Like anybody who ever heard Ricky Ricardo open his mouth, I’d always known that Desi Arnaz was a proud Cuban American, “one of the great personalities of all time,” as his friend the dancer Ann Miller once put it. But until I started researching my new biography, Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television, I did not fully understand just how much Arnaz’s traumatic teenage flight from his homeland influenced his life and career—for better and worse.
Arnaz was raised as a prince in pre-revolutionary Cuba, where his mother was the daughter of a Bacardi-rum executive and his father was the longtime mayor of Santiago, the island’s second-largest city, and a supporter of the country’s American-backed president, Gerardo Machado, who had started out as a democratic reformer but became corrupt and repressive and was overthrown in 1933. The family lost everything and was forced to flee, penniless, to Miami, where Arnaz re-invented himself as a self-taught musician and helped spark the conga dance craze in America before he turned 21.
Arnaz was soon spotted by the Broadway songwriting team of Rodgers and Hart, who cast him as a Latin-American football star in their 1939 musical, Too Many Girls, and when he went to Hollywood the following year to make the film version, he met an RKO contract player named Lucille Ball and fell head over heels in love, and married six months later. A decade later, after struggling to make it in the movies, they revolutionized television history with I Love Lucy.
Arnaz was the behind-the-scenes force in creating the show, and his determination to preserve it on film with three cameras at once in front of an audience made possible the birth of the rerun, helped move the center of television production from New York to Los Angeles, and pioneered the modern business model of television.
It was the youthful trauma of losing everything that made Arnaz willing to take such big risks—at a time when the Hollywood powers that be looked askance at his ethnic heritage and thick accent. His success made him the first Latino entertainment mogul—and by most measures, still the most prominent one to this day. But the scars of Arnaz’s refugee existence also probably helped spark the alcoholism and depression that would undermine his success at the very peak of his fame and power.
“If you feel betrayed by your own country, you’re always on the run,” the Cuban-American playwright Eduardo Machado, himself a refugee, from Fidel Castro’s Cuba, told me. “And no matter how talented you are, and no matter how many things you get, you’re always being told, ‘This isn’t real. Our real life is in Cuba.’ You feel like a phony because you don’t know who you are. I think the more you make it, the more you feel like a phony.”
By the late 1950s, Arnaz had parlayed I Love Lucy’s success into the factory of Desilu Studios, the largest producer of television content in the world. But he was also sinking into dysfunction and drinking that began in midmorning. “That’s when he realized the emptiness—at the crest of his success,” his son, Desi junior, told me. “He didn’t stop drinking. He didn’t know what the real poison was. This is a temporary life.”
In 1960, Arnaz and Ball divorced, and in 1962, she bought out his share of their empire. The remaining quarter-century was mostly a sad downward spiral, and he died broke—though he did at last stop drinking, a year before he died of lung cancer, in 1986.
But his proud legacy lives on—not only in the brilliant comic episodes of I Love Lucy but in the way so much of television, especially situation comedies, is still made today.
“I Love Lucy was a crucial part of entertainment in this country,” the late Norman Lear told me. “Lucy and Desi—I think it can be said they pretty much opened the door of Hollywood to America, and to the situation comedy. There was only one Lucy and one Desi, and between them, they knew what it took. He was a great businessman in the persona of a wonderful entertainer.”
Todd S. Purdum is a former New York Times political reporter and the author of Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution
