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Nearly 60 years following their split,Lucille Balland Desi Arnaz’s daughter is opening up about her parents’ contentious marriage — and “horrible” divorce.
“They were fighting all the time when we were growing up,” Lucie Arnaz, 67,toldCloser Weeklyin a new interview.
“There was a lot of anger and screaming,” she admitted.
In 1940, Ball and Desi met on the RKO set of a picture calledToo Many Girls. Ball was a 28-year-old contract player with a string of forgettable films, and Desi, at 23, a dashing, Cuban-born nightclub bandleader. They married six months later.
By 1950, Ball was starring on radio with actor Richard Denning in the popular CBS showMy Favorite Husband. When the network launched a version of the show for the new medium of television, she insisted that Desi be cast as her spouse. The formula was magic.
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But off-screen, the Arnaz marriage, which produced two children — daughter Lucie and son Desi Jr. (Jan. 19, 1953) — before ending in a divorce, was a volatile interplay of alcoholism and infidelity.
“Their divorce was horrible. And then there was the alcoholism,” Lucie toldCloserabout her late parents’ marriage.
Said Lucie, “I had preferred those things had never been there. We didn’t have any abuse, but we did go through some pretty hard stuff and that’s why my parents didn’t stay together.”
But they did find love again before their deaths (Ball died in 1989and Desi in 1986). She enjoyed a fulfilling, 28-year-marriage to comedian Gary Morton, and Desi retired, sold his share of Desilu Studios to his ex-wife and married his neighbor, Edie Hirsch.
“I think she always loved him. And there’s no question that he loved her always,”I Love Lucydirector William Asher told PEOPLE in 1991. “Later, he married her double. Edie [Mack Hirsch] was a marvelous girl in her own right, but she sure as hell looked like Lucy.”
source: people.com
