The Vaudeville of Lucy and Desi

Like our recent post about Lucy and Desi bio-pics, this post arises out of the quality time I spent with this entertaining couple and their various shows during the Covid lockdown (in particular, when I HAD it!) It’s mostly concerned with one particular sliver of the team’s evolution, but a crucial one. It’s the moment when they actually sat down and figured out how to BE a team. And it’s Desi’s birthday today.

When they married in 1940 Lucille Ball was a budding Hollywood starlet and Desi Arnaz a bandleader in nightclubs. They didn’t properly team up for a decade! That’s surprising, right? It now seems like inevitable history. But they each had their own very different things going on. It was when Lucy was asked to bring her radio show My Favorite Husband to television that she devised the idea of re-casting the hubbie character with her real life spouse (probably so she could keep an eye on him! But also because his exotic identity as a Cuban-American, though a risk, would give the show real novelty.)

To demonstrate to the network (CBS) how they would work together onscreen as a team, Lucy and Desi famously cooked up what has traditionally been called a “vaudeville act”, and toured a number of major cities with the show. The performances they gave during this 1950 tour are almost universally referred to as a vaudeville act, but some clarification is absolutely required. Technically, and most importantly it did not take place in vaudeville. The vaudeville circuits had expired nearly two decades earlier. On this occasion, Lucy and Desi toured what are usually called “presentation houses” — large theatres that did double duty as cinemas and concert venues in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. The show, which featured Desi’s orchestra, as well as some sketch material, songs, and other bits, was much more like what we think of as a night club act. That said, the aesthetics of the act were vaudevillian, and there were certainly elaborate tab shows in vaudeville that were not unlike this. We know that Desi’s old vaudeville friend Pepito the Clown advised them on the performance, and that Lucy did some stuff as a tramp clown, with a cello. There was lots of comedy cross-talk, singing, dancing.

We also know that their comedy characters were sorted out during this process, and here, too, there is much vaudeville influence. Jess Oppenheimer, who worked on the series as writer/producer, had previously crafted radio material for Fanny Brice, which seems highly relevant to Lucy’s broad comic shenanigans. As for Desi, his comedy character certainly reflected vaudeville’s ethnic stereotype tradition, although the most recent relevant example at the time (as a Latin character) was Lupe Velez’s Mexican Spitfire.(When he put on a straw boater there was more than a hint of Maurice Chevalier). The male-female relationship calls to mind such acts as Burns and Allen,Block and Sully, and Blossom Seeley and Benny Fields. And, like all sit-coms, the show owed a lot to Amos ‘n’ Andy, which in turn, owed a lot to the now discredited form of minstrelsy.

Lucy had spoken of her love for vaudeville as a girl. Having been to Jamestown, her hometown, where the National Comedy Center now is, and taken the train back to NYC, I got a first hand feel for how much vaudeville there was for her to enjoy at that time and place. Every stop on the Amtrak line coming that way was one I recognized as a vaudeville town. That region had originally been F.F. Proctor territory; later he sold out to Keith and Albee. But vaudeville had folded just as she was attaining majority. On the actual show, the only real vaudevillian per se was old timer William Frawley. And of course, vets like Harpo Marx and Lurene Tuttle would guest star on the show.

At any rate, it’s too fine a point perhaps for some, but one worth making for those who care. In general, the degree to which I Love Lucy and her subsequent shows had to do with vaudeville is overstated by writers and scholars. As we have shown, vaudeville was certainly an influence on the show, but mostly at second hand. That said, there is something telling about their DESIRE to re-connect with vaudeville for this project, wouldn’t you say? Even at mid-century, when vaudeville was widely rejected as intolerably cornball, some artists very sensibly recognized it as the SOURCE.

For more on the history of vaudeville,consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, for more on classic comedy please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube. And stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.