On November 30, 1986, Lucille Ball called Desi Arnaz from across the country. Their daughter Lucy, sitting in the room, heard her mother repeat the same three words five times before Arnaz replied: “I love you too, honey. Good luck with your show. ” He died two days later.
Only afterward did anyone realize that the call fell on the 30th of November, the forty-sixth anniversary of the night they had eloped at a club in Connecticut, with Desi racing against time to get back to Manhattan for his second show at the Roxy. Between that elopement in 1940 and that phone call in 1986, the two built the most-watched program in the history of American television, founded a production company with five thousand dollars that grew larger than MGM, invented the rerun, and presented a version of marriage so convincing that sixty-eight percent of American households tuned in on Monday nights. Their children grew up in the gap between that version and reality. The reality involved drinking, infidelity, a volcanic mother, an absent father, and a business empire so large it consumed the marriage that created it.
Their daughter Lucy, who spent thirty years trying to understand what happened, summarized it in a single sentence. They gave the country this wonderful creation, but they never got what they wanted, which was to stay together. Lucille Désirée Ball was born on August 6, 1911, in Jamestown, New York, to Henry Durrell Ball, a telephone lineman, and Désirée Evelyn Hunt Ball. Her father’s job moved the family frequently before he died of typhoid fever in 1915 when Lucy was three.
Her mother was pregnant with Lucy’s brother Fred at the time. Ball later said she remembered almost nothing of that day except a bird trapped inside the house, the origin of a lifelong fear of birds. The event that destroyed the family financially came twelve years later, in July 1927, when a teenage visitor accidentally shot an eight-year-old neighbor with a . 22 rifle during a shooting session supervised by Lucy’s grandfather, Fred Hunt.
The boy was paralyzed and died five years later. The grandfather was held legally responsible, sentenced to a year of house arrest, and his resulting bankruptcy forced the family to lose their home and move into a small apartment. Ball’s escape was performance. At twelve, her stepfather pushed her to audition for a musical troupe, and she remembered the stage as the first place she had ever felt praised.
In 1926, her mother enrolled her in drama school in New York, alongside future star Bette Davis, but the instructors told her she would not succeed. Three thousand miles away, six years later, a boy from the Cuban aristocracy was learning something similar. Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III was born in 1917 in Santiago de Cuba into a family of colonial nobility, with a father who had served as the youngest mayor of the city and a grandfather who was an executive at Bacardi. The revolution of 1933 ended that life overnight.
Crowds attacked and destroyed the family’s houses and livestock. Desi’s father was imprisoned for six months, and the family fled to Miami with nothing. Desi lived with his father in a garage infested with rats and cockroaches, worked menial jobs, and reflected later that he learned everything he needed in those early Miami years by watching his father’s toughness. Ball and Arnaz met in 1940 on the set of Too Many Girls, a film adaptation of the musical in which Arnaz had starred the previous year.
They fell in love fast, matching both their temperaments; neither was inclined to wait when a decision felt right. They married secretly at a club in Greenwich, Connecticut, on November 30, 1940. Arnaz was committed to two shows that night at the Roxy Theatre in Manhattan. He missed the first, but made the second.
In 1941, they bought a five-acre ranch in California and named it Desilu, a combination of their names that would become the mark of the largest independent television production company in the United States. The first serious crisis of their marriage came from wartime separation. Arnaz was drafted in 1943, served stateside in the army entertainment program, and was discharged as a sergeant in September 1945. But the separation bred suspicion, and that suspicion was grounded in evidence Ball could see from the other side of the country.
Confidential magazine later published a story about a weekend in Palm Springs that Ball said wounded and humiliated her deeply. In September 1944, she filed for divorce, telling a judge her husband had made her a nervous wreck. But she deliberately filed in California, a state where the divorce would take a year to become final, leaving 365 days for possible reconciliation. The calculation was precise and revealing.
She wanted her departure real enough to frighten him and slow enough to leave the door open. The decree became final in October 1944, but under California law the divorce was invalidated because the couple had spent the previous night together. That was the first of many cycles of rupture and repair that would define the marriage for the next sixteen years. By the late 1940s, Ball was a radio star on CBS.
When the network proposed bringing the show to television in 1951, she agreed on one condition: her real husband would 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. Some advisers reportedly urged the network to keep the redhead and drop the Cuban, advice that would have killed the most successful program in the medium’s history before it began. In early 1951, the couple financed the pilot themselves with five thousand dollars of their own money.
