Much of the research that went into forming these lyrics came from Lucille Ball’s autobiography covering her life up to 1964. It was discovered purely by accident by her daughter in an old box of letters and tapes thirty years later when Lucy’s estate was being settled. From this, I have included many quotes from her book in quotes along with my own paraphrasing where I felt appropriate set in double dashes. -Jon Charles Fortman

Daddy went to heaven
When I knew him ‘bout as well as me

--When Lucy was not quite 4 years old, her father died of typhoid fever.--

Said goodbye to Mamma for the moment
But I made do camped out in make believe

--Following her father’s death, her mother, DeDe, remarried but she and Lucy’s stepfather were forced to go to Detroit to find work. As a result, for a short while, the family was split. Lucy lived with her stepfather’s parents who were stern old-country people that frowned on “indulgences”. Silly, sassy and bold little girls like Lucy were not very compatible with stodgy people such as this.--

“And when life seemed unbearable, I learned to live in my imagination, and to step inside other people’s skins – indispensable abilities for an actress.”

Freddy not to worry can you meet me out in Hollywood?
Don’t forget DeDe, Grandpa Hunt and Cleo

--While working in New York City posing for commercial illustrators, one of the paintings of Lucy got sold to Chesterfield Cigarettes. Almost overnight, her likeness was all over the city as the new Chesterfield Girl. From that, a New York theatrical agent who was looking for young models to export to Hollywood noticed her and recruited her to sign on to Roman Scandals, a movie that called for a dozen well-known poster girls. Freddy, Lucy’s brother, joined her in Hollywood after he graduated from high school but it was Lucy’s dream to have all of her family with her in California which she loved so much. Eventually, her mother, grandfather and cousin did make it to the West Coast where they, too, found new life.--

Lilacs purple daisy field
One more ride up on that Ferris Wheel…so high
Where’s our Disneyland
Gone this morn’?
Someday maybe we’ll cry more

“I was eight and a half years old when we all moved into the little three-bedroom house on Eighth Street in Celoron, NY. My bedroom was in the rear, overlooking the big backyard with its high hedge of purple lilacs. Each Memorial Day we would cut great branches of blooming lilacs from the purple bushes in the backyard and carry them to Lakeview Cemetery to Grandmother’s grave. Since those days, lilac has become almost an obsession with me; someone once interpreted my passion for it as signaling a return to the womb, to Celoron NY, to the innocent happiness of childhood. Whatever the reason, the emotional tug is so overwhelming that I’ve been known to plan trips to New England in May just to see and smell lilac in bloom.”

“Many of the inspirations for our childhood stage plays came from the fine productions we saw on summer evenings at Celoron Amusement Park, which was just a hop, skip, and a jump from our house across a daisy field and a railroad track. To us, it was as unique and wonderful as Disneyland is today, with its calliope, Ferris wheel, and merry-go-round.”

“In the summer of 1930, the amusement park burned up in a spectacular blaze on a Sunday morning. My friend, Marion Strong, and I had been dancing there the night before with our dates; we wondered whose carelessly dropped cigarettes had started the fire."

"Marion and I stood by the lakeshore watching the towering flames devour the old ballroom. Steam billowed up from the cold lake as the burning timbers crashed down; the dense black smoke billowing into the summer sky could be seen for miles."

"This was where I’d gone to my first dance, in my pussy willow taffeta dress with its band of real fur. This was where my first bittersweet crushes were born and died to the strains of “Margie” and “’S Wonderful”. I began to cry, and then I couldn’t stop."

"All the ghosts in those crackling flames shooting into the sky. My wonderful, happy childhood in Celoron gone forever, and so tragically. My first picnics in the park, what exciting occasions they had been. Marion was crying too, and we clung together, drowning in a sea of tears.”

--Lucy’s friend, Marion, said years later that she never cried so much again.--

Lordy would you get a load
of Little Latin Lancelot
Tell’in me with all kind of courage
Maybe we had met somewhere

--Lucy first saw Desi in the Broadway show Too Many Girls in 1939 while on a press photo shoot in New York.--

“From the way girls reacted to him, he was the Elvis Presley of his day. Offstage he was dating film stars, stage stars, and all the leading debutantes, including the beautiful Brenda Frazier.”

