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This is Fresh Air.
I'm Terry Gross.
Lucy, I'm home!
That's a phrase Desi Arnaz was known for in the sitcom I Love Lucy.
I love you!
That was one of his signature songs.
The conga was the rhythm he helped popularize in the US, beating out on his conga drum as people danced to the beat of 1-2-3-kick.
Arneza's movie career didn't go far, but playing Ricky Ricardo, husband of Lucille Ball's character Lucy Ricardo, made him a star.
Just getting a major TV role was quite a feat, because networks and sponsors were skeptical that a Cuban refugee with an accent would be accepted by American viewers.
I Love Lucy premiered in 1951, when TV was young, and ended its run of new shows in 1957.
It became the first show in TV history to reach 10 million people.
For years, it was the most popular show on TV.
A lot of that is credited to Ball's comedic talent and to the work Arnaz did in front of the, creating what became standard procedures for producing shooting, lighting and broadcasting TV sitcoms and led to the possibility of reruns and syndication.
He also founded Desilu Productions, which kept expanding and for a while was the largest creator of TV content in the world.
Our Miss Brooks December Bride.
The Andy Griffith Show, The Untouchables and The Dick Van Dyke Show were among the programs produced by Desilu and or filmed in its studios.
The new book Desi Arnaz, The Man Who Invented Television, by my guest Todd Purdom, is about Arnaz.
I Love Lucy, the early days of TV, the seminal role he played in shaping it, his marriage to Lucille Ball and the excesses that did him in.
Purdom spent 23 years at the New York Times, where he covered the White House, was diplomatic correspondent and LA bureau chief.
He's the author of the previous books Something Wonderful, Rogers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution and An Idea Whose Time Has Come, Two Presidents, Two Parties and The Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
I Love Lucy is still part of current pop culture.
It continues to play in reruns on TV.
Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem starred as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in the 2021 film Being the Ricardos.
In 2022, Amy Poehler directed the documentary Lucy and Desi.
Todd Purdom, welcome back to Fresh Air.
I really enjoyed the book.
It has so much interesting TV history in it.
Networks and sponsors were not enthusiastic about the idea of a Latino man starring in a sitcom.
What were their problems?
Well, no, Terry, they weren't.
First of all, they were very concerned that he was different, that he had a thick accent.
And they just did not believe that widespread American audiences would believe him as the husband of an all-American girl like Lucille Ball.
Of course, the irony is they had been an all-American couple for 10 years already in real life.
How had he been typed in his earlier years in the movies?
He said at one point his ambition was to be the Cuban Mickey Rooney, and he really was a little bit like Mickey Rooney.
He could do comedy.
He could do music.
He could play the drum.
He could sing.
And he struggled to find a workable niche in Hollywood.
He was always a little bit off.
He never quite fit into Hollywood's stereotype of what a Latin performer should be.
He'd been a successful bandleader.
Yes, and he was apparently in person.
A very, very compelling entertainer, a wonderful showman who could hold the audience in the palm of his hand.
He wasn't a classically great musician.
He was self-taught.
He never learned how to read music.
He wasn't a spectacular drummer.
His Latin music, his Cuban music was, by the lights of authentic Cuban music fans, not the most pure version.
It was a kind of popularized American version that brought those Cuban musical forms to American mass audiences.
But apparently the whole package was pretty overwhelming when you saw him in the flesh.
He wasn't a great singer either, I'll add that.
And a lot of his songs were novelty songs.
Yes, yes.
He was an adequate singer, but he was not an incredible vocalist.
There's no doubt about that.
Meanwhile, Lucille Ball wasn't getting the traction that she wanted in movies either.
No, she'd been working steadily in movies since 1933.
This is 1950, 51, when they're trying to get the show on the air.
She was approaching the age of 40, which then as now, was a very dangerous age for a female actress in Hollywood.
She had worked steadily, but she'd never really broken through as a major A-list star, and she was beginning to be known as the Queen of the Bees the second-tier movies that rounded out double features.
So at the point that I Love Lucy is about to begin, she was starring in a radio sitcom called My Favorite Husband.
And now that TV was beginning to catch on, the network thought we should transfer it to TV and make it a TV sitcom.
And that's not what she really wanted to do.
She wanted herself and Desi to. who was her husband by then, to have their own sitcom.
