Today is the birthday of Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III, better known as Desi Arnaz. He was a Cuban-American actor, musician, producer, and bandleader. He was known for playing the conga drum and popularized the conga line in the United States. He played Ricky Ricardo on the American television sitcom I Love Lucy, in which he co-starred with his wife Lucille Ball
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Many think of him as only the straight man for Lucille Ball, however, he was as equal as her in the financial area. He negotiated a deal whereby they retained the rights to the I Love Lucy show and they bought Desilu Productions. Arnaz and Ball are credited as the innovators of the syndicated rerun, which they pioneered with the I Love Lucy series.
Arnaz and Ball decided that I Love Lucy would maintain what Arnaz termed "basic good taste" and were therefore determined to avoid ethnic jokes,
as well as humor based on physical handicaps or mental disabilities.
Arnaz recalled that the only exception consisted of making fun of Ricky
Ricardo's accent; even these jokes worked only when Lucy, as his wife,
did the mimicking.
Arnaz and Ball co-founded and ran the television production company Desilu Productions, originally to market I Love Lucy to television networks. I Love Lucy ended, Arnaz went on to produce several other television series, at
first with Desilu Productions, and later independently, including The Ann Sothern Show and The Untouchables.
Arnaz was born in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, on March 2, 1917, a descendant of Cuban nobility and , The Cuban Revolution of 1933
forced Arnaz and his family to lose everything. A mob
attacked and destroyed the family's houses, property, and livestock. The family then fled to Miami with no money and Arnaz had to live with
his father in a garage that was infested with rats and roaches. His first jobs included working at Woolworths
and cleaning canary cages in Miami. He then went into the tile business
with his father before turning to show business full time. A lifelong Republican, and active in politics, Arnaz was deeply patriotic about the United States. In his memoirs, he
wrote that he knew of no other country in the world where "a
sixteen-year-old kid, broke and unable to speak the language" could
achieve the successes that he had.
Xavier Cugat,
after seeing Arnaz perform, hired him for his touring orchestra,
playing the conga drum and singing. Becoming a star attraction
encouraged him to start his own band, the Desi Arnaz Orchestra. Arnaz and his orchestra became a hit in the New York City club scene,
including a club named La Conga, where he is credited with introducing
the concept of conga line dancing to the United States.
The Muppets conga line
He came to the attention of Rodgers and Hart who, in 1939, cast him in their Broadway musical Too Many Girls. The show was a hit and RKO Pictures bought the movie rights. Arnaz went to Hollywood the next year to appear in the show's movie version at RKO, which also starred Lucille Ball. Arnaz and Ball fell in love during the film's production and eloped on November 30, 1940.
On April 27, 1943, Arnaz received his draft notice as a foreign national
since he was a citizen of Cuba at the time, upon discovering the first thing the wounded soldiers requested was a
glass of cold milk, he arranged for movie starlets to meet them and pour
the milk for them. Later that year he became a
naturalized US Citizen and changed his legal name to Desi Arnaz.
On October 15, 1951, Arnaz co-starred in the premiere of I Love Lucy,
in which he played a fictionalized version of himself, Cuban orchestra
leader Enrique "Ricky" Ricardo. His co-star was his real-life wife, Lucille Ball, who played Ricky's wife, Lucy. At that time, most television programs were broadcast live, and as the
largest markets were in New York, the rest of the country received only kinescope images. Karl Freund, Arnaz's cameraman, and even Arnaz himself have been credited with the development of the multiple-camera setup production style using adjacent sets in front of a live audience that became the standard for subsequent situation comedies.
In the late 1960s, Arnaz was seriously injured in an accident when the
floor in his home in Baja California collapsed and he was impaled by a
tree stump. An operation saved his life, although his health was never
the same after the incident. He suffered a severe attack of diverticulitis in 1971, which required an operation and several years of recovery.
Arnaz was a regular smoker for much of his life and often smoked cigarettes on the set of I Love Lucy. He smoked Cuban cigars until he was in his sixties. Arnaz was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1986 and underwent treatment.
Lucille Ball visited him during this time in the hospital and the two
watched VHS tapes of I Love Lucy. His daughter Lucie was by his side constantly during his final days. He died two days later on December 2, 1986, at the age of 69, three years before Lucy's death.
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