Blind Item Revealed!- Lucille Ball used to call Desi Jr. gay slurs to embarrass him

She shouldn’t have used that word. My treatise addresses that.

I get the impression that Lucy was just a couple of wire hangers short of being Joan Crawford.

Yes, OP. According to many she was emotionally and verbally abusive to her kids and cold. She wasn’t the warm and loving mother you would think. She was also a control freak.

I (don’t) love Lucy.

This is the Entertainment Lawyer. He made it up. Lucy may have been many things but she wasn't homophobic and she had plenty of gay friends

I'll never understand people who treat Entertainment Lawyer blinds like they're the gospel

R5 I’ll never understand people like you who comment on every blind item thread instead of scrolling past it.

Sweetie, even people who aren’t homophobic don’t want their kids being gay. And it was to embarrass him. Now go look for a job.

R5, I can believe that in that time period someone could have had gay friends and could have also used gay slurs against their son.

Babs would screech at me, "Act like a man!".

Whether or not she called Desi Jr, gay slurs is up for debate. But there is no way that Lucy ever told reporters that he was sleeping with men. DID. NOT. HAPPEN.

What a bitch.

I can remember reading the gossip rags back in the 70s that said Lucy was mean; physically and verbally abusive to her kids.

It might have been how people may be called the opposite of what they are, as a joke. Like calling a big person Tiny.

Somehow I always assumed she was a nasty person.

Nonsense! Back then it was believed overbearing mothers caused their sons to be gay. I seriously doubt Lucy would go anywhere near any insinuation that his straight son was gay, especially out of her own mouth.

I had the impression the sun rose and set on Desi Jr. I always felt bad for her daughter Lucie because, to me anyway, Desi Jr. came across as the obvious favorite.

I didn't care for Vivian's "artistic" husband either.

[quote] She wasn’t the warm and loving mother you would think.

Honestly, I wouldn't think that. Everything I know about her says she was tightly wound and very controlled and controlling in all aspects of her life.

It’s somewhere on YouTube (it used to be easy to find) - an interview with Lucy from the late 70s) where she says she is a complete supporter of gay rights. This was LUCY and a very big deal for that time.

Desi fucked Cesar Romero who loved his huge Cuban cock

Isn't there a famous story about Lucy being on an airplane and flinging a coffee cup full of semen at a male flight attendent and bellowing 'You call this gay?'

Marry me, r20.

[quote]Lucy was just a couple of wire hangers short of being Joan Crawford.

People always try to drag Mrs. Steele into child abuse stories. Maybe Christina and Christopher were the problems and not Joan.

R11 yup. She was terrible to her kids behind the scenes.

R21 who replies “marry me” to themselves?

Desi Jr couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.

By the time he’d hooked up with Patty Duke, Lucy probably wished he were gay.

By the time he hooked up with Liza, she probably thought he was.

Lucy was uncomfortable when daughter Lucie began dating female impersonator Jim Bailey.

Lucy’s introduction to drag.

I love Lucie!

Desi was not a Fag. And I'm the dame who can prove it.

R6, you're the one taking elaborate fan fiction as fact

Huh r24? r20 ≠ r21.

Wtf with lucie jr fucking with the gay Bailey with a face full of plastic surgery? Desi jr was a scummy hereto. Denying paternity is his specialty. They seem like an awful family. Don’t get in Lucy’s way while she’s playing backgammon at Pips! She ain’t to be trifled with!

Lucie Jr put her career on hold to raise her kids. The cycle was broken.

R33, Not true. She continued to work sporadically.

Did Lucie actually put her career on hold to work on eliminating her annoying vibrato?

R32, Desi Arnaz, Jr. is not Sean Aston’s biological father, Michael Tell is.

^Astin

Back in the day, the Duke/Tell marriage was always listed as on of Hollywood’s shortest-lived marriages.

Now I wonder just how many people stuck it in Patty Duke.

R39, Don’t look at me.

Lucie used to say that when Lucy was mad at her kids she would yell at them and say "That's it, you're out of the will!"

[quote]Lucie used to say that when Lucy was mad at her kids she would yell at them and say "That's it, you're out of the will!"

You can bet Gary never attempted to talk her out of that!

What bullshit. If Desi Jr. was gay, Liza would have married him.

