NEED TO KNOW
Desi Arnaz loved Lucille Ball right until the end.
The famed actor died on Dec. 2, 1986, but just two days before his death, he had a brief conversation on the phone with his ex-wife. Their daughter, Lucie Arnaz, was by her ailing father’s side when she called her famous mother, allowing the former husband and wife duo to have one final conversation.
“He was very, very sick. And I said, ‘I’m going to put him on the phone now, so say what you want to say,’ ” Lucie, 73, told CBS Sunday Morning. “And I just held the phone to his ear, and all I could hear her saying was, ‘I love you’, like five times in a row. And he listened, and he said, ‘I love you, too, honey.’ And then he said, ‘Good luck with your shows.’ ”
The day they last spoke was Nov. 30, which was their wedding anniversary, their daughter revealed.
Lucille, however, would get another surprise from her ex-husband just days later. As she was being celebrated at the Ninth Annual Kennedy Center Honors on Dec. 7, 1986, she discovered that Desi had written a tribute to her, which Robert Stack read on stage.
“I Love Lucy had just one mission: to make people laugh. Lucy gave it a rare quality,” the posthumous letter said. “She can perform the wildest, even the messiest, physical comedy without losing her feminine appeal. The New York Times asked me to divide the credit for its success between the writers, the directors and the cast. I told them, ‘Give Lucy 90% of the credit and divide the other 10% among the rest of us.’ ”
“Lucy was the show. Viv, Fred and I were just props, damn good props, but props never the less,” the letter continued. “P.S. I Love Lucy was never just a title.”
Clearly moved, the Three For Two actress was seen wiping tears away and getting emotional.
Lucille and Desi married in 1940, but the next few years were turbulent and filled with frequent fights, as he was routinely caught having affairs.
In chatting with CBS, however, their daughter argued that her father never had affairs of the heart.
“People say he had affairs. He never had an affair. He didn’t even know these dames’ names. They were hookers.” CBS correspondent Mo Rocca chimed in, asking, “They were transactional?”
“Yeah. He loved my mother, he loved his family,” Lucie replied. “It was a very unique, weird problem to have. And I think that’s the reason she stayed with him so long, is that she understood it. I don’t think I could do what she did, but somehow, at the time, with what they had, with what they needed from each other, they stuck it out as long as they could.”
Lucille and Desi ended their marriage and subsequently their hit television show, I Love Lucy, in 1960. Lucie was 8 years old at the time, and her younger brother Desi Jr. was 7.
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In the new book Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television, biographer Todd S. Purdum claimed that Lucille and Desi’s divorce was ruled invalid just hours after a judge signed it. According to Pardum, the couple was just one day away from officially divorcing when Desi gave the Stone Pillow actress a call, inviting her to a farewell dinner in Beverly Hills. The conversation went well, it seems, as Purdum writes that the two “wound up in bed.”
But the next morning, Lucille woke up in a frenzy, telling her estranged husband, “Oh, my God, I’m late,” before he asked, “Where are you going?”
“I told you, I’m divorcing you this morning,” Ball replied, before telling him she had to “go through with it,” knowing that press had gathered at the courthouse in anticipation.
“She went to court, got the divorce decree from the judge, and came right back and joined Desi in bed again — thus invalidating the breakup under California law, which had a one-year period banning cohabitation after a provisional decree,” Purdum writes. “Cuddled together, they read the afternoon papers announcing their split. After that, they went back to their Desilu ranch — and Desi started coming home on the weekends.”
The legendary actress died at age 77 on April 26, 1989.
