Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television - Softcover

Purdum, Todd S

 
9781668023099: Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1668023091 ISBN 13: 9781668023099
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2026

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 Purdum’s biography, enriched with unpublished materials and interviews, reveals the man behind the legend and highlights his enduring contributions to pop culture and television.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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Chapter One: Once on an Island one ONCE ON AN ISLAND
He was a Pisces, born on an island, and for the rest of his life, in happy times and times of bad trouble, he would always return to the sea. He was an only child—a rarity in the Catholic culture of his time and place—a handsome, dark-eyed boy. In surviving formal photographs, he is sober, in his sailor suits and white linens, or in a pirate costume and painted mustache at an early birthday party. He looks mature beyond his years, and that is perhaps not surprising: From the beginning, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha was raised as a prince.

He was born on March 2, 1917, in a spacious Spanish colonial house on Santa Lucia Street in Santiago de Cuba, the island’s original capital and still its second-largest city after Havana. Not twenty years earlier, Theodore Roosevelt had stormed up the San Juan Heights, on Santiago’s northeastern fringes, in the Spanish-American War. He had pronounced it a “quaint, dirty old Spanish city,” though he allowed that “it was interesting to go in once or twice, and wander through the narrow streets with their curious little shops and low houses of stained stucco, with elaborately wrought iron trellises to the windows and curiously carved balconies.” Other visitors might have likened the city’s hilly, bayside topography to San Francisco’s, and its polyglot, bon temps rouler, music-filled atmosphere to that of New Orleans. To this day, the region is known as la tierra caliente, as much for the natives’ fiery temperaments as for the high temperatures.

Situated at the head of a wide, safe harbor on the southeastern, leeward side of the island, Santiago had been settled by the Spanish in 1515; over the next three hundred years the city was successively plundered by French and English forces and a rogues’ gallery of pirates. The aftermath of the slave uprising in neighboring Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, in the 1790s brought an influx of newly freed Africans—together with fleeing slave owners and their human chattel—that created an unusually rich demographic mix, importing African musical, culinary, and cultural influences and establishing sugarcane—“white gold”—as the island’s dominant cash crop. Tobacco farming, copper mining, and fishing were Santiago’s other industries, and in 1862 the Bacardí rum distillery was founded there, spreading its signature sugar-based spirit across the Caribbean and the Americas.

“Something about Oriente invites exaggeration,” the journalist Patrick Symmes wrote of the region around Santiago. “It is the hottest part of Cuba, the most mountainous, the first settled, and the earliest to achieve glory and shame…. There were men present at the founding of the city who had known Columbus himself, and the 1515 date was so early that it rooted Santiago more in the European Middle Ages than in the new world to come. Santiago was the first capital of Cuba, reigning for forty years before eventually losing out to Havana, an insult never forgotten. The city served as a kind of Jerusalem to the Americas, spreading the new faith of conquest, and the new tongue of Castilian.”

And, Symmes continued, “white or black, poor or rich, the Santiaguero insisted with a straight face that fruit is riper, the sun is stronger, the women more passionate, the politics more sincere, the talk more profound, the cemeteries more grand, even the night darker, than elsewhere in Cuba.” Residents of Oriente “insisted that not only was Cuban music the best music in the world, which everyone already knew, but Oriente was the only source of Cuban music.”

By the time of Desi’s birth, la familia Arnaz (properly pronounced Ar-NAAS, not Ar-NEZZ, as Hollywood would later Anglicize it) was firmly established as Santiago aristocracy. The matriarch, Dolores Vera y Portes, had fled Seville with her parents in the early nineteenth century when Joseph-Napoléon Bonaparte, the emperor’s older brother, invaded Spain and exiled the family. The Vera family bought or was granted land in and around Santiago and built a hilltop villa on Cayo Smith, a tiny islet near the mouth of Santiago Bay. Dolores, an only child, would eventually marry Manuel Arnaz y Cobreces, the municipal fire chief of Santiago, who in 1869 would be appointed the city’s mayor by Queen Isabella II of Spain. (The surname Arnaz itself is of Basque origin, after the town of Arnaz in Spain; in France it is rendered Arnault and in Italy Arnaldi.) Manuel and Dolores’s only son, Desiderio Arnaz y Vera, the first Desi in the family line, was born in 1857. His family sent him back to Spain to study medicine at the University of Seville, and he returned to Santiago as a practicing physician. In 1884, he married Rosa Alberni y Portuondo, a member of the Cuban nobility descended from an old and illustrious Santiago family. (Her great-grandfather, the first count of Santa Inés, had also been mayor.) She would bear Dr. Arnaz seven children: three sons and four daughters. One of those sons, born in 1894, was also christened Desiderio, and he would become the father of the family’s third Desi, who won worldwide fame.

The first Desiderio Arnaz’s growth to maturity had coincided with the rise of the movement for Cuban independence from Spain, a drive that began in 1868 when a small plantation owner, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, freed his slaves and proclaimed Cuba a sovereign state. This sparked a ten-year war that left two hundred thousand people dead but resolved nothing—though the resulting economic disaster led for the first time to heavy American investment in Cuban real estate and agriculture. In 1886, a royal Spanish decree finally abolished slavery on the island. And in 1895, the Second War of Independence began, this time led by José Martí, a poet, journalist, and lawyer who had been an active lobbyist for the Cuban cause from his exile in the United States. Martí was killed in his first battle and is revered to this day as a national hero (both by Cubans on the island and Cubans in exile; one of the few points on which they agree). His tomb in Santiago’s Santa Ifigenia Cemetery is a shrine. In 1898, spurred on by a group of neocolonialist American politicians (including Theodore Roosevelt, who was then assistant secretary of the navy, and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts) and whipped into a frenzy by sensationalist press coverage of wartime Spanish atrocities and the mysterious sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, the United States joined the Cuban rebels to repulse Spanish rule—and, not coincidentally, secure the U.S. economic stake in the island. (Many historians contend that the Cubans were already winning and did not need American intervention.) In any case, the effort was short and successful—a “splendid little war,” Secretary of State John Hay called it—and climaxed in the assault on the San Juan Heights outside Santiago on July 1, 1898. That cavalry charge in turn swiftly propelled Roosevelt to the governorship of New York later that year, to the vice presidency two years later, and ultimately to the presidency upon the assassination of William McKinley, in 1901.

But Cuba’s nominal independence came at a high price. The island traded its status as a Spanish colony for effective subjugation to the United States, beholden to American...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668023091
ISBN 13 
9781668023099
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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