Word: arnaz
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hijuelos returns the courtesy by giving Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball guest spots in his novel, as celebrities who descend like deities for a potluck supper in the modest home of ordinary mortals. Arnaz turns out to be a sweetheart who eats second helpings, drinks heartily and sings Babalu long into the evening. Ball has good manners and a considerate way of peeking at her watch...
...winning forgiveness. The thwarted schemer was a figure dating back to the Romans if not the Greeks, but Ball deftly sentimentalized the character, merged its cunning intellect with joyously low physical comedy and, perhaps most important, feminized it. Her shows -- I Love Lucy, The Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz Show, The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy -- reflected the major post-World War II social trends, from the baby boom to the exodus to the suburbs to the democratization of travel...
...then, once employed, to emerge from beneath the boss's thumb. She endured any indignity in search of her big chance. The greatest indignity of all, it generally turned out, was the chuckling condescension of her husband Ricky, played by her real-life husband and business partner Desi Arnaz. The confident king of the castle, he was always ready to teach Lucy a lesson. Looking back from an '80s perspective, some observers have suggested that Lucy was virtually an abused wife. In retrospect, Ball might have agreed. Certainly, she was bitter about the off- camera problems caused by Arnaz...
...saxophonist who bleated, a chanteuse who croaked, a hoofer who fell down. Even in the final season, when the Lucy character met her look-alike, the actress Lucille Ball, the script concluded that the "real" Lucy was the star-struck onlooker, not the star. Yet, after Ball divorced Arnaz in 1960, the Lucy character also evolved into a capable single mother, then an independent and modestly successful career woman. Off- camera, Ball was happily remarried in 1961 to a courtly, protective ex- comic, Gary Morton, and took a keen maternal interest in the acting careers % of her daughter Lucie Arnaz...
...Love Lucy was also the first program to be owned by its producers, Lucy and husband Desi Arnaz (who called their outfit Desilu Productions), rather than owned by the network. Today networks pay a show's producers for the rights to broadcast an episode a limited number of times. After a few years, the producer can then sell his series as reruns to stations across the country and make millions more. Lucy started all this, and has made up to $100 million in the process...