Look Loves Lucy

“You said you came from a small town. This is the most people I ever saw,” Desi Arnaz quipped to Lucille Ball at the start of an April 17, 1956 article in Look Magazine. Photographer Charlotte Brooks had been assigned by Look to cover Ball’s return to her hometown of Jamestown, New York, where the couple premiered their new movie, “Forever Darling.” Today, in honor of Ball’s birthday, we’re featuring a selection of the unpublished photographs taken on that trip.

The Look Magazine Photograph Collection is a treasure trove of mid-twentieth-century images. When the magazine, which launched in 1937, closed in 1971, the publishers donated its photographic archive to the Library of Congress. The collection of nearly five million items includes black-and-white contact sheets and negatives, as well as color slides and transparencies.

For her story on Lucy and Desi, Brooks shot fifty-six rolls of black-and-white film and sixteen color slides. Ten of the images were published in the final magazine spread. The contact sheets provide us with the opportunity to examine the images that were not selected for publication.

Zooming in on frame number twenty of this roll of film, we see just a sliver of the 25,000 people who lined the streets to warmly welcome Lucy home on a cold, rainy day.

The trip included a stop at Lucy’s childhood home, where she visited with the current residents.

In addition to the work by Charlotte Brooks in the Look collection, the Prints & Photographs Division also holds the photographer’s own archive, which includes her pre- and post-Look photographic work, magazine tear sheets, personal photographs, and papers, including the notebooks she carried during Look assignments. Here we see some of the photographer’s notes as she follows Lucy through the house, pointing to the stairs she used to sneak up and saying something rather indecipherable about a bar and putting on plays [perhaps “Here’s the bar for the parties where I used to put on plays”?].

Does this note explain the picture below? I, for one, am imagining a young Lucy hanging curtains from this bar to set the stage for living room plays.

While in Jamestown, Lucy and Desi also stopped into a local hospital, threw a party for old friends, and made a few four-legged friends.

The photo shoot included both extremely public situations and quite intimate moments.

Look’s office logbooks show Brooks shot some 650 stories over her twenty years as the magazine’s only female staff photographer. This story must have held special significance for her. Paging through a folder labeled “Notes for Memoir 1,” I gasped out loud when I stumbled across this telegram from Lucille Ball to Charlotte Brooks:

Archival research can be such a thrill! We promise we’ll never judge a joyous gasp of discovery in the reading room. In fact, we’ll probably cheer you on.

 

Happy birthday, Lucy!

Learn More:

• View all of the digitized images from Look Job 56-6486, Lucy Comes Home.
• Learn more about the Look Magazine Photograph Collection and the Charlotte Brooks Archive.