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‘I Love Lucy’ Star Desi Arnaz Went From ‘Prince of Cuba’ to King of Hollywood — and Risked it All
Through the passage of time, what we usually get from the history of Classic TV are the shows themselves — not necessarily their backgrounds in terms of how they came about, the ways in which they actually changed television, or behind-the-scenes drama that took place while on-screen magic was being created. For instance, when it comes to I Love Lucy, and especially husband-and-wife stars Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, there is simply so much that went on before, during and after the show. Particularly in the case of Desi, an incredibly interesting, often tumultuous life that somehow gets lost to pop culture history.
“If I were to write the story of Desi Arnaz’ life, I would title it The Prince of Cuba,” muses singer/stand-up comedian/pop culture historian/author Geoffrey Mark, whose tomes include The Lucy Book: A Complete Guide to Her Five Decades on Television and Ella: A Biography of the Legendary Ella Fitzgerald. “Most people don’t know this, but Desi was born into incredibly good circumstances. His grandfather went up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt and was high in Cuban politics. His maternal grandfather was one of the co-founders of the Bacardi rum industry. His father was the first mayor of their town — Santiago de Cuba is where he was born. His uncle was the chief of police of the town, and then his father went into larger politics on the island of Cuba.
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“Havana,” he continues, “was the political center of Cuba back then, and Santiago de Cuba was the cultural center of the island. It’s where the music came from and all the arts centered there, not that there weren’t night clubs and things in Havana for the tourists. But on the island, if you were creative, if you were an artist, a musician, a singer, a painter, a writer, you probably spent more time in Santiago.”
As he explains it, Desi’s family had mansions, ranches, yachts, livestock, and sports cars. “He was,” observes Geoffrey, “born into plenty.”
For much more on Desi Arnaz, please scroll down.
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Desi Arnaz Arrives
He was born Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III on March 2, 1917. His parents were Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Alberni II , who held a PhD; and Dolores de Acha, described as a doting mother. Notes Geoffrey, “I believe Desi’s great-grandmother was deeded, by Spain, a huge portion of Southern California. Her name was Ventura Arnaz, and there is a Ventura County in Southern California as well as a Ventura Boulevard that runs all through the San Fernando Valley. There is an Arnaz Drive in Beverly Hills, not named for Desi, named for his great-grandparents, because at one point they owned it.”
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Being Groomed for the Future
“So,” he continues, “his family name had worth long before he ever came to this country or learned to speak a word of English, and he was being groomed for the future. It was assumed that he would go to college, to Notre Dame, and then go back to Cuba and take his place in politics as the next mayor, the next governor or the next what have you. He was also an only child, which was rare in Catholic families of those days, so he was completely doted on. His father, Dr. Arnaz, was called the model mayor and the people loved him.”
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Courtesy Geoffrey Mark
‘Viva la Revolution’
The life of Desi’s family was forever altered during the 1933 Cuban Revolution (also known as the Sergeant’s Revolt), which was led by Fulgencio Batista, who overthrew Cuba’s president, Gerardo Machado. “Desi was 16 and the family was wiped out in that their homes were burned down, their livestock were slaughtered, their ships were sunk,” says Geoffrey, “and the only way Desi was able to get out of where he was without being killed was to have someone drive him. In those days, cars had running boards and he would shout, ‘Viva la revolution,’ so that no one would shoot him. Very luckily, Desi, his mother and father didn’t get killed, but they lost everything.”
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MGM
Escaping the Chaos
Desi and his father managed to get out of Cuba before they could be arrested, and moved to Miami. Geoffrey details, “With the help of some people who were already in Florida, who were Cuban refugees, they were put into a warehouse where they lived with rats and roaches. That was their new home, from mansions they went to rats and roaches. Eventually his mother came, but his parents’ marriage did not survive the trauma and they divorced. Desi’s first job in America was going to all the Woolworths in Miami and cleaning the canary cages. Then he and his father went into the tile business — at the same time Desi was going to high school to finish at least his high school education. At one point when they were doing tiles, their shipment of tiles broke and Desi figured out that they’d sell it as a luxury product — ‘Broken tiles done in a mosaic is the new fashion.’ That was the first of the indications that Desi Arnaz was brilliant and could turn lemons into lemonades.”
