The New Tycoon

Battered old movie posters still flapped in the Hollywood breezes on the high walls of the old RKO lot last week. But towering above the lot, in huge black letters on the freshly painted silver water tower, loomed a new hallmark: Desilu Studios. Below it, cameramen were already shooting TV films on five of the lot's 14 stages, while an army of wreckers, carpenters, painters and plasterers exorcised the past for the arrival of the new owners: onetime Bongo Drummer Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y De Acha III, 41, and his round-eyed, henna-crested wife, Comedienne Lucille Ball, 46.

For Desi and Lucy, the trip to the RKO lot was at once a sentimental journey and an ironic triumph. It is where they met, fell in love--and left in the early '40s under the shadow of Desi's dropped option. Since then, babyfaced. Cuban-born Desi has become not only half of TV's most popular comedy team, but the self-made boss of a company that produces, or takes a hand in producing, 27 TV shows.* This year on three different lots Desilu will grind out 270 hours of filmed television entertainment--more than twice the footage of any movie studio--rivaling TV's Revue Productions as the biggest film producer in the new Hollywood.

Pile & Putter. While Lucy moves into the dressing room that Ginger Rogers once occupied as queen of RKO and keeps an eye on the commissary (she hates "bad studio food"), Desi will reign in an oak-and-leather throne room, surrounded by deep pile, a disappearing bar, and a putter alongside the desk. The new Hollywood tycoon is already awakening echoes of older ones. As workmen remodeled buildings for directors, producers and writers, he said: "Those cubbyholes were no good. Our offices are going to be twice that size. These are creative people, and creative people gotta have room to think." Madelyn Pugh Martin, one of the company's favorite writers, will even get a built-in nursery for her new baby.

Desi has begun buying galley proofs of novels directly from publishers, "the same way major studios do," and is looking for fresh writing talent in colleges. He hopes to set up a studio workshop for acting tyros and a system of talent scouts. And he does not stop there in emulating the lost grandeur of the big studios. Says he: "If we get a good story that just won't fit on that small screen, then we'll do it as a movie feature."

Back in 1951, when Arnaz and his wife started I Love Lucy on a shoestring, they knew so little about the business that they sent their cameraman to Manhattan to pick up pointers from live shows. Today even the janitors on his payroll of 2,500 still call him by his first name, but Desi is equally authoritative behind the cameras directing a pilot film or rattling off shrewd decisions in long-distance calls with network brass, sponsors and ad agencies.

Since he and Lucy are sole owners, there is no lag at Desilu when he decides to make a deal. He beat two major bidders for the RKO studios when he strolled off a Lucy set one day last fall and made a phone call nailing down the purchase from General Tire & Rubber Co., RKO's owner since 1955, for a bargain $6,150,000. Desi usually spends ten hours a day at work, chauffeurs himself in his black Thunderbird from the Beverly Hills mansion where he and Lucy live with their two children, Lucie Desiree, 6, and Desi IV, 5, manages three-day golf weekends at another home in Palm Springs.

The Guy in Omaha. "This coming year," says Tycoon Arnaz, "is going to be probably the most important year in television's history. You might call it the industry's moment of truth. Only quality stuff will draw an audience, so I think only the fittest will survive. We're going to go all out."

Desi will plow $7,500,000 into his 1958-59 production schedule so confidently that "this time we're going to do the shows first and then go looking for a sponsor." The main project: Desilu Playhouse, which, with Desi as host, will offer weekly hour-long dramatic and musical productions, plus a dozen 90-minute spectaculars, including Don Quixote and six Desi-Lucy comedies. All the shows will be tailored to this Arnaz pattern: "No violence, no psychopaths, no dirtiness. There will never be any need to send the kids to bed when we come on."

Will the results please the critics--or confirm a rival's description of Desilu as "a sausage factory"? Snort Producer Arnaz, embracing the code of Hollywood tycoons old and new: "I've never yet made a show for the 21 Club or the Romanoff's crowd, and I'm not going to start now. The viewers have to be able to identify themselves with the characters or you're going to lose them. I've always got the guy in Omaha in mind."

* Desilu's own shows (current, shooting, or enjoying profitable reruns): the hour-long Desi-Lucy shows (which have won this season's highest Nielsen ratings among spectaculars), Whirlybirds, Official Detective, Walter Winchell File, Sheriff of Cochisc, This Is Alice, Ann Southern Show, The Texan, Willy, The Whiting Girls, Ernestine. Shows that lease production facilities from Desilu: December Bride, Danny Thomas Show, Eve Arden Show, Red Skelton's filmed shows, Lineup, Wyatt Earp, The Real McCoys, Jim Bowie, Meet McGraw, Mr. Adams and Eve, Zone Grey Theater, Trackdown, Richard Diamond, Hey, Jeannie, Four Star Playhouse, Alcoa-Goodyear Theater. The famed I Love Lucy series is also on the air, but owned by CBS, which paid Desilu more than $4,000,000 for it.

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