Was Ball actually a communist?
The next major crisis featured in Being the Ricardos took place in September 1953, when news of HUAC’s investigation of Ball went public. A House of Representatives committee established in 1938 to look into communist activity in the United States, HUAC initially questioned the actress in April 1952. The following September, the committee brought Ball back in, reportedly to review the statements she’d provided the previous year. After a two-hour interrogation, which was kept private, committee members told Ball that she’d been cleared of any suspected wrongdoing and assured her that her testimony would remain sealed. Two days later, however, Winchell revealed the investigation to his national audience. (“[S]omehow,” writes Brady in Lucille: The Life of Lucille Ball, HUAC “let it leak out.”)
The group’s interest in the comedian stemmed from events that occurred in the mid-1930s. Early in her career, Ball had brought her family, including Fred Hunt, the grandfather who served as her father figure (her own father died when she was a child), out to Hollywood. Hunt “had a very keen sense of social justice based in part on all that he had suffered in his life” as a working man, says Brady. “He believed in [labor organizer and five-time presidential candidate] Eugene V. Debs, socialism and communism. … He told Lucille and her brother to register as communists,” and during a lunch break from filming in 1936, the actress did just that.
Ball attributed her actions to wanting to please her aging, eccentric grandfather. “I didn’t intend to vote that way,” she told investigators. “As I recall, I didn’t. … [But] we didn’t argue with [Fred] very much because he had a couple of strokes and if he got overly excited, why, he would have another one.” The star added, “In those days, [registering as a communist] was not a big, terrible thing to do. It was almost as terrible to be a Republican in those days.”
In addition to the 1936 registration record, HUAC questioned Ball about her purported appointment as a delegate to the Communist State Central Committee by known communist Emil Freed and her membership in the Committee for the First Amendment, a collective of actors and filmmakers formed in support of the “Hollywood Ten,” who were imprisoned and blacklisted in 1947 for refusing to disclose potential communist ties to HUAC. Speaking out at the time, Ball said, “The way to [defend the Constitution] is not by shutting up the man you disagree with.” Years later, she struck a more conciliatory tone, telling HUAC that she had no knowledge of Freed and failing to recall anything about her involvement with the First Amendment committee.