'A Book (Expanded Edition) by Desi Arnaz
Desi Arnaz came to Miami as a refugee from the Cuban revolution. Not the one that brought Castro to power, but an earlier revolt, in 1933. His father, mayor of the nation’s second city, Santiago de Cuba, established a floor tile company. Young Desi learned to work hard, and he achieved his Cuban-American dream as the costar of the most beloved television show from the medium’s early years, “I Love Lucy.”
A Book, Arnaz’s 1976 autobiography, has been reissued in an “expanded edition” by inclusion of notes left behind before his death in 1986, as explained by daughter Lucie Arnaz in the afterword. His additional jottings cast light on his thinking, including spot-on remarks about the failure of most movies to become great because they are produced by factories run by committees. “I Love Lucy” was a cottage industry, an artisanal family business that succeeded beyond expectations.
In “I Love Lucy,” Arnaz played Ricky Ricardo, a version of himself as a struggling Latin band leader. A Book reminds us that he was actually a successful Latin band leader through the ‘40s and into the ‘50s. Although typecast with congas, guitar and voice were his first instruments. His “Latin looks” landed him a role on Broadway in Rodgers and Hart’s Too Many Girls (1939), which led to a contract with RKO. Arnaz is candid about his early film career. Those movies were mostly “lemons,” the directors incompetent bullies, and he learned what not to do should he ever have the chance to direct.
And the love of his life, his partner in stardom, Lucille Ball? They met at RKO where she was a versatile B actress. “Would you like me to teach you how to rumba?” he asked her. It was the beginning of a tempestuous relationship with no less than two divorces (the first, in 1944, was quickly annulled) and a professional commitment that continued past the second, enduring divorce in 1959.
Arnaz and Ball were schooled with experience by the time they launched “I Love Lucy” in 1951. She had starred in a radio comedy called “My Favorite Husband” and he was music director for Bob Hope’s radio show. They coupled the concision and timing they learned on the air with the novel idea of filming a television show with multiple 35mm cameras before a live audience. Arnaz gives much credit to Karl Freund, the Weimar-era German cinematographer who came to Hollywood in 1929.
Arnaz’s ethnicity was a problem for network executives wary of an interracial couple in prime time. But of course, Arnaz and Ball were famously married in real life, and like millions of immigrants in American history, he didn’t allow obstacles to stop him.
The fraying marriage? Arnaz admits to promiscuity and drug use, especially speed, a common drug among the era’s musicians faced with long road trips in the age before the Interstate. “I lived dangerously, but somehow managed to survive,” he wrote in one of the previously unpublished note unearthed for the expanded edition.
A Book: The Outspoken Memoirs of the Man who “Loved Lucy”—and Revolutionized Television is published by Running Press.
