October 27, 1947: Hollywood Fights Back

Bacall and Bogart, at the head of the marching actors in D.C.

That could be Bette Davis behind Bacall.

October 27, 1947: Members of The Committee for the First Amendment fly to Washington, D.C., as part of the "Hollywood Fights Back" movement against the House Un-American Activities Committee's hearings investigating Communist influence in the American film industry. They were attempting to defend screenwriters accused of Communist activity, a group known as The Hollywood Ten.

Members of The Committee included directors John Huston, William Wyler and Billy Wilder; songwriter Ira Gershwin (his brother George had died in 1937); singers Frank Sinatra and Lena Horne; and actors Myrna Loy (who founded the group with Huston and Wyler), Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall, Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz, Judy Garland & her director husband Vincente Minnelli, Groucho Marx, Edward G. Robinson, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, Bette Davis, Melvyn Douglas, Katharine Hepburn, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Burt Lancaster, Burgess Meredith, Jane Wyatt, Dorothy Dandridge and Marsha Hunt.

Many of them, including Wilder, Gershwin, Marx, Robinson and Kaye, were Jewish. So were half of the Ten: Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz and Samuel Ornitz. Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo were not Jewish, although Lardner's 1st wife, Sylvia Schulman, was. Regardless of religion, the artists saw this persecution as the sort of thing the Nazis would have done, and this fed their outrage.

Some of them were registered Republicans, but they couldn't accept this garbage. In particular, Lucy (a Republican) and Bogie (a Democrat) testified in such a way that it could only be described as an artful way of telling the HUAC members to go to Hell. (As Bogie's character Sam Spade said in The Maltese Falcon in 1941, "I won't play the sap for you!") That night, the actors bought a 30-minute special on ABC Radio, and did another a week later.

It ended up ineffective. Many of them found it impossible to get work in America, and moved to Europe. In 1960, Kirk Douglas asked Trumbo to write the script for the historical epic he wanted to star in, Spartacus, and that film's success helped break the blacklist.

Ring Lardner Jr., son of the famous sportswriter, was the last surviving member of the Hollywood Ten, living until 2000.

Marsha Hunt was able to make 2 movies in 1948, and 3 in '49, but none in '50 or '51, 2 in '52, none in '53, and just 1 each in '54, '55 and '56, before going into semi-retirement. In 1971, a year after Trumbo's death, she appeared in a film version of his novel Johnny Got His Gun. In 1987, she appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as an Admiral's wife. Her last role was in 2008, in The Empire State Building Murders.

She died on September 7, 2022, as the last surviving blacklisted actor. At the age of 105, she remained unrepentant, because she wasn't a Communist, and still believed that what had already been done, before she stepped in was unfair.

Marsha Hunt in 1947 (left) and 2020

One actor who did name names was Ronald Reagan, who wanted to protect his status as President of the only thing he ever should have been President of: The Screen Actors Guild. Yes, Reagan, the man who wrecked the labor movement in America 35 years later, ran a labor union.

I guess a later director and screenwriter, Christopher Nolan, was right: "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

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October 27, 1947 was a Monday. Baseball season was over. There was no Monday Night Football until 1970. The season of the Basketball Association of America, the league that would become the NBA, didn't start for another 16 days. The NHL season had started, but there were no games scheduled. So there were no scores on this historic day.

October 15, 1951: "I Love Lucy" Premieres

October 15, 1951: The pilot episode of I Love Lucy airs on CBS. The title explains the plot: "The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub." Fred (William Frawley) and Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance) are celebrating their 18th wedding anniversary, and Lucy (Lucille Ball) and Ricky Ricardo (Desi Arnaz) want to do something nice for, and with, them. Lucy and Ethel, as the title suggests, want to go to a nightclub, but Ricky and Fred want to go to a fight card at Madison Square Garden.

They come to an agreement. A stupid agreement. They set each other up with dates. Except all of Lucy's old boyfriends are married or otherwise busy, and Ricky, upon Lucy's claim that it was an American tradition, had long ago burned his "little black book." They end up calling the same woman, an old friend who "has connections to all the women in town." Since Ricky called her first, this friend tells Lucy, and so the couples are set up with... each other. Except Lucy and Ethel are in disguise. And Ricky and Fred don't recognize them at first. But Lucy gives them away, and she and Ethel get dragged to The Garden.

