Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television - Hardcover

Purdum, Todd S

 
9781668023068: Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1668023067 ISBN 13: 9781668023068
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

An illuminating biography of Desi Arnaz, the visionary, trailblazing Cuban American who revolutionized television and brought laughter to millions as Lucille Ball’s beloved husband on I Love Lucy, leaving a remarkable legacy that continues to influence American culture today.

Desi Arnaz is a name that resonates with fans of classic television, but few understand the depth of his contributions to the entertainment industry. In Desi Arnaz, Todd S. Purdum offers a captivating biography that dives into the groundbreaking Latino artist and businessman known to millions as Ricky Ricardo from I Love Lucy. Beyond his iconic role, Arnaz was a pioneering entrepreneur who fundamentally transformed the television landscape.

His journey from Cuban aristocracy to world-class entertainer is remarkable. After losing everything during the 1933 Cuban revolution, Arnaz reinvented himself in pre-World War II Miami, tapping into the rising demand for Latin music. By twenty, he had formed his own band and sparked the conga dance craze in America. Behind the scenes, he revolutionized television production by filming I Love Lucy before a live studio audience with synchronized cameras, a model that remains a sitcom gold standard today.

Despite being underestimated due to his accent and origins, Arnaz’s legacy is monumental. Purdum’s biography, enriched with unpublished materials and interviews, reveals the man behind the legend and highlights his enduring contributions to pop culture and television. This book is a must-read biography about innovation, resilience and the relentless drive of a man who changed TV forever.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Todd S. Purdum is a veteran journalist and author. In a career of more than forty years, he has written widely about politics and culture, starting at The New York Times, where he spent twenty-three years, covering politics from city hall to the White House, later serving as diplomatic correspondent and Los Angeles bureau chief. He has also been a staff writer at Vanity Fair, Politico, and The Atlantic. He is the author of Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution and An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers, with whom he has two grown children.

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Prologue PROLOGUE
On Sunday evening, October 3, 1954, Ed Sullivan, the stone-faced New York newspaper columnist who had become perhaps the most awkward, unexpected television star, hosted a special celebration on his popular CBS program, Toast of the Town: a tribute to I Love Lucy, the network’s top-rated show, which was already a national institution on the eve of its fourth season on the air.

At a V-shaped banquet table bedecked with flowers, Sullivan had assembled a collection of celebrities—including Dusty Rhodes, the New York Giants outfielder who had just led his team to a World Series victory, and Howard Dietz, the lyricist of Broadway standards like “Dancing in the Dark” and “You and the Night and the Music”—to pay homage to the most beloved husband-and-wife team in contemporary entertainment, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

The evening’s roastmaster was a balding, avuncular, tuxedoed character named Tex O’Rourke, a onetime Texas Ranger, Wild West show performer, sports promoter, and boxing trainer who introduced Lucy and Desi as “two of my very favorite people, who have virtually dynamited their way into the hearts of all of us.” By this point, Lucille Ball needed no introduction to anyone, but O’Rourke nonetheless fancifully celebrated her as “the worst kind of redhead.” O’Rourke then turned to Arnaz, who was in fact the dominant force behind the scenes of I Love Lucy. “Down in the Caribbean, another hurricane was making up” one who “was born with a golden guitar in his lap, son of the alcalde of Santiago de Cuba, the biggest mansion in town, the biggest ranch in the hills, imported motor cars, a yacht.” Then came the revolution of 1933. “He was lucky to get out of the country, got over into Miami, a refugee, penniless… He hooked up with a fella who supplied canaries for the local drugstore.” At this, Arnaz covered his eyes in mock chagrin and demanded, “How did you find that out?” O’Rourke plowed on, “That’s my job, Desi. You might say he started at the bottom because his principal job was going around in the mornings and cleaning the birdcages. But in a way it was musical. They were singing canaries.”

