He Loves Lucy : Chris Butler of Garden Grove surrounds himself with games, books, busts and lobby cards featuring his favorite star. But he can’t go ‘Waaaaaaaaaaugh!’

Remember the “Lucy” episode in which the plucky redhead was obsessed with a movie star, and, to get into the star’s home, disguised herself as a French investor interested in the property, using a phony accent and a borrowed Mercedes?

It wouldn’t be surprising if such a plot line could actually be found among the hundreds of shows Lucille Ball brazened through in her quarter-century in television. But, instead, this was the scenario unsuccessfully attempted by Lucy fan Chris Butler in order to see the inside of the late comedienne’s Bel Air home. He doesn’t know if the realtor saw through his accent or just couldn’t make the appointment, but he never got in.

“It was a really kooky thing to try,” the frazzle-haired special-education teacher admits. “But I’d been going up there to look at the home from the outside for years, ever since I was in college, and I wanted to get inside the house. I tried to think like the character Lucy. How would she get in there? So I staged the foreign accent and all that, and pretended like I didn’t even know who Lucille Ball was.

“I do lots of kooky things. My friends tell me I’m a male Lucy, that I’m just like her.”

Can Butler go “Waaaaaaaaaaugh!” ?

“No, I don’t do the cry, but I do all kinds of other kooky shenanigans.”

Butler’s own home is a house set amid a weathered trailer park off busy Harbor Boulevard. The rent is good, he says, as it should be, considering most renters don’t have to put up with having “Trailer Park” painted on the walls of their house.

The surrounding park looks like something out of “The Grapes of Wrath.” Down-on-their-luck adults were working under the grimy hoods of their cars, while kids played in rain puddles, rode bikes or struggled with blowing trumpets, with the child’s concentration that’s oblivious to the hard times and hard faces around them.

Amid all this, the interior of Butler’s home stands out as an Isle of Lucy. The 38-year-old single parent and his 6-year-old daughter, Roxanne, share their space with Lucy games, books, busts, lobby cards, dolls and such. There is a parrot named Lucy--which does go “Waaaaaaugh!” pretty well--and a snake, also named Lucy. There is a wooden-cabinet Silvertone TV-phonograph console just like the one the Ricardos had, as well as the same model ‘50s G.E. fridge as the one on the show.

Butler claims that “I know Lucy better than Desi did. I can’t remember ever not being a fan. I’ve always watched her on TV as long back as I could remember. I’d watch her in prime time, and I’d watch the reruns every morning when I was little. I still enjoy watching the episodes over and over and over. My daughter and I watch every day for an hour. We know every one by heart.”

His favorite Lucy item is a portrait of her and Desi hugging, signed by both, that he bought at a collectibles show.

“If I could take only one thing out of here if this place was flooding, I’d grab that,” he said.

After grabbing his daughter, of course.

“She can fend for herself. She can swim ,” he said with a laugh.

*

Although Roxanne also is a big fan of the Little Mermaid and Little Orphan Annie (making for a whole lot of red hair under one roof), she seems to enjoy Lucy nearly as much as her dad. The precocious tyke does indeed know “I Love Lucy” episodes by heart, needing no prompting to launch into Ball’s woozy “Vitameatavegamin” routine or other choice shticks.

She’s been accompanying him on his pilgrimages to Ball’s relatively unassuming Bel Air house for the last three years. Until the house sold a few months ago-- presumably to someone without a suspect French accent--they used to just walk around the periphery and sometimes chat with the caretaker. Butler had often visited the house on his own prior to Ball’s death in 1989 and sometimes went through her trash in the alley behind the house, looking in vain for items of interest.

“It was just the same things you’d throw in: garbage. Nothing interesting,” he said, sadly.

He didn’t make the attempt to get into her house until after she’d passed away and the house was on the market. Though he thinks he probably could have met Ball when she was alive, he never tried.

“I have a lot of respect for people’s privacy. And while I may go through their trash “--Butler exploded here in laughter--”I always thought that I respected her privacy. I know where lots of stars live. But I wouldn’t go knock on their door, just like I wouldn’t want someone knocking on mine.”

*

Now that Ball is gone, he feels called on to uphold her name. “I work to preserve her image and her popularity. That’s something I believe in, her good positive image. The thing that’s really ticked me off in recent times has been the hatchet job that people have done on her since she died. It seems as soon as someone dies they become this horrible person, and that she wasn’t.

“They say she was tough to work with, that she didn’t know how to love, that she was cruel to her children, that she was stingy, that she was a bitter and mean recluse. I’ve read all these things in print, and I don’t think any of it was true.”

One thing that was true of her personal life, he said, is “she was not funny. Most people that knew her said she was not funny. She was an actress, and wasn’t an improviser. But she had great writers who worked with her throughout her career.

“Everything was blocked out for her, blow by blow. Sometimes a description of a scene would go on for pages: ‘Lucy does this, then she does this.’ Every gesture and look were written in. They coded them after a while. It might just say ‘make the gobloots face’ to tell her to use a particular grimace from an episode where she thought she got the gobloots disease from the feet of the bushu bird.”

*

Butler frequently runs an ad in the Recycler looking for Lucy items. The Ruby Slippers of Lucy-dom, he says, is the Baby Ricky doll from the early ‘50s, which can go for more than $500. She also was on the cover of the first issue of TV Guide in 1953, which is tough to find. He hasn’t bought anything through the ads yet. One caller claimed to have the set of Franciscan Ware dishes used in the show, but had no way of authenticating them. When people call on the ad, though, it does give Butler a chance to bend their ear on the wonders of Lucy.

His other efforts in boosting Ball have been fairly limited so far. Whenever a TV station changes the time or cancels her reruns, he calls or writes to complain.

“There hasn’t really been much of a vehicle for me, outside of telling everyone in the world that I ever meet that she’s so great. Some friends and I are starting to see about forming a fan club for her, because there isn’t one here locally.”

He didn’t always have many friends sharing his interest in Lucy. When he was watching her in the ‘70s, most of his contemporaries were catching “Saturday Night Live.” What was the attraction for Butler?

“I think it was a vicarious thing for me. My friends say I’m as daffy as her now, but when I was younger, I was on the shy side. And she would just get herself into the biggest bumbling messes and it would just be uproarious the way she would get herself out of them. That really inspired me.”