It was based loosely on the story of Frank and Helen Beardsley, although Desilu Productions bought the rights to the story long before Helen's autobiographical book Who Gets the Drumstick? was released to bookstores. Screenwriters Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll wrote several I Love Lucy-style stunts that in most cases had no basis in the actual lives of the Beardsley family, before Melville Shavelson and Mort Lachman took over primary writing duties. The film was commercially successful, and even the Beardsleys themselves appreciated it.

This film was remade in 2005 with actors Dennis Quaid and Rene Russo as Frank and Helen Beardsley.

Plot

Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball take turns providing voice-over narration throughout—and in at least one scene, Van Johnson talks directly to the camera (a technique known as breaking the fourth wall), as does Fonda.

Henry Fonda's character, Frank Beardsley, is a Roman Catholic Navy warrant officer, recently detached from the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise and assigned as project officer for the Fresnel lens glide-slope indicator, or "meatball," that would eventually become standard equipment on all carriers. Lucille Ball's character, Helen North, is a Roman Catholic nurse working in the dispensary at the California naval base to which Frank is assigned.

Frank meets Helen, first by chance in the commissary on the Naval base (presumably Alameda Naval Air Station, though it is never identified) and then when Frank brings his distraught teen-age daughter for treatment at the dispensary, where Helen informs him that the young lady is simply growing up in a too-crowded house that lacks a mother's guidance. They immediately hit it off and go on a date, all the while shying away from admitting their respective secrets: Frank has ten children and Helen has eight, from previous marriages that ended in their spouses' deaths.

When each finally learns the other's secret, they initially resist their mutual attraction. But Chief Warrant Officer Darrell Harrison (Van Johnson) is determined to bring them together. To that end, he "fixes up" each of them with a blind date that is sure to be incompatible. Helen's date is an obstetrician (Sidney Miller) who stands a good head shorter than she; this prompts Helen to observe in voice-over, "Darrell had a malicious sense of humor." Frank's date is a "hip" girl (Louise Troy) who is not only young enough to be one of his daughters, but also is far too forward for his taste. As the final touch, Harrison makes sure that both dates take place in the same Japanese restaurant. As Harrison fully expects, Frank and Helen end up leaving the restaurant together in his car, with Frank's date sitting uncomfortably between the two as they carry on about their children.

Frank and Helen continue to date regularly, and eventually he invites her for dinner in his home. This turns nearly disastrous when Mike, Rusty, and Greg (Tim Matheson, Gil Rogers, and Gary Goetzman), Frank's three sons, mix hefty doses of gin, scotch, and vodka into Helen's drink. As a result Helen behaves in a wild and embarrassing manner, which Frank cannot comprehend until he catches his sons trying to conceal their laughter. "The court of inquiry is now in session!" he declares, and gets the three to own up and apologize. After this, he announces his intention to marry, adding, "And nobody put anything into my drink."

Most of the children fight the union at first, regarding each other and their respective stepparents with suspicion. Eventually, however, the eighteen children bond into one large blended family, about to become a little larger when Helen becomes pregnant.

Further tension develops between young Philip North and his teacher at the parochial school that he attends, because his teacher insists that he use his "legal" name (which remains North even after his mother's marriage to Beardsley). This prompts Frank and Helen to discuss cross-adopting one another's children. At first the children (except for Philip) are aghast at the notion of "reburying" their respective deceased biological parents. Yet the subsequent birth of Joseph John Beardsley finally unites the children, and they agree unanimously to the adoption under a common surname.

The film ends with Mike Beardsley, the eldest, going off to Camp Pendleton to begin his stint in the United States Marine Corps.

Cast

• Lucille Ball as Helen Brandmeier North Beardsley
• Henry Fonda as CWO Frank Beardsley, USN

Adult friends and relatives

• Van Johnson as CWO Darrell Harrison, USN
• Walter Brooke as Howard Beardsley (Frank's brother, who in this film temporarily "borrows" Germaine and Joan Beardsley after Frank's detachment from the Enterprise.)
• Nancy Howard as Nancy Beardsley (Frank's sister-in-law)
• Sidney Miller as Dr. Ashford (Helen's date, an obstetrician who stands a good head shorter than she)
• Louise Troy as Madeleine Love (Frank's date, a "hip" girl young enough to be Frank's daughter)
• Tom Bosley as a family doctor who makes a house call on the Beardsleys in their "neutral" home. We later see this same doctor as the consulting physician for the California Draft Board when Mike Beardsley reports for a required physical exam.

Teachers, officials, etc.

• Mary Gregory as Sister Mary Alice, who questions Philip's use of the Beardsley name
• Harry Holcombe as the Judge who handles the grand mutual adoption

Frank's unsuccessful housekeepers

• Ysabel MacCloskey as Number One, who lasts less than a day.
• Pauline Hague as Number Two, aka "Mrs. Anderson." She lasts a week—because she is hiding from the police. After a stint with the Beardsleys, she turns herself in.
• Marjorie Eaton as Number Three, aka "Mrs. Ferguson," who famously says, "Mrs. Anderson was last week; I'm Mrs. Ferguson, and you can mail me my check!" She has the fight with Louise that precipitates Frank's second meeting with Helen.

