At a time when there were only around 15 million television sets owned in the country, around 11 million of them were tuned into the sitcom. By all accounts, Desi Arnaz was an alcoholic. When he would drink, he would sometimes leave Ball for long periods of time.
During this time, she became a virtual recluse in her home. According to The Los Angeles Times , she would not want to deal with society or answer questions from others who wondered about her absent husband. After the failure of her last show Life with Lucy, which also coincided with the year Desi died, Ball allegedly became a bitter recluse until her death in The intelligent actress who propelled herself to stardom by co-creating I Love Lucy and co-founding Desilu Productions never finished her formal education in a traditional way.
Ball moved to New York City at the tender age of 15, where she attended drama school. That meant they could bring out the best in each other, but also the worst. Although Ball and Arnaz eventually got divorced, friends say they never lost their affection for each other. Arnaz died in from lung cancer, while Ball died in from an acute aortic aneurysm Aranz died at the age of 69, and Ball lived to be The two had a lot of differences, but their everlasting love and affection for each other stood the test of time even as they moved on with their lives and remarried other people.
Many celebrities have spoken openly about the pain of suffering multiple miscarriages in recent years. However, back when Lucille Ball was at the height of her fame, this was not a subject that was openly discussed.
Sadly, Ball had multiple miscarriages, and was essentially forced to keep it to herself. According to People , Ball may have experienced as many as three miscarriages early in her marriage to Desi Arnaz before the couple had their two children, Lucie and Desi Jr.
That was understandably very difficult for Lucille, who, according to close friends, was feeling pressured to have children because she believed it would keep her marriage together. Lucille Ball was the first actress to have her pregnancy shown on television.
When Ball gave birth to Desi Arnaz, Jr. It had a record-setting 44 million people tune in, with a million delighted fans sending congratulatory notes and gifts. Desi Jr. That included the hit sitcom The Brady Bunch. On the show, eldest daughter Marcia Brady was an adoring fan of the young star.
At the time, Desi Jr. Lucille got her deal for I Love Lucy on the heels of the success of a comedic radio program she'd created, about a banker and his wife. However, when she was offered to develop the radio show into a television series, she insisted that her real-life husband portray her on-screen husband. The problem, as the studio executives saw it, was that Desi was Cuban, who spoke imperfect English with a strong accent. The studio worried that audiences would have a hard time embracing a show about an white woman married to a Cuban man.
Ball wouldn't budge, and eventually the producers agreed. Did you know it had ties to I Love Lucy? Well, the song celebrates the fun Cuban carnival dance move that came to popularity in the midth century.
The novelty line dance involves a line of people holding on to one another and snaking around the dance floor. Like Estefan, Arnaz had Cuban roots, and he celebrated them with his music. However, Ball and Arnaz divorced in , and enjoyed several more decades of success on her own. Life with Lucy , which premiered the year Desi died, was the only show with her name in the title that was not a success.
In fact, it tanked so badly that it is often considered among the worst television shows ever made. It starred Lucy as a widowed grandmother, and child star and future musician Jenny Lewis as her granddaughter. Although Lucy and Desi are an iconic television duo, they actually met on a movie set. They met on the set of Too Many Girls. However, he was insecure about being shorter than his famous wife, so he frequently wore lifts. Although Arnaz was visibly shorter than Ball, he wore those lifts all throughout I Love Lucy, and listed his height to biographers as several inches taller than he actually was.
Lucille and Desi were well-known for their savvy as co-producers of I Love Lucy they created their own roles for the show, which was rare , but Lucy began her career as a super-involved producer many years earlier. Who would want to watch an interracial couple? Her real goal was to bring Arnaz to Hollywood and have him settle there, abandoning his life on the road.
She was funny and clumsy; Arnaz was charming and good looking. They quickly became the most beloved couple in America. The best part? Ball was the only one who could deliver, which gave her leverage in the studio. The show was destined for success but probably would have been nothing without the redheaded star.
She was mindful of what she portrayed on her show, cognizant of the fact that Hollywood influences culture. The show featured positive female friendships and the first pregnancy shown on TV.
Other than her sense of humor, she was known for her facial expressions and body language — a universal language that translated globally to any family.
They began to wrestle and to the audience, it was comedy gold, but for the actors? It got so bad that Ball nearly drowned in a vat of grape juice. Satisfied and with the show becoming a success, Ball and Arnaz decide to do something drastic. With Ball as vice president and him taking on a whole new side of the Hollywood industry, the Arnazs were blessed with success after success. Shortly after, the couple welcomed their son Desi Jr. Ball gave birth the same night the episode was aired!
