After a lifetime of shadow boxing, Lucie Arnaz is finally celebrating her late parents.
She’s executive producer of a new film called “Lucy and Desi,” starring Cate Blanchett as TV’s queen of comedy, Lucille Ball. Oscar- and Emmy-winner Aaron Sorkin is writing the narrative about a couple trying to juggle family and their 1950s sit-com, “I Love Lucy.”
She’ll also salute her father, Cuban bandleader and actor Desi Arnaz, in an April 3 benefit for the College of the Desert Foundation at the McCallum Theatre, titled, “Stepping Out For College of the Desert: Lucie Arnaz – Latin Roots.”
Arnaz, sitting in her South Palm Springs home with a stunning view of the mountains and a framed story on a wall recalling her 40 years in therapy learning to cope with her heritage, says she can now talk about her parents without feeling like she’s riding their coattails. It only took 30 years of concertizing and the release of a new autobiographical album, “Feinstein’s at the Nikko: Lucie Live.”
“There is that,” she said. “It’s an amount of time. You’ve been doing it for three decades. You don’t have to be like, ‘I’m my own person; I can’t talk about them!’ The fact (is), I feel it’s time now to give credit where credit is due.”
She credits her father with giving her the musical talent to feel Latina.
Her father felt compelled to assimilate into Anglo-American culture, so he never made Lucie learn Spanish. Desi’s family had fled to Miami after the 1933 Cuban Revolution and Desi survived by playing guitar and singing Latin-flavored pop in a straw hat. He started a conga craze after leaving a big band led by Spain’s Xavier Cugat.
“Cugat promised he would send him five guys for a new little band, and he sent him five guys who had never played that kind of music,” Lucie said. “It was New Year’s Eve and, out of desperation, he remembered that in Cuba they have this carnival every year in Santiago, and they would do this mile-long conga with everybody in town. So, he grabbed his big conga drum, which he always had with him, and taught the audience how to do the conga. They liked it and it became a big craze.”
Desi was sent to New York to open a La Conga nightclub in the Big Apple and, when he became a sensation, Broadway director George Abbott added him to his stage musical, “Too Many Girls.” The show was adapted into a film musical in 1940 and Desi was put in a featured role opposite Lucille Ball. They fell in love and eloped that November.
Desi assimilated so well, Lucie grew up identifying as an Anglo. She discovered she is inherently Latina while doing a musical tribute to her father.
“I don’t speak very good Spanish,” she said. “But, when I started singing the music, I was able to accept more of my Latin-ness. I’m still trying to earn my stripes. It’s not what I grew up listening to. (But,) when the music starts, I remember who I am.”
Lucie, 66, began celebrating her father seven years ago in New York. She was doing a Gershwin show at the 92nd Street Y performing arts center in New York and Deborah Grace Winer, artistic director of its Lyrics & Lyricists American Songbook series, asked where Desi’s musical arrangements were. Arnaz realized no one had heard them in 60 years and got them from the Library of Congress. They mounted a tribute called “Babalu” with a 16-piece orchestra and recorded a “Latin Roots” album to go with it.“The CD was not so much a tribute show,” said Lucie. “The CD has three or four of my dad’s songs, but most of it is American music with a Latin seasoning – like Dad use to do, oddly enough. But then, when ‘Babalu’ didn’t fly all the way (to Broadway), I said, ‘Let’s take that and meld that and make this.’”
The result is the “Latin Roots” show she’s bringing to the McCallum with a 12-piece band. She’s adding “I Love Lucy” clips because “people really want to know what it was like.
“The Babalu show is a celebration of Desi Arnaz and his music,” Lucie explained. “It told the story of how this guy lost everything in the revolution, came here, introduced the conga to the United States and became this Latin sensation and changed the face of television. He influenced Latin music because suddenly that music was on television and they weren’t afraid of that jungle rhythm as much they were.
“The Latin Roots show is a tip of the straw hat, if you will, to my dad because, if it hadn’t been for the inspiration of that music and him in my life, I don’t think I’d be able to get up and do what I do. But, I can honor him with his music and take it down the next generation and it becomes my music. I introduce myself as Lucie Desirée Arnaz y Ball because I like that in Latin they always use both parents’ names for the child. It reminds you you’re a product of these variety of soils, and it’s nice to be reminded of all of that.