So talk about how they made the deal to co-star in a new TV series.
Yes, what happened was she was in the last gasp of really big network radio.
It was a sitcom about a zany wife and her fifth vice president of a bank husband called My Favorite Husband.
And CBS realized that television was catching on and the Lucy show had been successful.
So they wanted to transfer to TV.
And the only way she was willing to do it is if Desi played her husband.
But he himself realized he could not plausibly be the fifth vice president of a bank.
Richard Denning, who was the actor who played her husband on the air, was a blonde waspy, jut-jawed kind of actor.
So they were struggling to have a different concept and one that CBS, which was running My Favorite Husband, would accept.
Finally, Desi said, I have an idea.
We'll go on a vaudeville tour.
We'll take my band on a tour of movie houses around the country in big cities.
And you can perform comedy.
And we'll perform comedy and music together and prove to the suits at the network that the public will accept us as a team.
And in the summer of 1950, that's what they did.
And it was a spectacular success all over all over the country.
And finally, CBS and the sponsor, Philip Morris, agreed.
And Philip Morris, of course, was a very big cigarette manufacturer.
And the sponsors were so influential at that time.
Their name was even in the title of some shows.
What I love is and I didn't know this until reading your book that the opening credits in the original broadcast, not the reruns, not in syndication, but in the original broadcast.
Why don't you describe what the opening was like?
It wasn't the Hart logo with Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, I Love Lucy.
It was completely different.
No, they were these charming little animated stick figures drawn by the Hanna-Barbera animation team, the people who created Tom and Jerry, the cat and mouse.
And Lucy and Desi were frolicking on top of a package of cigarettes and dancing around as the show began.
And the velvety-looking heart logo only came later in reruns.
So at the time, TV shows were mostly live or on kinescopes.
Why don't you explain what a kinescope is?
Well, in 1950-51 television was almost completely a live medium and it was centered almost completely in New York because it was dominated by the advertising agencies who were there.
The challenge for broadcasting across the whole country was it wasn't yet possible to beam a television signal all the way from New York to California.
So if a show was produced in New York, it was seen live in the eastern two-thirds or so of the country, to around maybe St.
Louis, Kansas City, something like that.
And then, in order to broadcast it in the West Coast, they had to film using 16 millimeter film off a television monitor.
And they produced a very poor duplicate called a kinescope that videotape had not yet been invented.
So the problem was shows that were produced in one place and shown in another had a very poor visual quality.
One of the challenges that you can't even now.
You'll notice probably sometimes if you watch a movie and a television screen appears in the background.
It vibrates and has a kind of a jiggly moiré quality.
Because the speed of film is different from the speed of the video image.
Digital has changed some of this.
But in any case, Lucy and Desi the whole goal of the show was to work together, live in Los Angeles, where they were about ready to have their first child, their daughter Lucy, Desiree Arnaz.
And the sponsor and CBS wanted them to come and do it in New York.
And they said, no, no, no, we don't want to do that.
And that's when CBS said well, We're certainly not going to have you do it.
Live in Los Angeles and make the most important markets in the country.
Watch a blurry kinescope.
So you'll have to film it.
And that will cost more.
So what was Desi Arnaz's solution to getting around the fact that you couldn't really broadcast from coast to coast and kinescopes looked really terrible?
His basic idea was, let's film it on 35mm film stock, just like a movie.
But because CBS and the sponsor also realized that Lucy performed best in front of a live audience, as her radio show had demonstrated, they wanted to film this television program also in front of a live audience.
Well, as you probably know, a movie is filmed most of the time with a single camera set up over and over again for each shot.
Every close-up of a reaction, it involves a separate camera setup.
And to try to film a half-hour situation comedy like that would have been in those days, very cumbersome.
It would have also wrecked the spontaneity.
It would have been complicated to capture the laugh and reaction.
So they came up with this notion of using three cameras at once in synchronicity, filming the show like a play.
And while a game show, the Ralph Edwards' Truth or Consequences, had been experimenting with that technique, no one had ever really done it for a play, you know, like a sitcom.
So Desi went around talking to various cinematographers, including the Academy Award winning cameraman Carl Freund, who had started out in the German expressionist cinema in the 20s and 30s and come to Hollywood.
Like so many emigres from Europe.
And he said, you can't do it.
And Desi said, why?
