On November 30, 1986, Lucille Ball called Desi Arnaz from across the country. Their daughter Lucy, in the room, heard her mother repeat the same three words five times before Arnaz replied: “I love you too, honey. ” It was only afterward that anyone realized the call had fallen on the thirtieth anniversary of the night they eloped to a Connecticut club in 1940, with Arnaz racing back to Manhattan to make his second show of the evening at the Roxy. Between that elopement and that final phone call, the two built the most-watched program in American television history.
They founded a production company with five thousand dollars that grew larger than MGM. They invented the rerun and presented a version of marriage so convincing that two-thirds of American households tuned in on Monday nights. Their children grew up in the gap between that version and the reality, and the reality involved drinking, infidelity, a volcanic mother, an absent father, and a business empire so vast it consumed the marriage that created it. Lucille Ball was born in Jamestown, New York, in 1911, to a telephone lineman and a housewife who moved constantly because of his work.
Her father died of typhoid fever when she was three, and her mother was pregnant with Lucy’s brother at the time. The event that destroyed the family financially came twelve years later when a teenage visitor accidentally shot an eight-year-old neighbor with a . 22 rifle during a supervised shooting session under Lucy’s grandfather’s watch. The boy was paralyzed and died five years later.
The grandfather, as the responsible adult, was sentenced to house arrest for a year, and his resulting bankruptcy forced the family to lose their home to foreclosure. Ball later said the only thing she remembered about her father’s death was a bird trapped inside the house, the origin of a lifelong phobia. Desi Arnaz was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1917 to colonial nobility, with a father who had served as the youngest mayor of the city and a grandfather who had been an executive at Bacardi. The revolution of 1933 ended that life overnight.
Mobs attacked and destroyed family homes and cattle. Desi’s father was imprisoned for six months, and the family fled to Miami with nothing. The boy lived with his father in a garage infested with rats and cockroaches, worked menial jobs, and later reflected that he learned everything he needed in those early years from watching his father’s toughness. Ball and Arnaz met in 1940 on the set of Too Many Girls, an RKO film adaptation of the musical Arnaz had starred in the year before.
They fell in love quickly, which suited both their temperaments. They married secretly on November 30, 1940. Arnaz had two shows that night at the Roxy in Manhattan, missed the first, and caught the second. In 1951, Ball was a CBS radio star in My Favorite Husband.
When the network proposed bringing the show to television, she agreed on one condition: her real husband had to play her television husband. CBS executives resisted, worried that audiences would reject a red-haired woman married to a Cuban bandleader with a heavy accent. To prove the duo was commercially viable, Ball and Arnaz spent the summer of 1950 touring with a live vaudeville act. The company formed to produce that tour was Desilu Productions.
In early 1951, they financed a pilot with five thousand dollars of their own money. When sponsor Philip Morris and CBS wanted to move the show to New York for live broadcast, Ball and Arnaz countered with an offer to take lower salaries and fund production themselves on 35mm film in Los Angeles, on the condition that Desilu retained ownership of the film negatives after each episode aired. CBS agreed without realizing what it was surrendering. Broadcast executives of the time expected a program to air once, with no concept of rerun value.
Arnaz reasoned that episodes could be resold as more television stations came online across the country, and he was right. The rerun industry was born in that single contractual clause. I Love Lucy premiered on October 15, 1951, and within six months became the first television program to reach more than ten million households in a single week. At its peak in the 1952–1953 season, the show averaged a rating of 67.
3, more than two-thirds of all American television homes tuned in on a given Monday night. The show was designed to save a marriage: Arnaz was constantly on tour with his band, and the couple never saw each other. They both believed working together in the same studio every week would give them the family life the tours had stolen. The belief was sincere, but it was wrong.
When Ball became pregnant with their second child in 1952, they proposed integrating the pregnancy into the show itself, an unprecedented move. CBS censors refused to allow the word “pregnant,” so the episode was titled “Lucy Is Enciente,” using the French euphemism. On January 19, 1953, the episode aired on the night little Ricky was born on screen. That same day, Ball gave birth to Desi Arnaz Jr.
by scheduled caesarean section. An estimated forty-four million people watched, more than twice the audience that watched Eisenhower’s inauguration the following day. Eight months later, Ball testified voluntarily before a House Un-American Activities Committee investigator about a 1936 voter registration card declaring intent to join the Communist Party. She told the committee the registration came at the insistence of her elderly grandfather, the same man whose bankruptcy after the 1927 shooting had cost the family their home.
