Desi Arnaz Jr. exposed: Desi Arnaz cheated on Lucille Ball the whole time. ht
Desi Arnaz Jr. exposed. Desi Ares cheated on Lucio Ball the whole time. The thing the son watched his whole life. Desi Ares Jr. was born into the most famous marriage in America. His birth was broadcast in its own way to 44 million people. His parents were the most beloved couple on television. His childhood home was to the outside world the living proof that [snorts] love and success could exist in the same place at the same time.
He knew something different. He knew it before he had words for it. He knew it in the way children always know things that adults believe they are successfully hiding. In the silences between arguments. In the way his mother’s face looked on certain mornings. in the sound of a front door closing too late at night.
Years later, after he had been through his own long destruction and rebuilt himself on the other side of it, Desi Ares Jr. would say things about his father and his family that careful, loyal children do not usually say, not out of bitterness. out of something more useful than bitterness.
The simple costly decision to tell the truth about what actually happened inside the house that everyone on the outside thought they understood. This is what he saw during the years that I love Lucy was the most watched show in America when their faces appeared on every magazine cover when their names were synonymous with the perfect American marriage.
Desi Ares was arranging to be with other women at a rate of two to three times per week. Not once, not during a drunken mistake on a lonely night on the road. Two to three times. every week while the cameras were rolling, while the laugh track was playing, while 40 million Americans were tuning in every Monday night to watch the most beloved couple on television.
January 1955, the set of I Love Lucy, a Monday morning rehearsal. Lucille Ball walked out of her dressing room holding a copy of a tabloid magazine called Confidential. She crossed the floor of the set, past the cameras, past the lighting rigs, past the entire cast and crew standing in silence, and she threw that magazine directly into her husband’s face.
Then she said loud enough for every single person on that set to hear, “Oh, hell, I could tell them worse than that.” That is not the sentence of a woman who just found out the truth. That is the sentence of a woman who has known the truth for a very long time and has spent years learning how to swallow it.
Before this video is over, I’m going to tell you about a phone call. It happened 31 years after that morning on the set. Desi Ares was dying. And what Lucille Ball said to him during that call after 26 years of divorce, after everything you’re about to hear will leave you not knowing what to feel.
But to understand that phone call, you need to understand the whole story first. Starting from the beginning, the way Desi Jr. lived it. Two people, one wrong decision. Lucille Ball was born on August 6th, 1911 in Jamestown, New York. Her father, Henry Ball, was 27 years old when he died suddenly of typhoid fever, leaving her mother pregnant with a second child and with almost no money.
Lucille was 3 years old. She remembered almost nothing from that day. Almost. The one image that stayed with her, that followed her for the rest of her life, was a bird trapped inside the house, beating its wings against the walls over and over, unable to find its way out. She never shook her fear of birds after that.
It sounds like a small detail. It isn’t. After her father died, her mother eventually remarried and left to find work. Lucille and her younger brother Fred were sent to live with their grandparents, a strict Swedish couple with hard rules and no patience for vanity. There was exactly one mirror in the house.
When Lucille was caught looking at herself in it, she was scolded harshly. By the time she was a teenager, she was already performing in local shows. By the time she was 14, she had fallen hard for a 21-year-old named Johnny Devidita, who was known around town for getting into trouble. Her mother, desperate to pull her away from him, scraped together enough money to send her to New York to study at the John Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts.
That school would go on to train Betty Davis. Lucille lasted one term. Her teachers told her directly that she didn’t have what it took. She was dismissed. She later said, “All I learned in drama school was how to be frightened.” She went back to New York anyway. She modeled. She handed out cigarettes as a promotional girl for Chesterfield.
She changed her name to Diane Belmont and tried Broadway, landing chorus line roles, only to be fired almost immediately from three different productions in a row. She contracted dramatic fever and was sidelined for nearly 2 years. She came back and started over. In 1933, she landed a tiny uncredited role in a Hollywood film.
She was one of the Goldwin girls. She had no lines. Nobody knew her name, but she was in Hollywood. And once she was there, she did not look back. By the late 1930s, she was working steadily at RKO. Not as a star, not yet, but as a reliable, hard-working actress who showed up on time and knew how to make a scene work.
