Lucie Arnaz, the daughter of the legendary I Love Lucy stars Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, is speaking out to defend both her father and her parents’ marriage decades after their respective deaths.
Lucie Defends Her Parents’ Marriage
Lucille and Desi were married from 1940 until they divorced in 1960. Their split came amidst rumors that Desi had engaged in multiple affairs. While being interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning last month, however, Lucie defended her parents’ marriage.
“People say he had affairs. He never had an affair. He didn’t even know these dames’ names. They were hookers,” said Lucie, 73.
“They were transactional?” asked CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Mo Rocca.
“Yeah. He loved my mother, he loved his family,” Lucie replied. “It was a very unique, weird problem to have. And I think that’s the reason she stayed with him so long, is that she understood it. I don’t think I could do what she did.”
“But somehow, at the time, with what they had, with what they needed from each other, they stuck it out as long as they could,” she continued.
Watch Lucie talk more about this in the video below.
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Lucille And Desi’s Divorce
Lucie was just 8 years-old when her parents ended both their marriage and their sitcom I Love Lucy. Her only sibling Desi Jr. was 7 years-old at the time. In her latest interview, Lucie recalled the moment that she and her brother learned that her parents were divorcing.
“We were at their house in Palm Springs, and they said that, ‘We love each other, but being husband and wife part is broken, and we can’t live together anymore,'” Lucie remembered.
“I remember that my brother said, ‘But if it’s broken, can’t you just fix it? Can’t you put stuff on it and fix it?'” she added. “And they said, ‘I don’t think so.’ The truth of it is, Mo, they were happier after they got divorced. The screaming and the arguing and all that stuff stopped.”
Lucie went on to say that when she was a child, she felt the need to protect her famous father’s image.
“I was very protective of my dad, believe it or not,” she admitted. “I felt really sorry for my dad, I felt like he was the one that got ousted.”
Related: Carol Burnett, 92, Reveals Message She Received From Lucille Ball Hours After Her Death
Lucille’s Final Goodbye To Desi
Though Lucille and Desi each married other people after their divorce, they remained close friends. In a 2022 interview, Lucie recalled Lucille saying goodbye to Desi just two days before he died of lung cancer at the age of 69 in 1986. Lucie witnessed her parents’ final telephone conversation as she sat with her father in the hospital.
“I could hear her say, ‘I love you.’ She said it five times in a row. And he was nodding and saying, ‘I love you too, honey,'” Lucie told People Magazine. “He died in my arms. None of us realized it at the time, but the day they last spoke was Nov. 30, their wedding anniversary.”
Lucille died less than three years later in 1989 of cardiac arrest at the age of 77.
In her 2022 interview, Lucie reflected on how her parents’ marriage was connected to I Love Lucy.
“They did the show so they could be together because my dad was always on the road and they never saw each other,” she explained. “So my parents thought, ‘Well, this is going to save our marriage, and we can have a family.'”
“They gave the country this wonderful creation, but they never got what they wanted — to stay together,” Lucie concluded. “… [But] they loved each other until the end.”
Lucie and Desi were true legends. While they are dearly missed to this day, they will always live on through I Love Lucy, and through the laughs that they have brought to millions of fans around the world.
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