Lucy didn’t see what all the fuss was about. “They just need a second bathroom?” she asked. “Well, that’s no problem. Tell the ladies to be my guest.”
Soundstages were always filled with adrenaline, but as Desi walked out in front of the studio audience, he found himself more emotional than ever. His mind began flashing back through his life and all that had transpired to bring him to this wonderful, improbable moment.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, as the last notes from the band faded away. “Welcome. I am Desi Arnaz.” The audience cheered.
The television episode they were about to tape would be the first one to ever use multiple cameras with 35mm film and tape before a live studio audience. Up until that point, TV was almost exclusively taped with a single camera that would be moved around as necessary. By using multiple cameras, a far higher quality of film, and a real live audience, Desilu was completely reinventing how TV was produced.
Desi made it clear to everyone involved with the series that the real star of the show wasn’t him; it was Lucy. He waved one of his arms toward the stage entrance. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, here’s my favorite wife, the mother of my child, the vice president of Desilu Productions—I am the president—and my favorite redhead, Lucille Ball!”
As the crowd applauded, Lucy walked onto the stage and wrapped her husband in a warm embrace. “How ya doing, you gorgeous Cuban?” she asked. With a smile that belied how nervous she was, she blew kisses to the audience.
Within minutes, the actors took their marks. Someone yelled, “Action!” And a Hollywood legend was born.
Set of Toast of the Town
New York City
October 3, 1954
Desi and Lucy had flown to New York to be honored on Ed Sullivan’s hit show, Toast of the Town. The couple seemed to be on top of the world. They now had two children, Desi and Lucie, a beautiful home, a hit TV show, and the love of a nation.
Desi, wearing a perfectly tailored tuxedo, stood up and scanned the studio audience in front of him. He glanced at Lucy, sitting to his right, just on the other side of Sullivan, then he turned to face the cameras. The cheering audience likely expected Ricky Ricardo to say something humorous. Instead, Desi’s face was somber, his tone serious.
He nodded in the direction of his wife. “I think if it wouldn’t have been for Lucy,” he said, his voice quivering, “I would’ve stopped trying a long time ago because I was always the guy that didn’t fit.”
The long, circuitous journey from destitution and terror in Cuba flooded through his mind. With his eyes moist, he added, “We came to this country and we didn’t have a cent in our pockets. From cleaning canary cages to this night here in New York, is a long ways. And I don’t think that any other country in the world can give you that opportunity.” He was choking on tears now. They would not stop. Emotion once again overcame him. “And I just wanna say thank you,” he croaked.
“Thank you, America.”
An applauding Sullivan rose to embrace Desi, who struggled to wipe the tears away. A similarly moved Lucy reached over and patted her husband on the arm. They had come a long way, indeed. But deep down, Desi was still haunted by the truth he’d vowed to remember while fleeing to Havana in the backseat of the car: Nothing good ever lasts.
Six Years Later
County Courthouse
Los Angeles, California
March 4, 1960
Few people in Hollywood were surprised by the breaking news: Lucille Ball was filing for divorce.
Friends had known that their marriage had become a façade for the last few years, breaking down over the same old problems: Desi’s drinking, his womanizing, and the utter conflict between their personalities.
The gossipy tabloid Confidential came out with the headline-grabbing story that Desi Arnaz was cheating on Lucy. When an advance copy of the magazine circulated on the set, everyone seemed to freeze. Even though they all knew the story was true, no one knew how to react. One friend watched Lucy grab the magazine and hand it to her husband. “Oh, hell,” she said. “I could tell them worse than that.”
As their marriage crumbled, Desi’s and Lucy’s professional lives became even more successful. Three years earlier Desi had purchased RKO Studios, where he and Lucy had first met. He was now producing a new hit series, The Untouchables, starring Robert Stack, and Desilu had become a multimillion-dollar media empire.
