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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Appearances
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Killing rats with baseball bats, yes.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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