Wanda Clark, who served as Lucille Ball’s devoted secretary for 26 years until the famed comedienne’s death in 1989, died Sunday in Langley, Oklahoma. She was 87.
While working as a secretary at Look magazine, Clark struck up a friendship with a woman named Cleo Smith. Clark left to take a job as a travel assistant on Queen for a Day, but the TV game show got canceled shortly after she got there.
Smith, however, told her about a job opening at Ball’s company, Desilu Productions — and as Ball’s cousin, she would have known. The I Love Lucy star hired Clark in 1963 without an interview based solely on Smith’s recommendation, and she was her valued assistant until Ball’s death in April 1989 at age 77.
On social media, Ball and Desi Arnaz’s daughter, Lucie Arnaz, noted that she was 11 when Clark began working for her mom. Clark also was her matron of honor at her first wedding, to actor Phil Menegaux in 1971.
“She traveled across the globe to catch any performance of mine or my brother’s [Desi Arnaz Jr.] that she could get to, including attending our daughter’s wedding,” Arnaz wrote. “She had a memory like an elephant and a heart the same size. Everyone she met loved her.
“She and our late amanuensis, Frank Gorey (who also knew me since I was four feet tall), stayed in my brother’s and my life for decades after my mother passed. She was my North Star. Wanda and Frank’s spirit of joy and pure kindness are responsible for most of anything good in me.”
Wanda Lou Clark was born on March 19, 1938, in Vandervoort, Arkansas. She and her family lived in Idabel, Oklahoma, and moved to Oklahoma City in 1951, and she graduated from U.S. Grant High School in 1956.
While working for six years at an insurance company in Oklahoma City, Clark accompanied her sister, Bonnie, and brother-in-law, Ross, to California, where Ross was stationed at what was then called Vandenberg Air Force Base. Ross and Bonnie returned home in 1962, but Wanda decided she liked where she was and moved to Los Angeles, where she would eventually connect with Ball.
“With her efficiency and thoroughness, Wanda always saw to it that every task was done in an exceptional way,” Michael Z. Stern wrote in his 2016 book, I Had a Ball: My Friendship With Lucille Ball. “She handled everything so effortlessly, balanced it all with such sharpness and clarity. I really don’t know how she did it.”
Clark even appeared — as a secretary, of course — on a 1969 episode of Here’s Lucy.
After Ball’s death, Clark worked for philanthropist Barbara Davis, actresses Victoria Principal and Melody Thomas Scott, talent agent Roger Vorce and producer Ray Stark.
Clark was a founding board member of the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center in Jamestown, New York. She also loved animals, poodles in particular.
Survivors include her sisters, Marian and Beverly; her brothers-in-law, Robert and Dan; her nephew, Scott; and her niece, Shelley.
