The Funeral and Casket Details of Lucille Ball

Introduction

Lucille Ball died on 26 April 1989, eight days after emergency surgery on her aorta, at the age of 77. She had been a fixture of American television since 1951, and anyone expecting a Hollywood farewell on that scale got nothing of the kind. There was no funeral, no viewing, no memorial service, no procession and no public gathering of any sort.

What happened instead was three people in a room, at her own request. She was cremated, her ashes were interred beside her mother in Los Angeles, and it took another fourteen years for her to reach the town she was born in.

The Life and Legacy of Lucille Ball

She was born on 6 August 1911 in Jamestown, New York, and the official Hollywood Walk of Fame record still lists it as her birthplace. She made the pilot of I Love Lucy with her husband Desi Arnaz in 1951 and talked CBS into airing it. The show then ruled the airwaves until 1957, by which time the number of American homes with a television set had quadrupled. Its highest rated episode was "Lucy Goes to the Hospital", broadcast the night she gave birth to their son Desi Arnaz Jr. She has two stars on the Walk of Fame, one for motion pictures at 6436 Hollywood Boulevard and one for television at 6100, and both were dedicated on the same day, 8 February 1960.

In 1962 she became the first woman to run a major television studio, taking control of Desilu Productions, which went on to make Mission: Impossible and Star Trek. The Television Academy records four Emmy wins from thirteen nominations. In 1986 she received the Kennedy Center Honors, a week after Desi Arnaz died, and Robert Stack accepted the tribute to Arnaz on his behalf and read a line from his autobiography in which he called her the show and himself a prop.

The News of Lucille Ball's Passing

Parade puts her last public appearance at the Academy Awards on 29 March 1989, where she and Bob Hope introduced a segment on younger performers. Less than three weeks later she had severe chest pains, and on 18 April surgeons at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles replaced a torn five inch section of the aorta near her heart along with a weakened aortic valve. They left the rest of the artery alone because they did not believe she would survive a longer operation. Hospital spokesman Ronald Wise said afterwards that she had been improving steadily.

Shortly after four in the morning on Wednesday 26 April the aorta gave way again, this time in the abdominal section, more than ten inches from the part that had been repaired. Staff worked on her for about an hour in intensive care before she was pronounced dead. Her surgeons, Robert Kass and Aurelio Chaux, spoke to reporters about fifteen hours later and described an acute aortic dissection, the layers of the artery separating and the weakened wall finally rupturing, and said the whole aorta had been weak because that is the nature of the disease. The hospital said the death had come suddenly and without warning.

The Funeral Arrangements for Lucille Ball

There was no funeral at all. Her husband Gary Morton said afterwards that he and her two children, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr., had said goodbye to her privately over the weekend following her death, and that she had asked for it to be just the three of them with no clergyman present. There were just the three of us, he said, and you could not really call it a service. He would not say where it had taken place.

In place of a service, Lucie Arnaz said three Roman Catholic Masses would be held in her mother's memory on Monday 8 May, at churches in Santa Monica, New York and Chicago. Nothing was announced in advance and nothing was opened to the public, which is the same decision Diane Keaton's family made in 2025, and close to the one Audrey Hepburn's sons made in 1993, when about 120 people were let into a village church in Switzerland and everybody else stood outside in the road.

The Casket Details of Lucille Ball

There was no casket. Lucille Ball was cremated, and her ashes were placed in an urn and interred beside her mother at Forest Lawn in Los Angeles, under a small bronze plaque carrying her married name and her own. No maker, model, material or finish for that urn has ever been made public, and with a cremation arranged entirely in private it is unlikely that it ever will be. The urn is on the record at all only because it was moved again fourteen years later.

For a cremation, that silence is normal rather than strange. A casket becomes public knowledge when it is carried into a church in front of cameras, which is the only reason the celebrity casket types used at famous funerals are known at all. Audrey Hepburn's family gave up two words, an oak coffin, and nothing further. Jane Goodall's urn was at least seen, standing under a white cloth on the altar at Washington National Cathedral in 2025, and Kelly Preston's family released nothing whatsoever. A cremation urn handled in private leaves nothing to describe.

