On my first day in the television comedy business, I learned two important lessons. The first was that there really was a rule about words with the hard “k” sound. In Neil Simon’s brilliant play about two aging comedy stars, The Sunshine Boys, they both insist that “k” words are funny. And it turned out my bosses and coworkers on the writing staff of the long-running hit sitcom, Cheers, agreed. Always pick the “k” word, I was told.
The second thing I learned was that I owed my paycheck—and my subsequent career—to the man who played Ricky Ricardo on a previous long-running hit sitcom, I Love Lucy. Desi Arnaz, the Cuban-born bandleader, singer, husband to Lucille Ball, was also (I learned that day) the entrepreneurial inventor of the multibillion-dollar business of American sitcoms. It was Desi who figured out that old episodes had big rerun value—he discovered residuals, in other words—and it was Desi who figured if you put three cameras on dollies you could film an episode in one night in front of a live audience, like a short stage play. Desi took a business that was slow and expensive and made it fast and cheap, and the result was 189 episodes of I Love Lucy and subsequent downstream variations like The Lucy Show and Here’s Lucy, but also a rock-solid business model that allowed studios to invest in young and clueless comedy writers (ahem) and wait for them to figure it out. Desi Arnaz, in other words, who died in 1986, helped me buy my first house in 1997.
There’s a lot more to the story, of course, and in his absorbing and well-paced biography of Desi Arnaz, Todd Purdum manages to keep it detailed but moving along. He describes the way Arnaz outwitted CBS network executives when it came to things like fees and creative control. There’s a riveting section where he explains how Arnaz maneuvered his way to the purchase of the old RKO studio lot on Gower Street in Hollywood, a move that allowed Desilu Studios, the enterprise he shared with his then-wife, Lucille Ball, to expand their creative output. Under Desi’s stewardship, Desilu produced Star Trek, Mannix, Mission: Impossible, The Untouchables, and every one of Lucy’s sitcoms.
Desilu was eventually purchased by Paramount Studios, which owned the production lot next door, and the two physical studios were combined. When I walked onto the Paramount lot in January 1990 for my first day as a staff writer on Cheers, I was actually walking onto the old Desilu lot. My office was in the Lucille Ball building, next to the flight of stairs where, I was told, Lucy shouted down to Desi that she wanted a divorce. George Wendt, who sadly died not long ago, had a dressing room lined with cedar panels. Before he took on the role of Norm in Cheers, his dressing room had been Lucy’s cedar closet. The partnership between Lucy and Desi rippled through all of my television career—not just my paycheck, but my work environment as well.
Paramount also purchased the creative properties of Desilu, which is why the 1987 blockbuster feature film, The Untouchables, was a Paramount production, as well as the multizillion-dollar properties Mission: Impossible and Star Trek. There are 8 Mission: Impossible movies, 6 Star Trek original movies, 4 Star Trek: The Next Generation movies, 3 Star Trek reboots, and about 12 Star Trek television properties. (I mean, I think. I gave up counting after a while…) So let’s just agree that we’re talking about tens, maybe hundreds, of billions of dollars here, all because a Cuban immigrant who fled persecution came to America with ambition, talent, and a comically thick accent, and went very, very big. It’s not just me who owes Desi Arnaz his house and his career. Nearly everyone in Hollywood should light a candle to St. Desi.
Arnaz was such a risk-taking inventive genius you almost forget that he was a terrible actor. His finger-in-a-light-socket reactions and Looney Tunes–style double-takes were easy to overlook next to the comic mastery of Lucille Ball. Still, it’s hard to ignore that Cuban-born bandleader Desi Arnaz wasn’t quite believable in his onscreen portrayal of Cuban-born bandleader Ricky Ricardo. But by the time Desi moved the I Love Lucy operation to the West Coast (another negotiating triumph that Purdum unfolds brilliantly) the movie business was barely 30 years old, and the television business was still in its infancy. Hollywood was a wide-open, Dodge City kind of place, and no one really cared whether Desi had the acting chops or not. He had big ideas and a lot of nerve, and that’s what mattered. It still is, though I can’t think of one true heir to Desi’s inventive spirit who is working in show business today.
Perhaps the strongest part of Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television is the way Purdum threads the story of Arnaz’s early life, especially his escape from Cuba, throughout the account of his later life and success. Purdum reminds us that Arnaz and his family barely made it out with their lives. Revolutionary mobs were systematically hunting down and executing their enemies, so when a young Desi joins his penniless father in Miami, the stage is set for his life of entrepreneurial risk and the courage to trust his intuition. When the assembled network and advertising executives try to insist, a few decades later, that the American television audience will never accept a marriage between a Cuban crooner and a white American girl, Desi refuses to back down. Where did he get that courage? Well, when everything you’ve known has gone up in smoke and you’ve seen friends and neighbors shot on the street, you’re hard to intimidate. A chaotic, violent social upheaval, it turns out, is terrific preparation for a life in show business.
Purdum does a masterful job keeping the narrative sprightly and human. He tells the fearless business story but he also captures the human frailty of Desi Arnaz. He drank too much, gambled away fortunes, and humiliated his wife with his serial (and blatant) adultery.
Here’s an utterly unsubstantiated story about Desi’s philandering, which also testifies to his total lack of acting skills: Cheers was shot on Paramount Stage 25, which was the same soundstage used by I Love Lucy. It’s a particularly tall structure, built during the silent era. The top half of the interior building was lined with catwalks and lighting rigs—what’s referred to as pipe and chain—from which you could have a bird’s eye view of everything below. And because none of the dressing rooms or production offices had ceilings, a hapless gaffer walking along the pipes and chains could look down into any dressing room. Including Desi’s.
One afternoon, as Desi was, um, entertaining a young woman in his dressing room, he looked up and locked eyes with the gaffer. His eyes widened in Ricky Ricardo-panic, and he pulled the young lady from his lap and shouted at her in (totally unconvincing) surprise, Hey! What are you doing?
Again: that entire story could be hashtag fake news, but it feels true because it captures the splendid excesses of Desi Arnaz—his risk-taking, his appetites, his inability to improvise—all set in a dressing room of a hit television show that he co-owned and produced, on a studio lot that he also co-owned, in a business that he basically invented. Desi Arnaz was the physical embodiment of Hollywood itself. His virtues were (and are) its virtues. His vices were (and are) its vices.
Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television
by Todd S. Purdum
Simon & Schuster, 368 pp., $29.99
Rob Long is an author, screenwriter, and executive producer.
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