Todd Purdum
Appearances
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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 to 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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
Well, there's one famous incident apparently where he was bending over to do something and she kicked him and she meant to kick him in the rear end and she actually kicked him in a more sensitive spot and apparently he was limping around for days.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
You know, their son, Desi Arnaz Jr., told me he thought really the theme of the show itself was fundamental conflict and that Lucy and Ricky almost hurt each other in every Monday night's episode. But then they drew back and they didn't. And by the end of the show, they were back in each other's loving arms.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
But, you know, the flip side of the conflict is in the words of the I Love Lucy theme song. We have our quarrels, but then how we love making up again. And Lucy in her memoir talked about how, especially early in their marriage, their fights were a kind of lovemaking in themselves that led to ultimately reunions.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
So the overtones of the show are constantly coming back to the dynamic of their relationship in real life. And that's part of what makes it compelling, I think.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
The show did bring them together, but I think it also, by the fact that they then were working together pretty much 24-7, always thinking about the show in one way or another. And Lucy's only salvation in life, the thing that her happy place was hard work. So she was restless if she didn't have a lot to do and she'd compulsively clean her house or rearrange her drawers or whatever.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
So she loved the work. She loved nothing better than working on that week's episode. And whenever they had a chance, and at one point, Desi suggested they scale back and not do the weekly show anymore. She was unwilling to do that. And I think what happened then was that familiarity began to breed increasing contempt as they were with each other all the time.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
Not just in home life, but in their work life. And, you know, the paradox, the poignant paradox is that the show did was intended to save their marriage and the tensions created by the success of the show ultimately were part of what drove them apart.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
Desi has been said to have a great deal of skill as an editor and a rewriter. He understood instinctively what might not work in a script, what would work, even if he couldn't always articulate it. To a person, the people involved in the show talk about Lucille Ball in real life was not verbal. She was not a good teller of a joke. She couldn't remember the punchline.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
She'd get lost in the weeds of telling the joke. Her genius was in situation, in physical comedy, in the use of props, in the human expressions of emotion on her face. So people said that from the first reading at the beginning of the week, Desi would deliver a very credible read, never get any better, never get any worse.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
But Lucy, as the week went on, and one effective part of Aaron Sorkin's movie being the Ricardos is you see Nicole Kidman as Lucy working and working and working with a set of flowers as a prop, perfecting the routine so that by the time the show was filmed at the end of the week, she had really reached an unbelievable level of skill.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
Lucy was the vice president of Desilu, but she never took much pleasure in the business end of the business. She really left that to Desi. After their divorce in 1960, then especially after she bought him out of the company in 1962, she did have to become the president and she had final responsibility, although she relied heavily on a team of business advisors.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
But Lucy herself did one very, very important thing in 1966. The studio had two projects in development, and her advisor said they're both going to be very expensive to produce these TV series. If you approve them, you'll probably have to sell the company because the cash flow won't be adequate to cover the production costs, and any future rewards will be way down the line.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
But Lucy believed in both of the programs, and she gave the green light, and those two programs were Star Trek and Mission Impossible.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
Well, after he and Lucy got divorced in 1960, their relationship got warmer and she stayed closely involved with, she relied on his business advice. When she bought him out of the company in 1962, he basically took his windfall, which would amount to about $30 million in today's money. And kind of retired and lived the life of Riley. He built a house down in Mexico in Baja, California.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
He lived at the beach north of San Diego in Del Mar. He had a horse ranch in inland California for a while. And then he got bored. And in the mid 60s, he tried to stage a comeback. He had one successful series in the late 1960s called The Mother's-in-Law with Eve Arden and Kay Ballard. But he never really succeeded again in getting anything much off the ground. He wrote a memoir in the mid-1970s.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
He was a guest host on the first season of NBC's Saturday Night, which was then called just Saturday Night, not Saturday Night Live. But he had a kind of sad unspooling in which he sank further and further into alcoholism and depression.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
And finally, with the help of his son, Desi, who had been a teenage music sensation himself with the band, with Dean Martin Jr., Desi helped him get sober, and he did finally grapple with some of his demons. He went to alcohol rehab down in San Diego, and then he got lung cancer and within a year was dead.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
Yes, Lucille Ball went to see him near the end of his life. They had a bond that time couldn't shake. It's really like a star-crossed, one of the great love affairs of all time. People who knew them said they really were one of the great love affairs of all time. Their capacity to hurt each other was almost as powerful as their love, I suppose, and they just couldn't manage to be together.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
Yes, Desi's grandfather was a doctor in Santiago de Cuba, the second largest city in Cuba in southeastern part of the island. The family legend has it that he was attached to Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders at San Juan Hill.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
Desi's own father was a pharmacist who then built a second career as the mayor of Santiago, the reform mayor from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, building all kinds of public works, drinking water, a beautiful esplanade on the waterfront. And his mother's family, his mother's father was an executive at Bacardi, the giant Cuban rum company.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
So Desi grew up as an only child with every conceivable privilege, a beautiful house in town, a big motor car, an island, a summer house on the bay with a motor launch and a Norwegian fishing skiff and a ranch in the country where he learned to ride horseback and everything.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
