Rant #2,785: Baby Love

Boy, have things changed in our world.
 
We can talk about just about anything today in popular entertainment, and I do mean just about everything, sexual or otherwise.
 
But it wasn’t always that way, and today is a significant anniversary in the annals of what you could and could not talk about on television way back when.
 
On December 8, 1952—or 69 years ago today, with "69" being the operative number in a somewhat lascivious way—TV’s first acknowledged pregnancy was showcased on the CBS TV show “I Love Lucy.”
 
In the second-season episode of perhaps the greatest situation comedy of all time, “Lucy is Enceinte” finally acknowledged the fact that while shooting this episode, Lucille Ball was pregnant, and her character, Lucy Ricardo, followed suit.
 
But understand this: while Lucy Ball/Ricardo was pregnant, that word was never mentioned on this particular show, or any show in the pregnancy arc of the sitcom.
 
You just could not say “pregnant” on network TV, because the connotation of a chaste, though married woman having had a sexual encounter with her husband to produce a pregnancy would have thrown advertisers for a tilt—
 
Even though in this case, Lucy was pregnant and the father was her real-life husband at the time, and her sitcom co-star, Desi Arnaz.
 
So even though Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz did what came naturally to them in their marriage—and Lucy Ricardo and Ricky Ricardo did what came naturally to them in their sitcom marriage—sponsors absolutely frowned upon any mention of pregnancy in the shows that they backed, so the word “pregnancy” was literally verboten in these shows.
 
When Arnaz and Ball found out that they were going to be real-life parents, they thought that their show would be canceled or put on hiatus, because you simply could not have an obviously pregnant actress on the show in any capacity, and in particular, as the star of the show.
 
But they and their writers found a way around this touchy subject.
 
Using the word “Enceinte” in the title of the episode allowed the show’s writers to kind of get around the use of the word “pregnant,” because how many people know what "enceinte" means to begin with?

Not only that, but one of the definitions of this word—beyond its use in military parlance as “a boundary or fortress enclosing a defended area”--is actually “with child,” according to just about any dictionary you would look the word up in.
 
As you remember the episode, Lucy and Ricky pussyfoot around her medical condition for almost the entire episode, and then it progresses to Ricky being told that someone in the audience at his club is with child.
 
He goes around from table to table looking to serenade the lucky couple—even going to a table of a married couple who probably had their children 50 years before—but he cannot find any of the couples who is in that situation.
 
Than his eyes go to his wife, who is sitting in the audience, and lo and behold, she gives him the “yes” sign, and he realizes that his wife is the one with the big surprise, and that he is going to be a daddy for the first time.
 
It is really a classic television episode, even though in real life, the Arnazes had already become parents a few years earlier with Lucie; the pregnancy outlined on the show was actually that of Desi Jr., who on the show, eventually became the character “Little Ricky” and was played by Richard Keith Thibideaux, a drumming prodigy who later figured in the show’s storyline as an older version of Ricky Ricardo Jr.
 
But whatever the case, the word “pregnant” was never uttered on the show, nor any other show, probably until the late 1960s on another popular CBS sitcom.
 
On the September 25, 1968 episode of “My Three Sons,” the character of Katie Douglas—played by Tina Cole—is not feeling right as she does her household chores.
 
Her husband Robbie Douglas—played by Don Grady—finds her resting on the couch, and Katie claims she is just tired, but Katie eventually goes to the doctor, who confirms that she is pregnant—and the word “pregnant” is actually used in the dialogue of the show.
 
And of course, this led to one of the long-running show’s major story arcs, where Katie is pregnant with—you guessed it—triplets.
 
This show’s pregnancy episode was preceded by five years by another popular primetime TV show’s pregnancy episode, that being ABC’s “The Flintstones” episode from 1963 where Wilma is knitting baby booties and acknowledges that she is “going to have a baby,” which became a daughter, Pebbles, but that is as far as it gets, as the writers were sensitive that this was a show watched by many children, and sponsors were sensitive to what was represented on a cartoon show like this.
 
This was followed by a 1965 episode of ABC’s “Bewitched,” where star Elizabeth Montgomery’s own second pregnancy was capitalized on as part of the show’s storyline, leading to a daughter, Tabitha, eventually joining the cast, but I don’t believe the word “pregnant” was used in the dialogue, although I could admittedly be wrong about that, but it certainly wasn’t used as part of the everyday dialogue of “My Three Sons” a few years later.
 
Some TV historians actually claim that NBC’s “Star Trek,” of all shows, was the first network TV show to use the word “pregnant” in its dialogue.
 
In the season 2 episode, on December 29, 1967, 'The Trouble With Tribbles," Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, asks Dr. McCoy, played by DeForest Kelley, about the proliferation of these furry balls on the ship, and Bones tells him something to the effect, “They are born pregnant, which saves a lot of time.”
 
The use of that word was supposedly cut out of another earlier episode, but this time, it slipped through this show—and by the way, “Star Trek” was a Desilu—meaning Lucy and Desi—production!
 
But the word was uttered five years earlier in CBS’s “The Dick Van Dyke Show” episode “Never Name a Duck,” but it was used in reference to a cat, not a human being.
 
So I am going to go with the “My Three Sons” episode as at least the first time the word “pregnant” was used as a matter of happenstance, referring to a human being carrying a child … in this case, three of them.
 
It is just incredible that the use of the word “pregnant,” and even actually being pregnant in real life, was such a to do way back when on network television, but it was just that, even thought to be somewhat scandalous during the time of the Victorian 1950s.

In fact, I believe that the first actress who had to shield her real-life pregnancy on the TV show that she appeared in was Gloria Henry, who played Dennis' mom on the "Dennis the Menace" sitcom. Henry was pregnant during part of the show's second season, but did not really show until the end of her pregnancy. When she finally started to show, she was written out of a few episodes, supposedly away caring for one of her parents, who was sick.

This type of situation reached its absolute zenith in the late 1960s when Sally Field, very obviously pregnant on the third season of "The Flying Nun," was given more flowing robes to wear, was shot behind rocks to hide her bump, and when possible, was shown using stock footage, all so as to not show her with child ... a nun that was pregnant????? 
 
But going back to the 1950s, there were definite cracks in that Victorian way of living, what with Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Hugh Hefner and Elvis Presley all demonstrating in their own way that the top button on the shirt needed to be opened at least a little bit so our society could breathe.
 
Of course, the Baby Boomers took that thinking to the next extreme, but one could say that Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were just as important to the loosening of the strings of the 1950s as Presley and Hefner and the others I mentioned were.
 
And it all started with such a natural thing as a pregnancy… heck, without pregnancy, none of us would be here,, but on network TV, you would have thought that the proverbial stork brought us all here!