These fun facts might surprise you!
1)
The name ‘Fred’ Mertz was given to the character
played by William Frawley as a nod to Lucille Ball’s real life brother, Fred.
2)
‘I Love Lucy’ began as a radio show called ‘My
Favorite Husband’ featuring Lucille Ball and Richard Denning as her
spouse. When the show transitioned to
early television, Ball insisted that her husband, Desi Arnaz, be given the
role. Denning was out and Arnaz was in.
3)
Unsure whether she should take the plunge from
movies to television, Ball had a dream about her good friend comedienne Carole
Lombard who had perished in a plane crash almost a decade earlier. Lombard told
Ball to take a chance and so she did.
4)
When selling the show to Philip Morris, Ball and
Arnaz were told that Desi’s orchestra could only be used when they were an
important part of the plot. Arnaz was
concerned about his ‘boys’ and explained that they had to be paid on a weekly
basis whether they were in front of the camera or not. The sponsors agreed.
5)
As part of their negotiations with CBS, Arnaz
asked if he and Lucy could own 100% of the shows. Much to their surprise, the network agreed.
6)
Arnaz’s Cuban accent always got a laugh—whether
he meant to or not. Someone once hung a
sign on his dressing room door that read:
“English broken here.”
7)
As CBS prepared for the show’s second season, the
network provided Arnaz with a new budget.
Going over the numbers, the business-savvy actor noticed an extra
million dollars. The very next day, he
took the paperwork back to CBS informing them of their error. He was told to stick to his acting and leave
the numbers to them. He immediately
spread out the paperwork and pointed out the problem. The CBS brass suddenly had a newfound respect
for the Cuban bandleader.
8)
Lucy and Desi tried to keep her second pregnancy
under wraps for as long as they could. However, when Louella Parsons found out
about it, she broke the news in her gossip column and at the same time
apologized to the couple for her betrayal.
She then went on to explain that keeping such important news from her
readers would be a disservice to them.
9)
William Frawley was a huge baseball fan and he
had a clause in his contract stipulating that if his favorite team, The New
York Yankees, made it to the World Series, he would be allowed time off to
attend the games. It happened four
times during the show’s six-year run causing Frawley to be written out of the
script more than once.
10) In 1953, Ethel Mertz was given a middle name of 'Louise'; 3 months later, the writers rechristened her Ethel 'Roberta' (Vance's real middle name, by the way); one year later, she was referred to as Ethel 'Mae'. I guess they couldn't make up their mind, but if anyone is checking, Fred's middle name was 'Hobart'--and that never changed.
