Amy Poehler Directs ‘Lucy & Desi’ Documentary — Relive the Love Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz

Historic Meeting

Lucy and Desi, each of whom were rising stars in their own right, first met on the set of the 1940 movie Too Many Girls. Although, as pointed out by author Michael Karol, who has written the books Lucy A to Z: The Lucille Ball Encyclopedia, The Lucy Book of Lists, The Lucille Ball Quiz Book, Lucy in Print and The Comic DNA of Lucille Ball, they actually met for a moment before that, in the commissary at RKO. Says Michael, “Maureen O’Hara wrote in her autobiography that she was having lunch with Lucy. they had just filmed a big fight scene between the two girls, and Lucy was made up with a black eye and all kinds of stuff. Desi Arnaz walked by and didn’t think much of her. But then, when he saw her all made up for her next picture, in which he costarred with her, called Too Many Girls, he was, like, ‘Wow, what a hunka woman.’ In any case, they got married soon after that, in November or December of 1940.”

‘Do You Know How to Rumba?’

Geoffrey Mark, author of The Lucy Book, notes that Desi initially asked her out with a line that would later be used on I Love Lucy, “Do you know how to rumba?” She said no, though she certainly did. “It was immediate for them,” he says. “They danced, lives changed, history changed and they began to date very seriously. Miss Ball was engaged to a director, Alexander Hall, and Desi had a girlfriend back east, and they just dumped them both and became exclusive.” As noted above, marriage came about quickly.

They Needed … Something

Besides her film career, Lucy had scored a huge success on radio in 1948 with the sitcom My Favorite Husband, which CBS wanted to bring to television. This, she thought, could offer a solution to a problem that had already arisen between her and Desi. Explains Michael, “Lucy was OK with that idea; she’d appeared as a guest star on TV in the late ’40s/early ’50s, but she insisted that Desi play her husband, even though he hadn’t been on the radio show. What was happening is that she was in Hollywood while he was touring with his band all over the place. He had a reputation for catting around and Lucy wanted him home with her in Hollywood. As she put it, ‘You can’t have a baby over the phone; you can’t make a family over the phone.’ So that’s why she really wanted Desi tied down to this project. And CBS wasn’t sure that the public would accept Lucy, this all-American redheaded girl, as the wife of a Cuban guy. But both Lucy and Desi responded, ‘We’re married in real life, you know. So it does work.”

Proving the Skeptics Wrong

Lucy and Desi decided to prove their chemistry by going on a vaudeville tour, playing live to audiences (she had proven how much she came alive in front of an audience with My Favorite Husband). Desi and his band performed music while Lucy did physical comedy. Geoffrey explains that it was around that time that Lucy found herself pregnant. “So they shot a closed-circuit pilot for I Love Lucy just for CBS to see if they could sell it,” he says. “She was beach ball pregnant. They don’t mention it in the the show, and there’s no Fred and Ethel. Philip Morris, the cigarette company, bought it. Lucille was ready to give birth to Lucie Arnaz and they called and said, ‘When are you guys moving to New York to do the show?'”

Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands

Philip Morris believed that the show needed to be filmed in New York, but Desi pushed back insisting that that the show could be shot in California and, when they brought up Lucy’s connection with the live audience, he added that they would film each episode in front of one. Geoffrey points out that the only previous show that had done that was Groucho Marx’s game show You Bet Your Life. “It wasn’t multi-set,” he notes, “and was done in a theater, not on a sound stage. Doing the show that way was Desi’s idea. Did he make that happen personally? No. One hundred of the sharpest, most talented people in show business joined the bandwagon to make I Love Lucy happen.”

‘I Love Lucy’

Things just picked up from there, Lucy and Desi making all the right moves. For starters, they were the first sitcom to shoot with three cameras in front of a live audience. They took a cut in their salary so that they would own the film, which CBS had no problem with (there was no such thing as a rerun at that point), though the network would eventually buy everything back for $4.5 million. One challenge they faced was finding a location large enough to house a studio audience with adherence to various fire codes. In the middle of the night Desi woke up with the idea of using a movie studio, which had never been done. To do so, the building — General Service Studios Stage 2 — had to be sound-proofed and Desi himself went door to door to get people from the neighborhood to give their written OK for the crowds that would be attending taping. He was successful in doing so, and the Desilu Playhouse came into existence. So did I Love Lucy.

An Immediate Hit

They became Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, and joining them were Vivian Vance and William Frawley as landlords and friends Ethel and Fred Mertz. Needless to say, the audience loved I Love Lucy and turned the show into a smash hit. It ran for six season from 1951 to 1957 and 181 episodes, before spinning off into 13 one-hour episodes of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, which aired between 1957 and 1960. In between, Lucy gave birth to Desi Arnaz, Jr. (after having previously given birth to Lucie) and she and Desi made that deal with CBS to sell back the rights to the show, and with the money they charted a new direction for themselves. “It was a good deal,” Lucie acknowledges, “but he had no idea what it would actually mean in the long run to own it, because they didn’t expect it to be so famous. They did try to figure out if they could do better by holding onto the show, but there was no syndication [reruns] in those days. They had no idea how well they would have done with it.”

Desilu Productions

The couple bought RKO studios, located next to Paramount Pictures, and began producing other shows for themselves while serving as home base for a number of outside shows. Says Geoffrey, “Desilu never became a movie studio, but it became the largest producer of television product around. There was hardly a night you didn’t see Desilu product on television and if they didn’t produce it, they got credit for it being filmed at Desilu.” It should be noted that, at the time, Desi was pretty much calling the shots with the studio.

It All Comes to an End

In 1960 with all incarnations of I Love Lucy coming to an end, so did the marriage between Lucy and Desi. Observes Geoffrey, “Desi, unfortunately, had the disease of alcoholism. The alcoholism and the background from which he came did not serve monogamy very well. That being said, Mr. Arnaz, I will swear on this, would never have purposely hurt Miss Ball for anything. He adored her, he was deeply in love with her, so any behavior that was hurtful, he either didn’t understand that it was hurtful or it was the alcoholism. I’m not saying he didn’t hurt her. And whatever her part in this was, she did’t mean to hurt him either. But they got divorced, mostly because she felt it was hurting the children.”

Lucy Goes Where She’s Never Gone Before

Shortly thereafter, Desi went into several years of seclusion, emerging occasionally on TV or as a producer, such as for the sitcom The Mothers-in-Law. “He married a lovely woman named Edith Hirsch that Lucille and Desi knew from Del Mar Racetrack. They were married until she passed away in 1985,” Geoffrey states.

Lucy would marry comedian and TV producer Gary Morton. She also took charge of Desilu, where she green lighted, among other shows, Star Trek, Mission: Impossible and Mannix (thank you, Lucy!), but ultimately needed to sell to avoid bankruptcy, which she did to Paramount Pictures. She continued starring in, first, The Lucy Show and, then, Here’s Lucy.

‘Lucy & Desi’ Live On

As noted at the outset, despite their divorce Lucy and Desi never lost their love for each other, united by their mutual feelings, their children and their five grandchildren. Desi died at age 69 on December 2, 1986, of lung cancer. Lucy passed away on April 26, 1989, due to a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm.

There is no word on when the Lucy & Desi documentary will go into production or be released, but for generations of fans it will be a wonderful opportunity to remember why we love Lucy — and Desi, too.