She had a reputation for precision and for being difficult to push around, which in 1930s Hollywood meant she got pushed around quite a lot. She was 28 years old when she walked onto the set of Too Many Girls in 1940 and first met Desi Ares. Desidario Alberto Arnaz de Archer III was born on March 2nd, 1917 in Santiago de Kuba.
His father was the youngest mayor in the history of the city. His family owned three cattle ranches, a large manor house, and a vacation mansion on a private island. He grew up with money and with the unquestioned authority that money gives you in a small city. In 1933, when Desi was 16 years old, the Cuban government was overthrown.
His father was arrested and imprisoned. Every piece of property the family owned was confiscated. When his father was eventually released, there was nothing left to go back to. The family fled to Miami, Florida with almost nothing. What Desi Ares did next is genuinely impressive. He was a teenager in a foreign country speaking limited English starting from zero.
He taught himself to play the conga drum. He formed a small band. He talked his way into better rooms, better clubs, better cities. By the time he was 20, he had his own orchestra. By 21, he was performing in New York. By 23, he was on Broadway. and he was extraordinary. He was also, by every account from people who knew him at the time, a young man who had spent his entire adult life on the road, surrounded by women who were interested in him, and who had never once seen a reason to say no to any of them. When Desi first saw Lucille Ball on the set of Too Many Girls, she had just come straight from filming a fight scene for another movie. She had a fake black eye, smeared makeup, and her hair was completely disheveled. His first reaction was to turn to the director and say, “She’s going to be the Aenu. You’re out of your mind.” An hour
later, when he saw her in costume for their film, he could not believe it was the same person. He was already engaged to someone else at the time. That detail did not slow him down. Within days, they were spending every available hour together. Within weeks, Lucille Ball, a woman who had never been easily swept off her feet, who had seen enough of Hollywood to be deeply suspicious of charm, was completely gone over this 23-year-old Cuban musician.
Lucille knew exactly who Desi was. Her friends warned her. His reputation preceded him to every room he walked into. When she found out he had secretly gone to see his ex-girlfriend, Betty Greybel, she drove directly to the apartment he shared with his mother, walked in without knocking, and called him a Cuban son of a in front of his mother.
Loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Desi’s response was to propose marriage. He called her the next morning and said, “I have everything arranged to marry you tomorrow morning if you would like to marry me.” He had already found a judge already arranged for a permit already mapped out the drive to Greenwich, Connecticut.
They eloped on November 30th, 1940. Desi forgot the ring. They used a cheap brass one from a Woolworth’s five and dime. He replaced it later, but the first ring they were married with cost about 50. Everyone who knew them gave it a year and a half at the outside. In a 1980 interview with People magazine, Lucille herself admitted, “Everybody gave it about a year and a half.
I gave it 6 weeks. There’s something you need to sit with here.” Lucille Ball was not a naive woman. She was not a young girl swept up in a romantic fantasy. She was 29 years old. She had lived in Hollywood for 7 years. She had been around long enough to know exactly what kind of man she was marrying. She knew.
She married him anyway. Maybe you’ve known someone like that. Maybe you’ve been someone like that. The person who sees clearly, understands exactly what they’re walking into, and walks in anyway. Because the pull of someone is stronger than the clarity of your own vision. Lucille Ball was not an exception.
[music] She was just the version of that story that 40 million people were watching every week without knowing what they were actually seeing. But before she signed that marriage certificate, there was something she didn’t yet know. And by the time she found out, turning back was no longer a clean option. The years before the cameras, the marriage almost didn’t survive its first year.
Desi went back on the road immediately after the wedding. Lucille stayed in Hollywood, continuing to work. They saw each other in the gaps between his touring schedule and her filming schedule, which is to say not very much. Their ranch in the San Fernando Valley, which they had bought and named Desiloo after themselves, became the place they would meet between absences.
In 1941, Lucille became pregnant for the first time. She miscarried. Desi wrote about it in his autobiography years later, saying she was completely shattered, that she felt, in his words, unfit, unable. He described how deeply it affected her. Then he went back on tour.
In May 1943, Desi was drafted into the army. He was stationed close to home at Van Ny, California, close enough to come back regularly. Instead, he visited mistresses. Lucille found out through the tabloids the same way the rest of the country would later find out about everything. In retaliation, according to accounts from people who knew them at the time, she began seeing other men as well.
