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Lucie Arnaz is shedding light on Desi Arnaz’s relationship with alcohol.
The actress, 73, got candid about her famous father’s addiction while speaking with CBS Sunday Morning on June 15.
The daughter of Arnaz and Lucille Ball recalled the actor being someone who was not particularly “changeable.”
However, “later on, way later on, almost when it was too late, he really made some amazing progress on himself.”
“He committed to AA meetings, treatment programs,” Lucie explained. “It was fantastic. My greatest memory of him to this day was him standing up [in a treatment center] in La Jolla. The guy who said, ‘I don’t air my dirty laundry in front of other people.’ …. he got up and said, ‘My name is Desi and I’m an alcoholic.'”
She gushed: “And that’s my proudest moment, that he stood up next to me and I watched him do that.”
“To take responsibility and try to solve it,” she reflected. “It’s a disease and he finally wrapped his head around that and I was so very proud of him. Unfortunately, it happened about three years too late. Because by that time, he figured out about a later, that he had lung cancer … and he only lasted a year.”
She noted: “It doesn’t matter when you get there, as long as you get there.”
According to the singer, Desi’s pride got in the way of him seeking help sooner.
She revealed that “he didn’t even show up when Desi [Jr.] went through recovery,” despite his son struggling with alcoholism himself.
But once Desi’s second wife, Edith Hirsch, died in 1985, enough was enough.
“He finally he said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ And he asked my brother to help him.”
During her sit-down, Lucie also spoke out about Desi’s infidelity throughout his 20-year marriage to his “I Love Lucy” co-star.
“People say he had affairs,” she said. “He never had an affair.”
Although Desi did step outside his union to Lucille.
“He didn’t even know these dames’ names, you know?” clarified Lucie. “They were hookers.”
She revealed that her famous mom “understood” that.
“He loved my mother. He loved his family. 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,” Lucie continued. “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.”
The exes married in 1940 and starred together on “I Love Lucy” from 1951 to 1957.
Lucille filed for divorce from Desi in 1960 after 20 years.
“It got so bad that I thought it would be better for us not to be together,” she allegedly told the court during their divorce proceedings.
“They were just going through a routine for the children,” biographer Bart Andrews told People in 1991. “She told me that for the last five years of their marriage, it was ‘just booze and broads.’”
In the new book, “Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television,” by biographer Todd S. Purdum, Desi Jr., 72, dove deeper into his father’s addiction and how he helped him seek treatment in the 80s.
Desi Jr. went to the Scripps Clinic near San Diego in 1981 and four years later, it was his dad’s turn to enter an alcohol rehabilitation program.
“It was really nice,” Desi Jr. reminisced, “because whatever I was going through, it was paying off. I said, ‘I can’t do anything for you, but there’s a place that can.’ He understood that.”
Desi attended the Scripps McDonald Center in La Jolla, where he registered under the name “Bill Sanchez.”
Looking back at Desi’s incredible career, the retired musician told Todd S. Purdum that his dad felt most alone at the height of his fame.
“That’s when he realized the emptiness — at the crest of his success,” he explained. “He didn’t stop drinking. He didn’t know what the real poison was. This is a temporary life.”
Many fans tuned into the 2021 film “Being the Ricardos” to get a better understanding into the famed duo, but according to Lucie, not all was accurate.
The Prime Video project, which starred Nicole Kidman as Lucille and Javier Bardem as Desi, was directed by Aaron Sorkin, who allegedly didn’t take Lucie’s notes into consideration.
“I tried to work on it and correct the incorrect parts, especially [my mother’s] relationship with the writers,” Lucie shared earlier this month. “Totally wrong, right? She adored those people. They got along so well; none of that backstabbing, crazy, insulting stuff.”
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