He said, because you have to light separately for the close-ups, for the medium shots, for the long shots.
And then, as a sheer intellectual challenge for him, he said but let me see if we can figure something out.
So he devised an innovative system of so-called flat overhead lighting that would light the set adequately for all three camera angles at once.
And then, because a motion picture studio is a working factory floor with all kinds of dangers cables and electricity and fire hazards they had to figure out a way to get an audience in there to watch it.
So they built a set of wooden and metal bleachers, had about 300 people come into this soundstage.
They had to cut a special door in the street side of this of the soundstage so that people could have adequate fire exit.
And that became the method that, with a few changes, is still used today.
Most sitcoms today are still shot using this same basic technique.
So when Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz shot the pilot, which was basically an audition for them, she was pregnant and wore baggy clothes to cover it up because she couldn't look pregnant on TV.
And then later in the series, she was actually pregnant again with their son.
And the writers...
And Lucille Bollandese-Arnaz wanted to write that into the story of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, but the network was against it.
Why was showing a pregnant woman so taboo?
Like a pregnant actress playing a pregnant character, why was that so taboo?
Well, because television in those days was a bland, sponsor-driven mass medium, that to some degree the way it does now, except it depended on the most innocuous fare to offend the fewest number of people.
And if you had a pregnant woman on the air, especially a really pregnant actress, it would betray the way that you get pregnant, which is by having sex.
And sex did not really appear on television in those days.
So Lucy and Desi fought hard with CBS to do this.
And they thought Desi particularly thought there could be a whole series, and the head writer and producer, Jess Oppenheimer, thought there could be a series of very tasteful, very charming episodes that would show what happens when people have a baby.
And finally, ultimately, Desi only found out a couple years later.
He'd gone over the heads of the network executives to the chairman of Philip Morris and written him a letter saying we've given you the number one show on television.
If you don't want us to be responsible for writing it anymore, then you'll have to figure out how to get the number one show on television, and we can't be responsible anymore.
And he later learned that the chairman of the company had sent a memo to his staff basically saying in the very pungent terms that I'm not going to say on the radio Don't mess around with a Cuban.
So they were allowed to do the episodes.
And they were so concerned about doing it in good taste that they hired a tripartite panel of a priest, a rabbi and a Protestant minister to vet the scripts and be on the set when they were filming to make sure that everything was done in good taste.
It's so ridiculous.
It's incredible.
It's incredible.
And also sitcom families.
I mean, the idea was they're typically supposed to have children and be like an average quote normal nuclear family a husband and wife and kids.
And so like you can't have kids without being pregnant.
It's just so absurd.
Anyhow.
Well in future years.
Desi recalled in a years later interview with David Letterman how you couldn't say the word pregnant on television.
You couldn't say pregnant?
No.
So he said in his wonderful accent, had to say spectin.
And the audience in David Letterman's show laughed out loud, of course.
And Desi took a beat and a classic deadpan, you know, and then said, spectin was better anyway.
And Letterman's like, it still is because you can't get a laugh with the word pregnant.
Whereas, you know, spectin is pretty funny.
I want to skip ahead to an episode of I Love Lucy in which she's just found out she's pregnant, because she's really wanted to have a baby.
She is just glowing.
And Ricky is about to come home.
So she's always imagined what it was going to be like to tell her husband we're going to have a baby.
She's going to make him a nice meal, put her arms around him and deliver the news.
It's going to be romantic and perfect.
So she makes him a great lunch, puts it on the table in the living room.
He comes in.
He's had a terrible day.
He's in a really foul mood, and he's very, very hungry, and all he wants to do is eat.
So I want to play that scene.
Ricky, do you have to eat now?
Well, honey, it's lunchtime.
You'll fix me a beautiful lunch.
Well, stop for a minute.
Now swallow that.
My stomach is going to sink.
I lost my teeth.
All right, honey, now what is it?
Ricky, darling.
Honey, the phone is ringing.
I know it.
Well, honey, one of us has to get up and answer it.
No.
Lucy.
Let it ring.
Oh, honey, come on.
It might be important.
Oh.
Come on, sir.
Hello?
Oh, hello, Marco.
What?
What do you mean they can't have the costumes there till tonight?
Now look, you tell that guy that he has to have those costumes there by two o'clock this afternoon, or I'm gonna sue him.
That's what I said, I'm gonna sue him.
