She thought she had the perfect name picked out. Then Desi Arnaz filled out the birth certificate.
Lucille Ball had the name “Susan” in mind long before she ever became a mother. But when she finally gave birth to her daughter in 1951, that dream name never made it onto the birth certificate. Her husband, Desi Arnaz, made sure of that—without telling her.
People reported that according to the new biography Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television by Todd S. Purdum, Ball had long imagined naming her first daughter Susan. The name was to be a tribute to her close friend, the actress Susan Peters. She’d even signed letters to Desi in the 1940s as “Susan and Desi Jr.”
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But after several miscarriages and a complicated surgery that nearly dashed her hopes of motherhood, Ball finally gave birth via cesarean section at age 39. She was asleep for the birth.
When she awoke from anesthesia, Lucille asked the nurse to see baby Susan. The nurse replied, “You mean Lucie?”
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It turns out Desi had already filled out the birth certificate, naming their daughter Lucie Désirée after Ball and her mother. The decision stunned Lucille, but she didn’t fight it.
Purdum writes that Lucy “was surprised but didn’t make a fuss. The name was, after all, a compliment she could hardly resist.”
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz would go on to have a second child, Desi Jr., whose birth was famously written into I Love Lucy. Both Desi Jr., 72, and Lucie, 73, talked to Purdum for his book about their parents.
But behind the laughter, there was tension. According to Desi Jr., his parents’ relationship was “full of arguments,” ending in a final divorce in 1960.
Still, the birth of Lucie marked a turning point. Even if the name wasn’t what Ball envisioned, it was the start of the family she’d fought so hard to have.
