Desi Arnaz

• Born: March 2, 1917
• Birthplace: Santiago de Cuba, Cuba
• Died: December 2, 1986
• Place of death: Del Mar, California

Cuban-born musician, actor, and business executive

Immortalized as “Ricky Ricardo” in the 1950’s television sitcom I Love Lucy, Arnaz began his entertainment career as a musician and film actor before becoming the first major Latino television star. However, he made his most significant contributions to the entertainment industry as an innovative producer.

Areas of achievement: Music; radio and television; acting; business

Early Life

Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y Acha III, better known as Desi Arnaz (DEH-zee ahr-NAZ), was born in 1917 in Santiago de Cuba, near the eastern end of Cuba. His father, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz, then the mayor of the town of Santiago, was a popular local politician who also served in the Cuban legislature. His mother, Dolores de Acha, was the daughter of a founder of the Bacardi rum company. Arnaz grew up as an only child, enjoying the privileges of membership in a wealthy and elite family, but all that ended abruptly in 1933, when Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar overthrew Gerardo Machado y Morales’s government. In the tumultuous revolution following Batista’s coup, the Arnazes lost all their property, and Arnaz’s father was imprisoned. After his father was released six months later, the family fled to Miami, Florida. Meanwhile, Batista built a dictatorial regime in Cuba that would last nearly three decades. Although Arnaz’s father eventually reached an accommodation with Batista’s regime, Arnaz seems never to have considered returning to Cuba permanently.

Arnaz had begun studying English at his Cuban high school, but mastering that language came slowly to him, impeded his employment opportunities in the United States, and left him with a distinctive and permanent accent. He wanted to go to college, but his formal education ended in 1936, when he graduated from a Roman Catholic school in Miami, where the gangster Al Capone’s son was his best friend. Meanwhile, he struggled to find remunerative work, taking on such odd jobs as cleaning bird cages in stores. During the winter of 1936 he began playing guitar and singing in a small rumba band. While performing in Miami, Arnaz caught the attention of the big-time Latin bandleader Xavier Cugat, who invited him to join his traveling band in New York after he finished school a few months later.

Life’s Work

Through working with Cugat, Arnaz learned how to run a band and launched his professional career. By the following winter, he was leading his own Cuban band in Miami. Becoming known for popularizing Cuban conga-line dancing, Arnaz got another major break in 1939 when he was cast in the Broadway production of Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers’s new musical Too Many Girls as a Latin American boy who comes to an American college to play football. Afterward, he reprised that role in a film version of Too Many Girls (1940) that starred Lucille Ball. He and Ball quickly hit if off and eloped to Connecticut in November, 1940. By the accounts of both partners and other observers, the twenty-year marriage that ensued was both passionate and stormy and was not helped by Arnaz’s persistent womanizing. Only a few years later, Ball filed for divorce, but the couple quickly reconciled. Meanwhile, they lived on a small ranch in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, not far from the Hollywood film industry and Los Angeles music clubs. Ball continued to work in films, but Arnaz’s film roles were limited because of his heavy accent, so he concentrated on working with his Cuban band.

After the United States and Cuba entered World War II at the end of 1941, Arnaz was given a commission in the Cuban navy but decided instead to enlist in the U.S. Navy. Because he was not a citizen, he was not allowed to volunteer. Nevertheless, in May, 1943, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. A recent knee injury kept him from combat duty, so he did his service out of a military hospital near his home, directing United Services Organizations’ (USO) programs for wounded soldiers.

After the war, Arnaz organized another Latin orchestra. In 1948, Ball was cast as a dizzy housewife on the CBS radio series My Favorite Husband. A few years later, CBS invited Ball to adapt the series for television. Ball agreed—on the condition that she could play opposite her real-life husband, Arnaz. The network was reluctant to air a television series featuring a Latino married to a white woman but eventually relented, allowing Arnaz and Ball’s new Desilu Productions to produce the show. This development transformed Arnaz’s life. Not only did it allow him to work regularly with his wife for the first time since they were married, but it also allowed him to develop what may have been his greatest talent—that of a television producer.

