As a young aspiring actress, Lucille Ball set out to make her fame and fortune in New York City. She quickly found work as a model, earning 40 bucks a week posing for illustrators creating cigarette and coffee ads, according to her memoir, Love, Lucy. Her work posing in fashion shows even earned her a screen test with Paramount, but nothing came of it. Ball “wasn’t photogenic, it seems.”
Modeling was fun, but it wasn’t the movie business. Lucky for Ball, good fortune did for her what a screen test could not. “I seldom use the word luck, but in 1933, when I became a Goldwyn girl, that was pure luck,” Ball told Rolling Stone, per MeTV. (Who were the Goldwyn girls? Think of them as overqualified extras, showing up frequently in movie musicals as background dancers and chorus line gals.)
Ball didn’t exactly apply for the job. “I was just walking down the street,” she remembered. “It was unbearably hot, and someone — I don’t remember exactly who — came up to me and said, ‘How’d you like to go to California?’ This was New York, so you had to be careful when anyone asked you anything, but this was a woman asking me, so I figured I was safe. She told me that the girl they had already found for Goldwyn couldn’t make the trip.”
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With one girl backing out, Ball was all too happy to jump in. Twelve girls were needed for a new Eddie Cantor picture, Roman Scandals, and Ball ran to the theatrical agent, who now only had eleven. “Fortunately, there was no screen test, or I might never have been accepted,” she wrote in her memoir. But the agent loved Ball’s enthusiasm and hired her on the spot: $125 a week for six weeks, plus a free ride to Hollywood.
“I said, ‘I’d go anyplace to get out of this head,’” she told Rolling Stone. “I went to Hollywood and I never came back.”
Ball said it happened so fast she didn’t quite realize she was getting her big break. As a bonus, she had a contract, avoiding the casting couch that awaited other young hopefuls arriving in California without a job. “I was already under a studio’s protective wing,” she wrote. “In those days, it was a blessed way to begin.”
Even as a chorus girl, her comedy future was never in doubt. On her first day at work on Roman Scandals, she lined up with the more voluptuous Goldwyn girls for their first meeting with Cantor. Wanting to make an impression among her buxom cohorts, she ripped up pieces of red crepe paper, licked them with her tongue and stuck them all over her face and arms, measles-style, as a prank.
“When Mr. Cantor got to me, his jaw dropped, his big eyes popped, and then he roared with laughter,” she remembered. “He asked me my name. He told everyone about ‘that Ball dame — she’s a riot!’”
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