When it comes to I Love Lucy, arguably the greatest Classic TV sitcom in television history, it’s usually Lucille Ball and husband Desi Arnaz as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo that first come to mind. But in truth, equally important to the show were their onscreen best friends, Ethel and Fred Mertz, as played by Vivian Vance and William Frawley — and in particular Ethel, who became Lucy’s comrade-in-schemes from episode to episode.
“It took several months of filming for Ms. Ball to realize what she had with Vivian,” suggests Geoffrey Mark, author of The Lucy Book and Ella: A Biography of the Legendary Ella Fitzgerald, “which is why, as the show goes on, the Ethel Mertz character gets more and more prominent, because she realized that as well as she and Desi worked together, actually the better team was Lucy and Ethel.”
And yet as true as that is, an equal truth is the fact that over the years Vivian hasn’t gotten the sort of attention that she actually does deserve. “I think she’s always been a mystery to most of the I Love Lucy fans,” he says of the actress who can currently be seen on Decades TV on both I Love Lucy and The Lucy Show. “Her early background is mysterious, not because you can’t find these things out if you look for them, but people just don’t look for them.”
Well, we are. One of Robert Andrew Jones Sr. and Euphemia May Jones’ six children, she was born Vivian Roberta Jones on July 26, 1909, in Cherryvale, Kansas, a town she supposedly disliked because it was just as oppressive as her family was. In fact, according to Theater Mania, when she decided to become an actress, there was no support on the home front. Notes the site, “As a teenager, she was a cheerleader for Independence High … But it was the legitimate stage that Vivian wanted, though her mother was dead-set against it. ‘You want to be an actress, trying to lead men into sin?’ she snarled. ‘You are going to hell.’”
Scroll to take a look back at Vivian’s tremendous career.
The Little Theatre
The above was not exactly a ringing endorsement. Nonetheless, as a teenager, Vivian moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she fared much better. It was then that she changed her last name to Vance and began performing at the Albuquerque Little Theatre in 1930, where her credits would include This Thing Called Love, The Cradle Song and, in 1932, See Naples and Die. Of the latter, the Albuquerque Journal enthused, “It was Vivian Vance’s night. Her entrance was marked by applause. She was stunning. Her gestures, her inflection of voice, her mannerisms — all Vivian Vance and all the business of a finished actress.”
Even before that, in 1930, she was getting rave reviews while performing in Whose Baby Are You in El Paso, Texas. The El Paso Evening Post buzzed, “Vivian Vance proves a pleasant surprise. In this show, she throws off some of the restraint that has handicapped her acting before and throws herself into the business of making herself beautiful and human. Miss Vance has demonstrated her ability to sing ballads. This week she puts over a ‘blues’ number that is splendid. We like this blond lady and hate to see her leave El Paso.”
Her Potential Recognized
Geoffrey explains, “The local theater people there saw her talent when she began to perform and, as a group, they sent Vivian Vance to New York, which is why, on episodes of I Love Lucy, they always referred to Ethel as coming from Albuquerque — Vivian wasn’t born there, but that’s where her heart was. They just felt she had so much talent and that there was nothing for her in Albuquerque and that she deserved to go where her talent could be recognized.”
How it happened was chronicled in the New York Daily News, which, in 1932, detailed, “Vivian had played in the Little Theatre for a couple of seasons — no salary — and the citizens decided she deserved fame and fortune in New York. So, on August 16, they opened an ancient opera house and staged a boom days revival much in the fashion of the widely publicized Central City, Colorado production of Camille. The show, however, was less ancient. It was The Trial of Mary Dugan, with Vivian as Mary. Box office receipts went to Miss Vance and she came to Broadway. No breaks yet, though.”
Vivian’s View
While speaking to New Jersey’s The Herald-News in 1942, Vivian remembered her journey to New York: “The money taken in at the box office got me to New York where I arrived as Vivian Vance. I soon verified what I had suspected all along: Broadway was no cinch. So I sang into the mikes of a couple of clubs and hoofed in a couple of choruses. My first break — it was almost a broken heart — came in Ed Wynn’s Hooray for What. I was a singing chorus girl and one had to find someone for the part in seven hours. The authors liked the way I spoke lines and I got the job.
“But,” she continued, “every performance a ‘name’ actress sat out front studying my part and I could see myself being shunted aside, which, praise the Lord, I wasn’t. You see, I had already had one disappointment — my part in Red, White and Blue had been whittled down in rehearsals to one word. Yes, I remember it. It was ‘who’ Just try to emote with one word. Then I got into a legitimate role or two, notably in Skylark, where the critics liked me, and Out from Under. But four years is a good par for the Broadway course.”
Nightclub Singer
As Geoffrey explains it, upon arriving in New York Vivian began performing in nightclubs, singing “The Japanese Sandman” song and appeared in the 1933 movie version of the Ethel Merman stage musical Take a Chance. “The big song from that,” he says, “was a slightly naughty number called ‘Edie Was a Lady.’ Ethel Merman didn’t get to do the movie, but the song is about a madam and her ladies who are singing about a deceased brothel prostitute. It’s naughty in the subject matter and it only has one funny line in it, which is almost spoken, not sung. It’s, ‘Now Edie could get plastered and call that guy a scoundrel’ — because they couldn’t say ‘bastard.’ As Vivian got cast in the film as one of the girls, the final line of the song, which makes the whole thing worthwhile, went to her.”
‘Let’s Face It’
“This,” he adds, “led to Vivian eventually becoming a star in her own right on the Broadway stage in musicals. She, Danny Kaye and Eve Arden were the stars of the big hit musical Let’s Face It in 1941. And then she did a play where she played the bitch called The Voice of the Turtle [in 1945]. But while they’re running that play, Vivian had a nervous breakdown.”
Painful Past
That nervous breakdown, Geoffrey notes, was a result of the cumulative effect of being repressed by her father. “He made her afraid of men,” he says. “This came from Vivian, so it is not me being witty, but she only married gay men. She said, ‘I was so afraid of men that I spent my life hiding underneath them.’ She stopped performing because of her breakdown. It was in 1950 that she started to work again, doing regional theater to get her feet wet. She also had small parts in two movies made in Hollywood, The Secret Fury and The Blue Veil.”
‘The Voice of the Turtle’ Leads to ‘I Love Lucy’
She took to the stage in La Jolla, California for a local production of The Voice of the Turtle, which would really ultimately change her life. “You have to understand that people loved Vivian,” emphasizes Geoffrey. “It wasn’t just Ethel Merman, but people like Cole Porter, Eve Arden, Helen Hayes and Marc Daniels, who was the original director of I Love Lucy. Now the pilot of I Love Lucy did not contain Fred and Ethel, so when the concept was sold to Philip Morris cigarettes [the sponsor], those characters weren’t a part of the show.”