Here’s What Happened to Keith Thibodeaux Before, During and After Little Ricky on ‘I Love Lucy’

Part of the Family

As part of her interview with the Television Academy Foundation, Lucie Arnaz confirmed that Keith was indeed a part of the family, commenting, “For a long time I thought Keith was related to us, because he went everywhere with us. Desi [Jr.] considered him his best friend and was responsible for teaching him the drums. He came to our house on many weekends and traveled with them during the summer. My mother kind of adopted him. He is in all of our home movies and photographs growing up and was a great kid, and still is.”

Pre-‘Lucy’ Days

Keith was born December 1, 1950 in Lafayette, Louisiana. His first attraction to any form of entertainment was the penchant he demonstrated for playing the drums. At the age of 3 he was reportedly making $500 a week touring with the Horace Heidt Orchestra (which gave Honeymooners star Art Carney his start as well). In his Foundation interview, Keith reflected, “I began to play with knives and forks on the kitchen table and then my mother kicked me out of there and brought me out to the backyard. I started playing on these trashcans in the backyard and the neighbor said to my parents, ‘Your son sounds like he has some talent. Why don’t you get him a set of drums?’ So my dad did. He got me a little snare drum, which I began to play and I got better.” He says his interest started from listening to the radio, as there wasn’t much television at the time, and from going to parades with his father where he could see drummers playing.

Getting His Start

“I started out as an amateur drummer, of course,” he said. “Never took lessons. But my dad invited me to the Qantas Club Meetings and Lions Club meetings and they invited me to play when they heard I could play pretty good drums. From there I auditioned for The Swift Show Wagon with Horace Heidt and the American Way in Lafayette, Louisiana. I was a big hit there; of course, I was the hometown boy. My dad asked Mr. Heidt if I had any future in show business. He said, ‘I don’t think so, Mr. Thibodeaux. We’ve already got a 12-year-old-drummer, so I don’t think we need a 3-year-old drummer.’ But two weeks later he called to ask me to be a regular with him. My dad left his job so he could watch over me. I remember the nice-looking dancers on the show and all the nice ladies that sort of took me in and cooed and coddled me. I remember flying on planes with the show and rehearsing with the band, and traveling from city to city when we traveled all over the United States. I was 3-and-a-half or 4.”

Fate Plays Its Hand

The Horace Heidt Orchestra made its way to Sherman Oaks, California and, when the show ended, Keith and his dad decided to stick around in the area, with his father getting a job there and becoming friends with a Hollywood agent. Learning about Keith’s abilities with the drums, the agent suggested that he might want to audition for the part of Little Ricky on I Love Lucy. “We went to the audition and I was introduced to Lucy, who said to my dad, ‘Well, he’s cute, but what does he do?’ They happened to have a set of drums on the set, so they brought me over to it and I just played them. Everybody started hearing me and wanted to know what the commotion was. Sheldon Leonard, the director for The Danny Thomas Show and other shows, came over and was enjoying this little kid playing. And then, finally, Desi Arnaz came up and started jamming with me on the drums and playing with them. He stood up and laughed in his way and said, ‘I think we found Little Ricky.’ And at that time, I think they interviewed perhaps 500 kids in New York and L.A.”

Learning to Act

When he was hired, Keith was faced with the challenge that now he had to actually act. “I was a little drummer boy,” he added. “I wasn’t an actor or anything. I had to learn to act, to say lines and remember lines in an age of Hollywood when they couldn’t just stop the camera and tell you the lines like they do nowadays to kids and then you repeat them back. My dad would coach me every night.”

Keith Thibodeaux Becomes Richard Keith

When he joined I Love Lucy, Keith Thibodeaux became Richard Keith, which, he noted, “was Desi’s answer to people not being able to pronounce Thibodeaux. Back then we didn’t live in such an international climate and the world was a little larger than it is now. He thought that would be good; my name Keith was an aspect of who I really was, and Richard could be like Ricky. On The Andy Griffith Show I was called Richard — I hated that. But I just answered to all these different crazy names. Nobody called me at Ricky at home. I was still Keith.”

Working With Lucille Ball

In reflecting on working with Lucille Ball, Keith noted, “She was kind of enigmatic. Very passionate, very complex, very energetic and very tightly wound. And no nonsense, but she could be very soft as well. She had a soft side to her as well. She treated me nice. I’d spend weekends in Delmar when Lucy and Desi were still married, I would spend some time with their kids. She would give us back massages, which was nice, and brought in some warm Ovaltine. But there was also this atmosphere in the Arnaz home where you wouldn’t feel very comfortable. There wasn’t a kickback feeling. We had fun as kids, and we learned to enjoy ourselves, but there was always this instability that was there because of the marriage at that time.”

And Then There Was Desi

Keith was a little more effusive in his praise of Desi Arnaz, commenting, “He was a genius of sorts. He had a way about him; I guess it was that Latin thing, where he actually made me feel comfortable on the set. There was a bond between us, because we were both drummers, we both came from different backgrounds. I come from a French Cajun family, he came from Cuba. We had similarities there; a little different from Lucy’s side where I wasn’t as close to Lucy as I was to Desi. But he was a visionary, coming up with the three-camera set-up in front of the audience. It’s too bad, because the alcohol really cut his creativity and effectiveness off as a producer.”

