Like just about everyone who grew up at a time when a few networks decided what Americans watched on their television sets, author Todd S. Purdum knew all of the antics of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, the characters played by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, on the ’50s sitcom “I Love Lucy.”
“It was unavoidable in syndication,” says Purdum, 65, on a recent video call. Though he’s too young to have seen its original run, “I Love Lucy” always seemed to be on, he says.
Lucille Ball as Lucy was the star around whom Arnaz as Ricky, and William Frawley and Vivian Vance as neighbors Fred and Ethel Mertz, orbited in each of the 180 episodes of “I Love Lucy” that originally aired from October 1951 to May 1957.
And it’s Lucy whose voice and visage come first to mind when “I Love Lucy,” which played in reruns for decades after it ended, is remembered today.
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For good reason, too. Ball was a brilliant comedian, her timing impeccable, her pratfalls hilarious, her physical comedy perfection. And no matter how frustrated or worked up Lucy might have made Ricky, played by her real-life husband Arnaz, by the end of each episode she was always back in his good graces.
Over the years, Purdum gradually learned more about Arnaz. He read his 1976 memoir, “A Book.” He knew elements of his Cuban origins, his reinvention after immigrating to the United States as a teenager, first as the leader of a Latin dance band, later as an actor, his twin careers by the time he met and married Ball in November 1940.
And Purdum knew that Arnaz had played a significant role in the creation of “I Love Lucy” and the formation of Desilu Productions, which in addition to “I Love Lucy” also made many more TV shows including “The Untouchables,” “Mission: Impossible,” and “Star Trek.”
“But I didn’t really understand the full depth of the fascinating aspects of his life in Cuba and his family life,” Purdum says. “And then the whole role that he played in the early days of television.”
“Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television” is the book Purdum began to when in 2020 the pandemic upended a career in journalism that included several decades as a New York Times reporter followed by stints at Vanity Fair and the Atlantic.
The book rebalances the history of the relationship of Arnaz and Ball, both on screen and off, giving Arnaz’s side of the story in more depth and detail than earlier biographies. It also explores ways in which Arnaz, through good fortune and a canny business sense, changed the making of television in ways that still influence the industry today.
“It seemed, at a moment when the culture was interested in re-examining the lives of people who might have been overlooked in their day, that he would make an interesting subject,” Purdum says of the decision to take up the story he tells in the book.
“And the more I got to know, the more I was impressed.”
Desi discovers TV
In many ways, “I Love Lucy” sprang from the desires of Ball and Arnaz to have more time together by collaborating on something with the stability of an ongoing TV show.
Given the success that “I Love Lucy” later found, it might have seemed a small thing to contact the right people, cast the show, and get it on the air.
It was, in fact, anything but simple.
The first hurdle, as Purdum writes, was a fear that audiences would not welcome an interracial couple or Arnaz’s accented English into their homes every week.
“One thing I found interesting about Desi was he didn’t take the first ‘no’ as the definitive answer,” Purdum says. “So if CBS said, ‘No, we don’t want this,’ he kept going.
Arnaz organized a cross-country comedy tour for him and Ball as a kind of proof of concept for the TV show they wanted to make, Purdum says. “Taking the vaudeville tour to do an end-run around them and prove that the audience would accept it, that’s a pretty clever move.”
The network and ad execs who held the purse strings also initially insisted that Arnaz and Ball make the show in New York City, like nearly every other TV show at the time.
There was no easy way to broadcast a show across the continent as television and the 1950s began, so programs aired live from New York in the Eastern and Central time zones, where the majority of the population then lived, with copies later broadcast to the less-populated western states.
Arnaz and his team proposed something entirely different for “I Love Lucy.” They would shoot it live in Hollywood with three film cameras simultaneously capturing the action on the set. It would quickly be edited and then provided a few days later to air in the entire country in the crisp black-and-white of 35 millimeter film.
“He didn’t do it by himself, but he’s leading the charge that filmed the show with the three-camera system and synchronization,” Purdum says of what remains a standard way of shooting sitcoms today.
“This led to filming becoming the norm,” he says. “I mean, live television still persisted for news and special events, but quickly other people, especially for half-hour sitcoms, wanted to film television programs.
“And that led to the transfer of the center of the business from New York to L.A.”
Value in the vault
The original contract to make “I Love Lucy” also granted Arnaz full ownership of the episodes after they aired. At the time, the networks didn’t see any value in a show past its original broadcast. The idea of reruns or syndication didn’t exist and even Arnaz wasn’t sure what he’d be able to do with the filmed episodes.
“He acknowledged that he didn’t quite know,” Purdum says. “There’s some suggestion that he thought they could maybe be valuable for foreign sales. But he’s the first to acknowledge that he had a lot of bravado for pretending he knew what this would amount to.”
A kind of instinct was there from the start, he says of Arnaz’s ability to sense what television might become.
“There’s a quote he gave to Earl Wilson, the Broadway columnist, in 1958, about how someday you’ll have a TV as big as your wall, as big as your house,” Purdum says. “So there was a part of him that clearly was visionary. He was also the beneficiary of, I don’t say dumb luck, but informed luck.
