THE PHRASE “comic genius” gets thrown around a lot these days. But even if Lucille Ball wasn’t the real thing (she was), her claim to glory should not be confined to her waah-waah screams and bug-eyed pratfalls, long burnt into the popular imagination; I Love Lucy carries tremendous historical importance for reasons both obvious and behind-the-scenes. In casting Ball’s real-life husband and coproducer Desi Arnaz as a fictionalized caricature of himself, the show represented the first instance of an immigrant leading man on weekly television, speaking American English with a Latin accent - the cause of much pearl-clutching from the show’s sponsors before I Love Lucy became a TV powerhouse. Further taboos were shattered when the Arnazes and their writers’ room incorporated Lucy’s real-life pregnancy into the plotline of season two, even though the soft censorship of the era’s broadcast standards required, at first substituting “pregnant” with bywords such as “expecting” and the French enceinte. It’s no secret that Hollywood’s vision/version of history is bogus, but nevertheless needs constant reminding/remembering that there is no shared, objective secret history either; much of what actually went down is still hidden behind studio vaults and velvet curtains, the truth peeking out intermittently from blind items and ghostwritten memoirs.
The years after World War II afforded stars more power to cultivate their careers and mythologies with their own attorneys and agents, versus the fading generation of silver-screen peonage during the Golden Era. One example of a postwar business deal that sounded at first like career suicide, only to end up changing Hollywood forever: as Anthony Mann was assembling his western PTSD masterpiece Winchester ‘73, the studio couldn’t afford Jimmy Stewart’s standard fee of $200,000. Instead, Stewart agreed to a percentage of whatever box office profits the film yielded, and he ended up making triple. Via their production company Desilu, the Arnazes set a mold in the 1950s that anticipated today’s more common producer-star hybrid power couple: their weekly salary for I Love Lucy was an immodest but by no means unheard-of $35,000 a week ($360,000 in today’s dollars.) Their stakes in other ventures - the rights to reruns, a galaxy of merchandise and, ultimately, producer credit on many otherwise unrelated shows - are what made them filthy rich. Alongside the movies and the show, Desilu would go on to produce Star Trek, The Untouchables, Andy Griffith, Dick Van Dyke and many others. There’s no doubting Lucy and Desi were as brilliant as producers as they were performers; their shared fortune was vast by the time of their (relatively speaking, amicable) divorce in 1960.
Lucy’s trademark role came after two decades spent chasing a “straight” film career with moderate, spotty success. After their first big-screen comedy (as “the Collinis” in Vincente Minnelli’s road comedy The Long, Long Trailer, 1953) they became TV stars with an MGM deal at the same time, performing and perfecting the I Love Lucy routine in new varieties and contexts. As the decade wore on, it did not prove much easier for Ball to break out of her long-held and much-loved persona, which is a shame1. Her dramatic turns in earlier films like Stage Door and The Dark Corner prove that, like many of the funniest people, Ball probably had an equally strong grip on pathos. This invites a juxtaposition: the comedy power couple who ruled television for a decade, versus the slap-happy clowns they played onscreen. Who were the real Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz? Any mention of the relationship dredges up the acknowledgment that Desi will always be seen as second banana to his iconic wife, which skews things even if you don’t already know about his legendary bouts of drinking and capillary-busting rages. These struggles live offscreen and are thus left to the fan imagination, much like the sea of alcohol and history of abuse powering Jackie Gleason through the heyday of The Honeymooners2, making either sitcom’s vision of domestic simplicity an inverted daguerreotype of backstage traumas and pressures of otherwise male-dominated Hollywood.
A veteran watcher of Nick at Nite will recall the flattening of Desi’s Cuban heritage into an unthreatening suburban shape - economically, if not ethnically, white. About the fictionalized version of their son, “Little Ricky” (played from 1955 onward by Richard Keith), Duke University professor Gustavo Pérez Firmat wrote in his book Life on the Hyphen: the Cuban-American Way:
“[Little Ricky’s] appearances in the show make clear that, his father’s bedtime stories notwithstanding, the cultural identity is papi’s alone. Little Ricky couldn’t speak accented English even if he tried. There is a healthy continuity between father and son, but there is also a healthy distance. When Ricky gets old enough to play an instrument, he follows in his father’s steps by choosing drums. But instead of the Afro-Cuban tumbadora, little Ricky plays the American trap drums.”
This erasure of self takes on added meaning given the exile of Desi’s family, aristocrats who fled Cuba for Miami after the Cuban Revolution of 1933. Desi’s pain does not show in the end product, which was entirely the point. (I always respected his decision to title his memoir A Book.) The same goes for Lucy’s hardscrabble upbringing, losing her father at the age of 3, effectively raised by her socialist grandfather, to appease whom she registered as a member of the Communist Party in 1936. Enter Aaron Sorkin’s Being the Ricardos.