Todd Purdum
speaker
82 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Todd Purdum’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But Lucy believed in both of the programs, and she gave the green light, and those two programs were Star Trek and Mission Impossible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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