By 1944, Desi had essentially stopped coming home. In September of that year, Lucille Ball filed for divorce. The press covered it heavily. She showed up at the courthouse, completed the paperwork, and walked out straight into Desi Ares’s arms. One reporter wrote that she had walked out of court into Ares’s arms. The divorce was never legally finalized.
They reconciled over dinner. Desi promised to do better. They went home together. She had experienced multiple miscarriages by this point. She had filed for divorce once. She had watched her husband choose other women over her again and again and she went home with him. What happened next is the most important moment in this entire story and almost nobody talks about it this way.
In 1949, Lucille Ball and Desi Ares stood in a Catholic church and renewed their wedding vows. Desi made specific promises. Lucille, by every account, wanted desperately to believe him. Around the same time, CBS approached Lucille about bringing her hit radio show, My Favorite Husband, to television.
She had one condition, and it was non-negotiable. Desi had to play her husband on screen. CBS pushed back hard. Their argument was that American audiences wouldn’t accept a Cuban band leader as the husband of a quote redblooded American girl. They were genuinely worried about losing their sponsor, Philip Morris cigarettes. They told her the accent alone was a problem. Lucille refused to move.
What almost no one mentions when this story is told is the real reason Lucille wanted Desi on screen with her. a reason that has nothing to do with artistic vision or creative partnership. Her friend and colleague Bob Weissoff later told People magazine directly. She knew that if Desi went back on the road with the band, [music] he would be with other women constantly.
She wanted him at home working with her where she could see him. She wanted him at home where she felt the marriage would have a better chance of lasting. Weissoff said that was the decision. That was the calculation. She used her professional leverage, the biggest opportunity of her career, to try to keep her husband from cheating on her.
Think about that carefully because that is not a business decision. That is an act of desperation dressed up as creative vision. And it worked. And it almost broke everything. To prove to CBS that they had chemistry in front of a live audience, Lucille and Desi put together a vaudeville act and toured the country in the summer of 1951, performing together on stage every night. Audiences loved them.
CBS relented. I Love Lucy premiered on October 15th, 1951. Within months, 40 million Americans were watching every week. In 1952, Lucille became pregnant with their son, Desi Jr., and rather than hide the pregnancy, which was the standard practice in the 1950s television. They wrote it directly into the show.
The episode where Lucy gives birth to little Ricky aired on the same night Lucille Ball delivered her actual son in real life. 44 million people watched that episode, more than had it tuned in for President Eisenhower’s inauguration that same year. The show won five Emmy awards. It was the first scripted television program shot on 35 mm film in front of a live studio audience.
Desi, who was sharper behind the scenes than almost anyone gave him credit for, had pushed CBS to shoot on film rather than live broadcast, which meant the footage could be preserved and rebroadcast. He then secured the rights to all the episodes. At a time when reruns didn’t exist as a commercial concept, [music] he was already thinking about the value of owning the archive.
He would eventually sell those episodes back to CBS for millions of dollars. They were a phenomenon. They were a business empire. They were oncreen the most perfect married couple in America. Offscreen, Desi was drinking more than he ever had before. According to Desyloo Productions executive Martin Leeds, the success of the show had created a wound that Desi never fully acknowledged.
No matter how hard he worked or what a great businessman he was, Leeds said she was the clown. The show was built around her. As I Love Lucy grew bigger, Desi’s drinking grew with it, and so did everything else that came with the drinking. The part of the story nobody tells. Here is where the story gets complicated in a way that most retellings skip over entirely.
because this is not a simple story about a bad man and an innocent woman and pretending it is would be a disservice to both of them. In 1953, Lucille Ball was summoned to testify before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. The accusation was that she was a member of the Communist Party.
The actual history is this. In 1936, when Lucille was 25 years old, her grandfather asked her to register as a communist so she could vote for a family friend who was running for local city council. She did it as a favor. She had no involvement with the party whatsoever. No meetings, no affiliations, no ideology.
It was a bureaucratic act done out of family loyalty. But in 1953, at the absolute height of the Cold War, with McCarthyism tearing through Hollywood and destroying careers overnight, that 1936 registration was enough. The press got hold of the story. The Philip Morris Company, I Love Lucy’s sponsor, began preparing to pull their funding.
