Hallmark Channel
Desi Arnaz was to be named Larry Lopez when the show was first being put together. The name was only changed to Ricky Ricardo because producers thought Larry and Lucy had horrible alliteration.
Desi Arnaz’s accent got a lot of attention on the show, but if anybody other than Lucy made fun of the way he spoke, those jokes were usually met with silence from the audience. It was an unwritten rule on the show that only Lucille Ball could make fun of Desi’s pronunciations.
When the CBS executive approached Lucille Ball to turn her popular radio show “My Favorite Husband” into a TV show, she immediately agreed if her condition was granted. Her condition is that her real-life husband Desi Arnaz must be given the role of her on-screen hubby. Executives said there was no way the average American would believe she was married to a “foreign” man with an accent they couldn’t understand. At that point Lucy and Desi had already been married for more than 10 years.
William Frawley was such a huge baseball fan - of the New York Yankees no less - that his contract stipulated that he could miss work if the Yankees were playing in a World Series game.
While Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance ended up becoming close friends, it did not start that way. In fact, Ball began the show questioning if Vance could play her part in a comedic way without taking the spotlight from her. The good news is that they patched thing up as the series began.
