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No matter what you think of most popular teleseries in television’s brief history – “I Love Lucy” and its successor “Here’s Lucy” – you’ve got to like the things which the keystone of that teleseries, Lucille Ball, says in real life.

“I don’t think I’m too versatile but people laugh where they should and don’t think I’m unbelievable,” she says modestly, adding: “I do what I do with all my heart, and strength.” And: “I dyed my hair this crazy red to bid for attention. It has become a trademark and I’ve got to keep it this way.”

Also: “I’m grateful for what motion pictures did for me even though, except for one or two pictures, I’ve never done any I liked.” Finally, this recognition of the basics of her own psychology: “All my life I have lived with a built-in feeling of inadequacy.” And her remedy for such inferiority feelings: “Life takes guts!”

Lucille Desirée Ball was born on August 6, ’11, in Jamestown NY,* a farming and manufacturing town about 60 miles south of Buffalo on the southern shore of Lake Chautauqua. Her father, Henry Dunnell Ball, worked as a telephone lineman, as had his father, who was an outcast from a well-to-do family. Her mother, Desirée Hunt, had parents who were well-known in Jamestown – Fred Hunt because he was a good carpenter and a Socialist, and Florabelle Orcutt Hunt because she was an out-going personality and a midwife.

In ’15 Lucille’s father, who was working as a lineman for the Anaconda Copper Co. in Butte MT while his family remained in Jamestown, contracted typhoid fever and died. Mrs. Ball, who was pregnant with their second child, Frederick, returned to her parents’ home in a suburb of Jamestown called Celoron. Around ’20 she married a salesman named Ed Peterson and within less than a year divorced him, because, it was said, he drank.

Lucille’s mother resumed the name of Ball and earned a living for herself, her two children, and an orphaned niece by working in a Jamestown dress shop. The niece, Cleo Van Marter, is the daughter of Mrs. Ball’s sister, and is often referred to as Lucille Ball’s sister. In ’38 she made a brief appearance with Lucille in HAVING A WONDERFUL TIME. She then married a press-agent named Ken Morgan, who later worked for Miss Ball’s Desilu company. After divorcing him she married Cecil Smith, then the tv critic of the “Los Angeles Times.” Most recently she has been “a producer” for her cousin’s shows.

Mrs. Ball played the piano and sent Lucille to the Chautauqua Institution for lessons. It was there that Lucille Ball, impressed by the monologist Julius Tannen, decided that show business was for her. She began to participate in the drama club at school, obtained a part in a local performance of CHARLEY’S AUNT, did an Apache dance in a local revue sponsored by the Masons. In the summer of ’26 she prevailed on her mother to let her enroll in the drama school in NYC conducted by John Murray Anderson and Robert Milton. Says Miss Ball: “I was a tongue-tied teenager spellbound by the school’s star pupil – Bette Davis.” Her instructor wrote to Mrs. Ball: “Lucy’s wasting her time and mine. She’s too shy and reticent to put her best foot forward.”

The Lucille Ball of those days may have been shy, reticent, tongue-tied and spellbound, but she knew what she wanted. She took any job she could that paid for her keep in NYC while endeavoring to become a chorus-girl. She finally landed a job in ’27 in the third road company of RIO RITA. But after several weeks of rehearsing the stage manager told her: “It’s no use, Montana. You’re not meant for show business. Go home!” She didn’t, and a month or so later managed to get into the chorus of a musical called STEP LIVELY, but was let out two weeks later when the choreographer decided he wanted only girls who could do toe work.

So she stopped calling herself “Montana”; adopted the name of Diane Belmont; and took a job as a Seventh Avenue dress model at $25 a week. She soon moved to the posh establishment of Hattie Carnegie and $35, and at night did free-lance modeling for commercial photographers and such illustrators as McClelland Barclay and John Lagata. Then, while modeling at Hattie Carnegie’s one afternoon, she was stricken with pains “which pierced my insides.” Malnutrition and fatigue had taken their toll, and she returned to Jamestown.

When her strength began to return she found herself spending more-n-more time with a hairdresser who had become a friend: Gert Kratzert. They talked of NYC, to which Miss Ball wanted to return and Miss Kratzert wanted to go. One afternoon they decided to stop talking about it and go, and were on the bus a few hours later.

They took a room in the Hotel Kimberley (72nd and Broadway). Miss Ball got back her old job at Hattie Carnegie’s, and Miss Kratzert found work in the beauty salon of the Amsterdam Hotel. But Miss Kratzert gradually became homesick, and, finally deciding NYC was not what she wanted, returned to Jamestown.

Miss Ball stayed on, and shortly thereafter got a break: Liggett and Myers decided she would be right as the model to be used for its Chesterfield cigarette posters. The resulting “exposure” led to her being chosen as one of 12 “Goldwyn Girls” who were hired to be briefly in, and to promote, the vehicle for Eddie Cantor that Samuel Goidwyn had put together under the title of ROMAN SCANDALS.

Busby Berkeley was the dance director on ROMAN SCANDALS and in ’65 he said this: “Goldwyn asked me to join him in the screening room one afternoon in ’33 to look at the screen-tests of some girls from New York he was thinking of placing under contract. Some of the girls he liked and some he didn’t, and among those he didn’t was Lucille Ball. I liked her and said so and the next day I asked his secretary if he had sent for that girl I liked and she said he had. So that’s how Lucille Ball got her first break in films – because Sam respected my judgment. If I hadn’t been with him that afternoon he would have let his personal likes and dislikes rule her out.”

Girls who want to become actresses would do well to study the index to Lucille Ball’s films which follows this article and note the kind of work Miss Ball did throughout her first three years in movies. She was an extra; she did walk-ons; she did bits. The important thing, however, was her industriousness, and her never losing hope.

She was a chorus-girl in three more Goldwyn pictures, and had bits in five other films in ’33-4. In the fall of ’34 she became a contract-player at Columbia, where she was used, unbilled, in such things as “comedies” starring “The Three Stooges.” Her first billing – far, far down was on her fifteenth film, some sentimental gush called CARNIVAL (’35), in which she played a nurse.

* In the early days of her career Miss Ball said she was born in Butte MT, which is where her father died. For a while she told everyone her nickname was “Montana.’

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