No Desi, No ‘Lucy’ : New Movie on Ball, Arnaz Sets Author Piecing Together The Teaming That Made TV History

It was inevitable. A movie about Lucille Ball, the American icon, the Queen of Comedy, the First Lady of Television. A shoo-in, a sure-fire ratings-getter.

An earlier program--the Dec. 18, 1989, airing of the 1956 “I Love Lucy” Christmas episode--garnered CBS an 18.5 rating, placing it No. 6 on the Nielsen list for that week. Then on April 30, 1990, when CBS trotted out the long-lost “Lucy” pilot and built a one-hour special around it hosted by Lucie Arnaz, it topped the Nielsen chart for the week.

Can “Lucy & Desi: Before the Laughter,” airing Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS, fail? For more than 23 years, Lucille Ball reigned supreme at CBS, starring in three sitcoms (four if you count the hourlong “Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour,” 1957-60), while earning countless awards, mind-boggling ratings and setting standards for television comedy that 40 years later are hard to match.

Recognizing this, CBS assigned a $3.2-million budget to film-maker Larry Thompson, who made the two-hour TV movie after conducting a nationwide talent search last summer for the two actors who would play Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in a story set in the ‘40s. (The roles went to Frances Fisher and Maurice Benard.)

“Lucy & Desi” is not the story of “I Love Lucy.” Thompson, who also produced a television biography on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (“The Woman He Loved”), chose to concentrate on Lucy and Desi’s stormy relationship before their television careers--how they met, married, loved and battled.

There was a lot of Angst over the project, most of it from the Lucille Ball camp. Daughter Lucie felt it was too soon to do a movie about her parents, saying recently: “I read an early draft of the script and I just thought it wasn’t enough. I wanted to see a deeper story. I wanted to see what made these people tick. But it’ll only be on for one night and it’ll be off. Their story will be told again, I’m sure, by somebody else and maybe better.”

“Lucy & Desi” takes place on the evening of Saturday, Sept. 8, 1951, the date of the filming of the first episode of “I Love Lucy.” The bulk of the movie is flashbacks to the 1940s, leading up to the start of TV’s most celebrated series.

Some feel that the better story is how “I Love Lucy” went on the air. (Perhaps that was Thompson’s ingenious plan all along: a sequel).

It all began when CBS nixed Lucy’s idea of having her husband co-star with her in a TV version of her hit radio series “My Favorite Husband.”

“If (CBS chief William) Paley won’t accept us as a team,” 33-year-old Desi told Lucy in early 1950, “then let’s go on the road and test it. You go on tour with me and the band. We’ll work up an act and see what happens. If the public can accept us as a comedy team, then CBS can’t possibly ignore us.”

It sounded good to Lucy, 38, who wanted nothing more than to work with her husband of nine years in an effort to save their shaky marriage and, she hoped, start a family.

The Arnazes sought the help of an old fishing buddy of Desi’s, Pepito Perez, an internationally known performer (“The Spanish Clown”) who agreed to help fashion an act for them.

Lucy and Desi spent nearly a week in March, 1950, holed up in a hotel suite learning some original comic routines devised by Pepito and film legend Buster Keaton, Lucy’s mentor from MGM. These comedy bits would serve them well: They would become the focal point of the pilot a year later and be used in several episodes of “I Love Lucy.”

Some songs and husband-and-wife sketches written by two of Lucy’s radio writers, Bob Carroll Jr. and Madelyn Pugh, were added to the 20-minute act.

The vaudeville bits, which would play between sets of Desi’s rhumba band, opened at the Chicago Paramount Theatre on June 2, 1950. “After the first show, Desi and I looked at each other in wild surprise,” Lucille Ball recounted in “The ‘I Love Lucy’ Book.” “Well, I guess we can work together after all. We’re on our way!”

But after record-breaking stints in New York, Buffalo and Milwaukee the Arnazes decided to call off the tour. Lucy was pregnant and because she already had suffered one miscarriage in the ‘40s, she didn’t want to take any unnecessary chances on the road with an act as strenuous as this one. But it was not to be. Two weeks later, back at the Arnazes’ ranch in Northridge, Lucy lost the baby. It was a devasting blow both personally and professionally.

Nothing seemed to be going right for Lucy. Her movie career was all but at a standstill. Her only outlet was the radio show of which she was about to start the third season.

By the fall of 1950, Lucy had made a momentous decision: If she and Desi could not do a TV show together, then she would quit acting and travel with him. CBS did not budge.

Lucy’s spirits were bolstered around Christmas. She discovered she was pregnant again; their agent Don Sharpe called with the news that CBS finally had given the go-ahead for a TV pilot to star her and Desi; and Jess Oppenheimer, her radio producer-writer-director, had concocted the perfect premise for the TV outing.

Five months’ pregnant, Lucy stepped before the live TV cameras at Studio A at CBS headquarters on Sunset Boulevard. and Gower Street on March 2, 1951, to do the “audition film.” A 16mm print of the proceedings was made to show advertising agencies in New York in hopes of finding a sponsor willing to underwrite the cost of producing “I Love Lucy.”

Although the 34-minute test film did not include Fred and Ethel Mertz (they were added several months later), it proved to have enough potential to interest giant Phillip Morris in picking up the production tab.

The last-minute decision to do the series on film--allowing us to enjoy the reruns 40 years later--was made when the ad agency made a routine phone call asking when the Arnazes and others were moving to New York. Because nobody intended leaving Southern California for New York, everything came to a halt until Lucy pleaded with Desi to do something.

What Arnaz did was literally create a new way of doing TV shows--the so-called three-camera method still in existence.

With only two weeks left before the first episode needed to be filmed, a motion-picture studio had to be located that would allow Desilu to build the sort of stage the production required.

At the very last moment, on Aug. 30, 1951, a lease was signed for Stage 2 at General Service Studio at 1040 N. Las Palmas Ave. in Hollywood for $1,000 a week. Nine days later, on Sept. 8, 300 eager people waited single file along Romaine Street. Above them hung a sign that read “Desilu Playhouse.” When the doors opened at 7 p.m. and they found seats in massive bleachers that had just been erected 24 hours before, the audience had no idea that it was about to see television history in the making.

“Lucy & Desi: Before the Laughter,” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS.

Andrews wrote “The ‘I Love Lucy’ Book” (Doubleday) and co-authored “Loving Lucy” (St. Martin’s Press).