Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

Photograph-Westinghouse Archive

July 26, 1909– Vivian Vance:

“When I die, there will be people who send Ethel Mertz flowers.”

Vances’s most famous character, Ethel Mertz, was a less-than-prosperous landlady of an East 68th Street Manhattan brownstone, owned along with husband Fred Mertz. Fred was played by William Frawley, who was 22-years older than Vance. The two actors shared great on-screen comedic chemistry, but they really did not get along when not filming and they never socialized. Vance complained about his age. Frawley had heard that Vance had stated that he should be playing her father rather than her husband. Apparently Frawley loathed Vance from the moment they began to work together.

All sorts of rumors continue to swirl around the beloved I Love Lucy (1951-57, and in other forms from 1957-1961), among them: Vance and Desi Arnaz were lovers; Lucille Ball and Vance hated each other; Ball was unusually cruel to Vance; Vance and Ball had a passionate affair; Little Ricky was gay, the McGillicuddy family was black, Mary Jane Croft was into bondage, you’ve heard them all.

I Love Lucy, the Ricardos and the Mertz duo were a huge hit. Lucy’s wacky misadventures only gained the heights of hilarity when they featured both Ball and Vance entangled in some scheme gone wrong. Vance’s talents as a comedic sidekick were rewarded. She received four Emmy Award nominations with one win for Best Supporting Actress.

Vance always wanted to be an actor, and in the early 1930s she moved from New Mexico to NYC and soon found work in the theater, landing her first Broadway role in the Jerome Kern musical Music In The Air (1934). She was pretty, could sing and dance, and she gained featured roles in more musicals: Cole Porter’s Red Hot And Blue! (1936), Harold Arlen / Yip Harburg’s Hooray For What!, and Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock (1937). She replaced Ethel Merman on Broadway in Anything Goes when the star took the Cole Porter show to London.

Photograph, Brooks Studio

In 1947, Vance suffered a nervous breakdown. She had gone into the comic lead, a slut, late in the long-run of the Broadway play Voice Of The Turtle by gay playwright John Van Druten, and then went with the first national company to Chicago. In what had to be a nightmare, Vance had the breakdown on stage. She returned to New Mexico where she had started her career. Vance took some time off. Sometimes a girl needs to regather her senses. But, she moved to California and bravely faced her fears head-on by returning to the same role in the same play at the La Jolla Playhouse. This gig would lead to her most famous role. Her friend, director Marc Daniels, had recommended her for the part of Ethel on Ball and Arnaz’s new television show. Arnaz went to see Vance in Voice Of The Turtle and decided on the spot that she had to have the role.

Vance was not sure she wanted to play Ethel Mertz. In the early 1950s, working in television was not prestige and Vance was angling for a film career. She had been cast in The Secret Fury (1950) with Claudette Colbert and Robert Ryan, and The Blue Veil (1951) with Jane Wyman and Charles Laughton. Smartly, she decided to accept the part. A great-looking gal, she even agreed to wear unflattering costumes as the character. Did Ball insist that she look frumpy? I am not certain, but so the story goes.

After I Love Lucy ended in 1957, Vance appeared on a series of specials featuring the original characters from the show. In 1962, when Ball returned to a series, having divorced Arnaz as husband on and off-screen, and as a producing partner, she convinced Vance to be part of the cast. A slimmer, more glamorous Vance again played second banana to Ball. Vance was living in Connecticut and she commuted to Hollywood to film the show. She grew weary of the travel and soon became an occasional guest-star instead of a series regular in 1965 until The Lucy Show ended in 1972.

Always a talented song and dance performer, Vance had developed a fear of using her singing voice during I Love Lucy. The first time she showed-off her pipes was in The Pleasant Peasant episode (Ethel and Lucy perform in an operetta). This episode was an emotional breakthrough for her.

Candid about her various neuroses on talk shows and in interviews, Vance would stop for a therapist session on her way to the studio every morning of the first three of seasons of I Love Lucy. Her battle with depression did not embarrass Vance and she was open about it. When she traveled, she would visit hospitals to talk to people who suffered from severe depression.

I have trouble accepting the simplistic idea that Ball and Vance were always at odds. They simply disagreed as professionals and friends, but they also supported each other. I am sure that it was not easy to always be fresh and upbeat during a long-running series. There was inequity between the star and the second-billed Vance. When Ball was pregnant she took Vance’s dressing room, which was smaller but closer to the soundstage. Ball had dressers helping her with the quick costume changes. Poor Vance was forced to crawl across the set and lighting cables, change all by herself and then get back to the stage.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, Vance was a regular on the summer stock circuit. When I was doing summer theatre on Cape Cod in 1973, she was performing nearby in the hip comedy Butterflies Are Free. A mutual friend made sure I was able to attend final dress rehearsal. Vance had not lost any of her crack comic chops and graciously chatted with our group of young actors, encouraging us to stick with our dreams of being performers.

