June Allyson and Lucille Ball (Similar Patterns)

The two women stood apart from the intermission crowd at the New York theater. Lucy was doing most of the talking. June, her hands nervously rolling and unrolling the program, listened carefully. From time to time, she’d nod, as if in agreement. She interrupted only twice, to ask a question. From the looks on both women’s faces, it’s certain they weren’t talking about the play. Later, at a restaurant, June still seemed edgy. Lucy whispered something to her and smiled, as if to reassure her. After a while, June seemed to relax a little. Those who saw the two women together were puzzled because they didn't know June Allyson and Lucille Ball were long time friends. 

When, suddenly, June picked herself up and flew to New York, the last person anyone expected her to look up was Lucy. And yet now it seemed that this was the very reason June had come three thousand miles—to see Lucy. Why? What was going on? In a matter of weeks, the answer was obvious. Right after her meeting with Lucy, June suddenly stopped squashing the rumors that all was not well with her marriage to Dick Powell. And early in January, when a sick and openly weeping June told reporters outright that she and Dick had separated and would seek a divorce, the mystery seemed to be solved. 

June Allyson was faced with the breakup of her marriage. There was only one other woman in the world who had ever been faced with just her unique and difficult position-and that was Lucille Ball. Lucy seemed to be the only person June could turn to for the understanding and advice she needed. Neither woman was willing to comment on what they talked about. But there were no denials either. After their meeting, people were quick to point out that Lucy, having been through the division of Desilu Studios, might well give June some financial advice. After all, June and Dick also shared an entertainment empire, Four Star Productions. At first look, June and Lucy seemed two such different types. June was shy. cuddly, with an appealing little-girl quality. Lucy was open and hearty, the typical redhead. And yet their lives have been oddly alike. June Allyson and Lucille Ball were born, a few years apart, in New York. As children they dreamed of show business careers. Each girl underwent a tragic experience that almost crippled her for life. For June it was an accident. She was on the wrong street at the wrong time; a tree, struck by lightning shortly before, dropped a huge branch on her. Her spine had been injured. Her legs hung useless, immobile. She could scarcely move her arms. And her face, bloodied and torn, was destined to a network of red scars.

For Lucille, it was an illness; she contracted pneumonia. Whether through improper treatment, or simply because of the violence of the attack, it left her paralyzed. For eight months she lay in bed, struggling to move a toe, an ankle, a knee. She had planned to begin her show business career as a chorus girl. Now she was told she might never walk again. Yet neither girl would consider giving up. Shy, delicate-boned, tiny June Allyson, and raucous, wide-mouthed, tall Lucille Ball—they shared an incredible determination. By effort, by sheer will power, they set about restoring themselves to health. For June there were long hours in a swimming pool, to help move her stiff and aching legs. And then there were the movies to help forget. She loved Fred Astaire’s “The Gay Divorcee,” which she watched eighteen times. She knew every step of the dance routines. Stubbornly, before a mirror, she made her agonized legs repeat the steps over and over. Stubbornly, she kept her eyes away from the scars that seamed her face. 

For Lucille, there were exercises that were much the same—and scars that were very different. For three long years she struggled to regain control of her legs. She spent hours listening to the radio, studying the great comedians, their tricks, their timing. The one thing she wanted was to make people laugh. At one point, some relative brought a drama coach to see her, to encourage her gallant fight. At the end of the session the man rose, bit his lip, and told her that she did not have a chance. Sick or well, the man said with pity she simply had no talent. As stubbornly as June Allyson kept her eyes from her face in the mirror, so Lucille Ball kept her thoughts from that man, his condescension and his judgment. Despite him, despite her unwilling legs, she would be a dancer and a famous comedienne. Both women went to the West, to Hollywood, where they would meet each other for the first time during the production of Best Foot Forward. 

