Lucy's Final Resting Place: A Quandary

By Stephen M. Silverman

Wednesday March 20, 2002 01:00 PM EST

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The ashes of TV's favorite redhead, Lucille Ball, who died in 1989 at the age of 77, could be in for a little traveling -- which actually sounds like something that might have happened to her TV persona, Lucy Ricardo. (Remember the time Lucy tried to smuggle a cheese from Switzerland through U.S. customs?) That is, Ball's daughter, Lucie Arnaz, 50, said she would like to see the remains of her mother and grandmother -- Lucille Ball's mom, "Dee Dee" Evelyn Ball -- transferred from their current (and adjacent) resting places at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in California's Hollywood Hills to the Lake View Cemetery, which is about two miles from the Lucy-Desi Museum in Jamestown, N.Y., the birthplace of lovable Lucy, reports the Associated Press. "It would be a nice finishing touch," Arnaz (whose father was Ball's first husband, the late Desi Arnaz) told the AP. Other Ball family members are in Jamestown, though a Forest Lawn spokeswoman has told the New York Post that, so far, no one has made any inquiries about moving the remains. On the other hand, some who knew Lucy have chimed in about the idea -- and feel strongly against it. "I think she'd be a little alarmed," "I Love Lucy" writer Madelyn Pugh Davis, now in her 70s, told the Post, adding that Ball "didn't like a big fuss made over her." "Lucy" director William Asher, 80, concurred, telling the paper, "I don't think she'd approve of the idea of being moved." On a more upbeat note, Lucie Arnaz and her younger brother, Desi Jr., 49, are reportedly bidding on their mother's girlhood home in upstate New York, which recently was put up for sale on eBay with an asking price of $98,500.