Attendees and Eulogies

Three people attended, and at her own request no clergyman did. Gary Morton, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr. were the only mourners, and because there was no service there were no eulogies, no readings and no music. For a woman whose working life was spent in front of an audience of millions, the audience at the end was her husband and her two children.

The words spoken publicly came from Washington instead. On 27 April 1989, the day after she died, Representative Moakley rose in the House of Representatives to pay tribute to her, saying that the entire world loves Lucy and mourns her loss, and that she had kept the nation and the world entertained for more than half a century. The tribute is printed in the Congressional Record for that day, at page 7589.

The Impact on Fans and the Industry

With no funeral to go to, the public response gathered around the three Masses and around Jamestown. United Press International reported that the town marks Ball and Arnaz with a Lucy-Desi festival every May, and it was still doing so fourteen years after her death. Jamestown is also where her hometown museum sits, and where, in time, she would end up herself.

Her own industry had handed her most of its honours while she was alive. The Television Academy put her in its Hall of Fame in 1984, five years before she died, and its records credit her with a Governors Award in 1989. What nobody in that industry could do in April 1989 was attend a service, because her family had not arranged one.

Legacy and Remembering Lucille Ball

Her ashes stayed in California for more than a decade. By 2002 her children were planning to move them, and in November 2003 United Press International reported that the urn had been taken from its place beside her mother's at Forest Lawn and carried to Jamestown. Lucie Arnaz said her mother had wanted to be buried with her own mother, and told friends at a charity benefit that she knew she was happier there because she loved the seasons. Lucille Ball now lies in Lake View Cemetery in Jamestown, among other members of her family, and the Times Observer reports that visitors find her by following red hearts painted along the cemetery road.

The one part of all this she settled herself was the shape of the goodbye, and her family held to it exactly. Others went further and wrote it down. Elizabeth Taylor left instructions that her own funeral should begin fifteen minutes late, and Luke Perry chose the biodegradable suit he was buried in, down to the fabric. Taylor had chosen the casket years ahead; Perry had written the instruction down and told his family about it.

Conclusion

Tom Shales called her television's biggest star in the Washington Post the week she died. She was seen off by three people, she had asked for exactly that, and her family did not add a thing to it. The only ceremony anyone else got was three Masses in three cities and a minute on the floor of the House.

Her resting place took far longer to settle than her farewell did. Burt Reynolds waited more than two years to be interred, George Foreman was buried a thousand miles from the city that held his memorial, and Steve Jobs lies under no marker at all. Lucille Ball took fourteen years to travel the width of the country, and she got to Jamestown in the end, which is where her daughter said she had always wanted to be.

Sources

• United Press International, "No way to save Lucy, doctors say", 27 April 1989
• United Press International, "Lucille Ball's remains moved", 28 November 2003
• United Press International, "Lucy and Desi", 8 December 1986
• Associated Press, "Lucille Ball, queen of comedy, dies", 28 April 1989
• Deseret News, "Lucy's husband, children hold own, private memorial", 2 May 1989
• Tom Shales, The Washington Post, "Lucy, television's biggest star", 29 April 1989
• Congressional Record, House of Representatives, 27 April 1989, page 7589
• Hollywood Walk of Fame, official star record for Lucille Ball
• Television Academy, official biography and awards record for Lucille Ball
• Smithsonian Institution, Archives Center, Marilyn E. Jackler Memorial Collection
• Parade, "Lucille Ball's final TV appearance"
• Times Observer, "Final resting place: Ball reinterred in Jamestown in 2003"
• News On 6, "Lucille Ball's remains may move", 19 March 2002

Image credits

• The plaque marking Lucille Ball's original resting place at Forest Lawn in Los Angeles, 1990. Photograph by Alan Light, published on Flickr and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en