Book Review: Desi Arnaz biography highlights triumphs of Lucy's favorite foil
For musician and actor Desi Arnaz, that shadow belonged to Lucille Ball, his wife and co-star on the ground-breaking 1950s sitcom 'I Love Lucy.' Etched in television history are the images of Lucy falling on her rear while stomping grapes at a winery, Lucy overwhelmed by a conveyor belt of chocolates, and Lucy acting nonchalant as movie star William Holden lights up her fake nose instead of her cigarette. Desi seems as important as the cone is to the ice cream.
Not only was Arnaz his wife's straight man, he endured non-stop mocking of his Cuban heritage on screen and off. In fact, he was a rare Latino on American screens, big and small, and played a successful husband and father, not a gangster or peon. His character achieved some degree of immortality in the catchphrase, 'Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do!'
'Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television,' Todd S. Purdum's deeply researched, insightful and enjoyable biography, gives Arnaz his due as an entertainer and a savvy businessman. With help, Arnaz envisioned, assembled and led the transformation that provided early television production its bedrock.
Arnaz (1917-1986) was the only child of a prominent family in Santiago, his father the mayor and a member of the Cuban national assembly. The 1933 revolution forced the privileged family to flee to the United States — their home set on fire, their cattle herd slaughtered and the father jailed for months. Arnaz spoke little English when he began attending high school in Miami and took any kind of work to earn some money.
Show business was an unlikely pursuit given that Arnaz couldn't read music, but the handsome and energetic young man could sing and play guitar and the conga drum. Soon he was working in New York with the popular band leader Xavier Cugat and turning the conga line into a dance craze. He was cast in a 1939 Broadway musical, 'Too Many Girls,' and sent to Hollywood for the film version. At RKO studios, he met his future wife and co-star, then a veteran of dozens of uncredited and supporting roles and struggling to break out.
Had either Arnaz or Ball been more successful in films in the 1940s, they would not have turned to the newborn medium of television. Had their marriage not been rife with problems — mainly their separate careers plus his womanizing and drinking — Ball might not have demanded that Arnaz be cast when her radio show, 'My Favorite Husband,' was transferred to TV in 1951. In that sense 'I Love Lucy' was designed to save their marriage.
The show turned out to be the innovative outlet Arnaz needed. The industry norm was a show broadcast live in New York sans audience and recorded with a film camera pointed at a TV monitor. Arnaz insisted that 'Lucy' episodes be filmed before an audience in Los Angeles. Film meant higher image quality and that episodes could be shown at any time and later repeated — the idea of a 'rerun' was new — and sold for syndication around the country and the world. Three cameras worked in sync and the show was presented like a play. An audience necessitated a redesigned studio placing seats in bleachers for an unobstructed view.
All this became the new standard for a situation comedy and jump-started the move of television production from East Coast to West Coast. Arnaz didn't create the machinery, but he did oversee the operation, hire the right people and lead the charge.
With 'I Love Lucy' a hit — it was the first TV show to reach 10 million homes, about two in three TV sets in the U.S. — their company Desilu expanded to produce other programs and rented space to even more. By the end of the 1950s Desilu was the biggest studio in the world in terms of hours of filmed entertainment.
With sympathy but open eyes Purdum chronicles Arnaz's descent into alcoholism, which sapped his creative energy and the goodwill he had established over the years. Arnaz also could not control his sexual drive, especially his desire for prostitutes. The combination of booze, adultery and fiery outbursts finished his career and marriage, destroyed his health, and broke him financially.
Ball, meanwhile, had career challenges of her own — she couldn't move beyond her Lucy persona — but she was wise enough when it came to handling her money. As the head of Desilu, having bought out her husband in 1962, she gave the greenlight for two television series that resonate today, 'Star Trek' and 'Mission: Impossible.' When she sold the studio in 1967, the on-screen ditzy redhead walked away with what today would be $100 million.
America's favorite make-believe couple in the 1950s each married again. Yet they were never out of each other's life completely, due in large part to their two children and extended families, some business interests and a unique professional legacy. Their undying affection for each other needs no 'splainin' at all.