So he really was on track to become a spoiled, rotten kid, I think, until the family lost everything in 1933 when the regime of Gerardo Machado, which had become corrupt and was overthrown, and they fled to Florida. And Patessi, except for one time... In a USO tour in World War II, he never went back to the island again.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
And he was a political conservative in real life and was very strongly anti-Castro. He never really felt that he could go home again.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
His father had been a supporter of the Machado regime, which is itself a kind of tragic story because Machado arose in the 1920s as a reform-minded, progressive politician who then, once he got in office, became corrupted by power. He suspended normal electoral processes and really kind of became a dictatorial figure and president.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
There's no indication that Tessie's father was himself part of the Machado era corruption, but he had backed the regime. He was, by that point, a member of the National Assembly in Congress in Havana. And so he was tarred by association with the Machado regime and fled when it fell.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
Yes, he and his mother fled from Santiago after the regime fell to relatives in Havana. And he saw things that no teenage boy should probably ever want to have to see, including a man's head stuck on a long pole hung in front of his house and his body was hung two doors down. I think, you know, it was an era when people wouldn't have necessarily processed this in the way we might now.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
And I think Desi must have been haunted for the rest of his life by this youthful dislocation. The strange part about it is it's that dislocation that also sparked his enormous drive to succeed. So it gave him, on the one hand, a tremendous willingness to take risks because he'd lost everything. He figured, what the heck, you know, I might as well try something new.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
But it also, in the end, I think, must have left a lot of ghosts rattling around inside his psyche that he sought refuge from in alcohol. Yeah.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
Yes, and I think that must have been a really wrenching dislocation, that he was on track to go to Notre Dame to become a lawyer, to come to college in America, and then suddenly he's kind of struggling to get through high school in Miami Beach, struggling to learn English, struggling to reinvent himself, becoming a musician, catching the attention of...
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
Savior Cugat, the rumba band leader, and the next thing you know, he's playing at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. So I think his head must have been spinning by all the various changes in his life that came when he was still really in his late teens.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
Well, I think it has to do with the fact that you didn't leave your country by choice, that your country was taken away from you and you had to come here and make your life over. It's interesting in the context of today's immigration debate, because, of course, Desi, as I mentioned, was politically conservative. But he also was a really shining example of what happens in America today.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
uh when diversity is seen as a strength and you know ultimately his success in getting i love lucy on the air and becoming the all-american husband and father that he became in the 1950s was proof that the country would accept this guy who had a funny accent and came from another place and had a kind of exotic background that he'd be seen as a very capable all-american guy
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
Well, like so many people of my generation, I wasn't old enough to see I Love Lucy in an original run, but I watched it in reruns as a child over and over. I'm sure I could recite many episodes from heart.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
The story of Desi, the artist and the businessman, struck me as something that in this moment in our culture when we're reexamining people whose contributions might have been overlooked because of the way they looked or the way they sounded or the way they weren't part of the mainstream... It seemed like a moment worth reexamining.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
And an old friend of mine from college, the late playwright and actor Doug McGrath, told me that he thought everyone understood Lucy's contributions, but that Desi was kind of an undersung hero. And the more I looked at it, the more I became convinced that he had a really compelling story that deserved telling.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
Yeah. Desi Arnaz was the first person to say that the entire thing depended on the brilliance of Lucille Ball. There's one moment where she trips over a cable on the set one day and he turns to her and say, amigos, if anything happens to her, we're all in the shrimp business. So he knew exactly.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
But she was careful always to give him credit as the brains behind the operation, the driving force behind the show, getting it on the air and keeping it on the air. And she, however bitter she might have felt about him, however sad she felt about the end of their marriage, she always, always to the end of her life gave him credit as the, you know, the spark behind the show.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
Thank you, Terry. So pleasure to be here.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
Yes, yes. He was an adequate singer, but he was not an incredible vocalist. There's no doubt about that.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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 all over the country. And finally, CBS and the sponsor, Philip Morris, agreed.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
His basic idea was let's film it on 35 millimeter 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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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, every 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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
So Desi went around talking to various cinematographers, including the Academy Award winning director,
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
cameraman carl freund who had started out in the 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 and then as a sheer intellectual challenge for and said but let me see if we can figure something out so he devised an innovative system of so-called flat overhead lighting and
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
that would light the set adequately for all three camera angles at once. 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.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
They had to cut a special door in the street side of the of the soundstage so that people could have adequate fire exit. And that became the method that with, you know, 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.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
And, uh, finally, uh, ultimately Desi only found out a couple of years later, he'd, 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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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, 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 that Don't mess around with a Cuban.
Fresh Air
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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
With 'I Love Lucy,' Desi Arnaz Changed TV Forever
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.