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108 C H a P t e r s e v e n Lucille Ball’s Best Friend in sePtember 1949, ProduCer artHur sCHwartz offered mary a regular role on Inside฀U.S.A.฀with฀Chevrolet, a half-hour, every-other-week TV variety show modeled after a successful Bea Lillie Broadway vehicle. At this point, Mary had made only a dozen appearances in the new television medium, including stints on a few game shows. A series meant regular work, and she took it. Broadcast live from New York by CBS, Inside฀U.S.A. starred husband-and-wife performers Mary Healy and Peter Lind Hayes and featured big guest stars of the day. Lucille Ball was to perform on the November 24 show, one of her first appearances on television. But because she was finishing a film in California, Lucy would be unable to arrive until shortly before the broadcast. Mary, who had never met Lucy, offered to stand in for her during rehearsals for the benefit of cast and crew. Lucy arrived during one of the last rehearsals and sat in bleachers beside the set as Mary performed Lucy’s role. Watching Mary, Lucy said aloud, “She’s clever!” A voice three rows behind her said, “Thanks. She’s my daughter.” The voice was Isabella’s. Mary and Lucy immediately hit it off and, from that meeting on, became especially close. “We were on the same wavelength, I guess because we enjoy all the same things,” Mary would later say. “There were lots of people around her who wanted something—money, a job or whatever. But all I wanted was her friendship.” If Isabella was the dominant relationship in Mary’s life, Lucille Ball was the defining one. Mary and Lucy would become each other’s most intimate friend for some thirty years. “Mary Wickes was my mom’s best friend. That’s not debatable,” says Lucie Arnaz. “My mother had various ‘best friends’ vying for the space, who came and went—people who’d get right up along side Mary for good reason—and for one reason or another, my mother would get tired l u C i l l e b a l l’ s b e s t f r i e n d 109 of those people and they’d kind of go away. Even Vanda [Barra]. Even Olavee [Martin]. We used to call these friends ‘The Kids’—they replaced [Desi Jr. and me] when we left. Couples who would come into the house and be there every night for dinner and always when they ran a movie and always with backgammon. Then all of a sudden those kids would be gone and ‘The New Kids’ would be there. And the couples would last sometimes a year, sometimes three years. So there were people who got to be good friends for a while, but Mary was always there. She was like forever. They were like sisters.” Certainly, they were closer than Lucy and Vivian Vance, with whom Lucy is so associated among the general public. “Vivian and she, through the years, had been estranged and on different coasts. They were more like girlfriends. Sometimes girlfriends can nit-pick at each other and have little fights and then they become best friends again. Mary and my mother were more like blood relatives, dependent on one another like family depends on one another,” Lucie says, noting that Mary often spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with Lucy’s family on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, where for many years Jimmy Stewart lived on one side and Jack Benny on the other. “If there was some law where I could have made her an official family member, I definitely would have. I would have given her ‘aunt’ status because she was closer to me in many ways than some of my actual blood relatives were. She was there so much more often.” In many respects, Mary’s place in Lucy’s life recalls that of Ebba Sedgwick , the widow of director Ed Sedgwick, who worked with Buster Keaton and the Keystone Cops. He had seen great talent in a young Lucille Ball and provided pivotal advice early in her career. Forever grateful, Lucy was generous to his widow for many years, serving as caregiver of sorts. “Ebba was a brilliant woman. Intellectual. Knew words. Read everything ever written. In her later years, she got frail and my mother saw to it that Ebba was always taken care of,” says...

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