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For more than fifty years Lucille Ball has been television's most recognizable and beloved face. As Lucy Ricardo she was the ultimate screwball housewife, getting herself into and out of scrapes with unmatched comic finesse. Indeed, she was so funny, and so central to the cultural landscape, that we often overlook Ball's role in shaping that turf: as producer of her own show and a cofounder of a major studio, she was a pioneer, rewriting the rules and forging new paths for women in the boardroom and on the sound stage. In Ball of Fire, Stefan Kanfer goes beyond the icon to examine the difficult life and enduring work of the most influential woman in modern American comedy.
Kanfer traces the arc of her career from its unlikely beginnings in a lonely and desolate childhood in upstate New York. There she discovered that making people laugh could ease the pains of a fragmented family life. But she was more than amusing. She was also beautiful, and when Lucy's adolescent attempts to crack Broadway ended in failure, she became a runway model and on a fluke, journeyed out to California to be an extra in one film. That led to another, and another, and another bottom-of-the-bill movie, until she became, in her own words, "The Queen of the B's". Ball of Fire tracks Lucy's pursuit of the superstardom that eluded her on the big screen and follows the actress through a series of disappointing affairs and sorrows until she meets a Cuban conga drummer six years her junior, and falls headlong in love with Desi Arnaz. Working with her husband, Lucille Ball becomes a different kind of comic artist in a program called I Love Lucy, the show that is still running in more than eighty countries around the globe.
Taking us through the development of television both as technology and cultural phenomenon, Kanfer chronicles the difficult birth of the sitcom that changed the world. He details the early executive meetings, the rocky first productions, the shaky first weeks and the unpredicted triumph. We see all of Lucy's behind-the-scenes battles for creative control of the show; her surprising confrontation with the House Un-American Activities Committee when it was discovered that she had once registered to vote as a Communist; her groundbreaking on-air pregnancy; and a series of in-depth analyses of the classic scenes and Chaplinesque slapstick that guarantee her a permanent place in the pantheon of American comedy.
Finally, we see the aftermath of her hard-won fame: the turbulent marriage and painful split from Desi, the man she never stopped loving; her second marriage; and her sad last years out of the limelight and away from the applause.
This is the first biography to examine the legendary Lucille Ball in all her many dimensions: her personal struggles and the torments that forged a comic genius; and, at last, her posthumous influence on television comedy, on feminist scholars and cultural critics, and on the public at large. Ball of Fire is the definitive biography Lucy fans have been waiting for.
- Sales Rank: #1691175 in Books
- Published on: 2003-08-19
- Released on: 2003-08-19
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.32" w x 6.57" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 384 pages
Amazon.com Review
Those expecting a vicious Hollywood tell-all from Stefan Kanfer’s Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball will be disappointed. Kanfer, whose past work includes a biography of Groucho Marx and a history of the animation industry, comes to his famous red-headed subject with admiration, and readers will be drawn by his exuberance for early film and television history.
Kanfer opens with a brief recounting of Ball's tragic childhood (her father died of typhoid when she was 3 years old) and her early career as an unintentionally starving model in New York City. The significant portion of the book begins, however, when Ball gets her first offer for a stint of film work in California and finds herself launched on a moderately successful film career. Here Kanfer provides details of the inner workings of United Artists, Columbia, and RKO as Ball does battle with Ginger Rogers, Kathryn Hepburn, and a host of other young actresses struggling for screen time. But, as Kanfer notes, it was in television that Ball made her great mark, starring with her husband Desi Arnaz. I Love Lucy debuted in 1951, and readers will delight in Kanfer’s behind-the-scenes details of the show’s production. The first situation comedy to be filmed before a live audience, Lucy offered countless challenge--technical, professional, and personal—for the volatile couple.
