Celebrate Valentine's Day with Lucy and Desi!

Celebrate Valentine's Day with Lucy and Desi!  The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center is offering a romantic Valentine evening Saturday, February 13, at the Lucy-Desi Museum and at Roberto's at the Ironstone.

The evening begins at 5 p.m. at the Lucy-Desi Museum, with cocktails, hors d'oeuvres and a tour of the Museum. There'll be romantic music, featuring local musician Steve Swanson, and then a screening of a film starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. There'll even be an opportunity to have your photo taken to commemorate the evening.

Leave the Lucy-Desi Center with special souvenirs of the evening...a lovely long stemmed red rose for the lady, and a wine glass filled with chocolate hearts for the gentleman.

Participants will then proceed to Roberto's at the Ironstone for a Valentine's meal that includes a choice of four entrées, beverage, and dessert selection.

This special Valentine fund-raising treat is limited to 25 couples. Price per couple, $99, including tax and tips.

For reservations, call the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center at 484-0800 ext. 249.

Vivian Vance Scrapbook Found

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle, details how a never-before-seen scrapbook that was owned by Vivian Vance. Known better as Ethel Mertz on the I Love Lucy Show, Vivian Vance’s personally created archive opens up chapters the public has never seen and presents in pictures and printed newspaper clippings of her extraordinary life as an actress, mental health advocate, and housewife, and the love she had for her husband, John Dodds.

Included with the scrapbook was a transcript of an unpublished book written by Vivian Vance-Dodds about her life. One of the chapters is published within the story about the scrapbook.

This excerpt from Vivian's manuscript details some of the pain she went through in her own childhood, to how her closeness with Lucille Ball was interrupted as her being a lesbian. It also tells of her laughter and wonderful friendship she shared with Lucy throughout the years.

Here is the excerpt:

Lucille Ball and I were just like sisters. We adored each other's company. She and I had so many laughs on "I Love Lucy" 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 my closeness with Lucille. "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 in Pacific Palisades, where I lived, 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.

Overall, my years on "I Love Lucy" were great fun. Lucille and I used to watch our own shows and rock with laughter at what we'd done on camera. We thought we were knock-outs in some routines. Before shooting, Lucille and I would do advance planning. We'd plot together: "What if I step on your head when I climb down from the upper berth...Suppose we both get so busy crawling around on the floor that we back into each other under the table?" Sometimes it took no more than talking about it to send us into stitches.

Yet when the role of Ethel Mertz was first offered to me, I actually tried to turn it down! When Lucille and her husband Desi Arnaz began turning their radio show into a TV series in 1951, Bea Benadaret - not I - was the original choice to play Ethel Mertz, Lucy's next-door neighbor. But Bea signed up for "The Burns and Allen Show." So Desi came to my dressing room after a performance of a play I was appearing in, and he offered me the role of Ethel. I told him: "I really don't care to have anything to do with it."

I meant every word. In 1951 television was a silly new medium that didn't amount to anything and attracted little attention. But, Desi kept calling. Finally, against my real desire and best judgment, I got pushed into playing Ethel Mertz for 13 weeks at $450 a week. Then Lucille's agent advised her to fire me from the show! He told Lucille: "Her eyes are bigger than yours. You'll have to let her go".

Lucille ignored his advice. Later she told me about it, and I said: "If I had your looks and talent, I'd fire that agent - not me!" Shooting began in a rented studio filled with cobwebs and dust, and no heat or hot water. The windows were so grimy you couldn't see out of th...and the toilets were unspeakable. We walked in - and Lucille handed me a can of Bon Ami cleanser. "Clean out the john", she said.

It was hard, but I got a scrub brush and went to work. I consoled myself by thinking, "Maybe you're a girl who's due to go down in history. Nobody's tried doing a television show like this before." I was right. "I love Lucy" was a success. At our peak we had 70 million viewers every week. There'd never been an audience that big before - and there hasn't been one since on a regular week-to-week basis. But throughout the "Lucy" years I was in analysis, trying to sort out crossed wires in my life.

I was married to a man, an actor, who liked to dominate and discipline me. I kept trying to please him, but nothing I did was right. There were times when I would literally beat my head against a bedroom wall in frustration. However, my problems went far back before this marriage. I'd grown up feeling I was the greatest sinner on God's earth. My mother had raged at me, whipped me and served hellfire and damnation up to me three times a day.

To Mama, I was a "bad girl". From the time I could first remember she had said, "What did I ever do to have a child like you?" I had a hang-up about showing my legs in public - Mama used to scream at me that showing my legs could drive men to sin. Whenever I heard four-letter words, I vomited.

Once a man exposed himself to me on the New York subway, and I retched until I was sick. I blamed myself, thinking: "He wouldn't have done that unless I looked like a whore." Mama - who'd cracked up more times than I could count - had told me that someday I'd have a nervous breakdown. And in my mid-30's her forecast came true. I cracked up.

I became perpetually fatigued and felt like I couldn't go on living. There was no telling when I'd black out. Before I went anywhere I always wrote my name and address on a piece of paper and put in my handbag, so someone would know who I was if I went totally crazy - which I thought I was going to do. One morning I woke up and the walls of my room seemed to be closing in on me. If they reached me, I knew my mind would crack. With tears streaming down my face, I slid out of bed, crawled to the telephone and called an analyst, Dr. Steele.

Analysis finally helped me. And working with Lucille Ball, seeing all the strength she had, was good and healthy for me. After 18 years of marriage, we filed for divorce and I went ton to find happiness with my second husband, John Dodds.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/collectivemind/detail?entry_id=55214

See a treasure trove in the photo gallery from Vivian's scrapbook here.