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Shutterstock
Man With a Guitar
Desi proved himself a natural with a guitar and made it obvious that he could sing, so once he was finished with high school he started a group called the Siboney Septet, which was comprised mostly of Jewish boys as there weren’t enough qualified Latino musicians in Florida at the time. “He began to make a small name for himself as a performer,” says Geoffrey. “Xavier Cugat, a Cuban musician and bandleader, saw him and asked him to join his organization. Desi began to tour with Cugat playing the conga drum and singing. And he stood out, because of his incredible good looks, showmanship and sex appeal.”
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Shutterstock
Starting a Trend
“Before Tom Jones,” he elaborates, “before Elvis Presley, their direct ancestor is Desi Arnaz, who used to dance swiveling his hips, showing off what he had and making the girls swoon. Elvis took it from Desi. Tom Jones took it from Elvis. Desi also brought Cuban music to this country; the Cuban music he remembers from Carnivale in Santiago de Cuba. Along the way working for Cugat, Bing Crosby came to see them — I believe in San Francisco — and sat down with Desi and said, ‘How much are you making?’ Desi told him and he said, ‘That’s ridiculous. You deserve a raise, and you should be featured.’ And Bing Crosby negotiated for him with Cugat to feature him more and pay him more money. Eventually Desi got tired of being what he felt was a flunky and he negotiated with Cugat. Cugat loved him so that he told him he could start his own organization and call it the Desi Arnaz Orchestra, Straight from the Xavier Cugat Orchestra. That allowed him to use his Cugat’s name to promote himself.”
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Snap/Shutterstock
Conga Line
It wasn’t long before Desi became the darling of New York City society, helped in no small way by the fact that he was the first person to start a conga line in this country while beating the conga drum. Notes Geoffrey, “The conga drum isn’t just shaped the way it’s shaped because of the sound it makes. It’s very phallic and a man beating on it and perspiring gives you the phallic allusion you’re looking for. Society women went crazy for him, and Desi would literally lead a conga line out of his own nightclub, go to other night clubs and beat the conga through the place, taking people with him. He’d go to two or three clubs and come back to his own, and now there’s, like, 50 more people there, so the clubs loved him. One of the other people who loved him was Larry Hart of Rodgers and Hart.”
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Playbill
‘Too Many Girls’ on Broadway
The duo was writing a new musical called Too Many Girls, and Larry Hart was convinced that Desi was perfect for it. In fact, he reportedly privately coached Desi so that by the time he auditioned, there was no way he wouldn’t be cast. And not only did he get the part, but the role was greatly expanded from the way it was originally envisioned. “They found that he was funny as well as handsome,” points out Geoffrey. “That he was dynamite on a stage, even more than in a nightclub, and the show was an enormous hit. RKO bought the rights to show, the great George Abbott directed it and it really helped Desi become a star.”
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RKO/Kobal/Shutterstock
Moving ‘Too Many Girls’ to the Big Screen
The movie version of Too Many Girls was released to theatres in 1940 and kept the basic plot of the romance between new college student Connie Casey and football player Clint Kelly, who begins as one of four bodyguards hired by Connie’s father to secretly keep her safe, but gradually falls in love with her. Desi is in the supporting role of Manuelito. Says Geoffrey, “They took almost everybody from the stage version to Hollywood, except the leading lady, whose husband wouldn’t let her go. And they replaced the leading lady with an RKO star, who at this point was starring in B movies for them, and her name was Lucille Ball.”
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RKO
Love at Second Sight
He continues, “Lucille was in a film called Dance, Girl, Dance and was shooting it when Desi saw her for the first time at the commissary at RKO, and she was in makeup that made it look as though she’d just been beaten up. Desi didn’t know that; he didn’t know films. He just assumed this was a beaten-up girl. Well, he saw her again without the makeup and went, ‘What a woman!’ He asked her out using the line — and they made fun of it on I Love Lucy — ‘Do you know how to rumba?’ and she told him, ‘No.’ Of course she knew how to rumba. She was a movie star. It was a musical. She knew how to rumba. It was immediate for them; they danced, lives changed and 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.”