Truth versus fiction

This film departs in many critical ways from the actual lives of Frank and Helen Beardsley and their children. The names of Frank and Helen Beardsley and their children are real. (In fact, the wedding invitation that appears midway through the film is the actual invitation that went out to Frank and Helen's real guests.) The career of Lieutenant Richard North USN is also described accurately, but briefly: specifically, he was a navigator on the crew of an A-3 Skywarrior that crashed in a routine training flight, killing all aboard, exactly as Lucille Ball (portraying Helen) describes in the script. Frank Beardsley is described correctly as a Navy warrant officer. The "loan-out" of the two youngest Beardsley daughters is also real, and indeed Michael, Charles ("Rusty"), and Gregory Beardsley were determined to see their father marry Helen North as a means of rectifying this situation. The movie correctly describes Frank Beardsley as applying his Navy mind-set to the daunting task of organizing such a large family (although the chart with the color-coded bathrooms and letter-coded bedrooms--"I'm Eleven Red A!"--is probably a typical Hollywood exaggeration). Finally, Michael Beardsley did indeed serve a term in the Marines, as did his brother Rusty.

The similarities, however, end at this point. The critical differences, which one may observe by comparing this movie to Helen Beardsley's book Who Gets the Drumstick?,[1] include the following:

• The film changes the ages and birth order of many of the children. As a corollary to this, the film places some of the children, most notably Colleen and Philip North, into situations having no historical warrant. For example, Colleen North did not have a boyfriend who took inappropriate liberties with her.

• Contrary to the depiction in the film, Helen North and Frank Beardsley began their relationship by corresponding with one another in sympathy for similar losses that each had recently sustained: he of his wife and she of her husband. Furthermore, each knew exactly how many children the other had before their first meeting. Indeed, Frank and Helen did not meet by accident in a Navy commissary. Rather, Frank's sister told Helen about Frank's situation, and Helen wrote to Frank to offer her sympathy. (Similarly, on their first date, Helen made no attempt to hide her children from Frank.)

• Frank Beardsley was a yeoman (that is, a clerk) in the Navy and afterwards the personnel officer at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He played no role in the development of the "meatball," nor is he ever listed as having served aboard any ship named USS Enterprise.

• There is no historical warrant for the existence of Frank's "friend" CWO Darrell Harrison USN, the character portrayed by Van Johnson. In the film, CWO Harrison draws Frank and Helen together. Helen Beardsley says in Who Gets the Drumstick? that her own sister and brother played this role.

• Frank Beardsley never told his own story in print, and Helen provides very little description of Frank's home life before he married Helen. Nevertheless the historical warrant for Frank's home (before he marries Helen) not being exactly "shipshape," and for his not being able to keep a housekeeper longer than a week (see the Cast section above) is highly dubious.

• The couple who temporarily took care of Germaine and Joan Beardsley were not Frank's brother and sister-in-law, but were two unrelated friends of his.

• The North and Beardsley children received the prospect of Helen and Frank's marriage with enthusiasm and without reservation. Indeed, when Helen visited Frank at his house for the first time, she took her five oldest children in tow. They met some of their Beardsley counterparts and immediately became friends. From the moment that the prospect of Frank and Helen's marriage became real, the children all began regarding Frank and Helen as their parents and even brought pressure to bear on them to celebrate the marriage as soon as possible.

• The "drunken dinner scene" in which Mike, Rusty, and Greg Beardsley serve Helen North a double (or perhaps triple) screwdriver with Scotch and gin, is without foundation. The scene is, however, reminiscent of the episode titled Lucy Does a TV Commercial in Lucille Ball's television show I Love Lucy in which she over-rehearses a television commercial for a vitamin elixir with a very high alcohol content. (Vitameatavegamin) This scene was probably a legacy contribution from Madelyn Pugh (Davis) and Bob Carroll, two writers for I Love Lucy.

• Mike, Rusty, and Greg observed "company manners" from the beginning of Helen's first visit to the Beardsley home. Their gestures touched Helen greatly in a manner that the film fails utterly to convey.

• The blended family did not move into a neutral home. Instead, Frank Beardsley had bedrooms and bathrooms added to his existing home, and Helen North sold her home and moved into his. (However, the leaking-roof scene has a basis in an incident occurring to Helen North while she still lived on Whidbey Island; that incident prompted her to move to California.)

• The North boy who was determined to be bad because "the good die young" was actually Nicholas North, not Philip. Likewise, it was Nicholas who first noticed that his teachers commanded him to continue to use the North name after his mother's marriage, even though at the time he preferred the Beardsley name. (However, the near-riot in the film, that a schoolteacher incites in her classroom over the naming issue, is also totally unfounded.)

• Philip's idolization of Mike, and Mike's willingness to be a role model to Philip, are real enough. However, all of Frank Beardsley's three eldest sons, not Mike alone, played this role in the blended family. Likewise, all of Helen North's sons, not Philip alone, lionized Mike (and Rusty and Greg). The high mutual respect that the stepbrothers developed for one another was one of the most important developments that knit the blended family into a functioning, harmonious whole. (In this regard, the petty jealousies between Frank's and Helen's children, as depicted in the film, are generally without foundation.)

• The one incident of mutual jealousy that did develop in real life—between the eldest of Frank's daughters and the eldest of Helen's daughters, between whom Helen had to mediate—was never depicted in the film.

• The children never objected to the massive cross-adoption by Frank and Helen of one another's biological children. The chief objectors fell into two groups: Richard North's brother and some of his other relatives, who objected to the "erasure" of Mr. North's name; and a large number of readers of a major magazine (which Helen Beardsley never named) who objected in principle to the adoption when that magazine mistakenly reported it as an accomplished fact. However, Frank and Helen ultimately ignored those objections in the face of more pressing and important consequences of their having married without initially adopting one another's children.

In addition to the above, the film distorts certain facts about Navy life and especially about flight operations aboard an aircraft carrier. Specifically: