She confronted him in front of his mom.
Desi Arnaz had a reputation as a ladies’ man, but the late Cuban bandleader once went on one date that really got under his future wife Lucille Ball’s skin.
In the book Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television, biographer Todd S. Purdum alleged that Ball flipped out when she learned that Arnaz took out a former flame, pin-up model/actress Betty Grable, one night when Ball was busy. Ball, who knew Grable from their RKO movie days in the 1930s, exploded when she found out about the date.
“When she got wind of this, she drove to the house he now shared with his mother on Wilcox Avenue in Hollywood, barged past Lolita [Arnaz’s mom] at the front door, and excoriated Desi, who was still in bed, as a two-timing b——, ” Purdum wrote. “All with Lolita in earshot.”
Purdum noted that Ball “was not naive” about Arnaz’s trysts with other women but that the couple’s courtship and marriage were still plagued by “jealous outbursts and bitter arguments.”
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In his 1976 memoir, A Book, Arnaz wrote about Grable, whom he dated briefly while working on Broadway in 1939. “She was gorgeous – what a figure and what legs,” he wrote of the starlet. “It was impossible not to sit next to Betty and not want to know her a little better…I invited her to La Conga to see our show. She would come, we would dance, and she would wait for me until I finished.”
Ball didn’t hold a grudge against Grable. In fact, years later, Grable made a cameo on the 1958 Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour episode “Lucy Wins a Race Horse,” where she danced and sang with her former lover Arnaz.
Ball and Desi Arnaz‘s daughter, Lucie Arnaz, recently clarified that her father never had an “affair” during his marriage to her mother, but that he did take out other women. “People say he had affairs. He never had an affair,” Lucie Arnaz said on CBS Sunday Morning. “He didn’t even know these dames’ names. They were hookers.”
Lucille Ball ended her 20-year marriage to Desi Arnaz in 1960.