The deal that changed television history came when the sponsor Philip Morris and CBS wanted to move the show to New York for live broadcast. Ball and Arnaz instead offered to accept a salary cut and finance the production themselves using 35-millimeter film in Los Angeles, on the condition that Desilu retain ownership of the film negatives after each episode aired. CBS agreed, not realizing what it was giving up, because broadcast executives at the time expected the program to air only once. Arnaz reasoned that episodes could be resold as more television stations came into service across the country.
The foundation of the rerun and syndication industry was laid in that single contractual clause. By the mid-1950s, Desilu was earning more than a million dollars a year from rerun income alone. The challenge of shooting scripted comedy on film before a live audience required real engineering solutions. Working with cinematographer Karl Freund, Arnaz developed the multi-camera system that became the industry standard for sitcom production and remains so today.
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. The show was designed to save a marriage. Arnaz was constantly on tour with his band, and the couple never saw each other. Both believed that 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. The show that was supposed to give them time together consumed every hour they had, replacing the marriage with a performance of it. By its peak in the 1952 to 1953 season, the show averaged a rating of 67. 3, meaning more than two-thirds of American television households were watching on a given Monday night.
After the January 1953 episode in which Lucy gave birth on screen, which drew an estimated 44 million viewers, Ball and Arnaz signed the largest contract ever written for a television series. The episode aired the very night Desi Arnaz Jr. was born by scheduled cesarean in real life, a coordination between fiction and reality no other program had attempted. More people watched that broadcast than watched President Eisenhower’s inauguration the next day.
Desilu grew from about a dozen employees in 1950 to nearly 800 within six years. In late 1957 and early 1958, using capital from selling the rights to the I Love Lucy library 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 purchase gave Desilu 33 soundstages, four more than MGM. Desilu went public in 1958, and during the 1958 to 1959 season the company generated revenue exceeding 32 million dollars.
By 1957, Parade magazine estimated the couple’s combined wealth at 25 million dollars, built entirely from the five thousand dollar investment in the pilot six years earlier. The company produced or provided facilities for shows including Star Trek, Mission Impossible, The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and dozens of others, making it the largest independent television production company in the country. In 1952, when Ball became pregnant with her second child, she and Arnaz proposed writing the pregnancy into the I Love Lucy storyline, an unprecedented move in television. CBS censors refused to allow the word “pregnant,” so the episode was titled “Lucy Is Enceinte.
” On January 19, 1953, the episode aired the same night little Ricky was born on screen, and in reality Ball gave birth to Desi Arnaz Jr. by scheduled cesarean. In September 1953, Ball testified voluntarily before a House Un-American Activities Committee investigator about a 1936 voter registration card declaring her intention to join the Communist Party. She told the committee the registration had been made at the insistence of her elderly grandfather, the same man whose bankruptcy after the 1927 shooting accident had cost the family their home.
She said she had never been a communist, and the committee cleared her. But the broadcaster Walter Winchell leaked a vague report, and the Los Angeles Herald Express ran a front page headline: “Lucille Ball Tinted as Red. ” Before the next episode was recorded, Arnaz addressed the studio audience directly, defending his wife through the lens of his own history. He had been driven out of Cuba because of communism, he said, and Lucy was as American as Eisenhower.
The only red thing about her, he said, was her hair, and even that was not natural. Ball came out crying to warm applause, and the crisis passed. The public performance of their marriage had never been more convincing. Behind the studio doors, the real thing was falling apart.
Arnaz attributed his heavy drinking and infidelity to the pressures of managing an expanding production company, saying he felt compelled to seek outlets to relieve the pressure. Confidential magazine ran a cover in January 1955 questioning whether Desi really loved Lucy. Ball’s longtime publicity director recalled her reaction. She read the story alone in her dressing room, came out, threw the magazine at Desi, and said she could tell them worse than that.
The line was both funny and painful, because it meant Ball knew exactly what her husband was doing, had known for years, and had decided the marriage and the business were worth more than the humiliation of confirming it in the press. Their daughter Lucy described the difference between her parents’ anger. Her father would lose his temper and raise his voice, but then calm down quickly, like a storm that had just passed. Her mother worked on an entirely different frequency, taking personal offense and cutting off emotionally for days, sometimes weeks.
