Pregnancies and births are not a new trope of television sitcoms. In fact, they’ve proven to be a tried-and-true means of bringing attention to a show and in turn boosting its ratings. But back on January 19, 1953, they were unprecedented, and when Lucy and Ricky Ricardo became the parents of “Little Ricky” on I Love Lucy, it coincided with the actual birth of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s second child, Desi Arnaz Jr, capping off what turned out to be a phenomenal case of reel mirroring real life.
The historic episode: ‘Lucy Goes to the Hospital’
That episode, “Lucy Goes to the Hospital,” was viewed by nearly 74% of all homes with televisions, which translated to about 44 million viewers, the highest audience ever at that time. And so impactful was this event, that it even knocked the inauguration of President Eisenhower off newspaper front page headlines nationwide.
“They were ready for the press and the press was ready for them,” explains pop culture historian Geoffrey Mark, author of the definitive The Lucy Book, regarding the I Love Lucy creative team. “All over the country, newspapers — back when newspapers were important and big cities had 11 or 15 of them — carried the headline, ‘Lucy Ricardo Has a Boy; Lucille Ball Has a Boy’ on their front page. In later years, when President Eisenhower met Desi Jr. as a little boy, he said, ‘So you’re the little guy that pushed me off the front pages.’ It just shows you the power of I Love Lucy.
“I would liken it to The Beatles when they first came to this country,” he adds, “or when 007 movies first started being made and it rippled across all of culture. It was that kind of a culture-changing thing.”
While the arrival of Little Ricky turned Lucy into a classic TV mom, Desi Jr was actually the second child of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz (sister Lucie Arnaz was born on July 17, 1951), culminating what had been a long and painful journey for both of them that began years earlier following their November 30, 1940, wedding day.
Lucille Ball’s journey to motherhood
“Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz wanted a family, but Ms. Ball couldn’t conceive,” details Geoffrey Mark. “Finally, in about the 10th year of their marriage, while they were doing a small tour of stage presentation houses — which were theaters that had a stage show in between the showings of films — they found out that Ms. Ball was pregnant, so they cut their tour short. Unfortunately, she miscarried, but then when all of the stars in the universe came together to make what we now know as I Love Lucy, she got pregnant again.”
At the time, Lucille was starring in the radio sitcom My Favorite Husband (which would serve as the creative inspiration for I Love Lucy) while Desi was doing Your Tropical Trip, a radio quiz show with a Latin American theme.
“I believe the pilot for I Love Lucy was shot in March 1951 and Lucie wasn’t born until July, but Ms. Ball basically gets pregnant in 1950 twice, and by the time [producer] Jess Oppenheimer and Desi put together a small version of what the big crew would be for I Love Lucy, they were able to have a pilot episode to try and get a sponsor. While they were filming the pilot, Ms. Ball was already very pregnant, which is why she wears very loose costumes to minimize the pregnancy, because they knew that nobody in the public would be seeing it.”
The pilot was taken to New York and the Phillip Morris Company agreed to sponsor the show. As noted, baby Lucie was born in July 1951 and the first episode began shooting in late August, allowing Lucille to lose some of her pregnancy weight. And when the series made its debut, it was an instant hit.
Breaking barriers with TV’s first pregnancy storyline
“Everyone took credit,” Mark continues, “but it really was Jess Oppenheimer’s idea that they write the pregnancy into the storyline. He was wagering the success of the show — and all of their salaries — that this would work. That Lucy and Ricky Ricardo were so beloved by the American audience, and that despite the fact that pregnancy had never been discussed openly on radio or television, unless it was a soap opera where it was a scandal, the public would buy it.”
All involved worked things out so that Lucille Ball could stop filming in the early fall of 1952, knowing that she would be delivering in January. And because Lucie Arnaz was delivered by Cesarean, in those days once a woman delivered that way, the doctors wouldn’t allow subsequent childbirths to be natural.
