We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
spotted something about her, and the others agreed. Before she quite knew what was happening, Vivian was in Hollywood trying out for a role in an unknown, untried, unheard- of TV show called 1 Love Lucy. A veteran of the Broadway stage (she had appeared in, among other things, “Let’s Face It” with Danny Kaye and had starred opposite Ed Wynn in “Hooray for What”), Vivian took immediately to the born trouper she recognized in Lucille Ball, whom she had never before met. It is doubt¬ ful that any two working people in all television get along better or have more mutual respect and admiration than these two. Desi makes three. And Bill Fraw- ley fits into the picture like a tenor fits into a quartet. While he likes to describe himself as “the oldest and meanest actor in Hollywood,” Frawley can turn on the manners of the most mannerly of Southern plan¬ tation owners. In the presence of young girls, he is a slightly grizzled Lord Chester- Bill Frawley, Desi, Lucy, Vivian Vance. field, courtly to his finger tips. In the presence of men, he is an outspoken critic of what¬ ever he doesn’t happen to like. He will say anything to anybody, in language as colorful as it is profane, and a general rule on the Lucy set is that he never be allowed near a newspaperman with¬ out a chaperone. If Frawley’s off-the- record stories ever got on the record, half of Hollywood would quietly com¬ mit suicide. A rabid New York Yankee fan, Fraw¬ ley has a clause in his contract stat¬ ing that, when the Yankees win the American League pennant, he is free to go to the World Series. (In three seasons out of four, this clause has cost Desilu Productions a good deal of schedule-juggling.) Bill is also a singer of no little note. He claims to have introduced “Melancholy Baby” back in the days when, he says, he was a nightclub singer—with that voice!—and probably knows more about barbershop har¬ mony than anyone in Hollywood ex¬ cept Bing Crosby. He claims, how¬ ever, to sing better than Crosby, whom he frequently joins in a spot of Sat¬ urday night quartetting. A professional from start to finish, Frawley considers himself an actor first and not much of anything else afterward. “Been an actor all my life,” he says. “Done all right, too. I’ve been all through that flattery routine they give the younger kids—tell ya how- great ya are and then offer half the money you’re worth. The way Uncle Chin Piece takes it away from ya these days, ya gotta grab it where ya can get it.”