They say comedy’s all about timing. If that’s true, this week in the life of actors Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball should be a corker. Count the shoes dropping this week.
One: Does Desi really love Lucy, like the TV show says? In 1952, the press is wondering whether Desi might be skipping out on his red-haired wife. The papers have a picture of Desi with a cute non-redhead as proof. And despite Desi’s protestations that he only has eyes for Lucy, that makes her wonder, too.
Oh, sure, the picture of Desi with the pretty young thing is a pretty old picture. Lucy was there when it was taken six months ago, for heaven’s sake, and she knows Desi wasn’t hanky-pankying then. But still, were the newspapers all the way wrong? Or just kind of wrong? Lucy wants to know.
Two: Newsman Walter Winchell let it drop during his radio commentary that the “queen of television” was in league with the communists. Could the red-haired woman be a Red? Well … yes.
True, Lucy only checked a box affiliating herself with the Communist Party back in 1936, supporting the left-leaning grandfather who’d raised her. That was as far as her support ever went, she insists. Lucy wasn’t called out by name, either, and no other news outlets have picked it up just yet. Still, that 16-year-old checked box is dangerous: If Stalin loves Lucy too, it’d be the end of the show.
Three: Lucy’s pregnant. Great, right? Not in the early 1950s sitcom landscape, when CBS wouldn’t even let I Love Lucy’s two main characters share a bed. Babies come from sex, and that’s the last thing a good, upright sitcom audience needs to be reminded of. And while execs can hide Lucy behind a laundry basket for a while, there’s only so much laundry one comedienne can do. Lucy and Desi want to incorporate the pregnancy into the show. But showrunner Jess Oppenheimer knows the suits would never go for it. Never, never, never.
That’s a lot of shoes, and they drop one after the other—just in time for another week’s worth of work.
On Monday, Lucy, Desi and the rest of the cast and crew show up as usual, part of television’s most successful show. By Friday, will there be a show at all?
Because, let’s face it. I Love Lucy But I May Have Cheated On Her and She’s a Pregnant Communist just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Setting aside whether Desi cheated on Lucy for a minute, it’s obvious that the two care deeply for each other, and that they make one tremendous team.
Lucy’s sitcom character is quite different from the Lucy we see when the cameras aren’t running. The excitable, sometimes scheming housewife she plays on I Love Lucy morphs into a shrewd, exacting businesswoman—willing to work like crazy (and make those around her work) to “kill it” with every show.
But if Lucy manages the comedy on set, Desi might be the mastermind off it. He’s designed the cameras to work in a revolutionary new configuration. He deals with the sponsors and manages almost every aspect of the business.
And we can’t lose sight of why they dove into this crazy enterprise in the first place: They wanted to spend time together. In their first years of marriage, Desi was playing nightclubs ’til 4 a.m., with Lucy needing to be on a movie set by 5. They’d meet on a Hollywood hill somewhere around dawn just to spend a few precious minutes together. I Love Lucy was an opportunity for the two to be a real couple by being, paradoxically, an unreal couple … and Lucy fought hard to make Desi apart of the show when sponsors were nervous about an “interracial” couple fronting a sitcom.
CBS and I Love Lucy’s sponsors are leery of putting a pregnancy story arc in the show in large part because of its Christian audience. Desi (seemingly half joking) suggests that the show—and every show thereafter—be vetted by Christian and Jewish clergy. (In real life, that’s exactly what happened.)
In a supposed interview conducted with I Love Lucy writer Madelyn Pugh decades after the show ended, she said that Lucy and Desi were often “either tearing each other’s heads off or tearing each other’s clothes off.” And as the movie opens, they essentially do both—a fight (over the story of Desi’s supposed infidelity) leads to clothes coming off and an interrupted bout of lovemaking on the couch. (Lucy’s wearing just her underwear when a radio broadcast interrupts their interlude).
Shortly after Lucy and Desi meet, Lucy makes some pretty obvious advances in Desi’s apartment. She walks out wearing, again, just underwear—though she’s partly covered by one of Desi’s shirts.
“It comes with pants,” Desi quips. “But I’m wearing them.”
“Not for long,” Lucy tells him. They wind up in bed together, and while they’re both there Lucy calls up her fiance to break up with him. They sometimes discuss their sexual relations with obscene candor.
We see Lucy and Desi treat each other with lighter love and affection, too, with the two kissing at times. When they’re first married, they meet under a streetlight as the dawn slowly breaks, spending a fleeting moment or two together when their schedules otherwise don’t allow it. Their first “date” involves Desi teaching Lucy how to rhumba, which involves some suggestive movements. (Desi apologizes, promising he’s not trying to come on to her.) When the two are trying to hold together a marriage while one lives in New York and the other L.A., Lucy says she still plans on spending whatever time she can with him—joking it’s an effort to keep Desi from falling for someone else while she’s away.