Thanks, goodbye.
Oh, what a business.
Sometimes I think I go back to Q and work in a sugar plantation.
Just the two of us.
Just the two of us?
Yeah.
I don't mind to get you all involved in my affairs, honey, but you should be happy you're a woman.
Oh, I am, I am.
Well, you think that you know how tough my job is, but believe me, if you traded places with me, you'd be surprised.
Believe me, if I traded places with you, you'd be surprised.
One of the things I like about this scene is the difference between the fantasy you imagine and the reality that you get.
But Lucille Ball, I think, was very pregnant at the time, because she's wearing what really looks like maternity clothes.
Do you know how pregnant she was, how expectant she was when they shot that scene?
She probably would have been approaching like five months or something.
And one of the things apparently about her pregnancies, she showed early and large in her pregnancy.
She she she tended to balloon up, which is why they they couldn't hide the pregnancy.
They would have had to stop producing the show if they couldn't have pregnancy be part of the plot.
And so, of course, the episode then continues from that wonderful scene you just played.
She finally goes down to the nightclub and devises a ruse to tell him there in public.
And it's a charming scene when he realizes that he's going to be the father.
And this is set at a nightclub where he's the band leader.
And he gets a note saying there's a couple here who is going to have a baby.
And he asked, like, well, who is it?
And nobody raises their hand or stands up.
So he goes from table to table basically saying, is it you?
Is it you?
And then he realizes Lucy is there.
And he realizes they're going to have a baby.
And then he sings this song.
We're having a baby, my baby and me.
You'll read it in Winchell that we're adding a limb to our family tree.
While pushing that carriage, how proud I will be.
There's nothing like marriage as your father and mother, and they'll agree.
He'll have toys, baby clothes.
He'll know he's come to the right house.
Bye and bye when he grows.
Maybe he'll live in the White House.
So that's an example too, of how they worked.
The fact that Ricky Ricardo was a band leader in a nightclub into the story.
The show and they were meta before meta was meta, you know, and the synergy of their real life relationship, the relationship on the show, it all played into each other.
And the episode in which the baby was born on television had been filmed weeks before the baby was born in real life.
And then because Lucy had had a C-section with her first child.
In those days, if you'd ever had a cesarean section, you had cesarean section for all subsequent children, right?
So her surgeon happened to do his operations on a Monday.
So she pre-scheduled the birth of the real life Desi Jr. for Monday morning.
So Desi Jr. was born on Monday morning in real life at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles.
And that night on the air, millions of Americans saw little Ricky born on the air.
But they weren't actually happening in real time.
Did they send out press releases explaining that both happened on the same day?
Yes.
Well, Jim Bacon, the Associated Press reporter, was sitting with Jesse outside the delivery room.
And within seconds of the word, that the baby, the real life baby, had been born.
The news was flashing all over the world and was worldwide headlines in Japan and Europe and every place in the world.
And that's really important, because they were so afraid to have a pregnant character on TV, even though the actress was pregnant too.
And it turned out to be a real boom for the show.
Absolutely.
And I think it's also another proof Terry, that the public is so often ahead of the leadership in these kinds of questions.
People prove totally capable of accepting the fact that these people had a baby without being horrified.
Let's take another break and then we'll talk some more.
If you're just joining us, my guest is Todd Purdom.
He's the author of the new book, Desi Arnaz, The Man Who Invented Television.
We'll be right back.
I'm Terry Gross and this is Fresh Air.
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What was Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz's relationship like on and off the set?
It seemed pretty tumultuous both on and off the set.
I think it was.
From the moment they met each other.
It was a classic case of love at first sight or, you know, very powerful attraction.
They got married within six months of meeting each other.
They were each pretty seriously involved with other people when they met, and they promptly dumped those other people and saw only each other.
The problem was from the very beginning that Desi had an idea that he could stray sexually and it shouldn't matter to his wife, because his wife was his wife and that's all that mattered.
Can I stop you there?
I mean, he learned that from his father and grandfather in Cuba who both had mistresses.
And he was introduced to what was then called a prostitute and is now called a sex worker, when he was 15 to initiate him.
Yes, his uncle took him to the fanciest bordello in Santiago de Cuba, his hometown, and introduced him to sex in a bordello.
And when he came to New York as a young performer, he frequented Polly Adler's bordello, which was the most elegant whorehouse in New York.
Basically that had the cream of bordello.
And Desi, I think he would clearly be what we now would think of as a sex addict.
He didn't have affairs with people, as his daughter once said to me, with people who had last names.
He just had endless dalliances with prostitutes, sometimes more than one at a time.
And when this was semi-private, it bothered Lucy, but she could tolerate it.
When it became increasingly public and he ultimately got arrested weaving down the street in Hollywood in a neighborhood of notorious bordellos, it became humiliating for Lucy and she really just couldn't take it anymore.
And that's ultimately what that and his drinking is what led to their divorce in 1960.
So they fought a lot on every level.
In their marriage, they fought a lot.
On set, they fought a lot over the direction of I Love Lucy.
And as characters, as Ricky Ricardo and Lucy Ricardo, they fought too.
What were the fights like on the set?
Well, there's one famous incident apparently, where he was bending over to do something and she kicked him, and she meant to kick him in the rear end and she actually kicked him in a more sensitive spot and apparently he was limping around for days.
You know, their son, Desi Arnaz Jr, told me he thought really the theme of the show itself was fundamental conflict and that Lucy and Ricky almost hurt each other in every Monday night's episode.
But then they drew back and they didn't.
And by the end of the show, they were back in each other's loving arms.
But, you know, the flip side of the conflict is in the words of the I Love Lucy theme song.
We have our quarrels, but then how we love making up again.
And Lucy, in her memoir, talked about how, especially early in their marriage, their fights were a kind of lovemaking in themselves that led to ultimately reunions.
So the overtones of the show are constantly coming back to the dynamic of their relationship in real life.
And that's part of what makes it compelling, I think.
The show was supposed to bring them together because he was working as a band leader touring and she was in movies.
And they didn't get to see each other very much because they just weren't in the same place very much.
And so the show was supposed to bring them together and have them work on the same project.
But in the long run, the show drove them apart as well as well as his dalliances.
The show did bring them together, but I think it also by the fact that they then were working together pretty much 24-7, always thinking about the show in one way or another.
And Lucy's only salvation in life, the thing that her happy place was hard work.
So she was restless if she didn't have a lot to do and she'd compulsively clean her house or rearrange her drawers or whatever.
So she loved the work.
She loved nothing better than working on that week's episode.
And whenever they had a chance, and at one point Desi suggested they scale back and not do the weekly show anymore.
She was unwilling to do that.
And I think what happened then was that familiarity began to breed increasing contempt, as they were with each other all the time.
Not just in home life, but in their work life.
And you know the paradox.
The poignant paradox is that the show did was intended to save their marriage, and the tensions created by the success of the show ultimately were part of what drove them apart.
In terms of like the scripts, did either of them have much input?
Desi has been said to have a great deal of skill as an editor and a rewriter.
He understood instinctively what might not work in a script, what would work, even if he couldn't always articulate it.
To a person, the people involved in the show talk about Lucille Ball in real life was not verbal.
She was not a good teller of a joke.
She couldn't remember the punchline.
She'd get lost in the weeds of telling the joke.
Her genius was in situation, in physical comedy, in the use of props, in the human expressions of emotion on her face.
So people said that from the first reading at the beginning of the week, Desi would deliver a very credible read.
Never get any better.
Never get any worse.
But Lucy.
As the week went on and one effective part of Aaron Sorkin's movie being the Ricardos is you see Nicole Kidman as Lucy working, and working, and working, with a set of flowers as a prop, perfecting the routine so that by the time the show was filmed at the end of the week, she had really reached an unbelievable level of skill.
I Love Lucy became a Desilu production, the production company started by Desi Arnaz.
Was Lucy active in Desilu Productions?
Lucy was the vice president of Desilu, but she never took much pleasure in the business end of the business.
She really left that to Desi.
After their divorce in 1960 then, especially after she bought him out of the company in 1962, she did have to become the president and she had final responsibility, although she relied heavily on a team of business advisors.
But Lucy herself did one very, very important thing in 1966.
The studio had two projects in development and her advisor said they're both going to be very expensive to produce these TV series.
If you approve them, you'll probably have to sell the company because the cash flow won't be adequate to cover the production costs and any future rewards will be way down the line.
But Lucy believed in both of the programs and she gave the green light, and those two programs were Star Trek and Mission Impossible.
