VIVIAN VANCE Her Long Road to STARDOM

IT TOOK STRENGTH, TALENT AND A SPECIAL FRIENDSHIP TO MAKE ALL HER DREAMS COME TRUE

- LOUISE A. BARILE

In a Chicago hotel room, actress Vivian Vance found herself shaking and crying for no reason at all. “To put it bluntly, I flipped,” she recalled about the start of her mental breakdown in 1945. “Every normal function of my body — heart, blood, pulse — roared in my ears. I was exhausted but I could not sleep. I was afraid to leave my room and afraid to stay in it. The walls grew closer.”

This Kansas-born beauty spent her girlhood yearning to perform, but her goals conflicted with her strict parents’ belief that respectable people did not become actors. Vivian persevered, even when mental illness threatened her life, and after years in theater joined the cast of I Love Lucy. But that wasn’t the end of her struggle. On the set, jealousy, a hostile work environment, and an abusive marriage challenged her ambition to make Ethel Mertz everyone’s favorite best friend.

Growing up, Vivian and her mother, Mae, clashed. “To Mama, I was a ‘bad girl,’” she wrote in her unpublished memoir. “I had a hang-up about showing my legs in public — Mama used to scream at me that showing my legs could drive men to sin. Whenever I heard four-letter words, I vomited.”

At 19, she escaped into a short-lived marriage and landed at a playhouse in New Mexico. “She got her start in Albuquerque,” former curator of the Albuquerque Museum, Deb Slaney, tells Closer. “She lived here between 1928 and 1930 and came back to do productions in the 1940s.”