Best Foot Forward was a 1943 American musical film adapted from the 1941 Broadway musical comedy of the same title, based on an unpublished play by John Cecil Holm. The film was released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, directed by Edward Buzzell, and starred Lucille Ball, William Gaxton, Virginia Weidler, June Allyson, Gloria DeHaven, and Nancy Walker. Produced by George Abbott, after an out-of-town tryout, the production opened on Broadway on October 1, 1941 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where it ran for 326 performances. It was directed by Abbott, with choreography by Gene Kelly, and starred Rosemary Lane. The show was Nancy Walker's Broadway debut and also launched June Allyson to fame. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times liked the "good humored" show, especially praising the score and choreography, singling out June Allyson and Nancy Walker. 

With no previous professional experience, Maureen Cannon debuted on Broadway portraying Helen Schlessinger in Best Foot Forward (1941). An Associated Press article about Cannon noted that she sang two hit songs in the musical and she was "overshadowed only by Rosemary Lane in the importance of her role". Theater critic Burns Mantle wrote that Cannon "sings 'Shady Lady Bird' to many encores". Following the Broadway production, Cannon performed on the road in Best Foot Forward including a run in Chicago. According to the Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz: They Weren’t Lucy & Ricky memoir, Cannon was friendly with Rosemary Lane and June Allyson, and she witnessed in the summer of 1942 the introduction of June Allyson to Dick Powell by mutual friend Rosemary Lane. This clearly would contradict Joan Blondell's madcap account of the meeting in her memoir Center Door Fancy, where she writes about an unlikely hysterical approach by June to her husband Dick Powell. And her fantastic tale doesn't sound like an innocuous memory lapse by Blondell, just more like a convenient and deliberate distortion of June's real personality and actions. 

While shooting Meet the People (1944), co-starring Dick Powell, Lucille Ball also observed Joan Blondell's erratic conduct and her tendency to spread false rumors about June's reputation. Blondell's official divorce from Powell would happen a year later, in July 1945. In August, 19, 1945, Dick Powell would marry her third and last wife, June Allyson. 

From Los Angeles Times article "Film Actor Dick Powell Marries June Allyson" (20 August, 1945): "Actor/singer Dick Powell and his bride actress June Allyson cut their wedding cake. The small ceremony was held at the house of Mr. Johnny Green and Mrs. Bonnie Green in Cheviot Hills, Los Angeles. It was conducted by Superior Judge Edward Brand and Louis B. Mayer gave the bride away." After getting nervous in her first wedding night with Powell, Allyson felt more on ease the next day, explaining: "The next morning he took me to the Santana, and there we had our second wedding night in broad daylight. What had I been afraid of? This was truly the gold at the end of the rainbow. I didn't want to get off the boat, ever." This would also contradict or at least reflect a change in Powell's bedroom customs that Joan Blondell mentioned in Center Door Fancy, complaining of a prudish Powell wanting to make love only in the darkness. 

Joan Blondell seemed eager to convince herself that Dick Powell was cheating on her with June Allyson, but all the evidence points to the contrary, it was Blondell who first started a clandestine sexual relationship with Mike Todd in early 1943. Blondell also alleges, in the most libelous passage of Center Door Fancy, that Allyson's reputation was in the public domain and she had been a call-girl in NYC, according to Mike Todd. Blondell mustn't have figured that future biographers of Allyson would confirm or debunk these awful allegations. And multiples sources deny these off-base accusations. First, Mike Todd was a shady, sexist, and manipulative fabulist who only could know about Allyson through third-party sources. 

As a youngster, June Allyson lived on 3rd Avenue Elevated, also known as Bronx El, on a clanking street of tenements, bars, and hock shops. To help her family, at 16 she was working as a nightclub singer and dancer. It was typical of the era tongue wagging about a young woman in such an environment. Whilst, Lucille Ball studied dance under Martha Graham Dance Company  before Graham asked her to drop the class. “You’re hopeless as a dancer,” Graham told her. “You’re like a quarterback taking up ballet. Perhaps you could find work as a soda jerk.” Reportedly, at 14, Ball wound up in a relationship with 23-year-old Johnny DaVita, who, some authors speculated, ran illegal booze from Canada. Ball's step-grandparents were a puritanical Swedish couple who banished all mirrors from the house except one over the bathroom sink. When Lucy was caught admiring herself in it, she was severely chastised for being vain. She later said that this period of time affected her so deeply, it lasted eight years to overcome. In 1928, Lucy began working for Hattie Carnegie as an in-house model. Later Lucy Ball was hired by theatre impresario Earl Carroll for his Vanities Broadway revue, and by Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. for the Rio Rita stage musical. After a stint in Roman Scandals (1933), Lucille Ball moved permanently to Hollywood as a contract player for RKO. 