Kanfer argues that Ball is one of the few truly enduring television personalities to emerge from the early years of television. His book, entertaining as it is educational, does much to secure her legacy. --Patrick O’Kelley
From Publishers Weekly
Early in the run of I Love Lucy, Ball gave co-star Vivian Vance a hard time. Vance decided, "If by any chance this thing actually becomes a hit and goes anywhere, I'm gonna learn to love that bitch." She did, and so did the rest of the world. But according to Kanfer's excellent, compulsively readable biography, Ball (1911-1989) was much easier to love from afar (as was Kanfer's previous subject, Groucho Marx). Despite all the laughter the gifted red-headed comedienne produced, her personal life was unhappy. To save their marriage, she and Desi Arnaz produced and starred in I Love Lucy. It revolutionized TV (it was shot on film with three cameras in front of a live audience), but the all-consuming pressure of the show (and other shows produced by their company, Desilu) pushed them apart and made them absentee parents. Although Ball reigned on four consecutive top-rated CBS comedies from 1951 to 1974, Kanfer sees a decline in the quality of her work beginning in the early '60s. Without Arnaz to dominate her and placate others after they divorced, Ball became all-controlling on her shows, and her temper and tactlessness began costing her professional and personal relationships. "She could be very cold," admits daughter Lucie Arnaz, "and although she told me she loved me all the time, I didn't feel loved." Kanfer's sad, well-written and -researched bio benefits from a wealth of previously published accounts (best are Kathleen Brady's Lucille and Geoffrey Mark Fidelman's The Lucy Book), but her story is still a compelling one. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From The New Yorker
Lucille Ball began her career as a wisecracking extra in Hollywood movies, so it's no surprise that the best lines in this biography are hers, from the famous quip that Katharine Hepburn "ignored everyone equally" to the dismissal of a suitor with a tart "I'm not the crooked-finger-and-teacup type." In 1951, when "I Love Lucy" arrived in living rooms across America via the novel technology of television, the red-headed comedienne became a friend to a fifth of the nation, heralding a new, more intimate kind of celebrity. But Kanfer skirts the chance to document the birth of the TV star as American icon, instead touring the familiar terrain of Ball's troubled marriage. Unlike his subject's sharp punch lines, Kanfer's writing is tepid and staid: he gives us the facts of her life but none of the verve.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
Most helpful customer reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
Very disappointing
By J. Baxter
Drawn entirely from secondary sources, there is nothing new to be found in this biography. I wouldn't even recommend it to someone who has read no other biography of Ball, as it is filled with the most elementary mistakes. The author doesn't even describe the "Lucy" episode with William Holden accurately. Just skip this one.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
If you can't even describe the Bill Holden episode...
By A Customer
correctly, you have no business being a Ball biographer. (Lucy had an 'argument' with Holden at the Brown Derby? As Ricky would say "Whaaaa????")
A tepid rehashing of every Lucille Ball book ever written. We know every story by now, and his one original thesis )that she was more successful on television than in the movies) is never really argued or clarified.
Rent it at the library if you must but I would save my dough.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
I Can't Even Believe This Got Published
By chris2519
So.... if I choose a subject matter, and then read several different books about that subject matter, and then summarize all the facts (while managing to get many of them wrong because I have no real understanding of what I'm writing about in the first place) into a new book... I can get published? Because that's exactly what this guy did. No new information of any consequence, and all he did was take information that he read from "Desilu", "Love, Lucy", "Lucille", "Lucy in the Afternoon", "I Loved Lucy", and a few others, and regurgitate it into one book. Yes, he sourced all of his information and gave credit appropriately, but still... isn't this what a book report is? Also, numerous errors throughout where he gets the different shows confused. I'm not suggesting he has to be one of those people who can answer trivia quizzes about every single episode of every show, but still -- there were only 3. It shouldn't be THAT hard to keep track of. He confuses the timelines several times, including having Robert Stack on the set of "I Love Lucy" (it was "The Lucy Show") and Joan Crawford on the set of "Here's Lucy" (it was "The Lucy Show.") The book is kind of like a "Greatest Hits" album -- except he didn't perform any of the songs himself.
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