I figured she was extra hard on Desi Jr because he was constant reminder of Desi sr and she was trying to make sure he didn’t turn out like his father whom she was so disappointed and bitter about.

R44, And he became an alcoholic pussy hound, just like his father.

Desi, Jr. was fucking groupies at 12, when he was with Dino, Desi and Billy.

Desi Jr. had his first child at 15.

Since Jr was impregnating women from the age of 15 , her tactic seems to have backfired.

I don't believe this at all, if for no other reason than Lucy was all set to sign to be the female lead in Making Love and it was only after she dropped out after being offered the Geraldine Page role in A Trip to Bountiful (a once in a lifetime role, she was quoted as saying at the time) that she gave her blessing to Kate Jackson as her replacement. Obviously anyone who was so willing to be a part of such a groundbreaking LGBTQ+ film that she would use words like that. Sadly Lucy wound up dropping out of A Trip to Bountiful after unnamed advisors suggested she work on her true labour of love, the role of Clarabelle in Stone Pillow...

I am always impressed at the power and influence Lucy achieved, since she got her start "whoring" and turned that into acting in B movies. Very impressive indeed.

How hilarious! No wonder she was called "The Queen of Comedy"!

R48 Spot on. Very few knew that Lucille Ball was ready to sigh to play opposite Shirley Maclaine in the ground breaking lesbian drama The Children's Hour but Gary talked her out of it. The role then went to Audrey Hepburn. What a loss to the LGBTQ community!

R48, Lucy would have been more appropriate for the Wendy Hiller role in “Making Love” rather than the Kate Jackson role.

I think Lucy giving us Mame excuses all flaws. And she said Angela didn't want to do it. Really.

The kids seemed to turn out pretty well though, as Hollywood kids go.

I wish Vivian had written a book about the "real" Lucy. She seemed like a smart cookie. I'm amazed she was willing to take the role when Lucy insisted she look dowdy and stay overweight.

Wife beater Ricky deserved anything Lucy threw at him

R55, Watching the series now on Pluto, it’s alarming to see in how many episodes Lucy is expecting to be hit by Ricky for something she did.

Husbands hitting their wives in the 1950s was standard procedure?

[quote]Very few knew that Lucille Ball was ready to sigh to play opposite Shirley Maclaine in the ground breaking lesbian drama The Children's Hour but Gary talked her out of it.

No one could suspend disbelief enough to imagine Lucy as a lez. Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn are believable.

[quote]Husbands hitting their wives in the 1950s was standard procedure?

It was a big improvement from how scolds and busybodies were treated in colonial America.

R56 I don’t know if you’re asking this question seriously but if husbands hitting their wives in the 50s was ‘standard procedure’ then he would have been hitting her, and all the movies and TV shows would have shown husbands hitting their wives, and we would have seen Truman and Eisenhower hitting their wives. I think you’ve been hitting the bottle.

R59, How do you know what went on behind closed doors?

R60 How do you know what goes on behind closed doors now, for that matter? Generally husbands loved their wives in the 50s same as now and if people were being hit it was considered abusive and not “standard.”

Lucy, outside the show came off as a cold narcissist. It wouldn’t surprise me if she did do shit like that

Lucy’s flirtation with the LGBTQIA+ film canon continued with The Boys in the Band. Matt Crowley wrote an additional pre-credits scene prefacing the party for the screen adaptation, where Leonard Frey’s Harold character has a tense encounter at home with Lucy as his mother serving him a strawberry birthday cake. The scene, done in a single, ten-minute tracking shot, contains no dialogue and is primarily Lucy and Frey staring each other down from opposite sides of the kitchen table, both eating cake while chainsmoking. They share a hostile, blistering chemistry that’s not been seen since. A very grainy version was up on YouTube a few years ago, but Lucy’s estate has since scrubbed it.

The scene was eventually cut, not due to Gary, but because Lucy, angling for her first Oscar mom, insisted on an additional scene where she arrives at the party intoxicated and engages in psychological warfare with all the guests, one after the other. It would have doubled the running time. Crowley wouldn’t bend to her demands, and the rest is history.

I wish you guys writing these parodies wouldn’t make me read halfway through them before I realize what I’m reading...

Lucille Ball was cold, ambitious, withholding, bitter, etc. But you know what? I still don't buy this.

She sure didn’t have to have kids in her 40s so she must have loved them to some extent.

