Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz: They Weren't Lucy & Ricky Ricardo: Volume One (1911-1960) of a Two-Part Biography

Darwin Porter & Danforth Prince

From 1951 through 1956, I Love Lucy was the most-watched show in television. Its launch was as rocky as the marriage of the real-life show-biz pros who crafted it.

After their divorce in 1960, Lucille Ball appraised Desi Arnaz, her former husband: “He’s like Jekyll and Hyde. He drinks and gambles, he’s awash in broads and booze, and that gay actor, Cesar Romero, is his devoted slave. Love?” she asked. “I was always falling in love with the wrong man. Including Desi.”

Arnaz summed up his marriage to Lucille: “We were anything but Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. They had nothing to do with us. We dreamed of success, fame, and fortune. And guess what? It all led to hell.”

Their early struggles were epic. As a girl, Lucy at times was literally chained to her backyard in Jamestown, New York. As a teenager, she broke away and earned a reputation as “The Jamestown Hussy,” riding around with Johnny DaVita, a local hoodlum.

Later, she broke into show business, hustling “sugar daddies” and stage-door Johnnies who gave her money and gifts. When she was desperate, she worked as a nude model.

In the 1930s, she migrated to Hollywood and made films for RKO. Offscreen, its executives used her as a gussied-up hooker to “entertain” exhibitors and clients from out of town.

Desi, however, was born to wealth and privilege in Cuba. At the age of twelve, as an incentive to helping him lose his virginity, he was escorted to a local bordello by his father.

Having lost most of their assets in the Cuban Revolution, his family fled. In Miami, Desi got a job as a janitor cleaning out canary cages. Later, in Manhattan, he accepted whatever gigs he could get. He became the “kept boy” of the gay composer Lorenz Hart, sustaining an affair with superstar Ginger Rogers on the side. That included the task of escorting her into Canada for an abortion. He was eventually hired by bandleader Xavier Cugat to “beat hell out of those Afro-Cuban drums.”

After drifting to Hollywood, he spotted Lucille on a sound stage “dressed like a two-dollar whore who had been badly beaten by her pimp.”

[That was, indeed, the character she developed for her role in Dance Girl Dance (1940). During its filming, she “more or less politely” resisted the lesbian advances of her director, Dorothy Arzner.]

Desi succeeded where Arzner failed, marrying Lucille that same year. Characterized by violent fights and long separations, their stormy marriage staggered along for two traumatic decades.

Desi’s obsession with sex became legendary. He seduced every prostitute in Polly Adler’s infamous NYC whorehouse. In Hollywood, Lana Turner and Betty Grable came and went from his life, along with countless showgirls and hometown gals attending his on-the-road band shows.

Meanwhile, Lucille waited for his return, occupying her nights with the son (Elliott Roosevelt) of the U.S. president; actor/mobster George (“Black Snake”) Raft; and George Sanders, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s suicidal husband. Coming and going from her boudoir were—among many others—William Holden, Milton Berle, Henry Fonda, Orson Welles, and Robert Mitchum.

By the early 1950s, the careers of both Lucille and Desi had run out of gas. TV executives objected to his Cuban accent. But I Love Lucy was launched nevertheless and shot up in the ratings, morphing into the most successful sitcom in TV history.

“With gold arriving in wheelbarrows” (Desi’s words), Lucille and Desi bought RKO Studios and launched Desilu Productions. It became the largest motion picture and television studio in the world.

This first-of-a-kind biography of TV’s wackiest and most eccentric couple is generously stuffed with ironic facts and blunt assessments from their frenemies. It radically changes the premises of the American Dream that helped fuel its success.

Details

Paperback ISBN 978-1-936003-71-6
Trim size 6x9 Ppg 530 with photos
MSRP $39.95

Print & emedia links for Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz

In the late 1950s, Darwin Porter, student body president at the University of Miami, arranged “Lucy & Desi” Day at the school, a celebration of the country’s most popular entertainers and favorite couple, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

But when he arrived to take them to the event, the snide and bickering couple he found resembled anything but America’s sweethearts.

“She shouted denunciations at him, at one point calling him [an ethnic slur]. She accused him of having sex with two prostitutes the night before,” writes Porter in his new book with Danforth Price, “Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz: They Weren’t Lucy & Ricky Ricardo,” (Blood Moon Productions, out now).

         

Blood Moon’s biography of the most famous woman in the history of TV was recently honored by the New York Book Festival as RUNNER-UP to the WINNER.
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About the Author:

“Darwin Porter is the master of guilty pleasures. There is nothing like reading him for passing the hours. He is the Nietzsche of Naughtiness, the Goethe of Gossip, the Proust of Pop Culture. Porter knows all the nasty buzz anyone has ever heard whispered in dark bars, dim alleys, and confessional booths. And lovingly, precisely, and in as straightforward a manner as an oncoming train, his prose whacks you between the eyes with the greatest gossip since Kenneth Anger. Some would say better than Anger.” (as quoted from Alan W. Petrucelli’s THE ENTERTAINMENT REPORT at Examiner.com).

Porter began his career writing about politics and the entertainment industry for Knight Newspapers and The Miami Herald. Today, he’s one of the most prolific biographers in the world. His portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Howard Hughes, John and Jackie Kennedy, Paul Newman, Merv Griffin, Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, and Michael Jackson have generated widespread reviews and animated radio and blogsite commentaries worldwide. Some of his biographies have been serialized to millions of readers in The Sunday Times of London and The Mail on Sunday.

Porter is also the well-known original author of many editions of The Frommer Guides, a respected travel guidebook series that’s among the most prominent and well-respected in the world.