Lucy & Desi
She was the brawn, he was the brains.
One of the standout television series of the 20th century was the I Love Lucy Show starring Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, William Frawley and Vivian Vance. It ran from 1951 to 1957, and was in reruns for decades afterward. Few people know the history of how the show even got on TV, in the midst of a racially divided America where media moguls thought Latinos–and African Americans–should be portrayed not as stars, but as servants and workers.
Hattie McDaniel (1893-1952), the first African American to win an Oscar, won it as Best Supporting Actress in Gone With the Wind (1939) for her portrayal of. . . you guessed it. . . the maid. She was not able to attend the premier of the film, being that it was taking place in Atlanta, Georgia in a 'whites only' theater. And at the Oscars ceremony, she was seated with her escort and her agent at a separate table from the other nominees, off to the side of the room. Having appeared in more than 300 films, when she was dying her last wish was to be buried in Hollywood Cemetery. But that was slated not to be, as the cemetery was, again, 'whites only.'
According to Encyclopedia Britannica in the 1950s even a top quality network show like Nat King Cole's had difficulty attracting commercial sponsorship. It really wasn't until the 1970s, with shows like Sanford & Son, Good Times, What's Happening, Diff'rent Strokes, Benson, Barefoot in the Park, That's My Mama and The Jeffersons, that African American actors began to star in their own series.
Latinos did not fare any better. In the early 1950s, any type of mixed marriage on television was not at the top of casting agent rosters, so when the I Love Lucy show featuring Lucille Ball (1911-1989) and Desi Arnaz (1917-1986) was pitched to CBS, the only way it got approval was by Desi agreeing to partially finance the production. This demand was partially due to Desi's insistence on filming the show on three 35mm motion picture cameras, as opposed to the lower-quality kinescope filming normally used in the nascent television industry. Additionally, the show was the first to be filmed before a live studio audience, requiring a great number of technical and logistical adjustments to the filming process, as detailed by Director of Photography Karl Freund.
Lucy and Desi turned to the new medium of television in desperation, after they realized they were both at the end of their Hollywood careers, in which they were far from being stars. Their marriage had also been under stress, being that they were often separated while each was working in different projects. In that light, it seems even more remarkable that they had the daring–or should we say the unmitigated temerity–to pitch a show with a politically incorrect premise, and moreover, to be so insistent on its filming process.
The couple formed a new company called Desilu to handle administrative duties of the show. As part of the deal with CBS, Desi insisted on having the syndication rights, which proved to be one of the shrewdest business deals ever. The idea of regular re-broadcasts of television shows had not yet entered the minds of TV’s elites. But because Desi and Lucy retained ownership of the high-quality 35mm films, they were able to create a tremendously lucrative market by selling the shows to both local and international stations after the CBS run was over.
Like Hattie McDaniel, whose multi-talents and high intelligence allowed her mega-success in a field that traditionally shunned and/or exploited Black artists, Cuban-American Desi Arnaz was successful in his innovations in the field of television, both technically and financially.
But he couldn't control everything.
One of the highlights of the I Love Lucy Show was its engaging, upbeat theme song. Officially, the composing credits went to Eliot Daniel, a CBS staffer. But according to my sources, the song was actually written by Desi's childhood friend and pianist/Musical Director on the show, Marco Rizo.
Here is what my friend and colleague Bobby Sanabria says about this:
"Marco was also from the city of Santiago and he and Desi were boyhood friends having grown up together there. Marco came to NYC in 1940 on a full scholarship to Juilliard. In 1951 he became Desi' s musical director/pianist although Desi would occasionally use fellow Cuban René Touzet on piano as well. Marco always contended that he was the true composer of the theme and not Daniel. He told me it was stolen from him as a concession to the studio because the powers that be at CBS didn't want Marco as the musical director for the TV show. They wanted a guy on staff to be the m.d. That makes sense because CBS didn't want Desi to begin with due to the racial climate at the time. Both Lucy and Desi had to fight that and prove to them that people would accept an inter-ethnic/racial couple on mainstream TV. The concession, according to Marco, was that if Desi wanted Marco as the m.d. they would have to give Daniel credit for the theme since he was on staff at CBS. According to Marco the way the theme was created was that Desi went to Marco and told him to come up with something that had the flair of a Broadway show tune. I believe him since anytime he would be asked about the theme he would become very bitter. During the time Marco was in L.A. and was on the show with Desi he studied composition with Igor Stravinsky at UCLA and Andrew Lloyd Weber was his classmate. The last gig he ever did was in 1998 at the Nuyorican Poets Café as a guest with my ensemble Ascensión just before he passed. Another incredible musician lost to the dust of time."
–Bobby Sanabria
Remember that Desi Arnaz plays a Cuban bandleader on the I Love Lucy Show. He is filmed playing a type of Cuban conga drum, although he is not really a percussionist. He is also featured singing the band's theme song in the series, "Babalu." Babalú-Ayé was an African god who is immortalized in song in the Afro-Cuban Santería tradition. Imagine the CBS execs' reaction upon learning that the featured song on their most popular show was about an African god!
Author Todd S. Purdum has a new book out that goes into depth on Desi Arnaz' contributions to the entertainment industry, including his innovative approach to television filming.
Trivia tip du jour: Lucy was not a redhead. She was actually a brunette-turned-blonde who died her hair red to achieve a more striking look for the then-nascent color filming in the movie industry.
Arnaz was from a wealthy aristocratic Cuban family. His father was the mayor of Santiago, the second-largest city in Cuba. But come the Cuban Revolution of 1933, at 17 years old he had to flee his country and start all over again, without a dime to his name, in the United States. He saw the rising attraction of Latino music in Miami, and re-invented himself as a musician and bandleader.
"In real life or fiction, neither Desi nor Ricky ever betrayed his Latino identity," the columnist Miguel Perez would write in the New York Daily News after Arnaz' death. "When Americans saw him on the screen in the 1950s, and when the world sees him now and in the future, they will not see Arnaz playing one of those criminal or drug-dealer roles usually given to Latinos. They see him as the head of an American family who, in spite of his accent and his Cuban quirks, is realizing the Latino-American dream." --from Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television by Todd S. Purdum.
In addition to I Love Lucy, the Desilu company also produced Mission:Impossible, The Untouchables, Mannix and Star Trek, as well as spinoffs The Lucy Show, Here’s Lucy, and the Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour. They partnered with Westinghouse to create the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse series. While Lucy and Desi were featured in some episodes, the series also utilized other programs. In the video below, Desi is seen introducing an episode written by Rod Serling which the writer had originally intended as the pilot for a new series called The Twilight Zone.
CBS, however, rerouted the pilot to the Desilu Playhouse. It was only after the overwhelming success of this episode that CBS permitted Serling to proceed with his own series.
I think one of the things that makes artists a mystery to non-artists is that people wonder where and how they get their ideas. In Serling’s case, his bizarre plots for The Twilight Zone were inspired by his recurring nightmares and flashbacks about his combat experience as a parachuter in the U.S. Army during World War II, after which he was awarded both the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. He later said that these memories haunted him so much that he turned to writing scripts in order to channel them into something more productive.
Great art frequently, if not mostly, derives from this sort of transformation of the energy of negative experiences. Just as Serling channeled his nightmares into riveting television scripts, Desi’s desire to survive after losing everything in the Cuban Revolution spurred him to reinvent himself as a musician in Miami. Lucy, for her part, came from a poor family who made sacrifices in order to send her to acting school, where she was repeatedly told by her instructors that she would never make it in show business! As a young woman she also survived a two-year period of catastrophic illness that prevented her from working.
Of course it’s not only artists that channel negative emotions and experiences into productive activities. Anyone can do that. If anything, it’s easier for artists because they already have a calling that demands continuing creativity.
As for the masses of people who don’t have that outlet, they may easily succumb to the negative forces spoken of by Rudolf Steiner and many other sages. It’s better to be an artist!
“There are beings in the spiritual realms for whom anxiety and fear emanating from human beings offer welcome food. When humans have no anxiety and fear, then these creatures starve. People not yet sufficiently convinced of this statement could understand it to be meant comparatively only. But for those who are familiar with this phenomenon, it is a reality.
“If fear and anxiety radiate from people and they break out in panic, then these creatures find welcome nutrition and they become more and more powerful. These beings are hostile towards humanity. Everything that feeds on negative feelings, on anxiety, fear and superstition, despair or doubt, are in reality hostile forces in supersensible worlds, launching cruel attacks on human beings, while they are being fed.
“Therefore, it is above all necessary to begin with that the person who enters the spiritual world overcome fear, feelings of helplessness, despair and anxiety. But these are exactly the feelings that belong to contemporary culture and materialism; because it estranges people from the spiritual world, it is especially suited to evoke hopelessness and fear of the unknown in people, thereby calling up the above mentioned hostile forces against them.”
Source (German): Rudolf Steiner – GA 56 – Die Erkenntnis der Seele und des Geistes – Berlijn, December 12, 1907 (page 145)
Translated by Nesta Carsten-Krüger
Many thanks to Bobby Sanabria, who gave me permission to reproduce his comments here for my readers.
Additional resources
Bobby Sanabria’s recording of the author’s composition The Troubadours, arranged by John Di Martino, from the Grammy Nominated album Live and in Clave:
The author’s quintet recording of the tune, featuring Cuban Yoruba chanting by David Oquendo:
David Oquendo, one of the stars of the new Broadway musical Buena Vista Social Club, featured in a NPR Tiny Desk Concert.
New book: Music and the 7 Hermetic Principles by Su Terry
I grew up watching “I Love Lucy” and other “Desilu” productions, but I knew very little about the background you present here.
I especially enjoy that Desilu’s “Playhouse” premiered the pilot for the fabulous “Twilight Zone” — and it is “icing on the cake” to see William Bendix (of “The Life of Riley” fame) starring in that pilot.
Thank you for this. All art fights to starve the “Dementors” of the world and the great beyond, however they feed themselves.