The success of I Love Lucy is often credited to Lucille Ball's comedic talent, but biographer Todd Purdum says Desi Arnaz was more than just "second banana" to Lucy. He also helped shape the modern sitcom. Also, TV critic David Bianculli reviews a documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
How did Desi Arnaz influence television?
Meanwhile, Lucille Ball wasn't getting the traction that she wanted in movies either.
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.
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.
So at the point that I Love Lucy is about to begin, she was starring in a radio sitcom called My Favorite Husband. And now that TV was beginning to catch on, the network thought we should transfer it to TV and make it a TV sitcom. And that's not what she really wanted to do. She wanted herself and Desi on. who was her husband by then, to have their own sitcom.
So talk about how they made the deal to co-star in a new TV series.
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.
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.
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.
And Philip Morris, of course, was a very big cigarette manufacturer. And the sponsors were so influential at that time. Their name was even in the title of some shows. What I love is, and I didn't know this until reading your book, that the opening credits in the original broadcast, not the reruns, not in syndication, but in the original broadcast, why don't you describe what the opening was like?
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