Lucy and Desi (Imagine Documentaries, White Horse Pictures, Amazon Studios, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched Lucy and Desi, a documentary directed by Amy Poehler and written by Mark Monroe. Poehler’s involvement can be explained by the extent to which Lucille Ball has become a sort of patron saint for later female comedians, and Monroe’s script includes a typical bit of first-itis: he said Lucille Ball was the first woman to do physical comedy on screen. (Does the name “Mabel Normand” mean anything to you? Or “Carole Lonbard,” for that matter?) Poehler and Monroe largely based their documentary on a cache of audio tapes Ball and her first husband, co-star and business partner, Desi Arnaz, recorded which were made available by their kids, Lucie and Desi, Jr. But the story as told here doesn’t add much to the historical record on Ball, Arnaz (Sr. – actually he was Desiderio Arnaz III and his son was Desiderio Arnaz IV) and the sensational success of their show together, I Love Lucy. If anything about this show surprises, it’s in how total a break Desi had with his native country, Cuba, to the point where he never went back there even while he still could have before Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959. Desi had literally been a boat person; his father had actually breen mayor of Santiago, Cuba’s second-largest city, before the regime of brutal, corrupt dictator Gerardo Machado came to a violent end in 1933.

Arnaz’s family were supporters and political allies of Machado, and when he was toppled Arnaz’s father told him that he had to get himself and his mother out of the country immediately. “What can I take with us?” Arnaz asked. “Nothing,” his dad told him – and so at the age of 14 Desi Arnaz became what would later be referred to as a “boat person,” frantically fleeing across the fabled 90 miles to make it to the Florida coast. Both he and Lucy would take care of their mothers for the rest of their lives. The show also discussed the crisis in Lucy’s childhood; when her father died her grandfather, Fred Hunt, took on the task of raising her. (Ironically, Fred’s daughter – Lucy’s mother – was named “Desiree,” yet another case of something a fiction editor would have rejected: how can you ask people to believe that the man she married had the masculine form of her mother’s name? And yet he did!) When Lucy was 16 years old, her brother, Fred Ball, accidentally shot a neighbor’s child with a .22 caliber rifle his grandfather had given him, and the boy survived but was paralyzed for the rest of his life. The boy’s family sued the Hunt-Ball family for everything they had and left them destitute.

Later Fred Ball would get Lucy in potentially career-ending trouble when, in 1936, he persuaded her to register to vote with the Communist Party. Lucy’s own explanation was that her grandfather had always been for the working man and had a strong sense of social justice. She also said that she had never actually voted Communist, let alone been a member of the party, and when the scandal came to light in 1953 at the height of the Joe McCarthy era and the Congressional investigation of alleged Communist subversion in Hollywood, she basically got out of it by playing lovable Lucy Ricardo. When asked at a press conference whether she hadn’t thought being registered as a Communist would hurt her career, she said, “What career? I was a stock girl at RKO. I made $35 a week, and if they’d told me to clean the studio floor, I’d have had to.” This film includes Desi Arnaz’s famous remark about Lucy in a warmup for an I Love Lucy filming during which he got J. Edgar Hoover on the phone to certify publicly that the FBI had nothing derogatory on Lucille Ball, and Desi famously said (though for some reason Aaron Sorkin did not include this line in his dramatization of this incident in his script for Being the Ricardos), “The only thing red about Lucy is her hair, and even that’s not legitimate.”

The show briefly touches on Lucy’s comedy mentor, Buster Keaton, though it does so only in passing and doesn’t mention how they got together: it was in the late 1940’s, they were both under contract at MGM (Keaton was there to write gags for Red Skelton, many of them recycled from Keaton’s own 1920’s classics). Keaton, Ball and a third person – Keaton’s former director, Edward Sedgwick – had a lot of time together which they spent making real-life versions of Rube Goldberg’s famous cartoon gadgets (including a “Venetian-blind opener,” which when it opened the blinds it started a record player playing “Hail to the Chief” and revealed a picture of MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer; when Mayer heard about this he ordered a studio construction crew to destroy it and personally watched them do it). Keaton noticed Ball’s gift for physical comedy and started sending notes up to the “suits” at MGM telling them that if they wanted to revive her moribund career, they should stop giving her musicals and romantic comedies and instead give her slapstick roles. Naturally their attitude was, “That drunken has-been? What does he know?” Ball eventually got out of her MGM contract and made two films for Columbia, The Fuller Brush Girl and Miss Grant Takes Richmond, both with William Holden as her co-star and both of which gave her the chance to play physical comedy.

She also got the chance to co-star in a radio sitcom called My Favorite Husband, playing the ditzy wife of sportswriter Richard Denning, and in 1949 the CBS network,which aired My Favorite Husband, told Ball they wanted to put it on TV. Ball famously said she’d only do it if her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, got to play her husband on the show – they wanted a project which would allow them to live and work together in Los Angeles. I’ve already mentioned the tortures of the damned Lucy and Desi went through to get the right to do I Love Lucy and do it their way – the best account of it is by Desi himself in his autobiography, A Book – but they ended up literally owning the hottest TV show and uising the profits from it to expand their production company, Desilu, including taking over the RKO studio (where they had both been lowly contract players in the early 1940’s) and producing not only the Andy Griffith Show and the Dick Van Dyke Show but a crime drama, The Untouchables. Much of the sorrow on this series came from the rather sad ending: Lucy and Desi broke up as a couple in 1960 (they literally broke up two days after the filming of their final Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour wrapped), though they remained business partners until she bought him out in 1964.

Desilu produced the next Lucille Ball comedy series, The Lucy Show, which co-starred her I Love Lucy cast-mate Vivian Vance as two single women raising their kids (it was based on a play about divorcées but for purposes of the TV standards of the time they had to be widows instead), and after Lucy’s and Desi’s business partnership ended she went on to produce Mission: Impossible and Star Trek. (I remember getting into an argument with a co-worker after Lucy died in 1989; he said, “I never liked Lucille Ball; I preferred more serious TV, like Star Trek,” and I told him, “If it hadn’t been for Lucille Ball there would never have been a Star Trek!”). As for Desi, he upped his drinking and screwing around, though he did try one more series, The Mothers-in-Law, which got good reviews but was not a commercial success. Lucie Arnaz (using her married name, Luckinbill) was interviewed for the show and she said that she was with her dad in the last hours of his life in 1986 and she called her mom to say goodbye. They ended by saying they loved each other even though both Lucy and Desi had remarried after they broke up (and their second marriages – hers to comedian Gary Morton and his to Edith Mack – lasted longer than Lucy’s and Desi’s had), and the show leads to a bittersweet ending on one of those professional and personal partnerships that forever changed the face of popular entertainment.