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| | | | |  | While Vivian Vance cut her teeth on Broadway in musicals, she hoped to eventually win dramatic roles. She did just that playing a "blonde menace" in Samson Raphaelson's Skylark (1939). |
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| |  | | A sophisticated Vivian Vance, in a pre-I Love Lucy studio publicity still. |
DESPITE HER LIST OF professional stage credits, Vivian Vance had enjoyed only limited show-business acclaim. She was a former Broadway showgirl who between 1932 and 1947 appeared mostly, with varying degrees of success, in stylish New York staged musicals and comedies. While she worked with dozens of Broadway and Hollywood luminaries -- the list just begins with Ethel Merman, Gertrude Lawrence, Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, Jimmy Durante, and Alfred Drake -- she never had approached their stardom and fame.
Just prior to being signed to play Ethel Mertz in 1951, Vance made her screen debut, appearing in two films: The Secret Fury (1950) and The Blue Veil (1951). Yet at age forty-two, she was not on the list of hot new screen personalities.
Vance's personal life had not progressed to that point without plenty of melodrama. To the world, her then husband, actor Philip Ober, was her first. However, hidden in her past were two early marriages, which she preferred to overlook. Additionally, just a few years before I Love Lucy, Vance had undergone a major nervous breakdown. She had been playing Olive Lashbrooke in a 1945 Chicago production of the hit Broadway comedy The Voice of the Turtle when her psychological problems first manifested themselves, leading to a full-scale mental collapse.
When she was first considered for the role of Ethel Mertz six years later, she was replaying Olive Lashbrooke at the La Jolla Playhouse near San Diego. While this was not her first stage appearance following her breakdown, Vance had to be coaxed by her actor/director friend Mel Ferrer away from the New Mexico home she shared with Ober and persuaded to take the part.
So beyond their roots, William Frawley and Vivian Vance also were united by a lack of major success in their chosen profession. Had they not been cast as Fred and Ethel Mertz, they would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with thousands of other long-forgotten actors. At best, they would be recalled -- somewhat dimly -- by musical-theater historians and, in the case of Frawley, old-movie buffs who specialize in pointing out the faces of venerable character actors. Once they became TV's Fred and Ethel, they were fated to be recognized throughout the world as two of the medium's most loved second bananas.
© 2000 by Rob Edelman and Audrey Kupferberg. All Rights Reserved |
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