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Douglass K. Daniel is the author of 'Anne Bancroft: A Life' (University Press of Kentucky)
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Globe and Mail
14 hours ago
- Globe and Mail
Dulcimer player Rick Scott helped establish B.C.'s folk scene
As a boy, Rick Scott was taken by his father to the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway in 1954 to see the original production of Peter Pan, with Mary Martin in the lead role. Sitting first row in the balcony, the wide-eyed child witnessed Ms. Martin floating toward him on a harness, staring at him as she sang, 'Look at me way up high, suddenly here am I, I'm flying, I'm flying.' The legendary production inspired a desire to perform, and perhaps Ms. Martin's lighter-than-air exuberance in particular made a lasting impression on the future entertainer. His career as a musician with the beloved British Columbia-based hippie folk trio the Pied Pumkin String Ensemble was marked by a determined effort to uplift audiences. 'Rick told me that every Pied Pumkin gig, they would set out to levitate the hall, and if they didn't do it in the first couple of hours, they would keep going to 1:30 in the morning, until they got everybody high,' said folksinger and friend Bob Bossin. 'It was a remarkable commitment to both being in the moment and being with the audience.' Mr. Scott, a musical joy spreader with a theatrical soul and an infectious sense of rhythm, died Aug. 1, at his home on rustic Protection Island in the harbour of Nanaimo, B.C., after an extended illness. He was 77. Over a 55-year career, the singer-songwriter, virtuoso dulcimerist, stage actor and children's entertainer released 19 recordings, either solo or with Pied Pumkin (alongside Shari Ulrich and Joe Mock) or Pied Pear (with Mr. Mock). On stage, he charmed audiences with maximum effort and a generous spirit. 'His approach was full-on entertainment every minute as big and dramatically as he could,' said Ms. Ulrich, a Juno-winning singer-musician. 'He would engage people in any way that would make them smile and feel a little better.' With dulcimers he made himself, he played dive bars, folk clubs, festivals, schools and symphonic halls in 12 countries. The musician earned three Juno Award nominations for his children's albums. 'He was a man who seemed energized and rejuvenated by the act of play,' said Fredrik Collin, a friend from Protection Island. Mr. Scott's 1996 album Philharmonic Fool was subtitled 'songs for kids of all ages.' The record included The Wild Bunnies of Kitsilano and Angels Do, which he wrote for his granddaughter with Down syndrome. As a goodwill ambassador for the Down Syndrome Resource Foundation, based in Burnaby, B.C., Mr. Scott emceed the 2005 World Down Syndrome Congress in Vancouver with Fred Penner. Inhabiting hippiedom his entire adult life, he lived irrepressibly to his own tune. In the mid-1970s with Pied Pumkin – a numerologist suggested dropping the second P in pumpkin – he helped foster a communal folk music scene in British Columbia. Since 1999, he regularly appeared at the annual Special Woodstock, a farm-set music festival in Duncan, B.C., that features the artistic talents of people with disabilities alongside professional musicians. He was born in New Jersey and raised in New York and Texas. After graduating from high school, he served as a military policeman and faced off against the young people taking part in 1967's antiwar March on the Pentagon in Washington. D.C. It was a life-changing event for Mr. Scott. 'He told me he thought to himself, 'I'm on the wrong side,'' Mr. Bossin said. In 1970, at age 21, he embraced the back-to-the-land movement of the era and drove from Annapolis, Md., to Pender Harbour, B.C. With him was his friend, the American luthier JR Stone, who taught him to build dulcimers. Mr. Scott quickly learned to play the stringed Appalachian instrument in a style all his own. 'I like to say he was the Jimi Hendrix of the dulcimer,' Mr. Bossin said. 'The music and rhythm weren't coming from his wrists and fingers. It just sort of emanated from him.' Busking outside the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr University of Art and Design), Mr. Scott was among the musicians who inspired and appeared in the 1972 animated short Street Musique, directed by Ryan Larkin. Mr. Scott also contributed to the film's score. He was a shaggy-haired man of his cosmic time, co-founding the scene-starting underground music paper Dill Pickle Rag. In 1972, he took off to Japan to perform for a year as the Lotus Eaters with the Japanese-Canadian photographer Taki Bluesinger (a.k.a. Takao Sekiguchi) in a whisky bar. Returning to Canada, he formed Pied Pumkin with Ms. Ulrich and Mr. Mock. The indie roots music pioneers launched one of British Columbia's first independent labels, Squash Records, with the release of their self-titled debut album in 1974, followed a year later by the cheekily titled Allah Mode. Among Mr. Scott's early compositions were Orville Goes to the Country, People I Love You, Lotus Eater's Blues and Yo De Do Do. The trio toured widely and sold some 30,000 albums from the stage or by mail, packaged in cut-up cardboard boxes from grocery stores. The acoustic music, which could be described as Birkenstock bluegrass, was a danceable, counterculture blend of folky singalongs, unanticipated arrangements and irreverent humour. 