When Lucille Ball met June Allyson

When June Allyson flew to New York in the winter of 1960, the last person anyone expected her to look up was Lucille Ball. 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 1961, when an openly weeping June told reporters outright that she and Dick had separated and she 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. 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. Her spine had been injured. 

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. 

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, and starred Lucille Ball, William Gaxton, June Allyson, Gloria DeHaven, and Nancy Walker. Produced by George Abbott, 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. Maureen Cannon (Best Foot Forward) 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. 

While shooting Meet the People (1944), co-starring Dick Powell, Lucille Ball helped her friend June Allyson to hide her and Dick Powell from the press. Lucille also observed Joan Blondell's erratic conduct and her tendency to spread false rumors about Allyson. Blondell's official divorce from Powell would happen in July 1945. In August, 19, 1945, Dick Powell would marry her third and last wife, June Allyson. 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 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 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 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. 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 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. June had married a respected, long-established movie star, Dick Powell—thirteen years her senior. 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. 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. Both men had a shrewd business sense. 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. Lucille Ball sold Desilu's stock for 17 million dollars in 1967, which amounts to $130 millions today. 

When Lucille was a young actress, she was known as a wild and rough woman, very unpolished and scrappy and willing to brawl, and she wasn't liked by everyone because she was sassy. Again, like her Stage Door character, she admitted: 'I'm a bitch in the boardroom, a bore in the bedroom and a bear on the toilet, so watch your back!' Lucille Ball clashed with Joan Crawford during the filming of "Lucy & The Lost Star." Not being used to the sitcom format, Crawford was filled with trepidation and turned to alcohol to calm her nerves, which greatly displeased the demanding and perfectionistic Ball. After Crawford failed to perform a Charleston dance routine to Ball's satisfaction, Ball loudly threatened to fire her in front of the entire cast and crew, causing Crawford to flee to her dressing room in tears. There, she uttered the infamous quote: "And they call me a bitch!" It is said that Desi Arnaz and Vanda Barra gave Crawford pep talks which helped get her through the shoot, and the episode became a big hit. 

Lucille Ball could be a comic wisecracker, but Ginger Rogers, Joan Blondell, and Eve Arden did it better. She's very good in The Big Street, but dramas were never going to be her bread and butter. She couldn't sing, she could move well but wasn't a dancer. Once the hair went red and she developed and was allowed to showcase her amazing talent for physical comedy she became a huge star in an emerging new medium. From a respectable but middling career to #1 at age 40. “On the set of The Lucy Show she could be a holy terror,” said one of the technicians who watched Lucy in action. Joan Blondell, who had known Lucy since their starlet days in the 1930s, had become a stage comedienne in middle age. Lucy booked her on the show, then expressed dissatisfaction with the way Blondell read her lines. After one take, her friend Herb Kenwith reported, the director yelled “Cut” and “Lucille pulled an imaginary chain. . . as if flushing an old-fashioned toilet.” Blondell turned away but caught the tailend of the gesture.“ ‘What does that mean,’ she demanded. Lucille said, ‘It means that stunk!’ Joan looked her right in the eye and said, ‘Fuck you, Lucille Ball!’ and left. The studio audience was stunned. You didn’t hear words like that in those days.” Blondell never came back.

Lucille Ball was very conservative and didn't invest in land properties, like a lot of other celebrities. Fred MacMurray made a fortune off of early Hollywood land valued over 60 millions at the end of his life, the same amount that Lucille Ball was worth: $60 million dollars at the time of her death in 1989. Dick Powell had been shrewd with property as well and was one of the founding investment developers of a big leisure complex at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue that included an ice hockey arena, a bowling alley, stores, and restaurants. Although his workaholic ethic might have given the impression he would have amassed near an equal fortune as MacMurray's, Powell's estate was just valued around 5 million. After their tumultuous honeymoon, Joan Blondell and Dick Powell left New York by train on 17 October, 1936, stopping at the tony South Shore Country Club in Chicago.

Some fans had difficulty separating reality from the movies. Joan Blondell complained bitterly: "People took all that love stuff so literally with Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, who were always playing opposite each other, that several times the fans were actually furious that I took him away from Ruby. When we got married, they thought she should marry him. It didn't bother them one bit that she was married to Al Jolson." Vivian Vance fondly remembered that during the days of the "I Love Lucy", she would regularly go over to Lucille's house at night to henna and perm Lucy's hair. Ann Sothern and Ethel Merman attended these hair sessions too. Merman, Vance and Ball were having a party at Chez Roxbury and getting pretty drunk in the process. Merman announced she had slept with Desi Arnaz when he was appearing in Too Many Girls (1940), before he went to Hollywood and met Lucy. Merman was also having an affair with Sherman Billingsley, owner of the Stork Club, and married William Smith in 1940.

The story took place on the evening after Lucille Ball threw a wedding shower at Desilu studios for Ethel Merman prior to her marriage to Ernest Borgnine, which would put the time in June 1964. "Lucille threw a party for Merman at her Beverly Hills house. Her husband, Gary Morton, and her children Lucie and Desi Jr. were sent away while Lucille Ball, Ethel Merman, and Vivian Vance spent the evening with bottles of scotch. The three ladies reminisced about being young together in Broadway and Hollywood. Ethel Merman had known Vivian Vance for twenty nine years and Lucille a little longer. They had done movies and Broadway together and had just finished filming a two part "Lucy Show" for airing on CBS. The more they drank, the freer everyone's tongues got. Merman admitted to her one night stand with Desi in 1939, which Vivian found hysterical. Lucille was not amused and wondered out loud that Ernest Borgnine "must be great in bed at night because he is nothing to look at in the daylight." Finally, the three dames dissolved into laughter and made coffee." 

After her death, more of Lucille Ball's life story surfaced: her reputation back in Jamestown, NY, the rumors about Lucy being a call girl in NYC, like June Allyson, being both stories by all accounts patently false, byproduct of jealousy. In another girl night, June talked about Lucy having an affair with Pandro Berman, head of RKO. Lucy said she had dated Berman but she fended off Harry Cohn's advances in Columbia. Lucy seemed curious about June and Dick's intimate life, asking if was June satisfied? "I cannot have enough of it," laughed June. 

Lucy just seemed bluntly cranky. She advised June not to "mess with the Rat guys" (Sinatra, Lawford, Dino). Allyson shaked her head in disgust. Changing subject, Lucy said: "No matter how I get dressed up, I always look like the cigarette girl at the Trocadero." She added she wanted to redecorate her Roxbury Drive house. She seemed to dominate her second husband Gary Morton. Only Vivian Vance, Ann Sothern and June Allyson could stand up to Lucy's formidable character. Her friends sometimes heard Lucy snicker: "Goddammit Gary, I said no ice! I can't drink this. Make me another one and remember no ice! It's useless. Oh, and can you get me another pack of Pall Malls from the cupboard? Can you manage to do that? Jesus Christ!" —"If Lucy Ball saw June Allyson, what would she tell her now?" article by Charlotte Dinter for Photoplay magazine (April 1961), "Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz: They Weren’t Lucy & Ricky" (2020),  and "Affairs, Romances, Feuds" (2023) by Allan Royle