Once a second banana, always a second banana when in the shadow of a brighter star.
For musician and actor Desi Arnaz, that shadow belonged to Lucille Ball, his wife and co-star on the ground-breaking 1950s sitcom “I Love Lucy.” Etched in television history are the images of Lucy falling on her rear while stomping grapes at a winery, Lucy overwhelmed by a conveyor belt of chocolates, and Lucy acting nonchalant as movie star William Holden lights up her fake nose instead of her cigarette. Desi seems as important as the cone is to the ice cream.
Not only was Arnaz his wife’s straight man, he endured non-stop mocking of his Cuban heritage on screen and off. In fact, he was a rare Latino on American screens, big and small, and played a successful husband and father, not a gangster or peon. His character achieved some degree of immortality in the catchphrase, “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do!”
“Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television,” Todd S. Purdum’s deeply researched, insightful and enjoyable biography, gives Arnaz his due as an entertainer and a savvy businessman. With help, Arnaz envisioned, assembled and led the transformation that provided early television production its bedrock.
Arnaz (1917-1986) was the only child of a prominent family in Santiago, his father the mayor and a member of the Cuban national assembly. The 1933 revolution forced the privileged family to flee to the United States — their home set on fire, their cattle herd slaughtered and the father jailed for months. Arnaz spoke little English when he began attending high school in Miami and took any kind of work to earn some money.
Show business was an unlikely pursuit given that Arnaz couldn’t read music, but the handsome and energetic young man could sing and play guitar and the conga drum. Soon he was working in New York with the popular band leader Xavier Cugat and turning the conga line into a dance craze. He was cast in a 1939 Broadway musical, “Too Many Girls,” and sent to Hollywood for the film version. At RKO studios, he met his future wife and co-star, then a veteran of dozens of uncredited and supporting roles and struggling to break out.
Had either Arnaz or Ball been more successful in films in the 1940s, they would not have turned to the newborn medium of television. Had their marriage not been rife with problems — mainly their separate careers plus his womanizing and drinking — Ball might not have demanded that Arnaz be cast when her radio show, “My Favorite Husband,” was transferred to TV in 1951. In that sense “I Love Lucy” was designed to save their marriage.
The show turned out to be the innovative outlet Arnaz needed. The industry norm was a show broadcast live in New York sans audience and recorded with a film camera pointed at a TV monitor. Arnaz insisted that “Lucy” episodes be filmed before an audience in Los Angeles. Film meant higher image quality and that episodes could be shown at any time and later repeated — the idea of a “rerun” was new — and sold for syndication around the country and the world. Three cameras worked in sync and the show was presented like a play. An audience necessitated a redesigned studio placing seats in bleachers for an unobstructed view.
All this became the new standard for a situation comedy and jump-started the move of television production from East Coast to West Coast. Arnaz didn’t create the machinery, but he did oversee the operation, hire the right people and lead the charge.
With “I Love Lucy” a hit — it was the first TV show to reach 10 million homes, about two in three TV sets in the U.S. — their company Desilu expanded to produce other programs and rented space to even more. By the end of the 1950s Desilu was the biggest studio in the world in terms of hours of filmed entertainment.
With sympathy but open eyes Purdum chronicles Arnaz’s descent into alcoholism, which sapped his creative energy and the goodwill he had established over the years. Arnaz also could not control his sexual drive, especially his desire for prostitutes. The combination of booze, adultery and fiery outbursts finished his career and marriage, destroyed his health, and broke him financially.
Ball, meanwhile, had career challenges of her own — she couldn’t move beyond her Lucy persona — but she was wise enough when it came to handling her money. As the head of Desilu, having bought out her husband in 1962, she gave the greenlight for two television series that resonate today, “Star Trek” and “Mission: Impossible.” When she sold the studio in 1967, the on-screen ditzy redhead walked away with what today would be $100 million.
America’s favorite make-believe couple in the 1950s each married again. Yet they were never out of each other’s life completely, due in large part to their two children and extended families, some business interests and a unique professional legacy. Their undying affection for each other needs no ‘splainin’ at all.
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Douglass K. Daniel is the author of “Anne Bancroft: A Life” (University Press of Kentucky)
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