“One of the lines I love in E.B. White’s essay ‘Here Is New York,’ about people who come to New York from other places, is ‘No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky,’” Purdum says..
“I think there was a part of Desi that was willing to be lucky. He made his own luck.”
A great love affair
“I Love Lucy” ended in the spring of 1957. The marriage of Arnaz and Ball ended in divorce three years later.
The couple had experienced success beyond their dreams with the show. Their Desilu Productions studio was booming. They had two young children, Lucie and Desi Jr., whom they adored.
But the grind of making a weekly TV show combined with Arnaz’s heavy drinking and constant infidelity, and the almost daily clamor of the couple’s battles, finally took its toll on a relationship their friends had always considered one of “great love affairs of all time,” Purdum says.
“They never stopped loving each other,” he says. “They couldn’t be together. They had a great deal of capacity to hurt each other, it seems to me, but they never stopped having this essential connection.”
Years earlier in their relationship, it was easy to see how much they were in love, Purdum says.
“You can see on the show, their obvious attraction to each other, their obvious chemistry,” he says. “It’s pretty palpable.
“Clearly, there was just a sheer animal magnetism, a physical attraction that must have been very real,” he says. “It’s always been remarked that Lucy was the rare female comedian who was absolutely radiant. She had been a showgirl at times.
“And Desi, the pictures of him as a young man, before age and alcohol took their toll, he was devastatingly handsome.”
The couple may have also been drawn together by early traumas each experienced as children. Arnaz’s family fled Cuba after a change in the government and had to restart their lives from scratch in the United States.
“Lucy also had what I think you could call unprocessed childhood trauma,” Purdum says. “Her father died before she was three. She shunted around to different relatives.”
Both also became responsible, financially and otherwise, for their mothers, he adds.
“On some level, that was something that caused tension, but it also must have drawn them together,” Purdum says. “Because they felt a mutual obligation to be the breadwinners and caregivers for their extended family.”
In some ways, the paradox of “I Love Lucy” was that the show Arnaz and Ball created to save their marriage contributed to the opposite outcome, he adds.
“It didn’t single-handedly break up their marriage, but it helped create the stresses and tensions,” Purdum says. “And the 24-7 working together, that probably only exacerbated the tensions, and in the end was part of what drove them apart.”
The industry leaves Desi
In the years that followed, as “I Love Lucy” became ubiquitous in reruns everywhere, Arnaz’s fortunes slowly declined as Ball’s held steady with several Desi-less spinoffs and reboots of the show that made her a superstar.
Arnaz eventually sold his share of Desilu Productions to Ball and struck out to create his own shows as an independent producer. “The Mother-In-Laws” was a modest success. A sitcom with Carol Channing never got off the ground.
“Bernie Weitzman, a Desilu executive, said [Arnaz] didn’t leave the industry, the industry left him,” Purdum says. “Because he was what they call in the insurance business an assigned risk, a bad risk.”
Alcoholism, the absence of Ball as his creative partner, and the under-recognition of all of his innovations in the television industry further contributed to the decline of Arnaz as a Hollywood player.
“The people who had dealt with him intimately knew the role he was playing,” Purdum says. “But the broader industry probably tended to typecast him as just a funny, accented second banana. There was a gulf between the people who really knew the role he played and the people who were too willing to assume that he was just an appendage to Lucy.”
Not that Ball ever failed to hail her husband during and after their marriage for all that he’d created.
“Lucy, to the end of her life, was always the first one to give him credit,” Purdum says. “In fact, Lucie Arnaz told me that when Amy Poehler approached her about what is a very good documentary, her interest and first angle was Lucy as the first female mogul in Hollywood.
“And Lucie Arnaz said you have to know that she took no joy in that,” he says. “She just did it dutifully because she had to keep the company going, and it wasn’t anything she was proud of or liked. She considered that was really Desi doing all of that.”
Ricky loved Lucy
The second season premiere of “I Love Lucy” is an episode titled “Job Switching,” though most people just think of it as the one where Lucy and Ethel get jobs at the chocolate factory.” It’s considered one of the most classic moments in television history as Lucy and Ethel are overwhelmed by the speed at which chocolate candies come flying down the factory conveyor belt at them.
It’s also one of the great Ricky episodes, Purdum says, though the storyline of Ricky and Fred taking on kitchen duties for a day is less remembered.
“He and Fred are making dinner, and he’s got an arroz con pollo on the stove with four pounds of rice for four people,” Purdum says. “The rice explodes and he’s slipping, and he fell once by accident and realized what a laugh it got and then arranged to fall two more times before the scene ended.”
As the title suggested, “I Love Lucy” was a show seen through Ricky’s eyes, which in hindsight further underscores the importance of his contributions to the work.
“He’s like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Purdum says of Ricky’s reactions to each new situation Lucy gets herself into. “He’s the window, our pathway, into the life of Lucy of the Ricardos, and that’s a very, very important role.
“If he weren’t ultimately sympathetic, if the character were a jerk, it wouldn’t work,” he says. “You have to know that he gets exasperated with her. But I think of that comment from Martin Leeds, the Desilu executive:
“‘There was nothing she could do that he wouldn’t love her.’ “