When Lucie Arnaz was first approached about participating in a new documentary about her parents, television legends Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, she declined.
The 70-year-old was, at the time, contractually obligated not to get involved with any projects about them other than the new Aaron Sorkin film “Being the Ricardos,” on which she and her younger brother, Desi Arnaz Jr., served as executive producers.
But she listened to the documentary producers’ plans anyway — and let them know their approach was all wrong.
“I took the opportunity to straighten them out on a couple of things,” Lucie told The Post. “Their whole focus was going to be Lucille Ball, and how she changed the female perspective, ran a studio and was a feminist. I said, ‘I’m gonna stop you right there. Because first of all, if that’s your focus, it’s fake, and you’re not going to be able to support this. She never thought of herself as a feminist. [The studio] was dumped on her. She hated every minute of it. All she wanted to do was a show.’”
Once Lucie, a veteran Broadway and screen actress and nightclub performer who began her career as a regular on her mother’s “Here’s Lucy” TV series in 1968, became free to participate in the documentary, she did. Now, “Lucy and Desi,” directed by Amy Poehler, is premiering Fri., March 4, on Amazon Prime.
The documentary that began as a study of a superstar “feminist” show-business tycoon eventually became the story of the epic Hollywood love affair between Ball and Desi — including “I Love Lucy,” the smash-hit 1950s television series starring the couple, as well as their Desilu studio empire, encompassing three production lots and 35 sound stages.
Following their 1960 divorce, Ball, who was vice president of Desilu, had to assume the reins of the company to keep it going after Desi’s departure. Yet that love affair never really ended, Lucie reveals in the film as she touchingly describes her parents’ last phone conversation when Desi was on his deathbed in 1986.
Lucie is interviewed in the documentary — along with Carol Burnett, Bette Midler, Norman Lear and others — and provided previously unseen family photos and home-movie footage and never-before-heard autobiographical audiotapes her parents recorded. “I was madly in love with Desi,” Lucy admits on one, while Desi confesses: “When I drank, I drank too much.”
Although the Lucy-Desi story has been told many times before — including in an Emmy-winning 1993 NBC documentary, “Lucy and Desi: A Home Movie,” directed by Lucie — their daughter concedes that the time is right for a new interpretation.
She pointed out that much of the content of the Poehler documentary will be new information for a lot of people. “There’s a whole new generation, people in their 20s and 30s, that don’t know what happened,” Lucie said. “What my father had to go through as a child in Cuba — to have everything and be kind of happy-go-lucky, not a care in the world, and then have the carpet just ripped out from under you, in a tragic way.”
Desi’s father had been mayor of the city of Santiago de Cuba, and the once-affluent family had to abruptly flee, penniless, for the US after the overthrow of the Machado regime in the early 1930s, when Desi was still in his teens.
“And on my mother’s side, they had nothing. They grew up pretty poor — happy poor, but poor. There was a lot of death in her family,” Lucie said about Ball, who was raised in Jamestown, NY. Ball’s father died when she was but 3 years old — the first of many tragic losses the family would endure. “It was just a lot for a young person to deal with. And she ended up having to feel responsible to take care of all those people who she loved. My mother took care of her family for most of her life.”
The choice of Poehler as the documentary’s director was a plus for Lucie, who thought, “That’s a really wonderful viewpoint to look at this through — she’s in the world of comedy, she’s a businesswoman, she has a family and is trying to balance all of that.”
Los Angeles-born and -bred Lucie, who has been living in Palm Springs, Calif., for the past eight years after a two-decade stint in New York and Connecticut, noted that she also has changed a lot since being interviewed for her own documentary about her parents. In it, she confessed that she felt deprived of their time and attention as a child, owing to their big careers, and suffered the pain of living through their very public divorce when she was not yet 10.
“I’ve grown up and I have I have a different way of looking at all this now,” said Lucie. “My kids have grown up and they have kids. I understand more about the choices that we make, and how difficult it is to keep a family going and to keep your work at a particular level without having to mess up your family. I’m just a lot more forgiving.”
She said she now looks at the retelling of her parents’ story as “sort of a ‘mental autopsy’ of why these people did what they did. I can get immersed in it and find it fascinating — more than feeling, ‘I didn’t get what I wanted.’
“These were two really amazing people who had crazy stuff happen to them in their lives and still they were able to mount this amazing, crazy, wonderful show. And probably the whole reason that these things existed was their love for one another. They wanted to keep it solid, keep it together. How did that [success] mess [their marriage and family life] all up? There’s something to be learned from that.”
The documentary, produced by Ron Howard’s Imagine Documentaries and White Horse Pictures, is part of a resurgence of interest in Ball and Desi that has included the resurfacing of Ball’s 1964 CBS radio interview show, “Let’s Talk to Lucy,” on Sirius XM; the third season of the TCM podcast “The Plot Thickens,” about Ball’s life; and the Sorkin film starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem, both of whom are nominated for best acting Academy Awards. (J.K. Simmons is also nominated for his supporting role as “I Love Lucy” actor William Frawley, aka Fred Mertz.)
While Lucie is not a big fan of prizes — “I’m fine with nominations, but I get uncomfortable when it starts to get to who’s the best” — she has been pleased by the accolades, which include a Golden Globe win for Kidman.
“The acting in this film was superb,” she said. “I think they’ve knocked it out of the park, especially Nicole and Javier, because neither one of them are necessarily Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.”
But what would her mother, who died in 1989 at age 77, think of the portrayals?
“[My mother] appreciated actors, she appreciated a good performance,” Lucie replied. “And I think she would see in Nicole somebody who really went above and beyond the wigs and the makeup and didn’t try be a Lucy lookalike. She would probably be more specifically critical about things in the film that didn’t happen [in real life]. But I think she would appreciate where the essence was coming from.”
Lucie said that while her parents were accurately portrayed, others — among them “I Love Lucy” writers Madelyn Pugh (played by, at different ages, Linda Lavin and Alia Shawkat) and Bob Carroll Jr. (Ronny Cox and Jake Lacy) — were not. “They were great actors, but they did not represent those people at all.
“I was not involved in the film at that level,” she continued. “Mr. Sorkin wanted to write the conflict he decided he needed to write. And he wound up writing a really good film … But I think my mother would have the same sort of beef with those little things.”
Aside from its undeniable comedic charms, Lucie thinks “I Love Lucy” endures because it’s “about unconditional love.
“Let’s take Lucy, who got in trouble most of the time. You waited for it, to see what kind of terrible trouble she’s going to be into. And then at the end, she gets out of it, and people forgive her,” Lucie said. “So all of us kind of wish that we could be Lucy Ricardo, that life would be gentle on us like that — that it would be more forgiving.”
As for the “Lucy and Desi” documentary, Lucie hopes viewers come away with a deeper understanding of her parents and “maybe a little understanding about their own lives and their own challenges in relationships and work,” she said.
“As I said in my own documentary, be careful what you wish for, because it can all turn bad,” she noted, recalling the disappointment and pain of that child of divorce she once was. But, drawing on the hard-earned wisdom the intervening years have brought to her, she added: “In this case, it’s, ‘be careful what you wish for and make sure you’re ready for it when it comes — and enjoy it.’”