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The Road to Marriage
Due to his Catholic background, Desi wanted them to get married right away, though Lucille was in no hurry to do so. “She was all about her career, but she loved Desi very much,” observes Geoffrey. “They finished the film and Desi went back east to play clubs again and Miss Ball went east supposedly to promote Dance, Girl, Dance, and there’s a very funny story that accompanies that. A newspaper columnist, and not a stupid one, came to her suite to interview her. They spent about an hour on the terrace of the place she was in, and as this columnist was leaving, she said, ‘By the way, I know that Desi’s in the bathroom. Why don’t you ask him to come out and say hello?’ Lucille started to laugh and Desi came out, and, unfortunately, his fly was open, revealing quite a bit. Lucille quipped, ‘Desi believes in free advertising.’ It’s a story he tells in his own book. They got married at the Byram River Beagle Club in Greenwich, Connecticut.”
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Hollywood, Here They Come!
Desi and Lucille were married in the morning, and by that afternoon they were at Manhattan’s Roxy Theatre, where he was performing. After his engagement there ended, the duo made the move to Hollywood, living in Chatsworth, California for the next 15 years. “She made one movie after another,” Geoffrey explains. “MGM took her away from RKO and made her a big movie star. And Desi was with his orchestra. He also made a few films, and even though the films weren’t necessarily good, he was good in them. The problem is that they didn’t know what to do with him, because his accent was so thick and he wouldn’t lose it. He felt such a loyalty to his home country. I mean, he became an American citizen and loved what this country did for him, but Cuba was always in his heart and he didn’t want to lose his accent and become more American in that way. He fought it. And then he got drafted in the American Army doing shows. He didn’t fight, he didn’t go overseas. He was in California, but they were separated.”
Before this look at Desi’s life continues, please scroll down to see the films he starred in prior to and during I Love Lucy.
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RKO Radio Pictures
‘Father Takes a Wife’ (1941)
Desi’s first film after marrying Lucille Ball was Father Takes a Wife. He has a supporting role in the story about a middle-aged widow shipping magnate (Adolphe Menjou) who falls in love with an actress (Gloria Swanson), the two of them getting married following a whirlwind romance. Sounds like something Desi could identify with.
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RKO Radio Pictures
‘Four Jacks and a Jill’ (1942)
Desi stars with Ray Bolger and Anne Shirley in this film about a quartet of struggling musicians who need to replace their vocalist, and do so with an innocent woman who is being romanced by a taxi driver who is pretending to be a king.
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Rko/Kobal/Shutterstock
‘The Navy Comes Through’ (1942)
We get to see a more serious side to Desi in this war drama that focuses on a U.S. Navy crew who are aboard a merchant marine ship and find themselves battling Nazis.
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‘Bataan’ (1943)
Set in the Bataan peninsula of the Philippines in 1942, Robert Taylor as Sergeant Bill Dane leads a ragtag American unit in a mission to slow the Japanese advance by blowing up a key bridge. Desi, again in a supporting role, plays Felix Ramirez.
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Universal Pictures
‘Cuban Pete’ (1946)
In this comedy, the assistant to an advertising executive travels to Cuba in an attempt to convince a Cuban band, led by Desi Arnaz (he plays himself), to come back to America to appear on a U.S. radio program.
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Columbia Pictures
‘Holiday in Havana’ (1949)
Desi plays Carlos Estrada, the busboy at a Cuban Hotel who dreams of nothing else but becoming a composer and leader of a band, and unexpectedly finds himself able to do both — though there are (naturally) complications.
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Shutterstock
‘The Long, Long Trailer’ (1954)
Lucy and Desi on the big screen as a newly married couple who decide to spend their honeymoon driving across the country in a motorhome — yeah, maybe not such a good idea for the onscreen couple (but a huge hit for MGM). For audiences at the time, though, a wonderful opportunity to see the couple in color rather than the black and white of I Love Lucy.
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Snap/Shutterstock
‘Forever Darling’ (1956)
The marriage between Susan (Lucille) and Lorenzo Vega (Desi) is falling apart after about five years, but Susan is warned by a guardian angel only she can see (James Mason) that life will go terribly wrong if they don’t straighten things out.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled biography of Desi Arnaz. Just scroll down.
