Laughing with Lucy: My Life with America's Leading Lady of Comedy - Softcover

Pugh Davis, Madelyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1578603056 ISBN 13: 9781578603053

Publisher: Clerisy Press, 2007

Synopsis

Read along as Lucille Ball’s staff writer Madelyn Pugh Davis shares priceless moments behind the scenes of I Love Lucy.

I love Lucy. You love Lucy. We all love Lucy. At any time, day or night, I Love Lucy is on TV somewhere in the world—which means that, 24 hours a day, Lucille Ball is speaking the words that Madelyn Pugh Davis wrote.

One of television’s groundbreaking female writers, Madelyn helped shape the landscape of American comedy. As Lucille Ball’s staff writer for nearly 50 years—spanning I Love Lucy, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, Here’s Lucy, and Life with Lucy—Madelyn was responsible for thousands of hours of classic TV. Many of the story elements used on the shows were, in fact, taken from Madelyn’s own life and immortalized by Ball’s comic genius.

This compelling memoir offers an unprecedented glimpse into the golden age of television comedy, celebrating the power of laughter, creativity, and perseverance in shaping American entertainment. Madelyn and her long-time writing partner, Bob Carroll Jr., share with you their favorite memories from crafting the stories for Lucy, Desi, and cast. In Laughing with Lucy, you’ll learn about

• the scramble to address Ball’s real-life pregnancy on the show without using the “p” word
• behind-the-scenes, painstaking work to create “spontaneous” jokes
• how, whenever an elaborate physical comedy gag was devised, Madelyn had to act it out first to be sure that a woman could perform it
• Madelyn’s and Bob’s fond memories of the partnership between Lucille Ball, the consummate perfectionist, and Desi Arnaz, the charmer

Experience television’s greatest era through the eyes of a pioneering woman writer. In Laughing with Lucy, Madelyn looks back with wit and affection on her many years working with Lucy, Desi, and other entertainment legends—and the adventures that came her way.

About this title

About the Author

Madelyn Pugh Davis and her writing partner, Bob Carroll Jr., have been in the entertainment business for more than 50 years. Together they have written more than 400 television shows—all the I Love Lucy shows as well as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, Here’s Lucy, Life with Lucy, and The Mothers-in-Law—and about 300 radio shows. They have produced more than 200 television shows.

Davis and Carroll were Executive Producers on the Private Benjamin and Alice TV series, and they also wrote for Steve Allen, Debbie Reynolds, Dorothy Loudon, and Dinah Shore.

Davis and Carroll are two-time Emmy nominees for their work on I Love Lucy, and they received a Golden Globe Award as the producers of Alice. In 2001, UCLA Film School honored Davis with a Lifetime Achievement in Television Writing.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

For the sixth season, we decided that little Ricky should be a bit older. The twins who were playing him were very cute, but they weren’t old enough to do lines. This is the great advantage to having sitcom children. They can stay in high school for seven years, or they can get three years older during the summer hiatus. Five-year-old Keith Thibodeaux had just appeared on The Horace Heidt Show, an NBC variety show, and he was a sensational little drummer. He was hired to portray an older Little Ricky and billed as Richard Keith. His drum playing gave us a lot of story lines: practicing the drums and driving the Mertzes crazy; getting stage fright before the school pageant, and Lucy having to perform with his little combo at the last minute; and Keith and Desi playing the bongo and singing “Babalu” together.

Bob Hope was the guest star on our opening show in an episode cleverly named “Lucy and Bob Hope.” Bob and Lucy were old friends and loved working with one another. They swapped TV guest shots and appeared in four movies together. The episode had a baseball theme and in the finale was a number with Lucy, Bob, and Desi, “Nobody Loves the Ump,” by Larry Orenstein and Eliot Daniel (Eliot also wrote the I Love Lucy theme with Harold Adamson, who wrote the lyrics). Jack Baker was the choreographer. Jack designed most of Hope’s dancing numbers, and if you’ll notice, they usually involve the same steps, a charming soft shoe. Lucy was not a trained dancer, but she could fake along with anybody, including Van Johnson, Dan Dailey, Shirley MacLaine, Sammy Davis, George Burns, Eddie Albert, Carol Burnett, and Red Skelton. She did the Charleston with Ginger Rogers and Lucie Arnaz, and taught Richard Crenna how to samba.

