Loving Lucy

Mark Anthony De Nigris loves Lucy.

Well, OK, love is a strong word.

But the born salesman who runs one of the country’s largest businesses in Lucille Ball memorabilia out of an Anaheim Hills storefront sure loves the market power of everyone’s favorite redhead.

“I’m an Elvis fan, really,” the grinning De Nigris confesses, even as he sits surrounded by the Lucy screen savers, Lucy games, Lucy CD-ROMs, Lucy banks and Lucy place mats he sells to fans all over the world.

“I mean, I love her to death, but I’m not the biggest fan. It’s my wife who’s really crazy about Lucy.”

Whatever ambivalence De Nigris may feel about the comedian--who, as everyone knows, was the funniest person ever to work a candy factory assembly line--hasn’t stopped him from building a business in Lucy stuff from his booth at the Orange County Fairgrounds swap meet. It grosses an average of $15,000 a weekend and nets about half that.

And this is the biggest of weekends for De Nigris and the thousands of Lucy fans and collectors gathered in Burbank for the Loving Lucy ’97 convention.

De Nigris drives up today in a 30-foot truck stacked high with Lucy everything.

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Nellie Blaker, a 44-year-old Huntington Beach fan who says she’s such a big customer of De Nigris that “I’m sure I’ve made a couple of house payments for him,” took Friday afternoon off to revel in Lucy heaven.

“My life is Lucy. I’ve been into her since she was a little girl,” Blaker said. “I had a really sad childhood and Lucy just pretty much kept me going my whole life. Whenever I’m feeling down I just flip on an episode, and she makes me laugh.”

The story is that “I Love Lucy,” the product of TV’s Golden Age that made Lucy and Desi as ubiquitous in most U.S. households as, well, the kitchen sink, appears on television via syndication every three minutes somewhere in the world.

That may or may not be true, but in the spirit of the lady who lit her (rubber) nose on fire for a laugh, who hilariously stained her feet illicitly smashing grapes and who made an endearing art of lying to her husband, who’s counting?

“Marilyn Monroe, James Dean? They’ve really faded, gone down the tube as far as popularity goes,” said De Nigris, 38. “But Lucy’s gotten bigger than life. It’s almost like the Elvis thing. I mean, who can forget her Vitameatavegamin routine?”

Indeed. And for those who may have a memory blackout on that and other scenes from the 30-minute comedy that ran for 153 episodes and starred Ball and her husband, the Cuban-born Desi Arnaz, there are two panel discussions at this weekend’s convention designed to help: “Remembering the Redhead--I,” and, of course, “Remembering the Redhead--II.”

De Nigris has no trouble remembering Lucy, who died in 1989 at 77. The convention of Lucy fans, for years a small gathering in Ball’s hometown of Jamestown, N.Y., moved to the Burbank Airport Hilton and Convention Center last year. More than 3,000 people showed up. This year, about 30 dealers in Lucy paraphernalia are expected, only a few with larger selections than De Nigris.

And De Nigris, who started in the Lucy business by accident, when the Lucy photographs and memorabilia decorating a 1950s-themed restaurant he owned began selling off the walls, now makes a lucrative living off Lucy paraphernalia from trivia games to bookends. On his top selling weekend, he says he grossed $32,000--and netted about half that.

De Nigris mailed out 100,000 free catalogs hawking his more than 200 different Lucy goods last year. He plans to expand his operation from his current base in the back corner of a mail service store to a new warehouse and showroom in Anaheim within the year. An Internet Web site is in the works. Eventually, De Nigris dreams of opening his own chain of Lucy stores along the lines of the Warner Bros.’ and Disney shops in many malls. Last year his swap meet business grossed $32,000 on a single weekend, he said.

Until then, De Nigris has to content himself with running his fairgrounds booth of Lucy paraphernalia. He’s there year round on weekends except these three weeks, when the annual fair, which began Friday, takes the place of the usual swap meet. While tending the booth, he chats with--and sells to--the Lucy disciples whom he said spend $500 to $1,000 on the average.

His customers are apt to break into riffs of Lucy trivia. They know Mrs. Trumble’s first name (Matilda). They know what a tweet suit is. They know the name of the episode when Ricky sang the lyrics to the show’s theme song. Heck, they know there were lyrics to the show’s theme song.

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De Nigris said that between all the stories and all the laughs, he’s become a Lucy expert. But next to some of his customers, De Nigris can’t clean Ethel’s carpet.

Blaker just had “I Love Lucy” tattooed on her leg. Her dog is named Lucy. Her license plate says LUCY. She maintains a Lucy room in her house.

“I’m a nut, I’m an absolute nut,” Blaker said unabashedly.

Kelly Conner, who said that De Nigris personally delivers the Lucy dolls, plates and other paraphernalia she buys to her Westminster home, gets up every morning at 5 to watch “I Love Lucy” before she goes to work.

“I swear, if we don’t start our day with Lucy, it’s like it hasn’t started,” Conner said. “As for Mark, he’s our main man. He’s our personal Lucy connection. He loves us because we’re suckers when it comes to buying this stuff.”