True Hollywood Story

Did Desi Really Love Lucy? The Scandal That Rocked TV’s First Family

“What’s she upset about?” Arnaz said of wife and costar Lucille Ball. “I don’t take out other broads. I just take out hookers.” A new novel, The Queen of Tuesday, digs into a legendary marriage.
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Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in 1955. From Archive Photos/Getty Images.

Desi Arnaz, one feels compelled to say, had some explaining to do.

Arnaz, the big-boned spouse on America’s favorite TV show, had been caught out, in real life, with a prostitute. At the very top of I Love Lucy’s success. And it seemed that for some time, he’d “sprinkled his affections all over Los Angeles,” as a reporter for Confidential put it. Now the whole country would know.

The perfection that Lucille Ball and her husband broadcast to American homes veneered a much more complicated, intriguing truth. Desi’s infidelities had long been a glitch in their relationship—and as a result the most successful program in the history of American TV almost didn’t get on its feet.

I dove deep into Lucille and Desi’s marriage while researching my new novel, The Queen of Tuesday. The book is a kind of three-fer. It’s the story of Lucille Ball’s rise, the story of my grandfather, and the story of their fictional romance. Family lore has it that both were once at a party thrown by Donald Trump’s father, not long after which my grandparents’ marriage split up. I knew inventing the affair would be risky. But the more l learned about Lucille, the more I wanted to invent a bit of payback for her.

In 1950, Lucille was a former B-movie star. Having been dropped by RKO and MGM, she’d turned to radio. When CBS came to her with a TV deal, she knew the offer was a lucky break. Still, she demanded that the network cast Desi as her husband. She feared that if she wasn’t around him all the time, he’d cheat.

A pregnant Ball stands with Arnaz outside their home, 1953. From CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images.

The couple had split up once already. In the mid ’40s, half a decade before Lucy, Lucille initiated a divorce “to teach Desi a lesson.” But the divorce had never taken effect. Lucille and Desi’s separation hadn’t made it a single night. A reporter wrote that she’d “walked out of court into Arnaz’s arms.”

All the same, she never trusted him. If a TV offer meant she couldn’t stay close enough to keep watch on Desi, Lucille wouldn’t accept. According to her biographer Kathleen Brady, executives at CBS told her that the average viewer wouldn’t accept a Cuban husband for a “red-blooded American girl.” (What color did they think Cuban blood was?) But Ball wouldn’t be swayed. She and Desi set out to prove the comic appeal of their marriage, touring vaudeville theaters across the country. Audiences loved it—and CBS relented. At least in this instance, the American people weren’t as racist as network execs had believed. The show aired, and was more successful than anyone had understood television could be.

That’s verifiable. Within six months of its debut, more than half of the country would tune in to I Love Lucy every week. Compare that to today’s fragmented entertainment landscape. CBS’s behemoth, NCIS, reaches more than 8 million

The Lucy craze led people to feel a personal share in the family. During the second season, Lucille dealt with her real-life pregnancy by incorporating the birth into the series’ storyline. CBS worried this might be in bad taste. An ad agency advised them not to show a swollen belly on air, so even here Lucille blazed new ground.

“Lucy Goes to the Hospital”—in which her character had a baby boy, timed to coincide with Ball’s real-life delivery—was watched by more than 70% of all U.S. television sets, a record. America began expressing its love by acquiring I Love Lucy pajamas, I Love Lucy bedroom sets, I Love Lucy comic books, and I Love Lucy dolls.

This was the stratosphere in which Lucille and Desi were flying when news of Desi’s liaisons with prostitutes threatened to crash the whole enterprise.

Desi would have to take it on his intensely handsome chin.

In 1955, Confidential was to tabloid journalism what I Love Lucy was to sitcoms. It was so successful as to be a proof of concept—the kind of magazine that made career-ruining scandals out of outing actors and reporting on interracial romances. Its tagline “Tells the facts and names the names” routinely sent spasms of terror through Hollywood.

The cover of the January 1955 issue featured a shot of Lucille hugging Desi above the words: “Does Desi Really Love Lucy?”

Claiming the story would jolt fans “right out of their TV hammocks,” the reporter described the “off-pasture passions” of “duck-out daddy” Arnaz: “Desi has, in fact, proved himself an artist at philandering.” The performer’s busy schedule, the story went on to say, meant “he’s had to sandwich his sin.”

The article described a business meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel where a friend of Desi’s “got on the phone, calling one of Hollywood’s best door-to-door dame services.” The friend, according to the report, “ordered two cuties, medium rare.” In case anyone missed the innuendo, the article specified that these were “cuddle-for-cash babes.” A woman named Mindy evidently had sex with Desi, and then with his friend, leaving at 3:45 a.m. “considerably richer.”

The magazine detailed other trysts, and engaged in what passed in 1955 for sociological analysis: “He comes from a land, Cuba, where the men are torrid and the ladies, allegedly, are glad of it.”

Desi seemed unabashed. “What’s she upset about? I don’t take out other broads,” he reportedly told a friend. “I just take out hookers.”

Lucille hid behind a brave façade. She tried to face down the article with humor, saying on a crowded set: “Christ, I can’t go out and buy that [magazine] myself—somebody go out and get one for me!” Her longtime publicist, Charles Pomerantz, would later tell People: “It was during a rehearsal day, and she went into her dressing room. Everybody was frozen on the set. She finally came out, tossed the magazine to Desi and said, ‘Oh, hell, I could tell them worse than that.’”

But it was hard for her; humiliating. That night, according to Brady, she and Desi were seated at a celebrity event next to the French opera singer Lily Pons and the famous actor and comedian Danny Kaye; Kaye made a point of twisting the blade: “Desi, you made Confidential!” When Pons asked what Confidential was, Kaye said: “It’s a magazine about fucking.”

So now the whole country knew. But no magazine had enough juice to sour tens of millions of fans. The show survived, and thrived—enough for Desi to buy RKO, the studio that had once fired both Arnaz and Ball. But the effect on their relationship was real. The article is said to have drained the joy from their marriage, and they divorced, for good, in 1960.

It’s impossible not to fall in love with Lucille Ball, at least a little, when you write about her. Some icons are so universal they slip from view; how does a storyteller breathe a little new air into a story like hers? Does anyone remember that she battled CBS to broadcast an interracial marriage? That she invented reruns so she could have kids and keep her job? Lucille Ball owned the most studio space—she was “the biggest single filler of television time,” according to Life.

I wrote The Queen of Tuesday because I wanted to remind people of her place in history. And I gave her a romance of her own. She was a strong woman, obviously brilliant, and her husband humiliated her. With this book, I tried to provide her with the closest thing to revenge to be found between hard covers. She earned it.

Darin Strauss is the author, most recently, of the National Book Critics Circle winner “Half a Life.” His book, “The Queen of Tuesday,” comes out on Aug. 18 from Random House.

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