References to an irritated Lucille Ball being unhappy with a script ultimately led to Carroll and Martin leaving "The Lucy Show" after the 2nd season. What, exactly, happened? Does anyone know? I couldn't find references to another thread about this after going through all pages on this message board.

References to an irritated Lucille Ball being unhappy with a script ultimately led to Carroll and Martin leaving "The Lucy Show" after the 2nd season. What, exactly, happened? Does anyone know? I couldn't find references to another thread about this after going through all pages on this message board.

Lucille Ball felt the way the script for "Lucy Enters a Baking Contest" was written made her character appear unsympathetic and unlikeable. Perhaps the script got tweaked before it was ultimately filmed; it's actually one of my favorite episodes of the 2nd season. I heard Bob and Madelyn discuss this incident many years later (around 1996) and apparently there was a misunderstanding. Whatever Ms. Ball said, they interpreted it to mean they had been fired, so they packed up and left. But apparently Ms. Ball thought they just packed up and quit on her, so she was furious that they would do that and didn't call them back. So for years, she apparently assumed they had quit on her while they assumed they had been fired. Six years later when Lucille Ball urgently needed a script written because Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had suddenly become available to appear in an episode (and there was a short scheduling window), and all her other writers were busy working on other scripts, she called them to ask them to write the script. Although they hadn't spoken in six years, they said she spoke to them that day as if nothing had ever happened between them. So suddenly all was forgotten and they got on with a new working relationship that would continue, as needed, for another 16 years (the remaining four seasons of Here's Lucy, one of Lucille Ball's specials, and her final series).

Thank you! That was very interesting.

Thank you! That was very interesting.

You're welcome. I just stumbled across this, which I guess is the version Lucy gave to the press: that Madelyn got married and moved to Indiana!

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19640503&id=6zAaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=dycEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5765,1958465

Well, it is true that Madelyn got married a few weeks after this interview, and that she and Bob Carroll, Jr. (according to imdb.com) didn't write anything else for another two years after this (when they wrote a pilot for Desi Arnaz for a show starring Carol Channing), but I doubt her marriage had much, if anything, to do with her departure.

For the most part, Desi worked with the producers and the writers, not Lucy. When Desi was out after the end of season 1, it was up to Lucy to deal with everyone. The fact is, Lucy didn't always handle her displeasure or dislike of things well. If she didn't like something, she told you so in no uncertain terms and it could definitely be nasty or hurtful. Bob and Madelyn were use to working with Desi on scripts. They did not like being "verbally abused" by Lucy and basically told their work was "****", and that is what she told them more than once. She did balk the believability of several scripts from the second season, not just the baking contest. After that, they left. They decided, understandably so, it was time to go. This is why Vivian Vance left the next year.