Todd Purdom
Appearances
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
Well, because television in those days was a bland, sponsor-driven mass medium that to some degree, the way it does now, except it depended on the most innocuous fare to offend the fewest number of people. And if you had a pregnant woman on the air, especially a really pregnant actress, it would betray the way that you get pregnant, which is by having sex.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
And sex did not really appear on television in those days. So Lucy and Desi fought hard with CBS to do this. And they thought Desi particularly thought there could be a whole series. And the head writer and producer, Jess Oppenheimer, thought there could be a series of very tasteful, very charming episodes that would show what happens when people have a baby.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
And finally, ultimately, Desi only found out a couple years later. He'd gone over the heads of the network executives to the chairman of Philip Morris and written him a letter saying, we've given you the number one show on television.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
If you don't want us to be responsible for writing it anymore, then you'll have to figure out how to get the number one show on television, and we can't be responsible anymore. And he later learned that the chairman of the company had sent a memo to his staff, basically saying in the very pungent terms that I'm not going to say on the radio, Don't mess around with a Cuban.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
So they were allowed to do the episodes. And they were so concerned about doing it in good taste that they hired a tripartite panel of a priest, a rabbi, and a Protestant minister to vet the scripts and be on the set when they were filming to make sure that everything was done in good taste.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
Well, in future years, Desi recalled in a years later interview with David Letterman how you couldn't say the word pregnant on television.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
No. So he said in his wonderful accent, had to say spectin. And the audience in David Letterman's show laughed out loud, of course. And Desi took a beat in a classic deadpan, you know, and then said, spectin was better anyway. And Letterman's like, it still is because you can't get a laugh with the word pregnant. Whereas, you know, spectin is pretty funny anyway.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
She probably would have been approaching like five months or something. And one of the things apparently about her pregnancies, she showed early and large in her pregnancy. She she she tended to balloon up, which is why they they couldn't hide the pregnancy. They would have had to stop producing the show if they couldn't have pregnancy be part of the plot.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
And so, of course, the episode then continues from that wonderful scene you just played. She finally goes down to the nightclub and devises a ruse to tell him there in public. And it's a charming scene when he realizes that he's going to be the father.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
The show and they were meta before meta was meta, you know, and the synergy of their real life relationship, the relationship on the show, it all played into each other. And the episode in which the baby was born on television had been filmed weeks before the baby was born in real life.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
And then because Lucy had had a C-section with her first child in those days, if you'd ever had a cesarean section, you had cesarean section for all subsequent children. So her surgeon happened to do his operations on a Monday. So she pre-scheduled the birth of the real life Desi Jr. for Monday morning. So Desi Jr.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
was born on Monday morning in real life at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. And that night on the air, millions of Americans saw little Ricky born on the air. But they weren't actually happening in real time.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
Yes. Well, Jim Bacon, the Associated Press reporter, was sitting with Jesse outside the delivery room. And within seconds of the word that the baby, the real life baby had been born, the news was flashing all over the world and was worldwide headlines in Japan and Europe and every place in the world.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
Absolutely. And I think it's also another proof, Terry, that the public is so often ahead of the leadership in these kinds of questions. People prove totally capable of accepting the fact that these people had a baby without being horrified.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
I think it was. From the moment they met each other, it was a classic case of love at first sight or, you know, very powerful attraction. They got married within six months of meeting each other. They were each pretty seriously involved with other people when they met and they promptly dumped those other people and saw only each other.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
The problem was from the very beginning that Desi had an idea that he could stray sexually and it shouldn't matter to his wife because his wife was his wife and that's all that mattered.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
Yes, his uncle took him to the fanciest bordello in Santiago de Cuba, his hometown, and introduced him to sex in a bordello. And when he came to New York as a young performer, he frequented Polly Adler's bordello, which was the most elegant whorehouse in New York, basically, that had the cream of...