She said she had never been a Communist and that in those days it was almost as bad to be a Republican. The committee cleared her, but broadcaster Walter Winchell leaked a vague item, and a headline soon read: “Lucille Ball Tops Red Probe. ” Before taping the next episode, Arnaz addressed the studio audience directly, defending his wife by invoking his own history. He said he had been kicked out of Cuba for communism, and that Lucy was as American as could be.
Then he introduced her as his favorite wife, the only red thing about her being her hair, which wasn’t even natural. Ball walked out crying to warm applause. The crisis ended. The audience had made its choice.
By late 1957 and early 1958, using capital from the sale of the I Love Lucy library rights to CBS, Desilu bought the former RKO production facilities for about six million dollars, the same lot where Ball and Arnaz had once been contract players. The deal gave Desilu thirty-three soundstages, four more than MGM and eleven more than Twentieth Century Fox. Desilu went public in 1958, selling five hundred twenty-five thousand shares immediately, and during the 1958–1959 season the company earned revenue exceeding thirty-two million dollars. By 1957, Parade had estimated the couple’s combined wealth at twenty-five million dollars, all built from the five-thousand-dollar pilot investment six years earlier.
The company produced or provided facilities for The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, and dozens of others. Meanwhile, the marriage was collapsing under the weight of the empire built on it. Ball filed for divorce on March 2, 1960, Arnaz’s forty-third birthday, one day after taping the final episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, describing married life as a nightmare. The divorce was finalized on May 4, 1960, after twenty years of marriage.
In November 1962, Arnaz resigned as head of Desilu and sold his shares to Ball for a reported two and a half to three million dollars. She became president and CEO, reportedly the first woman to head a major Hollywood television studio. She ran Desilu until the mid-1960s, personally greenlighting Star Trek and Mission: Impossible, two series that defined television for the next decade and exist today because a woman newly divorced from her partner decided to take risks on scripts the rest of the industry had rejected. In 1966, Ball married comedian Gary Morton, thirteen years younger.
Arnaz married Edith Mack Hirsch in 1963, on his forty-sixth birthday, and the marriage lasted twenty-two years until her death from cancer in 1985. Despite the divorce, the two never stopped being each other’s closest confidants. They appeared together publicly in 1976 for the first time in sixteen years. Their daughter Lucy said the divorce accomplished what the marriage could not: it gave them enough distance to be kind to one another.
The next decade brought the account with the damage. Desi Arnaz Jr. entered treatment for his addiction at a clinic near San Diego in 1981. Four years later, after Edith’s death, his father followed him into recovery at the same center, registering under an assumed name to protect his privacy.
Desi Jr. reflected on the role reversal with pride, saying that everything he had been through began to pay off, and when his father needed help, he told him he couldn’t do anything for him personally, but there was a place that could, and his father understood. His sister Lucy remembered attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with her father and feeling proud when he said: “My name is Desi, and I’m an alcoholic. ”
In 1986, Arnaz was diagnosed with lung cancer after a lifetime of heavy smoking that included lighting cigarettes on the I Love Lucy set itself.
Ball visited him in the hospital, and they reportedly watched old I Love Lucy episodes together on videotape. On November 30, 1986, Ball called Arnaz from across the country. Arnaz replied: “I love you too, honey. ” “Good luck with your show.
” He died two days later, on December 2, 1986, at his home in Del Mar, California, at sixty-nine. His death came five days before Ball was scheduled to receive the Kennedy Center Honor, an event for which Arnaz had already written a statement. Robert Stack read it at the ceremony. Its closing line was the last thing Desi Arnaz ever said to the public: “I Love Lucy was never just a title.
” Their daughter Lucy was in the room during that final phone call and in her father’s arms when he died. No one realized at the time that the day of their last conversation was their wedding anniversary, the same November 30 they had chosen forty-six years earlier when they eloped and Desi rushed back to the Roxy for the second show. Lucy, who spent decades as the primary keeper of her parents’ legacy, summed it up: “They gave the country this wonderful creation, but they never got what they wanted, which was to stay together. But they loved each other until the very end.
” Lucille Ball died on April 26, 1989, at seventy-seven, of an abdominal aortic rupture. Her last public appearance had been one month earlier, co-hosting the Academy Awards with Bob Hope. She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom later that year. In 1993, Lucy produced a documentary, Lucy and Desi, made because, she said, her parents had been too busy for her to ever really know them.
The show meant to save the marriage destroyed it, and the marriage meant to support the show outlived it by twenty-six years of phone calls, visits, and a love neither of them could stop feeling, and neither of them could make work.