Word: desi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...husband Desi--a Cuban bandleader she married shortly after they met on the set of Too Many Girls in 1940--who urged her to try television. CBS was interested in Ball, but not in the fellow with the pronounced Spanish accent she wanted to play her husband. To prove that the audience would accept them as a couple, Lucy and Desi cooked up a vaudeville act and took it on tour. It got rave reviews ("a sock new act," said Variety), and CBS relented...
...there were other haggles. Lucy and Desi wanted to shoot the show in Hollywood, rather than in New York City, where most TV was then being done. And for better quality, they insisted on shooting on film, rather than doing it live and recording on kinescope. CBS balked at the extra cost; the couple agreed to take a salary cut in return for full ownership of the program. It was a shrewd business decision: I Love Lucy was the launching pad for Desilu Productions, which (with other shows, like Our Miss Brooks and The Untouchables) became...
...meaning of loyalty and friendship. The series also reflected most of the decade's important social trends. The Ricardos made their contribution to the baby boom in January 1953--TV's Little Ricky was born on the same day that Ball gave birth, by caesarean, to her second child, Desi Jr. (A daughter, Lucie, had been born in 1951.) They traveled to California just as the nation was turning west, in a hilarious series of shows that epitomized our conception of--and obsession with--Hollywood glamour. And when the nation began moving to the suburbs, so too, in their last...
Most of all, I Love Lucy was grounded in emotional honesty. Though the couple had a tempestuous marriage off-screen (Desi was an unrepentant philanderer), the Ricardos' kisses showed the spark of real attraction. In the episode where Lucy finds out she is pregnant, she can't break the news to Ricky because he is too busy. Finally, she takes a table at his nightclub show and passes him an anonymous note asking that he sing a song, We're Having a Baby, to the father-to-be. As Ricky roams the room looking for the happy couple, he spies...
Tired of the grind of a weekly series, Lucy and Desi ended I Love Lucy in 1957, when it was still No. 1. For three more years, they did hourlong specials, then broke up the act for good when they divorced in 1960. Ball returned to TV with two other popular (if less satisfying) TV series, The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy; made a few more movies (starring in Mame in 1974); and attempted a final comeback in the 1986 ABC sitcom Life with Lucy, which lasted an ignominious eight weeks. But I Love Lucy lives on in reruns...