I Love Lucy: the “Lost Pilot” (March 2, 1951)

Posted on August 6, 2011
Filed Under early television

I Love Lucy is high on the list of brilliant entertainments nearly derailed by corporate obtuseness. CBS and prominent sponsors objected to nearly everything about Lucille Ball’s proposed TV show: her demand that the show be shot in California, that it be shot on film in front of a live audience, and most of all to Ball’s insistence that the show co-star her real-life husband, Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz. Part of the resistance was good old-fashioned American racism—the suits were certain that the audience would reject the notion of an “all-American” girl like Lucy being married to a Cuban—and part of it was sober showbiz common sense. Arnaz was a successful nightclub musician and had performed on Broadway, but he had no acting experience to speak of, his English was less than perfect and there’s always a risk that real-life couples will transfer their real-life problems to their performances. The network preferred to stick to the proven formula of My Favorite Wife, Ball’s then-ongoing hit radio show, in which her husband was played by the reliable (and very WASP) Richard Denning.

To overcome the network’s objections, Ball and Arnaz went on the road in 1950 with a vaudeville routine that previewed the humor and style of their proposed show. The tour was a success, and led to the production of a 30-minute I Love Lucy pilot episode in spring 1951. The pilot wasn’t intended for broadcast and wasn’t shot on film; instead CBS kinescoped the show and peddled it to major advertising agencies in an effort to find a sponsor for I Love Lucy’s first season. According to Wikipedia there was little initial interest in the show, which suggests that among the Mad men of the 1950s there were a couple of guys who were the TV equivalent of the Opry producer who told Elvis not to quit his day job. The pilot is brilliant.

Writers Jess Oppenheimer, Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll, Jr. had worked with Ball on My Favorite Wife and also wrote the Ball-Arnaz vaudeville routine that set up the pilot. They knew exactly how to exploit Ball’s incandescent personality and mastery of physical comedy. The episode takes place on only two sets: the Ricardo’s living room and the nightclub where Ricky performs. This is the first iteration of the premise that would drive the show’s spectacular 194-episode run: A TV producer is coming to see Ricky perform. Lucy wants to be part of the act. Hilarity ensues.

Fred and Ethel Mertz don’t appear in the pilot, which allows a couple of extra minutes for Arnaz to perform with his band. The episode includes Arnaz singing “A Cuban Cabbie” and parts of “The Continental” and “Babalu,” the latter his signature theme. (His frenetic conga roll-out at the end of “Babalu” reminds us that he was a electric live performer.) The plot has it that he’s booked Pepito the Spanish Clown to appear with him at the club that night. When Pepito suffers a laugh-out-loud accident, Lucy dons his costume and takes his place at the nightclub, performing a comical routine with a trick cello. Ball and Arnaz had been married for a decade and had polished their routine during the road tour, and their timing is superb. The live audience adds immensely to the performances. There’s wonderful moment during Lucy’s clown turn when she and Arnaz (and the numerous nightclub extras, and Arnaz’s band, and the studio audience) are all teetering on the edge of breaking up. The show is as funny today as it was 60 years ago.

Ball was five months pregnant at the time the pilot was produced, which was concealed by layered costumes, including an absurdly large bathrobe. (In The Box, Jeff Kisseloff’s oral history of television, Pugh recalled that “there wasn’t any discussion about that. You just didn’t have pregnant women on television.”) The baggy clothes accent Ball’s comedy persona, which is already fully developed—the double-take, the naïve cunning, the piercing “WAAHHH…” when she falls into tears. Compared to typical 1951 television, this is comedy dynamite–it’s amazing the show wasn’t snapped up by the first sponsor to see it.

My Favorite Wife ended its radio run a month after the I Love Lucy pilot was produced, and Ball’s TV show, Cuban husband and all, was eventually picked up by tobacco giant Philip Morris. In October 1951, seven months after the pilot was shot, I Love Lucy premiered on CBS, launching Ball into a quarter-century TV career that remains in broadcast rotation to this day. Several of the gags used in the pilot were recycled into subsequent episodes. Lucy stands in for a clown and performs a cello routine in ”The Audition,” episode six of the first season, and in the second season Pepito the Spanish Clown (Pepito Perez, an international star and close friend of Arnaz) returned to the show in “Lucy’s Show-Biz Swan Song.” The pregnancy issue arose again in the show’s 1952-1953 season, when Ball was carrying her second child. Initially, the sponsor suggested that Ball’s pregnancy be concealed from the audience. Kisseloff writes: In a letter to the head of Philip Morris, Alfred Lyons, Desi said he had no such intentions and threatened to break off the sponsorship agreement if Philip Morris stood in his way. Lyons then wrote to his agency, “Don’t fuck with the Cuban.” The incorporation of the pregnancy into the show’s storyline made the cover of TIME and is considered an early milestone of TV realism. The kinescope of the pilot was thought lost until a 16mm copy was discovered in the effects of Pepito Perez. His estate provided the film to CBS, and the network aired it in April 1990, almost exactly 39 years after it was made.

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previous: The Superman serials (1948/1950)

next: Guns: the Great Train Robbery (1903)

 

 

 

 

 

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