Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had a tumultuous love affair and marriage. More than 65 years later, the raw details of their romance are being shared in the book Lucy & Desi: The Love Letters, a compilation of personal letters between classic TV’s golden couple, compiled by their daughter, Lucie Arnaz.
In a book excerpt shared by People magazine, Ball, then 29 years old, penned a passionate plea to her love just one month before their November 1940 wedding. After telling Arnaz, 23, that she thought about him “all day-all nite,” she turned to plans for a romantic trip to Palm Springs.
“Please don’t jeopardize the next few months with these awful dames I dislike so,” Ball wrote. “Please don’t prefer them instead of me — really darling it won’t be worth it.”
The letter was dated October 27, 1940. Ball and Arnaz wed in a small ceremony on November 30, 1940, at the Byram River Beagle Club in Greenwich, Connecticut, per the website Today in Connecticut History. They renewed their wedding vows in 1949, according to People.
Although their love for one another was apparent both on-screen and off, Ball and Arnaz’s marriage was never easy. They’d go on to divorce in 1960, but throughout their union, Ball was forced to deal with her husband’s flings with other women.
During a June 2025 appearance on CBS Sunday Morning, the couple’s daughter, Lucie, said her father’s infidelities were purely physical. “People say he had affairs,” Lucie, 74, noted. “He never had an affair. He didn’t even know these dames’ names. They were hookers.”
“He loved my mother; he loved his family. It was a very unique, weird problem to have,” she said of her father’s “transactional” trysts. “And I think that’s the reason she stayed with him so long, is that she understood it. …somehow, at the time, with what they had, with what they needed from each other, they stuck it out as long as they could.”
While his indiscretions were well known, in his 1976 memoir, A Book, Arnaz admitted that he would still lie to Ball about his infidelities. “If she had caught me in bed with a girl, unless it was right in the middle of the act, I would have jumped out and demanded to know how the girl got in there,” the Cuban bandleader wrote, per Cracked.
One year after her divorce from Arnaz, Ball married comedian Gary Morton. The lifelong letter writer celebrated her second marriage in a 1983 note she wrote to a friend, according to Closer Weekly. “Boy, did I pick a winner! After 19 years with that Latin lover I never expected to marry again, but I’m sure glad I did!” the I Love Lucy legend wrote.