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Some Hope From Bob
While Lucille was starring in her radio show My Favorite Husband, and in order to prevent Desi and she from spending so much time apart, she arranged for him to go on the radio as Bob Hope’s bandleader for two seasons. He also had his own radio show, Your Tropical Trip. Points out Geoffrey, “My Favorite Husband is the progenitor of I Love Lucy. The names of the characters are different and the husband is white bread, but it’s an unfulfilled wife, her short-tempered husband and an older couple goading them both on to stand up for themselves. That’s really, I Love Lucy.”
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Onesmedia
‘My Favorite Husband’ Becomes ‘I Love Lucy’
Lucille Ball began starring on radio’s My Favorite Husband in 1948, and it wasn’t long before CBS expressed interest in bringing the concept to television with the actress. Points out Geoffrey, “So much has been written about this that is wrong. Things like her career was over and she needed this show … She needed nothing. She’d just made a comedy with Bob Hope that was the biggest selling comedy Paramount had ever made. Her star was doing just fine at this point, but she wanted time with her husband. She said, ‘If you’ll put Desi in as the husband, I will transfer My Favorite Husband to television.’ Television in 1950 hardly existed. It was mostly an East Coast thing; there was no coaxial cable to bring the show live across the country. It was shown in New York and then it was filmed on a special kind of camera to be shown in the midwest, and then two weeks later on the West Coast. That’s what television was back then. In any case, CBS said, ‘No, we cannot have a mixed marriage on television.’”
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Moviestore/Shutterstock
Hitting the Road
To prove the network wrong — that the audience would accept them — Desi and Lucille went on something of a vaudeville tour, playing live to audiences, with Desi and his band performing music (including some of his own hit songs), and Lucille doing some of the schtick she would later do on I Love Lucy. “Some if it was written by her My Favorite Husband writers, who were the original I Love Lucy writers,” Geoffrey points out. “Some of it was done for them by Desi’s friend Pepito the Clown, who also appeared on I Love Lucy with them. Around that time, Lucille finally got pregnant and they shot a closed circuit pilot for I Love Lucy just for CBS to make a Kinescope and see if they could sell it. She was beach ball pregnant. They don’t mention it in the show, and there’s no Fred and Ethel, just Lucy, Ricky, the agent and Pepito the Clown. Philip Morris, the cigarette company, bought it. Lucille was almost ready to give birth to Lucie Arnaz and they called and said, ‘When are you guys moving to New York to do the show?’”
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Mgm/Kobal/Shutterstock
Negotiations Begin
Geoffrey continues the scenario, “Desi said, ‘What do you mean moving to New York?’ The response as to why they wanted them to were all the things I just said, as well as the fact that Philip Morris, who’s the sponsor, is east of the Mississippi there’s more television stations east of the Mississippi. West of the Mississippi there was very little television yet. San Francisco and Los Angeles and Denver, and that was about it. And Desi said, ‘Why can’t we film the show here?’ and they said, ‘We’ve seen Miss Ball’s films. We’ve seen her do My Favorite Husband. She comes alive in front of a live audience.’ So Desi said, ‘Why can’t we film the show in front of a live audience?’ The only television show that had been done that way was Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life, but it was a game show. It wasn’t multi-set and was done in a theater, not on a sound stage. Now that — 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.”
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Courtesy Geoffrey Mark
Putting the Team Together
Those people included Jess Oppenheimer, who created the show; director Marc Daniels, who came in from New York, because he had multi-camera experience; Karl Freund, perhaps the most celebrated director of photography in show business history, who created, notes Geoffrey, “everything we take for granted today: To create a way of lighting and shooting the show so that anywhere on the set, you’d look great. You do that sort of thing on Broadway, but you don’t do that for film. It’s very hard to light films in such a way that wherever you’re standing, you look good. You had three and sometimes four cameras running at the same time. A man by the name of Dann Cahn devised a way of editing this on one machine, so they could see all three perspectives and choose the best ones. And you had brilliant casting and brilliant production values.”
