TV legend Lucille Ball’s outrageous life
Who really loved Lucy?
A biopic uncovers the lovable redhead’s risky romance with a gangster and the ugly truth about her TV love affair
Nicole Kidman may be playing one of television’s most beloved comedians, but she’s warned moviegoers not to expect loads of laughs in the film she’s making about Lucille Ball.
Nicole plays the ditzy comedy queen in Being the Ricardos, which centres around a week in the life of Lucille and her husband Desi Arnaz, who played a couple called Lucy and Ricky Ricardo in the hit TV series
I Love Lucy.
The movie tackles some serious themes, explains the
Australian Oscar winner.
“It’s about Lucy and Desi, and their relationship and their marriage. It’s very deep, actually.”
Being The Ricardos is written and directed by Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing fame, and Nicole, 54, says she’s fascinated by the way he’s tackled the story of the hugely successful star, who was one of the most powerful women in television in the 1950s and ’60s. “I’m very excited for people to see what Aaron found out about her, and the way he’s interpreted Desi and Lucy. I didn’t know any of this.”
By this, she means the couple’s extremely tumultuous relationship. The pair divorced in 1960 after 20 years of marriage that was fraught with furious rows and infidelities on both sides. Not much has been given away about the plot of the movie, other than it’s a behind-thescenes look at the making of an episode of I Love
Lucy, involving a crisis that threatens their marriage and careers.
It’s not known whether the film will draw on shocking material included in a recently released book, Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz: They Weren’t Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, by Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince.
Showbiz biographer Darwin, whose previous subjects include Elizabeth
Taylor, Frank Sinatra, James Dean and Judy Garland, first met the couple in the ’50s, when they attended an event at his university. He says they weren’t anything like their TV alter egos – instead of being America’s sweethearts, they were snide and rude, and bickered constantly. Lucille called Cuban Desi a racial slur and accused him of having sex with two prostitutes the night before.
“He didn’t deny that, but claimed, ‘It doesn’t mean a thing, my fooling around with some hookers,’” recalls Darwin, 83.
He and co-writer and publisher Danforth have been compiling information on the couple for many years, and some of it may surprise fans of the lovable redhead and her suave former husband.
“Lucille was a gangster’s moll and a nude model, who used the casting couch to claw her way to Hollywood stardom,” claims Darwin. “And her seemingly perfect marriage to Desi was a sham, filled with affairs, animosity and brutal arguments. The world thought Lucille Ball was a zany, loving and supportive housewife, but nothing could be further from the truth.”
Lucille, who was born in 1911, longed to perform from an early age and attended drama school in New York as a teenager, but was overshadowed by classmate Bette Davis.
By 14, she was the girlfriend of 23-year-old gangster Johnny Da Vita, who transported illegal liquor from Canada to New York. He was violent towards her and she developed a foul mouth to fit in with Johnny and his hoodlum friends.
After splitting up with Johnny, she scrounged to survive, often eating food left on plates by diners in restaurants. In desperation, she took up nude modelling and hustled rich older men for money. She dated Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, who would go on to produce the James Bond films, and his cousin,
Pat DiCicco, an associate of high-ranking mafia bosses.
Pat was married for a short time to heiress Gloria
Vanderbilt, who left him after he beat her.
Lucille’s mob connections could have cost her her life – on one occasion, she was in the bath when her apartment was fired on and the tub was riddled with bullet holes. Miraculously, she escaped injury.
Another time she fled from a nightclub after becoming concerned about the behaviour of a man she knew. Later that night, he gunned down one of the patrons.
After being fired from the Ziegfeld Follies for not being busty or a good enough dancer, she moved to Hollywood in 1933 to try to become a film star. She landed bit parts for the next decade, playing nurses, secretaries and telephone operators, but her career went nowhere until she followed the advice of Lela Rogers, mother of her distant cousin Ginger Rogers. “If you want to be a star,” Lela told Lucille, “get auditioned on the casting couch. That’s the advice I gave my daughter.”
Lucille gave in to the advances of lecherous Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn, and started getting slightly bigger roles. “I’ve resisted so far, but other gals like Joan Crawford did all right,” she told a friend.
Concerned that she looked too much like pin-up Betty Grable, the studio insisted she dye her naturally blonde hair red, creating what would later become her signature look. Being compared to the phenomenally popular Betty also made Lucille up her game. “It was because of Grable that Lucille quit yawning her way through a picture and did some real acting,” said one of her friends at the time.
Lucille met band leader Desi, six years her junior, on a film set in 1940. Entranced by his “broad shoulders and narrow hips”, Lucille was instantly smitten, and they married just a few months later. The relationship was volatile from the start, says Darwin. “They were always fighting, breaking up and passionately making up.” Lucille filed for divorce in 1944 but they reconciled.
When her movie career failed to take off, Lucille signed up for a radio show to earn some cash. Called
My Favourite Husband, it featured Lucille as a wacky wife who got up to madcap antics and proved extremely popular. She was asked to develop it for TV and insisted on real-life husband Desi being cast as her spouse in an attempt to spend more time together and save their troubled marriage. They founded Desilu Productions to make the show, which they called I Love Lucy, and the first episode screened in 1951.
“It became the most successful sitcom in television history,” says Darwin. “Desi said gold was ‘arriving in wheelbarrows’. They launched their own studio, which became the world’s biggest TV producer.”
I Love Lucy was groundbreaking – Lucille and Desi were the first interracial couple to appear on TV and the humour of the show avoided clichéd ethnic jokes. The success of the show bound them together but failed to improve their marriage, which was a disaster, largely thanks to Desi’s inability to be faithful. He had affairs with Hollywood stars including Lana Turner and Lucille’s great rival Betty Grable, and regularly used the services of prostitutes.
Thanks to her husband’s cheating, Lucille decided to look for attention elsewhere, and had dalliances with screen stars William Holden, Orson Welles and Robert Mitchum. She also had a longrunning on/off relationship with Henry Fonda, who once described her as “the love of his life”.
Finally the couple called it quits in 1960, with Lucille marrying comedian Gary Morton a year later. Darwin’s book only covers the period up until the end of Lucille and Desi’s marriage – a second volume continuing her story is due out later this year – but he explains that after she and Desi parted company, Lucille’s career continued to skyrocket.
She starred in two further sitcoms, in which she essentially played the same
‘Lucille was fabulously wealthy, yet she grew bitter and made many enemies’
zany character called Lucy
– I Love Lucy and Here’s Lucy, which also featured her children, Lucie Arnaz and
Desi Arnaz Junior. She bought out Desi’s share of Desilu and made huge amounts of money from other shows the studio produced, like Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. She sold the company for $17 million in 1967.
“After divorcing Desi, Lucille was the most successful woman in Hollywood, fabulously wealthy, yet she grew bitter,” tells Darwin. “She became dictatorial and made many enemies.”
Another attempt in 1986 to revive the Lucy character in a show called Life With Lucy failed dismally. Lucille died three years later, aged 77, from an aortic aneurysm.
“She was a multimillionaire, but her final years were sad ones,” says Darwin.
Desi, meanwhile, had died three years earlier, aged 69, from lung cancer. Ironically, after their divorce, they got on better than ever and were close friends in the last decade of his life. A family video screened on TV showed them playing with their grandson Simon shortly before Desi died. In his last years, Desi, who remarried, wrote that he still loved Lucille.
“I Love Lucy was never just a title,” he said.