As I Love Lucy ended its run in 1957—by then it had changed formats and been renamed The Lucille Ball–Desi Arnaz Show—their marriage was over in everything but name. On the last day of filming, there had been an eerie quiet. Lucy and Desi talked to each other like polite strangers.
Still, many in the cast and crew, like most Americans when they heard the news about the divorce, were heartbroken. They wanted a fairy-tale ending. Some, like I Love Lucy’s onetime director Bill Asher, believed right up to the end that things might turn around. “Maybe I’m a romantic,” he said, “but there was a great, great love there.”
Cast members remembered one particular scene from the show years earlier that hinted at what held the couple together. In the scene, Ricky Ricardo sings a song to Lucy after discovering for the first time that she is pregnant. The words Ricky sang to his wife were set to the tune of the show’s iconic theme song.
Even as both Lucy and Desi knew their marriage was crumbling, they seemed to lose sight of their characters during the scene’s first take. Overcome with emotion, they wept openly and held each other tightly. The director of the show had them do another take—this time with less visible emotion. But the studio audience insisted that they stick with the first take, the one that was real. Lucy and Desi agreed.
Unfortunately, the moment was fleeting. This second effort at divorce was going to stick.
Desilu Productions
Office of the President
August 17, 1964
After Desi’s hit series The Untouchables was canceled, Lucille Ball was installed as the new president of Desilu Productions.
Desi was on a downward path. He was drinking again, off television screens, and seemingly adrift.
Lucy was now the sole manager of the Desilu empire. The company had sold the rights to I Love Lucy to CBS for $5 million, a whopping sum at the time. Lucy had also bought out Desi’s share of the company for more than $2.5 million—thereby making her the most powerful woman in show business. Desilu Productions, with sixteen soundstages and one thousand employees, was also the busiest studio in Hollywood.
As a boss, Lucille Ball was nothing like Lucy Ricardo. She was serious, demanding, and a proud perfectionist. She had many friends and was a devoted, often overprotective mother. She was as tough in her job as any man. And she knew every detail about every lightbulb, screw, and bolt that made its way onto one of her sets.
The new Desilu Productions president had learned a lot from watching her husband all those years. She commanded her team to produce new and unique shows. Like Desi, she was also willing to go her own way and ignore advice from the so-called film and television experts in Hollywood and New York. One script that caught her attention was a show called Mission: Impossible. The production costs were high, but she thought it was worth the risk, so she signed the deal.
A script for another promising show now sat on her desk. This one had a confusing name—at first, she thought it involved sending celebrities abroad on USO tours. The script was filled with strange jargon, and the ideas seemed too highbrow for a general audience. Top officials at Desilu were not enamored with the concept, nor the expense that it would entail. They told her that even if they sold the show to a studio, it would cost Desilu more to produce it than they’d ever make in profit.
But Desi had taught Lucy to trust her instincts. This show seemed to her to be innovative and fresh and she felt like it could be bigger than anything the executives could put into their financial models. She also believed that, if it became a hit, they could monetize it in other ways—like merchandise—to of
fset the production costs.
After much deliberation, Lucille Ball gave the green light to Star Trek.
Twenty Years Later
Home of Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill
Los Angeles, California
May 1984
The California sun was less forgiving on Lucy than it was with Desi. As the two splashed in the pool, the water sparkling with reflected sunlight, Lucy wore a white hat with a yellow ribbon that shaded her face and complemented her modest yellow bathing suit. Desi was shirtless; his bronzed, sun-starched skin topped off by a mane of silver hair.
Their daughter, Lucie Luckinbill, filmed them as they swam with five-year-old Simon, their first grandson. It would be one more family video to add to the yards of home movie footage Lucy had accumulated over the years. It would also be the last time Desi and Lucy were ever photographed together.
Ever the protective grandparent, Lucy clung to her grandchild tightly while Desi circled them a few feet away. With his mouth, he made gurgling noises in the water, prompting squeals of delight from the boy. Helping Simon to a seat on the edge of the pool, his grandparents sang to him. Clapping her hands rhythmically, Lucy croaked, “Grand-pa-pa! Grand-pa-pa! Grand-pa-pa!”
