Two funny woman who left us but Vivian Vance passed 34 yrs ago today thats along time ago and time has passed since.. Lucille Ball was awesome to funny and just like Vivian they were the best of friends in real life not just on screen or on the I Love Lucy Show but in real life they were..
Just sharing this site that I stumbled on to thought id share here today
Kimberly
TV Reality Mom
http://news.kjosy.com/?p=5423
Vivian “Ethel Mertz” Vance died 34 years ago today, at the age of 70.
This entry was posted on Saturday, August 17th, 2013 at 10:31 am and is filed under
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Vivian Vance (born
Vivian Roberta Jones, July 26, 1909 – August 17, 1979)
[2] was an American television and theater actress and singer. Vance is best known for her role as
Ethel Mertz,
sidekick to
Lucille Ball on the American television
sitcom I Love Lucy, and as Vivian Bagley on
The Lucy Show.
When
Desi Arnaz and wife
Lucille Ball were casting their new television sitcom
I Love Lucy in 1951,
director Marc Daniels, who had previously worked with Vance in a theater production, suggested her for the role of
landlady Ethel Mertz.
[3] Lucille Ball had wanted either
Bea Benaderet or
Barbara Pepper, both close friends, to play the role.
CBS refused Pepper on the grounds that she had a drinking problem,
[citation needed] and Benaderet was already playing Blanche Morton on the
Burns and Allentelevision series.
[4] Arnaz then began searching for another actress. Daniels took Arnaz to the
La Jolla Playhouse, along with
producer Jess Oppenheimer, to see Vance in the
John Van Druten play
The Voice of the Turtle.
While watching her perform, Arnaz was convinced he had found the right
actress to play Ethel Mertz. Ball was less sure. She had envisioned
Ethel to be much older and less attractive. Vance, however, was close to
Ball’s age and was attractive. In addition, Ball, firmly entrenched in
film and radio, had never heard of Vance, who was primarily a theater
actress.
Nonetheless, the 42-year-old Vance was given the role on the new
television program,
which debuted October 15, 1951, on CBS. Throughout the run of the show,
Vance’s character of Ethel Mertz was usually dressed in less stylish
clothing than Ball’s character in order to tone down her attractiveness
and make her look older than she actually was. Although Vance’s and
Ball’s friendship was lukewarm initially, Ball eventually overcame her
resistance to Vance and began respecting her as a friend and an actress,
and the two formed a close friendship.
[citation needed]
Vance’s Ethel Mertz
character was the landlady of a New York City
brownstone, owned by her and husband Fred Mertz on East 68th Street. The role of Fred was played by
William Frawley,
who was 22 years her senior in real life. While Vance and Frawley
shared great acting, comedic, and musical chemistry on-screen,
off-screen they did not get along. According to some reports, things
first went sour when Frawley overheard Vance complaining about his age,
stating that he should be playing her father rather than her husband.
She used to skim through the script before she memorized her lines to
see how many scenes she had with that “stubborn-headed little Irishman.”
[5] Others
recall that Vance and Frawley practically loathed each other on sight,
and that Vance was put off by Frawley’s cantankerous attitude.
[6]
Honored for her work in 1953, Vance became the first actress to win an
Emmy Award for
“Outstanding Supporting Actress”. Vance accepted her award at the Emmy
ceremony in February 1954. She was nominated an additional three times
(for 1954, 1956, and 1957) before the end of the
series.
In 1957, after the highly successful half-hour
I Love Lucy episodes had ended, Vance continued playing Ethel Mertz on a series of hour-long
specials titled
The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show (later retitled
The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour). In 1959, she divorced her third husband,
Philip Ober, who allegedly
physically abused her.
[7] When
I Love Lucy was reformatted into the hour-long
Lucy-Desi shows in 1957, Desi Arnaz proposed to Vance and Frawley the opportunity to star in their own “Fred and Ethel”
spin-off show.
Although Frawley was very interested, Vance declined, mainly because
she did not want to work on a one-on-one basis with Frawley as they
already did not get along. Also, she felt the Mertz characters would be
unsuccessful in a show without the Ricardos. Vance declining the
would-be show intensified the animosity between her and Frawley.
[8] Instead,
Vance was interested in doing a series based on the life of Babs
Hooten, a New York socialite who moves to New Mexico to run a hotel and
ranch. Desi Arnaz financed a pilot starring Vance as Hooten titled
Guestward, Ho! which was shot in 1958 by
Desilu;
however, the show was rejected by CBS and in turn Vance continued in
her Ethel Mertz role. Arnaz would later retool the show with model and
actress
Joanne Dru taking the lead role, selling the series to
ABC, where it was subsequently cancelled after one season.