Orson Welles was also a guest, doing his magic act and levitating Lucy so she seemed to be lying unsupported in space. At one point, Lucy, not knowing she is to be a magician’s assistant and thinking she is going to do Shakespeare with Welles, starts reciting Juliet’s lines in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Orson Welles answers her, playing Romeo, and I have to tell you the way he did Shakespeare in that incredible, sonorous voice gave you goosebumps even in the middle of a comedy show.

“The Visitor From Italy” was next and was a typical example of how Lucy embraced a physical routine and made it a tour de force. Bob and I were in Hollywood one evening and happened to walk by an Italian restaurant where a man was making pizza in a window. He was throwing the dough up in the air and sort of twirling it around. (I understand they do this to get air in it, but I am certainly not a pizza-making expert. Do not try this at home.) We looked at each other, called Lucy, she joined us, and it wasn’t long before she was in the window wildly throwing pizza dough about, much to the enjoyment of the crowd that soon gathered outside. The pizza routine was an example of how we sometimes worked. We would think of a funny physical routine for Lucy to do and then work backwards, coming up with a story line so this could be the last big scene. Jay Novello was the fine comedy actor who played Mario, the gondolier from Venice, who knocks on their apartment door one day and announces that he has come to visit them like they said. You know, the old “If you’re ever in New York, look us up” kind of invitation. Lucy helps him get a job in a pizza parlor, and then finds out it is against the law for him to work since he is in this country on a visitor’s visa, and she has to fill in so he won’t lose his back pay. On the show, of course, she was a master of ineptitude, even throwing the pizza up in the air and letting it drop over her head, and then making two little holes in it for her eyes.

We took the Ricardos and Mertzes to Florida for a vacation in an episode called “Deep Sea Fishing,” better known to Desi as “Dipsy Fishin’.” While there, the two couples make a bet about who can catch the bigger fish, the men or the women, and there was an important bit of business which involved two large identical dead tunas. The foursome had been rehearsing with rubber tunas, which they had to drag back and forth, hiding them from each other in various hotel bathrooms (don’t ask). Desi, like Lucy, was very particular about props looking authentic and was a deep-sea fisherman himself, and he thought the tunas looked fake. By the time of dress rehearsal the day before we were to film the show, he was still unhappy. He announced to our assistant director Jack Aldworth that we simply had to have real tunas by the next night. Jack turned pale, but asked, “Can I start looking now, boss?” Desi told him to go. Jack spent half the night calling around hunting for identical tunas, found them at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, had them packed in ice and shipped to the studio. The tunas now looked authentic. Smelly, but authentic.

In that show, we did a scene where our foursome and Little Ricky are deep-sea fishing from a boat. The week before, Bob and I had a moment of giddy power. Desi was fishing off Baja, California, and couldn’t be reached. Argyle Nelson, vice president of Desilu Productions, was on vacation, and since Bob and I were at the studio writing and the only ones available, we gave the okay to dig up the nice, smooth floor of the stage and install a huge tank of water so the scene could be filmed in front of the audience. During that scene, Lucy’s line gets hooked onto Ricky and, thinking she has a big fish, she pulls Ricky into the water on the other side of the boat.

One day at rehearsal, Lucy said to the writers, “Poor Desi has to get in all that dirty water.” We knew her well enough that we translated it to mean, “And I sure wish I could get in all that dirty water, too.”

Edition details

• Publisher: Clerisy Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1578603056
• ISBN 13: 9781578603053
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288