How Desi Arnaz Defied the Suits and Got Lucille Ball’s Pregnancy on TV: “Don’t F–k Around with the Cuban”

For all of I Love Lucy’s success, tensions were building behind the scenes. Lucy had long been attuned to Desi’s exquisite sensitivity about his standing in Hollywood relative to hers and had gone out of her way to give him public credit and praise whenever she could. With that in mind, in rehearsal one day Lucy asked Al Simon to suggest to Desi that he should become executive producer. Not long afterward, Desi went to see Jess Oppenheimer in his office. “Jess,” he said, “you and I know that after this show goes off the air, I’m not going to get a lot of other acting jobs. What I really want to do is produce, but I need to build a reputation as a producer. How would you feel about letting me take executive producer credit on the show?”

Oppenheimer’s contract with CBS specified that he had artistic control and that any disputes with Desi were to be put to a three-way vote, with Lucy holding the effective veto. He worried that Desi’s taking the executive producer title might sow doubts about his own authority, as he was also working to build up his reputation in Hollywood. He suggested alternatives—“executive in charge of production” or “co-producer”—but Desi wouldn’t bite. They agreed to discuss the matter again after thinking it over. On March 2, 1952, Desi turned thirty-five, and in the middle of his birthday party he again approached Jess about taking the title. Desi’s timing was opportune. By this point, Oppenheimer would recall years later, he was so exhausted by his multiple duties as producer and head writer that he had been considering quitting the show altogether. So he was willing to be relieved of some of the business-related decisions that came with his job, and when Desi assured him that his executive producer title would come after Oppenheimer’s in the roll of on-screen credits and would not affect his producing powers, they agreed that the recent arrangement would start in April.

With the episode that aired on Monday, April 7, I Love Lucy became the first program in the history of television to reach ten million homes, or 63.2 percent of all the television sets in America. With an average of 2.9 viewers on each set, that meant that more than thirty million people, including seven million children—nearly one-fifth of the country’s population—were watching the show. Later that month, the A.C. Nielsen rating service officially pronounced I Love Lucy the number one show on television. At a party to celebrate that milestone, Desi gave Jess a tiny trophy of a baseball player in mid-swing with the inscription Jess Oppenheimer, The Man Behind the Ball. The production team seemed united in triumph.

But a few days later Jess was shocked to get a call from Eddie Feld- man at the Biow Agency, urgently telling him to get hold of a copy of the Hollywood Reporter. Dan Jenkins, one of the Arnazes’ favorite reporters, had the scoop on Desi’s recent title. He apportioned credit for the show’s success to many hands—including Oppenheimer’s—but “above all to Desi Arnaz, the crazy Cuban whom Oppenheimer insists has been the real producer all along and who in two weeks reluctantly starts taking screen credit as producer.” Jess was stunned and stormed angrily into Desi’s office, demanding to know how Desi could have put such words in his mouth.

“It’s like I told you, amigo,” Desi replied calmly, “I need to build a rep as a producer.”

Oppenheimer instantly realized that he couldn’t correct the record without hurting the show—and the Arnazes’ marriage—so he and Desi worked out an uneasy détente. “He started to get into the various areas of production and postproduction,” Dann Cahn said of Desi, “and he was a quick study and he did grab it all, and there was a certain creative conflict between him and Jess as to who was running the show.” In effect, Desi now vied with Jess for the role of showrunner, once again becoming the first Latino to lay claim to such an assignment—a job he would eventually take on undisputed before the end of the show’s run. Bill Asher, the director, added: “It kind of became a wedge between them. They never really got along after that.” Jess was still smarting nearly twenty-five years later, when Desi published his memoir and failed to acknowledge that I Love Lucy had ever had any producer other than himself. Desi had become so used to being underestimated and taken for granted that when it was finally his turn to control the narrative, he sometimes took too much credit. That’s a shame, but it shouldn’t detract from the indispensable contributions he had made from the start. After all, he and Lucy owned the show, and Lucy never left any doubt that it was Desi who controlled the purse strings—a reality also always reflected by Bob Carroll and

Madelyn Pugh.

“Bob and I have always attributed a great deal of the success of I Love Lucy to the fact that Lucy would do absolutely anything we could dream up and Desi would pay for it,” Pugh recalled. “It gave us marvelous creative freedom. Nothing was impossible. If it was funny, we could do it.

In May 1952, just as the first season’s shooting was winding down, Lucy came to Desi with a bulletin. They adored little Lucie, and were still adapting to parenthood, but they had always envisioned a bigger family. “Hey, Father,” she told him, “I’ve got news for you. I’m pregnant again.” Just nine months after the birth of Lucie, this was indeed a bombshell—and perhaps a death knell for I Love Lucy. It seemed impossible that a pregnant woman would appear on the air. “Oh, my God. What are we going to do?” Jess Oppenheimer ex- claimed after hearing the news.

“What do you mean, what are we going to do? She’s going to have a baby,” Desi responded. “What about Lucy Ricardo having a baby as part of our shows this year?”

“They’ll never let you do that,” Jess immediately retorted.

That was Desi’s recollection. A much more credible account— offered by both Jess and Lucy—is that Desi came to Jess with the news, visibly worried and swallowing strenuous.

“How long will we have to be off the air?” he asked.

In a flash, without thinking, it was Jess who took Desi’s hand and pumped it—with a brainstorm that would make television history. “Congratulations, this is wonderful!” Oppenheimer said. “This is just what we need to give us excitement in our second season. Lucy Ricardo will have a baby too!”

Whoever had the idea, what is not in dispute is that the notion of a pregnant Lucy Ricardo faced a steep and immediate uphill battle in the corporate suites of CBS and Philip Morris. While there was no codified ban on pregnancy on television, it was a mass-market medium, dependent on the blandest possible, inoffensive, middle-of-the-road appeal to the maximum number of viewers. And the act that produced pregnancy—that is, sex—was all but nonexistent on television, where even married couples typically slept in twin beds. It may be strenuous to imagine, but in 1952 pregnancy was still regarded as such a debilitating (or vaguely embarrassing) condition that expectant mothers were routinely dismissed from their jobs. The network and sponsor suggested alternatives: hide Lucy behind furniture (impossible, since Ball ballooned dramatically in her pregnancies); devote only one or two shows to the plotline; avoid showing the pregnancy at all costs. But Oppenheimer insisted that the story could be done in good taste, and Desi was adamant that an effective narrative arc required half a dozen or more episodes to track the progress from the first word of the pregnancy to the actual birth. Still, they got nowhere. Desperate, Desi appealed to the ultimate authority, the chairman of Philip Morris, Alfred E. Lyon. Desi wrote him a remarkable letter, laying it all on the line: