Dateline Love Lucy

from our studios in new york here is jane pauley lucille ball first lady of american television she died seven years ago but in a way has never left us because almost all of her television shows are still in syndication and i love lucy remains the most watched and most loved tv sitcom of all time even so when a manuscript of an unpublished autobiography turned up in a lawyer's file cabinet even her own children were surprised tonight a never-before-seen portrait of lucy and the reason tv's most successful partnership was an odds-on failure at home [Music] [Applause] they said you're the right height and you're a nice girl but you just don't seem to have it lucille ball didn't have it you got to be kidding by the mid-50s she'd already staked a claim as the first lady of television i refused to discuss anything with a sneak a snick all right a snake lucy and desi were just about the most famous couple in america maybe lucy and ricky still are because i had the toller they were the first tv family we felt like we really knew even their personal home movies like these from 1953 have a feel of familiarity it's easy to forget that there was a private lucy different from the one who came into america's living rooms every week lucy oh gee i'm glad you're home how's about a great big i'll see you later for one thing in real life she didn't sound at all like any of the lucy's from her tv shows what's the matter i didn't know that there was this kind of success i didn't dream of it for myself that's the real lucy talking on tape recordings that were discovered last fall in a lawyer's file cabinet along with a manuscript not even her family knew what they were her daughter actress lucy arnez total shock yeah total shock i mean she had never mentioned to me ever that she had even intended on sitting down and writing about her life in 1964 lucy was telling her story to betty hannah hoffman a writer for ladies home journal i was expecting the dizzy redhead you know from television and it was quite a shock because she was a she had a deep gravelly voice she didn't have that high pitchy voice that she has on television she's very serious she wasn't funny but without explanation after several months of work lucy changed her mind a first draft of a manuscript was put away and everybody possibly lucy included just forgot about it but now 30 years later her children lucy and desi junior a musician decided to publish it it's called love lucy after all of this time when everybody thought she's gone and she's said as much as she's gonna say about her life that there was suddenly this magical thing that just showed up one day that she could go and tell the story of her own life herself the audio tapes must be haunting having her voice on tape telling these exact stories in the book is just the most priceless thing a lot of what she talks about in the book though are things that happened that we didn't talk that much about her early childhood and her teenage years and when she first left home and thinks that she didn't really go into detail with us about because you know when you're with your parents you're talking about what's happening now they're not reminiscing all the time my mother worked very hard my mother worked very hard and under very difficult circumstances lucy's mother desiree ball they called her dede was widowed at 22 pregnant with lucy's younger brother i lived for the day when i could make life easy for them no doubt about that lucy's own childhood had been a series of tragedies she was three when her father died and nine before she lived with her mother again raised by a series of relatives but adversity only seemed to give her strength lucy tells of going to new york city in her mid-teens and even though she'd been a drama school washout she writes for some incomprehensible reason i knew i'd make it as an actress in the meantime she was modeling she changed her name briefly to diane belmont and spiced up her resume for years people thought my mother was born in butte montana which she encouraged and i went so far to write to the chamber of commerce of butte and anaconda and acquaint myself with every store every corner i could tell you more about butte and anaconda at that time than most people who live there do montana sounds better then you can talk like this and be kind of a sassy girl you know kind of sassy she like to be sassy kinda wet yeah rain usually is this time of year how do you be right up say butch i want you to meet mister by the late 30s she was known as the queen of the bees dewberry was a lady it was then at the age of 29. she met a younger man who knocked her off her feet it apparently was mutual what'd your father say when he first laid eyes on her what a hunker woman what a honker woman and she was when you hear they met on a hollywood back lot in 1940. he was pretty hot too the conga king of the nightclub circuit and a broadway sensation she said she fell in love with him not love at first sight she said it took five minutes i mean they they were very hot and very heavy very quickly apparently it was great passion latin passion irish passion fights you know and immediate makeups and the kind of thing that movies are made of five months after they met against everyone's advice and her own better judgment she writes they eloped it may have seemed a case of opposites attract but they had a lot in common childhood adversity desi's family was cuban aristocracy wiped out during political upheaval like lucy he turned to showbiz to support his mother and the eerie coincidence of their names desi that's short for desidario and lucy's middle name was desiree desiree and desiderio are the same word they both mean desire desire meant desire lucy sensed