Quote of the day:

Never ruin an apology with an excuse.
—Benjamin Franklin

Still reading Todd Purdum’s Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television.

I’ve long been fascinated by those unexpected chains of events that take a person from point A to point X or whatever.

From our perspective we view the I Love Lucy show as part of history, but of course, it never would have happened if Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III had never met and married Lucille Ball.

As I highlighted in the previous two posts, because of the political upheaval in Cuba the Arnaz family lost its fortune and had to flee to Florida in the hope of making a new life. That started a chain of events, some random, some of his own making, that led Desi to be seen by Lorenz Hart at a night club in Miami and later in the same named club in New York City, where Rogers and Hart offered him a part in their musical with Hart going out of his way to see that he got the part.

Which led to his role in the movie version where he met Lucille Ball.

Desi and Lucy were married shortly after they met, and a decade later, in order to revive their flagging careers, Desi sold the idea of a half hour sitcom starring the two of them as husband and wife to CBS.

I left some things out of the narrative.

For example, when Desi turned fifteen, his uncle, presumably at his father’s direction, took Desi to “the finest whorehouse in Santiago”. According to Todd Purdum:

In fact, this formative experience would cause Desi plenty of trouble in future years, because he had internalized the mixed messages about sex and gender reflected in the patriarchal, chauvinist Latin culture in which he was raised. On the one hand, sex with whores was there for the asking while nice women, respectable women—like his mother, elegant and aloof—were to be treated with courtesy extending to gallantry. On the other hand, the society of his class and time subjugated even such respected women to second-class, subordinate roles and a cruel double standard: Men could stray sexually, unpunished; women could not.

Later on, one of the A-listers who was drawn to La Conga in New York City to see the slim-hipped sensation was Polly Adler, and Desi soon became one of her clients.

Now I realize that the name Polly Adler probably doesn’t mean anything to my younger readers, but those of my generation will instantly associate her name with A House Is Not a Home, her memoir of her days running a, er, uh, a house. 

As Purdum describes her:

Adler was a celebrity in her own right, the sort of genteelly notorious figure that a more permissive age could not have produced. She was charged at least seventeen times with maintaining ever-grander houses of prostitution and generally got off with a slap on the wrist. In her memoir, A House Is Not a Home, she boasted that in the late 1930s she ran a close second to Grover Whalen as New York City’s official greeter, drawing her patrons not only from Who’s Who and the Social Register but also from the Almanach de Gotha, the definitive directory of European royalty. Her clients included the playwright George S. Kaufman (who ran a tab), the actors Milton Berle and John Garfield, and the New Yorker writer Robert Benchley, who had selected the fine books and signed first editions that lined the shelves of Adler’s establishment. (“I regret to say, as yet unread—at least by me,” she would confess.) Desi became a customer after he noticed a gorgeous redhead moving past La Conga’s bandstand one night—she was one of Polly’s employees—and Adler invited him over for a breakfast of caviar, sturgeon, and scrambled eggs, with the redhead as a complimentary dessert.

The point being that when Lorenz Hart and his procurer Doc Bender approached Desi to coach him for the audition, the 22-year-old was already very sexually experienced. Whether he was amenable to a different kind of experience is matter of speculation.

Gary Marmorstein’s biography of Hart, A Ship Without A Sail: The Life of Lorenz Hart, is quite direct in pointing out that Hart was infatuated with Arnaz, and that Bender may have tried to seduce him for Hart, but there is no indication of whether that was successful or not.

I, of course, can imagine several different scenarios for how it may have played out, but then I’ve long been accused having a dirty mind.

Of the three scenarios that I think possible, in two of them nothing happens; only in the third does Hart get what he was after. It’s the first scenario that I believe to be the most likely, the one where Doc Bender realizes that Desi, with his macho Latin background, isn’t ripe for the plucking and doesn’t make an advance, so Larry Hart could look but not touch.

In each scenario
You can depend
On the end
Where the lovers agree.
Where’s that Lothario
Where does he roam
With his dome
Vaselined as can be?
It is easy to see all right
Everything’s gonna be all right
Be just dandy for everybody but me.

—“Where’s That Rainbow?” by Lorenz Hart

For the record, Larry Hart was invited to Desi and Lucy’s wedding in Connecticut a week after the movie Two Many Girls opened, but he didn’t show up.

Todd Purdum’s Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television goes on to demonstrate how Desi’s showmanship helped to create the innovative three camera technique for filming a half hour situation comedy in front of a live audience and how that method is still used today. With Desilu, the production company he set up with Lucy, he helped to create some of the most influential shows of the 50s and 60s, such as The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible,  and Star Trek.

Here is the episode of What’s My Line? for November 9, 1952, when Desi Arnaz was the mystery guest. I’ve cued the video to start at the mystery guest appearance, but the preceding regular contestants were a lot of fun as well.

 

 

Note: When you purchase something after clicking Amazon links in my posts, I may earn a small commission. As of this date, I have yet to earn anything. 😎