CBS executives were in full panic mode. The show itself was in danger of being cancelled before the new season could even begin. 20 years of work. Everything Lucille Ball had built. Everything she had fought and failed and gotten back up and fought again to create, it was about to disappear. Desi Ares walked out onto the stage of the Desiloo Playhouse in front of 300 studio audience members before a taping.
He looked out at the crowd and he said, “The only thing read about Lucy is her hair, and even that is not legitimate.” The audience laughed. They applauded. The crisis ended. The man who had been quietly destroying his marriage for years, who was drinking his way through his own success, who had been with other women throughout their entire relationship, stood up in public when it actually mattered and saved his wife’s career when no one else could or would.
This is the part of the story that changes everything. Not because it excuses anything, but because it explains why she stayed. Because the truth about Desi Ares is not that he was entirely terrible. The truth is that he was capable of extraordinary love and extraordinary loyalty and also capable of extraordinary selfishness and cruelty sometimes within the same week.
The truth is that he was both things fully at the same time and so was she. That combination, the man who would betray you and also be the only person in the room willing to fight for you is the most dangerous kind of person to love. Because you can never leave cleanly because the betrayal is always entangled with the rescue.
That is what kept Lucille Ball in this marriage for 20 years. Not weakness, not blindness. The terrible complicated reality of loving someone who is genuinely irreplaceable to you in certain ways, even as they are genuinely destroying you in others. Desi Ares Jr. understood this better than almost anyone.
He saw both versions of his father simultaneously from childhood onward. the man who was magnetic and warm and genuinely talented and the man who came home late and drunk and left his mother alone with everything. He said years later that his father’s charisma was completely real. The damage was also completely real. Both things lived in the same person and growing up with that, he said, was something you never quite finish processing.
But in 1955, what his father was doing behind his mother’s back stopped being a private matter between two people. It became something that every person in America with 50 Cents and a news stand nearby could read about in explicit detail. January 1955, everything breaks open. Confidential magazine was the most notorious tabloid publication in 1950s Hollywood.
It trafficked in exactly the kind of stories that studios paid enormous amounts of money to suppress and it ran them anyway. It had destroyed careers and marriages and reputations for years. In January of 1955, it turned its attention to I love Lucy. The headline read, “Does desi really love Lucy?” The article described Desi Ares as [music] an expert at philandering.
It included a specific incident. During a night at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a friend of Desi’s had contacted what the article described as one of Hollywood’s top door-to-door escort services and ordered two women [music] described in the article as medium rare. Desi Ares did not deny it. According to accounts preserved from the people closest to him at the time, his response to being told his wife was upset was, “What’s she upset about? I don’t take out other broads.
I just take out hookers.” What makes this worse is the scale of it. In 2012, a man named Scott Bowers published a memoir called Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Lives of the Stars. Bowers had spent decades as an intermediary arranging private encounters for Hollywood’s biggest stars.
He was not a tabloid writer making things up. He was a man who had been in the rooms. In the book and in subsequent interviews, he claimed that during the height of I Love Lucy’s popularity, he was regularly arranging for Desi Ares to meet women at a frequency of two to three times per week continuously throughout the run of the show.
He also described the moment Lucille Ball confronted him at a Hollywood party in front of other people. She walked up to him and publicly accused him of procuring for her husband. She did not lower her voice. She did not wait for a private moment. She said it in front of the room. That tells you something about where she was by 1955.
She had moved past the point of trying to handle things quietly. She was past the point of pretending she didn’t know. She was somewhere further along, somewhere harder and more exhausted, where the performance of not knowing had become more costly than the humiliation of saying it out loud. The breaking point, what she said on the set.
Charles Pomerance was Lucille Ball’s personal publicist. He was present on the set of I Love Lucy on the morning that the confidential article broke. He later told the full story to People magazine and it has been confirmed by multiple sources over the decades since. Lucille Ball received a copy of the magazine.
She took it into her dressing room and closed the door. She was alone in there for some time. No one outside could hear anything. Then she opened the door, walked back onto the set, and threw the magazine directly into Desi Ares’s face in front of the entire cast and crew. She said, “Oh, hell, I could tell them worse than that.
” Let that sentence live for a moment. I could tell them worse than that. She is not denying it. She is not defending him. She is not even angry in the way of someone who has just been betrayed. She is announcing clearly and calmly to everyone present that what is in that magazine is only a fraction of what she knows that the truth she has been holding is heavier than the truth the tabloid was willing to print.
This is not a woman having a breakdown. This is a woman who has been managing an impossible situation for years. who has become so practiced at containment that when the container finally cracks, what comes out sounds almost like a joke. That same morning, outside the studio doors, 40 million Americans had no idea any of this was happening.
They were waiting for the next episode. They were telling their friends that Lucy and Ricky were the best thing on television. They were laughing at the couple on the screen and feeling the way you do with certain shows. that somehow these two people represented something good about the world. Desi Ares Jr.
was two years old that January. He was too young to understand any of it in words. But the house he was growing up in was already not the house the rest of the country believed it to be. What the son saw, what it cost him. Desi Ares Jr. grew up in a house that the public believed to be something close to perfect.
What actually happened inside that house was something very different and he has said so directly in interviews conducted across several decades. He has described his father with a clarity that only someone who loved a person and was also genuinely harmed by that person can manage. He said that his father’s musical talent was extraordinary and completely real.
He said his father’s warmth, when it was present, was unlike anything he’d encountered anywhere else. He also said that his father’s drinking escalated throughout his childhood in ways that made the household increasingly difficult to be inside, and that the fighting between his parents, which his sister Lucy later confirmed was constant and loud, was a defining feature of his early years.
His sister, Lucy Ares, spoke to Closer Weekly magazine about it decades later with similar directness. She said there had been a lot of anger and screaming. It was just awful. She described watching their father’s relationship with alcohol escalate in direct proportion to the deterioration of their parents’ marriage.
The more stressed my father became, the more he would drink. The worse their relationship was, the more he would drink just to show her. Just to show her. Desi Jr. grew up inside that dynamic. He grew up in the house where his mother was performing the role of the perfect wife for the cameras 6 days a week while the actual marriage around him fell apart.
He grew up with a father whose charm and talent and warmth were all completely real and whose drinking and infidelity and emotional destruction were equally real present in the same person at the same time. What Desi Jr. has said about this period is not angry. It is something more considered [music] than anger.
He has talked about watching his father, about admiring him and being confused by him simultaneously. about spending hours in his father’s recording studio as a child, soaking in the music, loving those hours, and then going home to a version of that same man who was somewhere else entirely by evening. He said he idolized his father’s musical gifts.
He also said he watched those gifts curdle under the weight of what his father was doing to himself and to the family. When Desi Jr. was a teenager. He started using drugs. It began as experimentation the way it often does and then it became something else. By the time he was 23, he had by his own account experimented with LSD, cocaine, quaudes, measculine, and marijuana.
He described reaching a point where he was paying doctors directly for prescription drugs. He said, “For one thing, I was so stubbornly sure I had all the answers. For another, drugs were taking over my life.” When he was 25 years old, his doctors showed him a brain scan. They told him that the biology they were looking at, the physical structure of his brain, as revealed in the scan, corresponded to someone in their 60s. He was 25.
He has never blamed his father for this directly. That is worth noting. He has never drawn a straight line from what happened in his parents’ marriage to what happened to him and said, “This is your fault. He is more careful than that and more honest.” He has said that the pressures of being the children of two enormous public figures were real and specific and unlike anything most people encounter.
He has said that the instability inside the house was real. He has said that he made his own choices and owns them. But here is what Desi Ares Jr. has also made clear. In the years since he got sober and rebuilt his life, the cost of growing up in silence about true things is not zero. It collects. It finds somewhere to go.
In any household, in any family, anywhere, when parents can’t say what needs to be said, when the things that are most true are the things that are most forbidden to name, the children feel all of it without having any words for what they’re feeling. They carry the weight of silences they were never meant to understand.
They find ways to put it somewhere. Desi Jr. found his ways. They were the ways available to a young man with too much access and not enough of what actually mattered in a house that looked fine from the outside and was not fine from the inside. He survived it. He went to rehab. He rebuilt himself. The brain scan was the wakeup call that finally broke through the wall he had built.