Not yet 3 years old, Tony Thomas must have seen this episode (and others) at some point, and, when he became a TV producer like his father Danny and his sister Marlo, based half the episodes of Three's Company on it (and those others).

I Love Lucy aired for 6 seasons, concluding on May 6, 1957. It was produced by Desilu Productions -- run by the couple themselves, Lucille Désirée Ball and Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III. Never before, and not again for a long time thereafter, did either a woman or a nonwhite person have that much power over the production of a television show. And the only reason the show stopped is because their marriage broke up.

The show became beloved on reruns, including, in the New York market, on then-independent station WNEW-Channel 5. But the show was very predictable. I can sum it up in 30 seconds:

Ricky, in his Cuban accent: "Lu-cy! I'm home!"

Lucy: "Ricky, can I be in the show?"
Ricky: "No, Lu-cy, you can't be in the show. Fred, you're cheap!"
Lucy: "Ethel, you gotta help me get into the show!"

Ricky: "Lu-cy, you got some 'splaining to do!"

Lucy: "Wahhhhhhhh!"

Actually, "Lu-cy, you got some 'splaining to do!" is one of those quotes that everybody presumes was said, but never was. A few times, Ricky told Lucy, "Explain yourself!" And while, on the other great CBS sitcom of the 1950s, The Honeymooners, Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden threatened to send Audrey Meadows' Alice Kramden to the Moon a few times, sometimes with the dramatization, "Bang! Zoom!", he never combined the two.

My guess is, like so many other non-quotes -- James Cagney's "You dirty rat!", Mae West's "Come up and see me sometime," Johnny Weismuller's "Me Tarzan, you Jane," Cary Grant's "Judy, Judy, Judy," Humphrey Bogart's "Play it again, Sam," William Shatner's "Beam me up, Scotty!" -- someone thought they heard it a particular way, and included it that way in a parody, and that's what people ended up remembering.

One time, one of Lucy's scams worked, so Ricky decided to get back at her, and he said, "Now, we're Igual-Pascual. That's Spanish for 'Even-Steven.'" (Actually, the Spanish form of "Steven" is "Esteban.")

Still, along with its CBS contemporary, I Love Lucy is one of the most beloved sitcoms of all time.

William Frawley died in 1966, Vivian Vance in 1979, Desi in 1986, and Lucy was the last to go, in 1989.

I Love Lucy ran until 1957, canceled because the Arnazes' marriage broke up. From 1962 to 1968, Lucy starred in The Lucy Show. And from 1968 to 1974, CBS aired Here's Lucy. Unlike her 2 previous shows, on this one, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr. played Lucy's on-screen children. The reason the later shows also ran 6 seasons was not a coincidence: As she owned her own production company, Lucy wanted to make sure there were enough episodes to make money in syndicated reruns before she quit.

In 1986, ABC gave her a 4th sitcom, Life With Lucy. She insisted on complete control, and got it. But she was 77 years old, and practically deaf. Even worse, she was culturally tone-deaf. She hired her old writers, and they were no more in tune with the times than she was. Nor was her old friend Gale Gordon, who had been her co-star in The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy.

She couldn't rely on Frawley, who died in 1966; Vance, who died in 1979; or Desi Sr., who was ill, and died within weeks of the show's debut. Nor did she ask Desi Jr. or Lucie to take part.

The show bombed. It got so bad that Audrey Meadows, the other great sitcom redhead of the 1950s, was asked to come out of retirement and play Lucy's sister. (She had recently come full circle by playing a tart-tongued mother-in-law on Too Close for Comfort.) That didn't work, either: It was the 8th episode to air, on November 15, 1986, and it was the last, with 5 episodes left in the can, never to see the light of day. After 35 years and 1 month, an era had ended.

The network canceled the show, and they couldn't even tell her. They had to tell her husband, Gary Morton, a comedian she'd married in 1961, and had produced her later shows with her, and let him tell her.

This was not the show-biz equivalent of Jack Nicklaus winning the Masters at age 46, or Gordie Howe being a legitimate NHL All-Star at age 51. This was Joe Louis coming back and getting knocked out of the ring by the up-and-coming Rocky Marciano, or Muhammad Ali getting pounded by Larry Holmes. A little more than 2 years later, on April 26, 1989, she was dead.