Oh, wow.
Let me reintroduce you again.
If you're just joining us, my guest is Todd Purdom.
He's the author of the new book, Desi Arnaz, The Man Who Invented Television.
We'll be right back.
This is Fresh Air.
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Mounting pressures from Desilu's constant expansion and Desi Arnaz's inability to control his urges, whether it was drinking or going to sex workers.
He was just having a lot of problems.
He wasn't functioning well at some point.
The stress was really overwhelming.
What were his final days like?
Well, after he and Lucy got divorced in 1960, their relationship got warmer and she stayed closely involved with she relied on his business advice.
When she bought him out of the company in 1962, he basically took his windfall which would amount to about 30 million in today's money and kind of retired and lived the life of Riley.
He built a house down in Mexico in Baja, California.
He lived at the beach north of San Diego in Del Mar.
He had a horse ranch in inland California for a while.
And then he got bored, and in the mid-'60s, he tried to stage a comeback.
He had one successful series in the late 1960s called The Mother's-in-Law, with Eve Arden and Kay Ballard.
But he never really succeeded again in getting anything much off the ground.
He wrote a memoir in the mid-1970s.
He was a guest host on the first season of NBC's Saturday Night, which was then called just Saturday Night, not Saturday Night Live.
But he had a kind of sad unspooling in which he sank further and further into alcoholism and depression.
And finally with the help of his son Desi, who had been a teenage music sensation himself with the band with Dean Martin Jr.
Desi helped him get sober and he did finally grapple with some of his demons.
He went to alcohol rehab down in San Diego, and then he got lung cancer and within a year was dead.
And Lucille Ball died two years later.
Yes, Lucille Ball went to see him near the end of his life.
They had a bond that time couldn't shake.
It's really like a star-crossed, one of the great love affairs of all time.
People who knew them said they really were one of the great love affairs of all time.
Their capacity to hurt each other was almost as powerful as their love, I suppose, and they just couldn't manage to be together.
I want to talk about Desi Arnaz's background because it's very interesting.
I knew nothing about his background before reading your book.
He actually was from a very privileged background until the Cuban Revolution of 1933.
And that's not the Castro Revolution.
This is an earlier revolution.
So tell us a little bit about his father and his grandfather.
Yes, Dessie's grandfather was a doctor in Santiago de Cuba, the second largest city in Cuba in southeastern part of the island.
The family legend has it that he was attached to Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders at San Juan Hill.
Dessie's own father was a pharmacist who then built a second career as the mayor of Santiago, the reform mayor from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, building all kinds of public works, drinking water, a beautiful esplanade on the waterfront.
And his mother's family.
His mother's father was an executive at Bacardi, the giant Cuban rum company.
So Desi grew up as an only child with every conceivable privilege a beautiful house in town, a big motor car, an island summer house on the bay with a motor launch and a Norwegian fishing skiff, and a ranch in the country where he learned to ride horseback and everything.
So he really was on track to become a spoiled, rotten kid, I think, until the family lost everything in 1933, when the regime of Gerardo Machado, which had become corrupt and was overthrown and they fled to Florida.
And Patessi.
Except for one time in a USO tour in World War II, he never went back to the island again.
And he was a political conservative in real life and was very strongly anti-Castro.
He never really felt that he could go home again.
Why did the family have to flee after the revolution?
How attached was Desi Arnaz's father to the regime?
His father had been a supporter of the Machado regime, which is itself a kind of tragic story, because Machado arose in the 1920s as a reform-minded, progressive politician who then, once he got in office, became corrupted by power.
He suspended normal electoral processes and really kind of became a dictatorial figure and president.
There's no indication that Tessie's father was himself part of the Machado era corruption, but he had backed the regime.
He was, by that point, a member of the National Assembly in Congress in Havana.
And so he was tarred by association with the Machado regime and fled when it fell.
There's a really chilling story that I think very much traumatized Desi Arnaz.
And the family had moved from the city where they were and moved to another city.
I forget what the locations were.
But one day, in front of their neighbor's house there was a head on a spear and the body was a couple of doors down.
Like that must have been incredibly upsetting.
Yes, he and his mother fled from Santiago after the regime fell to relatives in Havana.
And he saw, you know things that no teenage boy should probably ever want to have to see, including a man's head stuck on a long pole hung in front of his house, and his body was hung two doors down.