Everything was as it should be. They were a real American family that everyone could relate to — the type of American family that many aspired to be. As mentioned before, Ball was not a natural redhead, she was a brunette through and through and dyed it for her television career. According to her hairdresser on emmytvlegends. When doing a show in Vegas, Ball supposedly met a wealthy sheik and heard of her little problem. So what did the sheik do?
Gifted her a lifetime supply of henna, the dye used to make that shade of red we know and love. She hid the formula under lock and key, but that was the least of her problems. It was no secret that Arnaz was a charmer with the ladies.
Often enough, Ball and her husband would argue about his flirtatious demeanor with other women and his drinking habits to boot. She thought that having children would curb his bachelor-like antics. And it worked…for a while at least. Before the show was aired in , Ball had given birth to their first child: their daughter Lucy Arnaz.
He did…for a while. But old habits die hard. Though he loved his children and his wife, soon, things began to unravel. One thing Lucille Ball can honestly say is that both she and Arnaz were happy on set. They had to be. They had to portray a loving American family whose problems could be fixed within half an hour.
It was in those moments that Ball was truly happiest, and where her anger against Arnaz diminished. Between his alleged alcohol consumption, infidelity, and the stress of managing Desilu, the relationship was unraveling. Soon, their perfect illusion of marriage would shatter. Ball was the kind of person who believed that an audience should always get the satisfaction of seeing and believing in a happy ending, no matter how glum or bitter reality may be.
The show aired its final episode in She had been married to Arnaz for almost twenty years, and she never thought she would become a divorcee. What killed her the most was believing she not only disappointed herself but also disappointed the American people. As time progressed, she started questioning herself, her identity, and what was to become to her family and her career. There was one thing Ball could say with confidence, however: No matter how angry she was toward her ex-husband, she never blamed him.
She would later know his internal battle. Before their divorce in Ball was under serious heat with the US government. However, when appearing before court Ball assured Congress that she signed up solely to appeal to her socialist grandfather, but no one was convinced.
Once she was released, the FBI continued to keep tabs on her. Edgar Hoover who made it his personal duty to follow the Arnaz family. The FBI was even convinced in catering events as a front to hosting Communist meetings. Conspiracy, paranoia, or truth? You decide. She bought out the Desilu studio and was running the show, and with it, space exploration.
Now, Star Trek is one of the biggest media franchises in history. May you live long and prosper Lucille Ball! Though Ball and Arnaz had a nasty divorce, they still managed to remain friends. It turns out they were better friends than they were husband and wife. Instead of hiding in the dark recesses of her failed marriage, Ball would soon find love again. In , a year after their divorce, Ball found love and trust in the laughter of comedian Gary Morton.
Stars like Carole Lombard could say witty things, but they could not take pratfalls. Lucille Ball appeared in films with some of the greatest people in comedy — including the Marx Brothers — but none of them recognized her talent. The exception was Buster Keaton, who by then was past his box office prime. Keaton and a director named Ed Sedgwick had a comedy unit at Columbia Pictures, and they decided to bring Ball over.
They made some films where she did all these crazy, funny things like get caught in a mudslide, jackhammer a foundation, and hang from a clothesline. Ball herself had no idea of her great gift for a long time. What she really cared about was that she was an actress — that was a real calling to her. What did she learn from her radio experience? My Favorite Husband was about a banker with an eccentric wife, who always tried to help him, but usually ended up undermining him instead.
The show was recorded in front of a live audience, and Lucille discovered that their approval helped her shine. I think she can seem a little wooden in films, and what she needed was the energy of an audience to help her be all that she could be. For example, she had to do the commercials for the show. She hated doing them, so her producer told her to try performing them as characters from nursery rhymes. She did Little Miss Muffet and her encounter with the spider.
And when she did that, she made all these funny facial contortions of shock and horror. And the audience roared with laughter. She learned then what she could do with her face, and we see that in her close-ups on TV. Little did they know they were in the process of becoming great. But Lucy had an important condition. What was that? Lucille Ball said she would do it if she could work with her husband Desi Arnaz.
Well, there he was and he was Cuban. And very handsome. Women loved him; the executives at CBS liked him a lot less. They said no one would believe that a red-blooded America n girl could be married to a Cuban.
Of course, by that time, Lucille and Desi had been married for about a decade. So, before the show even started, when it was still being talked about, Lucy and Desi went out on the road. They would appear in person in movie theaters before the films began and put on an act. They were wonderfully well-received by the public, which softened the resistance of the executives to Desi. And once the show aired, to my knowledge, no letter was ever received complaining that this man was not American-born.
How was I Love Lucy received when it premiered? Some critics did not like it very much and said that the plot was inane, but the audience at home loved it. Within a month, it was clear that this was quite a phenomenon.
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