Meeting Superman

One of the highlights of his season of I Love Lucy was the opportunity to meet actor George Reeves who, at the time, was starring as the Man of Steel on The Adventures of Superman. The plot of that episode has Ricky trying to get Superman to appear at Little Ricky’s birthday party, which, after some comic misadventures, happens. “This was probably my personal favorite,” said Keith, “because George Reeves was my personal hero as Superman. When I met him off camera, he shook hands with me and he was this big, huge guy. He is Superman to me. I know he’s an actor and we’re all actors, but as far as I’m concerned he was Superman. Then there’s that bit where he flies through the kitchen blinds. He had a ladder he used to bust through there, but even that to me was super. He posed with me for some publicity shots and I’ve got a little Superman outfit on. I still have that picture today.”

Saying Goodbye to ‘Lucy’

Keith’s last appearance as Little Ricky was in “Lucy Meets the Mustache,” the 13th and final episode of the hour-long Lucy episodes, airing April 1, 1960. “The whole episode was about me,” reflected Keith. “Ernie Kovacs guest stars and he wants to sign me rather than Ricky. I played the drums a little bit in it. That’s when I was the most comfortable as Little Ricky, and that was the last episode, though it wasn’t until my dad drove me that one night that he told me they decided the show couldn’t go on anymore and that that was going to be the last episode. And that Lucy and Desi were going to be divorced. Of course I knew that part, because Desi Jr. had called me up and told me all of that. So I was out of a job at the age of 9. Ernie Kovacs was cool and easy to work with. Like I said, it was an easy show to do for me.”

‘The Andy Griffith Show’

Next up for Keith were appearances on Ben Casey, The Bill Dana Show, The Lucy Show (his part there was trimmed to virtually nothing due to the episode running long) and The Joey Bishop Show. In between, he made 13 appearances on The Andy Griffith Show as a friend of Opie Taylor (Ron Howard). “I went to the audition,” Keith related, “and they said, ‘You’re Johnny Paul Jason.’ Well, the show sort of categorized him as this guy who knew these little facts, these weird facts, like if you put a penny on a railroad track, what’s going to happen to it? Just kid stuff, but he was kind of the sage of the kids on The Andy Griffith Show. But my character never did turn to that. When I came on the show, I was just one of his buddies. Just a normal kid from Mayberry. Today I do all these Mayberry festivals and stuff; I did a show with Don Knotts. People just really love that show. If you’re on that show, it doesn’t matter who you were or what you were on that show, you’re a part of Mayberry forever.”

Very Different From ‘Lucy’

The filming experience, he said, couldn’t have been more different between I Love Lucy and The Andy Griffith Show: “Completely different. It wasn’t shot in front of a live audience. It was shot like a movie with one camera. Very laid back, The Andy Griffith Show was very much like their characters. Really nice to work with; played checkers with the makeup guy, some people played guitars and sung songs. Just kind of cool. Ron and I played catch and ate hamburgers together as the commissary.”

Farewell Hollywood!

Following his stint in Mayberry, Keith and his dad found themselves heading back to Louisiana as his parents decided to separate. “My parents separating,” he explained, “was like an atomic bomb blowing up my whole life. My little world was gone, you know? So we moved back to Louisiana. I was 15 at that time. I left all my friends back in L.A. and Louisiana was a completely different culture and whole set of things that I had to fit in with. And the fact that my parents separated was another thing that I was ashamed about. Back then people didn’t really talk a lot about divorce. Suddenly my mother had to get a job, she’d been a housewife. We had to live with my aunts and uncles who took care of us and provided for us. If it was for them, we wouldn’t have been able to survive.”

David and the Giants

By 1969, Keith had made the shift to music and became part of the Laurel, Mississippi-based band David and the Giants, which toured largely through the South and had a few regional hits. Despite the success, Keith hit some road bumps: “I played in rock bands and drugs and smoking and drinking began to get real big in my life. At that time, I just didn’t really care. I was raised in a religious home and when my parents separated, I kind of got hard-hearted towards God and the idea of God and all of that. I just really rebelled and didn’t want to care about myself at that point. And I wanted to distance myself from the whole aspect of being Little Ricky and this little actor character from Hollywood and the I Love Lucy show. Back in those days it hadn’t become a legend. It was kind of transitioning from the first time showing to reruns. And the whole hippie counter-culture thing was going on. The music scene was emerging, so being 15 or 16 or 17 years old, I was right in the middle of it in Louisiana. I began to take part in all of the things that were part of that world.”

Drugs continued to be a problem, which resulted in Keith ultimately dropping out of the band. But fast-forward to 1974 and he had become a born-again Christian — which his former bandmates did as well, which resulted in the group getting back together. They’re still performing to this day. Additionally, he married Kathy Denton in 1976 and the two of them have a daughter, who has made them grandparents. Besides performing, in 1990 Keith became the executive director for Kathy’s company, Ballet Magnifical!, which tours both nationally and internationally.

Sole Survivor

In the aftermath of the near 60 years since the last new TV show featuring Lucy, Ricky and Little Ricky, the only surviving cast member is Keith, which sounds like it could be a heavy burden — if he let it. “I really don’t think about it too much, unless I’m talking to somebody like yourself,” Keith related to Page Six. “I’m not enamored of myself and who I was. I kind of dredge up the memories when I need to, but it’s never far from me. I’m sort of identified in this context of, ‘This is Keith Thibodeaux, Little Ricky.’”