Desi Arnaz by Desi Arnaz
I love Desi's book.
For millions of Americans, Desi Arnaz was not Desi Arnaz. He was Ricky Ricardo, the Cuban orchestra leader on the TV show I Love Lucy whose signature song was “Babalú,” which most viewers didn’t know was a number rooted in the invocation of an Afro-Cuban saint. Dark, handsome and charismatic, Arnaz was a shrewd and highly successful businessman from a prestigious family in Cuba who was saved from a future of uncertainty as a refugee in the United States one night in 1937, when he strapped a conga on his shoulder in a Miami Beach nightclub.
A new book about Desi Arnaz will be out on June 3, written by Todd S. Purdum, a former NY Times correspondent. It’s called Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television. I’m looking forward to reading it.
That news sent me to my bookshelf to open Arnaz’s memoir A Book, which he wrote in 1976. I love this book for its comic relief and the details of Arnaz’s times, including his early days as a young immigrant, when he figured that joining a band could be a better way of making a living than cleaning the cages of canaries that were sold in drugstores in Miami Beach. As he tells it, he bluffed his way to stardom.
In the public’s eye, Desi Arnaz would live a double life with his alter ego Ricky Ricardo, the volatile but loving husband of Lucy Ricardo, played by his real-life wife Lucille Ball. Ricky Ricardo reinforced typical Latino stereotypes - he was a macho “latin lover” - whose pronounced accent was used to provoke laughter among the show's audience. Cringey or even disturbing as it may be to watch some of that show’s scenes now, Ricky-Arnaz was the first Latino star on American television. And he was a huge star. His presence was even more groundbreaking because the character he created was a Latino who was not a criminal, a gang member, or a bouncer, but a middle-class man, a musician and the owner of a club bearing the same name as Havana's famous Tropicana.