After bungling a few words to Simon in her ex-husband’s native language, she chided Desi, “All my life I’ve been telling you to speak in Spanish!”
Desi stopped floating and shrugged in mock disgust. “All my life you’ve been telling me I don’t know how to speak English!”
Lucy reached over to Desi and tried to flatten his hair. It was a gesture both familiar and automatic. “I wanted you to speak Spanish to the kids,” she said.
He smirked. “They made fun of me!”
More than three decades earlier, Desi and Lucy had negotiated an ownership interest in their pilot and then made the bold decision to record it on film. In the process, they had invented the television rerun.
Now, together again, they were living a real-life one.
Lucy had remarried and Desi thought her new husband, Gary Morton, was a pleasant man. A stand-up comic with a perfectly adequate act, if modest acclaim. He and Desi got along just fine. Gary never seemed much of a threat. Desi liked to refer to him as “that guy.”
As Desi sang “Babalu” to Simon, and Lucy laughed and clapped along, it was—for just a moment—I Love Lucy again.
One last time.
Desi Arnaz Residence
Del Mar, California
November 1986
When she heard that the priests had been alerted, Lucy quickly called a friend who then drove her over one hundred miles from Beverly Hills to Del Mar. Pulling into her ex-husband’s driveway, Lucy hurried into his house. She had been told before leaving that he would refuse to see her. Sixty-nine years old, and quickly dying of lung cancer attributed to a lifetime of cigar and cigarette smoking, Desi was a shell of the man he’d once been. Chemotherapy left him nearly bald. By some estimates, he weighed less than one hundred pounds. No one was allowed to see him in such a state. Any visitors would have to talk to him through closed bedroom doors.
Of course, whenever Lucy called, which was frequently as his health declined, he picked up the phone. On their last wedding anniversary Desi sent her flowers, as he had done every year since their divorce.
Lucy, never one to play by the rules, was determined to see him. But, just as she had been warned, he wouldn’t let her into the bedroom. For a while, Lucy yelled at him through the door, but finally, after much insisting and complaining and refusing to leave, Desi relented. She stayed by his side talking to him for hours.
Lucy had come to gain a whole new appreciation for her ex-husband and the dream they had shared together. Speaking to ABC’s Barbara Walters in a voice that had deepened considerably over the years due to her smoking, Lucy had lamented. “We built up a lot of things. But while we were building, they would not believe that he was doing the building. He was doing the successful building of a very well-run empire.”
Returning to the car, Lucy was visibly shaken. As she had told Walters, “We certainly did have everything. Worked very hard to get it. Two beautiful children. What else could you ask for? And I think if Desi were here, he would agree that it was . . .” Her voice trailed off. Desi wasn’t there. Gambling, womanizing, and drinking had ruined him.
Now in her car, Lucy broke down, telling her friend, “That was the one love. . . .”
Desi Arnaz Residence
Del Mar, California
November 1986
Desi knew he didn’t have much time left. But he was determined to write one last script before he died. It was to be a tribute, a short one, and its subject was the love of his life. He had married again—his new wife looking strikingly like Lucy. But it was still always Lucy first. Now, as he lay in his home, nearly broke from gambling debts, and succumbing to an illness attributed to a lifetime of smoking, he thought of her again.
“Nurse,” he called from his deathbed, “I need a pen and paper.”
“But Mr. Arnaz,” said the nurse as she walked into his bedroom, “you are too weak to write.”
“I’ll talk,” said Desi. “You write.”
When his nurse returned, Desi lay silent for several minutes. He thought of the first time he’d seen Lucy, with her fake black eye and bedraggled clothes, on the set of Too Many Girls. He thought of all the classics Desilu had produced over the years: Star Trek, The Danny Thomas Show, The Andy Griffith Show, The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible, Hogan’s Heroes, That Girl, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Gomer Pyle, I Spy, and My Three Sons.