By summer 1979, Vance, battling that damn cancer, suffered a stroke. The great character actor and I Love Lucy cast member Mary Wickes accompanied Ball on a last visit to see Vance. Wickes claims that on the car ride back, Ball was inconsolable. When Vance took her final curtain call a few days later, Ball said that as she spent days watching reruns of the two working together:

“I find that now I usually spend my time looking at Viv. Viv was sensational. And back then, there were things I had to do. I was in the projection room for some reason, and I just couldn’t concentrate on her. But now I can, and I enjoy every move that Viv made. She was something.”

Vance was just 66-years old when she passed. She had married four times. Her third husband, film bit-player Philip Ober, was abusive and his behavior contributed significantly to her mental health issues. Her last husband John Dodds, a literary agent, was gay. When they tied the knot in 1961, Vance was 52-years-old and might have been simply looking for companionship. Dodds had boyfriends and Vance seemed to not mind. Better a queer than a brute.

National Enquirer

On her own gay rumors, Vance stated:

“Lucille Ball and I were just like sisters. We adored each other’s company. She and I had so many laughs that we could hardly get through filming without cracking up. Then I began hearing that Lucille and I were too close. My first husband disapproved of our closeness. ‘People are talking about you two,’ he’d say. ‘You ought to be careful about the hugging and kissing you do on the show’.”

“The word was that something was wrong with me, something my analyst wouldn’t tell me about. That sent me leaping into my car and driving 30 miles to talk to my analyst, Dr. Steele. ‘Is there anything the matter with me that you’ve never told me?’ I wanted to know. Dr. Steele reassured me there wasn’t.”

It seems that Vance spent her lifetime working on learning who she was. She never forgot where she came from. And she never forget the people who helped her along the way.

Shaw surfing in 1929

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”

George Bernard Shaw

G.B. Shaw is one of my favorite figures in history. He was a man of Theatre and Film, a vegetarian, a Socialist, and a rabble rouser.

My first impression of Shaw as an important person was from my parent’s original Broadway cast album of My Fair Lady (1956), a Lerner and Lowe musical based on Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1913). The cover of the album featured a drawing of Shaw as God the puppeteer, pulling the strings of Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison as marionettes. My image of God is still Shavian.

Shaw was born in Dublin, but moved to London when he was 20-years-old. His considerable achievements and prosperity happened in England, but he remained essentially Irish, the way I see it. He had tremendous success as a music and literary critic, but he is most famous for writing more than 60 excellent plays. He continued to write right up until his passing when he was 94-years-old. Shaw was fiercely proud of being a Free-Thinking Humanist, dedicated to presenting the cause of Human Rights for all.

Shaw became a vegetarian while he was 25-years-old. As a strict vegetarian, he was a firm anti-vivisectionist and was antagonistic to cruel sports like fox and big game hunting for the remainder of his life. His belief in the immorality of eating animals is frequently a topic in his plays and essays. He was also a Pacifist and a critic of Britain’s participation in Word War I.

1888, National Portrait Gallery, photographer unknown

Shaw:

“A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.”

But, who knew that Shaw was also an early Gay Rights activist? In 1889, Shaw recognized that the harassment, arrests, and punishments given to homosexuals was a violation of basic Human Rights. He wrote to the editor of a London newspaper:

“I am sorry to have to ask you to allow me to mention what everybody declares unmentionable. My justification shall be that we may presently be saddled with the moral responsibility for monstrously severe punishments inflicted not only on persons who have corrupted children, but on others whose conduct, however nasty and ridiculous, has been perfectly within their admitted rights as individuals. To a fully occupied person in normal health, with due opportunities for a healthy social enjoyment, the mere idea of the subject of the threatened prosecutions is so expressively disagreeable as to appear unnatural. But everybody does not find it so.”

“There are among us highly respected citizens who have been expelled from public schools for giving effect to the contrary opinion; and there are hundreds of others who might have been expelled on the same ground had they been found out. Greek philosophers, otherwise of unquestioned virtue, have differed with us on the point. So have soldiers, sailors, convicts, and in fact members of all communities deprived of intercourse with women. A whole series of Balzac’s novels turns upon attachments formed by galley slaves for one another – attachments which are represented as redeeming them from utter savagery.”

“Women, from Sappho onwards, have shown that this appetite is not confined to one sex. Now, I do not believe myself to be the only man in England acquainted with these facts. I strongly protest against any journalist writing, as nine out of ten are at this moment dipping their pens to write, as if he had never heard of such things except as vague and sinister rumors concerning the most corrupt phases in the decadence of Babylon, Greece and Rome. I appeal now to the champions of individual rights to join me in a protest against a law by which two adult men can be sentenced to twenty years penal servitude for a private act, freely consented to & desired by both, which concerns themselves alone. There is absolutely no justification for the law except the old theological one of making the secular arm the instrument of God’s vengeance. It is a survival from that discarded system with its stonings and burnings; and it survives because it is so unpleasant that men are loath to meddle with it even with the object of getting rid of it, lest they should be suspected of acting in their personal interest.”

“We are now free to face with the evil of our relic of Inquisition law, and of the moral cowardice, which prevents our getting rid of it. For my own part, I protest against the principle of the law under which the warrants have been issued; and I hope that no attempt will be made to enforce its outrageous penalties in the case of adult men.”

By the way, G.B. Shaw was born on this day, July 26, in 1856.

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