‘I Love Lucy’ Stars Vivian Vance And William Frawley Couldn’t Stand Each Other, Here’s What Started It

For six seasons, Fred and Ethel Mertz bickered across the kitchen table at 623 East 68th Street, and America laughed at every crack about Fred’s stinginess and Ethel’s age. What viewers didn’t know was that the bickering didn’t stop when the cameras did. William Frawley and Vivian Vance, the two actors who played television’s favorite cranky landlords on I Love Lucy, could barely stand each other.

Their feud became one of the best-known stories in sitcom history, and plenty of it has been exaggerated over the years. But the parts that hold up are remarkable on their own, from the one remark that started it to the very last thing Vance said about him, and the truth is a little more complicated, and a little kinder, than the legend.

How Did The Feud Between Fred And Ethel Start?

It started with arithmetic. Frawley was born February 26, 1887, in Burlington, Iowa, and Vance was born July 26, 1909, in Cherryvale, Kansas, which left 22 years between the TV husband and wife. Vance, a stage actress who had been cast as Ethel in 1951, was not shy about it. According to Gregg Oppenheimer, son of I Love Lucy producer Jess Oppenheimer, she was heard asking, “How will anyone believe I’m married to that old man?” Frawley overheard her, and he never forgot it.

Desi Arnaz remembered the damage in his memoir, A Book. As he told it, Frawley disliked her from the start and said so openly, grumbling that she couldn’t sing worth a damn. Vance put it even more plainly years later in a line quoted in the book Meet the Mertzes: “I loathed William Frawley and the feeling was mutual.” She admitted she used to race through each new script, hoping there wasn’t a scene with the two of them in bed.

Frawley had his own priorities. As TV Guide reported in December 1954, his contract let him skip filming whenever his beloved New York Yankees made the World Series, which cost Desilu “a good deal of schedule-juggling.” It was one more reason the cast learned to work around him, and the remarks were about to get sharper.

What Did Frawley And Vance Say About Each Other?

Frawley’s best-remembered line about his co-star sounded almost like a compliment until the end. “She’s one of the finest girls to come out of Kansas,” he said, “but I often wish she’d go back there,” according to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Director William Asher recalled the private name-calling was much rougher, with Vance calling Frawley a “dirty old drunk” and Frawley answering with an insult we won’t repeat here, as Fox News reported.

Somehow none of it reached the screen. “They really kept it under wraps, especially around me,” Keith Thibodeaux, who played Little Ricky, told Fox News. “I think that their professionalism outweighed whatever they had between them.” Editor Dann Cahn, interviewed for the Television Academy’s Hall of Fame tribute, said simply of Frawley, “He was such a pro.” When I Love Lucy ended, the network saw a chance to keep the Mertzes going, and that is when the feud cost both of them.

Why Did Vivian Vance Turn Down A Fred And Ethel Spinoff?

After I Love Lucy wrapped, Desi Arnaz offered the pair their own series about Fred and Ethel. Frawley wanted to do it. Vance said no. She did not want to work one-on-one with Frawley again, and she didn’t believe the Mertzes could carry a show without the Ricardos, according to both Mental Floss and her biographers. Desi backed a pilot of her own instead, Guestward, Ho!, but CBS passed and the show went on without her.

Frawley landed on his feet as Bub O’Casey on My Three Sons in 1960, and our story on how he recruited his My Three Sons kids into the feud shows he still hadn’t let it go. Vance returned to Lucille Ball in 1962 on The Lucy Show, playing Vivian Bagley, and she reportedly agreed only on the condition that she never be paired with Frawley again. She never was. Four years later, he was gone.

What Did Vivian Vance Say When William Frawley Died?

On March 3, 1966, Frawley collapsed of a heart attack while walking on Hollywood Boulevard after seeing a movie. He was 79. Desi Arnaz served as a pallbearer and took out a full-page trade ad that read simply, “Buenas noches, amigo,” as Mental Floss and Fox News have reported.

For decades, a story has circulated that Vance heard the news and shouted for champagne for everyone. It is a great Hollywood anecdote, and as Remind Magazine notes, it may be more folklore than fact, because no one has ever produced a witness. What the wire services actually recorded was gentler. In a UPI story after his death, Vance said, “There’s a great, big, funny and amusing light gone out of the world.”

Vance died of cancer on August 17, 1979, at 70, in Belvedere, California, according to the Kansas Historical Society and her obituaries. In 2012 the Television Academy inducted Fred and Ethel into its Hall of Fame on the same night, side by side. Neither of them was there to complain about it, and that might be the most Mertz ending of all.