Playing Fast and Lucy

By James Poniewozik

You know about vitameatavegemin. You know about the consuming romance and contentious breakup with Desi Arnaz. You know about the glory years of I Love Lucy and the slow slide into irrelevance with a string of Lucy knock-offs. But I'll bet you didn't know this about Lucille Ball: "She once took an open-cockpit plane up in weather 20 below freezing to effect the rescue of a schoolboy."

O.K., so that last bit is a fib, concocted for Ball's press biography by publicists for RKO, the studio she was under contract to in the late 1930s. They made it up because they--and the rest of Hollywood, for some two decades--had no idea how to best promote or cast the woman who in mid-life would become perhaps the most popular actress of the 20th century. Ball didn't easily fit any of the standard movie-star niches. The saucy girl from Jamestown, N.Y., was pretty (a former model) but not va-va-voom sexy; she was down-home charming but divaishly difficult (she once chucked a coffeepot at a makeup man and missed, dousing Katharine Hepburn); she was funny but in a slapstick way audiences were not used to from women. Nearing 40, she was deep into a well-paid but unspectacular B-movie career when the opportunity came along to star in a TV show. Then, as Stefan Kanfer's entertaining but unreflective biography Ball of Fire (Knopf; 361 pages) details, she did what many unusual talents must. She created her own niche.

As Kanfer, a former TIME editor, presents her, Ball does fit one show-biz type well: the star whose early troubles (father dies young, family suffers financial ruin) fed an insecurity and need to please that paradoxically emboldened her to take risks. But as important as her talent and drive, Kanfer shows, was Arnaz, who handled her business savvily and smoothed over her tendency to bully co-stars and crew (though he also made her miserable with his boozing and philandering).

Ball of Fire is subtitled The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball. Kanfer does well by the tumultuous life, dishing with relish such anecdotes as the time Joan Crawford was a guest on The Lucy Show and declared that Ball "could 'outbitch' her any day of the week." But as for the comic art, he's short on insight, he offers little cultural context, and his one original explanation for I Love Lucy's enduring success is just weird: people love it because it is in black and white. "There is something incompatible," Kanfer writes, "about humor and color." (Let's see how Kanfer massages that theory should he ever write Jerry Seinfeld's bio.)

Ball's many fans, however, will enjoy how vividly Kanfer captures Ball in her prime--brave, pioneering and, above all, ravenous for applause. It has become a cliche for tributes to Ball to gush about how much we love Lucy. What is just as important, Ball of Fire shows, is how much she loved us. --By James Poniewozik