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
entertainment and society clientele and desi i think he would clearly be what we now would think of as a sex addict he didn't have affairs with people as his daughter once said to me with people who had last names he just had endless dalliances with prostitutes sometimes more than one one at a time and when this was semi-private it bothered lucy but she could tolerate it
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
When it became increasingly public and he ultimately got arrested weaving down the street in Hollywood in a neighborhood of notorious bordellos, it became humiliating for Lucy and she really just couldn't take it anymore. And that's ultimately what that and his drinking is what led to their divorce in 1960.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
Thank you, Terry. It's a pleasure to be here.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
Well, no, Terry, they weren't. First of all, they were very concerned that he was different, that he had a thick accent. And they just did not believe that widespread American audiences would believe him as the husband of an all-American girl like Lucille Ball. Of course, the irony is they had been an all-American couple for 10 years already in real life.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
He said at one point his ambition was to be the Cuban Mickey Rooney. And he really was a little bit like Mickey Rooney. He could do comedy. He could do music. He could play the drum. He could sing. And he struggled to find a workable niche in Hollywood. He was always a little bit off. He never quite fit into Hollywood's stereotype of what a Latin performer should be.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
Yes, and he was apparently in person a very, very compelling entertainer, a wonderful showman who could hold the audience in the palm of his hand. He wasn't a classically great musician. He was self-taught. He never learned how to read music. He wasn't a spectacular drummer. His Latin music, his Cuban music was, by the lights of authentic Cuban music fans, not the most pure version.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
It was a kind of popularized American version that brought those Cuban musical forms to American mass audiences. But apparently the whole package was pretty overwhelming when you saw him in the flesh.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
Yes, he was an adequate singer, but he was not an incredible vocalist. There's no doubt about that.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
No, she'd been working steadily in movies since 1933. This is 1950, 51, when they're trying to get the show on the air. She was approaching the age of 40, which then, as now, was a very dangerous age for a female actress in Hollywood.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
She had worked steadily, but she'd never really broken through as a major A-list star, and she was beginning to be known as the Queen of the Bees, the second-tier movies that rounded out double features.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
Yes, what happened was she was in the last gasp of really big network radio. It was a sitcom about a zany wife and her fifth vice president of a bank husband called My Favorite Husband. And CBS realized that television was catching on and the Lucy show had been successful. So they wanted to transfer to TV. And the only way she was willing to do it is if Desi played her husband.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
But he himself realized he could not plausibly be the fifth vice president of a bank. Richard Denning, who was the actor who played her husband on the air, was a blonde, waspy, jut-jawed kind of actor. So they were struggling to have a different concept and one that CBS, which was running My Favorite Husband, would accept. Finally, Desi said, I have an idea. We'll go on a vaudeville tour.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
We'll take my band on a tour of movie houses around the country in big cities. And you can perform comedy and we'll perform comedy and music together and prove to the suits at the network that the public will accept us as a team. And in the summer of 1950, that's what they did. And it was a spectacular success all over the country. And finally, CBS and the sponsor, Philip Morris, agreed.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
No, they were these charming little animated stick figures drawn by the Hanna-Barbera animation team, the people who created Tom and Jerry, the cat and mouse. And Lucy and Desi were frolicking on top of a package of cigarettes and dancing around as the show began. And the velvety-looking heart logo only came later in reruns.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
Well, in 1950-51, television was almost completely a live medium, and it was centered almost completely in New York because it was dominated by the advertising agencies who were there. The challenge for broadcasting across the whole country was it wasn't yet possible to beam a television signal all the way from New York to California.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
So if a show was produced in New York, it was seen live in the eastern two-thirds or so of the country to around maybe St. Louis, Kansas City, something like that. And then in order to broadcast it in the West Coast, they had to film using 16 millimeter film off a television monitor. And they produced a very poor duplicate called a kinescope that videotape had not yet been invented.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
So the problem was shows that were produced in one place and shown in another had a very poor visual quality. One of the challenges that you can't, even now you'll notice probably sometimes if you watch a movie and a television screen appears in the background, it vibrates and has a kind of a jiggly moiré quality. Because the speed of film is different from the speed of the video image.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
Digital has changed some of this. But in any case, Lucy and Desi, the whole goal of the show was to work together, live in Los Angeles, where they were about ready to have their first child, their daughter, Lucy Desiree Arnaz. And the sponsor and CBS wanted them to come and do it in New York. And they said, no, no, no, we don't want to do that. And that's when CBS said, well.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
We're certainly not going to have you do it live in Los Angeles and make the most important markets in the country watch a blurry kinescope. So you'll have to film it. And that will cost more.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
His basic idea was, let's film it on 35mm film stock, just like a movie. But because CBS and the sponsor also realized that Lucy performed best in front of a live audience, as her radio show had demonstrated, they wanted to film this television program also in front of a live audience.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
Well, as you probably know, a movie is filmed most of the time with a single camera set up over and over again for each shot. Every close-up of a reaction, it involves a separate camera setup. And to try to film a half-hour situation comedy like that would have been in those days very cumbersome. It would have also wrecked the spontaneity.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
It would have been complicated to capture the laugh and reaction. So they came up with this notion of using three cameras at once in synchronicity, filming the show like a play. And while a game show, the Ralph Edwards' Truth or Consequences had been experimenting with that technique, no one had ever really done it for a play, you know, like a sitcom.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
So, Desi went around talking to various cinematographers, including the Academy Award winning cameraman, Carl Freund. who had started out in German expressionist cinema in the 20s and 30s and come to Hollywood like so many emigres from Europe. And he said, you can't do it. And Desi said, why? He said, because you have to light separately for the close-ups, for the medium shots, for the long shots.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
And then as a sheer intellectual challenge for him, he said, but let me see if we can figure something out. So he devised an innovative system of so-called flat overhead lighting. that would light the set adequately for all three camera angles at once.
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
And then, because a motion picture studio is a working factory floor with all kinds of dangers, cables and electricity and fire hazards, they had to figure out a way to get an audience in there to watch it. So they built a set of wooden and metal bleachers, had about 300 people come into this soundstage. They had to cut a special door in the street side of the
Fresh Air
Best Of: The Innovation Of 'I Love Lucy' / Mark Hamill
of the soundstage so that people could have adequate fire exit. And that became the method that, with a few changes, is still used today, was used for shows like Friends, The Big Bang Theory. Most sitcoms today are still shot using this same basic technique.