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October 15, 1951 was a Monday. The baseball season ended 5 days earlier, with the New York Yankees beating the New York Giants in the World Series. Football season was underway, but there was no Monday Night Football back then. And the NBA season didn't begin until October 31, Halloween.

But the entire NHL -- the misnamed "Original Six" -- was in action that night. The New York Rangers beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 3-2 at the Chicago Stadium. The Montreal Canadiens beat the Boston Bruins, 2-1 at the Boston Garden. And the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Detroit Red Wings played to a 4-4 tie at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit.

January 19, 1953: Little Ricky Beats Ike

January 19, 1953: Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV is born in Los Angeles. The boy who will go on to become known as Desi Arnaz Jr. is the son of comic actors Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. He is one of the few people who has been famous for, literally, his entire life.

Because, at the same time, his parents, the stars and producers of the CBS sitcom I Love Lucy, were having their own baby.

When the show's pilot aired in 1951, Lucy was already showing her pregnancy with her 1st child, Lucie Désirée Arnaz. (Ball's full name was Lucille Désirée Ball.) No reference was made to it in the script. The show was picked up, but CBS executives decided that they had to wait until after Lucie was was born before they could start filming the show.

Mary Kay and Johnny was the first television series to feature a pregnancy, the Stearnses' real-life son Christopher, whose birth and character were written in the show in December 1948. It was also the first to feature a couple sharing a bed.

In contrast, I Love Lucy showed the Ricardos with separate beds. Even as late as its final season in 1966, The Dick Van Dyke Show showed Rob and Laura Petrie in separate beds. By that point, a lot of sitcoms got around the issue by showing widowed mothers and widowed fathers, who dated, but never got married again.

I Love Lucy was CBS' most popular show, so the network couldn't simply wait for Desi Jr. to be born: They had to keep filming. So they allowed the birth of "Little Ricky" to be worked into the storyline. But the censors refused to allow them to use the word "pregnant," so "expecting" was used instead. The episode "Lucy Is Enceinte" first aired on December 8, 1952 -- "enceinte" being French for "pregnant." (This ignores the fact the "pregnant" also comes from French.

The episode in which Lucy Ricardo gives birth, "Lucy Goes to the Hospital," first aired on January 19, 1953, which was the day before the Inauguration of  Dwight D. Eisenhower as President. To increase the publicity of this episode, the original air date was chosen to coincide with Ball's real-life delivery of Desi Jr. by Caesarean section, which occurred 12 hours before the episode, filmed on November 14, 1952, aired.

By modern standards, the episode is problematic. Not only is Ricky not with Lucy for the birth, he's at work, doing a show. That's bad enough. It gets worse: He was doing a jungle number, and Desi Arnaz, a Cuban light-skinned enough to appear on American television in the 1950s and be accepted as "white" (though definitely as an often-mocked "foreigner"), was wearing blackface. He not only had the offensive makeup on when he took the phone call that told him the baby was born, but he still had it on when he went to the hospital and saw his son for the first time, and he fainted.

"Lucy Goes to the Hospital" was watched by more people than any other television program up to that time, with 73.9 percent of all American television sets tuned in, topping the 67.7 percent who saw "Ike" sworn in as the 34th President of the United States the next day. The campaign buttons the year before read, "I LIKE IKE," and Ike might have been the most admired man in America, but America loved Lucy.

It was estimated that 44 million people watched the episode. That record has been surpassed many times, as America's population, and thus its viewing audience, has grown. But the 73.9 share is a record that has never been topped, and never will be. Even such events as the funeral of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the 1st Moon landing in 1969, and the coverage of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 don't count, since they were covered by multiple networks, and no single network had a 73 share.

The 1st issue of TV Guide was published with a date of April 3, 1953. Desi Jr. was on the cover. As you can see, not only was Little Ricky more popular than Ike, but he had more hair. (Then again, so did Adlai Stevenson -- barely -- but that didn't help him in the 1952 election.)

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January 19, 1953 was a Monday. Baseball and football were out of season. And no games were scheduled in the NBA or the NHL. So there were no scores on this historic day.