Lucille Ball: The Affair That Destroyed Her Marriage to Desi Arnaz

In 1962, Lucille Ball wrote a check for $2.5 million and bought the other half of a company called Desilu — a name made from two first names. Desi and Lucy. He was gone. She was alone at the head of a studio that still carried half her ex-husband's name on the door. She had just become the first woman in history to run a major Hollywood studio. Four years later, two pilots landed on her desk that her own advisors swore would bankrupt the company. One was about agents who got their orders on self-destructing tapes. The other was about a starship. She overruled every financial voice in the room and kept both alive. Mission: Impossible and Star Trek exist because of her. The studio's own accountant said it flat out: if it weren't for Lucy, there would be no Star Trek. And here's what makes it heartbreaking. The empire she saved had been built, in part, as a plan to save her marriage. Lucy wanted her husband off the road and out of the nightclubs, away from the other women. So she demanded CBS put him in her show — filmed in Los Angeles, ten minutes from their house. The network said no one would believe an all-American redhead was married to a Cuban. She proved them wrong with a vaudeville tour. The most beloved sitcom in American history was, among other things, a wife's strategy to stop her husband from cheating. It didn't work. This is the full story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz — the marriage, the empire it built, and the terrible arithmetic underneath it: the thing they made to keep them together was the thing that finally tore them apart. We cover all of it: the childhood tragedies that shaped them both — her father dead of typhoid when she was three, his family's Cuban fortune seized in a revolution that left him cleaning canary cages in Miami — the six-month courtship, the 1944 divorce she accidentally invalidated by sleeping with him the night before, the deal Desi negotiated that invented the rerun and made them a fortune, the crushing pressure that turned him into an alcoholic while the whole country called him "Lucy's husband," the courtroom where she called him Jekyll and Hyde, and the three words she used to sum up twenty years: booze and broads. Thirty million Americans watched Lucy and Ricky forgive each other every week. Nobody knew the two people playing them were going home to a marriage dying inside the machine they'd built to protect it. Watch to the end. What happened between them in the twenty-six years AFTER the divorce — and the phone call their daughter says was their last — is the part almost nobody knows. If you love the untold stories behind Hollywood's most famous couples, hit LIKE and SUBSCRIBE — new stories every week. #LucilleBall #DesiArnaz #ILoveLucy #Desilu #StarTrek #ClassicTV #OldHollywood #TVHistory #HollywoodHistory #TrueStory #Biography #Documentary #MissionImpossible #GoldenAgeOfTelevision #LucieArnaz