“So, now I’m at a point in my life where I feel it’s kind of nice to reminisce about it in a gratitude way.”
Spiritual practice
Lucie’s husband, writer-actor Laurence Luckinbill, also credits their emphasis on family and Unity Church principles for getting them to look back with gratitude.
They were both acclaimed Broadway actors when they met in 1979. Luckinbill had just been nominated for a Tony for “The Shadow Box” and Lucie was on her way to winning an Outer Critics Circle Award for Best New Talent in the Neil Simon-Marvin Hamlisch musical, “They’re Playing Our Song.”
Luckinbill had also starred on Broadway in “A Man For All Seasons” and “Tartuffe,” and off-Broadway in the groundbreaking “Boys in the Band,” which he also did on film.
Like most Broadway actors, the Luckinbills also made film and TV appearances. Lucie, who had been a series regular on her mother’s “Here’s Lucy” in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, got her own TV series, “The Lucie Arnaz Show” in 1985. Luckinbill was nominated for an Emmy in 1987 for a PBS version of his one-man stage show, “Lyndon Johnson.” He’s doing a new one-man play, “The Abraham and Larry Show,” based on the book of Genesis (slated June 10 at the Camelot Theatres in Palm Springs).
But they married in 1980 and put family ahead of career. They had three children to go with Laurence’s two kids from a previous marriage.
“We’ve both spent a lot of time throttling our egos,” said Luckinbill. “We made a decision a long time ago to back off from big show business because of the children. We moved out of L.A. and went back to Katonah, New York, lived in the country away from the city and that had a huge effect on my movie presence. When you get out of position in the movie trade, you’re done. It’s very hard to get back.
“There were times in our marriage where I was jealous of her and she was jealous of me. We were both stepping back for the kids, but, when the phone rang, we busted each others’ elbows to get to the phone, hoping it was my agent or her agent giving us a job. And yet, the transition has been to be a husband, to be a father, to be a writer, and I am just so completely enamored of her. She deserves every support that comes to her because she is such an amazing human being.”
Luckinbill, 83, said it didn’t bother him that a photographer was taking pictures of his wife as he toiled in his office, writing his memoir in longhand. But he said he worked at it.
“We fell into the Unity movement, which is an old American partition of spiritual health,” Luckinbill said – “the Daily Word and all that, which really supported us and our ideas that we’re not special. Both of us have lots of posters and awards, but that doesn’t make us special. There are actors out there who think that makes them special because they need the support. The ego support. I’m trying to kill my ego. You never get rid of it, but, it’s in conflict with the larger spiritual part of you that is the free part of you.”
As busy as the Luckinbills are with their careers, family and local involvements, they realize they’re blessed to be less busy than Lucie’s parents when they were raising children, producing and starring in TV shows, and running the Desilu Studio.
Family was a priority to Lucy and Desi, too, said Lucie. But their careers got in the way.
“They were dying to have a family as soon as they got married,” she said. “He had a band and bands travel. She was in movies and then on radio, so they were separated a lot and then she had two miscarriages. It took them 10 years to have me, and I think the only reason that happened was, she said, ‘You have to stay home for a while. Maybe I can put you on this new show we’re doing on television.’ And that’s how that happened.”
Lucy, who was seven years older than Desi, also had her share of childhood trauma. Her father died when she was 4 and she had to live with her grandparents while her mother worked. She loved her grandfather, but he was involved in a shooting accident that left a child paralyzed, and he lost his property in a legal judgement. Then Lucy’s mother re-married a man who didn’t want kids and Lucy wound up living with his mother, a Puritanical woman who didn’t approve of her interest in dance. She eventually moved to New York to pursue acting and modeling.
“It was just one disaster after another growing up,” Lucie said of her mom. “They didn’t have money and then they had really no money, so she escaped, basically, to try to make a life for herself.
“My father was forced into that same thing – from having everything to having nothing because of the revolution. So, they came from a similar disaster basis and they took care of their families. Then, when they met each other, it was like, ‘Oh good, someone can finally take care of me.’ But when you both feel that way, it doesn’t happen. They never really got a chance to look back and mourn for the pain they had to go through. They just went through it.”
Lucy’s 1948 radio show, “My Favorite Husband,” about a banker and his wacky wife, became popular enough to be developed into a TV series by CBS. Lucy insisted on Desi playing her husband, but there was such resistance to the idea of an Anglo woman being married to a Cuban that Lucy and Desi had to take the show on the road and prove to vaudeville audiences that America could accept a mixed marriage.
