What Desi Arnaz Could Teach Hollywood Today

Opinion|What Desi Arnaz Could Teach Hollywood Today

Seventy-five years ago, a fading redheaded movie star and her itinerant bandleader husband were searching desperately for a way to save their careers — and their marriage. She was starring in a network radio show in Hollywood and he was a musician on the road all the time, so they rarely saw each other. In their 10 years together, she’d already filed for divorce once, and was nearing her wits’ end.

The movie star was Lucille Ball and the bandleader, of course, was Desi Arnaz. In 1950, a glimmer of hope appeared for the couple: CBS intended to transfer Ball’s radio show, “My Favorite Husband,” to the untested new medium of television. But there was a problem: Ball wanted to make the move only if Arnaz — who’d helped start the conga dance craze in nightclubs in the 1930s and fueled America’s demand for Latin music after World War II — could play that husband on TV. The network and prospective sponsors believed the public would never accept a thick-accented Latino as the spouse of an all-American girl. “I was always the guy that didn’t fit,” Arnaz would later tell Ed Sullivan.

Arnaz, a Cuban immigrant and self-taught showman, had an idea: The couple would undertake an old-fashioned vaudeville tour of major cities around the country. He and Ball would demonstrate the real-life chemistry that he knew would click with Americans if they only had a chance to see the act.

Racism was a fact of daily life even in Arnaz’s adopted hometown, Los Angeles, where some restaurants still refused service to Latinos. The term D.E.I. did not yet exist, but Arnaz’s gambit amounted to a bold push for diversity, equity and inclusion in the white-bread monoculture of a dawning mass medium that was sponsor-driven and cautious to a fault.

Miracle of miracles, it worked. Critics and audiences from coast to coast raved at the couple’s onstage antics, as Lucy clowned with a battered cello while Desi sang and drummed his heart out. A.H. Weiler of The Times pronounced the pair “a couple who bid fair to become the busiest husband-and- wife team extant.” Soon enough, they were.

Based on the success of Ball and Arnaz’s tour, CBS executives agreed to film a test episode. The network had trouble finding a sponsor until a leading ad man, Milton Biow (as it happens, the grandfather of the actor Matthew Broderick) persuaded his client Philip Morris cigarettes to take a chance on the new show. “I Love Lucy” was born, the rest is history, and it was Desi Arnaz who made much of that history possible.