For decades, it was believed that one of I Love Lucy’s wackiest episodes was even more outrageous than it looked. According to legend, the other woman in the famous grape-stomping scene of “Lucy’s Italian Movie” didn’t speak English, leading to a series of miscommunications that nearly got Lucille Ball killed.
Teresa Tirelli, who Ball claimed on The Dick Cavett Show in 1974 that she found in “one of the grape vineyard areas,” didn’t quite understand the fight choreography, Ball explained, so when Lucy “slipped” and “accidentally” hit her, “she took offense.” The subsequent fight that they had was real, Ball said, leaving her with “grapes up my nose, in my ears” as “she was choking me, and I’m really beating her to get her off.” Eventually, a translator broke up the fight, and Ball was saved from a juicy grave. “To drown in a vat of grapes is not the way I had planned to go,” she quipped.
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Well, according to Gregg Oppenheimer, the son of I Love Lucy writer Jess Oppenheimer, it was a total crock, and not the kind you make wine in. “Any stories you may have heard that the Italian woman in the vat spoke no English, or that Lucy nearly drowned, are simply untrue,” he posted on Facebook in 2024.
Despite Ball’s claims that the actress only showed up that morning, “the fight scene in the grape vat was carefully rehearsed all week,” which makes sense, as Ball was kind of a stickler for details. “The Italian actress, Teresa Tirelli, was a card-carrying SAG member who spoke perfect English,” Oppenheimer continued. “She later appeared on the TV series Dr. Kildare and as a midwife in The Godfather Part II.”
Furthermore, she was an opera singer who had lived in the U.S. for over 30 years and worked in Hollywood for more than a decade. She was found on Wilshire, not wine country.
As for Ball’s lies, Oppenheimer tactfully explained that “one of the traits she shared with Lucy Ricardo was a rich imagination, and sometimes, she used it to embellish her stories, including this one.” In fact, “the only real problem they had with the scene was that, during rehearsals, Lucy’s hair kept going underwater,” he explained. “The prop and makeup people had to find something that wouldn’t leave Lucy with permanently purple hair. At the last minute, they came up with a food coloring that would wash out easily. Problem solved.”
Ball may have been a trailblazer in many respects, but she wasn’t ready to go proto-punk.
