I mean, you had Eve Arden in a brief cameo, Shelia MacRae in what also basically amounted to a cameo and Hedda Hopper. It would have been great to have had an episode with Marilyn Monroe or Katharine Hepburn or someone. Maybe they just figured the male stars would be a bigger draw.
shareExcellent question. My thought is that it boiled down to good old-fashioned sex. Lucy wanted to "sit and drool" over Richard Widmark, whom she found "dreamy." And all the other male stars - with the obvious exception of Harpo Marx - were handsome.
Sheila MacRae was a minor celebrity. Monroe was too busy and waaay too insecure to have handled a pressure-filled week on ILL. Hepburn would've looked down her nose at TV then and, anyway, she and Ball didn't get on, dating back to 1937's "Stage Door."
One star who might've taken the bite is Ginger Rogers. She and Lucy were friends...both sharing a common enemy: Hepburn.
Oh interesting, I didn't know her and Hepburn had a bad history like that. And yeah, I guess using Marilyn wouldn't have been practical, I was just throwing a name out there. Maybe somebody like Anne Baxter would have been a good choice.
shareMaybe they didn't have them under contract. I believe back then that studios locked you into contracts and you couldn't work for a competitor.
shareAll the male stars who appeared on ILL had different contracts with various studios. If the producers wanted female stars, they could've gotten some, especially since the highly rated ILL gave great exposure and promotion of the stars' latest films. For whatever reason, they went with male celebrities.
shareI used to wonder about that myself, but then I realized as Gary wrote, it was more fun to see Lucy drool over the top male Hollywood stars. She probably wouldn't have had the same desire to hunt down female stars.
And it was pretty obvious that Lucy was jealous of Ricky's female co-stars in ( the eventually shelved) Don Juan. I don't think Lucy would've wanted glamorous women too close to Ricky. In the European arc she had a major jealous fit over the actress Angela Randall and she wasn't even a gorgeous glamour girl.