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Mgm/Kobal/Shutterstock
Innovative Thinking
On paper all of this sounded great on the one hand, but expensive — too expensive — on the other. To counter this, Desi made a deal that he and Lucille would take lower salaries, but in exchange they would own the show after one viewing of each episode. Given that nobody had heard of a rerun up until that point, CBS thought they were getting off cheap. “Radio and early television worked on the same premise,” states Geoffrey. “You had a show that went on for 39 weeks and then it went off the air for 11 to 13 weeks and another show replaced it, giving the audience a chance to miss the show and creative people weeks off to catch their breath and come up with new ideas and be fresh. That’s what television was. You didn’t rerun anything. First of all, it was live, so there was no way to rerun anything. But because I Love Lucy was on film, it could be shipped all over the country and shown at the same time, so you didn’t need a coaxial cable. Everyone could show the same episode the same evening at whatever their version of Monday 9:00 Eastern Standard Time was. All over the country, people could see it at the same time.”
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CBS Home Entertainment
Real Baby #2, Reel Baby #1
While it took a few weeks for I Love Lucy to more or less become what it’s known for, by season two it was — and had been — firing on all cylinders, though Desi and Lucille and Ricky and Lucy were in for a change when Lucille Ball found herself pregnant with child number two. Comments Geoffrey, “The show had become a phenomenon all over the country, and the episode where Lucille Ball does the Vitameatavegamin thing is the week they found out that she was pregnant again. So what do you do? Jess Oppenheimer said, ‘That’s great. Lucy Ricardo will become pregnant, too. It will give us new storylines.’ They wrote beautiful, well thought-out, respectful storylines about what a couple goes through during a pregnancy. And it changed America, because women used to go into seclusion. It was almost considered naughty to see a pregnant woman, because that means she had sex, and nobody has sex, right? What’s funny is Lucy and Ricky had one big bed until the week she’s pregnant. Then, vavoom, two separate beds so that nobody could figure out how she got that way.”
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TV Guide
Babies Are Serious Business
From today’s vantage point, there were so many rules back then surrounding pregnancy that it seems absolutely ridiculous. For instance, the word “pregnant” could never be used, only that Lucy was “expecting.” On top of that, Philip Morris and CBS brought in a Jewish Rabbi, a Protestant minister and a Catholic priest to read every script and ensure that there would be nothing offensive in them to the American public.
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Life Magazine
A Phenomenal Reaction
All of that not withstanding, Geoffrey points out, “It broke so much ground. The whole country was waiting for that baby to be born. By this time, Desi is executive producer of the show, and because Miss Ball had had a caesarian section with Lucie, you knew in advance when she would be giving birth. You could actually pick the day it happens. So they happened to pick January 19, the same day that Lucy Ricardo goes to the hospital to have the baby, which was a publicity gold mine. In the script, irrespective of what kind of child Lucille and Desi had, Lucy and Ricky were going to have a boy so that little Lucie wouldn’t get confused about who’s what. The publicity from it was so large that even though Eisenhower was inaugurated the next day as president, that was not the headline on any newspaper in the country. Lucy has her baby was the headline, and then down lower on the page was the Eisenhower inauguration. That’s how big this was.”
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TV Guide
Things Start to Change
I Love Lucy ran for six seasons from 1951 to 1957, but then the decision was made to do hour-long versions of the show that would air once a month, thus giving Lucille more time with her children — which hadn’t been an easy thing for her to manage. “Desi made a deal with the Ford Motor Company for the first five episodes,” Geoffrey details. “They thought they would have people lining up, but they had trouble finding a sponsor. Television was changing, video tape was coming out and television was going from the Golden Age of Television to the Silver Age of Television. So they did one season of these five shows and at that point Desi found out that RKO Studios was coming up for sale.”
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Kobal/Shutterstock
Securing Their Future
Desi had a long talk with Lucille, pointing out to her that they owned 180 episodes of I Love Lucy and five hour-long episodes of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show. At that point they’d made enough money that they could afford to retire if they wanted to and enjoy their kids and their life. The alternative would be to grow larger, his concern being that MGM, Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox and Columbia were all getting into television. Additionally, by that time Desilu Productions was also producing several other television shows. To grow, they would need to own a piece of property and have their own studio. Lucille Ball’s response was, “I’m not giving up my career,” meaning that the decision was made: they would have to grow bigger.
