Here’s What the Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz Biopic Got Wrong, According to Their Daughter
Being the Ricardos got love from the critical community, with Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem garnering Oscar nominations for their portrayals of Desi Arnaz. But while the Academy loved Lucy, her real-life daughter believes that Being the Ricardos didn’t always tell the truth.
Lucy and Desi’s oldest child, Lucie Arnaz, consulted on the film but was frustrated when the filmmakers she hired stopped listening to her . “I tried to work on it and correct the incorrect parts, especially (Ball’s) relationship with the writers. She adored those people. They got along so well,” Arnaz said last week at a fundraiser on the Paramount lot, according to Remind Magazine. “None of that backstabbing, crazy, insulting stuff. That was such a crock of poop. It was so wrong.”
Misrepresenting Ball’s relationship with I Love Lucy’s writers was one misstep. Another plot line that the film got wrong? The “overly done” infighting between Vivian Vance and William Frawley, the actors who played Fred and Ethel. Arnaz believes the film overstated Vance’s issues with Frawley’s drinking.
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Director and writer Aaron Sorkin was dismissive when Lucie offered her perspective on what really happened. “He would listen,” she said, “but then he would say, ‘Well, what do you know? You were 15 months old.’”
Keith Thibodeaux, who played Little Ricky on I Love Lucy, also had problems with the film, he said at the event. When an interviewer asked him what he thought of Being the Ricardos, “I said, ‘You know, it’s well done and all that, but I just didn’t get it.”
Ironically, hiring Sorkin was Lucie’s idea in the first place. “I picked him,” she told The Palm Springs Post. “It was up to me to figure out and okay who the writer would be. He wasn’t the director. He was only the writer originally.”
Arnaz says her only objective was accuracy. “Why have Lucie Arnaz on board at all, or why buy the rights to two autobiographies and then mess with the facts?” she says. “It didn’t make any sense to me. Now I know you buy the rights so you can say, ‘I own them.’ Then you can switch them up any way you want because you own them.”
Sorkin insisted on creative license above all else, according to Arnaz. “He really wasn’t interested in the facts. He would flat-out say, ‘It’s a movie.’”
The children and grandchildren of I Love Lucy’s writers are still alive, which is one reason Lucie fought to portray the creative relationships behind the scenes accurately. “All I could do,” she said, “was say, ‘Sorry guys, I tried.’”
