Desiderio Alberto Arnaz III
1917-1986
Desi Arnaz was born on March 2, 1917 in Santiago de Cuba, the son of the mayor of Santiago and his wife, Dolores Acha, one of the most prominent and beautiful women in Latin America, whose father was one of the three original founders of the Bacardi Rum Company. The family owned three ranches, a palatial home in the city, and a vacation home on a private island in Santiago Bay.
It was in 1940 on the set of Too Many Girls that he met actress Lucille Ball. They were married five months later on November 30, in Greenwich, Connecticut. The couple bought a home in Chatsworth, California, which they christened the Desilu Ranch.
In 1950 when CBS asked Lucille Ball to take her popular radio program, My Favorite Husband, to the new medium of television, her answer was yes, if Desi could play her husband. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz entered into negotiations to star in a new CBS comedy entitled I Love Lucy.
After they filmed the pilot for I Love Lucy and got a sponsor for the show, the problem of where to shoot the show arose. Lucille and Desi wanted to stay in California, but CBS wanted them to move to New York, where all the shows were filmed in those days. Desi said they would stay in California, shoot the show in front of a live audience and put it on film, to be sent to New York.
Everyone at CBS was shocked--but Desi knew that Lucille worked best before a live audience, so he developed the idea for the three camera technique so the show could be shot on film in front of the audience. If not for this ingenuity, I Love Lucy and many other shows of the period may have been lost forever.
Desi Arnaz died of lung cancer on December 2, 1986, at his home in Del Mar, California. Although Desi Arnaz will always be remembered as the sidekick to the world's zaniest redhead, he was so much more. It was his business genius and forward thinking that led to the creation of the three camera technique.
