‘I Love Lucy’ Star Remembers Lucy & Desi Arnaz’s ‘Scary’ Fights
Keith Thibodeaux’s familial bond with Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz wasn’t just limited to I Love Lucy, in which he played their onscreen son, Ricky Arnaz Jr. During his youth, Thibodeaux was tight with the Arnazes, as he and Lucie Arnaz recalled at the Lucie on the Lot charity event at Paramount Studios on Thursday, June 5.
Thiboddeaux jokingly asked Lucie, Ball and Desi’s daughter, “What was Lucy like?” to which she replied, “I was gonna ask you the same thing. You saw her more than I did.”
“Keith spent a lot of time with us,” said Lucie recalled, explaining that Thibodeaux “became the best of friends” with her brother, Desi Arnaz Jr., and even taught him how to play the drums. “[Thibodeaux] traveled with us, he spent summers with us, and all of that.”
That meant Thibodeaux was around for the tumultuous decline of Ball’s marriage to Desi Sr. “At the Arnazes’ house … it was a very unusual family dynamic, I should say, that I saw,” he recalled at the event. “I was always a little fearful to go there, not knowing what would happen.”
“Because things would erupt, right?” Lucie asked.
“Yeah,” Thibodeaux said.
Ball and Desi Sr. eventually moved on to other marriages — her to Gary Morton, him to Edith Mack Kirsch — but Thibodeaux rooted for a romantic reunion between his TV parents.
“I remember when we would watch the movies, the screenings … and we were all there,” he said. “We were all hoping and wishing for them to get back together, because they did truly love one another. It was, like, so true. Passion. I mean, when they got together — it doesn’t matter whether Gary and Edie were there — they got together, it was like, that’s who they…”
“They’re actually the married couple, and the other people are just playing the other parts,” Lucie added, finishing Thibodeaux’s thought.
Ball and Desi Sr. never did get back together, but they did remain close. When the Kennedy Center honored Ball in 1986, Robert Stack read a message from Desi Sr., who had died days before. At the end of that message, Desi Sr. wrote, “P.S. I Love Lucy was never just a title.”
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June 2025
'Jaws' made us afraid of the water, 'Star Wars' took us light years away and Marty McFly took us back to 1955. Flashback to these classic Summer Blockbusters.
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