He found his way back to music, to performing, to a life that was genuinely his own. He married Amy Laura Bargiel in 1987 and they had a daughter together and by all accounts he found in that relationship the stability that had never existed in the house he grew up in. When Amy died of cancer in 2015 after 28 years of marriage, he was by her side.
[music] He turned out fine in the way that people who have been through very hard things sometimes turn out fine. Not despite what happened to them, but changed by it in ways that eventually become something useful. But the cost was real. The damage was real. And it didn’t start with him. It started before he was born in [clears throat] the decision his mother made to build a television show around her marriage in the hope that it would save the marriage.
The show outlasted the marriage by over 60 years. The marriage didn’t make it to 1960. The divorce that took two decades to arrange. Here is the part of the story that almost never gets told correctly. In the popular version, Lucille Ball decided she’d had enough and walked away. That is not quite what happened. According to accounts preserved in biographies and from people who were close to both of them, it was Desi Ares who finally said the thing that needed to be said.
In a large argument late in 1959, he told Lucille directly, “File for divorce.” He made specific promises. He would hire a lawyer for her. He would handle the financial arrangements in a way that protected her. He would tell the press that she had been the one to initiate the separation so that the public narrative would preserve her dignity rather than expose the full reality of what had happened.
Lucille Ball, by multiple accounts, could not bring herself to do it on her own. She had filed once before in 1944 and reconciled before the papers were finalized. 15 years later, it was Desi himself who had to walk her toward the door. On March 3rd, 1960, after the final episode they would ever film together had been completed, Lucille Ball filed for divorce.
The legal grounds cited were extreme mental cruelty. They did not hire lawyers for the actual negotiation. They worked it out between themselves. Desi sold her his shares of Desyloo Productions. She became the sole owner of the company they had built together. In doing so, she became the first woman to run a major Hollywood production company.
Under her leadership, Desylu would greenlight Star Trek and Mission Impossible. She would eventually sell the company to Golf and Western for $17 million. In his autobiography, A Book, published in 1977, Desi Ares admitted to having been unfaithful throughout their marriage. He described the final period of their time together in precise and unscentimental terms, that they had not shared a bedroom for nearly a year before the divorce, that he had begun looking for what he needed elsewhere, that by the end neither of them was capable of giving the other what they had once promised. He did not frame himself as a victim. He owned what he had done. Whether that ownership came too late to matter is a question only Lucille Ball could have answered, and she never did. at least not publicly. The man who had caused 20 years of damage made one decent gesture on the
way out. He made sure she left with her head up. Whether that was love or guilt or just the final competent act of a man who understood optics, nobody knows. Maybe he didn’t know either. Desi Ares Jr. was 7 years old when his parents divorced. He has described that period carefully without melodrama as a significant shift.
Not because the fighting stopped, but because the particular silence that replaced it was its own kind of weight. You spend years watching two people destroy each other. And then one day you’re told it’s over. And you discover that over doesn’t mean gone. It means rearranged. November 30th, 1986.
After the divorce, both of them moved forward. Desi Ares married a woman named Edith M. Hirs in 1963. By all accounts, it was a good marriage, quieter, more stable, less spectacular than what he’d had with Lucille, but real. Lucille married a comedian named Gary Morton in 1961. He was, by her account, easier to be with than anyone she’d known before.
They stayed in each other’s lives, not closely, not constantly, but they stayed. Their children grew up knowing that their parents, despite everything, had chosen to remain kind to each other. Lucy Ares later said they stayed friends till the better end, and that was good for the kids. Desi Jr.
maintained his relationship with his father through those years. He has spoken about visiting him, about playing music with him in his later life, about the version of his father that existed once the marriage and the show and the machinery of the empire they had built together were no longer present to distort everything.
He has said there was something cleaner about his father in those years, sadder in some ways, but cleaner. In 1985, Edith Hirs died of cancer. Desi, who had been sober for years, was alone for the first time in a long time. In 1986, Lucille Ball called Desi to wish him a happy 69th birthday. During that call, she found out he had been diagnosed with lung cancer.
