by Donna Parratt Lynch
Lucie Arnaz loves being a mom. She cajoles her headstrong teenagers with her natural, easy humor, she laughs with them and challenges them. She is clearly a lot of fun. The afternoon Lucie and I spoke, she was sweeping hay from the wide pine plank floors of her spacious home in Katonah. She and her husband, actor Larry Luckinbill, had thrown an old fashioned hay ride party the night before, for their 13-year-old-daughter, Kate, and 30 of her friends. Taking advantage of their 15 acres of rolling hills and fields, they put together a post-Halloween spook fest, complete with weenie roast and apple dunking. Lucie took great delight in showing the oh-so-sophisticated young teens that a hokey, old fashioned party can be fun "They loved it I know they did, " she says. "I heard some of the kids tell Kate it was awesome as they left."
Lucie has a stunning presence. She is tall, graceful, and exudes genuine warmth. Her openness is somewhat disarming. Because she is the real life progeny of "I Love Lucy," you expect, somehow more artifice, more self consciousness, but nothing about Lucie Arnaz seems forced or contrived. As the only daughter of one of Hollywood's most famous couples, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, she has been acting for as long as she can remember. "I've always acted. It's pure joy for me. There was a time when I thought I'd be a veterinarian or a nurse, because you're not supposed to do what your parents did, but I always invented plays." Her mother cast her for "Here's Lucy" when she was 15. "I thought it was pretty brave that my brother, Desi, and I did that. We knew the risk. Everyone would say we just got the parts because of who we were, but the reviews were pretty good and they got better as we did. I did it for six seasons. It was great training in some respects, but when I started doing live theatre, the director had to keep reminding me to walk while I talked and not to scream."
Live theatre appeals to Lucie much more than television or movies. It is something that is uniquely hers, and not something either her parents or brother did. She met Larry when they were both starring on Broadway in Neil Simon plays. Lucie was doing They're Playing Our Song and Larry was in Chapter Two. She remembers having lunch with Marilyn Redfield, Larry's co-star, "It was September 10th. We were at Joe Allen's. The door opened and amidst hundreds of swirling orange and yellow leaves in walked this man in a tweed coat, tweed vest, a hat, a pipe, and a dog and an easy chair and a fireplace... The whole picture walked right through the door." Larry had been recently divorced and was a single father to his two young sons, Nick and Ben. Lucie was cautious. "I backed off and let him fall in love two or three times. I didn't want to be dumped! We became great friends and developed a huge mutual respect for one another. We fell in love a couple months later and got married the next June." They've worked together extensively, so much so that at one point they heard through the grapevine that they weren't getting scripts because there weren't parts for them both in the same play. "People thought we had to work together," Lucie explains. The first thing they worked on together was the television movie, "The Mating Season." They also toured with one another in Social Security and Whose Life is it Anyway?
Even as a child, Lucie was very sensitive to her extraordinary childhood, but perhaps what haunts her most is the fact that her parents were working parents, not that they were famous parents. "They were never as happy as when they were working. They weren't home. I was raised by my nanny, Willie May Barker, and my mother's mother, DeDe. My father didn't come to my fifth grade father-daughter dance- my uncle did. Do you think I've ever forgotten that?"
Lucie expresses no bitterness towards her parents. She only wants to understand why such a famous television couple, who loved one another so very much, couldn't make it together in the real world. Though she harbors no resentment, it certainly affects how she views herself as a parent. This is my real life, my better life," says Lucie, as she gestures at her son and daughter who are bugging her about rides to the movies.
Memories are Lucie's stock in trade. Family history is her passion. "Cause and effect," she explains "are what most interest me about people. Why, but for the grace of God, am I not homeless and sleeping on a city grate? What is it that makes us end up as we do? " For that reason, her fondest professional accomplishment is the documentary she and Larry produced in 1990 (through their company Arluck Entertainment) about her parents. "Lucy and Desi: A Home Movie" which aired on NBC in 1993 and won an EMMY. It is a heart rending portrait of extraordinary talent and a troubled family. Lucie was determined to show the reality of her childhood, and her parents' marriage. "I think they would have loved to have been the Ricardos," she says, but they weren't.
She also produced, last year, a CD-ROM guide for preserving family history, titled How to Save Your Family History. "Holidays were the good times," she remembers. "That's why they're so important to me now." She is intent on establishing her own family traditions. At family birthday celebrations, again, for the sake of rich memory building, Lucie gives each person his or her own candle. "We go around the table and we each have to make a wish for, and say one nice thing, about the birthday person. It's amazing sometimes what comes out."