I Love Lucy Trivia Book Writer Has Died

Reported by VALERIE J. NELSON - Los Angeles Times

Bart Andrews, a prolific author of TV trivia tomes who wrote "The 'I Love Lucy' Book," an early definitive appreciation of the classic sitcom, has died. He was 64.

Andrews died Dec. 26 at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center following a heart attack, said his sister, Cathy LaGreca. After a series of strokes, he had moved four years ago from West Hollywood to a nursing home in Los Angeles.

"He was the first guy to ever write a history of the 'Lucy' show. It was the first book," said Lucie Arnaz, daughter of the program's stars, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

"It has been extremely helpful to the estate," Arnaz told The Times last week. "Early on . . . that was the book you went to."

Although Andrews was born Feb. 25, 1945, in Brooklyn, N.Y., in a sense his "real birth" took place on Aug. 8, 1950, the day his father brought home the family's first TV set, Burt Prelutsky wrote in The Times in 1977. It was a 12-inch RCA Victor.

"After that, I'd rush home and watch anything," Andrews said in the article. He also recalled the shock he felt as a child when he attended a taping of the "Howdy Doody" show and "couldn't believe" the star was "only just a puppet."

His world was forever altered when his parents tuned in to the Oct. 15, 1951, premiere of "Lucy," he wrote in "The 'I Love Lucy' Quiz Book." His parents "let me stay up past my bedtime to watch."

As an adult, Andrews said he could name the title of any of the 179 "I Love Lucy" episodes when given three words from the script - "unless the line is 'Honey, I'm home.' "

He considered the discovery of the long-missing unaired pilot episode - a copy was found in 1990 - "the biggest find in terms of archival material in the history" of TV.

By then, he had written more than 25 books, most of them TV-related with "Trivia" or "Quiz" in the title. His final book, "Out of the Madness," was an unauthorized biography of Janet Jackson published in 1994.

The four books he wrote about Ball and her seminal comedy turned Andrews into an acknowledged expert on the sitcom that unfailingly made him laugh.

"The 'I Love Lucy' Book," released in 1985, was a revised and expanded version of a 1976 book that he co-wrote, "Lucy & Ricky & Fred & Ethel." Amid the minutiae were nuggets of "refreshing dissonances," according to a 1976 review of the earlier book. They included a quote from William Frawley, who played Fred Mertz, on Vivian Vance, who portrayed his TV wife Ethel: "I don't know where she is now and she doesn't know where I am and that's exactly the way I like it."

The idea for a writing career based mainly on esoterica from the airwaves grew out of a family gathering where younger cousins failed to stump Andrews with TV trivia.

"After I got home, I wrote out 20 questions and mailed them to the boys with the promise to send them answers in a week," Andrews told The Times in 1977. "In the meantime, I ran into a friend in publishing who thought there might be a book in that sort of thing. And I've been at it ever since."

He was born Andrew Stephen Ferreri, the second of two children of businessman Joseph Ferreri and his wife, Camille, and grew up in New York City.

After attending New York University, he moved to Los Angeles to work for pioneering TV producer Sheldon Leonard as Bart Andrews, a pen name he adopted in high school. He became a freelance writer and literary agent before finding his niche in trivia.

At his West Hollywood apartment, he devoted a room to his extensive "I Love Lucy" memorabilia, which included a photograph of the show's cast displayed atop his family's first TV. For years, Andrews drove a 1953 Pontiac with a license plate that read "I LV LCY."

His sister is his only immediate survivor.

Teen Actress in Lucille Ball Movie has Died

Holly O'Brien, a teen actress in the 1968 feature "Yours, Mine and Ours", starring Lucille Ball, who went on to become a children's agent and casting director for commercials, died Dec. 30 at her home overlooking Lake Malibu. She was 55.

At age 13, O'Brien was cast in the comedy "Yours, Mine and Ours" playing Susan, one of Frank's (Henry Fonda's) 10 children and one of the 18 who become a family when Fonda marries Helen (Lucille Ball).

Later, O'Brien worked as a singer and dancer alongside such talents as Mitzi Gaynor, Anthony Newley, Kate Smith and Mac Davis. She also performed as a member of the international recording group St. Tropez.

As a theatrical agent, O'Brien worked at Abrams-Rubaloff & Lawrence, Jack Rose Agency, L.A. Talent, L.A. Models and her own firm, Landmark Talent, before she became a casting director.

O'Brien is survived by her fiance, Rick Squire; her sister, Rosemary O'Brien; and numerous cousins.

Video from "An Evening With Lucille Ball"

Video from the show "An Evening with Lucille Ball" starring Suzanne LaRusch:



Directed by Lucie Arnaz, this touching, funny and uplifting one-woman play is created and performed by Suzanne LaRusch and written by LaRusch and Arnaz. Lucy guides us through the lifetime of personal memories inspiring her timeless sketches on I Love Lucy, her 30-year television career and never-before heard personal recollections about her tempestuous and complicated marriage to Cuban bandleader turned impresario, Desi Arnaz. Crafted in the spirit of the amusing lectures Lucy enjoyed giving throughout her career, the evening recreates the comic genius and the magic behind the “Queen of Comedy.” It’s an evening with the REAL Lucy, as you’ve never seen her before.Join us for special talkbacks with Lucie Arnaz following the performances on Jan. 14, 15 and 16.

Click here for tickets and more information!