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A Desilu Production
So Desi and Lucille sold the rights to I Love Lucy back to CBS and with the money they received bought RKO Studios, which was next door to Paramount Pictures in Hollywood. Coming along in the package were the former Selznick Studios in Culver City and the small studio with several stages where I Love Lucy had been shot. “Desilu never became a movie studio,” explains Geoffrey, “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. Over the years Desilu would produce shows like The Untouchables, Make Room for Daddy, Our Miss Brooks, Star Trek, Mission: Impossible and Mannix.”
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Desi and the Studio
Geoffrey makes one distinct point about Desilu: “Desi ran the studio, Miss Ball did not — until she became the president later. Desi made the business deals, Desi made them financially independent. She loved the sandbox and having her own playpen in which to play and do anything she wanted to, but it was Desi that put the playpen there and ran it. He does not get enough credit for Desilu Studios.”
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‘Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse’
What few probably remember today is that between 1958 and 1960 Desi served as host and producer of this anthology series, which presented a wide variety of stories in different genres (including episodes of the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show. Two series were spun-off from it: The Untouchables and Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, that show having its beginning in an episode called “The Time Element.” Geoffrey points out, “So for two seasons, Desi Arnaz had his own show that he hosted and produced. In that time, eight more of the hour-long I Love Lucy shows were made, Lucille and Desi also appeared on The Danny Thomas Show and a Milton Berle special playing Lucy and Ricky, and Lucille played Lucy Ricardo on an episode of the Ann Sothern Show, all produced and directed by Desi Arnaz.”
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CBS Television Distribution
About Those Spin-Offs
In regards to The Twilight Zone and The Untouchables, Geoffrey emphasizes that Rod Serling “took it [the concept] and kind of screwed Desi, because he didn’t offer The Twilight Zone to Desilu. It went to MGM, and CBS bought it off of that one episode of the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse. The same way ABC bought The Untouchables off of a two-part episode, although that was a Desilu production. But The Twilight Zone was born on the Desilu lot with Desi Arnaz’ money.”
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Everything Changes in 1960
By the time 1960 rolls around, the Desilu Playhouse is cancelled, I Love Lucy was done in every way and the marriage between Desi and Lucille was falling apart. Reflects Geoffrey, “Desi, unfortunately, had the disease of alcoholism. So does the man you’re talking to, so I am now talking as an expert on alcoholism. It is a disease. It is not a weakness of character, it is not a shameful thing, it is not evil. It’s a disease like cancer and there is no cure for it, but it can be put into permanent remission. Eventually, many years later, Mr. Arnaz put it into remission and good for him. I am proud of him for that, but in 1960 he wasn’t ready. On top of this, 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 didn’t mean to hurt him either.”
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AP/Shutterstock
The Decline of Desilu
“But they got divorced,” he continues, “mostly because she felt it was hurting the children. There was also a problem at work; his disease was affecting his abilities as the head of the studio. When Miss Ball and Mr. Arnaz started Desilu Productions and bought the studio, there was all these legalese that, should anything happen, whether they got divorced or one of them wanted out for any reason, that the other one bought them out. By 1962 Miss Ball had done Wildcat on Broadway and had done several big films, but Desilu was floundering. It was no longer the huge production place it had been just a few years earlier. Pretty much it was one or two shows and renting itself out for other people, but not owning the shows. It was because of Desi’s problem with leadership, because of his disease, and changing times in television once again. The sitcom was out, which was Desilu’s staple. We were having a Western craze on television and although Desilu made Westerns, it wasn’t their cup of tea. Television was in transition.”
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Moviestore/Shutterstock
Desi and ‘The Lucy Show’
In 1962, Lucille Ball came back to television with The Lucy Show, playing a similar character to Lucy Ricardo, with Desi serving as executive producer for a time, though it was becoming harder for them to be on the set together every day. Geoffrey reflects, “There’s a wonderful quote about Desi and Vivian Vance being up on the lighting catwalks looking down on a rehearsal, and Vivian saying, ‘It just isn’t the same, Desi, is it?’ Because Vivian had gotten divorced and remarried, Lucille had gotten remarried to Gary Morton and Desi would get remarried two years later. But at this point he was single and Miss Ball invoked the contract and bought Desi out.”