'They didn't sound like anyone else, and they created an audience that was intensely loyal,' said Gary Cristall, who ran the Vancouver Folk Music Festival Society for 17 years upon its founding in 1978. 'Rick and Pied Pumkin helped build an alternative community.' After Ms. Ulrich left the threesome in 1976, Mr. Scott and Mr. Mock carried on as Pied Pear. The duo toured, released three albums and represented Canada at the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tenn. 'Rick lived life through the eyes of a man-child and played with open eyes and heart, with an unbridled imagination to enlighten the day with wonder, joy and laughter, bringing music to life,' Mr. Mock said. 'Music was food, spirit.' Mr. Scott dedicated himself post-Pied Pear to acting, even learning to walk tightrope for the title role in the stage musical Barnum. Falling off the rope once, he hurt both knees. The experience would inspire 2012's The Great Gazzoon: A Tall Tale with Tunes and Turbulence, a four-CD audio novel with music. Pied Pumkin reunited often over the years, including for a midnight concert for Vancouver's millennium celebration in 1999. At B.C.'s Hornby Island Music Festival in 2001, 53-year-old Mr. Scott pulled a muscle in his back partway through a Pied Pumkin performance. A masseuse, a physiotherapist and an acupuncturist all responded to his plea for help. Mr. Scott later spoke of the experience fondly: 'Lying on a table in the middle of a field with a dozen needles sticking out of me, staring up at a meteor show.' Richard Gaston Scott Jr. was born July 14, 1948, in Englewood, N.J. His father was a clinical psychologist. His mother, Genevieve Scott (née Heatley), was a poet and sailing enthusiast. A stepmother, Hilda Scott, entered his life when he was 12. In kindergarten, the precocious toddler enacted a mime routine entitled The Happy Woodsman, which incorporated much chopping and many pratfalls. By the time he graduated high school in San Antonio, he was already touring Texas playing bass in the rock band the Embers. On Oct. 21, 1967, Mr. Scott was in uniform as a 'riot cop,' in his words, when American political disruptor Abbie Hoffman led the flower-powered March on the Pentagon that involved a concert by folkie Phil Ochs and a speech and by pediatrician/activist Dr. Benjamin Spock. There was even a hippie-dippie attempt to 'levitate' the Pentagon building. 'It was this great moment,' Mr. Scott told The Globe and Mail in 2001. 'It was total foolishness. People were just sitting out on the grass, blowing giant bubbles and playing drums and flutes. Inside the Pentagon, there was this war situation. They didn't know what to do because it weren't in the manual. They finally decided that if the building did start to lift off, they would shoot 'em. They couldn't quite grasp the concept. To me, that's pure anarchy.' Disenchanted with the political conditions in the United States, Mr. Scott moved to Canada in 1970. In 1971, he hitchhiked up B.C.'s Sunshine Coast with Mr. Stone, his first wife, Sue (P'chi) Scott, and his dog, Mousse. 'It was tough for three hippies with a dog to catch a ride, but after about half an hour a woman driving a beat up Ford Pinto pulled over,' Mr. Scott later wrote of the experience. 'Big and shaggy, Mousse immediately climbed into the front seat and laid his head down in the driver's lap.' The woman agreed to take them to Pender Harbour but first had to pick up a friend. The friend turned out to be her rock star beau, Graham Nash. The driver was Joni Mitchell. 'I was amazed when she took up my dulcimer, tuned all the strings to the same note and proceeded to play A Case of You from her Blue album,' Mr. Scott recalled. In 1999, Mr. Scott had two of his dulcimers stolen from his car in Vancouver. One was a traditional acoustic model with two heart-shaped sound holes, built by Mr. Stone. The other was a unique electric dulcimer, the subject of his song The Ballad of the Electric Snowshoe. The theft shattered Mr. Scott. 'A part of what connects me to the children I play for has been stolen,' he told The Vancouver Sun. 'I play all over the world, and those two instruments were unique. A piece of that has been stolen.' That same year, Pied Pumkin played a 10-week, 25th anniversary tour. In 2000, they released the live album Pied Alive. Ms. Ulrich recalled running a song idea past Mr. Scott. It was called Making Friends With Gone, inspired by the deaths of people close to her. Though Mr. Scott was typically supportive and encouraging when it came to other musicians, he was not in favour of Making Friends With Gone. 'He had just lost someone in his life who he cherished,' Ms. Ulrich said. 'He told me he didn't like the song, and that he didn't believe you could make friends with gone. That keeps popping in my mind, of course, because that's what I have to do now.' Mr. Scott leaves his stepmother, Hilda Scott; sisters, Sandra Woodall and Tara Scott; children, Jorg Scott and Tai Scott; stepchildren from his first marriage, Jason Metz and Sebastian Metz; longtime partner and manager, Valley Hennell; and stepson, Whelm King. You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here. To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at obit@
Winnipeg Free Press
a day ago
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Winnipeg Free Press
a day ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Class issues central in quest for immortality
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