Vivian Vance is best known for playing Lucy’s neighbor, landlady, and best friend, Ethel Mertz, on the I Love Lucy TV show. She was born Vivian Roberta Jones in July of 1909 in Cherryvale, Kansas, the second of six children born to Robert Andrew Jones, Sr., and Euphemia Mae Ragan. The Jones family moved to Independence, Kansas, when Vivian was six years old, where she did her full public schooling. Eventually, her love of performing led her to take dramatics classes at Independence High School.
Young Vivian loved performing and was good at it, but her mom’s strict Christian beliefs put her at odds with her daughter. Euphemia did not approve of Vivian’s activities. Instead of conforming to her mom’s wishes, Vivian rebelled. She would sneak out of her bedroom window and stay out after curfew to be with her friends and to do what she loved. Once she graduated, Vivian changed her surname to Vance, moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, looked for acting work, and performed in her first professional show at the Albuquerque Little Theater in 1930. Vivian performed many shows at this theater after the first one, and her work there helped her to pay her way to NYC, where she studied acting under Eva Le Gallienne.
Vivian obtained work in movies and in the theater on a regular basis in the 1930s. While her movie career never really took off the way she wanted it to, she was almost never at a loss for paying acting work. Vivian was what she aspired to be as a child, a full-time working actress.
When Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, a married Hollywood power couple of the day, were casting for their new TV show, I Love Lucy, in 1951, their director, Marc Daniels, suggested Vivian Vance to them for the part of Ethel Mertz. Daniels had worked with Vivian in a theater production and liked her. Lucy wanted Bea Benaderet or Barbara Pepper in the role, as they were both close friends of hers. CBS, the network that the show belonged to, nixed Barbara for the role due to a drinking problem. Bea was already appearing regularly on another TV show.
Vivian eventually won the role. She was forty-two years old at the time. The show debuted on October 15, 1951. William Frawley was cast to play her character’s husband, Fred Mertz. Frawley was twenty-two years older than Vivian, but the two of them had exceptional chemistry together, and their comedic timing matched up perfectly with each other. Quite surprisingly for fans of the show, Vivian and Frawley did NOT get along.
No one knows exactly how or when the feud began between the two of them. Some people say it was when Frawley overheard Vivian saying Frawley was too old to be playing her husband and should be playing her dad instead. Vivian was known to call Frawley (to others) “that stubborn-headed little Irishman.” Other people have said that Vivian and Frawley disliked each other upon their first meeting, with Vivian, in particular, taking exception to the cantankerous attitude of Frawley.
Vivian was honored for her work in 1953 when she became the first person to win an Emmy Award in the new category of Best Supporting Actress. She was nominated for the award three more times during the original run of I Love Lucy.
After the show ended in 1957, Desi and Lucy did a revamp of it into several hour-long specials called The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show (later renamed The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour), where Vivian and Frawley continued in their roles as the Mertzes. Desi did offer the two actors their own Fred and Ethel spin-off show, but Vivian declined, as she did not want to work one-on-one with Frawley. Frawley had been keenly interested in doing the spin-off, so Vivian’s refusal only heightened the acrimony between them.
Vivian worked with Lucille Ball again when Lucy created a new TV show for herself, The Lucy Show. In this show, Lucy played a widow named Lucy Carmichael, who was a widow with two kids living in upstate New York. Vivian agreed to be Lucy’s co-star on the show, with the condition that she be allowed to wear more glamorous clothes on the show than she’d worn on I Love Lucy. She also wanted her character to be named Vivian, as she was over the public calling her Ethel.
Vivian co-starred on the new show as Vivian Bagley, a divorced mom with one child who shared a house with Lucy’s character. Vivian’s new character was the first divorcee character to ever appear on a weekly TV show in the United States.
Vivian appeared on this show from 1962 to 1965 but was no longer getting much joy out of it. She disliked her weekly commute between her home on the east coast of the USA to Los Angeles. She missed seven episodes out of the twenty-six in the show’s third season. After this third season, she asked for more creative control of the show, the opportunity to direct and produce, and better pay to make the commute worth it to her. The network did not communicate Vivian’s desires properly to Lucy. Vivian’s requests were ultimately refused, and she left the show, which injured her real-life friendship with Lucy.
Lucy learned of the true nature of Vivian’s requests later, and regretted not giving her what she wanted. In fact, without Vivian, Lucy considered ending the show, not really wanting to do it without her. Eventually, though, the two women made up with each other, reconciled their friendship, and Vivian made three more guest appearances on The Lucy Show during its remaining seasons.
After this, Vivian appeared once in a while on reunion shows with Lucy. She even made several guest appearances on Lucy’s third sitcom, Here’s Lucy, which aired from 1968 to 1974. She got an endorsement deal with Maxwell House Coffee in the early 1970s, which allowed her to appear on numerous commercials for the product over the next several years. She also made some appearances on a few of the TV shows of that time, as well as in made-for-TV movies. The last time she and Lucy appeared on TV together was in a 1977 CBS special called Lucy Calls the President.
As far as her personal life goes, Vivian was married four times. The first three marriages ended in divorce. In fact, her third husband, actor Philip Ober, to whom she was married for eighteen years, is rumored to have abused her because he was jealous of her successful acting career, a success which he apparently did not enjoy in his own acting pursuits. Vivian never had any children with any of her husbands.
In 1961, Vivian married her fourth husband, John Dodds, who was a literary agent, editor, and publisher. They moved to Stamford, Connecticut (where Vivian had to commute from to work in Los Angeles). After Vivian was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1973, about the same time she got the Maxwell House Coffee deal, the couple moved back to California in 1974, where they lived for the rest of Vivian’s life.
Vivian crossed to the other side in August of 1979. She’d suffered a stroke two years prior that left her partially paralyzed, but it was the breast cancer she’d been diagnosed with six years prior that provided the bridge for her crossing. After she crossed, Desi Arnaz said:
“It’s bad enough to lose one of the great artists we had the honor and the pleasure to work with, but it’s even harder to reconcile the loss of one of your best friends.”
Lucy reminisced about Vivian in a 1986 interview, saying (about watching reruns of I Love Lucy):
“I find that now I usually spend my time looking at Viv. Viv was sensational. And back then, there were things I had to do—I was in the projection room for some reason—and I just couldn’t concentrate on it. But now I can. And I enjoy every move that Viv made. She was something.”
Vivian was posthumously awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in February of 1991 to honor her ample achievements in television. The star is located at 7000 Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, California.