an inevitability to their relationship what did your mom figure the odds were that her marriage to desi arnaz would last she said she thought it would last six weeks she did she knew my father was a passionate sort of playboy person when she knew he was younger she knew that he was living fast and hard and she was organized responsible take charge pioneer stock person quite different from the way he was raised but they were passionately in love lucy writes in loving detail about the early years with desi ones at their home in chatsworth california life was well a party we celebrated anything barbecues dress up birthday parties old-fashioned swimming parties western parties halloween i planned them for weeks ahead and invited the people i've got the wonderful home movies of everybody all dressed up and having a ball that's van johnson's swandive and buster keaton in the straw boater it was hollywood's heyday they both wanted children lucy cut out pictures of babies from magazines and put them in her scrapbook but it was hard to start a family being apart as much as a movie star and a band leader were it just occurred to them that if they worked together if they could find a way to work together that they could be together the solution television the problem convincing the network what america is going to believe that this red-headed american all-american woman is married to this latin man from cuba and i said well i am married to aladdin it seems to me that there would be much more to work with if you're working with the truth so in 1950 they hit the road we said well let's get an act together and go out and see what audiences think of us together so we fashioned a mr and mrs act they call me sally sweet as a vaudeville-style comedy team they were heading for [Music] like the immortality boom chick he's very nice so full of spies i love lucy blurred the line between tv life and real life it was part of the show's appeal oh ricky please just let me do the commercial now's been doing why not look honey this is too big a chance for me i need someone with a lot of experience well i've had experience america knew that he really was a bandleader that they were really married and in 1952 that lucy was really pregnant with her second child desi junior the scene where lucy can't get ricky's attention to tell him that they're going to have a baby well that's a story that i never really knew until i read the book oddly enough she talks about how once they got into filming it everybody knew how real it was that they had waited this long to have these children when the bow breaks the cradle will fall [Music] no really then everybody on the set was was crying when they thought they should do it again but nobody would let them because it was so real the most significant tears were your fathers yeah we're having a baby my baby [Music] and me [Music] ironically though the idea of working together on i love lucy was to make it possible for lucy and desi to have a more stable family life the marriage barely made it through the run of the tv show lucy writes i wanted to get as far away from hollywood and desi as humanly possible they really tried they tried for 20 years to stay married and have the family and have the career and i start getting into those chapters and i remember and it makes me sad because it it comes back up you know i remember how how dark those days were for everybody you know i can still remember the moment that it happened when my parents sat us down and said we have to separate we can't live together anymore i can remember my brother turning to my mother and my father and saying well can't you fix it daddy can't you just take it all back and him saying with tears in his eyes no partner we can't on dateline tuesday lucy the red how lucille ball came to be called a communist and how desi saved their empire from catastrophe [Music] from studio 3b in new york here again is jane pauley when i love lucy is no longer playing in syndication it will be the end of tv as we know it somebody once said and they were probably right even if we were too young to see the show in its first run from 1951 to 1957 we've seen every episode a dozen times so they only seem to get better with age what was the magic no doubt it was the partnership of two people who were perfect together on camera but pictures don't tell the whole story the rest of the story tonight from lucy herself that's very funny now come on out of there as our first offering this evening we presented lucy i said come on out of there after 45 years in non-stop syndication lucille ball and desi arnaz long ago achieved broadcast immortality ricardo [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] he died in 1986. she died in 1989 only weeks after she'd finally agreed to sit down and write her autobiography perhaps forgetting she already had love lucy is the name of her newly rediscovered memoir hardly anyone knew it existed but 30 years ago lucy told her life story and hours of taped interviews edited the manuscript by hand and then with no explanation changed her mind her children lucy and desi aines jr think they understand why she changed her mind she didn't want to complete it my father and she had just divorced and i think she thought that she would hurt his feelings it was so so close then that she was afraid i think she was at a crossroads when she wrote this book it was important for her at that moment in her own life whether she shared it with people or not i have never been unhappy since i had a modicum of success i just thought it was great long before this throughout her life lucille ball carefully tended her general foods image as she called it i have never had uh a bad press or or ugly fans i've had love and