And I think you know, it was an era when people wouldn't have necessarily processed this in the way we might now.
And I think Desi must have been haunted for the rest of his life by this youthful dislocation.
The strange part about it is it's that dislocation that also sparked his enormous drive to succeed.
So it gave him on the one hand a tremendous willingness to take risks because he'd lost everything.
He figured, what the heck, you know, I might as well try something new.
But it also, in the end, I think, must have left a lot of ghosts rattling around inside his psyche that he sought refuge from in alcohol.
When he and his father were living in Florida.
It took a while for his father to have enough money to send for Desi, and then it took longer to send for his mother.
So the father and son were living in a warehouse that was filled with rats, right?
Killing rats with baseball bats, yes.
Yeah.
The young Desi Arnaz had experienced incredible privilege and then incredible poverty.
Yes and I think that must have been a really wrenching dislocation that he was on track to go to Notre Dame, to become a lawyer, to come to college in America, and then suddenly he's kind of struggling to get through high school in Miami Beach, struggling to learn English, struggling to reinvent himself, becoming a musician, catching the attention of savior cougat, the rumba band leader, and the next thing you know he's playing at the waldorf astoria in new york.
So i think his head must have been spinning by all the various changes in his life that came, you know, when he was still really in his late teens and he was always insistent, when people called him an immigrant, that he wasn't an immigrant, he was a refugee.
Why was that distinction so important to him?
Well, I think it has to do with the fact that you didn't leave your country by choice, that your country was taken away from you and you had to come here and make your life over.
It's interesting in the context of today's immigration debate because, of course Desi, as I mentioned, was politically conservative, but he also was a really shining example of what happens in America today uh, when diversity is seen as a strength.
And you know, ultimately his success in getting i love lucy on the air and becoming the all-american husband and father that he became in the 1950s was proof that the country would accept this guy, who had a funny accent and came from another place and had a kind of exotic background, that he'd be seen as a very capable all-american guy.
What has the show I Love Lucy meant to you over the years?
And the other part of the question is, why did you want to write a book about Desi Arnaz?
To be honest with you, when I saw you wrote a book about Desi Arnaz.
I love having you on as a guest, but I thought, like I don't know, I'm that interested in Desi Arnaz.
And then I looked at your book and I thought, wow, this is really interesting.
So why did you want to write about him?
And what was the significance of I Love Lucy for you?
Well, like so many people of my generation, I wasn't old enough to see I Love Lucy in original run, but I watched it in reruns as a child, over and over.
I'm sure I could recite many episodes from heart.
It seemed like a moment worth reexamining.
And an old friend of mine from college, the late playwright and actor Doug McGrath, told me that he thought everyone understood Lucy's contributions but that Desi was kind of an undersung hero.
And the more I looked at it, the more I became convinced that he had a really compelling story that deserved telling.
Yeah, and I just want to say, by not focusing on Lucille Ball is not to take away credit from her, but just to move the camera.
Yeah.
Desi Arnaz was the first person to say that the entire thing depended on the brilliance of Lucille Ball.
There's one moment where she trips over a cable on the set one day and he turns to her and say amigos, if anything happens to her, we're all in the shrimp business.
So he knew exactly.
But she was careful always to give him credit as the brains behind the operation, the driving force behind the show, getting it on the air and keeping it on the air.
And she, however bitter she might have felt about him, However sad she felt about the end of their marriage, she always always, to the end of her life, gave him credit as the spark behind the show.
Todd Purdom, it's been a pleasure to have you back on the show.
Thank you, Terry.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Todd Purdom is the author of the new book Desi Arnaz, The Man Who Invented Television.
Coming up, David Bianculli reviews the new documentary, One to One, John and Yoko.
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In 1971, the year after the Beatles broke up, John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved from London to New York.
They spent the next 18 months living in a small Greenwich Village apartment before moving uptown to the Dakota, a more lavish and secluded building.
During that time they held a benefit concert for the children of Willowbrook, a state-run Staten Island facility housing disabled children in horrifying conditions.
It was the only full-length concert Lennon gave after The Beatles, and a new film by Kevin MacDonald documents both the concert and that period in Lennon's life.
It's called One to One, John and Yoko, and it's now streaming on demand.
Our TV critic David Bianculli has this review.
