Movies about a real person usually take certain liberties in order to tell a more compelling story. While nobody doubts Lucille Ball’s really life was interesting in its own right, fitting a number of those interesting events into a two-hour film still requires some “shuffling around.”
The much anticipated new movie “Being the Ricardos,” starring Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball and Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz, gets a lot of things right: Lucille and Desi’s tumultuous relationship, their fight to keep the show going, the trouble with the FBI.
But in order to make it all make sense and capture the essence of what the Ricardos were really like, a few things, including the timeline of those events, have been altered. After all, that’s the beauty of the movies, isn’t it? We get three of the biggest events that shaped Lucille’s life: her second pregnancy, an accusation of being a communist, and a look into Desi’s cheating ways. But we don’t necessarily get all the details as they truly were in any of those events. “Being the Ricardos” ignored, changed or embellished Lucille Ball’s true story.
Ball wasn’t actually surprised about the tabloid story
In “Being the Ricardos,” we see Lucy read a story in the tabloid magazine Confidential about Desi cheating on her. In a conversation with the actress who plays Ethel soon after, she says Desi has told her, “Lucille, I have been with no girls since the moment I saw you,” and she believes him. There’s nothing ever said about her knowing about affairs or his cheating.
But the truth is that Ball had been very aware of Desi cheating on her for years. One of the reasons she had pushed so hard to have Desi as her TV husband on “I Love Lucy” is because she figured he wouldn’t cheat if he had to be there instead of touring all over the country with his band (per Distractify).
He, of course, found other ways to cheat. According to the Confidential story, Desi wasn’t a stranger to calling escort services and having encounters with sex workers. “He has, in fact, sprinkled his affections all over Los Angeles for a number of years,” the story reads. “And quite a bit of it has been bestowed on vice dollies who were paid handsomely for loving Desi briefly.”
The rumors also included dalliances with famous stars, including Ginger Rogers. Desi wasn’t even very discreet about it most of the time. In the book Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz: They Weren’t Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, he’s quoted as saying, “Marriage is okay, but adultery is more fun” (as reported via Daily Mail).
