In 1953, Lucille Ball gave her I Love Lucy costar Vivian Vance a very special Christmas gift. Titled This Is Your Life — Vivian Vance, the binder contained a collection of personal photos and memories. “She assembled it all herself,” recalled Vivian. “It took her weeks of sending back to my childhood home for the pictures and mementos — little things like dance programs from high school.”
In less than two years, Lucille, star of I Love Lucy, and Vivian, who played landlady Ethel Mertz, went from strangers to close friends. It would become a relationship that survived career ups and downs, divorces, illness and many decades. “You could see the love they had for each other,” Michael Stern, author of I Had a Ball: My Friendship With Lucille Ball, tells Closer. “Lucille really respected her opinion on everything.”
It didn’t start out that way. Desi Arnaz first saw Vivian in a play at the La Jolla Summer Playhouse with I Love Lucy’s producer and director in 1950 just as they were casting Ethel. The three men offered her the job on the spot. “I was hired,” recalled Vivian. “Just like that, you put something so incredible in scope that it transforms your entire existence.”
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Lucille, however, expected the actress who played Ethel to be much older and less attractive. “[Lucille] said, only one person wears false eyelashes on set — me,” relates Stefan Kanfer, author of Ball of Fire. “The director said [to Vivian], ‘You know, She’s pretty hard on you. Do you want me to say something?’ And she said, ‘No, because if this show goes, I’m going to learn to love that bitch.’ And she did learn to love her.”
The feeling became mutual. “It took several months of filming for [Lucille] to realize what she had with Vivian,” says Geoffrey Mark Fidelman, author of The Lucy Book. “That’s why, as the show goes on, the Ethel Mertz character gets more and more prominent, because Lucille realized that, as well as she and Desi worked together, actually the better team was Lucy and Ethel.”
Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance Became Close Friends
Lucille always admitted that she and Lucy Ricardo were very different. “I am not funny,” she famously said. “The writers were funny. My directors were funny. The situations were funny.” But she was a very talented actress, who understood what made a scene work — a quality Lucille quickly realized that Vivian shared. “Vivian could fix up a script,” says Stern. “She could read into it what the audience would believe.”
Lucille’s longtime assistant Wanda Clark agreed. “Lucille considered Vivian to be the best script doctor in town,” she told Closer. “If something wasn’t working, those two ladies would put their heads together and figure it out.” Whether their characters were manning an out-of-control candy conveyor or ripping each other’s dresses to shreds while singing “Friendship,” Lucille and Vivian created some of I Love Lucy’s most enduring gags.
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Once Lucille saw past her initial reservations about Vivian, they became good friends. “Vivian and Lucille got along very well,” says Keith Thibodeaux, the former child actor who played Little Ricky. “They’d be in makeup or getting their hair done like two ladies in a beauty salon chatting away.”
Eventually, Lucille and Vivian opened up about their personal lives, too. Vivian confessed that she had suffered a nervous breakdown in 1945. Therapy had helped her take back her life, but she feared a relapse. “I think work must have helped Vivian a lot,” said Clark. “They shared the joy and importance of working.”
Lucille also helped Vivian find the strength to divorce her third husband, actor Philip Ober, who was jealous of his wife’s success and the costars’ relationship. “I began hearing that Lucille and I were too close,” said Vivian. “‘People are talking about you two,’ he’d say. ‘You ought to be careful about the hugging and kissing you do on the show.’”
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Lucille felt relief when Vivian and Ober finally split up in 1959. “He was a terrible man,” said Lucille. “He used to beat her up. Loved to embarrass her. He was nuts, and he made her nuts! God, it was a mess.”
A shoulder to cry on went both ways. Vivian was one of the few people on the I Love Lucy set who knew that Lucille and Desi were headed for a divorce. “Viv was, in many ways, like a sister to my mother,” says Lucie Arnaz, Lucille and Desi’s daughter. “She could talk to Mom like nobody else, and I don’t think my mother could confide in many people the way she would with Viv.”
Life After ‘I Love Lucy’
In 1962, Lucille returned to television with The Lucy Show, a series she only agreed to do if a role could be created for Vivian. For the first three seasons, Vivian played Viv Bagley, the divorced best friend of Lucille’s widowed Lucy Carmichael. “I’m back playing the character I know best and like best — Lucy,” said Lucille. “But I don’t think I’d be doing this if it hadn’t been for Viv. The studios had the idea, and the offers were fabulous. But the thing that jelled it all was Viv.”
Playing single women was a refreshing change for the pair, who built on the chemistry they had in the original series. “Before, we were always being threatened by our husbands — we were always doing kooky things so that Ricky or Fred wouldn’t find something out,” said Lucille. “Now we’re substituting other kinds of threats — weather, lack of dates, our kids.”
In many ways, life imitated art. Vivian, who had no children of her own, became “Aunt Viv” to Lucille’s real-life children, Lucie and Desi Jr. “She kept telling Lucie Arnaz, ‘Go do theater,’” says Stern. “If you look at Lucie’s stage career, it’s just amazing. She thanks Vivian for encouraging her.”
Meanwhile, Vivian had married John Dodds, a book editor based on the East Coast, in 1961, and began the happiest marriage of her life. Eventually, she wearied of the commute to California. “I feel now that home is in Connecticut and I’m a visitor out there,” said Vivian, who left her weekly role on The Lucy Show after 81 episodes. She continued to appear at reunions and made several guest cameos on Here’s Lucy, Lucille’s third sitcom, which ran from 1968 to 1974.
In 1977, Lucille urged her friend Vivian to join her for the TV special Lucy Calls the President. By then, Vivian had been living with breast cancer for several years, but she made the trip to do one more appearance with her friend — and Lucille was grateful. “Even after 50 years of doing comedy, she still wanted the support of Vivian,” explains Stern, who was there. In return, Lucille took care of her friend, who died two years later at age 66. “She was very protective of Vivian,” says Stern. “You couldn’t shoot her head-on because her mouth dropped a little bit [due to Bell’s palsy]. But it was wonderful to see them together one last time.”