Even Ben Cartwright thought women needed a lesson in how to behave

R61, Any child growing up in the 1950s was punished physically, as in HITTING.

Today, a child who misbehaves is given a time out and a lecture.

Right or wrong, physical punishment was prevalent in the 1950s and unfortunately that often extended to wives being slapped around by their husbands.

It was legal for husbands to discipline their wives once upon a time, as in a spanking or little slap around, but not full beatings. Idk how many husbands actually did so in the 1950s to make it “common” but it was allowed.

As for Lucy, someone upthread has a very very small mind and thinks “Lucy wanted to star in a movie about a lesbian!” so that means she couldn’t have embarrassed or mocked her own son.

Grow up. Even a lot of real life allies don’t want their own kids to be gay. They don’t care if it’s someone else but they don’t want it for their own.

God help the wife who was negligent with the coffee.

I wonder how many jerkoff sessions that spanking ad at r71 inspired.

R59 Every friend I had growing up in the 70s was punished physically by their parents. My bare ass can still feel those belt welts. Yet you don’t see that in TV of the era either.

Hoss looked hot in the scene at r67.

That mf is right up my alley.

Physical spankings kept kids in line. Look at kids today. They’re truly unruly and disrespectful and no one wants to acknowledge it.

[quote]Husbands hitting their wives in the 1950s was standard procedure?

Only when necessary.

It's such a bizarre thing that Lucy and Desi are still so lauded for buying RKO and rechristening it Desilu Productions. They were both in over their heads immediately, and simply lacked the time, skills and resources to run the studio is a tv/film production entity as envisioned. Desi figured out quickly he'd have to be more of a rental lot to generate income, which was fine, but not his dream. In a decade both were out and Desilu was over as anything but the producer of the shockingly awful (yet popular!) "Here's Lucy".

Everyone forgets that in order to do this, the Arnazes had to SELL all the "I Love Lucy" films they owned outright back to CBS. The truth is had they just done nothing but Lucy's two series, and kept the ILL films and licensed them in syndication, they'd have been far richer and still be earning millions from the series today! Buying RKO was pretty such a disaster and hastened the ending of their marriage.

R77 what are you even talking about? Lmao. Desi sold his half to Lucy and she later sold Desilu for many many millions!

Did Ceaser Romero and Desi really hook up?

No, r78, Desi was forced to sell his half to Lucy which really didn't work out well for either, and certainly wasn't much of a smart move for Lucy. She barely lasted another five years before being bought out by Gulf + Western after losing a ton of money producing Star Trek. She wasn't paid all that much for the whole thing either. It was an ok deal and it wasn't as if Lucy had lots of options, she was losing millions.

Just sitting on the "I Love Lucy" series would have been far more profitable.

R80 false. Desi ASKED Lucy to buy him out in 1962 and she obliged. She bought him out for $2.5 million. She sold it in 1968 for $17 million, $132 million in todays money.

This has unexpectedly turned into the gayest thread EVUH.

Lucy forced Desi out as a contractual right either could force.

Yes those numbers are correct, but the two studios (Gower and Culver lots) in real estate alone, plus the film library and all other assets don't make that a great deal. Lucy and Desi sold the "I Love Lucy" films to CBS for 5 million in 1958, which would have thrown off a lot of pure profit between 1958-1968, plus the tv airing rights and product licensing over the next FIFTY years with the soon arriving VHS era.

Still think 17 million was a brilliant deal? It was kind of a polite fire sale.

R83 that is false though. Why are you lying? Desi asked her to buy and she did. That came from his mouth.

$17 million was a shit ton in 1968 and one of the biggest deals of that time. You’re a retard.

Lucille had a mouth on her. A friend of mine who used to do steam cleaning worked on her carpet at 1000 Roxbury Drive. He said she was a total bitch and she'd be cussing up a storm yelling "watch what you're fucking doing, you're getting water all over the fucking place!!" He told me when he first walked into her home it smelled of stale cigarettes and mothballs.

Desi Arnaz died broke, mainly due to his gambling habit.

^ and Vivan Vance's cootchie

Few are aware William Friedkin desperately wanted to cast Lucy in the lead role as a police detective who goes undercover in the underground S&M gay subculture of New York City to catch a serial killer who is preying on gay men in his controversial Cruising (1980). Of course we know that didn't happen. God Bless you Gary Morton.

