Looking Back on the Life, Career and Enduring Legacy of Lucille Ball

She even cried funny. As I Love Lucy’s adorably wacky Lucy Ricardo, Lucille Ball would often burst into a full-throated “Waaa!” — and leave audiences weeping with laughter. But this time her tears were real. It was 1960, and her torrid marriage of 20 years to her on- and offscreen leading man, Desi Arnaz, was ending. “She was playing a geisha in a show and wearing the white makeup,” Lucy’s best friend and longtime costar Carole Cook recalled before her death in 2023. “She had been crying so much that her eyes were all red, and she looked like a rabbit. It was a very rough time in her life.”

It wasn’t the only tough patch she hit in her 77 years. From her impoverished childhood through her stormy romance with Desi and her less-than-idyllic second marriage to Gary Morton, Lucy endured her share of heartbreak. Yet she always spread happiness to others, even when she wasn’t feeling it herself. “Just being with her was a party,” her friend Lee Tannen, author of I Loved Lucy: My Friendship With Lucille Ball, says. “I wish she were around today — not a day goes by I don’t think of her.”

Born on Aug. 6, 1911, in Jamestown, N.Y., Lucy was shuffled among relatives after her dad, an electrician, tragically died of typhoid fever when she was 3. “She used to run away from home all the time when she was young,” Wanda Clark, Lucy’s late personal secretary, said. Like her future alter ego, Lucy Ricardo, “she’d go to NYC looking for work, trying to break into show business, but she’d always come back because home was so important to her.”

She broke into acting with small roles in movies like Top Hat and Bottoms Up, but it wasn’t until after she made a movie with Cuban bandleader Desi in 1940 — and fell madly in love and married him the same year — that her star really started to rise. The couple turned their successful vaudeville act into I Love Lucy, a sitcom so popular that two-thirds of all TV viewers tuned in for the 1953 episode in which Little Ricky was born, topping even President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration.

While Lucy and Ricky’s on-screen squabbles were hysterical, Lucy and Desi’s real-life clashes were no laughing matter. “They were fighting all the time when we were growing up,” daughter Lucie Arnaz confides of her upbringing with little brother Desi Jr. “There was a lot of anger, screaming, yelling and alcoholism. We went through some pretty hard stuff.”

Desi had a reputation as a womanizer before he wed Lucy, and alcohol fueled his extramarital affairs. “People wonder why they got divorced, but I wonder how they stopped from killing each other!” Cook said. “They were with each other day and night building an empire, and on top of that she had to deal with his women and booze.”

Even after their 1960 divorce, Lucy and Desi remained close, running Desilu Studios (which produced The Dick Van Dyke Show and Star Trek) and enjoying each other’s company. “They still really liked being around each other, but they couldn’t be together as a couple,” Cook recalled. “He was the great love of her life, and she was for him, too. They loved each other until the days they died.”

Lucy remarried in 1961 to Borscht Belt comic Gary Morton, but “it wasn’t a great love affair like it was with Desi,” says Tannen. “But he provided stability for her, and that was important.” She installed him as head of Desilu, but Gary bristled in Lucy’s shadow. “She just needed somebody in that chair,” said Cook. “He was Mr. Lucille Ball, and that was hard.”

Over the years, she continued to carry a torch for Desi, who remarried in 1963. “When she was married to Gary, the phone would ring, and I’d say, ‘Your husband would like to speak with you,’” said Lucy’s chauffeur of 30 years, the late Frank Gorey. “And she’d say, ‘Which one?’ ”

Lucie and Desi Jr. sometimes took a backseat to their parents’ careers. “Lucy didn’t have much time for the kids, and that really bothered her, but she was relieved she had good people watching them,” said Gorey. Adds Lucie, “They were very loving to us, but it’s hard not to have your parents bathe or raise you. Having a good caretaker is great, but it’s not the same as having your mother or father there.”

Lucy was more giving of her time with fans. “Tourists would knock on her door asking to meet her — she didn’t have a gate or anything,” Cook remembered. “She always made herself very accessible to her fans, which was so endearing.” Clark agreed: “I’d collect her fan letters and photographs, and during her breaks from filming she’d sign them all.”

She was also affectionate with her friends. “When I was living in her guesthouse [after her divorce], she insisted on doing my hair every day,” Cook said. “She told me if she hadn’t been an actress, she would’ve been a hairdresser — although maybe not a good one. Those were some of my favorite times, when she’d do my hair and we’d talk about her childhood and early days.”

Surprisingly, she was not a jokester off-camera. “She was funny on TV, but as a person, my mom was not funny,” says Lucie. “She was very serious and usually very worried about anything and everything.” Tannen adds, “She didn’t have an innate sense of humor — she would do funny things accidentally, like Lucy Ricardo.”

She was, however, incredibly generous. She paid for TVs to be placed in the children’s wing of her hometown hospital. She knew the young patients “could benefit from laughter,” says Journey Gunderson, executive director of Jamestown’s Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum & Center for Comedy.

When Lucy died from a ruptured aorta in 1989 (nearly three years after Desi’s death), she had one regret: she wished she’d gotten a better education. She was looking forward to receiving an honorary degree in Jamestown but passed away only weeks before the ceremony.

“She truly wanted to learn,” recalled Clark. “But if she didn’t do things the way she did, she may never have become who she was.”

And for that, we’ll always love her.