From the day “I Love Lucy” debuted on CBS-TV in October 1951, families took the show and the characters to their hearts. For the next six years, they would gather around black-and-white sets, bursting with laughter, as Lucy and Desi Ricardo and their neighbors, the Mertzes, clowned around and cavorted in crazy situations backed by the Latin beat of Desi’s band.
The winner of four Emmy Awards and multiple nominations for the show and its stars was followed by The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show from 1957-1960. Today the most beloved couple on television continues to bring joy to the world in syndication. Best of all, the Library of Congress preserves their legacy in a display of their lives and accomplishments. It will be on display to the public until January 2012.
Throughout this year, the 60th anniversary of “I Love Lucy” and the 100th birthday of Lucille Ball have been honored by BABALU!, a celebration of their lives and musical gifts. Presented by Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz, Jr., BABALU! was first performed at New York’s 92nd Street Y in January as a tribute to her father. His bright and lively orchestrations were performed by the Desi Arnaz Orchestra. Desi, Jr. wanted to use his father’s original graphics, some of them ten to twelve pages long, but they were too flimsy, so the Library of Congress copied them free of charge. The New York concert was followed by one in Miami last summer and a third in Washington at the Library of Congress’s Coolidge Auditorium in October. The Washington concert was recorded for future performances.
Actress and singer Lucie Arnaz had stored 20 boxes of her father’s music, including 300 of his playlists, in her garage for years not knowing whether to give them to the family, donate them or throw them away. She had no idea if they were valuable or not, but she remembers her father’s advice: “If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything.”
He mentioned his storage issue while chatting with Michael Feinstein. He advised her to archive them at the Library of Congress, as he had done with his collection of Gershwin materials. Along with the music, he had 110 family scrapbooks from the 1930s through the 1970s.
Following Feinstein’s advice, he contacted the Library of Congress. They were delighted and arranged for the boxes to be picked up at their home in New York. Once the materials arrived in Washington, the scrapbook items that were glued to the paper, a sometimes fatal mistake, were located and preserved.
Although Lucie is not a historian, she considers everything she has done for her parents’ legacy to be a necessity. She was so unhappy with the CBS show that aired in memory of her, calling it a “lazy tabloid”, that she went to work to find out why all her success wasn’t making them happy.
He started by interviewing people who knew them well, like Van Johnson, Ann Miller, and their makeup artists. It was a stormy marriage, but she wanted to know what went wrong, why he was drinking and why she was playing backgammon towards the end of her life. As she watched home movies going back many years, she saw incredible images that brought clarity. Excited, she reached out to NBC-TV with her findings. The result, a documentary that was as cathartic for her as it was joy for her fans, won an Emmy Award.
“I was trying to tell the truth and be as objective and journalistic as possible,” she said. “Some of the story wasn’t pretty, but it was balanced with love.”