower’s inauguration.

  Companies sold Little Ricky dolls, Lucy nursery tables, games, and jewelry. An I Love Lucy comic strip ran in 132 newspapers. You could even buy an I Love Lucy potty seat.

  Lucy got thirty thousand letters and telegrams congratulating her.

  What’s a telegram?

  It was like a letter that was delivered electronically.

  You mean like a text or an email?

  Sort of, but it was printed on paper.

  So it was a letter.

  Not exactly. The point is, it was Lucymania! Desi Jr. and Lucy were on the cover of the first issue of TV Guide.

  Actually, Lucy appeared on the cover of TV Guide thirty-nine times, more than anybody else.

  Hey, I just noticed something. Lucy and Desi named their two kids Lucie and Desi!

  CHAPTER 8

  The Four-Headed Monster

  I Love Lucy wasn’t just the most popular TV show in the country. Lucy and Desi also made a bunch of decisions that changed the way television was made.

  Oh yeah. Before I Love Lucy, most TV shows were made in New York City and they were shot live. But people on the West Coast are three hours behind New York, so they didn’t see anything live. They watched kinescopes of the show a day or more later.

  Kinescopes? What’s a kinescope?

  It was like pointing a camera at a TV screen and recording it. Kinescopes were cheap to make and the picture was fuzzy. CBS thought they would make I Love Lucy like all the other TV shows at the time.

  But Lucy and Desi were living in California, and they wanted to keep their family there. So Desi came up with another idea: What if they shot I Love Lucy on film, the same way movies were made? The image quality would be much sharper than kinescopes, and they could send the prints to TV stations all over the country to broadcast them. So that’s what they did.

  Here’s another smart decision they made. Back in those days, TV shows were shot using one camera. But on I Love Lucy they used three cameras, all filming at the same time. One camera shot close-ups, one was for medium shots, and one was for longer shots that included the whole set. It was a lot faster than shooting the same scene over and over again to get all the shots that were needed.

  They also saved tons of time by using the “Four-Headed Monster.” It was a machine that was able to hold the film from all three of those cameras so they could be easily edited.

  If there were three cameras, why was it called the Four-Headed Monster?

  The fourth head was just for the sound.

  Oh. Another smart decision they made was to build a big stage with four different locations right next to one another. One location was Lucy and Desi’s living room. The second one was their bedroom. The third one was Desi’s nightclub. And the fourth one could be used for any other location they needed for the episode.

  So the studio audience could sit in one place and watch the actors move across the stage to film all the scenes.

  Exactly!

  But here’s the biggest decision Lucy and Desi made—they took a thousand-dollar pay cut to shoot I Love Lucy on film on the condition that Desilu would own each episode after it aired.

  Why was that such a big deal?

  Because episodes of I Love Lucy would be shown a zillion times! Lucy and Desi

  invented the rerun!

  You mean before that it never occurred to

  anybody that people might want to watch a TV show more than once?

  Yes! And they’ve been running those I Love Lucy episodes for the last seventy years! They’ve been dubbed into more than twenty languages and shown in seventy-seven countries.

  Wow! Those reruns must have made Lucy and Desi a ton of money.

  Duh! And they used that money to make Desilu bigger. They developed other hit TV shows like The Real McCoys, The Untouchables, and The Dick Van Dyke Show. Desilu made hundreds of commercials too. It became the biggest TV studio in the world, with twenty-six sound stages and a thousand employees. Lucy and Desi became TV’s first millionaires.

  All those decisions were revolutionary when they were making I Love Lucy. Now almost all comedies are made that way. A lot of the credit goes to Lucy and Desi.

  More fun facts we found about

  I Love Lucy . . .

  The first scripts for I Love Lucy abbreviated the name of the show to “ILL.” Lucy took a look at the script and said, “I don’t want a show that’s ill.” After that, the scripts just said “LUCY”

  on them.

  The first week I Love Lucy was filmed, Lucy and Vivian Vance cleaned the bathrooms in the studio.

  Desi was a little shorter than Lucy, and he didn’t want the TV audience to know that. So he wore lifts in his shoes. And when Lucy and Desi sat next to each other on the couch, a board was put under his cushion so he would look a little bigger.

  The first episode of I Love Lucy was filmed on Desi’s thirty-fourth birthday—March 2, 1951. But the film somehow disappeared and was missing for nearly forty years. One of Desi’s friends, Pepito Perez, finally found a copy at his house, and it was aired in a special CBS tribute in 1990.

  The first season of I Love Lucy was thirty-five episodes. These days, most TV shows are just ten or fifteen episodes.

  During breaks from filming I Love Lucy, Lucy and Desi also acted in two movies together, The Long, Long Trailer and Forever Darling. In the first one, they played newlyweds driving cross-country in an RV.

