Inside ‘I Love Lucy’: Meet Lucille Ball’s Close Friend and Frequent TV Sidekick, Mary Jane Croft

Geoffrey refers to Mary Jane as a genuine actress because of what she was able to bring to her performances. “Talking to her personally,” he says, “I asked Mary Jane how, with only her voice,  she was able to play haughty society matrons, lower-middle-class secretaries, judges, and dogs with such great facility. And she said, ‘I wasn’t playing me. I wasn’t one of those actresses who just did versions of myself. I thought about what the backstory of the character might be and invented a voice that would serve that character.’ Which is something she learned being a radio actress.”

“All of those ladies and gentlemen who worked on radio,” he continues, “had one voice that as soon as you heard it, you were laughing, and they could play variations on that character. Like Frank Nelson who became famous for his, ‘Yeees?’ You knew his voice instantly. But Mary Jane was able to change her voice and use it differently to inform the character she was playing. So people like her worked constantly on radio, because they were so versatile and dependable. It’s hard for us to understand today that these men and women in radio would literally run back and forth between CBS and NBC in Hollywood and New York — in New York, they were literally around the corner from one another — so they could play eight, nine or 10 different parts in a week. Some of them who were on soap operas were doing three or four different characters a day on live radio.”

Mary Jane Croft was born February 15, 1916 in Muncie, Indiana. Her career started there as well when she appeared on the stage of the Muncie Civic Theatre. After that, she became a part of the Guild Theatre Company, a stock company based in Cincinnati, Ohio. This led to work at radio station WLW. In a 1957 interview with the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, Mary Jane herself recalled her days working there. “Talk about stock company experience,” she said. “That was it on WLW. For four years, from 1935 to 1939, I played parts with every kind of voice and accent: children, babies, old women, society belles, main street floozies — everything.”

Her extensive credits in radio include Blondie, The Adventures of Sam Spade, Crime Classic, Joan Davis Time, The Mel Blanc Show, Our Miss Brooks and even an appearance on Lucille Ball’s My Favorite Husband, which became the inspiration for I Love Lucy.

Geoffrey notes that when television came along, those actors could no longer just depend on their voices to read. Suddenly looks affected how much work they would get as they could no longer get by with just reading and performing. “Now,” he explains, “you had to memorize the script and have blocking and change costumes and all the other things that resulted in a lot of them working less. But somehow Mary Jane just kept herself working, in the middle of the ’50s going from one thing to another.”

In 1952, Mary Jane made her television debut on the series I Married Joan, which was followed between 1953 and 1955 with four appearances on Our Miss Brooks. Throughout the rest of the 1950s, besides occasional one-off guest starring, she appeared in seven episodes of I Love Lucy, 28 episodes of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet between 1956 and 1966, and every episode of the 1955-1958 series The People’s Choice. “Mary Jane was funny and bitchy on Our Miss Brooks and played three different characters on I Love Lucy and each one for Lucy fans is enormously memorable,” Geoffrey points out. “Her first appearance is as Cynthia Harcourt, an old school chum of Lucy Ricardo back when she was Lucy McGillicuddy. Cynthia was from New England, which makes sense because Lucy is supposed to have come from Jamestown. So in forming the character, she has that Kitty Carlisle/Arlene Francis New England accent, and is not very patient with those who are not in her circle.”

In the pages of The Lucy Book, the actress told Geoffrey, “They wanted someone very haughty and grand for this episode and I guess she [Lucy] liked what I did. There was no way I could have known I’d be working with her again.”

Her next appearance was in the episode “Return Home From Europe” in which, describes Geoffrey, “Lucy is smuggling that cheese on an airplane back from Italy and then the baby becomes a cheese and the cheese becomes a baby and Mary Jane screams, bringing reality to a very almost burlesque situation. She has a moment when she says, ‘What do you mean that wasn’t a baby? I saw it!’ and the way she said, ‘I saw it!’ — well, how many people jump to conclusions about something? She played it perfectly.”

As Mary Jane told Geoffrey in The Lucy Book, “I had a hard time keeping a straight face sitting next to her in the airplane set. When she took a swig of the baby formula, I had to look away. I really loved doing this episode.”

Next up was Mary Jane playing one of the Ricardo’s neighbors after they move to Connecticut, Betty Ramsey, and someone completely different from her first two appearances. Says Geoffrey, “Now she’s playing an upper-middle-class, Westport, Connecticut matron with wonderful taste who believes that she knows how to decorate other people’s houses, has connections with major magazines, her husband — played by Frank Nelson — is an executive at an advertising agency and that’s the way she played it. During this time, she’s also doing dramas on television, guest appearances and then she gets to parts that last quite a while again before she’s back with Lucy. How many people do you know that can work three years playing a dog?”

In The People’s Choice, Jackie Cooper plays former marine and politician Socrates “Sock” Miller, owner of a basset hound named Cleo who offers up commentaries regarding her master to the audience. “This is a sitcom before Mister Ed about a talking dog that only talks to the audience,” details Geoffrey. “They’ve basically trained this dog to do a double-take to the camera and every time shenanigans are going on, Cleo turns to the audience and comments on it. It’s really funny. But Mary Jane, no offense to anybody else who was on the series, is the only reason to watch the show.”