O’Rourke then recounted Arnaz’s breakout as a Latin bandleader and how he and Lucy had met when Desi went to Hollywood to repeat his role as a South American football star in the film version of the Rodgers and Hart Broadway musical Too Many Girls. “From the start, it was a team through rough seas and smiling skies, but always a team,” O’Rourke said. “Sometimes a little bit hectic, but way down deep in their hearts they were always the kind of lovers that the whole world has got to love.”

When it was her turn to speak, Ball saved her warmest words for the man who, she knew better than anyone, had been most responsible for the show’s creation and for making her into one of the most famous women in the world. She and Desi had undertaken I Love Lucy at the lowest moment in their careers, when both had run out their string in the movies and were willing to leap into the still-untested, second-tier medium of television. Desi had persuaded a reluctant network and skeptical sponsor that the public would accept them—an unconventional, intermarried couple—as an all-American team. He had seen something in Lucy—and in the two of them together—that he knew would click with audiences. In personal terms, the show was also a determined attempt to save their marriage, after ten years of frequent career conflicts that kept Desi on the road with his band, by allowing them to work together at last. Now they had triumphed beyond their wildest expectations and seemed to have everything.

“His name escapes me at the moment,” Ball deadpanned, “but this guy, who seems to be in all places at once, making like an actor, a banker, a politician—in short, a producer—gets my vote as the greatest producer of all time. And I have two little Arnazes at home to prove it.” At this she cast a sexy, heavy-lidded sidelong glance at her husband, the studio audience burst into supportive laughter, and Arnaz wiped his forehead with his pocket square. “Desi, I love you,” she said. “Signed, Lucy.”

Arnaz rose last, with an earnest intensity not at all like his character Ricky Ricardo’s so-often-exasperated mien. “Thank you, sweetheart,” he began. “Thank you, Ed. You know, if it wouldn’t have been for Lucy, I would have stopped trying a long time ago, because I was always the guy that didn’t fit.” He recounted his uphill battle to get the show on the air with himself as the costar. “Finally, one executive at CBS said, ‘Well, maybe the audience would buy him, because after all they have been married…’?” Struggling to compose himself—his shoulders hunched, looking into the middle distance and not at the camera, barely holding back tears—he went on. “We came to this country, and we didn’t have a cent in our pockets. From cleaning canary cages to this night here in New York is a long ways. And I don’t think there’s any other country in the world that could give you that opportunity. I want to say thank you. Thank you, America. Thank you.”

Arnaz sat down with his head in his hands. Sullivan—a keen judge of talent who had known Desi for years and understood better than most the crucial role he had played in his wife’s success—cuffed him around the ear and drew him close in a fatherly embrace.

The gratitude that Desi Arnaz expressed that night was mutual, for against all the odds, white-bread, conformist, Eisenhower-era America had taken him and his unconventional alter ego to heart. He was adored as the man who loved Lucy, the combustible Cuban bandleader whose spluttering Spanish and long-suffering straight man’s frustration at the comic antics of his crazy wife softened into a loving embrace at the end of each episode. But Desi Arnaz was so much more than Ricky Ricardo. If Ball’s brilliant clowning—her beauty, her mimicry, her flexible face and fearless skill at physical comedy—was the artistic spark that animated I Love Lucy, Arnaz’s pioneering show-business acumen was the essential driving force behind it. He was, as NPR’s Planet Money once put it, the man who “invented television.”

“There’s a misconception that we—that Desi wasn’t all that important to the show,” Madelyn Pugh Davis, the founding cowriter of I Love Lucy, would recall years after his death. “And Desi was what made the show go. And he also knew that she was the tremendous talent. He knew that. But he was the driving force, and he was the one who held it together. People don’t seem to realize that.”

Today, nearly four decades after his death, Arnaz the performer remains a widely recognizable figure—“one of the great personalities of all time,” as his friend the dancer Ann Miller once put it. Much less well understood is the seminal role he played in the nascent years of television, helping to transform its production methods, and transforming himself, a successful but second-tier Latin bandleader, and his wife, a journeyman actress in mostly forgettable B movies, into cultural icons.

It was Arnaz (and I Love Lucy’s...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668023067
ISBN 13 
9781668023068
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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