Kevin MacDonald and editor and co-director Sam Rice Edwards framed their movie about John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the early 70s by looking through the lens of television.
In this case, it's a perfect framing device.
As Lennon arrived in this country, being more politically outspoken than he was as a Beatle, he and his wife, Yoko Ono, eagerly went on TV talk shows to rally support for their causes, showing up everywhere, from Dick Cavett to a week co-hosting the Mike Douglas show.
And even more eagerly, John Lennon devoured television.
In their small Greenwich Village apartment, which is recreated for the documentary, John and Yoko installed a TV at the foot of their bed so they could lounge around watching.
And both the variety and sheer volume of what was available delighted them.
We're very comfortable here, especially like having TV, you know, 24 hours a day or something.
Suits me fine.
Suits me fine.
What are your favorite programs?
I just like TV, you know.
To me it replaced the fireplace when I was a child.
And if you want to know what 20 million Americans are talking about on Saturday night, it's what they saw on Friday night on TV.
It's a window on the world.
Whatever it is, that's that image of ourselves that we're portraying.
They consumed it all, from the Waltons to Watergate coverage and lots and lots of news about Richard Nixon and Vietnam and George Wallace and Attica.
They also watched American football games and beauty pageants.
And in one of Lennon's first local radio appearances after arriving he responded to a phone-in caller by demonstrating his familiarity with televised beauty pageants.
Yes?
I'd like to ask John a question.
Sure.
John?
Yeah?
I can't believe I'm speaking to a myth.
A myth?
Yeah.
Myth world or myth universe?
For Lennon, it was a time of reinvention, both musically and in terms of his political involvement.
He fell in with activists like Jerry Rubin and appeared and performed at a rally protesting the 10-year sentence of another activist, John Sinclair, for a minor drug possession.
But after agreeing to headline a series of national protest tour dates leading up to the 1972 national political conventions, Lenin backed off because he sensed the leaders of that movement were advocating violence.
Even so, Lennon's activities got him singled out by the Nixon administration, which threatened to deport him and installed listening devices on his phone.
And just as President Nixon ended up secretly taping his own White House conversations, John Lennon ended up taping his own phone calls too.
From heated talks with his then-manager to casual chats with friends, they provide some of the best moments in this documentary –.
In this call, which is loaded with suspicious static, a reporter asks about the wiretap rumors.
People say their phones are burnt.
First of all, I thought it was paranoia.
I've been reading all these, you know, conspiracy theories.
You can hear things going on on the phone every time you pick it up.
People clicking in and out.
There's a lot of repairs going on downstairs to the phones every few days down in the basement.
I started taking my own phone calls too.
So, you know, I don't know why.
I thought well, at least I'll have a copy of whatever they're going to try and say.
Eventually, John and Yoko find yet another cause by watching TV.
After seeing a news report by ABC correspondent Geraldo Rivera exposing the terrible treatment of young disabled patients at Willowbrook State Development Center, John and Yoko decide to hold a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, just as fellow Beatle George Harrison had done the year before with his concert for Bangladesh.
They called theirs the one-to-one concert, and this film plays many songs from that show full length.
Imagine Instant Karma and Mother, a searingly emotional song about John feeling abandoned by his parents, a father who left and a mother who died.
And even a Beatles song to which Lennon adds an overt message of opposition to the Vietnam War, to the audience's obvious delight.
Sean Ono.
Lennon is one of this documentary's executive producers, which may explain why some of the more unflattering details from the period are omitted or downplayed.
But Yoko gets her due here, as she should, as an artist in her own right and as the victim of some awful treatment by Beatles fans and the press.
And by using TV to tell their story One to One, John and Yoko retells the story of that time as well.
Incendiary times.
Inspirational artists.
Amazing music.
David Bianculli is a professor of television studies at Rowan University.
He reviewed One to One, John and Yoko, which is now streaming on demand.
Tomorrow on Fresh Air, our guest will be Mark Hamill.
He played one of the most iconic heroes in movie history, Luke Skywalker, in Star Wars, but he's also played one of the most notorious comic book villains, doing the voice of the Joker in Batman, the Animated Series.
He's in the new movie The Life of Chuck, which is an adaptation of a Stephen King story.
I hope you'll join us.
Our co-host is Tanya Mosley.
I'm Terry Gross.
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