Lucille Ball: Chart Activation after Death, Venus retrograde in Capricorn conjunct Pluto.

Lucille Ball is one of the most famous Americans of the 20th century. There was a time in the 1950s when she was the most recognizable face in the world. Her television show, I Love Lucy, was pioneering and revolutionary in inventing and developing many industry standards that we now take for granted. She and her husband, Desi Arnaz, broke new ground by filming the show using three 35 mm film cameras (still used today), which enabled the show to be recorded in much higher quality (thus inventing the rerun) instead of the inferior process of kinescope in standard use at the time. It was the first ensemble sitcom; it was the first mixed race sitcom; it had the first TV pregnancy; and it was filmed in front of a live studio audience to get more authentic reactions, rather than canned recorded laughter.

Lucy and Desi were the first husband and wife team to form their own television production company (Desilu Productions) and later bought RKO studios, thus establishing them as a major and powerful film studio to rival MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount, 20th Century Fox and Columbia. Desilu would go on to produce such hits and groundbreaking shows as Twilight Zone, Mission Impossible, The Untouchables, Make Room for Daddy, The Andy Griffith Show and countless others that used their production company for filming. After their marriage dissolved, Lucy bought out Desi Arnaz of his shares and became the first woman to run a major Hollywood studio. She proved herself to be a very adept business woman. She was groundbreaking, pioneering, as well as being one of the most brilliant comediennes of our time. She is without argument the first lady of comedy and paved the way for everyone to come after. 

Lucille Ball was born on August 6, 1911 at 5:00 p.m., Jamestown, New York. (From Birth Registry, Kathleen Brady, AA, Lois Rodden AstroData Bank.)

A rounded off birth time is always a little suspect, but in going through some major life events, there is one in particular that really stands out to help pinpoint this time. Her second child Desi Arnaz Jr. was born on January 19, 1953. On exactly the same day Ball gave birth to Desi Jr., the fictional Lucy Ricardo gave birth to “Little Ricky.” As a testament to how interested the American public was in Lucy's TV baby, Arnaz appeared on the cover of the very first issue of TV Guide with the headline “Lucy's $50,000,000 baby.” The episode “Lucy Goes to the Hospital” was watched by more people than any other television program up to that time, with 71.7% of all American television sets tuned in, topping the 67.7 rating for the inauguration coverage of President Dwight D. Eisenhower the following morning. The revelatory transit to Lucy’s chart on this day has Saturn at 27.03° Libra conjunct her MC at 27.01° Libra. I’d say that is a pretty amazing timing for an exalted public event that has a major influence on her career, status and public image. In the natal chart, Saturn sits in the 5th house of children (hence her difficulty in conceiving and having children later in life, she was 42 at the time), so the transit brings 5th house imagery to the 10th. Also, the transiting South Node on the day of the birth is at 13.05° Leo, and Lucy’s Sun is 13.17°.

A brief analysis of Lucy’s chart reveals interesting insights. Yes, she was a Leo (the clown) but the Sun is in the 8th house, generally a weak and hidden position, behind the scenes and slow to activate. Lucy didn’t become famous as a comedienne and the world’s funniest clown until she was 40 years old. That’s rather late, especially for a woman in Hollywood.

The Sun is in a powerful t-square with Mars/Saturn and Jupiter. Mars/Saturn/Jupiter are in very favorable houses, so they push that 8th house into the spotlight after much hardship, effort, mistakes and diligent effort. It took a long, long time for Lucy the Clown to come out of the hidden and inactive energy of the 8th house, and it was only after years of being pushed by Mars/Saturn, along with some grace from Jupiter, that she uncovered the hidden and buried treasure of an 8th house, dignified Sun. It helped that Saturn rules the 1st house and the Moon, so it was Lucy herself (along with her mother) that did all the pushing and supporting.  
The Sun represents the most important men in our life, beginning with our father. The Sun in the 8th house afflicted by the malefics Mars and Saturn is indicative of several things: Lucy's father died of typhoid fever at age 27, when Ball was only three. Her mother remarried and she was separated from them for a two-year period. She had an intense sense of abandonment. Her grandfather then became the most important figure in her life afterwards, and she adored him to the point of registering as a communist in 1935 just to please him. That would come back to haunt her, almost destroying her career in 1953.

At 15 there was an accidental shooting incident involving her grandfather and the death of an 8-year-old neighborhood boy. The boy was paralyzed and in a wheelchair the rest of his life, and died five years after the accident. Lucy’s family was ostracized, ruined financially and run out of town. It was a defining moment in her youth. In the first decade of her life, she lost her father, grandmother, was separated from her mother for two years, lived in eight different places and the family dealt with financial ruin and breakups. That was a lot of grief and hardship in a young girl’s life.

