I Love Ethel - A Vivian Vance Archive Uncovered

[Zoneboy]

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One day, while visiting my friend, Serge, I sat carefully on a small chair, maybe too fragile to support my weight. I asked him if it was an old child's chair. He replied that it had belonged to Tallulah Bankhead. He said the reason the chair and matching chaise were so small was due to Tallulah's diminutive stature. They were custom made by Syrie Maugham, the ex-wife of the late William Somerset Maugham. This really piqued my interest. After all, she was quite a star in her day. I loved her in the Alfred Hitchcock movie, "Lifeboat" ("Cartier dahling"). They were a gift from Tallulah to Vivian Vance Dodds, of "I Love Lucy" fame, and her husband John. It was said that when John and Vivian visited her one day, Tallulah had a few drinks too many and gave the chairs to Vivian when she complimented her on them. I asked Serge how he had come to own it, and so my story begins.

I met Serge through my cousin, Billy, former owner of Billy Blue men's wear in Union Square. For many years Serge had an antique store on Union Street, in San Francisco's Cow Hollow district. He primarily dealt in 18th century French antiques, and sold to many local luminaries. He closed up shop about 3 years ago but still dabbles a bit in the business via his website, Serge Matt Antiques and via the online antiques collective Go Antiques.

One evening Serge attended the San Francisco Opera with his business partner, Lola. Lola aspired to mingle with the local 'glitterati'. She might have been described in the day as "piss elegant," driving her white VW convertible Beetle swathed in expensive fur. She was half Jewish and grew up in Germany during WWII. She managed to elude the Nazis until someone turned her in. Lola's non-Jewish mother had a friend who had joined the Nazi party early on and eventually became a member of the SS. He protected Lola and her sister, and sometimes found them busy work, such as sweeping in a railroad station in Munich. During the evening's intermission they ran into Marcella Gump and her husband Len Curley. Also at their table was John Dodds, the husband of the late Vivian Vance (married from 1961 until her death in 1979) and a successful New York publisher. Introductions were made, champagne was ordered, and a friendship soon developed between Serge and Doddsy, as he was affectionately known to his friends.

They shared a love of the opera, antiques, fine dining, art, and all things cultural. Their friendship lasted until John's death in 1986 and was close enough for John to leave Serge the Vance/Dodds estate.

While going through Vivian and John's estate, Serge discovered an unpublished manuscript. It was Vivian Vance's autobiography. She had sought to have it published shortly before her death. Apparently it sat in a dusty closet for 10 years. Except for excerpts printed by The NATIONAL ENQUIRER, it has never been seen by the public. Serge has been trying to find a publisher for it so perhaps we will all have an opportunity to read it in the future. This particular passage caused quite a stir because of rumors that Vivian and Lucille Ball were lesbian lovers. She wrote about the angst that this caused her.

Here is the excerpt from Vivian's manuscript:

By Vivian Vance

Lucille Ball and I were just like sisters. We adored each other's company. She and I had so many laughs on "I Love Lucy" that we could hardly get through filming without cracking up. Then I began hearing that Lucille and I were too close. My first husband disapproved of my closeness with Lucille. "People are talking about you two," he'd say. "You ought to be careful about the hugging and kissing you do on the show."

The word in Pacific Palisades, where I lived, was that something was wrong with me, something my analyst wouldn't tell me about. That sent me leaping into my car and driving 30 miles to talk to my analyst, Dr. Steele. "Is there anything the matter with me that you've never told me?" I wanted to know. Dr. Steele reassured me there wasn't.

Overall, my years on "I Love Lucy" were great fun. Lucille and I used to watch our own shows and rock with laughter at what we'd done on camera. We thought we were knock-outs in some routines. Before shooting, Lucille and I would do advance planning. We'd plot together: "What if I step on your head when I climb down from the upper berth...Suppose we both get so busy crawling around on the floor that we back into each other under the table?" Sometimes it took no more than talking about it to send us into stitches.

Yet when the role of Ethel Mertz was first offered to me, I actually tried to turn it down! When Lucille and her husband Desi Arnaz began turning their radio show into a TV series in 1951, Bea Benadaret - not I - was the original choice to play Ethel Mertz, Lucy's next-door neighbor. But Bea signed up for "The Burns and Allen Show." So Desi came to my dressing room after a performance of a play I was appearing in, and he offered me the role of Ethel. I told him: "I really don't care to have anything to do with it."

I meant every word. In 1951 television was a silly new medium that didn't amount to anything and attracted little attention. But, Desi kept calling. Finally, against my real desire and best judgment, I got pushed into playing Ethel Mertz for 13 weeks at $450 a week. Then Lucille's agent advised her to fire me from the show! He told Lucille: "Her eyes are bigger than yours. You'll have to let her go".

Lucille ignored his advice. Later she told me about it, and I said: "If I had your looks and talent, I'd fire that agent - not me!" Shooting began in a rented studio filled with cobwebs and dust, and no heat or hot water. The windows were so grimy you couldn't see out of th...and the toilets were unspeakable. We walked in - and Lucille handed me a can of Bon Ami cleanser. "Clean out the john", she said.

It was hard, but I got a scrub brush and went to work. I consoled myself by thinking, "Maybe you're a girl who's due to go down in history. Nobody's tried doing a television show like this before." I was right. "I love Lucy" was a success. At our peak we had 70 million viewers every week. There'd never been an audience that big before - and there hasn't been one since on a regular week-to-week basis. But throughout the "Lucy" years I was in analysis, trying to sort out crossed wires in my life.

I was married to a man, an actor, who liked to dominate and discipline me. I kept trying to please him, but nothing I did was right. There were times when I would literally beat my head against a bedroom wall in frustration. However, my problems went far back before this marriage. I'd grown up feeling I was the greatest sinner on God's earth. My mother had raged at me, whipped me and served hellfire and damnation up to me three times a day.