When they began filming “I Love Lucy” before a live audience, to take advantage of Lucy’s live comedy skills, she was pregnant with Lucie.
“She always said having a family was the best thing that ever happened to her,” said Lucie, “but, it collided with the ‘I Love Lucy’ show. Having me six weeks before she went to work on ‘I Love Lucy,’ they thought, ‘We’ll do this for a year and we’ll have home movies for our kids.’ And it became the biggest thing ever. So, it was one of those things, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’ It was almost impossible to be with the family you said you wanted to have all your life.”
Lucie grew up with an affinity for acting and put on plays in her garage. Her brother, Desi Jr., grew up with a talent for drums and wound up in a rock band with Dean Martin’s son, called Dino, Desi & Billy. But, Lucie doesn’t recall who coached her back then.
“My dad was almost never up there when we were doing those shows,” she said. “It was probably always my mother. But, she didn’t give me input. I have no memory of her ever coming in and saying, ‘Do it this way.’ I only have memories of, ‘Oh my God, that was great’ and ‘Let’s invite people to see it.’ It was always extremely encouraging, like ‘Keep on doing what you’re doing.’ I love that. Most parents don’t do that for their kids.”
Stories of Desi’s drinking, gambling and womanizing are legion, but Lucie said it was her father who wanted to keep their television business small to have time to enjoy their family. Lucy, she said, wanted to become an institution.
“They had their own little production company, but they were getting involved in helping other people produce their shows,” Lucie said. “It came down to, ‘Look, Honey, we’re not selling our shows because the big studios have more clout and they spend more money to promote. So, if we want to be this production company, we have to get bigger or go home. We buy RKO, which is for sale, and get bigger and we give those big studios a run for their money. Or, we go home and spend time with our family. I don’t think we need to get any bigger. We made all the money we could ever use in our lives. Let’s just cash in the chips now, go home. We’ll do a special every now and then, and we’ll get to fish and ride horses.’
“And, faced with that choice, my mother said, ‘I don’t want to quit. I want to keep going.’ She chose to buy the studio. It was her choice to get bigger. He was saying he wanted to get back to the roots. He wanted to go back and have life happen again.”
Lucie says that’s what “Lucy and Desi” must be about. Fortunately, the producers who came to her and Desi Jr., Todd Black, and Jenna Block of Escape Artist Productions, wanted that, too.
“I didn’t come to them and say, ‘Let’s do a love story on my folks,’” Lucie said. “The last thing on my brain is to try to re-create those people. But, they presented it in such a wonderful, positive, optimistic way. They said, ‘Look, this is a complicated story. They got divorced. Everybody knows that. There were lots of problems. But, we believe this was one of the great love stories ever.’ I said, ‘Yes, it’s very difficult and if you want to do sensationalism, I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed because they want their ‘I Love Lucy.’ If you’re going to talk about the alcoholism and the dames, all of a sudden you’re going to look at ‘I Love Lucy’ differently and you’re not going to have the joy. Be careful of that. It’s fragile and it’s perfect, and you don’t want to screw with that.’”
The producers haven’t found an actor to play Desi, but Blanchett committed more than a year-and-a-half ago and Lucie met her in New York.
“Her first instinct was not about the comedy,” Lucie said. “It wasn’t about trying to do (classic sketches like) Vitameatavegamin or the Chocolate Factory. It was, ‘It must have been holy hell to try to keep a marriage together and a family and have the kind of success she had.’ I said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and, ‘We’re done.’ That’s all I needed to hear.”
She hasn’t seen what Sorkin may be writing, but she’s confident he’ll write sympathetically about her parents’ shortcomings and their lasting impacts.
“Aaron Sorkin writes that better than almost anyone I know,” she said. “He can get into the head of a character and show you the demons and make you love that person and pull for that person. It’s not a tribute. It’s not a trash piece, just like I hope my documentary, ‘Desi and Lucy A Home Movie’ was not. I tried to walk a very fine line of two tortured people who had it all and lost it in a minute because they somehow couldn’t accept themselves.
“So, we’ll see. I’m excited and I’m terrified to go to work and do this. But, I’m trusting the masters to help me along.”
