Desi Arnaz was so much more than his ‘I Love Lucy’ character

Desi Arnaz was so much more than his ‘I Love Lucy’ character

Luuuucy — he’s home.

And about time. Desi Arnaz — the “I” in “I Love Lucy” — has never been given his rightful due as a protean force, perhaps the protean force, in early television history.

Still, the subtitle of Todd S. Purdum’s new biography of Arnaz — “The Man Who Invented Television” — makes a sweeping claim, one that Philo Farnsworth and other “fathers of the medium” might argue with. Yet the hyperbole is merited when you consider that “I Love Lucy” not only pioneered the three-camera/live-audience format used by sitcoms to this day but also, by shooting on film (rather than broadcasting live), created the concept of reruns, syndication and residuals.

Arnaz left other important marks on the medium. By insisting that “I Love Lucy” be produced in Los Angeles rather than New York, for instance, he restored control of the nascent industry to the creative community and away from its sponsors. Through savvy dealmaking and smart programming, Desilu, the studio he ran with Lucille Ball, evolved quickly from a small production company to one of the biggest and most powerful producers of TV shows in the business.

While the public’s focus remained on Ball, Arnaz more or less invented the made-for-TV movie with a two-hour version of “The Untouchables” that launched the hit show in 1959. Rod Serling wrote the first episode of what would become “The Twilight Zone” for “Desilu Playhouse,” the studio’s anthology series. An entire generation of small-screen creative talents — producers Quinn Martin and Aaron Spelling, director Jay Sandrich — came up through the ranks of Desilu.

Yet most people still think of Arnaz as the guy who sang “Babalú” and told Lucy she had some ’splainin’ to do — an exasperated yet loving straight-man foil to one of the most gifted comediennes of the 20th century. And he was that guy. But he was most definitely not only that guy. This overdue and welcome biography, from a journalist with established bona fides in biography, is deeply researched and clear-eyed about Arnaz’s talents as well as his struggles with alcohol and what today, Purdum says, would be called a sex addiction.

Lucy and Desi were one of the great creative couples of their era, and the story of how they risked everything to become the biggest stars on the planet — big enough to buy Ball’s old film studio, RKO — is a classic David-and-Goliath tale. It’s been told often enough from Ball’s side. Purdum gives us Arnaz’s life story, and it’s an often surprising one.

For one thing, while Ball was raised in poverty and an unstable home life in Jamestown, New York, Arnaz — properly pronounced Ar-NAAS — was the princeling of Santiago, Cuba, a scion of two generations of mayors who was raised in baronial splendor and wealth. All that was washed away in the 1933 revolution that swept President Gerardo Machado from power; the 16-year-old Desi barely escaped a mob that destroyed his family home, and he never fully understood what had happened.

Desi was raised in luxury in prerevolutionary Cuba. All that changed when he immigrated to Miami in 1933.

When Arnaz landed in Miami with his father shortly after the Cuban revolution (his mother stayed behind initially), he had very little money. His musical career, once a youthful novelty, became a way to put food on the table. He toured with bandleader Xavier Cugat before venturing out on his own with a group — hastily hired and terrible — that was fired after its first set. Given a reprieve, Arnaz had an idea, remembering a percussion-based line dance from the Santiago de Cuba street celebrations of his youth. Never mind that his band didn’t have the proper instruments; Arnaz made do using a frying pan, spoons and his conga drum. Whether he single-handedly introduced conga to the United States with this one glorious improvisation is a matter of debate, but it’s something Arnaz touted ever after.

He was handsome and charismatic — a newspaper columnist described him as “a black-eyed, slim-hipped rhythm conscious young Latin on the threshold of becoming a fad.” It was only a matter of time before Broadway and then Hollywood came calling, with a hit musical revue called “Too Many Girls” that was made into a film in 1940. His co-star in the movie was an actress who had worked hard and steadily at RKO for years without breaking through to full-fledged stardom: a saucy then-brunette named Lucille Ball. Arnaz took one look and pronounced her “a hunk of a woman.” Within a week, they had left their respective partners and moved in with each other, marrying before the year was out. “When you fall in love immediately, and violently, as we did,” Ball later said, “you fall in love with your senses — sense of sight and sound and touch and smell.”

But Ball’s career was floundering, and Arnaz, past his first flush of fame, was stymied by pervading anti-Latino racism. (MGM head Louis B. Mayer once compared Arnaz to a thoroughbred horse and told him that without a conga drum on his shoulder, the Cuban-born entertainer was “just another Mexican.”)

Arnaz carries his bride, actress Lucille Ball, across the threshold of a theater dressing room in Greenwich, Connecticut., on Nov. 30, 1940.

“I Love Lucy,” then, was a product of economic necessity, as well as a way for the couple to work together and keep Arnaz from his pathological straying. (“‘Too Many Girls’ is the story of your life!” Ball bitterly told her husband more than once.) It was a tough sell on all fronts. Ball developed a radio version of what would become “I Love Lucy” with WASP-y Richard Denning as her husband, but when CBS decided to air the show on TV, Ball insisted that Arnaz take over the role.

“Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television” is especially good in its exploration of how the show came to be. Purdum gives due credit to producer Jess Oppenheimer, writers Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll Jr., legendary cinematographer Karl Freund (who rose to the challenge of lighting and filming live TV), Ball’s comedy mentor Buster Keaton, and many more. But it was Arnaz who ran Desilu, doing the hiring and budgeting and extending the studio’s reach into commercials and other series. It was Arnaz who negotiated the deal that gave him and Ball 100 percent ownership of the episodes after CBS had aired them. And when Ball became pregnant with the couple’s second child, it was Arnaz who fought the sponsors and censors to have Lucy Ricardo pregnant on the show, as well. Forty-four million viewers tuned in to the episode in which Little Ricky Ricardo was born Jan. 19, 1953 — the same day Ball gave birth to Desi Arnaz Jr.

The final third of Purdum’s biography is deeply sad, as the workaholic Arnaz continued womanizing and started drinking heavily to cope with the pressures of managing a major production studio. Desilu took risks that didn’t pan out and saw corporate entities such as MCA-Universal move into the field he and Ball had pioneered. The couple divorced in 1960, and two years later, Ball bought out her ex-husband’s share in Desilu. Besides writing a defensive, self-glorifying memoir (1976’s tepidly titled “A Book”), he never mounted another meaningful project in the quarter-century before his death in 1986.

Purdum touches on the insecurities that both drove and undermined Arnaz — despite being the first (and still the only) Latin American studio head in Hollywood history, he was regularly called “Mr. Ball” and remains to many an English-mangling stereotype who played second fiddle to his older and more celebrated wife. But the author could have gone deeper. He gives us the life, but for all the research, interviews and details, he never quite finds the man. The fault may not be Purdum’s but American culture’s. “There is no classification for a Cuban fellow with an accent who plays drums and marries redheads,” Arnaz once said. For all that, this book ’splains him as well as anyone — and better than most.

Desi Arnaz

The Man Who Invented Television

By Todd S. Purdum

Simon & Schuster. 368 pp. $29.99