Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television

For readers of a certain age, the name Desi Arnaz probably conjures up an immediate association: his iconic role as Ricky Ricardo, the long-flustered husband of Lucy in I Love Lucy,

But Arnaz’s story does not begin and end with Lucy. His extraordinary journey from Cuban refugee to self-made showman, movie star, TV trailblazer, and ultimately, entrepreneur and visionary could fill a book.

Luckily for us, someone has written that book: Todd Purdum, whose revelatory biography, Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television, gives its subject long-overdue acknowledgement and appreciation. Arnaz spent much of his public life in the shadow of his wife, who in 1996 was named by TV Guide the greatest TV star of all time. He, early on, was derisively referred to as “Mr. Ball.”

The Arnaz story contains multitudes, Purdum, the author of Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution, told The Saturday Evening Post in a phone interview. “The paradox is he’s a foreigner who became the centerpiece of a great story,” he said.

As an entertainer, Arnaz influenced myriad artists, from John Leguizamo to Pee-wee Herman. As an entrepreneur, he changed the way television shows were produced. But “invented television?” To quote Ricky Ricardo’s immortal catchphrase, Mr. Purdum has some “’splainin’ to do.”

Donald Liebenson: What inspired you to write a biography about Desi Arnaz?

Todd Purdum: I’m 65, so I take it for granted that everyone knows who Lucy and Desi are, but I had a sobering experience with a very bright, early 30-something child of friends who drew a blank when I mentioned Desi. I said he was the husband of Lucille Ball, and she said, “Oh, Arrested Development.” I said that was a character named Lucille Bluth. But the answer as to “what,” is that in 2020, during the pandemic, I was involuntarily liberated from my job at The Atlantic and looking for a book idea. A college friend of mine, a wonderful actor and writer named Doug McGrath, said, “Everybody knows about Lucy, you should write about Desi.” Long story short, Desi’s daughter, Lucie Arnaz, always felt her father deserved more credit. She was, at the time, tied up with what became the film Being the Ricardos and was constrained from cooperating with any other project. She later invited me to her house in Palm Springs where she has a meticulously organized archive, and she gave me cart blanche.

DL: What did Being the Ricardos get right about Desi?

TP: I thought Javier Bardem was very effective. He captured Desi’s charm and intensity. It showed he was the brains of the operation behind the scenes. Desi was extremely attractive in every way, just a very live wire. It’s clear that he and Lucy fell in love in an almost thunderstruck way. He just broke her heart, but I don’t think she ever stopped loving him.

Trailer for Being the Ricardos (Uploaded to YouTube by Prime Video)

DL: How did he resist typecasting once he came to Hollywood?

TP: He never really fit the stereotype that Ricardo Montalbán or César Romero filled as the Latin lothario. He was more a go-getter, a bundle of energy. When he was young and new to Hollywood he wanted to be like Mickey Rooney. Like Mickey, he could sing, do drama, comedy and music.

DL: You write that his Hollywood career never really flourished. Neither did Lucy’s, though she was more prolific.

TP: He gave a good dramatic performance in Bataan, an all-star movie with Robert Taylor, but he never got the movie roles he wanted. When he came back from service in World War II, Ricardo Montalbán had come to the studio. His moment had passed and he thought, “What can I do instead?” Lucy was in the same boat. When she met him in the 1940s, she had already made 60 movies. She was 40 when I Love Lucy started, and 40 for a woman in Hollywood then and now is a dangerous age. She was steadily working, but it was clear she would never be an A-list star. It must have been interesting in the social hierarchy of Hollywood that these two people who had not been on top became Hollywood royalty by virtue of their success in television.

DL:  Desi, of course, did not invent television. Why did you title your book The Man Who Invented Television?

TP: I borrowed that line from an episode from NPR’s Planet Money. Its hyperbolic, the title, but Desi certainly was very instrumental in inventing the modern way that television is produced. It’s an accident of history that the show started at a time when you couldn’t have a coast-to-coast television signal. Most television was centered in New York and went live to two-thirds of the country. People on the West Coast could only see a cruddy kinescope image that had been filmed off a television monitor and shipped for later broadcast. Desi wanted to film episodes of I Love Lucy on 35mm. CBS, already skeptical about Desi starring in the show, said the cost would come out of his paycheck. Desi did the math and said okay as long as he and Lucy could own the negatives.

They had to solve a host of creative problems. They hired Academy Award-winning cinematographer Karl Freund, who had to light effectively for close ups, wide shots and long shots so the actors’ reactions to the comedy could be captured in real time.

DL: So, Desi revolutionized television is more like it.

TP:  He revolutionized television. He didn’t do it alone, but he was the head of a team that he assembled. For the epilogue of the book, I talked to people like Peter Roth, the longtime head of television at Warner Bros. He said there’s nothing like the excitement of a live audience’s reaction to comedy. When people watch an episode of Friends or The Big Bang Theory, they are in debt to Desi Arnaz.

Scene from an I Love Lucy episode (Uploaded to YouTube by I Love Lucy)

DL: Fred Allen used to joke that television was a medium because nothing was well done. Did I Love Lucy’s phenomenal success help to remove that stigma?

TP: The fact the TV could be filmed and didn’t have to be performed live made it suddenly attractive. All sorts of stars would come to visit the set and see the method they were using. Certainly, they owned their IP [intellectual property]. When you own the content, you have a lot of power. Lucy and Desi were performers and moguls. Their studio, Desilu, became a landlord and producer of other television programming. Eventually, they sold I Love Lucy episodes to CBS for over $5 million and they used that nest egg to buy RKO and become the biggest studio in Hollywood for television.

DL: What are other aspects of Desi’s cultural contributions that most impressed you?

TP: We are living with Desi’s legacy in all sorts of ways we may not immediately grasp. Desi was a real pioneer for diversity in cultural life. He was a great popularizer of Latin music [“Babalu” was his signature showstopper], and he fueled the conga dance craze. He did not take no for an answer when the gatekeepers at CBS or the sponsor Philip Morris said they didn’t want to see this heavily accented guy as the husband of this red-headed American girl. He just kept plugging away. Lo and behold, he became universally accepted as an all-American guy. He was proud of his Cuban heritage. The writers also learned early on that his accent was played for laughs, but only Lucy could make fun of it. If others made fun of it, it seemed mean spirited.

DL: What does Desi’s story have to teach us in 2025? What do you hope readers take away from it?

TP: I do hope readers take away a reminder that one of the great things about our country is that it is made up of all kinds of people. On the surface, Desi was not the sort of person one thought would be welcome in millions of homes in the 1950s. But he was embraced. Desi’s is a universal story of perseverance: don’t give up if someone slams the door in your face; find a way through. That’s what Desi did repeatedly. He had to flee his country, and the dislocation haunted him for the rest of his life. His willingness to risk what he did in his career probably came out of a mindset that he had recovered after losing everything so he might as well bet the house and see if he wins. For much of his life, it worked for him.

Ultimately, I just find his to be a good human story of a very interesting guy who walked across the culture in a transformative time. Revolutionaries come in all kinds of packages.