As a young woman Lucy was wild, bossy, attention seeking, liked men and had a penchant for hooking up with mobsters and nefarious 8th house types of men. Her husband, Desi Arnaz, although the love of her life, was an alcoholic and serial cheater. The squares from the malefics in the 5th and Jupiter in the 11th forced her to channel that Leo Sun’s craving for attention into her creative and artistic pursuits, and she eventually turned those hardships around into something productive, as the t-square involves the houses of good spirit and good fortune.  

The Capricorn Moon rising was so important in her identifying with family, motherhood, as well as with challenge, extreme hard work and her need for structure, control and discipline in order to feel secure. She always was extremely obsessed with the pursuit of building familial and marital security. She went to great extremes to achieve both. She always said that being a mother and having family was the most important thing to her, and when she became a success, she turned her TV series into a family affair. She surrounded herself with her blood family and TV family every chance she could get. She was a self-admitted workaholic. Being a mother was as important to her as being a star. Her life was all about building structure through family and career.

She has two grand trines in Earth, which gave her that supreme gift for physical comedy, common sense and the ability to make lots of money. She was practical, serious, no nonsense and she NEVER considered herself to be naturally funny. If you watch her behavior outside the “Lucy” character, what you see is that Capricorn Moon ruled by Saturn. She was very earthy! Saturn became so vastly important to her overall personality because it rules the Ascendant and the Moon and sits in the 5th house conjunct Mars, while both square the Sun. She was deadly serious about her art and work. She was harsh, tough, ambitious, and I would say greatly motivated out of fear. Let’s not forget that Capricorn is the sign of time, and all comedians need a good sense of timing to be successful. There is so much more one can say about this chart, but I’ll stop there. 

Speaking of timing, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz are big news again as the highly anticipated movie Being the Ricardos, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, was released on December 10, 2021—a week before Venus turned retrograde in Capricorn and exactly conjunct transiting Pluto. Venus was firmly in her first shadow at that point, so the effects of the impending retrograde would have been stimulated. Why is Lucy making such a comeback right now? Venus retrograde in conjunction with transiting Pluto is happening in Lucille Ball’s first house. Her identity and image is being resurrected, analyzed, resuscitated and transformed as her story is being retold and reinterpreted. She is literally being brought back from the dead! Venus retrograde is always about harkening back to past relationship issues.

This is a revisiting and retelling of her marriage to Desi Arnaz and a behind the scenes look not of Lucy and Ricky, but Lucille and Desi. This movie deconstructs their marriage and gives us a psychological look on how they struggled to stay together and in the process built an empire. Lucy embodies the Venus retrograde in Capricorn archetype of a creative woman as an institution and part of our tradition, legacy and past. The Venus retrograde conjunct Pluto digs up the past and reinterprets, rebalances, recalibrates and restructures our image of this institution and woman, who has shaped the foundation of the television industry and eventually became the gold standard by which everything else is compared. This is the time to re-evaluate her achievements. 

The show is not about destroying Lucy’s image but transforming it and allowing us to see something richer, deeper, more psychologically complex about a woman that we “think” we know. The public only knows the image of Lucy the Clown, and this show is about exposing Lucille Ball the woman. The Venus/Pluto is conjunct her natal Uranus, which enables us to reverse our perceptions, as well as opposing natal Neptune in the 7th, allowing us to see past, dissolve and transcend the outer image of who she was vis-a-vis the marriage. It’s interesting to note that both Uranus and Neptune square her MC and she came before the public eye via film (Neptune) and television (Uranus). 

The Venus/Pluto transit also squares her MC, so it actively brings this revisionist story to the attention of the public. The approaching transit of Uranus to her natal Saturn/Mars conjunction in the 5th squaring her 8th house Sun is also responsible for the enlightenment and shocking revelations of the woman on a deeper level and the creative power that she unleashed. Finally, transiting Saturn in Aquarius fills out the empty leg of her natal t-square, forming a grand square for the next year. She’s unmasked to show us the woman behind the image. This is not about destroying our love of Lucy, but allowing us to see her humanity—warts and flaws included. 
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I can’t wait to see what kind of job Nicole Kidman does. A quick synastry glance shows they share the exact same nodal axis with the South Node at 4° Taurus and the North Node at 4° Scorpio, Nicole’s Sun tightly conjuncts Lucy’s Pluto, Nicole’s Ascendant conjuncts Lucy’s Jupiter and Nicole’s Venus/MC/Jupiter conjuncts Lucy’s Sun. That’s all significant, but I’ll leave it up to interpretation for another article!