BOB CARROLL JR., 88, A WRITER OF THE ZANY ‘I LOVE LUCY,’ DIES
By MARGALIT FOX
February 3, 2007
Bob Carroll Jr., a founding writer of “I Love Lucy” who helped introduce millions of viewers to the joys of frenzied grape stomping, warp-speed chocolate-stuffing and the increasingly tasty 46-proof patent medicine Vitameatavegamin, died on Jan. 27 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88.
Mr. Carroll died after a short illness, said Madelyn Pugh Davis, his writing partner of more than 50 years.
With Ms. Davis and others, Mr. Carroll wrote every episode — 179 half-hour shows, and a pilot — of the original show, broadcast on CBS from 1951 to 1957. He and Ms. Davis were also involved with all of the show’s later incarnations.
The two writers joined forces in the 1940s, when both worked for CBS Radio in Hollywood. There, they wrote “My Favorite Husband,” which featured a young actress named Lucille Ball. When the show moved to television as “I Love Lucy,” starring Ms. Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz, as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, the writers moved with it.
With Jess Oppenheimer, who also produced “I Love Lucy,” Mr. Carroll and Ms. Davis wrote the show’s first four seasons; in Season 5, they were joined by Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf.
The pace was breakneck. A new script had to be ready every Monday morning.
“The very first year of the show, we did it at General Service, which was a little studio in Hollywood,” Ms. Davis said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “They weren’t open on the weekends, so we’d climb over the wall to go to our office.”
Happily for the writers, few ideas were off limits. Most weeks, they approached Ms. Ball to ask her some variation on the following:
Can we tie you to a chair? Roll you in a rug? Hang you out the window? Can we fly you through the air? Put you on stilts? Put four dozen eggs down your blouse? Will you bark like a seal? Work with an elephant? Sing to a sheep?
Can we dip you in chocolate? Coat you in clay? Splatter you with mud? Will you fight with a woman in a vat full of grapes? Work on an out-of-control conveyor belt in a candy factory? Can we put you in handcuffs? Blacken your teeth? Set your nose on fire?
Ms. Ball, resilient, agreed to everything.
Robert Gordon Carroll Jr. was born on Aug. 12, 1918, in McKeesport, Pa., and reared in St. Petersburg, Fla. He attended St. Petersburg Junior College (now St. Petersburg College) before joining CBS.
Though Mr. Carroll and Ms. Davis briefly dated, they both married other people, keeping their professional partnership intact. Among the other shows they worked on were “The Mothers-in-Law” and “Alice.” They also wrote the story for the 1968 film “Yours, Mine and Ours,” starring Ms. Ball and Henry Fonda.
Mr. Carroll, who was divorced twice, is survived by a daughter, Christina Carroll, of Los Angeles.
With Ms. Davis, he wrote a memoir, “Laughing With Lucy: My Life With America’s Leading Lady of Comedy” (Emmis Books, 2005).
Often interviewed about the Golden Age of television, Mr. Carroll was forthright about the changes in the medium since then:
“I’m not too sure about these reality shows,” he told The Daily News of Los Angeles in 2001. “They take 16 contestants, 100 crew, tons of equipment, go to Borneo — and all we had to do was say, ‘Ethel, if Ricky finds out I bought this hat, he’ll kill me.’ ”