uh admiration who can knock that tell me something do you play that thing how's that i say do you play that thing what's in in 1951 she was shooting the pilot for what would become the most successful tv sitcom of all time she was also at the age of 40 about to have her first baby never mind making fun of my english that's english in the book at one point she talks when you were born about how difficult it was to leave you and knowing that when she went to the studio it might be midnight before she came home can you imagine if we had had to do that i mean the kind of never being around mothering that you would have to accept and she really had literally had no choice at the time working six days a week sometimes 16 hours a day lucy saw her tv family much more than her real family she wasn't there i had a nurse who took care of me from the moment that i was born virtually and then she would come home at midnight like she said i was asleep you know and everything those were the toughest times for them with the show because it was a new show in 1951 television was in its infancy when i love lucy went into production there was no blueprint to follow they were inventing a genre she was the star but if history is accurately reported he was the brains of the outfit when it got to i love lucy yeah right from the start lucy writes desi arnaz turned out to be a huge star behind the camera it came about that he was a great director and a great producer he can take a story apart he can give you a synopsis of a story and pick out the highlights like that does he can really get down to the root of a story or a characterization he became very very good at this she got the laughs but it was never at the expense of his dignity never and that was something that my father insisted upon i mean a whole series of rules that he laid out i don't want ricky to ever be the stupid husband who is the brunt of the jokes if lucy's going to pull over something over his eyes he's got the audience has to know he's in on it the audience should never see her or him really flirting with anybody else they should always know that this is first and foremost a romance the formula was an instant hit but lucy and desi didn't know how famous they'd become till 1953 when they took a break from the hollywood grind to see some shows in new york the first night there we went to the theater and as we were getting into our seat applause broke out and a lot of hubbub which went into a cheer well at that time mrs roosevelt was in town and we thought she was there so we got up and we looked around and we applauded and we're standing there going along and we found it was for us television had brought them success they could never have imagined and then they almost lost it all good evening mr mr north american all the ships to see let's go to press flash somebody tipped walter winchell to the fact that lucille ball had once been a communist it was on the front page of every paper it was on the news it was on television it was on the radio lucille ball is a card-carrying communist it was the height of the red scare countless careers in hollywood had already been destroyed it was desi who made the decision to face the crisis head on my father called up everybody he knew from the heads of the networks to the sponsors had bishops and priests and rabbis and all the people come to the show the night of the filming made a big huge speech in front of the audience and basically told the truth bottom line was she had signed a membership card for the communist party lucille ball well the bottom line was her grandfather way back when when it was okay to join a socialist party or be a communist that was just like you know voting for parole it wasn't like a big you could just choose you know it was no big deal after her own father died when she was just three lucy called her grandfather daddy when she was 25 after he had suffered a stroke lucy her mother and brother all agreed to register with the communist party to humor him she never voted my mother never voted and she did it just to silence him and make him feel better before the i love lucy show was filmed that night desi introduced lucy to the studio audience saying the only thing read about lucy was her hair and even that was fake his pr gambit worked just two months later they were performing in person for president eisenhower in 24 hours they could have lost everything they were very lucky they were very lucky [Music] the show went on for four more seasons never out of the top three it remains a television phenomenon the plot lines survived they're not dated they're always about people and needs and wants and love and jealousies and trying to make a buck and trying to make ends meet and it's all the stuff that you can still relate to you know the hemlines change that's all after i love lucy her tv family featured her own real-life kids but though she remarried lucy never had another tv husband let me take this with all these exploding cigars around i never know when i'll need a spare this was the final episode of the lucy desi comedy hour guest starring ernie kovacs it was the last time the ricardo's appeared together [Music] lucy filed for divorce that same day when the show ended you realize that it's the end of an era it was the end of that magic [Music] it's taken her years but lucy arnez has finally organized all of her parents showbiz memorabilia and the home movies and the photographs literally by the thousands on a cd-rom we'll be telling you about it later this fall on dateline

Channel: The American Player

Views: 37,055

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Id: Tpf5LT372qs

Length: 21min 9sec (1269 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 27 2021