I’ve heard of stories against black actors in that era, how when James Baskett was not allowed to attend the premier of Disney’s Song of the South in Atlanta because of segregation. I Love Lucy wasn’t filmed too long after that. Were there any widespread racism towards Arnaz? Any significant objection to a minority marrying a white woman? Were audiences, maybe in certain parts of the country, hostile to the idea of interracial marriage? I noticed that Loving vs. Virginia didn’t happen until well after the run of the show in 1967.
Wasn’t he a white guy?
A light-skinned Cuban, still almost a decade before Castro’s coup turned “Cuban” into a bad word? Doubtful.
John McGraw tried to pass off a black baseball player as “Cuban” to break the color line, and there wereCuban baseball players in baseball long before the color line was broken. Cubans were just not the target of racism the way Blacks were.
In some episode of I Love Lucy, Arnez calls a 40 year old Black Conductor “Boy”. :rolleyes:
CBS executives certainly worried about it:
Of course, once they decided to go ahead, the show proved wildly popular, so it couldn’t have been too big a deal to the country at large. At this time, obviously, a show involving a black-and-white couple would not have aired.
Luuuuucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do!
J. Edgar Hoover kept a 200+ page file on Arnaz, though he did that with pretty much everybody of any fame.
Well, his wife had red hair. Perhaps Hoover took that as a sign of Communist sympathies.
Well, of course. He had to document his lousy fashion sense!
(Am I remembering right? Is Arnaz the guy whom Hoover and Tolson mocked at the race track in J. Edgar)?
She was also a registered Communist in the 1930s, which caused more than a little headache for them in the '50s. (Her grandfather, whose house she grew up in, was a leftist and it was largely to appease him.)
See post number seven.
It’s interesting that “I Love Lucy” featured a Cuban-American married to a woman of European descent, and another big hit of the same period featured an Arab-American actor (Amos Muzyad Yakhoob Kairouz aka Danny Thomas) whose character was married to a woman of European descent.
I wasn’t alive back then, but was his ethnicity even widely-known at the time? Anyway, he looked totally white on black-and-white film. And Arnaz isn’t a common surname. I don’t think people would see it and think, “that’s a brown guy.” As opposed to Cuban surnames like Díaz, López, García, Fernández, González, Gomez, etc.
They referred to his being Cuban many times on the show.
Including at least one episode of how they met in Havana.
Plus there’s the fact that he would occasionally open his mouth.
Wonder what Lucy would say if she knew that Star Trek was still around today. Her studio, Desilu, produced the original Star Trek in the 60s before she sold out to Paramount.
She was alive for the first batch of Star Trek movies and the start of the next generation series.
There’s an alternate history about this
“That Wacky Redhead” That Wacky Redhead | alternatehistory.com
Summary: Lucille Ball doesn’t sell Desilu to Paramount - affects history of Star Trek, eliminates the Brady Bunch, and has rippling further effects down the corridors of time (I haven’t read it all yet)