Lucille Ball Created ‘I Love Lucy’ to Stop Desi Arnaz’s Womanizing
I Love Lucy. The radio program My Favorite Husband had a similar premise to her later hit, featuring Ball as Liz Cooper, a young wife who stumbled through minor domestic conundrums that resulted from her harebrained schemes. Jess Oppenheimer, who’d later be one of the leading creative voices behind I Love Lucy, was the show’s head writer.
My Favorite Husband featured Oppenheimer’s vision of a “stage-struck schemer with an overactive imagination that got her into embarrassing situations.” Sound familiar? The radio show was reaching the peak of its popularity just as television took off. In 1947, fewer than 200,000 TV sets had been sold in the United States; by 1949, two million sets glowed in American living rooms. The emerging medium needed content, and CBS believed a filmed version of My Favorite Husband would score.
Radio had been a compromise for Ball, who still dreamed of movie stardom. Television, which in its early days featured amateurish productions delivered to blurry screens, was another step down the ladder. But Ball agreed to star in a television version of My Favorite Husband on one condition: Her TV husband would have to be played by her real-life spouse, Desi Arnaz, according to the biography Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television.
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Arnaz didn’t need a job. His movie career wasn’t going gangbusters, but he made a good living touring around the country with his band. That was the problem. While Lucy stayed home, Arnaz played theaters and stayed out all night, indulging in all of the usual vices. His infidelity with chorus girls was an open secret, “casual dalliances” that often showed up in the gossip pages.
To keep Arnaz at home and away from temptation, Ball had previously convinced Bob Hope to hire Desi as the bandleader for his radio show. Hope’s writers didn’t think too much of Arnaz as a comedian, and made him the frequent butt of the jokes. At least Arnaz took notes while watching Hope “rehearse the entire show, supervise the music, the costumes, the props, the sets.” That was a skill set he’d hone on I Love Lucy.
Lucy thought the show might save her marriage, but CBS wasn’t so sure Arnaz was husband material. The spouse in My Favorite Husband was an executive at a bank. “There was no way,” Arnaz said, “I could play that guy.”
To convince the network powers that a Lucy/Desi pairing could work, Arnaz suggested that he and Lucy develop a stage act as proof of concept. As a bonus, Ball would be on the road with her husband to keep him out of trouble. The act was a hit, “by far the best show of its kind I’ve ever seen,” said Hollywood Reporter’s Broadway columnist.
CBS still wasn’t sold, until Oppenheimer came up with this pitch: “Why don’t we do a show about a middle-class working stiff who works very hard at his job as a bandleader and likes nothing better than to come home at night and relax with his wife, who doesn’t like staying at home and is dying to get into show business herself?”
Lucy bought it. The network bought it. And Arnaz had a full-time job that sent him home to his wacky, redheaded wife every night.