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Desi Goes into Seclusion
As Geoffrey explains it, for the next few years Desi dropped out of sight for the most part. “He married a lovely woman named Edith Hirsch that Lucille and Desi knew from Del Mar Racetrack,” he says. “She was a beautiful redhead and a good wife to him. They were married until she passed away in 1985. And Lucille was friendly with her, and Desi played golf with Gary Morton. I’m not saying everybody loved everybody, but everybody was there for each other and for the children. And then Desi decided around 1966 that he wanted to get his feet wet again and be creative, so he started Desi Arnaz Productions. He produced several television pilots that did not sell, and one that did, called The Mothers-in-Law.”
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United Artists Television
‘The Mothers-in-Law’
Airing from 1967 to 1969, in the show two sets of parents (Eve Arden and Herbert Rudley, Kaye Ballard and Roger C. Carmel) are neighbors, the best of friends and constantly interfering with their kids who have fallen in love. There’s an I Love Lucy vibe to some of this, which isn’t entirely surprising when you consider that Desi served as executive producer and it was created by Lucy writers Bob Carroll, Jr. and Madelyn Davis. “It starred his old friend Eve Arden, who he had known since the ‘30s, and Kaye Ballard, who was a Broadway and cabaret star,” says Geoffrey, “and put them together in a sitcom that was bad luck, on the wrong network at the wrong time. It was on NBC, which at the time didn’t do well with sitcoms, on opposite Ed Sullivan. It ran for two seasons, Desi and Desi, Jr. were guest stars on it several times and Desi directed about half or two-thirds of the episodes before it was canceled. After that, he did some variety show work, but it was spotty. He was spending more time in his personal life. In the mid-‘70s he wrote his autobiography, A Book.”
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Occasional TV Appearances
In the mid-1970s, Desi made several television appearances, some tied in to the promotion of his book. He spent a week co-hosting the daytime series The Mike Douglas Show (where one of their guests was Vivian Vance). There was also a hosting gig on Saturday Night Live, where he was joined for a bit by Desi Arnaz, Jr., did a spoof of I Love Lucy, performed a couple of his hits and actually led the studio audience in a conga line. He, Desi, Jr. and Lucie performed together on NBC’s variety show Kraft Music Hall, the two Desis appeared on the TV special California, My Way. Desi also guest starred on The Virginian, Ironside and Alice.
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NBC
Relationship With His Kids
Whatever else went on in his life, Geoffrey observes, Desi was a good father. “His children have told me he was a good, loving, devoted father who taught them to have joy in life,” he says. “When his children joined Here’s Lucy, any time there was a musical number or something really, really special, he was in the audience cheering them on. He worked with his kids on the Kraft Music Hall and he did some live things with them. When Desi, Jr. developed his own addiction issues, his father was there for him. His father went in with him and said, ‘All right, we’ll do this together. We’ll both get better.’ How’s that for a father? I have spoken to hundreds of people and, with the exception of one or two, have not heard a negative word about Desi. I was told again and again that he was the most brilliant, tasteful, hard-working, generous of time and money and spirit boss and friend you could want when he wasn’t battling the alcoholism. The thing to remember is that he was friends with Miss Ball until he died and he was there for his children until he died.”
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Finding Joy
Towards the end of his life, Desi owned a horse-breeding farm in California and raced thoroughbreds. Additionally, he taught studio production and acting for television at San Diego State University. Unfortunately, though, throughout most of his life, Desi had smoked Cuban cigars and in 1986 was diagnosed with lung cancer, passing away from the disease on December 2 of that year. “I think everyone reading this can learn from Desi Arnaz to take joy in life while you can,” muses Geoffrey. “Don’t put joy off. Every day find something about which to be joyful. That’s how you have a happy life, and he did that. In his worst days, he did that. And in his best days, he shone like a star, because he loved his life. He loved what he did, he loved his children. He loved to cook — not many people know he was a great cook.
“For all of these things,” he closes, “he wasn’t just Lucille Ball’s husband who lucked into a part on I Love Lucy because she demanded it. He was so much more than that.”