[quote] [R59] Every friend I had growing up in the 70s was punished physically by their parents. My bare ass can still feel those belt welts. Yet you don’t see that in TV of the era either.

I wasn't and no one I knew was.

When I was a kid in the early 1990s, a kid in the neighborhood once asked me if my dad ever gave me the belt. We were probably 6 or 7. I remember being scandalized. Looking back, I think his father was abusive. I remember him as a sneering guy who always made me a little uncomfortable.

R89 I grew up in the late 60s and I was spanked, but not with a belt and there weren’t welts. Just a spanking, very common. Can’t believe you never knew anyone who was spanked, at that time. But anyway that was punishment, for a child. If anyone thinks it was normal for a wife to get that treatment, it was not.

R91, Actually, it was.

r92 = Phil O.

It happened more than it should have, r92, but it wasn't the *norm*.

R91, The initial post questioning this cited marriages of the 1950s.

[quote]This has unexpectedly turned into the gayest thread EVUH.

Coming soon...

CUM SLOPPY BUTTHOLES 47, a Desilu production.

R96 For you dear.

Blind Item - What attention starved lazyass troll with no imagination creates a new thread every day, sometimes twice daily, by copy-pasting a deadly dull blind item?

I always kind of wished Desi, Jr. was gay.....and he was in my dreams.

I'm a 4 but everyone says I can pass for a 9.

I grew up in the 1930s (born in 1929, though most of my friends say I look at least ten years younger) and my parents never used corporeal punishment, though many of my friends at school's parents did (I grew up in rural Kansas).

R101 sure….

Did Desi Jr date Susan Dey?

[quote]This permanent A list comic actress had her own television show which all of you know. It was her production company that owned it and lots of other shows.

How was that even a blind item in the first place? Even I could see it.

I am the only gay who is not a fan of her - I'm a bigger non-fan now!

I find a lot to admire her for, for both her work in front of the camera and her endeavors off-camera.

Lucille Ball would have hated Datalounge because Patty Duke is so well-liked here, and Lucy hated Patty!

I love Lucie Arnaz. So talented. I wish she had worked more. She's fabulous.

[quote]Lucy was uncomfortable when daughter Lucie began dating female impersonator Jim Bailey.

It’s no wonder. Their sexual chemistry was sizzling hot!

Considering that Lucy was originally discussed for the Patrice Donnelly role in Personal Best, I highly doubt she would have called her son gay slurs!

It kind of makes sense now that Frank Sinatra wanted her to play Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate.

Lucy wouldn't let Lucie attend Northwestern,

Lucy came off as cold and bitter in interviews she did with Carson and others.

Having seen the video of Lucy and Desi in the pool with their grandchild I know that was a side of her- affectionate, warm, loving, able to enjoy herself. So she may have had other sides, but when you see things like that you know she wasn’t some 100% cold bitch as some here claim.

The failure of her attempted comeback series in 1986 left her humiliated and she never really recovered from it.

It’s been said before but it’s too bad she didn’t return to TV in something totally different. Even the special Lucy Calls The President would have been a pretty good premise for a sitcom. It wasn’t totally different but it was different enough, and still managed to include some of her favorite actors, and it was amusing.

But by the time of Life With Lucy I think she was too old for that. Anyhow she should have done character comedy, mainly verbal, and nothing physical, or not big physical comedy bits at least.

[quote]Anyhow she should have done character comedy, mainly verbal,

That wasn't really her thing.

R118 What do you think she did on the radio? She was offered Our Miss Brooks on radio, too, before Eve Arden. And not all I Love Lucy episodes were full of slapstick.

No episodes were "full" of slapstick, r119. But the physical comedy is where Lucille was brilliant. Eve could deliver a line with better timing than Lucy, but Our Miss Brooks hasn't stood the test of time as well as ILL.

[quote] Our Miss Brooks hasn't stood the test of time as well as ILL.

Because Richard Crenna pretending to be a teenager whose voice hadn't changed yet was too embarrassing

R210 She had great comic timing with lines. Just off the top of my head there’s the Rock Hudson episode. No physical comedy in that one. I think in her 70s she could have done a different kind of sitcom that didn’t require “Lucy” style physical comedy. She was a good actress. If you disagree, so be it.