  The I Love Lucy Christmas episode was one of the first holiday specials in television history.

  In one episode, Lucy promises Little Ricky she’ll get Superman to come to his birthday party. George Reeves, who played Superman on TV, was a guest on that show. But Lucy didn’t want Desi Jr. to know that Superman wasn’t real. So she insisted that George Reeves’s name didn’t appear in the credits.

  Jay Sandrich was a twenty-one-year-old assistant director on I Love Lucy. He went on to direct lots of other classic comedies, such as Make Room for Daddy, Get Smart, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, The Odd Couple, The Cosby Show, The Golden Girls, and Two and a Half Men.

  CHAPTER 9

  After I Love Lucy

  In the 1950s, TV shows didn’t run for ten or more seasons. I Love Lucy ended in 1957. It never ranked below third place during its six-year run.

  Well, it didn’t completely end. After it was over, Lucy and Desi did thirteen episodes of a show called The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour. Their last show was on March 2, 1960. It was Desi’s forty-third birthday. And do you know what Lucy and Desi did the next day?

  They retired?

  No. They got divorced.

  Wait. WHAT? I thought they were the perfect couple! I thought they were made for each other! I thought they loved each other.

  They did. But like we said earlier, they fought a lot. Lucy wanted a husband who would stay home with her and be a family man. Desi liked to gamble, drink, and chase other women. So they decided to split up.

  Lucy received eight thousand letters begging her to patch things up with Desi, but she had made up her mind.

  Two years later, Lucy bought out Desi’s shares of Desilu Productions. He retired, and the board of directors asked Lucy to be president. So she became the first woman to run a major TV studio. Eventually she sold Desilu to Gulf + Western for seventeen million dollars. It was renamed Paramount Television.

  That’s a lot of coin! Hey, Turner, have you ever heard of Star Trek or Mission Impossible?

  Of course. I love those movies.

  Well, you can thank Lucy.

  What? Why?

  Back in the 1960s, the other bigwigs at Desilu had the chance to make the Star Trek and Mission Impossible TV shows. They turned

  both of them down.

  How come?

  Mainly because they would cost a lot of money to film. But Lucy was the president of the company. She overruled them, and gave the go-ahead to shoot both series. They became huge, and were turned into all those movies.

  But if it wasn’t for Lucy, there would be no Star Trek or Mission Impossible today.

  Lucy didn’t really like being a TV executive. She liked performing comedy in front of a live audience. After she and Desi split up, she did six seasons of another sitcom called The Lucy Show.

  And after that was over, she did six seasons of another sitcom called Here’s Lucy. She even had her kids on that one with her. Lucie was seventeen and Desi Jr. was fifteen.

  And after that was over, she did another sitcom called Life with Lucy. But none of those shows had the magic of the original I Love Lucy.

  Strange Stuff about Lucy

  Let me start this part by saying that all of us act a little strange sometimes. Like, if you look at our lives really closely, we have all done some strange stuff.

  So I guess you’re going to tell us some strange stuff about Lucy.

  Yeah. Like she was good friends with the actress Carole Lombard. After Lombard died in a plane crash in 1942, Lucy became afraid of flying.

  What’s so strange about that? Lots of people don’t like to fly.

  Yeah, but when Lucy was on a plane, she was known to get out of her seat and clean the floors and toilets.

  Okay, that’s a little strange.

  She was also superstitious. When

  somebody entered her house through one

  door, they had to leave through the same

  door. And she believed in astrology, going

  to lectures twice a week. She felt that the

  reason why she and Desi had problems getting along was because she was a Leo and he was

  a Pisces.

  That’s pretty strange. But millions of people believe in astrology.

  How about this one? Desi’s last name was Arnaz, and Lucy was convinced that the letters A and R were good luck. That’s why she chose the last names “RicARdo” and “CARmichael” for the characters she played on TV.

  Hmmmm.

  Okay, this is the strangest one of all. Remember back in the beginning of the book when I told you that Lucy could pick up radio signals through her teeth?

  Yeah. I said you were crazy.

  Well, it was true! One day she went to the dentist and he filled some cavities for her. Afterward, Lucy started hearing strange sounds and music. She didn’t know where they were coming from. Then she realized the sound was coming from her own mouth! Her fillings were picking up mysterious radio waves!

  I suppose it was aliens who wanted to audition for I Love Lucy.

  Very funny. She contacted the FBI, and they traced the sounds to an underground radio station run by a Japanese gardener!

  Okay, I admit it. That’s strange.

  Oops!

  Hey Paige! Let’s play a game.

  I love games!

  Good. Performing physical comedy can be dangerous, and Lucy was pretty accident-prone. I’m going to give you a list of bad things that may or may not have happened to her. You

  have to guess which ones I made up, and

  which ones actually happened to Lucy in

  real life.