But, before long, his mind turned to his failures. As if the title of their first movie had been an omen, there had indeed been “too many girls.” There had been too much drinking as well. He had been careless with money. He had been hurtful to his family. And his recklessness had not just cost him a media empire; it had cost him a marriage.
Desi regretted that he would be leaving his children a home he had mortgaged to pay for his drinking and gambling debts. But his biggest regret of all was losing Lucy.
She was to be honored the following month at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. President Reagan would be there with the First Lady. So would a slew of television legends—some of whom Desilu’s Productions had made into stars.
The original plan for the ceremony had been for Desi to be a guest speaker. The show’s producers knew the ratings bonanza he would bring. It would have been a very public, emotional reunion between two Hollywood legends. But Desi now understood he would never make it to Washington, even though he wanted to be there for Lucy. He felt like he was failing her—again.
Instead, Desi sent a message to be read at the Kennedy Center by Robert Stack, an actor who became famous playing Eliot Ness on Desilu’s The Untouchables. Stack was a close friend and a kind man, but for the ceremony, as in Lucy’s life, there was no good substitute for Desi Arnaz.
The question for Desi was what to say in a message that would likely be delivered after his death. He wanted to say “I’m sorry.” He wanted to say “I wish I could go back and do a thousand things differently.” He wanted to say that he wouldn’t drink, he wouldn’t cheat, and he wouldn’t let anything or anyone come between him and the shy actress with the big smile and the bright red hair.
But he knew he couldn’t write those words. He wasn’t going to make this a speech about him—about his failings and his regrets. The ceremony at the Kennedy Center was about Lucy. And his message would be as well.
“I love Lucy,” he said to the nurse, pausing just long enough for her to wonder whether Desi was making a declaration or dictating the beginning of the first sentence of his speech. “I Love Lucy had just one mission: to make people laugh.”
As Desi spoke, the nurse wrote.
“Lucy gave it a rare quality,” Desi continued. “She could perform the wildest, even the messiest physical comedy without losing her feminine appeal.”
Desi paused. He had been bewitched by her feminine app
eal for the past forty-six years.
“The New York Times asked me to divide the credit for success between the writers, the directors, and the cast,” said Desi, still dictating. “I told them, ‘Give Lucy ninety percent of the credit—divide the other ten percent among the rest of us.’ ” A tear came to his eye as he struggled to find the strength to say “Lucy . . . was . . . the show.”
As selfless and generous as his words were, they weren’t the whole truth. But precision wasn’t his goal. This was a love letter. And he knew just how to end it.
“P.S.,” he said, as tears trickled down his cheeks and memories of better days flooded his thoughts, “I Love Lucy was never just a title.”
EPILOGUE
New York City
September 20, 2012
Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference in New York, CBS Television president Leslie Moonves reflected back on the all but unbelievable success of one of its most beloved sitcoms. He stunned reporters by noting that even now, six decades after the show first aired, the Arnaz-Ball production was still a cash cow for the network.
By 2012, CBS, which had repurchased rights to I Love Lucy in 1994, was receiving $20 million a year in syndication revenue from the show. The sitcom was still being aired in seventy-seven countries around the world.
Desi Arnaz’s unorthodox decision to take ownership of his show not only netted Desilu Productions millions of dollars, it also set a precedent for the generations of comedians who’d follow. Taking a page from Arnaz, Seinfeld co-creators Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, for example, received around $400 million in syndication fees. And every major sitcom since I Love Lucy has seen new life in reruns—all thanks to the genius of Desi Arnaz, the inventor of the rerun.
In life, he “bestrode the flickering world of television like a colossus,” the Los Angeles Times recalled in his obituary. But today—in a world of syndication, iTunes, and Netflix—the legacy of the rerun’s inventor is bigger than ever. “It’s well to remember that every evening we spend watching television,” said the Times, “we are exposed to his influence.”