William Frawley

The I Love Lucy cast (clockwise): William Frawley, Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball, Vivian Vance

By 1951, the 64-year-old Frawley had appeared in over 100 movies, but was starting to find film role offers becoming fewer. When he heard that Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball were casting a new television situation comedy, he applied eagerly to play the role of the cantankerous, miserly landlord Fred Mertz. One evening, he telephoned Lucille Ball, asking her what his chances were. Ball was surprised to hear from him, a man she barely knew. Both Ball and Arnaz agreed it would be great to have Frawley, a motion-picture veteran, appear as Fred Mertz. Less enthusiastic were CBS executives, who were wary of Frawley's well-known frequent drinking and instability. Arnaz warned Frawley about the network's concerns, telling him that if he was late to work, arrived drunk, or was unable to perform because of something other than legitimate illness more than once, he would be written out of the show. In one version of this conversation, Arnaz told Frawley he would get three chances. The first screw-up would be tolerated, the second would result in a severe reprimand, and the third would result in his being fired. Contrary to the network's concerns, Frawley never arrived at work drunk, and mastered his lines after only one reading. Arnaz eventually became one of Frawley's few close friends.

Before each episode, Frawley would read the script with the rest of the cast, then would take out the sheets with only his lines and discard the rest of the script to study only his part.[7]

I Love Lucy debuted October 15, 1951, on CBS, and was a huge success. The series was broadcast for six years as half-hour episodes, later changing to hour-long specials from 1957 to 1960 titled The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show (later retitled The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour).[6]

Vivian Vance played Ethel Mertz, Frawley's on-screen wife. Although the two actors worked well together, they greatly disliked each other. Most attribute their mutual hatred to Vance's vocal resentment of having to play wife to a man 22 years her senior. Frawley reportedly overheard Vance complaining; he took offense and never forgave her. "She's one of the finest girls to come out of Kansas", he once observed, "But I often wish she'd go back there."[8]

An avid New York Yankees baseball fan, Frawley had it written into his I Love Lucy contract that he did not have to work during the World Series if the Yankees were playing. The Yankees were in every World Series during that time except for 1954 and 1959. He did not appear in two episodes of the show as a result.[9]

For his work on the show, Frawley was Emmy-nominated five consecutive times (1953–1957) for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a comedy series. In 1957, at the end of I Love Lucy, Ball and Arnaz gave Frawley and Vance the opportunity to have their own Fred and Ethel spin-off series for Desilu Studios. Despite his animosity towards her, Frawley saw a lucrative opportunity and accepted. Vance declined, having no desire to work with Frawley again and also feeling that Ethel and Fred would be unsuccessful without the Ricardos.[10]

While appearing on My Three Sons, Frawley was the subject of This Is Your Life in January 1961. He received a lifetime baseball pass from the Angels' Fred Haney. Fred MacMurray also was part of the show.

Frawley next joined the cast of the ABC (later CBS) situation comedy My Three Sons, playing live-in grandfather and housekeeper Michael Francis (sometimes, as in "What's Cooking?", William Francis), then "Bub" O'Casey beginning in 1960. Featuring Fred MacMurray, the series was about a widower raising his three sons.

Clockwise from left: William Frawley, Tim Considine, Fred MacMurray, Don Grady, and Stanley Livingston on My Three Sons (1962)

Frawley reportedly never felt comfortable with the out-of-sequence filming method used for My Three Sons after doing I Love Lucy in sequence for years. Each season was arranged so that main actor Fred MacMurray could film all of his scenes during two separate intensive blocks of filming for a total of 65 working days on the set; Frawley and the other actors worked around the absent MacMurray for the remainder of the year's production schedule.

William Frawley is buried in the San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Mission Hills, Los Angeles. For his achievements in the field of motion pictures, he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6322 Hollywood Blvd, on February 8, 1960.[16][19] He is memorialized, as well, in the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center in Jamestown, New York, which also contains his "Hippity-Hoppity" (frog) costume from an episode of I Love Lucy. Both Frawley and Vivian Vance were inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in March 2012.[20][21][22]

The story of how Desi Arnaz hired Frawley to play Fred Mertz in I Love Lucy is told in I Love Lucy: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Sitcom, a stage comedy that had its world premiere in Los Angeles on July, 12, 2018. The play, from Gregg Oppenheimer (son of I Love Lucy creator-producer-head writer Jess Oppenheimer), was recorded in front of a live audience for nationwide public radio broadcast and online distribution, and starred Sarah Drew as Lucille Ball and Oscar Nunez as Desi Arnaz.[23] BBC Radio 4 broadcast a serialized version of the play in the UK in August 2020, as Lucy Loves Desi: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Sitcom, in which Stacy Keach portrayed Frawley, Anne Heche played Lucille Ball, and Wilmer Valderrama played Desi Arnaz.[24]

Frawley was portrayed by John Wheeler in the television movie Lucy & Desi: Before the Laughter. Thirty years later he was portrayed in the 2021 film Being the Ricardos by J. K. Simmons, who received an Academy Award nomination for his role.[25]

• Bill Frawley Sings the Old Ones (1958) Dot DLP-3061