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186 S C H A P T E R 2 0 Another Medium, Another Conquest Loretta never worked with Lucille Ball, although she knew who Ball was, and closely followed her growing fame in the medium that Loretta was planning to enter. Lucille Ball was star writ small. She appeared in some films—Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), Jules Dassin ’s Two Smart People (1946), Henry Hathaway’s The Dark Corner (1946), Douglas Sirk’s Lured (1947)—that have attracted film scholars, not because of her, but because of the directors. Ball’s MGM career was erratic; she could have brought her own brand of zaniness to the MGM musical, except that the studio had its resident zany, Red Skeleton, with whom she costarred in DuBarry Was a Lady (1943). “Costarred” is not entirely correct—the only star was Skelton. Otherwise, she was upstaged by a musical comedy trouper (Nancy Walker in Best Foot Forward [1943]), or the MGM family (Thousands Cheer [1944]), or relegated to sidekick status (Without Love [1945], Easy to Wed [1946]). When Ball had a chance to release the scatterbrain within, using her body as a comic conduit, it was in a string of Columbia B movies—Her Husband’s Affairs (1947), Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949), and especially The Fuller Brush Girl (1950)—released the same year that she and her husband, Desi Arnaz, hit the road, offering audiences a prevue of the sitcom that made television history when it premiered in October 1951: I Love Lucy. Although stars who defected to television were threatened with blacklisting, those whose movie careers had run their course were not alarmed. Television was small-screen film. Don Ameche, who made four movies with Loretta, entered television in 1950 as the Manager of Holiday Hotel, an ABC variety show. The same year, he emceed a quiz show, Take a Chance. Since Ameche was never a major movie star, threats—if he even heard them—did not matter. He had the next best thing in television , and Broadway as well. In April 1951, Claudette Colbert, who  " /  , Ê   1  ] Ê  " /  , Ê " + 1 - / 187 also knew her glory days were over, shocked Hollywood by appearing in a comedy sketch on The Jack Benny Show with one of film’s masters of gravitas, Basil Rathbone (whose movie career petered out with the end of Universal’s Sherlock Holmes series). Others had nothing to lose. Live television was another form of live theater for those who were as comfortable on the stage as they were on the screen (e.g., Madeleine Carroll, Melvyn Douglas, Zachary Scott, Jane Wyatt, William Lundigan, Diana Lynn, Lloyd Nolan, Margaret Wycherly, Claudette Colbert, Ethel Barrymore, and the venerable Lillian Gish, who knew that if she could make the transition from the silents to the talkies to the theatre, she could move on to television and work the tripartite circuit for the rest of her career). If live TV proved daunting, there was always filmed television , particularly sitcoms, such as I Married Joan with Joan Davis, My Little Margie with Gale Storm and Charles Farrell, and The Donna Reed Show. Loretta had no fear of blacklisting. When Louis Mayer bluntly told her that if she defected to television, she would “never get another script— ever,” Loretta replied that television was “the next, natural step” in entertainment. Mayer was wrong, but his death in 1957 precluded his realizing it. Loretta received movie offers over the years: for example, the part of the unmarried secretary vacationing in Venice in Summertime , which Katharine Hepburn inherited, along with an Oscar nomination . Producer Jerry Wald felt confident enough to inform the press that Loretta would costar with James Stewart in Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962). She probably took one look at the script and realized that, despite costar billing, she would be in the supporting cast; the title made it clear who the main character was, and it wasn’t Mrs. Hobbs. For an actress who was a natural nun, it was surprising that Loretta even passed on the role of the mother superior in Lilies of the Field (1963), in which an itinerant handy man (Sidney Poitier) helps a community of German nuns build a chapel. Just as Loretta would have been miscast in Summertime , she would have been eclipsed by Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field. Poitier deservedly won an Oscar for his performance, becoming the first African American actor to be so honored. The role of the mother superior , with whom...

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