The Magic of Welles
My last post featured an hommage to the Duck Soup mirror gag performed by Lucille Ball and Harpo Marx, and today we progress to another notable guest star on I Love Lucy.
In all honesty, the clip below of Orson Welles doing magic with Ball as his glamorous assistant is pretty entertaining in its own right, though the story behind it is even more so. The extract below comes from the episode Lucy Meets Orson Welles in which Welles invites Lucy to be part of his show and she, accordingly, starts rehearsing Shakespeare in preparation for whatever play Welles might want to use her in. The gag, though, is that Welles' show is in fact a magic act, the same routine he had performed for GIs on USO tours to Europe during World War II, when Marlene Dietrich and Rita Hayworth were his assistants.
The show was made in 1956, one of the many periods in Welles' career when he was utterly out of favor in Hollywood. A destitute Welles had ended up camping out Ball and Desi Arnaz's guest cottage, but had almost immediately alienated his hosts with his gruff temper, crude sense of humor and heavy drinking. Ball saw the bad influence he was having on Arnaz, who liked a drop or two himself, and sought a way to rid her household of Welles, sensing he would stay forever if he were not asked to leave. Instead of straightforwardly kicking him out, she came up with the idea of featuring Welles as the guest star in their fifth anniversary show: she would be able to pay him for his appearance, and he would then have enough money to be able to get his own place once again.
As a coda, Welles' relationship with Ball and Arnaz did actually continue past this point. The couple's production company, Desilu Productions, subsequently engaged Welles' to write and direct a series of half-hour television adaptations of classic short stories which had the proposed title The Orson Welles Show. Welles' pilot for the show, a version of John Collier's The Fountain of Youth, was made for NBC but, although it won a Peabody Award, it was not picked up by the network.
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