Recalling being cast as the voice of Cleo, Mary Jane said in an interview, “I was called into a recording studio. ‘These are your lines,’ somebody said to me. ‘Read ‘em!’ ‘What’s the person like?’ I asked. ‘Lady,’ I was told, ‘it ain’t a person, it’s a dog.’ I read my lines blindly that day, but I started finding out about this character called Cleo. I decided that she was the Greek chorus — a little blasé, a little worldly, but still a good Joe under her sophistication.”

States Geoffrey, “Concurrently with The People’s Choice, she gets a job on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Her character is Clara Randolph, who was Harriet’s best friend and confidante, and someone she played on and off for nine seasons. Mary Jane found working on Ozzie and Harriet to be a wonderful paycheck, especially for somebody who was unhappily married and raising children. She also tried a couple of TV pilots that didn’t work, and then Lucille Ball decided to come back into television in 1962 with The Lucy Show — and Miss Ball loved to surround herself with people she knew and could trust. So besides Vivian Vance, she surrounded herself with character actresses like Carole Cook, Mary Wickes and Mary Jane Croft.

“In the first year or two of The Lucy Show, her original character was Audrey Simmons,” he adds. “She was a member of the volunteer fire department as was Lucy and Viv. Mary Jane was very funny in it and she was playing a character very similar to Betty Ramsey on I Love Lucy. Eventually they changed the format and Mary Jane stopped being on The Lucy Show, though she continued to be on Ozzie and Harriet. After a while they changed the direction of the show, moving Lucy to Hollywood with no children and working for Mr. Mooney [Gale Gordon]. They brought Mary Jane back as her next door neighbor and best friend, and a replacement for Vivian Vance, playing Mary Jane Lewis, which was her actual married name. So from that point forward with Miss Ball, Lucille was called Lucy, Mary Jane was Mary Jane and, when she would guest star, Vivian was Viv, all of them using their actual first names. She appears quite a lot and is very funny. But now the character she’s playing has this whiny, funny voice that Miss Ball just loved. So she could not only say funny things, but she could say things funny. Even a straight line could come out funny, because of how Mary Jane said it.”

Despite its ratings success, Lucille Ball decided to end The Lucy Show when she sold Desilu Studios to Paramount Pictures. Determined to own the show she was starring in, she then brought to life Lucille Ball Productions and changed the name of the series to Here’s Lucy, though in many ways it was the same show. “The original concept,” says Geoffrey, “is that she was a part-time secretary, full-time mother and that Doris Singleton, another one of her friends with wonderful voices, was going to play the smart secretary who worked in the morning, while Lucy was the dumb secretary who worked in the afternoon. Doris appears in the pilot, but then she’s only there as a guest star after that. So Mary Jane once again plays Mary Jane Lewis in the same basic part.”

He elaborates, “As Lucy’s children grew and they got busy doing other things, Mary Jane’s character got more and more to do and she was, once again, very funny. She was not Vivian Vance, she didn’t have the same theatrical background that Vivian had that she could bring to the show, but because they had dumbed down Lucille’s character, who was not as smart or as worldly as Lucy Ricardo, we now had two singles ladies, well into middle age, who didn’t have much of an education. For whatever reason, Mary Jane Lewis never got married, but she was looking.”

Following Here’s Lucy’s cancellation in 1974, the only subsequent acting role that Mary Jane plays is in a 1977 TV special titled Lucy Calls the President, which Geoffrey refers to as “the last hurrah.” He explains, “Although Miss Ball will again play the Lucy character almost 10 years later on Life with Lucy, this is the last show for Lucille Ball, Vivian Vance, Gale Gordon and Mary Jane Croft to all work together. They were what was left of the real core of Lucy people. Vivian found out she had cancer shortly before the show was shot. Lucille’s mother had just died; in fact, they had to reshoot the opening of the show, because Miss Ball broke down crying over the fact that her mother wasn’t in the audience. She yelled, ‘Cut!’ and walked into the audience to hug Eve Arden, who was sitting there. This just wasn’t a happy shoot. And that was the last thing that Mary Jane did.

“She’d been married to Elliott Lewis, who had a lovely income. Elliott was producing Petticoat Junction and other shows, so she chose to retire. She never worked with Ms. Ball again.”

Mary Jane was briefly married to Jack Zoller, though they divorced. Their son, Eric, was killed in action during the Vietnam War. In 1959, she married Elliott Lewis and was with him until his death in 1990. She herself died on August 24, 1999 of natural causes at the age of 83.

When considering her legacy, Geoffrey suggests that the odds are strong that Mary Jane’s talents wouldn’t have been appreciated by modern-day Hollywood. “If you go on a television show today, whether it’s broadcast, cable or streaming, and play a character, unless you’re coming back as that character, you’re not seen again. Back then, though, you could come on two, three or four times a year playing different characters. And as long as you were able to make them different and funny, they hired you, because they could count on you and you had a good rapport with the regular cast. I don’t see that anymore. That is a big change for actors in show business, especially on television.

“On I Love Lucy,” concludes Geoffrey, “there were other actors they could have brought in who could have played her part, but Mary Jane got it because of her ability to create something that Miss Ball could count on. Miss Ball counted on her to be able to deliver the goods as best she could from any of the scripts she was given, because on The Lucy Show and Here’s Lucy, some of the scripts weren’t nearly as wonderful as the earlier ones had been. She did the best that she could with them and delivered. I never saw Mary Jane Croft not be good or not deliver, even when the scripts were a little soggy, the foundations not strong, Mary Jane, much like Miss Ball, gave her all. And that was enough. Why else would we be talking about her?”