At 15 years old, Lucy convinced her mother — who had moved back from Detroit — to let her move from Jamestown in the western part of the state to New York City, so she could attend a drama school. Lucy wound up going to the school but had trouble getting out of the shadow of one of the school’s most prominent students. “I was a tongue-tied teenager spellbound by the school’s star pupil, Bette Davis,” Ball later said (per Biography).
The school didn’t even see a way forward for Lucille and wrote a letter to her mother that said, “Lucy’s wasting her time and ours. She’s too shy and reticent to put her best foot forward.” However, Lucy didn’t return to Jamestown. Instead, she stayed in New York City where she sought work under the name Diane Belmont. According to Everything Lucy, she got the idea for her temporary stage name from Long Island’s Belmont racetrack. Ball — or Belmont, depending on how you want to look at it — eventually found work, only not as an actress, but as a model.
