The Mertzes - and how they got that way | TV Guide Chicago, 25-31 December 1954

It would be difficult to imagine a more ridiculous set of circumstances than those surrounding the casting of Vivian Vance and Bill Frawley as Ethel and Fred Mertz in I Love Lucy.

It was back in the late summer of 1951, at a time when Lucy was still just another girl's name and Milton Berle was in personal charge of the channels. Today, for some reason, the impression is abroad that I Love Lucy sprang full blown from the brow of Hooper, that Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz ruled the roost right from the start, and that Frawley and Vance were two of Hollywood's most important, most sought-after featured players.

It wasn't like that at all. Vivian Vance was found practically in the middle of the New Mexican desert, still shaking off the tag end of a nervous breakdown. Bill Frawley, an old Hollywood hand who claims absolute seniority in the matter of service in the land of smog, put in his own pitch by telephoning his old friend, Lucille Ball, and asking her if there wasn't maybe a part for him in her new show. There was, and he thus barely escaped from a soap opera dubbed The First 100 Years, for which he had helped make the pilot film.

"Thank you, Lucille Ball," Bill rasps, with all the sentiment of an Irish New York cop tearing up a Jersey driver's ticket on a particularly fine spring day.

Miss Ball, who is no less sentimental but equally reluctant to show it, was thus personally responsible for the male half of the Mertz team.

But if it took a rather large gob of personal sentiment to account for Fred, it took a minor miracle of forethought to account for Ethel. Her husband, actor Phil Ober, had practically hauled her out of their New Mexico home by the hair to get her to to do do the acid and hateful "other woman" role in "Voice of the Turtle" at the La Jolla summer playhouse. The other two in the cast were to be Diana Lynn and Mel Ferrer. Vivian, still not feeling too sharp physically, hemmed and hawed and came within a haw or two of just staying there in New Mexico, staring back at the tarantulas.

"When I think," she shudders to- day, "of how close I came to turning down that La Jolla date, I nearly die."

Anyway, sitting in the La Jolla audience one night were Desi Arnaz, producer-writer Jess Oppenheimer and director Marc Daniels. They were there chiefly to enjoy them- selves, but Desi kept seeing some- thing in this Vance girl that made him think of Ethel Mertz, and Ethel Mertz was a part he was having a tough time casting.

What makes it all so incredible is the fact that Vivian was playing (and looked) the part of a woman. as far removed from Ethel Mertz as a rainbow-hued Martian. But Desi spotted something about her, and the others agreed. Before she quite knew what was happening, Vivian was in Hollywood trying out for a role in an unknown, untried, unheard- of TV show called I Love Lucy.

A veteran of the Broadway stage (she had appeared in, among other things, "Let's Face It" with Danny Kaye and had starred opposite Ed Wynn in "Hooray for What"), Vivian took immediately to the born trouper she recognized in Lucille Ball, whom she had never before met. It is doubt- ful that any two working people in all television get along better or have more mutual respect and admiration. than these two.

Desi makes three. And Bill Frawley fits into the picture like a tenor fits into a quartet. While he likes to describe himself as "the oldest and meanest actor in Hollywood," Frawley can turn on the manners of the most mannerly of Southern plantation owners.

In the presence of young girls, he is a slightly grizzled Lord Chesterfield, courtly to his fingertips. In the presence of men, he is an outspoken critic of whatever he doesn't happen to like. He will say anything to anybody, in language as colorful as it is profane, and a general rule on the Lucy set is that he never be allowed near a newspaperman without a chaperone. If Frawley's off-the- record stories ever got on the record, half of Hollywood would quietly commit suicide.

A rabid New York Yankee fan, Frawley has a clause in his contract stating that, when the Yankees win the American League pennant, he is free to go to the World Series. (In three seasons out of four, this clause has cost Desilu Productions a good deal of schedule-juggling.)

Bill is also a singer of no little note. He claims to have introduced "Melancholy Baby" back in the days when, he says, he was a nightclub singer-with that voice!-and probably knows more about barbershop harmony than anyone in Hollywood except Bing Crosby. He claims, however, to sing better than Crosby, whom he frequently joins in a spot of Saturday night quartetting.

A professional from start to finish, Frawley considers himself an actor first and not much of anything else afterward.

"Been an actor all my life," he says. "Done all right, too. I've been all through that flattery routine they give the younger kids-tell ya how great ya are and then offer half the money you're worth. The way Uncle Chin Piece takes it away from ya these days, ya gotta grab it where ya can get it."