Happy birthday, Lucille Ball: Looking good for 100

Lucille Ball, the long-stemmed looker born August 6, 1911, came to Hollywood when she was 22. For two decades. mostly at RKO Pictures, she was cast as dime-a-dance dames, b-girls and burlesque queens, ever the wisecracker, never the star. But she had the last laugh. In the early 1950s, the studios lived in dread of television, refusing to sell their old films for broadcast or permit their stars to appear on the small screen, Ball and her husband, bandleader Desi Arnaz, took their radio show to television, renaming it I Love Lucy. Five years later, she and Arnaz bought the RKO real estate holding for their thriving TV studio, DesiLu.