She may have reason to worry. Women fawn over Desi (on a film set, several rather provocatively dressed female extras rush to introduce themselves to him), and his rumored infidelities form a critical part of the drama here. We hear the story repeatedly mentioned. We learn that Desi spends several nights a week away from home, ostensibly playing cards on “the boat.” Someone suggests that Lucy might be partly at fault for any marital difficulties the couple is having: His Cuban background has given him a very strict definition of masculinity, and living with such a strong-willed woman might feel emasculating to him.
Vivian Vance, who plays Ethel Mertz in I Love Lucy, does some stretches in her dressing room in a leotard. There’s some tension between her and Lucy: Ethel is supposed to be frumpy and unattractive, and those running gags have gotten to her. And Lucy, it’s suggested, would really like to be the only truly attractive woman on the show—going so far as to have breakfast brought to Vivian in order to fatten her up a bit.
[Spoiler Warning] Near the end of the film, Desi confesses multiple infidelities with “prostitutes” and “hookers” who don’t mean anything to him. In a closing slide, we learn that the two divorced in 1960, shortly after their final performance together.
In an I Love Lucy scene, show characters Lucy and Ricky invite a squabbling Ethel and Fred Mertz over for dinner to patch up their differences. The two elbow each other. And when their elbows strike simultaneously, they knock each other off the bench they’re sitting on.
That’s about it for explicit, on-screen violence–though we do hear some extremely violent threats at times (and threats not meant to be taken literally). Someone threatens, for instance, to reach down someone’s throat, grab his heart and pull it out.
When Lucy first sees Ricky, she’s playing a battered wife, and she appears on stage covered in bandages and fake bruises. We hear about how Desi and his family had to flee Cuba in the wake of the 1933 Revolution there. Desi describes the usurpers as “Bolsheviks,” and as such he was staunchly anti-communist. He also talks about how the attackers killed all the animals—not for food, but just to kill them. “I still don’t know why they did that,” he says.
More than a dozen f-words and four s-words We also hear “b–ch,” “crap” “g-dd–n” and “h—.” Jesus’ name is abused four times.
William Frawley, who plays Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy, has a notorious drinking problem. When William takes Lucy to a bar across the street for a heart-to-heart talk, Lucy reminds Fred that Desi hired him on the condition that he wouldn’t drink while working. William corrects her: He promised Desi that he wouldn’t be drunk at work. And he apparently isn’t—at least not so much that it would impact his work. But …
During a morning table reading, Vivian accuses him of being drunk. It’s 10 a.m., he snaps back. Of course he’s drunk, he jokes. When Lucy and William go to the bar for their talk, Lucy reminds him that it’s 10 in the morning. “It’s gotta be 10:15 somewhere,” suggesting that’s when he starts tippling. We see him sip his double Jack Daniels at the bar.
Desi, Lucy and almost every other character we see here smoke—and Lucy puffs away even as she’s pregnant. (It was some years before the public realized that smoking was pretty bad for folks, especially pregnant women.) Cigarette manufacturer Phillip Morris is the main sponsor of I Love Lucy, and one rep gripes that if Lucy was going to smoke, she could at least smoke one of the eight brands of cigarettes that Phillip Morris made.
Some characters lie. Vivian and William despise each other, and they make no secret of it.
When pitching the show, Lucy finds that Desi’s ethnicity is a concern for sponsors. Would the audience accept a Latino character being married to an all-American girl like Lucy? Lucy reminds these sponsors that Ricky is American, but we see Desi subjected to occasional racial and ethnic slights throughout (including some slights that’d be more culturally acceptable back in the 1950s than they would be today).
For millions upon millions of Americans in the 1950s, I Love Lucy was a picture of home. Their homes might not have looked like the Ricardos’. Their families might not have acted the same way. But many felt that, for that half-hour, they were Lucy and Ricky’s next-door neighbors, dropping in for a visit.
It was all fake, of course—just as scripted sitcoms are today. The kitchens and living rooms were props and plyboard. The conversations were tightly scripted. It was all an act.
The truth behind this fictional couple (or at least the truth posited in this equally fabricated, tightly scripted movie) was more sordid. The real Lucy and Desi didn’t sleep in separate beds and kiss each other chastely. They had sex. The language that came out of their mouths went quite a bit farther than “golly” or “darn.” They drank. They smoked. They did their best to hide their sins and skeletons in whatever closet was handy, and they were only partly successful.
Thus, a behind-the-scenes peek at a quaint, clean 1950s sitcom becomes a tawdry, R-rated tell-all. And while the acting sparkles (Nicole Kidman is surprisingly good as Lucille Ball) and the dialogue crackles (Being the Ricardos was written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, who won an Oscar for his screenplay of The Social Network), the content here would make a 1950s CBS executive positively immolate. “We can’t do that!” They’d say. But 70 years later, they can. And they do.
Millions loved Lucy back in the day. And honestly, millions still do. Being the Ricardos offers a lot to like, if not love. But that doesn’t mean I want to have a two-hour relationship with this film. Sometimes, as Lucy herself might say, it’s healthier to just walk away.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