According to their daughter, Lucy, the news devastated her mother completely. Desi chose to stop treatment. He moved into his son Desi Jr.’s home in Delmare, California to spend his remaining time. Read that again. He moved into his son’s home. The boy who had grown up watching everything. The young man who had spent years destroying himself trying to find somewhere to put what he had witnessed.
Desi Ares at the end of his life came to his son’s house and Desi Jr. took him in. About a month before the end, Lucille flew to California and came to see him. Lucy Ares described this visit in the Amazon Prime documentary Lucy and Desi, for which she had provided access to never-beforeheard recordings of her parents.
She said that during the visit, she set up a television in her father’s room in [music] Desi Jr.’s house and played old episodes of I Love Lucy. She did not go into the room with them. She stood outside the door and listened. She heard them laughing together. When Lucille left to go back to Los Angeles, she cried the entire drive home.
A few days later, Lucy called her mother. She told her he doesn’t have much time. If there’s anything you want to say to him, now is when you say it. Lucille Ball picked up the phone and called to Rex-husband. Lucy held the receiver to her father’s ear, and Lucille Ball, 26 years after she had signed the divorce papers, after everything this story has described, after all of it, did not say anything complex. She did not summarize.
She did not explain. She did not list grievances or offer forgiveness or try to resolve anything that had remained unresolved for decades. She said one thing over and over. I love you. I love you. I love you, Desi. Desi Ares, who was dying, whispered back, “I love you, too, honey. Good luck with your show.
” 2 days later, on December 2nd, 1986, he died. He was 69 years old. He died in his son’s home. Desi Ares Jr. was there. Lucy Ares, sitting with that memory afterward, realized something. she had not noticed in the moment. The date of that phone call was November 30th, 1986, the 46th anniversary of the day they were married.
Nobody knows whether Lucille Ball remembered that when she picked up the phone. Nobody knows whether she chose that date deliberately or whether she was simply calling when she had the courage to call and the calendar had arranged itself around her without her awareness. But if she knew, if she knew it was their anniversary when she dialed, then after 26 years of being apart, after two new marriages and two full separate lives, she called him on that day and said nothing except that she loved him.
What stays? Lucille Ball attended Desi Ares’s funeral. She sat with her children, with Lucy, with Desi Jr. she cried. When reporters asked her to say something about the man she had spent 20 years with, she called him a great great showman and a great part of their innovation in the business.
She did not call him a good husband because he was not. Lucille Ball died on April 26th, 1989. She was 77 years old. A heart attack sudden in the early morning. She had outlived Desi by less than 3 years. Desi Ares Jr. has spent the years since then doing something that is in its own way remarkable.
He has preserved his parents’ legacy honestly, not as a myth, not as a cleaned up version of what they were, but as the real thing, complicated and human and worth understanding. He served on the board of the Lucille Ball Desi Ares Center in Jamestown, New York. He performed his father’s music at the Library of Congress.
He accepted awards on behalf of his mother at televised ceremonies, standing in front of cameras that once broadcast the fiction his parents performed for the world and saying true things about who they actually were. He is the son of both of them. He carries both of them. and what he has chosen to do with that.
To speak clearly about what he witnessed, to preserve what was genuinely great about them without pretending the rest didn’t happen is its own kind of answer to the question his childhood asked him. In 49 years of knowing each other, 20 years of marriage, 26 years of divorce, and one phone call that happened to land on their wedding anniversary, Lucille Ball never once called Desi Ares a good husband because he [music] wasn’t.
But he was still the last person she wanted to say, “I love you” to before he closed his eyes. And she was still the last voice he heard. That is not a happy ending. It is not a cautionary tale exactly either. It is something harder than both of those. A true story about two people who built something extraordinary together, who hurt each other in ways that lasted decades, who could not be what the other person needed and could not fully let go of each other either.
There is no clean lesson here, no simple moral about what love should look like or what it shouldn’t. There is only what actually happened, which was messy and painful and human and real in a way that the show they made together, perfect and polished and funny and beloved, was never allowed to be. Somewhere there is still a version of Lucille Ball and Desi Ares standing on a stage together making 40 million people laugh. The show runs in syndication.
It has run continuously since 1951. You can watch it right now if you want to. The bird is still beating its wings against the walls. If this story made you think of someone, you probably already know what that means.