The Fifties

by David Halberstam

One scene shows them arriving at the hospital with Lucy pushing Desi in a wheelchair. Desi Arnaz, Jr., was born on January 19, 1953—right on schedule. By some estimates, 68 percent of the television sets in the country were tuned to the show, which meant that 44 million people saw it. That was twice the number who watched the inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower the next day, a President who was uneasy with television but who presided over the years in which it became an ever more dominant force in American life. During its first years the I Love Lucy show, like most of the early shows, had an urban setting; but a few years down the line, as their ratings slipped a bit, Lucy and Desi were forced to follow much of their audience to the suburbs. How, otherwise, could the housewives of America sympathize with Lucy? Fred and Ethel with them, they moved to Westport, Connecticut. Their real lives were not quite so idyllic as their television existence. It was always a difficult relationship: Desi was a drinker and a womanizer. “If I stayed mad at every woman that Desi had an affair with, I’d have been angry with half of the nicest girls in Hollywood,” Lucy once said. As Desi Arnaz, Jr., the true child of television, once noted, “I learned pretty early to relate to I Love Lucy as a television show and to my parents as actors on it.... There wasn’t much relationship between what I saw on TV and what was really going on at home. Those were difficult years—all those funny things