The Fifties

by David Halberstam

Nothing showed the power of this new medium to soften the edge between real life and fantasy better than the coming of Lucille Ball. In 1951 she was forty years old, in the middle of a less than dazzling show-business career. In films she was seen more as a comedienne than as an actress, and she tended to draw what one executive termed “second-banana roles”—generally low-budget that did not go to the top stars. “The Queen of the B movies,” she was sometimes called. Often, it seemed, she was hired because someone else did not want the role. In the opinion of casting agents and directors, she was a little rough, a little obvious for the more sophisticated roles that might go to Katharine Hepburn. She had enjoyed some measure of success in radio, and in 1948, hoping to save her shaky eight-year marriage to Cuban band leader Desi Arnaz, she opted to do a radio comedy show called My Favorite Husband so that she would not have to travel away from home so much. Her radio husband was a pleasant Midwestern banker from Minneapolis, as Lucy herself later said, “certainly not—great heavens—Desi Arnaz from Cuba.”