The Fifties

by David Halberstam

resoundingly against Arnaz. “Keep the redhead but ditch the Cuban,” said the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein. He was told it was a package deal. “Well, for God’s sake, don’t let him sing. No one will understand him,” Hammerstein said. But Lucy understood something that the producers initially did not: Viewers certainly knew that Desi was her real husband, and that made the show itself all the more believable. Since Desi played a Cuban bandleader on the show, his profession in real life, who could tell where reality ended and the show began? At first Lucy, the producer, and the writers grappled with the story line. There was talk that Lucy should be a Hollywood star, but she vetoed that—she knew that the heroine should not be a star, because ordinary Americans believed that movie stars had no problems. Who would identify with an actress? But an ordinary housewife who longs to be a star, she suggested—that was another thing entirely. “Everybody wants to be in show business like Lucy did and they could relate to that,” she later said of the program’s main theme. Slowly, the concept evolved: They were Ricky and Lucy Ricardo; he was a musician who longed for an ordinary life and an ordinary marriage. “I want a wife who’s just a wife,” he said in the pilot. She was the housewife who wants nothing more than to be a star. Gradually, against great odds, the show was put together, and after a series of rejections, the producers found a sponsor, the Philip Morris company. It premiered