--I borrowed “Latin Lancelot” from an article by Helen Gilmore in Photoplay, February 1942.--

--It wasn’t until Lucy returned to Hollywood that she and Desi finally met. He was there doing the film version of Too Many Girls. She was filming Dance, Girl, Dance. George Abbott, who was directing Too Many Girls, introduced them in the commissary. It was anything but love at first sight what with each of them donned in costume and make up. Lucy had a fake black eye for a scene she was shooting. Desi looked anything but Elvisesque having just come from rehearsing football tricks.--

“At the end of the day’s shooting, I was in slacks and a sweater, my face washed and my long red hair pulled neatly back in a bow. Desi didn’t recognize me as the wild woman he had met at lunch, and had to be introduced all over again. He invited me to dinner and I accepted. I might as well admit here and now I fell in love with Desi wham, bang, in five minutes! There was only one thing better than looking at Desi, and that was talking to him.”

--Though there was no mention of this in Lucy’s autobiography, according to Helen Gilmore’s Photoplay article from February 1942, Desi, prior to being reintroduced to Lucy that day, said “Haven’t we met somewhere” not as a pick up line but because he wasn’t sure she was the same girl.--

So we’ll go to Greenwich
You can buy me a dime store ring

--By 1940, Lucy and Desi had become popular to the point that the stress from their careers was threatening their relationship.--

“We weren’t competitive in our careers. Desi’s name was as well known in show business as mine and he made just as much money. But he was supposed to spend six months of the year in Hollywood and six months on the road, and what kind of a life was that for us? We were both head over heels in love and we both longed with all our hearts for a home of our own and children. But everything else in the picture seemed hopelessly negative; we agreed that night that we could never marry.”

--In the fall of that same year came one of the biggest surprises of Lucy’s life. After returning from an extended Milwaukee benefit appearance to New York and having fought with Desi earlier that night, she met him thinking it was all over only to be told that he had been planning their elopement to Greenwich, Connecticut!--

“In Greenwich, we spent a harried two hours seeing a judge about waiving the five-day waiting period and getting the necessary health examination. Desi had planned to marry me at the office of Justice of the Peace John J. O’Brien. He had forgotten only one thing: a wedding ring. Desi’s business manager ran into Woolworth’s and bought me a brass one. Although Desi later gave me a platinum ring, that little discolored brass ring rested among the diamonds and emeralds in my jewel case for years. It was November 30, 1940, the most momentous day of my life so far.”

‘Cause it’s all I need Cuban Pete
And I hope you miss your Sally Sweet

--The earliest seeds for the concept of the I Love Lucy show were planted in 1946 by then vice president of programming at CBS, Hubbell Robinson, who pitched the idea of a radio show to Lucy called Mr. and Mrs. Cugat.--

“I was interested, especially if Desi could costar, but the big brass at CBS thought he was not the type to play a typical American husband. ‘But he is my husband,’ I told them, ‘and I think it helps make a domestic comedy more believable when the audience knows the couple is actually married’”.

“But CBS turned a deaf ear to my proposal to team me up with Desi. So finally I relented and did a series with Richard Denning called My Favorite Husband, based on the Cugat book. This half-hour weekly show was similar to I Love Lucy only in that I played a wacky wife. I was married to the fifth vice president of a bank and trying in comic ways to promote his career. Gale Gordon was the bank president – the same role that was to be his on The Lucy Show.”

--With no one else having faith in them as a team, least of all the executives at CBS, Lucy and Desi decided to find out on their own what the public thought of them together. So, they put together a vaudeville act featuring just the two of them and tested it in army camps. The word of mouth on the act was good and soon they had contracts to do it in theaters across the U.S.A. One of the numbers in that act was “Cuban Pete / Sally Sweet”. Then, suddenly, in 1951, CBS agreed to finance a pilot for a domestic television show featuring the two of them as a married couple. I Love Lucy had been born.--

Put a butterfly in your hair

--Though she makes no mention of this in her autobiography, it is believed that, in every I Love Lucy episode, Lucy wore a butterfly clip given to her by her Grandmother either in her hair or on a piece of her clothing or on her handbag.--

Shine on Tessie
Paint a gray town carrot-pink

--It is generally thought that Lucy changed her hair color from blonde to red when she left RKO studios and signed with MGM. That is actually not true. According to her autobiography, she had been a redhead during much of her years with RKO. It was when she got to MGM that she was given her signature color by the studio, which many have described as “carrot-pink”. She became known as “Technicolor Tessie” due, supposedly, to Technicolor having such a hard time reproducing the color on film. I used “gray town” as symbolic representation for the black and white film format common to that period (early 1940’s). It must have been startling for moviegoers to see that orange-pink head glowing so on a large screen when most were used to seeing movies in black and white.--

“In August 1942, I signed with MGM for $1500 a week and began, in effect, a whole new career. I was changed the minute I got over there. Sidney Guilaroff, the hairstylist, had the most to do with it. I had been a redhead at RKO but Sidney changed me to a lighter and more vibrant shade for Technicolor. “Tango Red,” he called it, but actually it was as orange as a piece of fruit hanging on a tree.”

And yellow, Lilly white

--Yellow and white were, supposedly, Lucy’s favorite colors.--

Go to sleep on pillows soft

--In 1985, Lucy starred in a dramatic TV movie, “Stone Pillow” playing a homeless New York City bag lady for which she earned critical acclaim.--

Hands are shakin’
Got a sickle cuttin’ into me
Don’t care much for a party
Where they only serve up Stoli

--To most of my generation, which was not alive in the McCarthy era but witnessed the end of the cold war nearly 40 years later, “blacklisting” is something we have only read about or heard of second hand. Because of that, the grim nature of its implications and the devastating effect it had on so many people is likely lost on most of us. Lucille Ball’s account of her own “red scare” in her autobiography paints a very vivid picture of the seriousness of the matter.--

--In 1952 and 1953, Lucy was investigated for her communist association both by William A. Wheeler, an investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the FBI. In each case, she freely complied and was cleared of the matter explaining to both that she actually had registered with the Communist party in 1936 but had only done so in support of her grandfather. He had wanted the family to register as such so they could vote in support of a friend of his who was running for office at the time. Lucy never voted and her registration with the party, which she never renewed, lapsed after two years.--

--Though the investigations concerning her were supposed to have been kept secret, word of them leaked first to Walter Winchell who lead his popular radio program of the time with “What top redheaded television comedienne has been confronted with her membership in the Communist party?” on 6 September 1953. By Friday of that week, the Los Angeles Herald-Express headlined with “Lucille Ball Named Red” in 3-inch type and the east coast was reading in their evening papers, “America’s Most Beloved Comedienne is Communist.” On this same Friday, Lucy and Desi were scheduled to film the opening episode of the new I Love Lucy season.--

“My hands shook. In the afternoon I went through hours of comedy rehearsal, white-faced and with a devastating headache.”

How could Tango Red
Ever give me this scare?

--Under desperate, intensely traumatic circumstances, the human mind can wander and generate fantastic thoughts and ideas. In light of this, I couldn’t help but think that Lucille Ball, faced with the very real possibility of being “blacklisted” in 1953 and, thus, ending her career in show business, might have imagined at one point that her hair color somehow triggered the notion that she had Communist affiliation. A silly thought, of course, unless you’re the one being driven to near insanity from dealing with such an accusation.--

But I swear I bleed blue as Franklin D.
Bless you God be with me

--Lucille Ball was lucky with respect to her “red scare” due, perhaps in part, to the fact that she was a major star at the time. Even she had to make pleas and testimonies as to her innocence in the matter of her allegations. No one was safe. There were many in show business that were not nearly as lucky and were forced out of work for many years, if not permanently, as a result.--