She and Larry don't have time to entertain much now, but they do have a New Year's Eve party with close ` friends. "Everyone comes in elegant pajamas, like in an old Noel Coward movie. We want to feel, `Gee, what a swell party this is!' We wear hats, play Charades, drink champagne and eat caviar and smoked salmon." She credits her father with instilling in her a joy of party giving, of celebration. She insists on celebrating holidays at home. "I love doing Thanksgiving. I like to invite Strays." They used to have a Christmas party when they lived in the city, but it's too complicated now. Lucie adopted one of her mother's Christmas traditions, "Christmas eve dinner is our big dinner, the grown-up dressy time. I don't do our California white-flocked tree though. We have enough snow here." Since moving from Los Angeles to Katonah, nine years ago, she and Larry have been balancing their busy careers and travel schedules with raising their three children, Simon,18, Joe, 16, and Kate,13. "It took us a year and a half to renovate this house which we had only used on weekends," says Lucie. "Before that we rented a house in Waccabuc and I drove the kids to Increase Miller School which was great. The elementary schools are pretty fabulous. The middle and high schools have more problems. Because they are public, state-run, their hands are tied. When it comes to certain kinds of discipline and certain consequences, they can do nothing."
This year, Lucie and Larry selected a boarding school for Joe. Lucie is considering Catholic school for Kate. "I was raised Catholic, but religion wasn't forced when I was a child. My mother was not religious and my father wasn't living with us, so my grandmother, DeDe, who wasn't even Catholic, took us to church every week."
She recalls being turned off to the Catholic Church when she got married at age 20. She very much wanted an outdoor wedding, as a girlfriend's had been in San Diego. "The priest said no way. I thought, so in San Diego it's not a sin to be married outdoors, but in Beverly Hills it is? The Catholic Church confused me." Lucie occasionally now goes to the Presbyterian Church in Katonah. "It's very much a community experience. There is a great sense of love," she says. "Church needs to make me feel like there is hope. I go to church for inspiration."
Lucie's life is, she says, "much like anyone else's." She is baffled when people ask her what it was like growing up with such famous parents. "I know they want me to tell them that it was incredible, but it wasn't. I always say to them, "It was probably a lot like your childhood. I wish that people would stop looking outward all the time for something better."
She and Larry do a lot of schedule juggling-lots of driving, lots of errands. They have two dogs, Lucky and Yoda, mutts from the pound, and two cats. There's a swimming pool, a vegetable garden, which Larry fenced himself, and a fish pond where Larry fished with the children when they were younger. The house is open and casual, well lived in, and filled with mementos from Lucie's and Larry's stage careers. The sunken living room has a piano and spotlights where the children used to put on their own plays. Lucie loves to cook and her hanging rack is full of well-used pots and pans. Both Joe and Kate attest to their mother's culinary talents. "My Dad was a great cook," says Lucie. "He could whip something up and it would be marvellous and we'd all wonder how he did it that. I need a recipe."
Shopping is not one of Lucie's favorite pastimes. "I don't buy a lot of stuff, I keep things forever. Actors are that way. We don't throw anything out. You never know when you might need it," says Lucie. "I'm a convenience freak. It's all about time." She has a few favorite stores locally. Her nightclub act jewellery is from the Elephant's Trunk in Mt. Kisco. She also likes Chry salis for unusual clothing but she's most comfortable in jeans. Her favorite food store, for everything but meat is Mt. Kisco Farms. She grocery shops at D'Agostino's because I've memorized the aisles. We love eating Chinese at the Royal Gourmet. I just wish they delivered." For a while, Lucie toyed with the idea of opening a restaurant near her house, but had no interest in really running it. I m a CEO, she jokes, I have great ideas, but I need someone else to execute them."
Much of Lucie's time is spent running the Desilu, too Enterprises, but when she was recently approached by a buyer, she turned him down. I was tempted, but as Kate said, it's family ., Someone else might do something we wouldn't be proud of. The buck still stops with me. At least it s finally run like a real business now." This year she only managed to do her nightclub act a few times. "I've got to keep it up or I get rusty."
Time is always an issue. "Larry and I rarely travel anywhere alone together. One of us needs to be home. I don't have a nanny. My housekeeper holds the house together so we can do the kid thing. I want to take full responsibility for my own mistakes." She expresses real gratitude to Larry for "being the kind of man he is. Larry is self contained. He's happy to be at home; he's not a wanderer. He loves his family, he loves his wife, and he's thrilled to spend the evening with us. Even when the kids were little he was fabulous. He spent hours drawing with them. "
Lucie and Larry were initially drawn to northern Westchester hoping to establish more of a professional theatre presence here. They were caught up in the problems that besieged the Northern Westchester Centre for the Arts. Lucie taught an acting class for awhile, but when things at the Centre started to fall apart she backed away. "I don't even like to think about it now, " says Lucie. She doubts that Westchester can develop serious professional theatre given its proximity to Broadway.
Currently, both Lucie and Larry are committed to founding a local teen centre. "These are kids who fall between the cracks, who may be angry because they think the towns don't want them. I know these kids. They are charming children, but when they get together they take on a pack mentality, they need a supervised place to go." Lucie and Larry hope that they can enlist community support. It s a legacy that both Larry and I would like to leave."
Lucie's life is hardly glamorous, nor does she want it to be. She lives her days with such grace and joy that she elevates the habitual a bit. She is grateful for things that many of us take for granted and hopes to remind us both through her work and by her actions that life is short. "Follow your bliss," she tells us.