To Mama, I was a "bad girl". From the time I could first remember she had said, "What did I ever do to have a child like you?" I had a hang-up about showing my legs in public - Mama used to scream at me that showing my legs could drive men to sin. Whenever I heard four-letter words, I vomited.

Once a man exposed himself to me on the New York subway, and I retched until I was sick. I blamed myself, thinking: "He wouldn't have done that unless I looked like a whore." Mama - who'd cracked up more times than I could count - had told me that someday I'd have a nervous breakdown. And in my mid-30's her forecast came true. I cracked up.

I became perpetually fatigued and felt like I couldn't go on living. There was no telling when I'd black out. Before I went anywhere I always wrote my name and address on a piece of paper and put in my handbag, so someone would know who I was if I went totally crazy - which I thought I was going to do. One morning I woke up and the walls of my room seemed to be closing in on me. If they reached me, I knew my mind would crack. With tears streaming down my face, I slid out of bed, crawled to the telephone and called an analyst, Dr. Steele.

Analysis finally helped me. And working with Lucille Ball, seeing all the strength she had, was good and healthy for me. After 18 years of marriage, we filed for divorce and I went on to find happiness with my second husband, John Dodds.



Many of the other items that Serge inherited have been sold but there are many pieces with great stories still in his collection. He has a great photo of Lyndon B. Johnson and the first family sitting in a Model-T, inscribed to John and Vivian. There's also a great photo of Maurice Chevalier autographed for Vivian. I remember an episode when he appeared on the show. He was quite the lady's man of the day. The Vivian Vance/John Dodd inheritance also includes a carved, early American eagle, a pair of bronze mice titled The City Mouse and The Country Mouse, a pair of Venetian mirrors, a water color of their Santa Fe, NM house, an early American pair of Staffordshire dogs, and some miscellaneous artworks.



Also amongst the treasures was a painting by Olga Carlisle. I had never heard of her and did some online research to find that she had a rather extraordinary history before settling in San Francisco as a painter and writer. According to a piece published in the Chronicle in 2004 she is the "granddaughter of one of Russia's most admired writers, and daughter of socialists imprisoned during the Bolshevik Revolution." She also managed to smuggle the first copies of Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle" and "The Gulag Archipelago" out of the Soviet Union. The story has many twists and turns so be sure to read the article to fully appreciate it. Sometime after Vivian's death, Ms. Carlisle asked Serge to return the painting to her. Being fond of the painting, he chose to keep it. If you look at a detail from the painting here, it shows Vivian working in her garden in their house in Connecticut.



There was a painting on wood, of their cat Spartacus, by Barnaby Conrad, who had quite a life, which included, in addition to artist, bullfighting, boxing, and writing.

Also included amongst the items that Serge inherited was a scrapbook that belonged to Vivian. Serge had mentioned the scrapbook to me some months prior. I was anxious to see it. One day, when I was visiting, I asked if he had located it. He hadn't and went into another room to search for it. I sat in the living room, perusing Vivian's manuscript and could hear Serge rifling through stuff in another room. After a while, I went to see how he was doing. I could see that he had rummaged through lots of books and papers with no success. I scanned the room and something caught my eye. I asked Serge what it was. He said, "Only what I've been looking for". We both had a good laugh over that.



I started to turn some of the pages in the scrapbook. It had become friable and yellowed with age, but held several clips of newspaper and magazine articles about various events in Vivian's public and private life. There were clips about life in Connecticut, living in Santa Fe, the local theater in her childhood home of Albuquerque, NM, Hollywood, and the Bay Area. There were several great photos in the scrapbook, including stock photos as well as vernacular or candid shots never seen by the public. In one of the photos, where Vivian has her back to the camera, she's meeting President Eisenhower. You can see William Frawley (Fred Mertz) in that photo, too.



The photos spanned the ages from the time of her infancy to the pinnacle of her career when she appeared on "The I Love Lucy Show," and the "Jack Paar Show." There was something very ordinary about the scrapbook itself, nothing glamorous like you'd imagine a star to have. It looked like she might have started it before she achieved stardom, maybe even pre-dating her showbiz career.

I brought the scrapbook home. Later that evening I sat down on my bed with it, and started to look more closely at the contents. I could imagine Vivian also sitting on her bed with the scrapbook, searching for clippings in current magazines and newspapers. It was a privilege to be able to thumb through the aging pages which represented important events in an American icon's life. Ultimately this is why I love collecting. I get to be close to items that carry history around with them. With a little digging you can always find a story, some elaborate with incredible associations like this one but most are more mundane and open a doorway on the past.

[Marvo301]

Wow! I sure hope Vivian's autobiography gets published. That would be an absolutely fascinating read. Neat pictures in the archive. I'd never seen pictures of Viv when she was young before. she was very pretty as a young lady.

[Schmoopie]

Wow, awesome story! Thanks for sharing! I agree... a Vivian Vance biography would be a wonderful read. I don't know much at all about her, but those pictures are beautiful!

[HuntingtonM15]

I haven't read it since it first came out, but I really enjoyed the book "The Other Side of Ethel Mertz." I should read it again sometime soon.

[Madame X]

Thanks for the great post, Zoneboy. I really enjoyed it. I think I am in the minority but Vivian/Ethel has always been my favorite from the show. Up until now I only knew extra stuff from The Other Side of Ethel Mertz.

Thanks for taking the time to create an interesting post.

[Zoneboy]

Originally Posted by Madame X

Thanks for taking the time to create an interesting post.

You're welcome but of course I can't take credit for creating it. It was simply a cut and paste job.