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Loving Lucy, Performing Biography Mary Desjardins (bio) Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball by Stefan Kanfer. Knopf 2003. $15.00 paper. 361 pages Laughing with Lucy: My Life with America's Leading Lady of Comedy by Madelyn Pugh Davis, with Bob Carroll Jr.Clerisy Press 2005. $12.95 paper. 271 pages I Had a Ball: My Friendship with Lucille Ball by Michael Z. Stern. iUniverse.com Books 2011. $18.95 paper. 228 pages Richard deCordova argues that the emergence of the film star out of the "picture personality" happened when the star became understood as possessing "a personality, a love life, and perhaps even a political persuasion."1 Even though media stars since the 1910s have been subjected to intense forms of visual surveillance, deCordova's historical thesis suggests that stars are constituted not only through visualization or imaging but also through textual narration that constructs an individual agent following a life course. Given this [End Page 157] well-argued insight, it is surprising that our discipline has so rarely analyzed the immense industry of biographical writing that has been so crucial to constituting and reconstituting individual performers as stars.2 In fact, many stars, whether dead or alive, remain in public consciousness more as biographical subjects than as performers. Film and Media Studies scholars do analyze the biographical discourses about stars in movie fan-magazine articles or fan blogs. We do check and cite published biographies to confirm (or to point to discrepancies in) dates of birth and employment and for an explanation of how, say, a star's siblings or third husband wasted her life savings. But our collective hesitation to engage in full-scale interrogations of the star biography as a subject in itself is perhaps due not only to our commitment to a Foucauldian notion of authorship as a discursive construct and to a belief that selfhood is enmeshed in a web of social, political, and biological forces and discourses but also to pragmatic questions and concerns about the veracity, speculative conclusions, and motivations of biographies and biographers (questions and concerns that are also pertinent to scholars who use or analyze fan-magazine articles that purport to contain biographical information about stars). Scholars of performance may have additional concerns, or even fundamental questions, regarding the relevance of biographical narrative to assessments of a star's talent or style. Since this review can only make a dent in allaying these valid concerns that support our hesitations about taking biography as one of the primary objects of our scholarship about media stars, I chose to write about three recent, very different, biographies of Lucille Ball: Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball, a "traditional," heavily documented biography written in third-person narration by Stefan Kanfer; Laughing with Lucy: My Life with America's Leading Lady of Comedy, by Madelyn Pugh Davis, one of the lead (and only female) writers for almost all of Ball's broadcast productions; and I Had a Ball: My Friendship with Lucille Ball, by Michael Z. Stern, a memoir by one of Ball's fans who became friends with her in the last fifteen years of her life. Perhaps no other media star has been the subject of such a huge number and variety of biographies, and the recent publicly celebrated one hundredth birthday of Ball—celebrated in media forms ranging from special television news reports to Google's home-page birthday card to the star—reminds us how important biographical "facts" about Ball's marriage and career, and their alleged relationship to her comic performance "genius," are to the media circulation and public discussions that proclaim her value to American history. In other words, there is by now an already-understood aspect to the place of Ball's life and her particular performing talent in American culture, and the variety of biographical publications trying to explain or exploit a relation to that place provide us with the opportunity to examine biographies as narrations of stardom that function as continual reconstitutions of stars' collective meanings, including the meaning of their performances, across historical moments. [End Page 158] The biographical narrative has been central...
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