On January 16, 1961, Vance married
literary agent, editor, and publisher John Dodds (1922-October 9, 1986). The couple established their home in
Stamford, Connecticut,
although they moved to California in 1974; the marriage lasted until
Vance’s death. In 1962, Lucille Ball was planning to return to
television in a new series,
The Lucy Show. The series starred Ball as Lucy Carmichael, a widow with two children living in
Danfield, New York.
Vance reluctantly agreed to be her co-star on the condition that she be
allowed to appear in more glamorous clothes as well as having her
character be named “Vivian”. By this time in her life, Vance had grown
tired of the public addressing her as “Ethel”.
She appeared on
The Lucy Show from 1962–65, as Vivian Bagley, a
divorced mother of one son, sharing a house with Ball’s character. The
character was the first
divorcee ever on a weekly American television series. The strain of commuting from her home in
Connecticut to
Hollywood was
too hard on her. In the third season, Vance didn’t appear in 7 of the
season’s 26 episodes. In 1965, after completing her third year on the
series, Vance decided to leave. At the start of the 1965-66 season, the
format of the sitcom had changed. The “Lucy” character moved out to Los
Angeles. Vivian Bagley remarried and she, her son, and her new husband
remained in Danfield. Before she departed the show, Vance was offered a
new contract with
Desilu Studios,
giving her the opportunity to direct. This never came to fruition as
Vance could not reach an agreement on salary. She made only three more
guest appearances on the remaining seasons of
The Lucy Show.
Following her departure from
The Lucy Show at the end of the third season, Vance signed on to appear in a
Blake Edwards film,
The Great Race.
Vance saw this as an opportunity to restart a movie career which never
really took off. The film was a moderate success, receiving several
Academy Award nominations; however, it did little to help Vance
establish a career as a movie actress. Vance was slated to make her
return to Broadway in the
Woody Allen comedy
Don’t Drink the Water.
However, Vance left the play during its out-of-town tryouts, later
saying she felt the role was not right for her and asked the show’s
producers to be let out of her contract. Vance would end up making her
Broadway return several years later in 1969 in the comedy
My Daughter, Your Son. However, the show was not a success and lasted only five weeks. A national tour proved to be more successful.
[citation needed]
After her departure from
The Lucy Show, Vance appeared occasionally alongside Ball on reunion shows and made several guest appearances on Ball’s third sitcom,
Here’s Lucy (1968–1974). In 1973, Vance was diagnosed with
breast cancer. The following year, she and her husband moved to
Belvedere, California, so she could be near her sister. It was during this period that Vance’s agent got her an endorsement deal with
Maxwell House Coffee.
Over the next several years she could be seen in numerous commercials
for Maxwell House. The 1970s saw Vance making a number of TV guest
appearances, including a well-remembered 1975 episode of
Rhoda, as well as appearing in a number of made for TV movies including
The Front Page (1970),
Getting Away From it All (1972) and
The Great Houdini (
Vance made her final television appearance with Lucille Ball on the CBS special
Lucy Calls the President, which aired November 21, 1977. That same year, Vance suffered a
stroke which left her partially
paralyzed.
She died on August 17, 1979, of
bone cancer (secondary to
breast cancer). After her death,
Desi Arnaz remarked,
“It’s bad enough to lose one of the great artists we had the honor and
the pleasure to work with, but it’s even harder to reconcile the loss of
one of your best friends.”
Prophetically, one of Vance’s lines from
The Great Houdini was,
“I’d rather be cremated. …I’ll keep warm longer.” true to her word,
Vance was cremated, and the ashes scattered at sea. True to her word,
Vance’s body was
cremated, and the ashes scattered at sea. Family members donated Vance’s
Emmy Award to the
Albuquerque Little Theatre after her death. During a 1986 interview, Lucille Ball talked about watching
I Love Lucy reruns and
her reaction to Vance’s performance: “I find that now I usually spend
my time looking at Viv. Viv was sensational. And back then, there were
things I had to do—I was in the projection room for some reason, and I
just couldn’t concentrate on it. But now I can. And I enjoy every move
that Viv made. She was something.”
For her achievements in the field of television, Vance was
posthumously awarded a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1991 at 7030
Hollywood Boulevard.
[9]
Vance is memorialized in the
Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center in
Jamestown, New York. On January 20, 2010, the
San Francisco Chronicle reported
that a local antique dealer had inherited many of Vance’s photos and
scrapbooks and a manuscript of Vance’s unpublished autobiography when
John Dodds died in 1986.
[10] Vance and Frawley were inducted into the
Television Academy Hall of Fame in March 2012.
Vance was the godmother of
Lovin’ Spoonful guitarist
John Sebastian, whose mother had been a close friend. Vance herself had no children.
Who won the week 8 Power of Veto on 
