The phone rang in the Del Mar house two days before Desi Arnaz died. He was drifting in and out of consciousness, barely present, his body ravaged by lung cancer. His daughter, Lucy Arnaz, answered. The caller was her mother, Lucille Ball.
“It’s the redhead,” Lucy said, handing the phone to her father. She stood there for a moment, listening. Her mother was telling him she loved him, over and over, in different intonations, as if trying to squeeze a lifetime of feeling into a single call. It was too intimate.
Lucy stepped out of the room to give them privacy. Finally, Desi said, “You know, I love you, too. Good luck with your show. ”
Soon after, he slipped into a coma.
At 12:05 a. m. on December 2, 1986, Desi Arnaz died at sixty-nine, with his daughter holding him. Lucy wasn’t surprised.
“He died with me in my arms,” she said. “It was sad. But I wasn’t surprised. ”
For a generation that had grown up watching *I Love Lucy*, it felt like losing a friend of the family.
But behind the beloved television icon was a life of exile, excess, addiction, and loss that had left him vulnerable long before the cancer ever took hold. Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III was born in Cuba in 1917, the only child of a high-ranking politician. He grew up with homes, yachts, sports cars, and racehorses, groomed to take his place in Cuban society. But in 1933, a revolution turned everything upside down.
The army forced President Machado to flee, and in the violence that followed, the Arnaz family’s property was destroyed. Desi’s father became an enemy of the new regime. Desi escaped to Miami with his father, leaving his mother behind. They started a banana import business and lived in the warehouse where they stored the fruit.
Every night, they chased rats before going to sleep. When that business failed, Desi took whatever work he could find until he landed a job as a musician. He worked for Xavier Cugat’s Latin orchestra, then formed his own group. He brought the conga to New York’s café society, and his hip action made him the biggest hit in the city.
His success led him to Broadway in *Too Many Girls*, and then to Hollywood for the film version. There, he met the leading lady, Lucille Ball. She claimed he took her out to teach her the rumba. She already knew how, but she wanted to rumba with him.
They married in 1940, and together they created one of the most successful television series of all time. In *I Love Lucy*, the real-life couple played Ricky and Lucy Ricardo. Desi’s character was a heavily stereotyped version of himself, a Cuban orchestra leader with a thick accent. The show took off almost immediately.
On Monday nights at 9:00, department stores closed so people could watch. Retailers put signs in their windows saying, “We Love Lucy, Too, So We’ll Be Closed Until 9:30. ” They were on every magazine cover, every newspaper column. When Little Ricky was born, more people watched that episode than had watched the inauguration of the President of the United States.
Desi wasn’t just the cute Cuban husband on screen. He devised a method for filming live shows in front of an audience, which meant reruns could be played on multiple channels across the country. That idea built an entire industry. By the mid-1950s, Desilu Productions, the company he and Lucy ran, had bought RKO Studios, making it the biggest in the world.
Desilu’s fingerprints were on everything in Hollywood. But with fame and fortune came escalating troubles. Desi began to play harder. His addictions flared up.
He had always been a man of excess, without a natural governor. When he drank, he was a different man. And his drink of choice was rum, specifically Bacardi—his grandfather had been a co-founder of the company. Rum was in his DNA.
He also never stopped smoking. He smoked cigarettes on screen for years because Philip Morris sponsored the show, and he loved Cuban cigars. He smoked cigarillos, five or six a day, and unlike most cigar smokers, he inhaled. Those carcinogens went straight into his lungs.
By the mid-1950s, Desi’s reasons for drinking changed. He felt the pressures of the business, and he began to drink in the morning. He’d show up intoxicated. In the fall of 1959, after a hard day’s drinking, he stumbled out of a brothel and got into a confrontation with two policemen.
He was arrested by Vice Squad officers and charged with being a public drunk. The story hit the papers. Desi came from a culture where mistresses and prostitutes were accepted, and he didn’t understand the uproar. He still loved his wife.
But eight months later, when his behavior didn’t change, Lucy divorced him. Desi was still a devoted father. He loved his children, and they loved him back. But the divorce took a visible toll on him.
It was the only time people close to him saw a deep fracture in his spirit. Around the same period, Desi began having stomach problems. In 1957, he was diagnosed with diverticula—small pouches that form in the lower intestine when the inner layer pushes through weak spots in the outer lining. His doctor advised a healthier diet and less stress.
But Desi was running the biggest studio in the world. Slowing down wasn’t an option. He ignored the advice and kept drinking and smoking. By the late 1960s, the diverticula had become infected and ruptured.
He needed emergency surgery to remove the diseased section of his colon, and he wore a colostomy bag for over a year. For a man with a strong Cuban macho personality, it was devastating. “You can’t be much of a Latin lover when you have a colostomy bag coming out of your abdomen,” one associate said. A year later, surgeons reconnected his colon.
But he continued smoking and drinking, and five years before his death, he was again hospitalized for emergency surgery for intestinal bleeding. His colon was constantly compromised. In 1985, Desi married again, to Edy Hirsh. She was bubbly and fun, a wonderful influence on him.
When she was diagnosed with cancer, Desi watched her battle the disease for two years before she died. Her loss hit him harder than almost anything else. He was still grieving when, nine months before his own death, in March 1986, a cancer specialist confirmed that Desi had lung cancer. The diagnosis hit him hard.
He underwent radiation therapy and chemotherapy. The treatment left him debilitated. He lost so much weight that he dropped below one hundred pounds, unrecognizable as the vibrant Latin lover he had once been. But he was determined to fight.
The same grit that had carried him from a rat-infested warehouse in Miami to the top of Hollywood made him dig deep. He would do whatever it took to beat it. But the cancer was too advanced. The healthy lung tissue was being destroyed, and his body couldn’t absorb enough oxygen.
He struggled to breathe. Toward the end, he refused visitors, wanting only his daughter Lucy by his side. But Lucy knew how much her parents’ relationship had meant to them both. She convinced her father to let her mother visit.
She brought her mom down and put on *I Love Lucy* tapes. She left them alone in the room, and they sat and reminisced and laughed about the old shows and the old times. It was heartbreaking for her to witness. On November 30, 1986, two days before he died, the phone rang.
Lucy answered, then handed the phone to her father. “It’s the redhead. ”
She heard her mother telling him she loved him, over and over, in different intonations. Then Desi said, “You know, I love you, too.
Good luck with your show. ”
He slipped into a coma. On December 2, 1986, at 12:05 a. m.
, Desi Arnaz died with his daughter holding him. His physician claimed his lung cancer was caused by smoking Cuban cigars. Dr. Michael Hunter, the forensic pathologist who investigated his death, agreed that smoking was key, but he also pointed to the alcohol, the intestinal problems, and possibly the grief that had weakened his immune system.
Desi Arnaz spent nearly fifty years smoking and drinking. He simply couldn’t escape the consequences. But those who knew him didn’t see a tragedy. They saw a man full of life.
He was loud, funny, vibrant. He loved his cigars, his rum, his fishing, his gambling. “We can very easily judge and say, ‘Well, that was bad for him. It probably killed him,’” one friend said.
“But in many ways, it kept him alive. ”