Ball herself later admitted the price in language that showed she understood what had happened. Children soak up their parents’ unhappiness, she said, and fortunately they soak up contentment just as easily. The problem was that contentment was less abundant in the Arnaz household than unhappiness. Lucy Désirée Arnaz was born in 1951, and Desi Arnaz Jr.
on January 19, 1953, the same day 44 million Americans watched his fictional counterpart appear on their screens. Lucy remembered hiding under the studio bleachers, embarrassed, when her father tried to introduce her to the live audience. Desi Jr. was pushed into a pop band called Dino, Desi and Billy at age eleven or twelve, an experience his sister said led him down a path involving drugs and alcohol and eventually rehab.
Desi Jr. himself described the tension clearly in a rare interview. He said his parents sat the children down and told them things were not going well, and he remembered the conversation word for word decades later. He understood the emptiness his father felt at the height of his success, but his father never stopped drinking because he did not know what the real poison was.
Ball spent nearly two decades watching the gap between the Ricardos and the Arnazes widen until it became the only thing she could see. On March 2, 1960, Desi’s forty-third birthday and one day after the final episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour was filmed, she filed for divorce, 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 president of Desilu and sold his shares to Ball for between two and a half and three million dollars.
The deal made her the president and chief executive of the company, by all available accounts the first woman to head a major Hollywood television studio. She ran Desilu until the mid-1960s, personally giving the green light for the development of Star Trek and Mission Impossible. In 1967, she sold Desilu to Gulf and Western Industries for seventeen million dollars. After the divorce, the couple never stopped being each other’s closest confidants.
They appeared together publicly for the first time in sixteen years on a CBS special in 1976. Their daughter described the paradox the divorce had created. Once she got past the fact that her father would not be around anymore, the following years were better because each of them still loved and depended on the other, and they were less harsh with each other than they had been during the marriage. The divorce accomplished what the marriage could not.
It gave them enough distance to be kind. When Arnaz was asked in 1976 why he did not return to television, he answered with rare frankness. People kept asking him to come back, he said, but it was too hard to compete with Ricky Ricardo twenty years earlier, because Ricky looked much better than he did. He understood that the character he had created had outlived the man who played it.
Desi Arnaz Jr. entered treatment for his addiction in 1981. Four years later, after the death of his stepmother Edith, his father followed him into recovery, checking in under an assumed name to protect his privacy. Desi Jr.
recalled the reversal of roles with clear pride. Everything he had been through began to pay off, and when his father needed help, he told him he could not do it for him personally, but there was a place that could. Lucy remembered attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with her father and hearing him say, “I’m Desi, and I’m an alcoholic. ” The son who had been given paper dolls of his famous parents as toys, who had watched 44 million Americans celebrate his birth while his parents’ marriage crumbled behind the studio walls, and who had been pushed into a rock band at eleven and into addiction before twenty, found his way out and then reached back to pull his father out behind him.
In 1986, Arnaz was diagnosed with lung cancer, the result of a lifetime of heavy smoking that included lighting cigarettes on the I Love Lucy set itself. Ball visited him in the hospital, and it was reported they watched old episodes of I Love Lucy on video together, the characters they had created keeping them company while the bodies that had played those roles declined. On November 30, 1986, Ball called Arnaz from across the country. Their daughter Lucy, present in the room, heard her mother repeat the same words five times.
Arnaz replied, “I love you too, honey. Good luck with your show. ” He died two days later, on December 2, at his home in Del Mar, California. No one realized until later that the day of their last conversation was November 30, the date they had chosen forty-six years earlier when they eloped in Connecticut.
Desi’s death came five days before Ball was scheduled to receive the Kennedy Center Honors. Arnaz had already written a statement for the event, and Robert Stack read it at the ceremony. Its closing line was the last thing Desi Arnaz ever said to the American public. “I Love Lucy” was never just a title, he wrote.
He used his final public words to insist that beneath the brand, the franchise, the syndication, and the laughter, it had always been exactly what it said. Their daughter Lucy, who spent her adult life managing her parents’ legacy, expressed the paradox as both epitaph and thesis. They did the show so they could be together, because her father was always traveling and they never saw each other. They thought the show would save their marriage and let them have a family.
She said 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,” she said. Lucille Ball died on April 26, 1989, of a ruptured aortic aneurysm at the age of seventy-seven. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously by President George H.
W. Bush later that year. Desi Arnaz was burned and his ashes scattered in the Sea of Cortez.
The program that was supposed to save the marriage destroyed it, and the marriage that was supposed to support the program 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.