Getting a TV spouse is a big gamble: If you hate them, you might have to pretend to love them for a reeeally long time. I Love Lucy was mostly an exception, because even if Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s marriage was never perfect and often a shitstorm, they were used to making kissy faces. William Frawley and Vivian Vance, however, lost that gamble big time. The actors who played Lucy and Ricky’s best friends and neighbors, Fred and Ethel Mertz, couldn’t stand each other so much that it affected the entire run of the show.
It all started when Vance expressed her frustration with audiences accepting her, at 42 years old, without question as the wife of a man Frawley’s age, which was 64 when the series premiered. Whether or not she had a point is up for debate. On one hand, Hollywood does love to cast actresses who can still drink Red Bull and vodka without dying as the wives of their middle-aged leading men. On the other, this could be chalked up to changes in fashion, but if you go back and watch those old episodes, it’s hard to say Vance was a young 42. Like, Anne Hathaway is 42 right now. There’s a difference, is all.
Anyway, word got back to Frawley that Vance thought he was old and gross, and he didn’t take kindly to that. He was “really a very, very bad alcoholic” as well as “a woman-hater, known throughout Hollywood for very bad language and just antisocial behavior,” according to one biographer, so he didn’t take kindly to much. As revenge, he instructed the show’s writers to give Fred creative insults to lob at Ethel, such as comparing her body to “a sack full of doorknobs,” to which Vance responded by making sure Fred and Ethel never got too physically friendly. The insults continued off camera, too. On the set of another sitcom, Frawley told visitors that Vance was a “miserable”… word we can’t print. It rhymes with “punt.”
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By the end of I Love Lucy, Vance and Frawley were so done with each other that they turned down lucrative offers for a Mertz-based spin-off. (It turns out frigid, hateful marriages were popular in the ‘50s.) And we do mean lucrative: Vance turned down a $50,000 bonus, which was basically Jeff Bezos money back then.
Do you know anyone you wouldn’t hang out with in exchange for that kind of money? I don’t. Call me, CBS.
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