On March 3, 1960, (one day after filming the final episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour), Lucille Ball filed papers in Santa Monica Superior Court, claiming married life with Desi Arnaz was "a nightmare" and nothing at all as it appeared on I Love Lucy. On May 4, 1960, they were officially divorced. Both the show and the couple’s marriage ended in 1960. However, until his death in 1986, Arnaz and Ball remained friends and often spoke fondly of each other. Lucille’s marriage had taken place in 1940. June’s in 1945. Lucille chose a temperamental Cuban bandleader, Desi Arnaz, five years younger than herself. June had married a respected, long-established movie star, Dick Powell—thirteen years her senior. But the truth is both women had unerringly chosen a man who would, as the years went on, almost dominate them completely. Lucy, big-boned, tall, strong-willed, longed for a man who would restore her to gentle femininity; June, tiny, delicate, shy, was accustomed to being guided and tutored by others. 

At the beginning, there was the strain of being apart. For June and Dick, enforced separations were not really long or frequent. They were apart only when location shooting was required for either of them, and this seldom meant more than a few weeks. But for Lucy and Desi Arnaz, enforced separations were far more severe. Lucy once estimated that in the early years of their marriage they spent far less than half their time together. In each marriage, the result was one of increased tension. For as the wives’ careers soared, those of the husbands slipped or changed drastically. Their marriages staggered on—and faltered. Lucy and Desi’s broke down first in 1944. For June and Dick the first serious split came in 1957, when Dick moved out of their Mandeville Canyon home. In both cases the decision was made by the woman. And in both cases the women changed their minds and decided to reconcile. Money rolled in. Both men had a shrewd business sense. Before long they were working not for others but for themselves. Four Star Productions and Desilu became names to be reckoned within the world of TV. But just as strains had emerged from the success of the two women, new tensions appeared born of their husbands’ triumphs.

Both men were soon working eighteen hours a day. Desi rarely left the RKO studios he had purchased for Desilu. At home, keyed up beyond exhaustion by his accomplishments, he would pace the house restlessly. Dick, less bound to a single location, flew back and forth to New York, to Europe, from chore to chore, gave interviews, bought scripts, cast, directed and produced. Older than Desi, Dick showed the wear and tear more conventionally—at home he simply collapsed. Lucy was no businesswoman; she was willing to be, on paper, a vice-president of Desilu, but violently opposed to letting it dominate her life. June, working less now than Dick, was restless. Still young, poised, beautiful in a more mature way, she wanted a little of the glamor and excitement she had been too awkward to enjoy years before. 

For June and Dick there were new notions—a house closer to fashionable Hollywood than their Mandeville Canyon estate, trips to New York and stunning new wardrobes for June. In late winter of 1960, June Allyson, after her long talk with Lucille Ball, announced that she had split with Dick Powell, and her lawyer confirmed that either a legal separation or a divorce would shortly take place. Dick Powell stepped off an airplane in Los Angeles and walked into the outstretched arms of his wife, June, on January 18, 1961. Dick Powell’s statement was: “I still love June and I believe she still loves me. If people will only leave us alone, maybe we can work out our situation.” Lucille Ball would marry her last husband Gary Morton, a Borscht Belt comic 13 years her junior, on November 19, 1961. According to Ball, Morton claimed he had never seen an episode of I Love Lucy due to his hectic work schedule. On January 3, 1962, Allyson’s interlocutory divorce decree was declared void since the Powells had reconciled. —Sources: "June Allyson: Her Life and Career" (2023) by Peter Shelley and "If Lucy Ball saw June Allyson, what would she tell her now?" article by Charlotte Dinter for Photoplay magazine (April 1961).