--On Friday, September 11, 1953, Lucy was finally cleared completely of any Communist connection by Donald L. Jackson, then chair of the House Un-American Activities Committee. This cleared the way to continue with the production of the first show of I Love Lucy of that season scheduled to be filmed that night. In his warm-up speech for the audience, Desi stated that “Lucy is as American as Bernie Baruch and Ike Eisenhower”. I couldn’t make either of those figures work poetically so I chose Franklin Delano Roosevelt instead who was of blue-blood pedigree. My real reason for using “blue”, however, was to create contrast to “red” as though Lucy might have said something like this in making her pleas to the investigators.--

--As Desi finished the audience warm-up…--

“The audience stood and cheered. Someone yelled, ‘We’re with you boy.’ Then he said ‘Now I want you to meet my favorite wife, my favorite redhead – in fact, that’s the only thing red about her, and even that’s not legitimate – Lucille Ball.”

“Feeling as stiff as an iron poker, I walked out into the limelight. I couldn’t speak, but my features were fraught with emotion. Still speechless, with tears in my eyes, I turned and walked back through the curtains. My years of rigid self-discipline paid off that night. I lost myself in Lucy and clowned and cavorted without a sign of strain. At the end of the show, the cast came out as usual for a farewell bow. My Lucy voice – that high, bubbly, child-like voice – dropped to my normal low tones. ‘God bless you for being so kind,’ I told them. Finally, in my dressing room, I gave way to the tears I had been holding in since early morning.”

Let a tear my Desi fill your eye
Sing to me your sweetest “Rock-a-Bye Baby”

“Both times I was pregnant, I mooned for hours over a baby photograph of Desi, hoping by some magic I would have a baby who looked just like him. Then we did the I Love Lucy episode where Lucy tells Ricky she is having a baby. She sends an anonymous note to him at his nightclub, requesting that he sing ‘Rock-a-Bye Baby’. Ricky complies, going from table to table singing the old nursery rhyme. In front of Lucy’s table, he looks into her eyes and suddenly realizes that he is the father. When we did this scene before an audience, Desi was suddenly struck by all the emotion he’d felt when we discovered, after ten childless years of marriage, that we were finally going to have Lucie. His eyes filled up and he couldn’t finish the song; I started to cry, too. Vivian started to sniffle; even the hardened stagehands wiped their eyes with the backs of their hands. The director wanted retakes at the end of the show, but the audience stood up and shouted, ‘No, no!’”.

Now this all elusive bird shall land
In our blessed Valley grand

--In these last four lines, I altered the chronology in order to gain better lyrical flow. Lucy was, in fact, pregnant with Desi, Jr. (their second child) when they filmed the now famous “Rock-a-Bye Baby” I Love Lucy episode. It was Lucie Arnaz that she gave birth to first after ten childless years of marriage that had involved a miscarriage:--

“She arrived at eight-fifteen a.m. on July 17, 1951, weighing seven pounds, eight ounces. Lyricist Eddie Maxwell wrote the words to a song in her honor, ‘There’s a Brand-New Baby at Our House,’ and Desi sat up all night with his guitar composing the music. The next day, the proud papa passed out Havana cigars to his entire studio audience and introduced his new daughter and that song to the world on his new CBS radio show, Tropical Trip. Later on, it was used on the show when Lucy Ricardo had her baby.”

--In March of 1941, Lucy and Desi bought a little white ranch house in the San Fernando Valley. The period they spent living there proved to be one of happiest times they would ever know.--

“Desi and I were convinced that trying to build a happy marriage right in the heart of Hollywood was very, very difficult. So after we’d been married about six months, we decided to move far out into the open spaces of the San Fernando Valley. The Valley, in those days, was considered the wild and woolly open spaces and many movie people built homes there to get away from it all. In the evenings our neighbors would come over to play cards, run home movies or just sit there, feet up and talk – mostly ranch talk, about when the best time to plant was, which insecticides to use, and how often to irrigate. All that good earthy talk carried me right back to Celoron, my childhood, and my grandfather’s livestock and garden.”

--Desi Arnaz died of lung cancer on December 2, 1986 at the age of 69. Lucille Ball died on April 26, 1989, shortly after undergoing open-heart surgery which resulted in a ruptured aorta. She was 77.--