The original concept for the new television show was to pair Arnaz and Ball as show-business stars whose busy careers left them little time together, as had been the couple’s real-life experience. Eventually, however, it was decided to make Arnaz a moderately successful Cuban bandleader named Ricky Ricardo and Ball a zany housewife who ceaselessly connives to get into show business. This formula worked perfectly. The resulting I Love Lucy program topped television ratings throughout its long run (1951-1960) and continued in syndication into the twenty-first century. More importantly, however, the show revolutionized television. Arnaz and Ball were nominally coproducers, but Arnaz made most of the business decisions. He began by persuading CBS to let Desilu produce the show in Los Angeles, instead of New York. Back then, most shows were broadcast live in the East, and viewers in the West later watched low-quality kinescope pictures filmed off studio television monitors. To make West Coast production acceptable, Arnaz had I Love Lucy shot directly on film, ensuring that all regions would see high-quality pictures. Using film also ensured that every episode would be permanently preserved for future reruns.

At the same time, Arnaz persuaded CBS to grant Desilu full ownership of all I Love Lucy episodes. Because kinescoped programs had never been used for reruns, CBS appeared to be giving up nothing of value. However, filmed episodes later proved to be enormously valuable, and Desilu’s ownership of all the television programs it would go on to produce enabled the company to expand its studio space as it grew under Arnaz’s guidance. Eventually, Desilu took over the studios of RKO Pictures.

Despite Arnaz and Ball’s busy producing and performing schedules, they made several feature films together during the 1950’s. They also had two children, Lucie Arnaz (born in 1951) and Desi Arnaz, Jr. (born in 1953), both of whom would later go into show business. Arnaz oversaw the production of other Desilu television programs. The strains in Arnaz and Ball’s marriage became mutually intolerable, and the couple divorced in 1960. By this time, their show business careers were going in different directions. As they divested their interests in Desilu Productions, Ball continued to star in television situation comedies, and Arnaz gradually withdrew from producing. In 1963, Arnaz married Edith Mack Hirsch, remaining with her until she died in 1985. Ball also remarried, but she and Arnaz remained friends through the remainder of Arnaz’s life.

Throughout the 1970’s, Arnaz appeared frequently on daytime television shows and made occasional guest appearances in primetime shows. In 1976, he published his autobiography, A Book, a candid and lively account of his life up to 1960. He and his second wife spent their remaining years in semiretirement in Del Mar, California. Arnaz was planning a second volume of his autobiography when he succumbed to lung cancer on December 2, 1986.

Significance

The public will long remember Arnaz as “Ricky Ricardo,” but to people in the entertainment industry he will be remembered as a producer who pioneered modern production techniques, helped shift television production from New York to California, and set a precedent for rich syndication deals. He will also be remembered as the first Latino to star in an American television series. Indeed, during the 1950’s, he was probably the best-known Cuban in America until the rise of the revolutionary leader Fidel Castro.

Bibliography

Arnaz, Desi. A Book. Reprint. Cutchogue, N.Y.: Buccaneer Books, 1994. First published in 1976, this frank and revealing autobiography covers Arnaz’s life through 1960.

Fidelman, Geoffrey Mark. The Lucy Book: A Complete Guide to Her Five Decades on Television. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999. Year-by-year guide to every television program in which Lucille Ball appeared. Provides useful details on Cuban themes in episodes of I Love Lucy.

Gordon, John Steele. “What Desi Wrought.” American Heritage (December, 1998): 20. Appreciation of the contribution that Arnaz made to the television industry by obtaining the syndication rights to I Love Lucy.

Sanders, Coyne Steven, and Tom Gilbert. Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Reprint. New York: It Books, 2011. Dual biography with detailed attention to the financial history of the Desilu studio and its impact on the entertainment industry.