I Love Lucy’s idyllic portrayal of 1950s America made it the most watched show of its time, and its stars Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were presumed to be the perfect couple both on-screen and off.
But a new book has laid bare their torrid two-decade relationship with revelations of alcoholism, extra-marital affairs, prostitution use and brutal arguments.
The book, Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz: They Weren’t Lucy & Ricky Ricardo, charts their rise from ambitious actors to America’s sweethearts.
While the couple’s flings were an open secret during their marriage, the book goes into extraordinary detail about the turbulent nature of their personal life.
It also reveals how Ball posed naked in modeling shoots and ‘turned tricks’ to make ends meet during years spent trying to make it in the showbiz industry.
Ball, who was eight years senior, and Arnaz wed in 1940, having met the same year, when they were at opposite ends of the Hollywood power dynamic.
Ball was the established star of more than 50 films, while Arnaz had fled Cuba and been forced to take work as a janitor, before trying his luck as a musician and actor
After their careers had both hit roadblocks, the couple convinced TV executives at CBS to cast Arnaz as a Cuban bandleader, a fictionalized version of himself, alongside his all-American wife Ball.
Almost as soon as it launched in 1951, the show quickly became the top-rated program on television.
But behind the scenes, the sex-obsessed Arnaz was constantly cheating with prostitutes, while Ball also sought the company of other men.
‘Marriage is okay, but adultery is more fun,’ the book quotes Arnaz saying. ‘Just ask Lucy.’
Author Darwin Porter recalls meeting the famous couple in the late 1950s when they appeared together at a ‘Lucy & Desi’ day at the University of Miami.
Porter, the student body president at the time, had arrived to drive them to the event, and discovered the pair having one of their legendary arguments.
‘She shouted denunciations at him, at one point calling him (a racial slur). She accused him of having sex with two prostitutes the night before,’ writes Porter.
‘He didn’t deny that, but claimed, ‘It doesn’t mean a thing, my fooling around with some hookers. Peccadilloes don’t count.’
The biography also charts the pair’s very different pathways to fame.
Ball, born in 1911, was a young starlet in the making from her early days growing up in Jamestown, New York.
She moved to New York City as a teenager to take acting lessons, but was outshone by another future star in her class, Bette Davis.
At the age of 14, Ball started a relationship with then-23-year-old Johnny DaVita, a roughneck alcohol smuggler who used to beat her up.
