Ball of Fire

'Easily the year's best Hollywood biog.' Independent on Sunday 'Ball Of Fire reveals all about house- wife superstar Lucille Ball. She made the top-rated TV show in America before her husband's serial adulteries practically sunk it.' Sunday Herald To viewers all over the world, Lucille Ball remains the ultimate screwball housewife, getting in and out of outlandish scrapes with hilarous finesse. But Stefan Kanfer's biography looks behind the image, tracing Ball's comedic genius to its beginnings in a lonely childhood in upstate New York. She yearned to make people laugh, to attain stardom and love. Then a Cuban bandleader called Desi came into her life to make her wealthy and famous -- and nearly destroyed her in the process. Kanfer chronicles the runaway success of I Love Lucy, the fiery marriage and eventual split from Desi, and Ball's struggle to manage both a business empire and her own rebellious children. 'A wonderful and poignant book . . . Kanfer portays Lucille Ball as insatiably anxious and insecure, a woman whose search for a father-figure would only ever find the unlikely and unholdable Desi . . . Kanfer pulls no punches over Lucy the pain in the neck but he gives a superb picture of how she and Desi changed television.' David Thomson

Stefan Kanfer is the author of Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball and Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando.He was a writer and editor for Time magazine for more than twenty years. He lives in New York and on Cape Cod.