Seventy-five years ago, a fading redheaded movie star and her itinerant bandleader husband were searching desperately for a way to save their careers — and their marriage. She was starring in a network radio show in Hollywood and he was a musician on the road all the time, so they rarely saw each other. In their 10 years together, she’d already filed for divorce once, and was nearing her wits’ end.
The movie star was Lucille Ball and the bandleader, of course, was Desi Arnaz. In 1950, a glimmer of hope appeared for the couple: CBS intended to transfer Ball’s radio show, “My Favorite Husband,” to the untested new medium of television. But there was a problem: Ball wanted to make the move only if Arnaz — who’d helped start the conga dance craze in nightclubs in the 1930s and fueled America’s demand for Latin music after World War II — could play that husband on TV. The network and prospective sponsors believed the public would never accept a thick-accented Latino as the spouse of an all-American girl. “I was always the guy that didn’t fit,” Arnaz would later tell Ed Sullivan.
Arnaz, a Cuban immigrant and self-taught showman, had an idea: The couple would undertake an old-fashioned vaudeville tour of major cities around the country. He and Ball would demonstrate the real-life chemistry that he knew would click with Americans if they only had a chance to see the act.
Racism was a fact of daily life even in Arnaz’s adopted hometown, Los Angeles, where some restaurants still refused service to Latinos. The term D.E.I. did not yet exist, but Arnaz’s gambit amounted to a bold push for diversity, equity and inclusion in the white-bread monoculture of a dawning mass medium that was sponsor-driven and cautious to a fault.
Miracle of miracles, it worked. Critics and audiences from coast to coast raved at the couple’s onstage antics, as Lucy clowned with a battered cello while Desi sang and drummed his heart out. A.H. Weiler of The Times pronounced the pair “a couple who bid fair to become the busiest husband-and- wife team extant.” Soon enough, they were.
Based on the success of Ball and Arnaz’s tour, CBS executives agreed to film a test episode. The network had trouble finding a sponsor until a leading ad man, Milton Biow (as it happens, the grandfather of the actor Matthew Broderick) persuaded his client Philip Morris cigarettes to take a chance on the new show. “I Love Lucy” was born, the rest is history, and it was Desi Arnaz who made much of that history possible.
At a time when so many universities, cultural and business institutions are retreating from formal efforts to increase inclusion and the federal government is working to discourage and erase diversity efforts in all areas of life, Arnaz’s tactics offer an instructive example for performers and institutions alike.
Arnaz’s differences — the very elements that made network chiefs hesitant to feature him — became his greatest strengths, as his charming portrayal of the solid, bread-winning paterfamilias of an intermarried family broke new ground in television and made Ricky Ricardo a beloved figure to the 30 million people who watched his show each week. He was the one TV star who did not look or sound like any other — he was forever telling Lucy she had some “’splainin’ to do” — an immigrant who became the all-American man. The show’s sponsor had been so skeptical about Arnaz’s appeal that the contract with Desilu stipulated that Ricky could sing only if it was absolutely necessary to the plot. The audience’s near-immediate embrace of Arnaz and his music made that a moot point and the clause was eventually dropped.
Once the show became a cultural juggernaut, Arnaz rewrote the rules of stardom. When the network suits and advertising honchos balked at the idea of Ball, who was pregnant in real life, appearing that way on the show, it was Arnaz who went over their heads and straight to the top, to the chairman of Philip Morris, who responded with a blunt Anglo-Saxonism: Don’t mess around with the Cuban!
“In real life or fiction, neither Desi nor Ricky ever betrayed his Latino identity,” the New York Daily News columnist Miguel Perez wrote on Arnaz’s death in 1986, noting that when audiences remember him, “they will see him as the head of an American family who, in spite of his accent and Cuban quirks, is realizing the Latino-American dream.”
Arnaz heard “no” a lot in his career but he never took it as a final answer. Before “I Love Lucy,” television was largely a live medium in which programs ran once, then disappeared. Arnaz assembled a team that arranged to film their show in front of a live audience so that it could be preserved pristinely on 35-millimeter film.
This production method was more costly, so the network insisted that Ball and Arnaz take a weekly pay cut. They agreed — if they could own the negatives of the show. The eventual multimillion-dollar value of the approximately 180 half-hours they produced provided the capital that made Desilu Productions the largest studio in Los Angeles, and the biggest producer of television content in the world. Arnaz’s technical innovations also made it possible for the show to be repeated (thus giving birth to the rerun) and resold (thus creating the syndication market). His refusal to be shut out of television led to the birth of a business model that persisted for seven decades.
Behind the scenes, Arnaz rose to become the most prominent Latino entertainment executive of his day and one of the most prominent Latino creative forces in the history of Hollywood. He remains the rarity that proves the necessity — indeed, the essential Americanness — of diversity. The fact that Latino stories are now part of the pop-cultural landscape, from a reimagined “One Day at a Time” on Netflix to the current success of Broadway shows like “Buena Vista Social Club,” can be traced directly to Arnaz’s creativity, intelligence and courage.
He looked and sounded nothing like the preconceived notion that the entertainment business had of a successful star. So he changed the way Hollywood did business, and whom we can imagine as stars. Anyone who can’t understand that has some ’splainin’ to do.
Todd S. Purdum, a former Times correspondent and Los Angeles bureau chief, is the author of the forthcoming biography “Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post What Desi Arnaz Could Teach Hollywood Today appeared first on New York Times.
